We head south-east towards the Mediterranean leaving behind the huge housing blocks of Madrid’s new suburbs and crossing the dry, parched plain of La Mancha. It stretches wide and flat and almost treeless to the horizon, marked by the outline of a range of mountains that never seems to get any closer. An occasional farm, drifting smoke, a gypsum plant, a grain store, a line of white-washed windmills, a castle on a hill, everything seems detached, distant, as if reluctant to be on this great exposed plain at all.
After three hours the line cuts down through the edge of the plateau and in amongst the mass of orange groves from which Valencia has made its money.
Valencia Norte is the loveliest, least rugged, least bombastic of stations. The way out takes you through a turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau concourse, across a brown and white chequered marble floor, beneath a ceiling of coffered wood and walls of multicoloured mosaic tiles to a low white exterior, decorated with stucco oranges and orange leaves.
The next thing I notice is a huge frankfurter driving by, passing a twenty-foot-high brightly coloured statue of a bare-breasted lady, and a long line of women and children in eighteenth-century costume walking behind a vigorous, if discordant band.
We have arrived at the time of year when Valencia goes crazy. The festival of Fallas. The time when, we are told ominously, nobody sleeps.
I‘m woken by a series of sharp explosions in the street below. A salvo of fire crackers. Then another, then another. There is a moment’s calm and my eyes are gently closing when, with a short warning squeal, a pipe and drum band starts up below the window.
Downstairs on the way to breakfast I ask the hotel receptionist what is going on. She tells me, brightly, that the noise and the music are the work of les despertas, the waker-uppers, whose job it is to go round the city rousing those who might have defied all the odds and fallen asleep during the night.
‘They want you to go and see their fallas,’ she explains.
She hands me a brochure called ‘Living las Fallas’, which she says will help me enjoy the festival. A quirkily translated introduction advises the visitor to ‘leave your prejudices and timid fears behind’ and to ‘accept human ridicule in an absurd world’.
Venturing out to accept ridicule I find a city out on the streets and not taking itself at all seriously. Crowds amble around inspecting the various colourful, rude, sexy, satirical papier mache effigies they call fallas, which are erected in squares and on street corners throughout the city by various neighbourhood groups. There are apparently seven hundred of these sculptures all over Valencia, and all will be set alight at midnight on the feast of San Jose, which is the day after tomorrow.
The origins of Fallas lie in the middle of the eighteenth century when the local carpenters would burn all their winter shavings, off-cuts and general rubbish in one big fire which they would sometimes decorate with a makeshift figure of some kind.
They’re a lot more complex and sophisticated nowadays, but the intention remains to poke fun, to be disrespectful and entertaining at the same time.
Hard by a handsome eighteenth-century church in the Plaza del Pilar rises a huge and curvaceous flapper girl surrounded by a grotesquely made-up Mae West stretched out on a couch, alongside beaded madames and crazed sax-players. Outside the central market is a looming likeness of Steven Spielberg aboard the Titanic, holding a film camera from which springs the ET bicycle.
Politics, the church and the media are popular targets for the designers. At one falla I notice a real life TV presenter being filmed in front of a grotesque and joyfully lewd caricature of a trouserless television presenter.
Just as I’m feeling rather thankful for my anonymity, a short fair-haired man hurrying by turns and stops and greets me cordially He says we’ve met before, at one of Graham Chapman’s parties in the early seventies.
His name is Robert Misik and he’s a Dutchman living and working in Valencia. He offers his help if there’s anything we want. There is, of course. Like tickets to one of the bullfights and a bullfighter who will agree to talk to us.
Robert barely blinks at this and, after a quick exchange of numbers, vanishes into the crowds who are now gathering two or three deep along the route of yet another procession. This one lasts several hours as women from the various falla groups carry flowers through the city to a forty-foot high wooden effigy of the Virgin Mary. Every offering of flowers is then handed up to a special team which arranges them into a giant floral-tapestry. It sounds awful but it is done with great style and as it seems to give at least half the entire female population of Valencia the chance to participate, it is also truly democratic.
This evening, over a very fine meal of crayfish and delicately cooked, zingily fresh merluza (which sounds so much more exotic than hake), Robert brings us the good news that one of the top matadors at this year’s feria has agreed to meet me early tomorrow morning, the day before his fight.
Vicente Barrera, grandson of Vicente Barrera the matador whom Hemingway takes to task for his killing technique in Death in the Afternoon, is, it goes without saying, slim and good-looking. These seem obligatory qualities for a bullfighter.
He’s also thirty years old, a couple of months older than my eldest son, which is considered, in his profession, to be getting on a bit. Everything about him is neat and restrained, from his taste for plain expensive clothes in autumnal colours to the formal but immaculate cut of his jet-black hair. He looks like a choirboy.
We meet in a very ordinary meson, a local bar with tiled walls and hams hanging from the ceiling.
There is a bit of a hiatus as our director, always a stickler for veracity, had been assured that criadillas fritas - fried bull’s testicles - are a speciality of the meson, and wants me to nibble one or two on camera as we talk. It turns out that, like the Monty Python cheese shop, they have lots of them normally but today the van broke down. Robert is out combing Valencia for fresh testicles.
Whilst we wait, Vicente, in a soft voice and with continual apologies for his English, tells me about his background. He only took up bullfighting six or seven years ago, and like Fabian in Madrid, against his father’s wishes. He had trained as a lawyer, though he adds, with a self-deprecating laugh, that it was lucky for all clients that he never practised. He is now among the top ten fighters in the country, appearing at something like a hundred corridas a year, in Spain, France and across the Atlantic, in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia.
Robert arrives, breathless, holding a paper bag. There are no bull’s testicles to be found so he has bought pig’s instead. The director approves and they are sent to the kitchen to be prepared, reappearing quite soon, sliced and fried and ready for the interview.
I ask Vicente why he became a bullfighter.
‘Next to being Pope, it’s the only thing,’ he smiles, but it isn’t entirely a joke.
‘It is the most important thing I can do with my life.’
‘There are many people who think that bullfighting is cruel.’
He turns aside a moment and when he turns back his politely courteous manner has slipped a bit.
‘What do people in an office in …’ He searches for a name, ‘… in New York, know about bulls? We know about them. We live with them.’
He points at a piece of cooked meat on display by the bar.
‘This animal … what is this animal?’
‘Cow?’
‘Cow, yes, a cow. A cow has six months. A bull has four years, living wild in the country.’ He turns again to the cooked cow. ‘Who is this animal? You don’t know. We know the father, the mother of the bull, we put the name of each one on the bull.’
Vicente is undergoing an almost Clark Kent-ish transformation as he warms to the theme.
Bullfighting, he says defiantly, is something that cannot be done without passion. Technique is nothing without passion. He grabs at his cashmere sweater as if wanting to tear out the heart beating beneath it and show me the passion inside.
‘You live y
our passion all of the day, you know. You don’t have holidays, you don’t have weekends, you don’t have family, you only have your passion and the toro and the fiesta and no more.’
‘Do you still have fear?’
He looks at me pityingly.
‘Of course! If they don’t have fear, they are crazy people! Matador is a person I think normally very intelligent and normal. A brave person is not someone who has no fear!’
I am not sure if this vehemence is the frustration of a highly educated, sensitive man continually forced to defend something at which he is particularly gifted or just a demonstration of the pride and controlled aggression which makes him able to do what he does.
All I know is that I would never describe anyone who stares a charging bull in the face two hundred times a year as normal.
But this is exactly how Vicente seems when the interview’s over. He returns to his soft-spoken, almost solemn politeness, shaking all our hands and inviting us to come and see him fight tomorrow, and to go backstage afterwards.
Whereupon he slides gracefully out into the street leaving me alone with a plate of pig’s testicles, by now greasy, congealed and ready for my close-ups.
This morning the pipe band and its attendant explosions passes, with scrupulous punctuality, at ten minutes past eight. This time I don’t take it lying down. I stagger to the window and peer through the curtain.
I suppose I had expected to see young children following the band like a Pied Piper, ebulliently scattering fireworks. In fact, the procession consists almost entirely of elderly men, one of whom pushes a supermarket trolley brimful of firecrackers which his two lugubrious companions light with their cigars and toss across the street.
This is the last day of Fallas, the culmination of a week’s festivities. Tonight, at midnight, the statues all over the city will be torched, though the largest one in the main square will not go up until an hour later. Vicente’s bullfight begins at five, so we ask the ever-enterprising Robert how we can best kill the time. He suggests more noise.
At two o’clock every afternoon during the festival there is an event known as the mascleta in which the three big pyrotechnic families of Valencia vie with each other to produce the most powerful explosive display, and as today is the last day of the last festival of the century, and the millennium, Robert reckons it will be one of the best.
He calls some friends who have an apartment over the square and they invite us to watch the performance from their balcony.
It is a perfect day, bright, cloudless with a dry, fresh breeze. An hour before the display is due to begin, the Plaza del Ayuntamiento is already impassable. The crowd, estimated at two to three hundred thousand, is kept behind barriers allowing access for the Red Cross emergency teams who occasionally dive in to retrieve someone overcome by the crush. In the centre of the square the men from the fireworks company work quietly away, checking the network of wires from which hang thousands of small packages of explosive, and loading up rows of mortars.
Our kind host Jose Luis Soler, an architect, offers us a drink and a piece of sliced sausage and advises us to keep our mouths open during the display as it takes the strain off the eardrums. And don’t use earplugs, let the blast through.
Three shells fired high into the air signal the start of the onslaught. The fuses are ignited, releasing a thunderous wall of sound which rolls towards us, the speed of the explosions carefully orchestrated to vary the pace whilst building up a counterpoint of overlapping echoes. One huge report follows another, the blasts hurling shock-waves across the square, strong enough to send my jacket flapping. The pace accelerates as the fire sprints along the wires of thunderflashes, sending up a ripping, shattering din, and when you think you can take no more, the big mortars start to blow with such force that you can only hang on and let it thrill and terrify. A final, ferocious amalgamation of sound, fed by thunderous explosions on the ground and soaring shell-bursts in the air, builds to a relentless, ear-splitting cacophony, an unbelievably tremendous roar, which, with one last mighty salvo, stops as suddenly as it began. Which was, according to my watch, five minutes and eight seconds ago.
For a fragment of time complete silence falls, then with a great cry, the crowd spills through the barriers and races across to the fence to salute the pyrotechnic team, who emerge like mythological heroes from the shroud of white smoke they have created.
Ticket-touts are out at Valencia’s graceful brick bullring long before this afternoon’s fight begins and the souvenir-stalls are doing brisk business selling scarves, packs of cards, baseball hats, T-shirts and key-rings bearing likenesses of the stars of the circuit, though I notice a range of car-window ornaments offers Jesus and General Franco as well.
I hire my cushion and search out my seat on the bank of long concrete terraces. There is a mix-up however and the seat is already taken. Then, just as I’m desperate, fame comes to the rescue. No sooner am I identified as the killer of small dogs in A Fish Called Wanda than I cease to be a troublemaker and am treated most cordially by all. The man whose seat it is introduces himself as Paco and orders his wife and friends to squeeze up and make room for me.
Paco, in a smart grey lightweight suit, looks like a late-middle-aged businessman. Like his wife and friends, he seems to be dressed more for the opera than the bullring.
Each of the three matadors fights two of the six bulls, and Vicente’s first bull is the third of the afternoon, indicated as weighing 600 kilos and hurtling into the ring like a tank on steroids. Vicente, in black hat, blue and gold suit of lights and pink stockings, mops his brow with a towel before going forward.
The most unpleasant face of bullfighting, in which the bull is drawn away to charge a heavily armoured horse (whose vocal cords have been cut to prevent it whinnying) takes longer than usual and the crowd don’t like it.
Vicente draws the bull away with his cape and fights close and is generally thought to have done well.
The fifth bull is fought very stylishly and the matador, Enrique Ponce, has the crowd on its feet in appreciation. He is awarded two ears by the judges, an acknowledgement of great skills.
This is a hard act to follow, and as the sun moves off the stadium and a brisk night chill comes on, Vicente appears to be coping well. The music plays a paso doble for him, as it does when particularly artistic moves are executed, but when it comes to the kill, things go wrong. This is the most dangerous moment for the bullfighter, for, although his bull is weak, he must at this point take his eyes off it and hope to bend himself and his killing sword over the still lethal horns to deliver the coup de grace. Vicente has to take three serious risks before he can dispatch the bull. The crowd is unappreciative.
When Robert and I get to Vicente’s minibus after the fight, the atmosphere is not good. Vicente is angry with his cuadrilla - his support team in the ring - for not preparing the last bull properly. In between tearing them off a strip he has to switch on a flashing smile for the fans thronging the van.
When eventually we manoeuvre our way through the crowds and reach the hotel, there are more adoring fans waiting for photographs, autographs and handshakes. He deals with it all very patiently and delivers grave, long-suffering smiles.
Back in his room his real feelings surface. He is angry at the way things went and is clearly regretting his promise of an interview.
He disappears to the bathroom, leaving us with his valet, a small dark gnome-like older man with very black hair and thick eyebrows who is given to much shaking of the head and muttering. Robert whispers to me.
‘He’s saying this is very irregular.’
Vicente reappears. There is still no sign of our crew. He smiles thinly and stands beside a small table on which I notice pictures of the saints and the Virgin. I don’t like to ask right now, but Robert tells me later that it is a portable chapel, laid out by his dresser so that Vicente can pray before the fight. All bullfighters pray before a fight.
Vicente is completely preoccupied. His hands a
nd body keep repeating the movements of a pass rather as a golfer might replay a putt that let him down.
A mobile phone rings. He looks up. It’s our film crew, calling to say their vehicle is stuck in traffic. Human traffic. The doorbell goes. A woman from Spanish television regards us anxiously. Did we know that Vicente had promised to appear on a live discussion programme in ten minutes’ time?
Vicente’s dresser shuts the door on her.
Vicente looks forlorn, well as forlorn as a bullfighter in a bejewelled suit worth $3000 can look. His face betrays the strain of a profession caught between the demands of ancient tradition and modern exploitation. As we shake hands he apologises. This weekend there is a lot of pressure on him. He is fighting again tomorrow and the night after in Alicante.
‘I’m playing with my life each night,’ he says, almost bitterly. And in his case it is probably true.
Five minutes to midnight in a small square in the heart of the old city. There isn’t room for that many people and those that are here are mainly local. They’re gathered around a tall, Disneyesque Aladdin, centrepiece of an Arabian Nights fantasy with prominent local politicians, nuns, and a bishop or two thrown in for good measure. It’s an elaborate and clever piece of work and those who created it are now busy making sure that they can destroy it just as cleverly. They move around the base of the figure poking an air-hole through here, laying a fuse there. One man is up a ladder at the back of the statue, sticking wires and paraffin bags up Aladdin’s backside.
The mood is serious and celebratory at the same time. I have the feeling that the general success of Fallas is considered more important than any single event. The groups compete with each other but only to make the whole festival better. Which is why this festival has been marked by high spirits without violence, drinking without fighting, noise without aggression. And tonight is perhaps the most precarious balancing act of all. Seven hundred bonfires are about to be lit across an urban area of a million people.
Hemingway Adventure (1999) Page 9
