Or the Bull Kills You

by Jason Webster

  Cámara took out his packet of Ducados and offered one to Margarita. She smiled, then refused. Cámara lit his cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. Another ex-smoker, he thought to himself.

  ‘Anyway, you’ve got me here today, which is the important thing,’ Margarita went on.

  ‘I was told you were the leading expert,’ Cámara said. ‘And when I realised you were based in my old home town…’

  ‘Look, this is a huge subject. You really can’t understand the culture and history of this country without knowing something about bulls and bullfighting.’

  Perhaps just a few days ago Cámara might have rejected her comment out of hand as just more pro-bullfighting rhetoric. Now he sat and listened.

  ‘Great national writers and artists have recognised the truth of this,’ Margarita continued, ‘from Picasso to García Lorca to Ortega y Gasset. Something about bulls and the lore of bulls runs deeply in us. In folklore they often refer to the Iberian peninsula itself looking like the hide of an ox. While the tenth labour of Hercules – taming the bulls of Geryon – took place here, not in the lands of the Greeks.’

  ‘OK,’ Cámara said, trying to catch where this was all going.

  ‘What I’m trying to get across,’ Margarita said, ‘is how deeply rooted bull imagery and stories are in our culture. The Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all had important bull rites of one kind or another. You remember the pictures of the famous Minoan bull rituals in Crete, I’m sure.’

  Images of scantily clad women jumping somersaults over bulls’ backs passed through Cámara’s mind. They must have made up some of the very first erotic visual representations he had ever come across.

  ‘The point is,’ Margarita said, ‘that Spain is the only country to retain this contact with the ancient Mediterranean culture where bull rituals formed a part of everyday life. Yes, there’s bullfighting in southern France and in Portugal, but here in Spain is where you find the real thing.’

  Cámara was wondering when she was going to get to the point and explain how all this tied in with Ruiz Pastor’s genitals being cut off. Not that it wasn’t interesting. But the policeman in him was thinking about the investigation going on without him back in Valencia. He hadn’t mentioned to Pardo he was disappearing for a while – effectively taking the morning off. Torres could keep things going for the time being. He’d give him a ring later on. As long as Margarita didn’t take it too slowly he should be able to get back to Valencia by just after lunchtime. Perhaps even earlier.

  ‘So I like to think of bullfighting as a rear-view mirror for human existence,’ Margarita was saying.

  Cámara raised his eyebrows. He was talking to an academic who specialised in symbolism; metaphors were her stock in trade. But this one went right over his head.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Bullfighting tells us where we’ve come from, culturally.’ Margarita picked up one of the biscuits, broke it in two and then dipped the corner of one half into her carajillo.

  ‘When you go to a bullfight,’ she explained, ‘you’re allowing yourself a moment’s communion with the Heroic Age – the world of Hercules, Theseus and the rest. So a bull represents where we come from, a world we left behind many, many centuries ago. But it also represents something deeply Spanish. And perhaps that is why Spain alone has retained this connection with its ancient bull rituals. Think about it: the stubbornness of the bull, its unwillingness to give in, even as more pain and suffering is laid upon it. And yet still it keeps running, keeps charging at the matador. Any other animal would crawl away and hide in a corner somewhere. That’s why the spectacle is unique. You couldn’t do this with any other beast. Not even an ordinary bull. It has to be a toro de lidia, a direct descendant of the ancient aurochs. But this is why I think we Spanish feel a connection with bulls – because we see ourselves in them, in their behaviour. The stubbornness, the pride, the unwillingness to give in, even if we’re driving ourselves to our own deaths.’

  Cámara smiled as he recognised the truth of what she was saying. Wasn’t that a good description of himself? Didn’t he ask himself often enough why he kept going? And yet somehow he believed deeply in the rightness of his police work. And so he went at it again, and again, doggedly, ignoring the obstacles that got in his way. Wasn’t that him right there now with the Blanco case? Yet he carried on. He might have no interest in bullfighting, but the bull in him – his Spanishness – seemed inescapable.

  ‘This really is fascinating,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette and leaning back in his chair.

  ‘But what’s it got to do with Blanco and Ruiz Pastor?’ Margarita interjected. ‘Yes, I’m getting to that.’

  She drained the last of her carajillo and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. There was a certain masculinity about her, Cámara realised, which made him feel at ease with her.

  ‘Part of the ancient origins of bullfighting has to do with matters of sex, fertility and gender roles.’ She marked the three elements off with the fingers of her right hand. ‘In almost the entire ancient world bulls were associated with the sun. It’s common in ancient cave paintings to see bulls portrayed with solar discs in between their horns. This bull–sun link is particularly evident from Mithraism – an ancient faith which was competing with Christianity to become the state religion of the Roman Empire at one stage. Like Christianity, it was a hotch potch of different ideas, but essentially for the followers of Mithras their god had to sacrifice a bull every morning to ensure the sun came up for another day. In that you have the elements of the bull, the sun, sacrifice and a kind of key for engaging with the cosmic order. All these are present in some form in the contemporary bullfight: the circular bullring, much like a solar disc; the death, or sacrifice, of the bull; even the bullfighter’s costume is called el traje de luces – the suit of lights. So what we’re probably dealing with here is the remnant of an ancient sacrificial ritual relating to sexuality and fertility, the bull being a symbol of male sexual potency.’

  Cámara pursed his lips.

  ‘You think there’s some symbolic significance in the mutilation of Ruiz Pastor,’ he said. ‘Something to do with all this. He was emasculated.’

  ‘I think there’s a significance in what happened to Jorge Blanco,’ she said. ‘Am I right that something similar happened to him?’

  ‘There was a deep cut near his genitals,’ Cámara said. ‘The murderer may have intended to remove them.’

  ‘Look, there are various theories about gender roles in the bullfight,’ Margarita said, ‘but I subscribe to the theories of Julian Pitt-Rivers on this. Essentially he says that for the first two sections, or tercios of the corrida, the bull represents the male sexual role and the bullfighter the female. The bull is obvious, I think – all that power and aggression, the phallic symbolism of the horns etc. The bullfighter is less obvious, but the elements are there. Firstly, how many bearded bullfighters have you ever seen? None, exactly,’ she said before waiting for a reply. ‘The bullfighter is a paragon of masculinity in our culture, but for the first part of the bullfight at least he shows some decidedly feminine characteristics. In some ways you might even describe him as a femme fatale. His hat, the montera, looks very much like a female wig, while the capote – the pink and yellow cape he uses at the start – is very much like a skirt. Have you noticed how he always holds it at waist height and seems to use it to flirt with the bull? Then there’s the rather odd way that he wears his trousers: so tight that you might see it as a way of emphasising his genitalia, and hence his masculinity. Yet to press them to one side and force the seam high up into the groin creates something resembling a vagina, does it not?’

  Cámara tried to picture a bullfighter with his absurdly tight pants. A vagina? Perhaps it was pushing the point a little, but he could see what she was driving at.

  ‘These feminine aspects are discarded, however, for the final act – the Tercio de muerte,’ Margarita continued. ‘Here the bullfighter discards his skir
t-like capote, throws his wig-like montera to the ground and reaches for his estoque, thus transforming himself from feminine into masculine. And in that moment the roles are reversed. From now on the bull represents the female and the bullfighter is the arch-male, dominating and finally penetrating the bull-woman with his phallic sword.’

  Margarita pressed her fingertips together and looked Cámara straight in the eye.

  ‘Am I going too fast?’ she asked. Cámara shook his head. ‘The point is,’ she went on, ‘that when a bullfighter performs well he is awarded the bull’s ears and perhaps its tail as a prize. Of course what is really meant by this are the bull’s testicles and his penis. By overcoming the bull he turns it first into a female being, and then finally emasculates it, thus absorbing its sexual potency for himself. There is an overt sexuality about bullfighting. El Cordobés admitted openly that he used to ejaculate whenever he killed a bull.’

  Cámara laughed.

  ‘I thought that was just an urban legend,’ he said.

  ‘Other bullfighters have made similar comments.’

  ‘So, forgive me, but to bring it back to our murders.’

  Margarita sat back in her chair and for a second Cámara felt almost like the slow schoolboy, trailing behind the rest of the class. He still couldn’t quite see the connection.

  ‘Well, you see it makes sense with Blanco,’ Margarita said. ‘Blanco was a bullfighter, the best there’s ever been. So to remove – or at least try to remove – his genitals has a deep symbolism: the emasculator is being emasculated. The great super-male being is having his gender literally cut away from him.’

  ‘But at the beginning you were talking about more than one killer,’ Cámara said.

  ‘Exactly.’ Margarita’s face lit up, as though she sensed Cámara was finally about to understand. ‘Whoever killed Blanco – it seems to me, at least – must have a good knowledge of bullfighting and its inner significance.’

  ‘But with Ruiz Pastor—’

  ‘Yes, you’ve got it,’ she said, clapping her hands together with joy. ‘Why mutilate poor old Ruiz Pastor? It doesn’t make sense. He’s not a bullfighter. Yes, he’s involved in the world of bullfighting. But symbolically speaking, mutilating Blanco made total sense, disturbing though the idea might seem. To do so on Ruiz Pastor lacks the same coherence. When I heard that he too had had his genitalia removed my first thought was that you were dealing with a copycat murderer.’

  She scratched her nose.

  ‘Or perhaps with someone who wanted you to think it was the same person who killed Blanco’ she said. ‘Nothing else really makes sense. Or at least not to me.’

  The rain had stopped and he decided to walk to Hilario’s place. The sun was casting an intense streak of light over the city through a break in the thick clouds and the smells of lunch were beginning to drift out of the kitchen windows of a thousand red-brick apartment buildings: fried fish, meat stews, boiled beef with chickpeas and potatoes. Cámara pulled out his phone and dialled a number.

  ‘Huerta’s lot have had a look at that drainpipe, chief,’ Torres said as soon as he picked up.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Someone’s been up and down it; they can tell by the scratch marks. But no prints and no DNA. Could be just kids messing about, but they reckon whoever’s done it was there quite recently – hardly any oxidisation underneath where the paint’s been scraped.’

  ‘All right. Anything else?’

  ‘No, pretty quiet here today – apart from the Fallas racket outside, that is. Pardo’s doing his disappearing act again. Ibarra’s working through the statements we got from the Albufera fishermen. Sánchez is on his day off, and I’ve got Montero and Vargas talking to members of Blanco’s team – see if there’s anything we’ve missed.’

  ‘All right. I want you to look into the Ramírez family business. And the other top bull breeders in the country while you’re at it. I’m particularly interested in any suggestions of dodgy breeding practices.’

  He could hear Torres scribbling notes at the other end.

  ‘What, like nobbling the bulls?’

  ‘That kind of thing,’ Cámara said. ‘You’ll probably hit a wall of denial if you ask people directly. Just see what you can come up with.’

  ‘Right you are. Thinking of going round there yourself?’

  ‘What? To the Ramírez farm?’ Cámara paused. ‘I’ll be back later on,’ he said, and rang off.

  The keyhole had all but been worn away after decades of use, and where once a sharply defined space had been, there was now a gaping amorphous hole. A lock-picker’s dream, Cámara thought as he felt in his pocket for the key that he had slipped in and out of this door so many thousands of times, before deciding against it and ringing the bell instead. There was a lengthy pause before the lock finally clicked and he pushed it open. Inside the dark, musty entrance hall he could hear Hilario’s door on the first floor above being unlatched. The old man would be standing there, waiting.

  ‘You should ask who it is, first,’ Cámara called up. ‘You never know who you might be letting in.’

  ‘Who else is going to show up here unannounced on a Thursday lunchtime?’ Hilario’s voice echoed down the stairwell. ‘And besides, you’ll be running out of maría. I told you you’d be round here soon.’

  Cámara reached to grab the iron banister and pulled himself up the final couple of steps.

  ‘You might be just a little more discreet,’ he said as he kissed his grandfather’s closely shaven cheeks, looking around at the other doors leading off the stairwell.

  ‘Don’t worry about them,’ Hilario said, turning and walking back down the corridor towards the living room. ‘They’re all too ancient to know what we’re talking about. Probably think you’ve joined the Opus Dei or something.’

  Cámara closed the door and followed him in. He’d grown used to the eighty-two-year-old dismissing his contemporaries as ‘ancient’ or ‘stupid’. In Hilario’s mind – as well as his spirit – he was still a man in his thirties or forties, despite the increasing reminders from his body that he was somewhat older than that. He might not be able to get around as nimbly as before, but there was a defiance in him which refused to accept that age was anything other than a gift. Let the others moan and complain about this and that, about stiff knees and aching joints, dicky hearts and high blood pressure. For Hilario, life had to be lived to the full. Not in the thrill-seeking way of youngsters wishing they’d been born in a more adventurous time, but through a combination of a relentlessly positive attitude with a stubborn refusal to ever be beaten down. He’d suffered enough as a boy, first losing his father in the Civil War, then keeping himself and his mother alive through ingenuity and luck during the depression and famine of the 1940s. You get through something like that and you can get through anything, he always said. If you can’t learn from the experiences you’ve had, you might as well give up and die. Hombre que el bien no agradece solo el desprecio merece, he’d say: A man who doesn’t appreciate the good in life deserves nothing but contempt.

  ‘There’s some spinach still in the pot,’ he said as they passed the doorway into the kitchen. ‘And a few scraps of pollo al ajillo. Pilar made it. Help yourself.’

  Although Hilario was still virtually independent, ever since Cámara could remember, the dark shadow of Pilar had been a part of their lives in this flat, cooking meals, tidying the place up, ironing his grandfather’s clothes and sewing for him. Dressed in permanent black, she’d moved around the dark passageways like a ghost, coming and going as she pleased, always there when you least expected it; never around when you needed her. She must have been quite young back when Cámara had first moved in, taken under his grandfather’s wing as the only family remaining to him, yet she was always old in Cámara’s mind, the stuffiness of widowhood sticking to her like a spider’s web. Not old in the way he thought of Hilario – that had more to do with experience, and stories and proverbs. Pilar seemed to be cast in stone, petrified like on
e of the victims of Medusa in Cámara’s childhood books on Greek myths. For a while he had resented her, with her death-mask face. There were no secrets for a pubescent boy from Pilar, and the soft-porn magazines he occasionally managed to get his hands on, spreading like mushrooms across the country in the wake of the Generalísimo’s death, would mysteriously disappear, no matter how carefully he thought he had hidden them. Pilar, the home help, a token female presence in their all-male environment, ruled over them with a silent, disapproving tyranny. It had been another reason to leave Albacete.

  With his plate piled with Pilar’s food, he picked up a fork and went into the living room to sit next to his grandfather. Hilario leaned forwards and hit the mute button on the remote control, and the TV news fell silent, the lights from the screen flickering in the background.

  ‘Should be nice and dry, this lot,’ Hilario said as Cámara began to eat. ‘Been hanging up all winter. Packed it into plastic bags for you. Keep you going for a while.’

  Cámara smiled to himself. The old anarchist was patting himself on the back again, ensuring that his wayward grandson – who’d joined the police of all things – kept one foot at least on his side of the law. In Hilario’s mind, the marihuana plants were there to prevent Cámara from falling completely into the arms of the state, a small act of defiance to remind himself of his roots. Hilario and Cámara’s great-grandfather before him had both been activists in the anarchist CNT trade union, although Hilario hadn’t been able to join up officially until the political amnesty after Franco’s death. This militancy had bypassed a generation with Cámara’s father, but for the son there had been high hopes that he would follow the family tradition. Instead he had taken a law degree and joined the forces of oppression. Hilario hadn’t spoken to him for three weeks afterwards and Cámara had been on the point of moving out before his grandfather had found him sitting on a doorstep nearby smoking some grass with a couple of friends. In that instant he found the gap, the chink, he had needed to hang on to his grandson.