Fighting the Bull

I had intended to write a followup to yesterday's blog, but what I did was search for old digitized photos from running with the bulls so long ago.  But the search was in vain.  I couldn't find them.  I did, however, manage to distract myself looking through file after file after file of old photographs.

So there can be no longish post today.  I have promised myself I would do certain things.  Things.  You know.

But as a short follow, that  afternoon after the second day in Pamplona and the first day of running with the bulls, we went to the bullfights in the afternoon.  Tickets were to have been purchased by a local agent well in advance, but such was not the case, so we had to go to the arena and find scalpers in the early afternoon.  We bought  "sol y sombra" tickets and thought ourselves lucky to get them.  We would watch the bulls we had run with in the morning killed in the afternoon.

It is terrible, I know.  I sounds terrible to write and probably is a terrible thing, but I had been to the bullfights in Madrid on the day of my arrival, and I was enthralled.  I was in a sleepy, transatlantic trance when I arrived.  I had only time to check into my room before the fights were to begin.  We were staying at the Palace Hotel, and I was loathe to leave its posh comfort wanting only to sleep in the big, soft bed.  Rather, I found myself in the bullfight arena waiting for the first fight to begin.

When the first bull was released, he charged out to the middle of the ring and then stopped on all fours, throwing his head back to the sky and issuing forth a high, forlorn wailing like I'd never heard before.  And then, dropping his head, he looked around for something to charge.  They stuck him and stabbed him and jabbed him for quite awhile before the matador came out.  It was terrible and cruel and something you couldn't believe you were watching.  And then the matador made him charge time and time again, the muscles of the neck tearing, the head lowering with every move.  But the bull got lucky for just a moment and hooked the matador in the thigh on one of the passes, and he lifted him up to the sky and threw him over his head.  Lying flat on his back on the sandy arena floor, the matador wiggled and squirmed as the bull through his horns left and right trying to gut his foe.  But soon there were people all about waving capes at the bull to distract and confuse him, and they were able to drag the matador to safety behind the wooden barricade below me.  I watched as they probed the wound with their fingers and then the matador getting to his feet and waving them away.  He took a scarf and wound it tight above the wound to stave the flow of blood, then walked defiantly back into the arena.  The audience had gone mad.  And now, limping and bleeding in his tight gold pants, the matador brought the bull back to him for the kill.  Now, antagonists both wounded and bloodied, the matador took brought out his straight killing sword and invited the bull to charge, running at the bull as it came and leaning in between the horns to place the sword just so between the shoulder blades taking the bump from the top of the bulls head as he dropped dead right at his feet.  It was unbelievable in most ways that I knew.  It was terrible and horrible and awful, a pagan ritual pitting man against his fate, the dark thing that awaits us all.  And for a time, man had faced and beaten his foe.  For awhile.

I was hooked.

And so in Pamplona, I sat among the drunken crowd that was nothing like the bullfight crowds I'd sat with elsewhere, this just a drunk bunch of college students and partying tourists who constantly chanted and squirted cheap wine all over the crowd from bota skins bought for the occasion.  There was little of the solemnity I had seen before.

But there is man's hope and man's fate for you, and our incredible ability to live without grace or with dignity in almost any circumstance.  All that was missing were the gladiators.

That night we wandered the streets full of revelers, the fiesta constant and unabated at any hour of the day or night.  All about the parks, people were rolled into sleeping bags as the festivities went on around them.  It was like that, fascinating for a minute, wearing for much more.

Things went bad for our little group, but I haven't time to tell it today.  I must go as I said I would, though I have written something after all and am now incredibly late.  Things will have to wait.

Until tomorrow. . . .