American: (aggressively) What do you mean, football?
Spaniard: I’ve been following your statistics for some years, and each year your American-style football kills more than forty of your finest young men.
American: There’s an accident now and then.
Spaniard: Forty men, year after year. And not dead-end kids like boxers. But the best young men of your country, many of them fine scholars. Yet I hear no outcry against football.
American: Well, football’s different. Our best colleges play football.
Spaniard: Why is there no public outcry against a sport which kills forty of your best young men each year?
American: Well, football’s part of the American way of life. Everybody’s for football.
Spaniard: Exactly. Football’s part of your way of life. Universities pay for their stadiums with football. Television earns enormous sums from bringing it into your homes. Automobiles and razor blades are sold by means of it. Newspapers, who might be expected to lead the fight against such brutality, earn much of their profits from emphasizing football. It would be ridiculous to attack something that earns everyone so much money.
American: But we don’t look at football as a way to earn money. It’s a manly sport.
Spaniard: To a European like me, the amazing thing is that while you’re killing your forty a year, you have at your disposal a much finer version of football which kills nobody.
American: You mean soccer? The sissy game?
Spaniard: All the rest of the world plays what you call derisively the sissy game and finds it the best team game ever invented for professionals. Millions of people watch it with interest. It sells just as many automobiles and fills just as many pages of newsprint. And it kills no one.
American: But fundamentally it’s a sissy game. And it’s not part of the American pattern.
Spaniard: Precisely. Because Americans demand a more brutal game. And if fine young men are killed each year, that’s a small price to pay for your entertainment.
American: I’ve never seen anyone killed.
Spaniard: And the maimed?
American: Well, a broken neck now and then. Or your front teeth knocked out. But boys get over things like that.
Spaniard: And walk with a limp the rest of their lives. The solemn fact, according to fatality statistics, is that your football is some six hundred times more dangerous than our bullfighting. Yet you want me to go out and protest against bullfighting while I am not allowed to demand that you protest football.
American: There’s this difference. In football the young man can either play or not play … as he wishes. In bullfighting the animal has no choice. And he’s killed.
Spaniard: If you want to lament the death of a bull and forget the death of young men, it’s your decision. What we might conclude is that bullfighting is a relatively safe brutal sport, and Spaniards like it. Football is a relatively dangerous brutal sport, and Americans like it.
American: Yes, but bullfighting is somehow degrading.
Spaniard: If you say so.
Although I have known most of the great matadors, some fairly well, my major interest has always been with the bull, for I find this noble animal one of the most praiseworthy beasts existing. When left with his fellows he is gentle and can be easily handled; when separated and alone he will fight anything that moves. His stubborn heroism is unmatched, for he has attacked and sometimes conquered automobiles, trains, airplanes, trucks; in organized fights with lions, tigers, elephants, bears and dogs it is seldom he who slinks away. He has a tenacity of purpose not equaled in the animal kingdom; on July 10, 1966, in the plaza at Pamplona a bull raised by César Moreno was pitted against the matador Tinín in third position. He gave a notable fight, was brave as a bull could be and was killed by a good thrust of the sword. I say killed, for the bull was technically dead, but in the waning moments of his life he walked stolidly nearly twice around the entire circumference of the ring, seeking some spot in which he could defend himself in this battleground where he had behaved with such honor. Up and down pumped the mighty hooves, here and there probed the doughty head. If men molested him, he fought them off, conserving his strength and dealing with them as he would with pestering flies. On and on he went, refusing to die, marching like a Roman legion that had been assaulted in the north of Spain, resolute and beaten and magnificent. Men standing beside me had tears in their eyes, and an awe-struck Englishman whispered, ‘My God, he’s a Winston Churchill of a bull.’ Finding no protecting corner in which to make his final stand, he backed against the wall, his feet widespread, his horns still dangerous. Lower and lower dropped the magnificent head, and at last he died. The mules dragged him in a circuit of the ring so that men could shower flowers upon him and hosannahs, but his triumphal tour dead was as nothing to the two he had made alive. It is this kind of animal one sees occasionally in the ring, and he reminds us of the quality that inheres in all animals.
The fighting bull is a special breed, and some of my happiest days in Spain and Mexico have been those long and lazy afternoons spent watching bulls in their native habitat. Dark against the brown fields, they stand in monumental groups, serenely indifferent to the stray men who happen to move upon them. My lasting memory of such days is of a group of Concha y Sierra bulls in Las Marismas, raising their heads at my approach, watching me for a few moments, then returning to their browsing. I have always loved animals and have spent many hours comparing them: the elephant is more majestic than the bull; the lion is more animated; the tiger is certainly more terrifying; but for the inherent nobility of the animal kingdom, a nobility which I have observed in dogs, in horses, in kestrels, in ants, in groundhogs, in antelope and in the three kingly beasts just named, I prefer the bull, as men of a philosophical mind have done since the beginning of time. It is not by accident that the bull marches across the rocks at Altamira and Lascaux; the young nobles of Crete could have tested their skill against lions or bears, but the adversary they chose was the bull; and the mystic rites of Mithras could have been composed around any well-proportioned animal, but it was only the bull that gave power and significance. I respond to the fighting bull of Andalucía exactly as my ancestors responded to his ancestors at Altamira and Crete.
In writing of Pamplona, I pointed out that in 1966 the last day of running with the bulls through the streets was not the last day of the fair, and this requires some explanation. That year San Fermín covered eight days, and on the first seven the running with the bulls occurred each morning as planned, but on the eighth day there was a fight but no running, and for good reason. On the first seven days the bulls to be fought each day all came from a single ranch, and what was more, all from the crop of bulls born four years earlier and raised together since birth; on the final day one bull from each of six different ranches was fought in what was called a concurso. This is a formal competition with two characteristics: a panel of judges awards a prize to the bravest bull, so that the reputation of the competing ranches is at stake; and the public is attracted by the possibility that it can, if some bull proves to be extraordinarily brave, spare that bull’s life. I have seen only two concursos, the classic one held each year in Jerez de la Frontera and this one in Pamplona. I have, of course, seen several fights in which six bulls from six different ranches were brought together haphazardly, but these could not be termed concursos because there was no competition for the bravest bull, nor did the public have the right to excuse a bull from death in case he proved unusually brave. In general I have found fights built around bulls from different ranches disappointing; one gets a better sense of the bull if all six come from the same ranch.
To attempt to run the six bulls of the Pamplona concurso through the streets would have proved impossible, for since they came from different ranches and were strangers each to the other, if they were lumped together in the holding corrals at midnight, by dawn five would be dead. Bulls will not tolerate other bulls whose smell they do not know and will duel such intru
ders to the death. In fact, if from the same ranch a five-year-old bull were to be thrown in with a group of adjusted four-year-olds, the latter would probably kill the former because they would not be accustomed to his smell.
I remember at the Sevilla feria of 1961, when Robert Vavra and I spent about ten hours during visits to the Venta de Antequera corrals, studying two strings of bulls to be fought later. We were fortunate in the bulls we chose to concentrate upon, because one string came from the ranch of Benítez Cubero and were to give the finest six fights I have ever seen a set of six bulls give; in the corrals they were magnificent, relaxed yet quick to respond to anything unaccustomed, and we were able, by dint of careful comparison, to determine fairly well the kind of fight each bull would give and how he would be differentiated from his fellows. Our error was that we consistently underestimated the bulls; I had never seen a finer group, but I did not discover this until the fight unfolded.
The second string was not so fine but in some ways it was more interesting, and to it we gave the bulk of our attention. It was a group of six Miura bulls from the famous ranch whose animals have killed more toreros than any other and against which, at the beginning of this century, a group of matadors went on strike. Even today, when Miuras are fought, the matadors are apt to be the hungry ones of fading reputation who cannot get other fights; well-established matadors consent to fight them only rarely. Part of their evil reputation stems from the fact that the Miura ranch has been in unbroken existence longer than most others and has thus had time to build up its list of fatalities; at any rate, it is the most feared of the existing ranches and along with that of Tulio Vázquez one of the most prestigious. The Miura is noted for a sway-back body, a long neck and a relatively small head. They turn with incredible swiftness and are said to be ‘all over the matador in an instant,’ so that many matadors refuse to fight them. As we studied these six we began to isolate obvious characteristics: one of the bulls appeared to have homosexual tendencies, which so perplexed him that he was not going to give a good fight, nor did he; another was shy and nervous, apt to jump at unusual phenomena and always away from the source of the surprise, not toward it, but he was a splendid animal and we felt that although he would be dangerous in the first portion of the fight, when he struck the horses and was made to know the seriousness of the battle by the picadors jabbing at the hump of muscle over his neck, he would quieten down and give good combat, which proved to be the case; there were two bulls from which nothing much could be expected, for they simply lacked class, and in the arena some days later they proved to be as poor as we suspected; and there was a powerful red bull who might go either way.
This noble animal lost its ears in the arena in proof of the great fight he gave.
He was a contentious beast and accepted no nonsense from any of the others, but he was far from suave, which a great bull should be. The more we watched him the more complex he became, for although he wanted to fight he was fundamentally unsure of himself. He fascinated us, for he was obviously a beast of much potential, and then on the morning of the fight, before the hour when the bulls are put into the little cells from which they emerge into the sunlight of the arena to give battle, that solemn hour at high noon when the peons of the matadors who are to fight that day assemble at the ring to determine how the bulls can be most fairly matched in pairs and to draw lots to see which man will fight which pair, a sly and tricky negotiation, we saw the big red bull for the, last time, and he had become so self-contained, so suave that we knew he was going to be one of the memorable Miuras. He was fought by the matador Limeño from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and he responded so well to all elements in the fight, charging the first capes, assaulting the horses and ignoring the picadors, following the red muleta at the finish, that all agreed he was the notable bull of the year.
It is by such study that men come to know bulls and to love them for the simple, brave things they are. I remember once in Madrid when Vavra and I went out to the Venta de Batán corrals to see a set of Cobaleda bulls from Salamanca. (For some inexplicable reason bulls from Andalucía are apt to be brave and strong, bulls of Salamanca quite the contrary. Of course, a fine Salamanca bull, and each year there are some, is superior to a poor Andalusian, but in general it is the bulls from the south who give good fight. Several wild guesses have been made on this subject, none of which satisfy me. It is claimed that grass in the south is richer in vitamins and the water in minerals, but analysis does not bear this out: the more even length of day in the south has been suggested, but this makes no sense at all; one argument has been persuasive, that the rocky land of Andalucía develops stronger hooves and leg muscles than the softer soil of Salamanca. Persuasive, that is until one recalls that in the swamps of Las Marismas are grown some of the finest fighting bulls so far produced, and during half of each year these animals walk only on a soft and marshy soil. Experts, of course, argue that it is the effort required when the bull drags his feet out of the sucking mud that builds up his muscles.)
Well, these Salamanca bulls at Madrid looked fine. They were big and in the corrals they comported themselves with dignity. But they were very heavy and their fore knees were weak. Even from the barrier Vavra could detect signs of weakness. ‘Those knees won’t stand up in the fight,’ he predicted, and later when these pathetic creatures came into the ring they made one or two charges, as their taurine hearts commanded, but then their knees gave out and they fell into heaps around the ring, too heavy to get back up on their feet. The fight degenerated into a dismal spectacle of one pass, bull down, haul the bull back up, another pass, bull down again. Two of the poor creatures, their hearts still willing but their legs played out, simply lay on the sand and protected themselves by cutting swaths with their horns; to get them to their weakened legs proved most difficult. The afternoon was a travesty, the worst I’ve ever seen. My only consolation was that long before the fight we had guessed that it would probably be so.
As I explained in the chapter on Badajoz, I am loath to introduce unfamiliar Spanish words which are not essential, and foreigners who write about bulls offend in this respect, peppering their pages with italic instead of information, but for what I wish to say from here on, a limited taurine vocabulary is necessary, with as many of the words as possible kept in English:
Torero includes all men engaged in the fight, whether matador, picador, peon or banderillero.
Cuadrilla (crew) is the team working in support of one matador. It consists of two mounted picadors who ride on horses supplied by the ring, and three peons, who are called banderilleros when engaged in placing the banderillas.
Corrida (a running) is the complete bullfight, customarily consisting of six bulls from the same ranch fought by three matadors. The senior man in point of service fights bulls number one and four; the second, bulls two and five; and the junior, bulls three and six. Since it requires about twenty minutes to fight one bull, the corrida lasts about two hours. In June fights may start as late as seven; in the autumn as early as four. I have often seen acceptable fights on rainy days but never on windy.
Single fight is the action of one matador against one bull. It has been described by earlier writers as a ritualistic drama in three unequal acts, plus prologue and epilogue. One advocate of this interpretation has said, ‘The prologue, which consists of the matador’s testing the bull with the cape, might be thought of as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its airy joy. The first act with the picadors is heavy like King Lear. The relatively unimportant but poetic second act of the banderilleros is Twelfth Night. The stupendous third act, heavy with emotion and impending tragedy, when the matador alone faces his destiny, is of course Hamlet, while the overpowering epilogue of death can be likened only to Aeschylus.’
Cape is the large stiff-fabric cloth, magenta on one side, yellow on the other, used by the matador in the prologue and first two acts and by the peons throughout. The bull will charge either color equally
The calf, bloodstained and wet, struggles to
rise from the earth. At the end of his life he will struggle just as valiantly to avoid returning to the sandy earth of the arena.
Pic is the long steel-tipped pick or lance used by the picador in the first act.
Banderillas are the colorfully decorated short sticks with barbed steel points which are placed in pairs by the banderilleros in the bull’s shoulders.
Muleta is the red-flannel cloth, smaller than a cape, used by the matador during the third act and epilogue.
Faena is the vital third act in which the matador exhibits his skill with the muleta. Tradition requires that during the faena he keep his sword in his right hand, which usually also holds the muleta. Experts judge that the excellence of any single fight depends about sixty to seventy percent on the faena, which can excuse poor work elsewhere.
Kill is the tragic epilogue that ends the fight.
Let me make one thing clear. Most corridas are a disappointment. Six bulls are fought, and of them, five are apt to be so difficult that the matador cannot parade his skill. In all the years I’ve been seeing corridas, only the six Benítez Cubero bulls of which I have spoken gave a uniformly excellent show. No other set has ever provided even as many as four good fights, and the vast majority have provided none. Of a hundred corridas taken at random at least eighty will be bores; ten will be reasonably good; five will be unquestionably good; four will be worth remembering; and one might be superb. Therefore, the mathematical chances of buying a ticket on impulse and seeing a good fight are at least four to one against. At one catastrophic San Isidro feria in Madrid of sixteen fights, fourteen were very poor and the other two barely acceptable.
At the Pamplona feria in 1966, government inspectors found that sixteen of the forty-eight bulls failed to meet legal standards, being either underage, underweight or with the tips of their horns shaved off. Fines of 265,000 pesetas were assessed, and this in a feria which was supposed to emphasize the excellence of the bull. In the two hundred and fifty corridas I’ve attended my luck has been poor, for I have seen even fewer good fights than the averages would have indicated.