Iberia (84 page)

 

A habitué of the bar ran up with a set of photographs from that
morning’s running of the bulls, and the photographers had caught
Matt in regulation Pamplona costume of white shirt, white pants,
red scarf and sash and rope-soled shoes, running about six inches
in front of the horns of a massive bull. Later pictures in the
sequence showed him flat on his face, with bulls, oxen and people
running over him. A final shot showed him up and grinning, with
his fantastic black eye.

 

‘A very fine run,’ he said as he studied the photographs, but in
his opinion it did not equal the one which some photographer
had caught four years ago in color film. Matt had a copy of the
postcard which was now sold in Pamplona souvenir shops. It
showed him sprinting for life ahead of a bewildered bull whose
left horn was about to toss him far and wide.

 

‘He gave me a neat six-inch scratch which wasn’t particularly
dangerous, but could have been.’ I suggested that judging from
the photographs, he must carry quite a few horn wounds on his
hungry-looking body. ‘Nope. I’ve been lucky. But I do have this
one to muzzle those clowns in Paris who sit around cafés
explaining how to run the bulls at Pamplona.’

 

‘How many years you been coming here?’

 

‘This is my fourteenth. The running this morning was fine.
Not great. Bulls couldn’t catch up with the runners. But it would
have to be graded fine.’

 

‘Would you tell me what happened with Hemingway?’

 

‘Will you treat it with respect?’

 

‘In your words.’

 

He ordered a beer, sat back, fingered the edge of his eye and
said, ‘I revere Hemingway. And years ago I revered him even
more. So this evening at San Fermín, I was sitting here, where
you are, and he was over there, where Orson Welles is sitting now.
He was with the elite of the feria, everyone important, and I looked
like a real bum. Drunker than I am now. He had done some of
the good writing of our generation. I’d done nothing more
permanent than a popcorn fart in a typhoon. So I grabbed my
bota, staggered over to his table and shouted, “Hemingway, you
old bastard, have a drink with me.” Mary Hemingway said, “Please
don’t. He’s drunk.” So I shouted, “Drunk or sober, Hemingway,
have a drink with me,” so he grabbed the bota, wound up and
threw it as far as he could. It landed on a truck in the street, and
I announced in a loud clear voice, “Mr. Ernest Hemingway, fuck
you!” At this he brushed Mary away, leaped to his feet and began
cursing me. He lunged at me and I was going to break him in half,
fat old man that he was, but two Swedes dragged me away, and
that night when I got back to my room I wrote a letter to him and
said, “Mr. Hemingway, I revere you as one of the fine writers of
my generation and I am overcome with remorse that I should
have behaved in such a way. Please forgive me.” I gave the letter
to Peter Buckley, who did that great book on bulls in Spain, and
he delivered it to Hemingway, but Big Dave who was there at the
time, told me that Hemingway took one look at the letter, sneered
and tore it up. He was real big talking about brawls and that, but
when he had one in his lap he didn’t know what to do nor how
to end it. To me Ernest Hemingway is a crock of shit.’

 

The one good eye that I could see was steely blue and the craggy
face was resolute. The sandy hair, with a few streaks of gray, was
tousled and the faded red scarf was pinned at the neck with the
diagonal shields of San Fermín. At the edge of his shirt a jagged
horn scar showed across his chest.

 

‘The scar? How’d you get it?’

 

‘I have this crazy thing. All year long, when I’m working in
Paris, I keep thinking of Pamplona. San Fermín. To run, to touch,
to feel the horn tips edging closer.’

 

‘Is it something mystical?’ I asked.

 

Matt looked at me as if I were out of my mind. ‘Christ, you
miss the whole flaming point. It’s fun! It’s joy!’ He showed me a
photograph from the morning paper and I suppose that in years
to come this shot will often be seen in books, for there was Matt
galloping a few inches ahead of the steers and bulls, alone and
laughing his Irish head off. It was as lovely a portrait of man’s
inherent nonsense as I had ever seen. ‘I run the bulls for joy, which
is the chief ingredient in generosity. In this way I prove that I have
the capacity to give myself whole hog to some activity.’

 

‘Do you run to prove your bravery?’ I asked, for in recent years
the most courageous acts at Pamplona had been Matt’s.

 

‘To stand in the street before the run begins…to visualize the
bulls coming at you…to sense what might happen…yes, that
takes courage. But when those rockets go off and the black shapes
come tumbling at you…Hell, you’ve already made your
commitment and all it takes now is a sense of joy…to be part of
the stampede.’

 

‘Yet you think that Hemingway was a crock of crap?’

 

‘I must. He glorified this sort of thing, but when it came to
him, face to face with a bota of red wine, he didn’t know how to
handle it. No gracia. No understanding. A good writer. Not the
greatest man. But a good writer.’

 

In this book I have tried to keep the focus on Spain and
Spaniards rather than upon the experiences and opinions of
foreign visitors. I have filed away those diverting accounts of what
happened to a German in Córdoba or to an Englishman in
Badajoz, but in this material on Pamplona during San Fermín, I
must speak of foreigners, because the city is crammed with them
and it is what happens to them that makes the festival intriguing.
If three beautiful Swedish girls of nineteen can find no place to
sleep but in the street, one cannot ignore them, nor can be close
his eyes to a sports car filled with six handsome juniors from the
University of California, three girls, three boys, who sleep sitting
in their car near a main intersection.

 

I am not, however, going to deal with the young punks who
have come here for a sexual holiday; what with the shortage of
beds in Pamplona they could do better elsewhere. Nor am I
concerned about the various groups who look at one running of
the bulls, attend one bullfight and spend the rest of their time at
LSD and marijuana parties. What I am involved with are these
lineal descendants of Ernest Hemingway and his fictional
characters who four decades ago discovered the high hilarity of
San Fermín, which through the years has not diminished.

 

To understand the magic of Pamplona one must follow the
passage of a typical day. The feria, which regularly starts on July
7, San Fermím Day, is billed throughout Spain as the festival of
the bulls, signifying that for once in the mean and ugly world of
bullfighting the animal himself, known as the only element in the
fight that has not been corrupted, is meant to be king. And in a
sense he is.

 

Shortly before midnight, in the darkened streets of the lower
part of town where barricades have been erected to form a runway,
the bulls for the next day’s fight are turned loose from the
reception pens known as the Corrales de Gas, run across the river
on a narrow bridge, then up the steep hill to the temporary corral
at the bottom of the Calle Santo Domingo, where they will spend
the rest of the night. It is an eerie thing to see the hurrying bulls
loom through the darkness and rush past on almost silent hoofs.
They are frightened by the dash across the bridge and uncertain
about the rush up the hill, so they run with concentrated purpose,
like ghosts who have little time for their night journey. A rush,
the rattle of hoofs on paving stones, an echo of panting, the clean,
lingering smell of animals on the night air and they are gone,
mysteriously and with a sense of great drama.

 

From midnight, with the bulls now safely in their corral, until
six o’clock in the morning, when the bands begin to play in all
parts of town, Pamplona is a dream city. At the Bar Txoco on the
square, customers from Scandinavia and Germany, delighted to
be again where there is warmth, sit all night at small tables
drinking beer. At the next bar my degenerate waiter whispers,
‘Shift over to this table, and I can serve you.’ With every order
the Swedes give him, he pours one for himself, and for the whole
eight days he will be drunk. In cars parked throughout the city,
boys from Harvard and girls from Wellesley sleep on back seats,
wrapped in blankets. Bank lobbies have been thrown open by the
police, and college students from Oxford and the Sorbonne sleep
on the marble, boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl, right up to the teller’s
cage. Others, not lucky enough to get into the banks, sleep on the
sidewalks; and in the public square by the bandstand, hundreds
lie on benches or on the grass. The town is a vast open-air
dormitory, and each sleeper has about his throat the red scarf of
San Fermín and in his hand a bota of red wine.

 

At a quarter to six bands playing the music of Navarra start
circulating through all parts of the city, wakening both those who
slept in beds and those who did not. If the sleeper is fortunate he
is awakened not by a brass band but by one of the three-man
groups consisting of two playing antique oboes and one beating
a drum, for if there is sweeter music on earth I have not heard it.
The sound that comes from these old oboes is like the whispering
of a thousand birds at dawn; it is the fairy music that elves dance
to; it is the Middle Ages captured in haunting notes; and long
after all else in Pamplona has been forgotten, these delicious
sounds will echo in the memories of men and women in small
towns in Norway and Peru, those who were wakened at Pamplona
by the oboes. I once had a record of them on their morning
rounds, and at a house party in southern Spain I would
occasionally play it on the gramophone, and those in the audience
who had not known the music at San Fermín would ask, ‘What’s
that wailing?’ But those who had wakened to it during the feria
would have tears in their eyes.

 

By six o’clock the streets of Pamplona are jammed with twenty
or thirty thousand people, from boys of five to old couples of
eighty, for to lie late abed during San Fermín would be insanity.
Some fourteen thousand of these early risers are heading toward
the bullring, and now one begins to understand why Pamplona
is such an ideal spot for an all-out feria like this. The bullring is
practically in the center of town, a couple of short blocks from
the central square, so that life moves alternately from the ring to
the square.

 

At the bullring, people pay sixty cents for entrance to what will
become a major part of the feria. The real fun won’t start till seven,
but shortly after six a band, led by a zany conductor with a
magisterial sense of comedy, entertains the crowd with songs of
Navarra and nonsense of a high order. It’s a bright, lovely part of
the day and time passes swiftly.

 

Meanwhile, along a course nine hundred yards long and leading
through the very heart of the city, temporary barricades have been
erected in such manner that later on they can be dismantled in
about ten minutes and stored along the sidewalk for use next
morning. When in place and it takes a goodly number of men to
gear them properly, these barricades form a continuous runway
from the Santo Domingo corrals, up to the colorful town hall,
along Doña Blanca de Navarra (formerly known as Mercaderes),
then up the historic Estafeta, an extremely narrow street, through
an open square and into the tightly barricaded chute that will
throw the stampeding animals into the bullring itself.

 

At half past six this narrow course has attracted young men
from all parts of Europe, and some not so young. Matt Carney is
running for the eighty-fourth morning. Tigre’s tall son is running
for his fourth; already he’s been on the tips of the bulls’ horns,
but without incident. John Fulton and several Spanish matadors
will run for the fun of it, and because they inherently love the
bulls and enjoy being with them in any circumstances. Even
Kenneth Vanderford, in his Hemingway cap, will be running, and
he will by no means be the oldest participant, for yesterday a man
of seventy-five was pegged by the bulls and is now in the hospital.
It is a madness, this running with the bulls, and it never leaves a
man’s blood.

 

Promptly at seven a powerful rocket flies into the air and
explodes aloft to signify that the gates to the corral have been
opened. As soon as all the startled animals have dashed into the
street, a second rocket explodes to warn everyone that they are
on their way, six bulls and six large oxen pounding ahead at a full
gallop up Santo Domingo, past the military hospital and into the
square before the town hall. They run extremely fast, and as they
go men run ahead of them, seeming to fly along the narrow streets.
But since the bulls can run much faster than the men, the animals
catch up with the speeding humans and sometimes knock them
down or one man trips over another and there is a pile-up. When
you first see a batch of runners stumble and fall into a heap, with
enraged bulls bearing down upon them, you think, My God!
They’ll be killed.

 

But the forward motion of the bulls is such that they prefer to
surge onward with the oxen rather than lag behind to fight with
fallen men. I have seen incredible accumulations in which several
dozen men have formed a mad pile in front of the flying animals,
but the latter have plunged ahead, fighting to get over the human
barricade, and whereas they have bruised some with their heavy
hoofs they have not bothered any with their horns. If a man falls
and can roll into the gutter and lie motionless, there’s a good
chance he will escape.

 

It is when a bull becomes detached from the herd and finds
himself alone that he panics. Then he starts slashing out with his
horns and darting with savage speed at whatever confuses him.
It is then that young men, no matter how adept at dodging, go
to the hospital. Over the years, of a hundred men wounded by
horns at Pamplona, fully ninety-five have been wounded by
solitary bulls who have been isolated as they rush toward the
arena. But even if a man does get trapped by a lone bull, and even
if the horns are two inches from his gut, there’s always the
likelihood that some other runner will attract the bull’s attention
at the last fragment of a second, and the horn will miss. When
this happens people say, ‘San Fermín came down to make the
save.’ San Fermín protects a lot of lives.