Death and the Sun (24 page)

It was a Saturday, and the air was oven-hot, with the terrible African heat of southern Spain that comes when the sun is large and the sky clear. But the heat was nothing more than a nuisance to the bullfighters. They were accustomed to it. What worried them was the treacherous wind that blew in from the water, a wind that would play havoc with their capes, blowing them up and revealing the toreros' bodies to the bulls. Algeciras is a blowy town. It sits at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, where Spain and Morocco pinch within ten miles of each other, forming the Strait of Gibraltar—a stretch of water where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean come together, kicking up a sea wind.

Algeciras is also a Spanish city with a palpable Muslim presence, and signs on the grungy shops and coffeehouses down by the docks were in Arabic as well as Spanish. The bullring was a mile or so inland, atop a hill in the middle of the city's fairgrounds, which were filled for the
feria
with gaudy amusement rides and the booths of sellers of perfume knockoffs, fake NBA team T-shirts, greasy doughnuts, and all manner of plastic gewgaws. This schlockiness was the flip side of the elegance of Sevilla's
feria
. Up the hill, in direct confrontation with the coastal wind, was the bullring, which had the romantic name Las Palomas (The Doves). Inaugurated in 1969 with a corrida featuring Paquirri, the ring was decorated in red brick and white tile and resembled a municipal parking garage from the outside.

The stands were half full, the air smelled of sea and cooking grease, and the dying day was so hot you couldn't think straight when the toreros marched across the arena to open the bullfight. Fran was the senior man that day and he faced the opening bull of the spectacle, a black creature that was what the Spanish would call
anovillado
, an adult specimen that looked like the kind of immature bull used in
novilladas
. Fran chose a patch of sand to defend and began his performance with a confident series of
verónicas
, keeping the little bull under his thumb. Then the picadors did their business, and Poli, Joselito, and José Maria got the sticks well placed, and it was time for Fran to show what he could do with the red cape.

He began the
faena
with three series of right-handed passes to the right horn, running the bull with some success but without generating the emotion of good bullfighting. There was nothing technically wrong with Fran's performance, but the bull was too small, there were too many empty seats, and the people who were there were too hot to rouse themselves. Fran switched the
muleta
to his left hand and glided through two easy sets of
naturales
that elicited lackluster
olés
from the crowd. After this the bull showed signs of wear. Its sides heaved and it began charging with its mouth open, the bluish pink tongue lolling out.

Fran paused for a moment. He and the bull stood in the shaded side of the sand about six feet apart, and the bull was heavy on its hooves. Having completed an exploration of the bull's left horn, Fran decided to go back to working the right one. He transferred the cape to his right hand, set the sword behind it to spread out the fabric, and took his eyes off the bull to twist the end of the fabric down over the tip of the sword and fix the cape in place. It was a lapse in concentration of less than five seconds, and with most bulls on most days Fran would have gotten away with it. For some reason, however, this tired half-bull in Algeciras got excited at the wrong moment.

It might have been the motion of Fran's left arm as he twisted the cape down over the sword, or it might have been the gust of wind that blew, fluttering the cape at a key instant. Whatever it was, the bull surged forward, taking less than two seconds to get to Fran. If he had been paying attention, he might have escaped the situation one way or the other, but his head was down. By contrast, the bull, suddenly energized by the expectation of harming its tormentor, had its head up, and it drove its right horn into Fran at the level of his chest. It looked like the kind of goring that would kill. But there was no discernible puncture hole or blood as Fran blasted off the horn and fell backward onto his feet. The bull came again, chopped and missed, pounding Fran with its skull, slapping him down. As Fran collapsed he threw his left arm out behind him to break the fall. The arm shot out stiff, the hand struck the ground, and Fran's body went down on top of the hand, crumpling the arm in sickening fashion. The lower half of the arm, the part that can only bend forward, wrenched backward, popping the elbow from the socket.

The other bullfighters leapt into the ring and moved the bull away. Fran stood up and it was clear that the horn had missed his chest and hooked into his armpit instead. Otherwise he might well have been dead. But relief gave way to fear when Fran swooned against the banderillero standing next to him, holding his left arm and whimpering like an animal. They tried to carry him out of the ring, but he insisted on walking, and he sobbed as they led him around the
callejón
and into the infirmary while the audience gave him polite, ladies'-lunch applause.

In the small operating room the doctor shot Fran full of painkillers. Then he gripped Fran's arm and snapped the dangling lower half of the limb back into its socket. Two hours later Fran lay in the local hospital, easing his way into what would be a night of misery. “I thought the elbow was broken,” he said. “Because I have never had pain like that. It was horrible, really, and I was asking for more drugs. And they said, ‘We can't give you any more drugs, you've had enough,' and I was begging, saying, ‘Please, give me something to end the pain. Give me everything you have.' It was a horrible night.” The next day they flew Fran up to Madrid to assess the damage.

 

Madrid, July 2
. The season was now in doubt. Soft-tissue injuries like the one Fran had sustained do not heal quickly, and a matador cannot get by with an injured elbow: he uses his elbows in just about everything he does. Back in Sevilla, Pepe Luis was trying to sound upbeat. Tests had shown that Fran had suffered nothing worse than a few strained ligaments in the one elbow, he said, adding that Fran would spend the coming weeks in Madrid doing physical therapy, under the care of Dr. Alfonso del Corral, the orthopedic surgeon of the professional soccer team Real Madrid. There was no way to predict how and when Fran would be able to perform again. “
Hombre
,” Pepe Luis said, “you never know. We'll have to wait and see what the doctor says. Right now we're hoping to come back on the twenty-first in Barcelona.” That seemed optimistic.

20

Pamplona, July 8
. The alarm rang in the darkened bedroom, but Miguel Angel Eguiluz was already awake and staring at the ceiling. It was six-thirty in the morning.

He swung out of bed. Short, compact, athletic, with a shaved head, a well-tended black mustache, and lively blue eyes, Miguel Angel was a forty-seven-year-old Pamplona native, a doctor who'd been running the bulls since he was a teenager. The famous running-of-the-bulls
feria
had been in swing for two days already, but Miguel Angel's suburban neighborhood was quiet as he dressed in white pants, white shirt, and running shoes, slugged down a sports drink, and descended the stairs to the basement parking lot to pound out thirty minutes of wind sprints. At seven-thirty he zipped into the city on his motorbike. As he parked he could hear the big crowd that had assembled in the bullring to watch the end of the bull run, and the band playing.

The route the bulls and runners took each morning snaked for a little more than half a mile through the streets and squares of the old part of town—the area was cordoned off with heavy wooden barricades. On a typical weekday during the
feria
, more than two thousand runners participated, and the number could double on weekends. Most of the runners were from somewhere other than Pamplona. Many hadn't slept the night before. Some were drunk. Almost none knew what they were doing. But within this ignorant mob (for that is what they were) was a small and anonymous group of a few hundred expert runners. Some were non-Spaniards—Noël Chandler, in his day, had been among them. Most were locals. These hard-core participants treated the
encierro
as a spiritual exercise and a serious competition. Their goal was simple: to put themselves just ahead of the bulls' horns and run there for as long as possible without touching or interfering with the bulls in any way.

Like most serious runners, Miguel Angel specialized in a certain stretch of the route. He began almost at the end, where the Calle Estafeta curved through an open intersection and down into the tunnel that led into the bullring. By law the runners were supposed to assemble back at the beginning of the bull-running route, at the Calle Santo Domingo, which sloped down to the makeshift corrals where the bulls were held. But Miguel Angel didn't do this. Instead he slipped into a shuttered bar on a side street behind the Calle Estafeta, walked through the bar and out a door and right into Estafeta, just about where he liked to begin his favorite part of the course. Then he settled in and listened for the rocket that signaled the release of the bulls.

“This is the worst time,” he said. “It is just horrible. You are so afraid. You can't stop looking at your watch. You know eight o'clock is coming.”

 

Pamplona's Feria de San Fermín is the most moving, horrifying, hard-drinking festival in Spain. It goes on for nine days and the pace is punishing. The bulls run each morning at eight, and then everyone eats breakfast, takes a short nap, then has drinks, then comes lunch with drinks, then the bullfight, then more drinks, then dinner with drinks, followed by more drinks, dancing and carousing in bars (still more drinks), maybe a few hours' sleep, and then it's time for the next bull run. The city runs riot. Revelers from local clubs called
peñas
, the marching bands of the
peñas
, lines of dancers, tourists, and drunks of all descriptions roam the streets at all hours, clashing together with mad passion.

The atmosphere of the corridas in the large ring is just as wild as the atmosphere in the streets. The
peñas
buy up most of the seats in the sunny sections, and they spend the entirety of the spectacle chanting insults and hurling sangria and flour while their house bands play over each other at full volume. There are true aficionados in Pamplona, some of the best in Spain. But the presence of these sober fans is wiped out by the cacophony of the sunny sections. “It is very hard there,” Fran said. “Because you don't know if the people like or don't like what you do. You can't hear if the serious people are clapping or booing.”

But the Feria de San Fermín, rather like bullfighting itself, is redeemed by that amazing Spanish ability to reconcile the high with the low, the grotesque with the beautiful, the morbid with the joyous, the religious with the unholy, and make sense of it in a way that few other cultures can. The Pamplona fair blends a louche and seedy carnival with stirring church services, with bull sortings held in a spotless corral where tapas are served, with dinners in local homes where the cooking is as complex and well prepared as in any restaurant, with the people of a simple and elegant city trying to hold their annual festival in the middle of a tidal wave of rowdy foreigners.

Pamplona is the capital of Navarra, a square-shaped region in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Named for its founder, the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great), Pamplona became a Roman garrison town in the first century before Christ. During the Middle Ages Pamplona was variously under the dominion of the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Moors. In the year 778 the future Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, attacked the city, knocking down its walls. The Pamplónicas responded to this a few months later by ambushing the Frankish king's army, wiping out the rear guard, and this bloody bit of business became the basis for a popular and enduring epic poem,
The Song of Roland
, although the poet converted the Pamplónicas into Moors for dramatic effect.

Today Pamplona is a small city of the type that no longer exists in the United States, sort of like what Charleston or Baltimore must have been in the time before America was afflicted with the suburban scourge. Pamplona has a population of fewer than two hundred thousand, yet it is a center of banking and small industry; it has a university; and it is home to many wealthy and middle-class residents who support its restaurants, theaters, and shops and would never dream of fleeing the city center for split-level sprawl.

The only cloud over Pamplona is the ongoing violent campaign by some of its citizens to force the creation of a Basque state separate from Spain. The Basques are an ethnic minority, tall and fair, very Catholic, and with a strong agrarian tradition. They live on both sides of the French-Spanish border and in Spain are concentrated in the Pais Vasco (Basque Country) and adjoining Navarra. Although the Basques are a distinct ethnic group, they have almost never ruled themselves. They have their own language (of ancient and obscure origin), but it's been centuries since any significant population spoke it. You could be killed for saying such things in some parts of Spain and France, but the truth is that Spanish Basques are Spaniards, just as are the Catalan speakers of Cataluña, the Gallego speakers of Galicia, and the Valenciano speakers of Valencia. Spanish Basques live, speak, eat, and pray like Spaniards. They also adore bullfighting. There are three first-category rings in Navarra and the Pais Vasco—Bilbao, Pamplona, and San Sebastián—and a brace of smaller rings of great history and respectability. The aficionados in these rings are known for their
torista
tendencies. They are demanding of bullfighters and enamored of big, fierce bulls.

The Pamplona
feria
, as its name implies, is dedicated to Saint Fermín, a local priest who was beheaded in the second century after Christ by French pagans who didn't appreciate the good news of the Bible as much as Fermín had hoped they would. His namesake festival has been celebrated since at least the thirteenth century, and has long included religious processions, outdoor markets, fireworks, and bullfights. These days the festival goes from July 6 to July 14.