Why, in my travels, did I go out of my way to see Harvey Holt? Why, of all the tech reps I worked with, was he the one who captivated my interest?
The reason was bizarre. I first met Holt, as I have said, at Yesilkoy in 1954, just after his wife had stormed out of Turkey. Since his quarters were empty, he offered me a bedroom while I peddled World Mutual to other technicians in the Constantinople area; and one day when I was about to take my shower, I ran into Holt leaving the bathroom with a towel about his middle. Across his chest I saw a vivid scar. It looked as if a jagged streak of lightning had struck and seared itself into position. Normally one ignores the wounds of others, uncertain as to how the wounded will react to questioning, but this was so conspicuous, so fearsome you might say, that I had to speak.
‘You get it in Korea?’
‘Nope. Pamplona. Last year.’
This stopped me, and Holt obviously intended saying nothing more, but then a flash of memory came to my assistance. ‘Isn’t that the town in northern Spain that Hemingway wrote about?’
‘Yep.’
‘You mean a bull did that?’
‘Yep.’ And that was all he said that day, but a couple of evenings later, when a friend of his had some Spanish records he wanted transferred to tape, and when the garish trumpets and flourishes had died away, Holt said, ‘We were putting in a Big Rally III at Portela, and in late June some of the men who had been in Portugal for a couple of years asked me if I was going up to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. I’d never heard of the place, but they made it sound so interesting that I said I’d like to go along, but I didn’t want any part of running in front of bulls. “Hell,” they said, “we never touch the bulls. We check in at Bar Vasca and stay drunk for eight days and listen to music and watch other damned fools run with the bulls. That’s for idiots.”
‘So I went to Pamplona, and I checked in at Bar Vasca and listened to the music, and for three mornings I watched others run before the bulls, and on the fourth morning—why, I’ll never know—I was there in the narrow street as the bulls thundered past me. On the eighth morning a big Pablo Romero caught me right in the chest. But for horn wounds, Pamplona has the best doctors in the world. They get practice.’ Instinctively he pressed his right hand against his shirt to feel the ridges of scar left by the operation.
After that first experience with Pamplona, Holt’s contract with UniCom had provided that his vacation begin on July 1. On that day he would report to the nearest airfield and fly to Rome, which he considered the best city in the world. Perched in the lovely square that faces the ancient church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, he would waste two days watching the stately vaudeville show of tourists, priests, cadgers, pretty girls, gigolos and harassed waiters. Late in the afternoon of July 3 he would fly to Madrid, where I would be waiting, for after my initiation in 1958, I, too, became addicted to Pamplona and the ridiculous hilarity of Bar Vasca. On the Fourth of July, Holt would report formally to the American embassy, where he would sign the book and present his respects to the ambassador. That night we would go to bed early, so that on the fifth we could rise before dawn, take our last warm bath for a long time, pack our rented car and be on our way by sunrise.
We planned our arrival in Pamplona for late afternoon, so that we could have our pick of rooms at Bar Vasca—not that any of them were any good—and on the sixth we would sit in the public square and watch the fireworks and meet old friends from all parts of Europe. Five-thirty on the morning of the seventh all hell would break loose from the marching bands assembled in the plaza before Bar Vasca, at which Holt would carefully climb out of bed and stand before the clothes which he had laid out with neat care the night before: tennis shoes, white pants, red belt, white shirt, red scarf. Clad in this historic costume he would go forth to meet the bulls.
For Holt, this compulsive running with wild animals had become a religious ritual, the act which gave his otherwise routine life structure and meaning. When he had first explained the running, I had had no comprehension of what it signified—to him or to others—and even when I saw it for the first time myself, it was nothing more than insanity in the streets, but then someone who knew that I knew Holt said, ‘I suppose he’s shown you those great photographs from 1953.’ When I replied that Holt would never show anyone photographs of himself, the man said, ‘They’re on display at the Kodak shop around the corner,’ and we went over to see them. In 1969 the series was still on display in the same shop, and copies were sold each year, for better than any other these photographs epitomized Pamplona.
I keep a set in Geneva, and strangers who know nothing of Pamplona or Harvey Holt can scarcely credit what the camera shows. They see Holt running a few inches ahead of the stampeding bulls. They see him looking back over his shoulder, laughing, as if this were the apex joy a man could know. They see him stumble in front of the charging bulls. They see five bulls and ten steers run right over him, as if he were a paving block. And most spectacular of all, they see the final bull sink his right horn into Holt’s chest and throw him in the air. The last shot shows Holt landing on his head, feet aloft, with blood already staining his white shirt, while the six bulls and their accompanying steers disappear.
Until you see these photographs you cannot understand Pamplona, and until you know that for the following sixteen years the principal actor in the photographs came back to run with the bulls—a total of a hundred and twelve mornings, six hundred and seventy-two bulls, any one of which could have gored him the way the Pablo Romero did—you cannot understand Harvey Holt.
‘Why would a man do that … voluntarily?’ many of my guests in Geneva have asked. When I have explained that he has gone back every year since to repeat, they have been incredulous. ‘He was extremely lucky. Look … those bulls are running right over him!’
And when I tell them that in addition to this first near-fatal goring, Holt has been hit three other times, so that his torso now looks like a pincushion, they mumble, ‘Idiot.’
Finally I show them the photograph of Pamplona which for me best captures the fey quality of the place. It is early morning, of course, and the streets through which the bulls are running are packed with daring men in their white costumes. Harvey Holt has obviously been running like hell right before the horns, but now the moment has come when he can no longer keep ahead of the bulls. He feels their panting breath on his back, so with a superb act of gallantry he draws to one side, rises on his tiptoes, throws his arms high in the air, sucks in his gut, and hangs there poised like the noblest of the Greek statues while the bulls rush by, their horns less than an inch from his waist. Man, the animal, has rarely looked more glorious than in this confrontation with bull, the larger animal; he hangs suspended in time, in space, in meaning. John Keats would have understood this photograph and would not have asked, ‘Why would a man do such a thing?’ The more pertinent question would be, ‘If any man finds such joy in a given act, why would he do anything else?’
X
PAMPLONA
To be young, and in love, and in Pamplona, and in July is heaven itself.
Theoretically, the bullfights at Pamplona are held to honor the bull. Nine fights of six bulls each mean 54 bulls in all. Last year of that number 21 were underweight, 14 had had their horns shaved, 6 especially ferocious ones were served sedatives in their corral water, and the 5 biggest ones had been slowed down by having three-hundred-pound sacks of cement dropped on their kidneys from a height of seven feet.
The fool wanders, the wise man travels.—Thomas Fuller
When J. Edgar Hoover announced that no respectable citizen could trust men who wore long hair and beards, Claude told the local Associated Press man, ‘Well, that takes care of Jesus Christ and Ulysses S. Grant.’
Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.
Lie down, I think I love you.
My old man shouts, ‘Goddammit, you should listen to my fifty-eight years of e
xperience; but what he had was one year of experience repeated fifty-eight times.
Blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere.
The only man who propositioned me all night was this old geezer who had reached the age of metal. Silver in his hair, gold in his teeth, and lead in his ass.
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.—Shakespeare
True courage is to do without witnesses everything that you are capable of doing before all the world.—La Rochefoucauld
It seems to be an immutable law of human nature that each new generation will dress, speak, make love, and listen to music in the way best calculated to infuriate their elders.
King Kong died for our sins.
St. Paul was certainly a cat who knew
The urge, that demi-urge
To see beyond the last bend in the road.
When Ulysses spoke before the Athens P.T.A.
And told the good Greek ladies of
The wonders he had known, the mighty wonders,
The ladies cried, ‘Son, you has been smokin’ hash.’
I feel that urge, that demi-urge to give the shaft
To good old Lewis B.
And to escape, my ship will sail beyond the stars
Till it make juncture with Ulysses
And we head outward to the straits.
If you seek martyrdom, St. Paul’s your boy,
He knew the way and ended on the block.
If you want ostracism and rejection,
Ulysses is your boy. He gigged them all.
But if you seek yourself, cling to me, baby,
For I am truly lost, lost, lost,
And in the losing we shall find ourselves.
A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country guided by blind impulses of curiosity is only a vagabond.—Oliver Goldsmith
A great country cannot wage a little war.—Duke of Wellington
Southern Florida is filled with people sixty-eight years old who were going to do something big in their lives but waited till it was safe. Now it’s safe and they are sixty-eight years old.
This world has no leaders. Convert the ordinary man on your left.
In northern Spain, where roads converge, there stands an old Roman bridge of surpassing beauty at a spot called, for historical reasons no one now remembers, Puente La Reina—Queen Bridge, and not Bridge of the Queen, as some would translate it.
When Harvey Holt and I reached this point in the late afternoon of July 5 on our trip north from Madrid, we felt a surge of excitement, even though we had made the trip together eleven times before. Holt looked at the speedometer and said with satisfaction, ‘Exactly six miles more,’ and we headed into the low hills that lay across the river.
At the end of the six miles we were not in Pamplona, but at the top of a pass which gave a commanding view of the terrain ahead. Puerto del Perdón it was named. Pass of Pardon, and when we reached it Holt stopped the car, as he did each year on this afternoon, and we climbed out to view once more a sight that thrilled us now as it had when we first saw it.
In the foreground, on low hills, stood a group of brown-red square towers that dated back to one of the wars that had ravaged this focal area since Roman times. They were handsome towers, of little use today, but lending the landscape character and even distinction, for they seemed to fix things in place, as if to say, ‘We are the protectors around which civilization has coalesced.’
Eight miles beyond the towers, at the edge of the Pyrenees, we could see the white spires of Pamplona, nestling under a sky turned to deep blue by the approaching sunset. Charlemagne must have felt this way when he looked down upon Pamplona on his return to France after having battled the Moors. Ignatius Loyola had stood at this spot in the days before his conversion, when as a lusty brawler from a village to the west he came here to make his fortune. And it was from this spot that Ernest Hemingway saw the city in those pregnant days when he was planning his first significant novel.
It was a remote, peaceful Pamplona we saw that afternoon, and it was difficult to believe that for the next nine days it would be the hell-raising capital of the world.
Near the center of Pamplona stands the old town hall, and by July 5 each year it looks besieged, as if the Visigoths were about to roar down from the Pyrenees, for all store windows in the area are boarded over, four policemen stand where one stood before, and sedate shops are padlocked with the notation that residents of the city understand: This Establishment Closed for Nine Days.
When we arrived in Pamplona, Holt went directly to the town hall to check the plaque embedded in the walls: Height Above Sea Level at Santander, 443.80 Meters. Like all tech reps, Holt thought in meters and not feet, and often wondered why the United States did not switch to this sensible system. The altitude, over 1,450 feet, explained why it would be very cold during the festival of San Fermín: ‘I always laugh at the Americans who think that because Pamplona is in Spain, it’s bound to be hot. They forget it’s also in the mountains.’
Behind the town hall lies a small and dirty plaza, one side of which opens onto the public market, the other onto one of the strangest churches in Europe. It is called Iglesia de Santo Domingo and must be very old, for the floor level of the nave lies a good fifteen feet below the present surface of the street, which has been built up through the centuries by the rubble of war and the rubbish of daily living. The façade of the church is something to see, for it has been completely bricked in, so that it looks like an apartment building with fake balustrades, fake windows, fake marble balls and a wonderfully fake bell tower.
In fact, from a distance it would be quite impossible for an uninstructed visitor to detect that a church stood here at all, so completely is it masked by the ridiculous façade and the buildings that encroach upon it. No portion of the nave or apse is visible; centuries ago they were blocked in by little stores and houses. Santo Domingo is a monument submerged by the requirements of the living.
Holt and I headed toward the remarkable building which obscured the western end of the church. It was called Bar Vasca, a rambling arrangement of rooms on five stories, each of which had been added at a different age. The ground floor, opening onto Santo Domingo Street, which ran from the hidden church uphill to the town hall, comprised a dark, low-ceilinged bar which for the next nine days would be the center of our life.
Around the four walls, on platforms eight feet above the floor, were ranged twenty-four great tuns of sherry, cheap red table wine, good white, poorly mixed rosé and powerful cognac. The casks were dark with age, their brass hoops shining bright against the well-polished wood. Beneath these impressive barrels ran a comfortable alcove in which patrons could sit protected from the noise and confusion that filled the central part of the bar, and in the alcoves thus cut off hung ceramic tiles which summarized the rural wisdom of Spain:
If Wine Interferes with Your Job,
Quit Your Job.
A Night of Good Drinking
Is Worth a Year’s Thinking.
The Worst Thing in the World Is a Drinking
Companion with a Memory.
If You Are Drinking to Forget,
Please Pay Before You Begin.
To an Old Man, Even Musty Wine Is like Mother’s Milk.
He Who Eats Well at This Table
And Drinks Well at This Bar
Dies of a Terrible Disease: Old Age.
Each year, with the approach of feria, Bar Vasca began to fill with disreputable characters from all parts of Europe. There were Swedes who found great joy in the sun and the bulls, daring Germans who ran a few inches before the horns, American college kids who read of Pamplona in Sophomore English, and a collection of huge Basque woodchoppers.
Holt and I had been returning to this restaurant for the past eleven years, and we came partly for the music—played on strange instruments like the country oboe and the txistula—and partly to renew acquaintance with the woman after whom the
bar was named, Raquel La Vasca: The Basque.
She was a big woman, apt mate to the woodchoppers, and of gargantuan appetite. On this evening, when we reached the Plaza de Santo Domingo, Holt parked the car, unloaded his bag and his tape recorder, hurried across the cobbles, reached the door of the bar and shouted, ‘Raquel!’ Fom behind the bar she ran to greet us, lifting Holt in the air with her powerful arms and kissing him on both cheeks. She was in her sixties, we judged, but as lively as she had been years ago when her Pamplona husband had bought this bar. Together they had made it a popular place, the headquarters of all who really loved the feria.
‘Is the food ready?’ Holt asked, and rarely had I seen him betray excitement so openly.
‘Where did you spend this year, little tiger?’ the big woman asked.
‘Afghanistan.’
She looked at him blankly, knowing nothing of this word. Then she clapped her hands with pleasure at seeing her old friend once more and called the girls to bring in the meal.
The food at Bar Vasca should have been served with a shovel, but it was good. Holt had the same meal three times a day. He tucked his napkin into his collar to prepare for a dish he preferred above all others. ‘For our little tiger,’ Raquel said approvingly as she helped the maid bring a large tureen to our table. It contained a mixture of heavy white beans cooked with ham ends and certain herbs which made it both aromatic and sweet as a nut. It was customary when serving pochas for the waitress to keep dishing big ladlefuls until the guest said, ‘Basta!’—Enough! With a flourish Raquel herself began serving the delicacy, and Holt merely smiled until his plate was loaded. Finally he called, ‘Basta!’ and the meal began.