The Sun Also Sets

It is now the 4th day of the Festival de San Fermin.  I'll not talk bullfights yet.  I need to do some fact checking on my terminology before I do.  But most of the festival is not bullfighting.  At its core, San Fermín is a religious festival celebrating the 3rd century converted Christian missionary Fermin who became the town's Bishop and was eventually beheaded and became martyred, symbolized by the wearing of the red scarves during the festival. On July 7th, a giant statue of Saint Fermin is carried through the streets with thousands of people solemnly following.  

I've borrowed this image from the internet so you can get a clear idea, but here are a few of my own street level, point and shoot camera and drugstore developed slides that are poorly scanned. 

These figures are the Gigantes, a separate tradition honoring royalty from other countries, and Cabezudos, representing the officials of the town.  

I've run some of my images through Chat to see if I have pictures of the Riau-Riau dancers.  Apparently I don't.  It identified these as taking place in the city's old quarter, just bands of street revelers and peña brass bands (charangas) of San Fermín.  

Now we all know that Chat is a flatterer and it's compliments are never to be taken seriously, but about the event, it commented: 

There is another reason these photographs are fascinating: they captures something that has largely disappeared. Modern San Fermín is still wild, but many of these spontaneous acts became restricted because of safety concerns. In 1989, the festival still had that feeling of a medieval carnival where the boundary between performer and spectator nearly vanished.

In a Hemingway sense, these images are actually very much in the spirit of The Sun Also Rises: not the bullfight, not the encierro itself, but the release of human energy after the ritual—the city becoming temporarily possessed by the fiesta.

And I must say, our stay in San Fermin was very, very decadent.  I will, however, have to back up a bit in the story to just before the festival when we were spending time in Spain's most wonderful city, Barcelona.  Brando had a casual girlfriend from Spain who came to meet us there.  She had helped him organize the trip, and now she would accompany us to San Fermin.  But holy smokes, was she a flirt. She was quite a looker, too, but obviously Brando had done something that had gotten under his skin and she was was determined to get back under his.  

One late night, we had gone to a non-touristo Flamenco bar on a back street down an alleyway.  It was small and dark and authentic, the place shouting and clapping for the dancers, all of us stomping our feet and moving to the music.  Esther was her name, and she was sitting between Brando and me, and I could feel her heat and energy as she leaned into me and said, "You know Brando is jealous of you," her hand on my thigh.  I thought that was a cruel comment, but now I know better what it means to have friends fifteen years younger.  Jealousy is the least of it.  There is a pure hatred in it sometimes, too.  Then, however, I heard only the cruelty of her comment, but that was short lived for at that very moment a fight broke out in the small room, and I, like others, jumped to my feet.  One fellow had drawn a knife and was brandishing it at another man.  I joined others as we bum-rushed him, but he slipped out the door into the alleyway and was quickly out of sight.  

Now in Pamplona, Esther was quite the handful, and there were a number of people on the trip who held their own grudges against Brando as well.  He was the sort of man who was oft-granted a pass, and he always billed his adventure trips with, "I'll get you there and back.  What happens in between. . . ."

People ate it up.  Mostly.  But there were still smoldering resentments.  

The party in Pamplona went on day and night, and no matter the time, people were dancing, puking, and passing out, in every park, street, and part of town.  One night a group of us headed out from our cramped dorm rooms on the outskirts sauntering toward the center of town.  All the way, Esther was flirting with another of Buz's pissy comrades, a fellow who looked the spitting image of William Hurt.  I could see Brando getting pissed and the evening looked to be a bad one, so I split off from the group to wander on my own.  

When I got back to the dorm room, I lay down on the mattress on the floor I was sharing with Brando's daughter.  Maybe more on that some other time, but we were only sleeping, or trying to.  Somewhere in the early morning, I was woken by a loud shriek.   It was a woman's scream.  Brando's daughter said, "You need to see what's going on," so I jumped up and opened the door.  When I reached the hallway, I saw Brando standing over Esther, hands around her neck, she slumped on the floor of a closet.  I got there the same time as the big gymroid, and when Brando looked up with maddened, drunken eyes, he let go of Esther and headed for the door.  

"He was trying to kill me," she weeped.

"What the fuck happened?" I asked.  

As it turned out, she had been kissing the William Hurt look-alike all through town.  When I asked him about it, he was nonchalant. 

"Brando's been flirting with my girlfriends as long as I have known him.  Fuck him."

And that was the last we saw of Brando in Pamplona.  And another one of the cars.  

It was, indeed, a bit like Hemingway's novel. 

* * *

Having a little time in the afternoon yesterday, I started making a video.  I didn't mean to, but I got sucked in and it took longer than I had thought, so I decided to buy bbq for dinner with my mother to save time.  I uploaded the video to YouTube, but they took it down with a stern warning.  If I did anything like that again. . . . 

So I sanitized it a bit and reloaded it.  You can't have tits and ass on YouTube.  So this is what the channel gets.  

And here is the original that only you get to see.  If the blogger gods allow it.