Iberia (110 page)
Authors: James Michener
followed by a consonant, so the English words like
scarp, spume and stupid became in Spanish escarpa, espuma and
estúpido. This meant, the essayist had pointed out, that the two
radically different English words, eschatology which means the
philosophical analysis of ultimate goals, especially those religious,
and scatalogy, which means preoccupation with or study of
excrement, had each to be translated by the Spanish escatalogía.
Vanderford, a remarkably irreligous man (he calls himself a
humanist), humorously proposed that since no intelligent man
really believed in the future life any more and since there was not
much to be gained by continuing to talk about it, maybe it would
be better to drop the first meaning and cling to the second, which
is concerned with an inescapable fact of life that is always with
us. He continued with the suggestion that on second thought
neither meaning need be dropped, since further study of the
conflict had revealed an intimate relationship between the two
meanings of the word, psychologically if not etymologically. He
pointed out that the famous ascetics of history, who have always
been interested in eschatology, have also notoriously been
interested in scatology, since the French Catholic writer Viscomte
Maxime de Montmorand, in his
Psychologie des Mystiques
Catholiques Orthodoxes
, holds that nearly all Christian ascetics
have been scatophagous. Vanderford holds equally recondite and
stubborn views on bullfight matters.
it, so I suppose I can’t fight you all. But to say that at the kill a
matador “goes over the horn” is pure nonsense. Let him go in
that way and he’ll get a horn in the gut every time. What he does
is to trick the bull into charging one way while he slides in on a
curving trajectory the other way, thus avoiding the horn. Over
the horn? Never.’
dedicated foreign bullfight expert of either sex is Alice Hall.’ This
tall, slim gray-haired spinster was, until her recent retirement, a
teacher of Spanish in a fancy private school in Atlanta, Georgia.
She came originally to Spain for the laudable purpose of
improving her pronunciation, little aware of what was in store.
Like any dutiful tourist she went routinely to a bullfight, had the
good fortune of seeing César Girón on one of his great days, and
promptly surrendered. Year after year she returned during her
vacations and applied to bullfighting the tenacious scholarship
which had made her a fine teacher. A friend says, ‘Alice feels
intuitively what the bull and the man are going to do next…what
they must do…and she is in the ring with them when they do
it.’‘Each autumn when I go back to Atlanta and face my first class
of girls,’ she says quietly, ‘I feel as if I have been sentenced to exile,
that I am in a strange land surrounded by strangers. My heart
was left behind in Andalucía.’
the first fight at Pamplona, which is quite near to France and
therefore attracts many Frenchmen, this doughty little bourgeois,
with mustache, close-buttoned black suit and lunch in a briefcase,
became so enraptured with the performance of Paco Camino that
as the matador took a turn of the plaza he threw his bota of wine
into the ring, and Camino drank from it. The crowd applauded.
Later my Frenchman did the same for Diego Puerta, and again
the crowd cheered.
why the crowd kept cheering this modest Frenchman, but on this
day, when he tossed his bota at the feet of Miguelín, his section
of the plaza rose en masse and accorded him a round of applause
usually reserved for generals or generalísimos. Why? Because
when this prudent fellow tossed his bota into the ring he kept it
attached to a long length of French fishing cord, so that when the
matador finished taking his drink, the valuable leather bottle,
worth about forty cents, would be reeled back to its owner.
bullfighting can exert is a man I have not met. George Smith, a
retired high school Spanish teacher from Los Angeles, saw his
first fight in Mexico and subsequently came to Spain on vacation,
developing an intense interest in the bulls. He began to acquire
a bullfight library, and with the help of a former matador who in
retirement became an expert on old books, has built up what
many call the finest library of its kind in the United States. He
intends leaving it to the Los Angeles public library. Sudden and
protracted illness has prevented him from returning to Spain but
he is so infatuated with the ambiente that each spring, during San
Isidro, he sends his matador-bibliophile a substantial check in
order to assemble in Salvador’s taurine restaurant a group of
aficionados to partake of the feast that he would like to give in
person. In 1967 Nicanor Vilalta, one of the finest and bravest of
the old-time matadors, attended. Also present was the critic who
wears the gold watch that once belonged to Manolete: ‘The mother
of Manolete to Antonio Bellón, loyal and unselfish friend of her
son.’ Vanderford was there and several others who appreciate the
bulls, and as the meal drew to an end, Vicente Molina, the book
dealer, proposed the toast, ‘To a man who truly loves our crazy
world.’
bullfights, conclude that it is only the thrill-seeking foreigner who
keeps the art alive, and it is true that along the Mediterranean
coast the rings are populated mainly by travelers from northern
countries who understand little of what they are seeing. I
remember the last fight of the season in Barcelona, when more
than two-thirds of the meager audience consisted of white-hatted
sailors from the visiting American fleet. In Mallorca foreigners
constitute a majority of the audience, and standards have
degenerated so badly that a local impresario has rigged up his
private plaza and keeps a tame bull therein for tourists to ‘fight’
at five dollars a throw. For two dollars they rent gaudy matador
suits, and for an additional two dollars they can have their
photographs taken facing the bull. When they get back into street
clothes for another dollar they can purchase from the Plaza
Mallorca a colorful poster showing their name printed between
that of Manolete and El Cordobés.
Bartolomé Bestard, honorary American Consul in Mallorca, told
me. ‘He’s so smart that when he sees a camera he shows the
one-day matadors where to stand. But don’t laugh! That bull
personally has paid for those three apartment houses over there.
A fabulous animal.’
chapter, many intelligent and progressive Spaniards decry
bullfighting as a blemish upon their country’s reputation. In 1965
I saw a series of excellent fights on government television, but in
1966, following a disastrous corrida which revolted many people,
the broadcasts were quietly eliminated. Word went out that the
government had decided that public reveling in bullfights must
stop, at least over television. (In 1967 the programs were
resumed.) More significant was what happened on Sunday
afternoon, September 18, 1966, when Vanderford and I attended
a corrida in Madrid, only to find that without previous warning
members of the Guardia Civil had stationed themselves at all
entrances and were turning away children under the age of
fourteen. Later the government encouraged the rumor that this
was henceforth to be the law in all cities. ‘They’ve determined to
stamp out bull-fighting by driving young people out of the arena
and onto the football field,’ a matador told me. ‘In the end they’ll
succeed.’ (In 1967 this ban was still in force.)
bullfighting to have been voiced in recent years is that published
in 1962 by Eléna de La Souchère, a Barcelona woman of French
descent who fled Spain after the Civil War:
Beginning in the eighteenth century, the uprooted and
somewhat indolent masses who pushed into Madrid and Sevilla
conceived a passion for the arena. Bullfights, which until this time
had been occasional single combats for the pleasure of the
knights-combatant, now were transformed into periodic
spectacles; the professionals of the arena reappeared…. These
games were the response to a deep-rooted psychological need.
The people had ceased to participate in public life and the
psychologically passive plebeians refused henceforth to take any
risk or assume any effort; nonetheless, they craved a chance to
demonstrate their aggressive instinct…. In Madrid, as formerly
in Rome and Byzantium, the people continued to fight and to
triumph but through an interpreter an appointed
slayer-of-beasts—with whom they could identify….
The
in fact completes the destruction of the conditions
which gave it birth. The games of the circus are costly, voracious.
There is not enough bread—and the wheat fields lie fallow as far
as the eye can see, giving graze to the
corrida
bulls. The farmer
trudges behind his antique wooden plough: The bullock is a
luxury, reserved for the minority of wealthy cultivators. Thousands
of bulls are sacrificed each year to the arenas. The circus devours
the unsown harvest, the bull unharnessed to plough the scanty
soil, the glebe land, which is the raw material of bread and of
man’s labor.
Each village should awaken from the torpor into which all have
fallen. But the
is an obstacle in the path of necessity which
orders man to work. This torpor is born and nourished by the
perpetuation of man’s resignation. Every Sunday, the circus games
sap his vital energy: the intensity of a prolonged and repeated
emotion summons all his energies, gathers them, strains them to
paroxysm, breaks them by an abrupt relaxation, knots them
together once again, breaks them once again, to the rhythm of the
bull’s charge and retreat, charge and retreat. In this impassioned
catharsis, the active energy of a people becomes so many nervous
sparks strewn on the sterile sand of the arena. Becoming
accustomed from an early age to the death-spectacle, the dolorous
diversion, destroys the sensitivity of the human being. Henceforth,
he is predisposed to any abuse, any cruelty. Familiarity with bloody
spectacles goes a long way toward explaining the sadistic abuses
which have marked the revolutions and the civil wars in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain. By tolerating the arena
games, by promoting them and allowing children to witness them,
the Church and the public authorities have shown to what extent
they submit to the
terratenientes
, landowners, who raise the bulls;
and they show once again how indifferent they are to their essential
task: education of the masses.
On the other side of the ledger, the idolatry of these circus
games has been condemned by all the great figures of
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century liberal Spain, from
Blasco Ibáñez to Pío Baroja and Ortega y Gasset. In that era all of
the progressive forces, particularly the liberals and the
anarcho-syndicalists, were alarmed by the psychological effects
of the
. Their alarm was all the more pronounced because
the ravages of the arena, physical ravages first of all, are felt most
in the lowest classes: each Sunday during the bullfight season is
marred by several accidents. In a special issue, September-October,
1962, devoted to bullfighting, the Madrid magazine,
Indice
,
published the complete list of Spanish
toreros
killed in the arena
since the end of the eighteenth century. Listed were the names of
some 278 victims between 1900 and 1962; in other words,
considering the brevity of the bullfight season (from Easter to the
autumn) one death every six weeks.
But the
perverts even more than it kills. Its false prestige
has demoralized generations of young workers; in presenting a
gilded mirage and factitious universe it tempts their appetites for
luxury, for vainglory, and instills in them a disdain for useful
work. Yet the majority of apprentice
toreros
have not even a chance
to prove themselves in regular
corridas
. While casting about for
engagements they subsist on shady deals.
A varied fauna buzzes about the walls of the arena…these
down-and-outs perhaps were once the hopes of a season; ever
suppliant, they cling to the neighborhood of the plaza in low
taverns filled with the stench of refried oil. The adolescents who
hang about the arena in search of work will join them one day.
And others, and still others…The arena wins. It spreads out. It
eats into the city, as an ulcer eats into healthy flesh; the ulcer is
devouring the city.
Señorita de la Souchère speaks for many, but her figures on
deaths from bullfighting apply primarily, of course, to a previous
condition. One man altered the trend of those figures, and outside
the bullring in Madrid, matadors have erected a statue to him:
‘Dr. Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin.’ Four-fifths of
bullfight deaths in times past came because horns infected with
animal manure produced instant gangrene; most of these men
would have lived had penicillin existed in their day. Today
Fleming’s miracle drug saves literally dozens of bullfighters, and
he is properly their patron saint.
In her criticism, Señorita de La Souchère implies that the meat
of the fighting bull is wasted; this has never been true. In the old
days the carcasses were butchered at the bullring and passed along
without charge to hospitals and poorhouses, but today the meat
is carted to selected butchershops throughout each city and sold
at a slight reduction. At the ring at Pamplona, I came to know
Señora Aniceto Oloriz, a small, doughty woman with a marvelous
smile and reddish hair who supervised the butchering of the dead
bulls as promptly as they were hauled from the arena. About ten
minutes after Paco Camino killed a bull, Señora Oloriz had it cut
into quarters and early next morning was hawking it at her stall
in the Pamplona market.
