Authors: James Michener
The drabness of the Pamplona fights was underscored by the
arrival that afternoon of Brewster Cross, an American architect,
who during his years of work in Spain had learned to take such
fine color photographs of bullfighting that they appeared on the
covers of bullfight journals. For the past six years he had been
seeing an average of ninety fights a year and during that time had
turned down numerous promotions to work in other countries
because, as he said, ‘I’ve discovered an ambiente I love and I’d be
nuts to lose it so long as I can make a living here.’ He was delayed
in coming to Pamplona, he told us, by a bullfight in Madrid. ‘I’ve
been waiting through more than two hundred fights to see that
one special thing. That afternoon which the Spaniards describe
as culminating. Each time you enter the gates you say, “I hope
this is going to be it.” But always you’re disappointed. The other
day, however, Curro Romero was on the program, and although
I’d never seen him in top form, I knew he had the capability. If
the right bull came along. On his first bull, nothing. But on his
last animal, the greatest single performance in the world of art
I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen people like Horowitz and Menuhin.
It was the most evocative, the most elegant, the most artistic.
When he finished with that noble animal, my palms were wet
with tension and Aristotelian catharsis.’
The fights had been bad that afternoon, but there are
compensations. After the last bull the mob wandered slowly over
to the square to drink beer and consume vast plates of expensive
breaded shrimp. A gang of college kids from California, on
marijuana and LSD, sprawled at a table served by the debauched
waiter, who looked no worse than they, and Orson Welles, very
handsome with slightly grayed hair, conducted an interview with
Kenneth Tynan for the benefit of television cameras. Matt Carney
surveyed the scene with bleary eyes and condemned it all as bad,
while a group of Scandinavians, who had skimped to buy their
tickets for the disastrous fight, sat glumly in a land from which
the sun had vanished.
But by ten-thirty all had changed. From the public square a
rocket ripped into the night air and exploded with a huge bang
to initiate a half-hour of fireworks which festooned the sky with
fiery banners. This night they were under the supervision of
Pirotecnica Vicente Caballer of Valencia, the Vatican of fireworks,
so they were bound to be good. There were colored rockets and
noisy ones and flowered ones, and at the end two powerful shots
which signified that the display was over.
Now it was midnight again, and from the Coralles de Gas six
more dark shapes emerged to run quietly across the bridge and
up the hill to the temporary corrals, from which they would erupt
next morning at seven to chase brave young men through the
streets.
If I have not spoken in this account of orderly sleeping and
eating it is because one does not worry much about such matters
during San Fermín. The most gracious thing you can do for
someone you meet in the plaza is to say, ‘I have a bath at my place.
You look as if you need one. Come along.’ The invitee has been
sleeping in a bank lobby for six nights and needs a wash. As for
food, it is available if you can elbow your way to the counter.
The true heroes of San Fermín are not those who run with the
bulls, nor the amateurs who dodge with the heifers, nor even the
matadors who do the fighting, but the police of the city. With an
unruly mob of many thousands on their hands, and most of them
young people of high spirit from foreign lands, the quiet police
steel themselves to show courtesy, tact, humor and a benevolent
indulgence. To do so is not easy, for a young man who has just
run before six Miura bulls is not apt to be frightened by a
policeman, but at five o’clock one morning as I sat in the square
I witnessed the following incidents, none of which unnerved the
two stolid policemen who were keeping order. A sports car flying
the flag of the American Confederacy roared past with two buglers
playing their mangled version of the rebel yell. Three Swedish
girls, who had slept in the streets, were playfully molested from
four sides, to their delight. An impromptu band of six instruments
played three different pieces of music, accompanied by revelers
dancing in the streets and over the tables. An Englishman insulted
two Spaniards, who quickly took care of him, but his place was
taken by a Chinese student who came out flailing karate chops
and elbow jabs; him the two policemen watched admiringly. Two
drunken newspaper vendors sat in the middle of the street assuring
each other in brotherhood, ‘I’ll sell your papers and you sell mine.’
A French car banged through the square sideswiping two parked
cars at different corners, then steamed off at top speed.
The imperturbable police did nothing, but what I didn’t know
until later was that at two that morning, when things had
quietened down a bit, these same policemen had walked slowly
through the sidewalk bars and had arbitrarily arrested the six or
seven worst-looking hell-raisers, and these we would not see again
for some days.
During San Fermín the government distributes thousands of
copies of a pamphlet in Spanish, French and English warning
against unacceptable behavior: ‘Any act uncivil or offensive to
common decency, such as a lack of respect to women, will be
severely punished. All behavior that offends the moral sensibility
of the people will be absolutely repressed.’ This high-sounding
dictum is enforced in a curious way. A French girl in our group
nearly fainted when a Spanish man ran his hand so far inside her
dress that he reached her navel. The police smiled. An English
girl was astounded when another Spaniard slipped his hand deep
inside her sweater. The police laughed. But at the bullring, when
a deluge interrupted the fight one day, a Swedish boy happened
to take off his shirt to wring it out, and the same policeman
grabbed him, roughed him up and hauled him off to jail on
grounds that his behavior had ‘offended the moral sensibility of
the public.’
I wander back to my hotel to read briefly in Pedrell’s collection
of old songs and to think how inappropriate to Pamplona is the
famous one attributed to Juan del Encina (1469-1529). It is a
mournful chant dating from around 1505 and probably referring
to some royal death, perhaps that of Felipe I in 1506. In recent
years certain pessimists have proposed it as an appropriate lament
for the passing of Spain’s age of greatness:
Sad and hapless Spain,
I have never felt that Spain deserved such a lament; her Golden
Age vanished, to be sure, but there are many signs that she is
capable of creating another, on altered terms. There is an
enormous natural vitality in this country which, properly
channeled, could produce a new age of literature, art, philosophy
and even government.
Certainly the national sadness referred to in the chant is
nowhere evident during San Fermín, so I turn to another of
Pedrell’s recoveries, a song which probably could not be sung
publicly in Spain today. It is numbered 79 and the words were
written about 1555 by some unknown poet and set to music by
an irreverent troubadour named Juan Navarro (fl. 1540-1565) of
Sevilla. Pedrell entitled it ‘The Nun’s Song’ and in it are reflected
the anti-religious feelings which are always cropping up in Spain
at unexpected places:
Alas for hapless me!
Oh, what a harsh rule,
San Fermín provides a constant kaleidoscope of visual imagery.
The parades vary; papier-mâché giants fifteen feet tall wander
through the streets; sometimes additional bullfights are offered
at eleven in the morning; and on Thursday morning the bullring
is occupied by a weird exhibition of Basque sports featuring two
events that defy reason. In the first, four huge men in rope sandals,
white trousers and T-shirts march forth, each bearing two
long-handled axes whose heads are protected by leather sheaths.
The men divide into teams of two each and stand at attention
before the wood they must chop: two rows of logs laid out on the
ground, each row consisting of eight logs about eighteen inches
in diameter
Referee and timers appear and the contestants untie the leather
sheaths; then you see how carefully the cutting edges have been
honed. A whistle blows, and the lesser man on each team leaps
onto the first log of his row and begins cutting a wide V into it,
sending the chips flying as he swings the ax with fierce energy
against the wood. When he has the V well defined and about half
cut, he leaps down and his more skilled partner takes over,
swinging with even greater force, and he completes the V halfway
through the log, which is rather difficult, for as the cut grows
deeper, wood grips the ax and lets go only when the man gives a
powerful upward jerk.
At this point the first man takes over and starts the V on the
opposite side, and when it is half cut, the second man jumps onto
the log and hammers home a series of tremendous cuts until the
log falls in two. Now the first man starts on the next log, and for
some twenty minutes the two men alternate in chopping their
way through the eight big logs, and remember that since they are
standing on the log, to chop it they must bend forward so that
the ax strikes below their feet, putting a severe strain on the
stomach.
I was relieved when the leading team finally chopped its eighth
log in two, for my stomach was hurting in sympathy, but to my
surprise the two men ran from the row they had been chopping
and across to those which their opponents had been cutting. It
became apparent that both teams would chop through all sixteen
logs with a combined thickness of at least twenty-four feet.
Without pausing in the broiling sun, the superbly muscled men
continued this extraordinary feat for some forty minutes and
finished less than a minute apart. I could understand how the
Basque in the bar had given Matt Carney the black eye.
What followed was for me even more memorable. Two Basque
shepherds brought into the arena rams from the Pyrenees and
allowed them to smell one another, whereupon the animals, each
aware that a rival had come into its terrain, quietly withdrew to
a distance of about twenty feet, dug their feet in and leaped
forward, butting heads in the middle of the ring with shattering
force. I expected them to have broken necks, but instead each
blinked his eyes, shook himself and went back to his starting
position, from which he leaped forward again, striking his
opponent with unbelievable force, forehead to forehead. You
could hear the impact a hundred yards away.
This continued, methodically but with deadly intent, for some
twenty or thirty butts until you would think the horns must drop
off. Occasionally one would feint cleverly and the other would
fly over his head, to receive a sharp butt from below as he went
past, but usually the two beasts met head-on, and the blows
became sharper as the fight continued. What surprised me was
that when at the start of a round the two rams considered
themselves too close for maximum effect, they would back off so
that the blows would be more shattering.
Finally the judge declared the contest a draw, and I asked a
Basque sitting next to me what would have happened otherwise,
and he said, ‘They’d go right on till sundown. Or till one of them
is killed.’
In view of the richness provided by San Fermín it seems
captious to say that I arranged three excursions into the
countryside, but there were places as important to me as
Pamplona, so one morning, after no sleep, Vavra and Fulton and
I set out for the little Basque town of Azpeitia, where I wished to
pay my respects to a Basque who had played a significant role in
history, Don Iñigo López de Recalde. The journey to Azpeitia was
a delightful jaunt through the countryside of Navarra and
Guipúzcoa. North of Irurzun we slipped through the Pass of the
Two Sisters, a defile that reminded me much of the Iron Gates
on the Danube but even more of the Cilician Gates in southern
Turkey. From its northern exit it threw us into a fine hill country
with alternate views across deep valleys and shrouds of fog which
slowed us down to less than a walk. Finally, descending from a
high plateau, we came upon Azpeitia, and it was exactly as I had
imagined: a trivial place of no consequence, with an ordinary
village church that one would not remember long and
townspeople who greeted any stranger in French, for they stood
close to the French border.
I got out of the car and started to walk to the small church,
when a blacksmith at his forge, now converted into a garage, said,
‘It’s not here that you pay your respects but up the road a little
farther.’ I had expected little in the town to remind me of Don
Iñigo and I found little, so I was willing to proceed in the direction
the blacksmith had indicated, and after driving for a mile or two
I received one of my major shocks in Spain.
For we came not to some small church memorializing a great
man, but to a vast establishment centering upon a huge
eighteenth-century basilica built of the finest marble. This was
the memorial to Don Iñigo, better known as St. Ignatius of Loyola,
the man who founded the Society of Jesus. His army was given
Papal approval by Paul III on September 27, 1540, and the
powerful work of the order stems from that date.