The Bullfight

I jumped ahead of myself yesterday with a bland post simply because I realized it was time for the Festival de San Fermin and I wanted to say I’d been there and done that, to post photos that said as much, and to create envy and desire in those who had not. And of course, if you were not there then, you will never be or have been. But I went to the blog on CNN.com and read a hundred comments that this festival is cruel and unnecessary and that it does not matter if it is a cultural event any more than human sacrifice or stoning the condemned was. It is wrong.

I went to my first bullfight in Madrid before I got to Pamplona. It was the day I had arrived on a long flight and I was drowsy, but we had tickets and I would go. I was not at all in favor of killing bulls for the sake of sport and was uncertain what my reaction to the fight might be. When they let the first bull into the ring, he ran around the ring shaking his head and stomping, then abruptly, he stopped dead still and threw his head into the air and let out a long, mournful wail. I am not making this up. You could not help but be moved. Then the picadors came on horseback to lance the bull’s neck muscles in order to weaken them so that its head would drop making it easier for the matador’s eventual show. The horses wore thick quilted blankets to protect them from the horns of the bull, but at least once that summer I saw a bull’s horn slip beneath the quilt and reach the horse’s belly. The horses never seemed to be doing this voluntarily. When the first blood is drawn, again, my sympathy was wholly with the bull. I thought of my dog, Wiley, being subjected to something as terrible as this.



In that first fight, as the lancer did his cutting, the crowd began to whistle. Either they loved the bull or just did not want him to be too weakened , but they definitely did not want the bull cut more. Next came the banderlerros whose job was toward the bull at an angle and place sharp banderillas into its neck to further weaken the muscles. At this point, the bull was bleeding and shitting. The next act featured the matador. Matadors then were like rock stars in Spain. They were poster boys for machismo, at least the good ones. Hemingway explains all this in great detail in Death in the Afternoon, and details the ways in which the best matadors can be identified. I liken it to a pro football quarterback who has two and a half seconds to throw a football before one or two three hundred pound linemen knock him down. You can tell the ones who are afraid to take the pounding and even though they may have great skill in throwing a football, they are too nervous to wait until the last second to throw the football. The other’s, the ones who are not nervous, have multiple concussions and get into the Hall of Fame. Maybe another, better example would be Mohamed Ali.

What I am saying is that the very good matadors work very close to the horns of the bull and thus run a greater chance of injury or death. In each of the corridas I saw in Spain that summer, a matador was gored. One was particularly spectacular. The bull caught the matador in the thigh and swung him over his head, and when the matador fell to earth, the bull had him pinned to the ground, swinging his horns left and right trying to finish the job. The matador was helped behind the barrier right in front of me. He waved off help, tied a bandana around his blood-gushing thigh, and came back out to finish the fight. The crowd went wild.


In the end, the bull is tired, it’s head hanging low, and the matador must rush it with a small sword, a muleta, between its shoulder blades so that it will enter the heart. If it is done correctly, the bull dies instantly. But it is not often that it is done correctly on the first attempt. I saw frustrated matadors try to finish the bull in three or four attempts while the crowd whistled and jeered.

When the bull is dead, it is whisked quickly from the arena and, I am told, butchered, the meat given to the poor.

I will not speak here of the symbolic and religious suggestions of the corrida here. I only mean to describe. I attended several bullfights that summer before got to Pamplona, and there I ran with the bulls in the morning and watched them killed that afternoon. I understand the concerns of those bloggers at CNN. I would not imagine it will be long before they convince authorities to put a stop to all of this. The world is changing and most people do not need the bullfights any longer. They have the internet.