One of the Spaniards asked for cheese. The restaurant was probably saving it for dessert, but the waitress brought out a plate of soft, creamy French cheese. This was also rejected, since it didn’t resemble the hard cheese from La Mancha that the toreros were used to. By the time the main course arrived, both the Spaniards and their French hosts were getting frustrated. In theory, the entrée should have been acceptable. It was steak and fries. Unfortunately for all concerned, Poli sniffed at his plate, looked around, and said in Spanish, “Maybe this is horse.” The meal was done for. After a respectable amount of time the bullfighters retreated to their motel.
That evening everyone gathered to set out and find some dinner, and while he was waiting for the cuadrilla to assemble Fran talked about his upcoming corrida in Pamplona on July 10. Every morning of the Pamplona feria the bulls that are to be killed in the arena that afternoon are run through the streets of town, and anyone who wants to can run with them. Many people are injured each day, and once in a while someone is killed. The last time this happened, the victim was an American. Few professional toreros run in these encierros, as the bull runs are called. Bullfighters risk their lives with bulls for money, and don’t need the added danger of being surrounded by amateurs, many of them drunk, many of them non-Spaniards. But like his father and grandfather before him, Fran often ran the encierros, partly to honor his forebears and partly because, like them, he enjoyed it.
“You must run with me this year,” Fran told me. “It will be great.”
I shuffled my feet a bit and said something about having a wife and child.
Fran smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said, the picture of reason and judgment. “I run far from the horns.”
I asked him what he meant by “far.”
“Oh, a few meters.”
That sounded too close to me, so I mumbled more excuses.
Fran shot me a look, clearly exasperated with my un-Spanish show of fear. “I know!” he said with a wicked smile. “You will run with the bulls, you will get caught, and you will die. Then I will write a book about a dead writer.”
We left it there. But I knew I was expected to run, and if I didn’t, I’d be branded as the coward I was.
That evening, Fran decided to go to McDonald’s for dinner. So there they were, a hardened group of matadors, picadors, and banderilleros, eating Happy Meals in a plastic picnic area in the south of France, where one can dine about as well as anywhere on earth. The night was cool and the meal pleasant, until the end, when Poli discovered that the big craggy-faced picador López had removed the desserts from some of the Happy Meals and eaten them himself. The two got into a shouting match, which had to be broken up by the apoderado. “It’s just like summer camp,” Fran observed.
Istres, June 22. The southern French border is closer to the great bullfighting land of Andalucía than New York is to Chicago. So it should come as no surprise that there have been Spanish-style bullfights in the south of France for at least two centuries. Today the bullfight is on the rise in France, and more corridas are given each year and more bullrings are being built. There are now about thirty plazas de toros on French soil, all of them in the south. Bullfights are held in the two-thousand-year-old Roman arenas at Nîmes and Arles. Béziers and Mont-de-Marsan have distinguished nineteenth-century rings, and there are a number of contemporary plazas in smaller towns, among them Magesq (opened in 1989), La Brede (1999), and Istres, which would officially open on the day of Fran’s corrida.
Northern France has had its bullfights too. In 1889 a group of investors, led by the duke of Veragua, built a ring on Rue Pergolese in central Paris. It accommodated twenty-two thousand spectators and had electric lighting and a retractable roof, and the corridas held there led to a flowering of interest in bullfights in the north. There were strong protests as well. Animal rights groups brought many lawsuits demanding the abolition of the bullfight in France, and in the mid-1890s the national legislature passed a law banning the bulls. But bullfighting supporters worked to repeal the law, taking their case all the way to France’s highest court, which ruled that the bullfight was indeed to be outlawed everywhere in France, with the exception of the south. The justices thought the bullfight was such a part of the indigenous culture there that it should be allowed to go on. This is the legal situation today.
The bullring in Istres was spanking new and rather pretty, with a graceful white awning that kept the expensive seats in shade. The program did not open with a traditional Spanish bullfighting march; instead the band played the “Toreador Song” from the French opera Carmen. Otherwise it was a regular corrida. The crowd was small. The bulls were bad. A young French matador cut the only ear. The six bulls died their deaths and the cuadrilla hurried back to the motel to shower, change, and get the hell out of France as soon as possible and back to the only real country in the world. For dinner they sent Juani to a supermarket, where he found ham and cheese and bread and beer that approximated the Spanish versions of those foods.
“Next year when we come,” Pepe Luis said, “we can bring a barbecue and grill our own food.”
As the cuadrilla minibus was being loaded, Joselito sat with his gangly frame draped over a chair in the motel lobby. He was studying a sheet of paper that had Fran’s upcoming corridas listed on it. There were six dates left in June, then another ten in July.
“You have a lot of work coming up,” someone said.
Joselito folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “Hombre, there’s no point in worrying about the future,” he said. “In this business you never know what is going to happen.”
19
A Lapse in Concentration
Algeciras, June 29. In the days following the corrida in France, Fran and company drove back to Spain and made a tour of Castilla-León, the region just north of Madrid. They had no luck with a pair of Montalvo bulls before a half-empty plaza in Burgos on June 23, or with Luis Algarra bulls in the packed ring of León the next day. On June 25 they were down in the westernmost edge of Extremadura, in Badajoz, where Fran cut an ear off an excellent Jandilla bull, and it was back up to Castilla-León on the twenty-sixth, where Fran’s poor showing with the sword in the bullring in Soria cost him any chance of trophies from the Arauz de Robles bulls he’d drawn. Next stop was Sevilla, for two days’ rest, then on the road once again for a corrida of Núñez del Cuvillo bulls in Algeciras on the twenty-ninth.
It was a Saturday, and the air was oven-hot, with the terrible African heat of southern Spain that comes when the sun is large and the sky clear. But the heat was nothing more than a nuisance to the bullfighters. They were accustomed to it. What worried them was the treacherous wind that blew in from the water, a wind that would play havoc with their capes, blowing them up and revealing the toreros’ bodies to the bulls. Algeciras is a blowy town. It sits at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, where Spain and Morocco pinch within ten miles of each other, forming the Strait of Gibraltar—a stretch of water where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean come together, kicking up a sea wind.
Algeciras is also a Spanish city with a palpable Muslim presence, and signs on the grungy shops and coffeehouses down by the docks were in Arabic as well as Spanish. The bullring was a mile or so inland, atop a hill in the middle of the city’s fairgrounds, which were filled for the feria with gaudy amusement rides and the booths of sellers of perfume knockoffs, fake NBA team T-shirts, greasy doughnuts, and all manner of plastic gewgaws. This schlockiness was the flip side of the elegance of Sevilla’s feria. Up the hill, in direct confrontation with the coastal wind, was the bullring, which had the romantic name Las Palomas (The Doves). Inaugurated in 1969 with a corrida featuring Paquirri, the ring was decorated in red brick and white tile and resembled a municipal parking garage from the outside.
The stands were half full, the air smelled of sea and cooking grease, and the dying day was so hot you couldn’t think straight when the toreros marched across the arena to open the bullfight. Fran was the senior man that day an
d he faced the opening bull of the spectacle, a black creature that was what the Spanish would call anovillado, an adult specimen that looked like the kind of immature bull used in novilladas. Fran chose a patch of sand to defend and began his performance with a confident series of verónicas, keeping the little bull under his thumb. Then the picadors did their business, and Poli, Joselito, and José Maria got the sticks well placed, and it was time for Fran to show what he could do with the red cape.
He began the faena with three series of right-handed passes to the right horn, running the bull with some success but without generating the emotion of good bullfighting. There was nothing technically wrong with Fran’s performance, but the bull was too small, there were too many empty seats, and the people who were there were too hot to rouse themselves. Fran switched the muleta to his left hand and glided through two easy sets of naturales that elicited lackluster olés from the crowd. After this the bull showed signs of wear. Its sides heaved and it began charging with its mouth open, the bluish pink tongue lolling out.
Fran paused for a moment. He and the bull stood in the shaded side of the sand about six feet apart, and the bull was heavy on its hooves. Having completed an exploration of the bull’s left horn, Fran decided to go back to working the right one. He transferred the cape to his right hand, set the sword behind it to spread out the fabric, and took his eyes off the bull to twist the end of the fabric down over the tip of the sword and fix the cape in place. It was a lapse in concentration of less than five seconds, and with most bulls on most days Fran would have gotten away with it. For some reason, however, this tired half-bull in Algeciras got excited at the wrong moment.
It might have been the motion of Fran’s left arm as he twisted the cape down over the sword, or it might have been the gust of wind that blew, fluttering the cape at a key instant. Whatever it was, the bull surged forward, taking less than two seconds to get to Fran. If he had been paying attention, he might have escaped the situation one way or the other, but his head was down. By contrast, the bull, suddenly energized by the expectation of harming its tormentor, had its head up, and it drove its right horn into Fran at the level of his chest. It looked like the kind of goring that would kill. But there was no discernible puncture hole or blood as Fran blasted off the horn and fell backward onto his feet. The bull came again, chopped and missed, pounding Fran with its skull, slapping him down. As Fran collapsed he threw his left arm out behind him to break the fall. The arm shot out stiff, the hand struck the ground, and Fran’s body went down on top of the hand, crumpling the arm in sickening fashion. The lower half of the arm, the part that can only bend forward, wrenched backward, popping the elbow from the socket.
The other bullfighters leapt into the ring and moved the bull away. Fran stood up and it was clear that the horn had missed his chest and hooked into his armpit instead. Otherwise he might well have been dead. But relief gave way to fear when Fran swooned against the banderillero standing next to him, holding his left arm and whimpering like an animal. They tried to carry him out of the ring, but he insisted on walking, and he sobbed as they led him around the callejón and into the infirmary while the audience gave him polite, ladies’-lunch applause.
In the small operating room the doctor shot Fran full of painkillers. Then he gripped Fran’s arm and snapped the dangling lower half of the limb back into its socket. Two hours later Fran lay in the local hospital, easing his way into what would be a night of misery. “I thought the elbow was broken,” he said. “Because I have never had pain like that. It was horrible, really, and I was asking for more drugs. And they said, ‘We can’t give you any more drugs, you’ve had enough,’ and I was begging, saying, ‘Please, give me something to end the pain. Give me everything you have.’ It was a horrible night.” The next day they flew Fran up to Madrid to assess the damage.
Madrid, July 2. The season was now in doubt. Soft-tissue injuries like the one Fran had sustained do not heal quickly, and a matador cannot get by with an injured elbow: he uses his elbows in just about everything he does. Back in Sevilla, Pepe Luis was trying to sound upbeat. Tests had shown that Fran had suffered nothing worse than a few strained ligaments in the one elbow, he said, adding that Fran would spend the coming weeks in Madrid doing physical therapy, under the care of Dr. Alfonso del Corral, the orthopedic surgeon of the professional soccer team Real Madrid. There was no way to predict how and when Fran would be able to perform again. “Hombre,” Pepe Luis said, “you never know. We’ll have to wait and see what the doctor says. Right now we’re hoping to come back on the twenty-first in Barcelona.” That seemed optimistic.
20
Running the Bulls
Pamplona, July 8. The alarm rang in the darkened bedroom, but Miguel Angel Eguiluz was already awake and staring at the ceiling. It was six-thirty in the morning.
He swung out of bed. Short, compact, athletic, with a shaved head, a well-tended black mustache, and lively blue eyes, Miguel Angel was a forty-seven-year-old Pamplona native, a doctor who’d been running the bulls since he was a teenager. The famous running-of-the-bulls feria had been in swing for two days already, but Miguel Angel’s suburban neighborhood was quiet as he dressed in white pants, white shirt, and running shoes, slugged down a sports drink, and descended the stairs to the basement parking lot to pound out thirty minutes of wind sprints. At seven-thirty he zipped into the city on his motorbike. As he parked he could hear the big crowd that had assembled in the bullring to watch the end of the bull run, and the band playing.
The route the bulls and runners took each morning snaked for a little more than half a mile through the streets and squares of the old part of town—the area was cordoned off with heavy wooden barricades. On a typical weekday during the feria, more than two thousand runners participated, and the number could double on weekends. Most of the runners were from somewhere other than Pamplona. Many hadn’t slept the night before. Some were drunk. Almost none knew what they were doing. But within this ignorant mob (for that is what they were) was a small and anonymous group of a few hundred expert runners. Some were non-Spaniards—Noël Chandler, in his day, had been among them. Most were locals. These hard-core participants treated the encierro as a spiritual exercise and a serious competition. Their goal was simple: to put themselves just ahead of the bulls’ horns and run there for as long as possible without touching or interfering with the bulls in any way.
Like most serious runners, Miguel Angel specialized in a certain stretch of the route. He began almost at the end, where the Calle Estafeta curved through an open intersection and down into the tunnel that led into the bullring. By law the runners were supposed to assemble back at the beginning of the bull-running route, at the Calle Santo Domingo, which sloped down to the makeshift corrals where the bulls were held. But Miguel Angel didn’t do this. Instead he slipped into a shuttered bar on a side street behind the Calle Estafeta, walked through the bar and out a door and right into Estafeta, just about where he liked to begin his favorite part of the course. Then he settled in and listened for the rocket that signaled the release of the bulls.
“This is the worst time,” he said. “It is just horrible. You are so afraid. You can’t stop looking at your watch. You know eight o’clock is coming.”
Pamplona’s Feria de San Fermín is the most moving, horrifying, hard-drinking festival in Spain. It goes on for nine days and the pace is punishing. The bulls run each morning at eight, and then everyone eats breakfast, takes a short nap, then has drinks, then comes lunch with drinks, then the bullfight, then more drinks, then dinner with drinks, followed by more drinks, dancing and carousing in bars (still more drinks), maybe a few hours’ sleep, and then it’s time for the next bull run. The city runs riot. Revelers from local clubs called peñas, the marching bands of the peñas, lines of dancers, tourists, and drunks of all descriptions roam the streets at all hours, clashing together with mad passion.
The atmosphere of the corridas in the large ring is just as wild as the atmosphere in the streets
. The peñas buy up most of the seats in the sunny sections, and they spend the entirety of the spectacle chanting insults and hurling sangria and flour while their house bands play over each other at full volume. There are true aficionados in Pamplona, some of the best in Spain. But the presence of these sober fans is wiped out by the cacophony of the sunny sections. “It is very hard there,” Fran said. “Because you don’t know if the people like or don’t like what you do. You can’t hear if the serious people are clapping or booing.”
But the Feria de San Fermín, rather like bullfighting itself, is redeemed by that amazing Spanish ability to reconcile the high with the low, the grotesque with the beautiful, the morbid with the joyous, the religious with the unholy, and make sense of it in a way that few other cultures can. The Pamplona fair blends a louche and seedy carnival with stirring church services, with bull sortings held in a spotless corral where tapas are served, with dinners in local homes where the cooking is as complex and well prepared as in any restaurant, with the people of a simple and elegant city trying to hold their annual festival in the middle of a tidal wave of rowdy foreigners.
Pamplona is the capital of Navarra, a square-shaped region in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Named for its founder, the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great), Pamplona became a Roman garrison town in the first century before Christ. During the Middle Ages Pamplona was variously under the dominion of the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Moors. In the year 778 the future Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, attacked the city, knocking down its walls. The Pamplónicas responded to this a few months later by ambushing the Frankish king’s army, wiping out the rear guard, and this bloody bit of business became the basis for a popular and enduring epic poem, The Song of Roland, although the poet converted the Pamplónicas into Moors for dramatic effect.
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