The Drifters (76 page)

‘At seven in the morning the gates of this corral are thrown open and the rocket we heard uptown explodes, startling the animals and starting them on their mad rush up the hill and into the city. For the first hundred yards no runners are allowed in the streets. This permits the bulls to get started. They run in this chasm formed by the museum walls on one side, building walls on the other.

‘Here, where the museum wall ends, this ramp leads up to another level. It’s blocked off and filled with hundreds of watchers, who are the first people the bulls see. At this spot the course narrows to only fifteen feet across. Also, it turns sharply to the left and goes uphill to the military hospital, and after that to Bar Vasca, as you can see.

‘At six-thirty each morning runners of exceptional bravery are allowed to take position at this point where the course narrows to fifteen feet and turns left for the run uphill. When the rocket explodes, these exceptional men start to run—not uphill toward safety but downhill toward the onrushing bulls. They time themselves exactly, spin on their toes, turn, and race back uphill just in front of the horns. I don’t know anything in sport—not even auto racing or skiing—which requires the combination of courage and timing this does, for not only must the runner calculate the relative speeds of himself and the bulls, but when the critical moment comes he must turn and race uphill with absolutely no escape, for as you can see, there are no doors or exits of any kind. In the end he must either dive into the gutter or press himself hopefully against the bare wall, trusting that the bulls will roar past without stopping to gore him!’

‘Have you ever run down to meet the bulls?’ Cato asked.

‘Never had the nerve. But Holt has run here every morning for sixteen years—1954 through 1969—his last three gorings occurred here. Of the seven runners who have been killed, most were pegged on this hill. The charming part is, if a bull does catch you, he knocks you down at the doors of the military hospital. You’re on the operating table in less than a minute. When you see Harvey Holt, you see a man who has run into the horns of the bulls more than a hundred times.’

Yigal said, ‘He must be completely nuts,’ but Cato said, ‘He has guts.’

We returned to the bar and waited for Holt to appear. So far, none of the young people had seen him run and therefore had no concept of what he did, but after my explanation they were prepared to speak to him with respect, so when he came in for his
pochas
, Britta asked, ‘Did you run down the hill today?’

Holt stared at me reproachfully and said nothing, so Britta continued, ‘Could we watch you run tomorrow?’

‘No place for girls,’ Holt replied, but later that night
after the fireworks, as we were coming home to bed, Britta and Gretchen took my arms and said, ‘We want to see what Mr. Holt’s been up to,’ and I told them, ‘You ought to see. Be ready at six-thirty.’

On the morning of July 10 we rose early, fought over the bathroom, went down to greet the singers in the bar, and proceeded down Santo Domingo to the escape ramp leading up to the art museum. Testing several locations, Joe and Yigal finally decided that we should stand not at the end closest to the corrals, but farther up the hill where we could see the men run down the hill, turn, and then run back to the military hospital.

When the girls looked downhill toward the quiet corral and saw the narrowness of the street up which the bulls would charge, they began to appreciate what a powerful scene was about to unfold.

It was not until a quarter to seven that Britta cried, ‘Look! There’s Mr. Holt.’

In the front ranks at the barrier stood Harvey with his Spanish friends. He was, of course, the only non-Spaniard who would dash downhill toward the bulls. The others were men of approximately his age, with only one or two young fellows in their early twenties who had been accepted by the veterans.

‘Watch what he does when the rocket sounds,’ I advised, and the girls kept their eyes on Holt in his white outfit with the red sash and scarf.

Whoooosh!
With a loud roar the rocket exploded. Deftly the police swung away the barrier and fled to safety on the ramp. At that moment the second rocket exploded. As it did, Holt and his companions raced downhill directly at the oncoming bulls. When it seemed that the horns must catch them, they turned and for some forty yards ran like mad ahead of the pressing animals.

‘My God!’ Britta screamed as the lead bull gained on Holt, reaching out as if to knock him over or gore him. At that moment Holt dove for the crevice where the high wall and the paved street met, and over him passed the two bulls and three steers who were running wide that morning.

Britta closed her eyes and seemed about to faint, believing
that the bull had knocked Holt over with his horn, but Gretchen, who had been watching more closely, saw that he had been neither gored nor stepped upon, and she said, ‘He’s getting up.’ Britta opened her eyes and saw Holt dusting himself off, but now Monica screamed, ‘Look!’

Six men came running down Santo Domingo from a spot in front of Bar Vasca where a bull had gored a young boy, whose torso was covered with blood. Across from us the big doors of the military hospital swung open to admit the boy. Before I could assure the girls that he would probably be all right, two other groups of running men dashed down the hill bearing two other young men who had been hit. These men showed no blood. ‘Broken ribs,’ I said confidently. ‘They’ll be all right,’ but Monica kept shouting, ‘Look at them hauling in the corpses!’ Yigal, watching Holt, shook his head and said, ‘Now I know he’s nuts.’

Gretchen now spotted Holt and called down to him, asking him to wait for us, and we descended to the street, where Britta said, ‘You were beautiful, running at the bulls.’ Holt grunted, then led us to our alcove at Bar Vasca, where a large crowd gathered to discuss the accidents. A total of seven had been hauled to the various hospitals, but nothing serious. One Spaniard stopped by our table to report, ‘They didn’t even have to call a priest. Very satisfactory run. And with you, Señor Holt?’

‘Regular.’

Sleeping arrangements at Bar Vasca were apt to be chaotic and I shall not try to chart a report of who slept in whose bed … or more likely, under it. To do so would require one of those transistorized computers, because so many people crowded into Pamplona for San Fermín that there simply were not enough beds to go around, and the luckless ones had to make unusual adjustments. North of town there was a camp on a hillside overlooking a valley, but it was so crowded with tents that not another could be squeezed in. As it was, every tent did quadruple duty, and when you toured the area you had to be careful not to step on feet protruding from the canvas. There were several large fields set aside for trailers but these had been preempted three days before
the fair opened. A good many visitors slept on the ground, some in the lee of the Hemingway statue, so that whenever any of our group went into the central square, we were sure to find half a dozen persons who desperately needed sleeping quarters. It was not at all unusual for Joe and Yigal to come back at two in the morning with three or four girls, especially from Canada and Australia, who would pile into the room with them, some sharing the beds with the boys, others sprawled along the floor.

Twice, when I reached home, I found young girls asleep in my bed, so exhausted that they barely wakened when I shifted them to the floor; since it was known that I had a room to myself, Britta and Gretchen were likely to assure any new acquaintances in the square, ‘He’s a good Joe. Get to the room before one o’clock and don’t say anything.’ My quarters were frequently littered with sleeping bags in which young men and women, sometimes together, slept, oblivious to me.

Of these strangers who passed through my room, I can say that they were honest, for I never lost anything; they were as clean as life without bath or shower would permit; and a good many of them were as virginal as they would have been under their mother’s care back in Australia, Canada or Texas, but an equal number weren’t.

As a matter of fact, during San Fermín the word ‘sleeping’ carried an arbitrary definition: something you rarely did. You got up at five-thirty in the morning, met the gang in the central square at eight, had lunch somewhere, went to the bullfights in the afternoon, had dinner, watched the nightly fireworks, danced in the streets till about three-thirty, and were up fresh two hours later. About the only time that Pamplona was reasonably quiet was from nine o’clock in the morning till twelve, and it was then that most of us slept and did our laundry. Those who failed to do the latter, and there were many, began to smell pretty raunchy by the third day, but since few of us had access to baths, everyone else was smelling rather high too, so it didn’t matter.

What happened sexually on the third floor of Bar Vasca, I never clearly understood. About as far as I could safely go would be to say that Cato and Monica were continuing their intense affair, fortified by nightly bouts of marijuana and occasionally LSD, which continued to frighten me. If Joe and Yigal remained continent, they were cast
in heroic mold, for the girls I saw them with were among the most attractive at the fair. One morning I had to go into their room for some bullfight tickets and found a girl in bed with each boy and two other girls asleep on the floor. Since that same night two quite attractive girls had slept in my room without incident, I would not have wanted to jump to any conclusions about what might or might not have happened with Joe and Yigal.

The room which Gretchen and Britta occupied was another matter. These girls were careful of their behavior; Britta allowed no one to slip quickly into her bed, and Gretchen was still aloof. Any strangers who shared their room were girls who simply had to have some place to get a night’s uninterrupted sleep; but in what I say next I am not speaking of strangers.

At lunch on the day when we first saw Holt run with the bulls, there was a commotion at the bar and I heard Raquel shouting in Spanish, ‘You dear little blond bastard, welcome home.’ Immediately after, Monica, who was sitting facing the bar, leaped to her feet and rushed out of the alcove to embrace someone. I turned, and it was Clive, with his purple carpetbag, Christ-like beard and gentle smile. He made a tour of the table, kissing everyone, men and all, and I said, ‘Clive, this is my long-time friend and Pamplona expert, Harvey Holt,’ whereupon Clive kissed him and Harvey almost toppled into his
pochas.
While Holt was still aghast, Clive took Harvey’s spoon, exclaiming, ‘Delicious! Raquel, you’re as glorious as ever. Now get us your turntable, because I have some wonderful music in here for you.’

We made a place for him in the alcove, and while Raquel set up her machine, he regaled us with the sensational news that had rocked London. ‘Octopus has broken up! Yes, dissolved. But a powerful new group is coming out of it. You must remember the name, because they’re making some of the most fantastic sounds you ever heard. Mauve Alligator, and you’re about to hear their magic.’ Carefully he unzipped his carpetbag and lifted out a record with a lurid dust jacket. ‘This has to last all the way to Marrakech,’ he explained, ‘and this is the first stop.’ With care he placed the needle in the lead-in grooves, turned the volume almost as high as it would go, then sat back with a beatific smile on his face while gigantic, driving sound throbbed from the loudspeakers. The
young people pushed away from their
pochas
and surrendered themselves to the flood of emotion that hammered itself upon us. Holt looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, then asked, ‘Can we turn the volume down a bit?’ But Clive pushed his hand away from the controls.

When the first side of the Mauve Alligator record ended, dive tucked the precious disk back into his bag and allowed the machine to stand idle for some minutes as he told us, with engaging shyness, of the great thing that had happened to him. ‘The Homing Pigeons came to me and said they wanted a new song. They’d dreamed up this staggering theme … wait till you hear it. What they had in mind was a set of words that would go on and on. Their lead guitar had heard me in a club one night speaking of Torremolinos and Ibiza and the endless road of music that was uniting us all. He sort of had the idea that this might be a concept … well, a concept that would coincide spiritually with the music. I said I’d even like to hear their theme again, so they cut a disk for me … just a few bars … an idea only … and I went to Mother’s and put it on the machine for three solid days. She went off to her flat in London. And when the whole world was suffused with that beat … Listen.’

From his bag he produced the latest Homing Pigeons record, in a psychedelic jacket which pictured two thirds of the Sphinx, a fragment of the Taj Mahal, broken figures from the frieze of the Parthenon, a slum in Liverpool, and Clive’s face wreathed in flowers. The title of the album was
St. Paul, Ulysses and Me.

‘You wrote it?’ Gretchen asked.

Clive nodded and placed the record on the machine, keeping the volume at its maximum, and for the first time his friends heard the song that was to echo around the world. It started with the driving beat of three guitars, no drums, playing one theme incessantly. It was not monotonous, because the theme was good and the guitars embellished it in various simple ways, but after about a minute of this, an anguished, protesting voice began the words which young people in many countries would find so congenial:

It was a song of the disenchanted, the disengaged who threw down a challenge to forces they could not control. One pasage attracted my interest because, although it had been written by an Englishman for an English group, it dealt with what one might at first consider a purely American theme:

‘Why such a thought in an English song?’ I asked. ‘What could listeners over there possibly care about General Hershey?’