Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  Today Pamplona is a small city of the type that no longer exists in the United States, sort of like what Charleston or Baltimore must have been in the time before America was afflicted with the suburban scourge. Pamplona has a population of fewer than two hundred thousand, yet it is a center of banking and small industry; it has a university; and it is home to many wealthy and middle-class residents who support its restaurants, theaters, and shops and would never dream of fleeing the city center for split-level sprawl.

  The only cloud over Pamplona is the ongoing violent campaign by some of its citizens to force the creation of a Basque state separate from Spain. The Basques are an ethnic minority, tall and fair, very Catholic, and with a strong agrarian tradition. They live on both sides of the French-Spanish border and in Spain are concentrated in the Pais Vasco (Basque Country) and adjoining Navarra. Although the Basques are a distinct ethnic group, they have almost never ruled themselves. They have their own language (of ancient and obscure origin), but it’s been centuries since any significant population spoke it. You could be killed for saying such things in some parts of Spain and France, but the truth is that Spanish Basques are Spaniards, just as are the Catalan speakers of Cataluña, the Gallego speakers of Galicia, and the Valenciano speakers of Valencia. Spanish Basques live, speak, eat, and pray like Spaniards. They also adore bullfighting. There are three first-category rings in Navarra and the Pais Vasco—Bilbao, Pamplona, and San Sebastián—and a brace of smaller rings of great history and respectability. The aficionados in these rings are known for their torista tendencies. They are demanding of bullfighters and enamored of big, fierce bulls.

  The Pamplona feria, as its name implies, is dedicated to Saint Fermín, a local priest who was beheaded in the second century after Christ by French pagans who didn’t appreciate the good news of the Bible as much as Fermín had hoped they would. His namesake festival has been celebrated since at least the thirteenth century, and has long included religious processions, outdoor markets, fireworks, and bullfights. These days the festival goes from July 6 to July 14.

  The bulls have been run in Pamplona for a good four hundred years, and in other places in Spain—especially in Navarra and around Madrid—in more recent times.

  Most historians agree that the practice grew out of the fact that bullfighting bulls used to be herded on foot directly into whatever town square or palace was being used for the corrida. In order to minimize danger to life and property, the herdsmen would wait until the wee hours of the morning and dash the bulls in as fast as possible. One morning, way back when, some bright townsman decided to run along with the bulls, and this spontaneous activity hardened into a Spanish tradition.

  The runs are now called encierros—“the enclosing of the bulls in a corral”—because that is what the runners are theoretically aiming to do, racing ahead of the bulls to lure them into the bullring. The average run lasts less than three minutes and results in the trampling and perhaps the goring of perhaps ten runners. From the 1870s to the 1970s, there were two dozen occasions when falling runners caused dangerous pileups that resulted in many injuries. Every so often a runner has died from being gored or trampled in a pileup. This has happened thirteen times since 1924, when people started keeping count. The most recent death was an American, in 1995, the only non-Spaniard to die in an encierro.

  Pamplona, July 10. The buzzer echoed in the dark hallway of Noël Chandler’s apartment and someone stumbled out of bed to let in whoever it was and stop the racket. There were four people staying in the apartment and they were all desperately hung over. Just then Noël shuffled out of his room, went down the hall, and opened the heavy wooden shutters in the living room, which gave out onto a city of gray stone situated in a green valley. The air was damp and cold. Down below was the Calle Estafeta. Apartment buildings lined the narrow street on both sides. Scores of people hung out of the small balconies on the buildings’ façades, and ragged clusters of people wandered around on the street. All of them were dressed in the traditional costume of the feria: white pants, white shirt, with a red bandanna around the neck.

  Noël was especially bleary that morning. He had been hard at the red wine the night before, something that he’d done frequently and with impunity in his younger days, but that had begun to play havoc with his close to seventy-year-old system. His blood pressure had spiked to vertiginous heights and he was worried about it. Of course that didn’t mean Noël was willing to give up drinking or place himself in the care of a physician. Instead he did the best he could to moderate his alcohol consumption and was taking some blood-pressure medicine procured from a Miami cardiologist friend who was in town for the bullfights.

  “At least I’ve got these new tablets,” Noël said. “Last night my blood pressure was two-fifty over one-twenty; the doctor told me that by all rights I should be dead.”

  Just before eight o’clock, the mood in the Calle Estafeta quickened. The balconies were filled with spectators and the streets were mobbed with a sea of people in white shirts and red bandannas. Someone turned on the television in Noël’s living room and there was a broadcast of what was taking place some three hundred yards down the street. A red-and-white throng had gathered beside a high stone wall with a small shrine in it, and they were chanting to the shrine: “To San Fermín we ask / because he is our patron / to guide us through the bull run / and give us his benediction. / Long live San Fermín! Long live San Fermín!” They chanted it again and again, the fear and anticipation rising in their throats.

  Just then a mob came jogging below Noël’s window. They had come from the spot where the people were chanting. They were the “valiant ones,” who’d chosen to run so far ahead of the bulls that they were in more danger of losing their dignity than their lives. The crowd along Estafeta let out a lusty and sarcastic shout for the valiant ones, and the runners kept coming. Suddenly there was the cracking report of a single rocket. “They’ve opened the gates,” Noël said. He waited, his long nose skyward, and then another rocket blast. “All the bulls are out,” he said. “Watch now, you’ll see them soon.”

  Pamplona, July 8. An old man touched the flame of his cigarette lighter to a wick and the rocket shot up leaving a cloud of white smoke. Bang! Someone opened the wooden gate and a thicket of gnarled horns emerged through the cloud. Behind the horns were steers: tame, lanky animals with coats of red, brown, and white blotches, cowbells around their necks. The steers ran the encierros every year. They knew where they were going and moved with a certain detachment, heads up, maintaining a steady pace. In their wake, crowding their bony hindquarters, scrambling with heads down, in a big hurry, came a knot of six bulls. The bulls were muscled and thick, and their heads bounced on stiff necks as they galloped.

  Up the steep grade of Santo Domingo they ran, the clacking of the bulls’ hooves and the lunatic music of the cowbells echoing off stone buildings. The runners were massed at the top of the hill, where the police had herded them. When the bulls came into view, the runners flew down to meet them, breaking around the bulls like a red and white sea over black rocks. The bulls kept moving. The runners stopped short, turned, and began running back up the hill, some ahead of the bulls, some right with them, and some behind them.

  A man in a red shirt fell just in front of the pack of bulls. A chestnut bull lowered its head and, almost as an afterthought, punched its horn into the falling man’s back. The man crumpled and didn’t get up again. The bull moved on up the street, blood on its horn. “Oh, my God,” shouted a pretty young American tourist, perched on a wall. Bang! The second rocket fired, indicating that all of the bulls were out of the corrals, but by then they were already over Santo Domingo and into central Pamplona. People stood on rooftops and balconies to see them. They hung off drainpipes, dangled over walls, and wrapped themselves on the wooden barricades to see the race go by.

  Men and animals scurried through the Plaza Consistorial, where the Pamplona town hall was, and turned into the short Calle Mercaderes. The pack was running
due east just then and the sun poured over them from between the buildings. Three bulls fell, but the madness of the herd was on them and they got up and kept running. Mercaderes ended with an almost ninety-degree turn into Estafeta. This was the notorious curve where there was always a spill. This morning four bulls went down, straining their necks forward and pawing madly as they lurched upright once more.

  Estafeta was packed. The street was wall-to-wall runners, spectators, and hangers-on; there was nowhere for people to escape because the street was lined with buildings. The bulls plunged into the crowded street and the people gave way around the animals, falling, flailing, pushing with all their might into the stone walls. At this moment Miguel Angel appeared. He ran up from behind the bulls as they passed, out on the margins of the pack, gaining speed, dodging people, reaching the pace of the bulls, closing in. Runners surrounded the bulls. Miguel Angel lanced into the center of the street, toward the herd, moving laterally like an American football player, looking for a way to pierce the runners and get to the bulls. Then he saw daylight, shot to his right, hit the gap between two runners, and he was in with the bulls.

  Knees pumping up and down almost to his chest, arms out, trying to maintain his balance, Miguel Angel Eguiluz ran in the small space between the hindquarters of the steers and the horns of a chestnut bull. He jumped out ahead of the horns a few paces, then slowed down again, then bounced off the horns, searching for the correct pace to stay within inches of the heavy bobbing horns. He ran looking back over his shoulder, watching the bull, heedless of what was going on ahead of him. For a moment he and the bull ran together, lost in their own form of communication in the middle of the mob. Then Miguel Angel lost steam. He slid across his bull, across the horns of two others, and popped out of the traveling herd and over to the safety of a wall. His run had taken less than ten seconds.

  The bulls had more work to do. The three lead animals took the curve out of Estafeta, bounded into the tunnel, and came into the circle of the bullring to cheers. The rest of the pack straggled in behind, entering the ring one, two, three. As they entered they spread out, instinctively taking charge of the new, wider space they were in. Then they moved across the sand and were herded into the small entrance to the corrals. When the last bull had been stowed away, another rocket sounded. Bang! It was the end of an easy and uneventful encierro that lasted less than three minutes, with one goring and maybe two significant tramplings. Happy and exhausted, Miguel Angel went off in search of friends and some breakfast.

  About an hour after the encierro of July 10, the day that Fran was supposed to have appeared in the afternoon corrida, Miguel Angel Eguiluz walked over to Noël’s apartment to talk about being a bull runner. He was not eager to have his name in a book. His feria was a religious festival, he said, and the festival of the people of Pamplona as a group. It was not an excuse for one person to engage in self-promotion or bragging. Miguel Angel did not want to take too much time to talk about his exploits as a runner, or his injuries, or anything that he had done. What he did wish to do was to explain why he ran and how he felt about it.

  “For me, the concept of the encierro is that it is for our saint, for San Fermín,” Miguel Angel said. “For a Pamplonica, running with the bulls is the culmination of our fiesta and we honor our city by taking part in it. But it is hard to describe what it is like to run. It is a mix of fear, of anguish, of terror, and of joy. When you are running right there with the bulls, the world closes up around you, and it is just you and the bull. And sometimes you feel you are actually slowing the bull down, that he is running with you, and it is a kind of conversation between you and the bull.”

  21

  Papa

  For most of its history, Pamplona’s feria was an obscure local festival, and its encierros were of little interest to anyone save the few men who took part in them. Anyone familiar with the overcrowded, spectator-sport atmosphere of present-day encierros would be shocked to see early photographs that show tiny handfuls of men, many wearing jackets and ties, running with bulls through streets otherwise devoid of life. Change came to Pamplona when Ernest Hemingway arrived, fell in love with the feria, and sold it to the world through his writing.

  He was twenty-three, an unknown writer living in Paris, when he heard about bullfighting from his literary friends Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and from an American painter named Mike Strater. In the spring of 1923 he went to Spain and saw his first corrida hours after stepping off the train in Madrid. He returned to Spain a few months later for his first adventure in Pamplona. Those two trips altered the course of Hemingway’s life and work. From that year on, he would return to the bullring again and again, both as a writer and as a fan. It is said that Hemingway called to reserve tickets to the Pamplona corridas in the weeks just before he killed himself. The first rocket of the 1961 feria exploded four days after the self-inflicted gunshot that blasted off Hemingway’s head.

  Bullfighting is one of the predominant subjects in Hemingway’s work. It crops up in his early newspaper articles; in the short sketches that interlard his first story collection, In Our Time (1925); in his Pamplona novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926); in Death in the Afternoon (1932), which at the time was the only philosophical explanation of bullfighting in any language; in the Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); in short stories like “The Undefeated” (1927) and “The Capital of the World” (1938); and in the last work Hemingway published during his lifetime, the three long articles for Life magazine about the series of one-on-one corridas in 1959 that starred Fran’s grandfather Antonio Ordóñez and Fran’s great-uncle Luis Miguel Gonzáles Lucas, Dominguín, later published in book form as The Dangerous Summer (1985).

  Hemingway has done more than anyone to foster worldwide understanding and appreciation of the bullfight. Nearly all bullfighting enthusiasts born in a nonbullfighting country were either drawn to the bullfights by Hemingway or read him as their interest in bullfighting grew. So why is it that most bullfighting people dislike him? You’d think Hemingway would be a hero in taurine circles, but he isn’t. The Spanish dismiss him because he doesn’t translate well into their language and because many of them refuse to accept that a non-Spaniard has become, in effect, the spokesman for their national fiesta. He embarrasses English-speaking aficionados because he reminds them that what they like to think of as their private obsession is actually something found in books that are read by most high school English classes.

  “Look, Hemingway was the first kid on the block,” said Jesse Graham, a Hollywood screenwriter and aficionado of Anglo-Irish descent. “So you have to declare independence from him. There is a defensive thing that happens. When you say you are interested in the bullfights, people immediately assume you were inspired by his example, and then you just feel like saying, ‘No, I never read him.’”

  Whether they are Spanish, English, or German, bullfighting fans don’t like Hemingway because they feel competitive toward him. Like most religions and many hobbies, bullfighting inspires a tedious snobbism among its adherents. Hemingway was the worst when it came to this sort of thing. From the know-it-all tone of much of his writing on the subject, it seems obvious that part of what attracted him to bullfighting was that it was virgin territory from a literary standpoint and he could have it all to himself. The Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy sums up Hemingway’s attitude in her 1999 treatise On Bullfighting. “The Hemingway bravado did nothing for me,” Kennedy writes, “the menopausal bar-room stories, the foreigner trying too hard to be part of Spain, but, all the while, hoping to keep it exclusive, defining the country, for the first time, as one vast DT-haunted tourist club.”

  But Hemingway is by no means the only offender in this department. Since the very beginnings of the spectacle, Spanish commentators have consistently written about bullfighting fans as though they were divided into a vast ignorant crowd that comes to the arena for cheap thrills and an elite minority of aficionados who understand what they are seeing and can make in
telligent judgments. Taking their cue from this attitude, most non-Spanish fans like to think of themselves as members of the elite. Visit any bar in Pamplona at feria time and you will find an American going on and on about his near-death bull-running adventures, how many corridas he’s seen, how many matadors call him friend. If anyone else at the bar makes a comment about bullfighting, this guy will disagree for the sake of it. If anyone mentions Hemingway, he’ll say Hemingway didn’t know blankety-blank about bullfighting.

  The standard rap on Hemingway is that he didn’t know as much about the subject as he claimed; that he saw a relatively small number of corridas in his life compared, say, to an aficionado like Noël Chandler; and that his Life articles of 1959 contain some grossly unfair criticisms of such important matadors as Manolete and Dominguín. The critique is fair, but it misses the point. Hemingway wasn’t a bullfighting expert or a journalist, even when he was ostensibly writing bullfighting journalism. He was a fiction writer and a prose stylist who used the corrida as raw material for his larger artistic purposes, dramatizing and warping bullfighting as he needed to for effect.

  Yet in looking back on Hemingway’s work—particularly The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon—one is struck by how quickly and fully he understood his subject. He makes few if any factual errors. More important, he manages to zero right in on bullfighting’s peculiar nature. As Hemingway said, bullfighting is an ephemeral art. The work of a great matador disappears as soon as the bull dies, and nothing can preserve the feeling of it as it happened—not painting, not sculpture, not film, not video, not words on a page. It is gone. Which is part of the reason why bullfighting fans are almost always nostalgic, their memories of bygone corridas being so much sweeter and more exciting than the corridas they are able to see in real time. It is also part of the reason why no two fans can ever agree on anything except that Hemingway didn’t know what he was talking about.