It takes the animals about two minutes to gallop the nine
hundred yards, and now they thunder into the bullring, where
some thousand runners have preceded them and again the animals
stay bunched and drive like lemmings for the exit that will take
them to the corrals behind the stands. But again, if one bull gets
detached he will drive and hook at anything that comes his way
until he is lured by capes into the exit. One morning I had proof
of this. Because I could not run with the bulls, the city authorities
had granted me a pass permitting me to perch atop the barricade
at the chute, and after the bulls were well past and safely in their
pens I walked fat and happy into the arena in what I judged was
complete safety, only to find that a huge red bull had become
detached from the oxen and was running in a great circle about
the arena on a course which brought him almost face to face with
me as I stepped into the sunlight. I practically fainted with
astonishment, to see that huge, horned face looming so close to
mine, but he was intent on finding his mates and San Fermín led
him on.
Rules for running with bulls are not haphazard. A local
ordinance governs, and copies are widely distributed. The crucial
rule, and one that could not be known intuitively, is that no
runner may in any way attract the attention of the bulls by waving
his arms or anything else. To do so might attract the bull not to
himself but to someone farther on who is unaware of what is
being done and is therefore unprotected. Also, once the bulls have
caught up with a runner and passed him, he may not run at their
heels, lest they sense him there and turn back into the crowd.
Women may not run, nor drunks, nor men with unusual costumes
that might attract the bulls in their direction. The governing
concept is that once the bulls are started on their course, clearly
marked by fences, they will keep going unless someone radically
diverts their attention and lures them into masses of unsuspecting
people. I have seen six bulls run right over a pile of twenty or
thirty fallen bodies, so intent were they in plunging ahead. Had
anyone at that moment sidetracked their herding instinct,
someone would surely have been hurt.
When all the bulls are safely inside the bullring corrals a final
rocket is fired to announce that all is well. If it goes off in less than
three minutes, listeners know that the bulls made a good run
without any having been detached from the herd, but if the final
rocket is much delayed, apprehension grows. A bull may have
become separated and young men from Norway and Holland
may be pinned against the improvised barriers at the town hall
or against some shop door in Estafeta.
Now that the bulls are out of the ring and it remains filled with
young men in white trousers and red sashes, a different gate is
thrown open and into the crowd catapults a heifer, the tips of her
horns covered with leather. Year for year and pound for pound,
the female of the fighting strain is as brave and rough as the male,
a fact which she proceeds to demonstrate by slashing into the
men and knocking them over as if they were tenpins. The audience
roars its approval as the heifer sweeps the arena. She is like a
charge of compressed dynamite, for her energy seems tireless and
her aim unerring. She runs like this for eight or ten minutes,
dispensing contusions as if they were kisses, but there is one group
of men who bewilder her, and these she damages but does not
disperse.
Among college students it is considered gallant to take up a
position directly in front of the gate from which the vigorous
heifer emerges into the arena. There they form a pile of some sixty
or seventy students, several bodies high, and in this uncomfortable
formation they wait the charge of the animal. I’ve seen heifers hit
this pile of humanity like thunderbolts, bore into it with horns
slashing and feet pumping, only to be defeated by the sheer bulk
of the bodies. The students protect their heads, but their backs
and bottoms sometimes take serious punishment. Yet there they
are, piled up and waiting as each heifer emerges. They are the
stars of the morning.
Each day some five or six heifers are thrown into the arena,
occasionally two at the same time, and the havoc is hilarious. The
band plays, people cheer, students limp off to the hospital, teeth
are loosened, but the only real brawl I ever saw came when a
bulldogger from Texas started to wrestle a heifer to the ground.
Everyone in the arena who could lay a hand on the Texan beat
the bejeezus out of him, knocking him flat and bruising him rather
badly. It is forbidden to grab the heifer in any way or to strike her
with anything but a rolled-up newspaper; she has all the privileges
and that way the fun is better.
It is now eight o’clock, when the all-nighters drift off for a few
hours’ sleep. Others wander back to the central square, where the
waiter whispers, ‘Pssst, move over here!’ Hot coffee and croissants
are the order, and in many languages people discuss the events
of the morning. At eleven, enterprising photographers appear
with their postcards recording that day’s excitement, and one
shows Matt Carney, wild grin on his face, going down before a
stray bull, while Tigre’s son and John Fulton can be seen artfully
dodging the pack as it sweeps by. A lot of astonished people in
America and Scandinavia are going to receive these cards in a few
days, showing their neighbors in extraordinary predicaments.
At high noon Don Luis Morondo will lead his a cappella group
in a concept of sixteenth-century motets and at three a company
of comedians from Madrid will perform in
La tía de Carlos
(Charley’s Aunt)
, which is as funny in Spanish as it was in the
Brandon Thomas original.
At four-thirty parades start to form in various parts of the city,
the best one originating at the town hall, where the morning’s
barriers have been expertly removed and stacked. A brass band
of about a dozen pieces, all playing fortissimo, lines up behind
the members of a drinking club whose banners, brightly painted
in comic-strip style, proclaim their faith in Navarra, good wine
and predilected bullfighters. Huge leather botas of wine appear
on many shoulders, plus bottles of beer and gin. At five a group
of picadors on their way to the bullring appear on horseback and
the parade sets forth, a noisy, raucous wonderful gang of men
who won’t be sober for six days. They march through the streets
at a leisurely pace, shouting the songs of San Fermín and alerting
the populace to the fact that the bullfight is about to begin.
In 1966 the theme song was the first two lines of Verdi’s
splendid aria from
Rigoletto
, in which Gilda realizes that she is in
love with the duke who masquerades as a student:
Festi primo palpitar…
For eight days I was to hear this melody chanted twenty-four
hours a day, never more than the two first lines, never less. It
became the haunting leitmotiv of the feria, the half-mad cry of
happiness. I am sure the incessant repetition has permanently
ruined
Rigoletto
for me and that if I were tomorrow in an opera
house where Joan Sutherland started ‘Caro nome che il mio cor,’
I would rise and bellow, ‘Viva San Fermín.’ I am sure that
whenever I hear this theme again I shall smell Pamplona and taste
the flow of red wine from the botas. Never has a musical theme
so swamped a city
Now from everywhere appear pairs of men lugging plastic
buckets, and even tubs, loaded with bottles. They converge on
the Calle Estafeta, where an ice company is ready to fill their
buckets with ice, so that the beer will remain cold during the fight.
If Pamplona provides an excess of music, it also provides an
abundance of beer and wine, and there is no bullring in Spain
where so much is consumed during the fights. The result is that
the public, especially the part occupying the cheaper seats in the
sun, is always ready to protest violently the less fortunate
performances in the ring, even to showering seat cushions and
chunks of bread on the hapless bullfighters. This tense atmosphere
means that the actual bullfights at San Fermín are apt to be
mediocre, and some of the best matadors prefer not to show
themselves in this rowdy city. Others, because of the hostile
ambiente, quickly lose whatever enthusiasm they may have
brought to the fight. Many people blame the mediocrity of the
fights on the early-morning running of the bulls, believing that
the pounding of their hoofs on the hard stone paving blocks
weakens their legs and that the presence of thousands of runners
frays their nerves. Since Pamplona’s is the only major fair in which
the bulls are run through the streets, it is easy but perhaps not
accurate to blame any deficiency in the condition of the bulls on
this circumstance.
Take the fifth day of the feria in 1966, when everything went
wrong. On July 11 three matadors of excellent reputation,
Ordóñez, Murillo and Fuentes, were to face bulls from one of the
better ranches, that of Don Alvaro Domecq. As the drinking clubs
marched into their sunny-side seats, accompanied by their bands,
they were excited, because this promised to be a great afternoon.
It is difficult for one who has not been to Pamplona to imagine
what that half-hour prior to the fight was like, because in the
tightly packed stands seven different full-sized bands blared away,
each attending to its own tunes, and the noise passed
comprehension. From it there was no retreat, only surrender to
the deafening salvos of raw sound.
Well, when the first bull appeared he looked wonderful, and
since he was to be fought by Ordóñez, a recognized master, it
looked as if the promise of the day might be fulfilled. The bands
exploded with joy, but before Ordóñez had made even one pass,
a peon had the misfortune of luring the bull against a post in such
a way that it suffered a concussion and had to be destroyed in the
arena. The crowd broke out in an angry demonstration, partly
against Ordóñez and his unlucky peon, partly because this was
the fourth such accident of the fair, and partly because it was not
yet apparent whether the judge would allow a substitute bull. The
substitute was granted, Ordóñez made a few passes, the bull fell
down because of weak knees, and Ordóñez dispatched it with
unseemly haste and with a sneaky, low-blow sword thrust,
whereupon the crowd’s protests were renewed.
The second animal proved difficult and Murillo could do little
with it, so he killed it quickly to a chorus of protests. The third
bull looked pretty good, but once more, as a peon was putting it
through its first passes, it grazed a horn against the wall and
snapped it off at the base. According to bullfight regulations, bulls
injured after they are fairly in the arena are not to be replaced,
but the judges frequently do allow such substitution, in part to
avoid the public’s wrath. A tremendous protest now broke out,
which was increased when the judge, having ignored the
regulations in the case of the first bull and having allowed a
substitute, now decided to enforce them; he refused to grant a
substitute. When a matador fights a bull that has lost one horn,
honor requires that he never pass it on the side of the broken
horn, but this afternoon the public was unwilling for Fuentes to
pass this one on either side and insisted that he kill it forthwith,
which he did.
As for the fourth bull, it remains in my memory as the
worst-fought animal I have ever seen, for it was a fine-looking
bull and brave with the horses. But Ordóñez, sick of the afternoon
and the Pamplona mob, gave a few trial passes, noted that the
bull had a slight tendency to hook to the right, and said the hell
with it; and the audience had to sit in the stands and watch this
fine bull wasted. To show his contempt for the crowd, Ordóñez
deliberately killed in the most disgraceful manner, with a running,
sideways swipe of the sword, a punctured lung, the breathing-out
of the bull’s blood through its nostrils. The protests began as soon
as his intentions became apparent and finally became so
clamorous that I feared a riot must ensue. It was a shame-filled
conclusion to a shameful performance.
On the fifth bull it was clear that Murillo, a man noted for his
pundonor, hoped for a triumph. He did a competent faena, during
which the band played, but on the whole it was a lackluster
performance that didn’t get through to the public, with the result
that he killed the bull perfunctorily, to a moderate chorus of
protests. And this was a real pity, because some of us in the stands
knew that Murillo, from the neighboring region of Aragón, had
always been looked upon with a certain favor by the natives of
Pamplona, and this was his farewell performance in the city, since
he was to retire at the close of the season.
The sixth bull came weak to the fight, and poor Fuentes, a
young matador who could not afford the luxury of a shameless
performance like that of Ordóñez, tried his level best to make up
for the disappointment of not having been able to fight his
one-horned bull. And he did accomplish a few good passes,
because the band played for his faena. But he tried so hard and
so long that, running into unexpected difficulty on the kill, he
heard the humiliating trumpets sound a warning. And so ended
a representative, but nevertheless interesting, Pamplona bullfight.
Fights in this city have a unique feature, the singing of the
audience.
‘Navarra, Navarra, número uno!
Como Navarra no hay ninguno.’
(Navarra, number one. Like Navarra there is no other.) When a
matador is doing poorly, through lack of pundonor, one row of
chanting people starts swaying to the left, the ones above and
below to the right, so that the whole plaza seems to be in motion,
and if you look at the alternately swaying figures you become
dizzy, and all the while the swaying figures are bellowing a song
whose shouted refrain consists of the phrase ‘Todos queremos
más.’ (We all want something more.) At the fight when Antonio
Ordóñez refused to try, the stands bellowed: