We did not sleep well in Pamplona. The rooms we were supposed to have rented were not available and we ended up staying crowded into dorm rooms at the university on the edge of town. There were not enough beds, so we took the mattresses off the beds so that we could have either a mattress on the floor or the boxed springs. At night, we wandered the town where everything continued as it had during the day, the bars and bodegas full, festival dancers performing in costumes, religious icons carried paraded above the crowds. There was no way to take it all in, or really very much. Wherever you were, there were a million places you weren't. The best places for me were always just beyond across the edge of the madness where the crowd had dwindled and then almost disappeared, standing in the pale darkness with the sound of the festival crowd at a near distance, there between the pulsing madness and stillness.
The third day of the festival was the second day of the running of the bulls, and like pilgrims, we were in place at the same bar early in the morning to run once again. We were veterans now. We knew what to do.
The corals were opened and you could feel the thunderous vibrations of the tons of bulls pounding the cobbles, closer then closer, us trotting at first, then jogging, and then zigging and zagging as fast as we could as we intermixed with the bulls. And then I did the thing you were not to do--I ducked into a shallow recess in the wall to watch the bulls run past. It was the worst thing to do, they said, because you were trapped if a bull came after you, but it seemed the natural thing to do when I did it and nothing went wrong, but the bulls came by closely and I could look at their dumb, mad eyes and hear their heavy breath and see really what it looked like to run just ahead of the horn of the bull. And then they were by and the day's running was through. And so, another day of fiesta.
We went, of course, back to the cafe where we had drunk the day before, then wandered around town a bit like everyone else to watch the festivities. In the center of a square, we stopped before a crowd of people watching a fellow climb up a monument in his bare feet. And when he got to the top, a group of people formed below him in a double line and joined arms to make a human net to catch him. And then, with arms raised high, he leaped in a perfect swan dive into the outstretched arms. Only he went a bit farther than did the human net so that the arm-linked line caught him from the waist down. His head, however, hit the cobblestones with a sick and terrible thud. And then the boy lay still. The crowd now became like ants, running to him then running away, people calling out to one another, and presumably someone got a shopkeeper to call an ambulance. And in just a bit it was there and we had seen enough. I didn't stay to watch them pick him up or place him in the van, but I was there long enough to see the little bit of blood that had accumulated on the street below his head. Who jumps into the arms of a drunken group of strangers, I wondered. Another drunk, of course. There was a lesson to be learned there, and I hoped that I'd learned it already. The festival was over for him.
By noon, I was tired and after eating lunch, I wandered back to the dorm room to get a few hours sleep. But others wandered in and out making sleep difficult at best. Once, having drifted far away, I was awakened by one of our group asking me for the key to the car. "I have to get something out of the trunk," he said. And then I drifted back off to sleep in the stuffy heat of the midday dorm.
No comments:
Post a Comment