Iberia

by James A. Michener

  By six o’clock the streets of Pamplona are jammed with twenty or thirty thousand people, from boys of five to old couples of eighty, for to lie late abed during San Fermín would be insanity. Some fourteen thousand of these early risers are heading toward the bullring, and now one begins to understand why Pamplona is such an ideal spot for an all-out feria like this. The bullring is practically in the center of town, a couple of short blocks from the central square, so that life moves alternately from the ring to the square.

  At the bullring, people pay sixty cents for entrance to what will become a major part of the feria. The real fun won’t start till seven, but shortly after six a band, led by a zany conductor with a magisterial sense of comedy, entertains the crowd with songs of Navarra and nonsense of a high order. It’s a bright, lovely part of the day and time passes swiftly.

  Meanwhile, along a course nine hundred yards long and leading through the very heart of the city, temporary barricades have been erected in such manner that later on they can be dismantled in about ten minutes and stored along the sidewalk for use next morning. When in place and it takes a goodly number of men to gear them properly, these barricades form a continuous runway from the Santo Domingo corrals, up to the colorful town hall, along Doña Blanca de Navarra (formerly known as Mercaderes), then up the historic Estafeta, an extremely narrow street, through an open square and into the tightly barricaded chute that will throw the stampeding animals into the bullring itself.

  At half past six this narrow course has attracted young men from all parts of Europe, and some not so young. Matt Carney is running for the eighty-fourth morning. Tigre’s tall son is running for his fourth; already he’s been on the tips of the bulls’ horns, but without incident. John Fulton and several Spanish matadors will run for the fun of it, and because they inherently love the bulls and enjoy being with them in any circumstances. Even Kenneth Vanderford, in his Hemingway cap, will be running, and he will by no means be the oldest participant, for yesterday a man of seventy-five was pegged by the bulls and is now in the hospital. It is a madness, this running with the bulls, and it never leaves a man’s blood.

  Promptly at seven a powerful rocket flies into the air and explodes aloft to signify that the gates to the corral have been opened. As soon as all the startled animals have dashed into the street, a second rocket explodes to warn everyone that they are on their way, six bulls and six large oxen pounding ahead at a full gallop up Santo Domingo, past the military hospital and into the square before the town hall. They run extremely fast, and as they go men run ahead of them, seeming to fly along the narrow streets. But since the bulls can run much faster than the men, the animals catch up with the speeding humans and sometimes knock them down or one man trips over another and there is a pile-up. When you first see a batch of runners stumble and fall into a heap, with enraged bulls bearing down upon them, you think, My God! They’ll be killed.

  But the forward motion of the bulls is such that they prefer to surge onward with the oxen rather than lag behind to fight with fallen men. I have seen incredible accumulations in which several dozen men have formed a mad pile in front of the flying animals, but the latter have plunged ahead, fighting to get over the human barricade, and whereas they have bruised some with their heavy hoofs they have not bothered any with their horns. If a man falls and can roll into the gutter and lie motionless, there’s a good chance he will escape.

  In the last century only butchers and those who worked with cattle ran in the streets before the bulls. Today any adventurer from Vienna or Pasadena is entitled to do so.

  It is when a bull becomes detached from the herd and finds himself alone that he panics. Then he starts slashing out with his horns and darting with savage speed at whatever confuses him. It is then that young men, no matter how adept at dodging, go to the hospital. Over the years, of a hundred men wounded by horns at Pamplona, fully ninety-five have been wounded by solitary bulls who have been isolated as they rush toward the arena. But even if a man does get trapped by a lone bull, and even if the horns are two inches from his gut, there’s always the likelihood that some other runner will attract the bull’s attention at the last fragment of a second, and the horn will miss. When this happens people say, ‘San Fermín came down to make the save.’ San Fermín protects a lot of lives.

  It takes the animals about two minutes to gallop the nine hundred yards, and now they thunder into the bullring, where some thousand runners have preceded them and again the animals stay bunched and drive like lemmings for the exit that will take them to the corrals behind the stands. But again, if one bull gets detached he will drive and hook at anything that comes his way until he is lured by capes into the exit. One morning I had proof of this. Because I could not run with the bulls, the city authorities had granted me a pass permitting me to perch atop the barricade at the chute, and after the bulls were well past and safely in their pens I walked fat and happy into the arena in what I judged was complete safety, only to find that a huge red bull had become detached from the oxen and was running in a great circle about the arena on a course which brought him almost face to face with me as I stepped into the sunlight. I practically fainted with astonishment, to see that huge, horned face looming so close to mine, but he was intent on finding his mates and San Fermín led him on.

  Rules for running with bulls are not haphazard. A local ordinance governs, and copies are widely distributed. The crucial rule, and one that could not be known intuitively, is that no runner may in any way attract the attention of the bulls by waving his arms or anything else. To do so might attract the bull not to himself but to someone farther on who is unaware of what is being done and is therefore unprotected. Also, once the bulls have caught up with a runner and passed him, he may not run at their heels, lest they sense him there and turn back into the crowd. Women may not run, nor drunks, nor men with unusual costumes that might attract the bulls in their direction. The governing concept is that once the bulls are started on their course, clearly marked by fences, they will keep going unless someone radically diverts their attention and lures them into masses of unsuspecting people. I have seen six bulls run right over a pile of twenty or thirty fallen bodies, so intent were they in plunging ahead. Had anyone at that moment sidetracked their herding instinct, someone would surely have been hurt.

  When all the bulls are safely inside the bullring corrals a final rocket is fired to announce that all is well. If it goes off in less than three minutes, listeners know that the bulls made a good run without any having been detached from the herd, but if the final rocket is much delayed, apprehension grows. A bull may have become separated and young men from Norway and Holland may be pinned against the improvised barriers at the town hall or against some shop door in Estafeta.

  Now that the bulls are out of the ring and it remains filled with young men in white trousers and red sashes, a different gate is thrown open and into the crowd catapults a heifer, the tips of her horns covered with leather. Year for year and pound for pound, the female of the fighting strain is as brave and rough as the male, a fact which she proceeds to demonstrate by slashing into the men and knocking them over as if they were tenpins. The audience roars its approval as the heifer sweeps the arena. She is like a charge of compressed dynamite, for her energy seems tireless and her aim unerring. She runs like this for eight or ten minutes, dispensing contusions as if they were kisses, but there is one group of men who bewilder her, and these she damages but does not disperse.

  Among college students it is considered gallant to take up a position directly in front of the gate from which the vigorous heifer emerges into the arena. There they form a pile of some sixty or seventy students, several bodies high, and in this uncomfortable formation they wait the charge of the animal. I’ve seen heifers hit this pile of humanity like thunderbolts, bore into it with horns slashing and feet pumping, only to be defeated by the sheer bulk of the bodies. The students protect their heads, but their backs and bottoms sometimes take serious punishment. Yet
there they are, piled up and waiting as each heifer emerges. They are the stars of the morning.

  Each day some five or six heifers are thrown into the arena, occasionally two at the same time, and the havoc is hilarious. The band plays, people cheer, students limp off to the hospital, teeth are loosened, but the only real brawl I ever saw came when a bulldogger from Texas started to wrestle a heifer to the ground. Everyone in the arena who could lay a hand on the Texan beat the bejeezus out of him, knocking him flat and bruising him rather badly. It is forbidden to grab the heifer in any way or to strike her with anything but a rolled-up newspaper; she has all the privileges and that way the fun is better.

  It is now eight o’clock, when the all-nighters drift off for a few hours’ sleep. Others wander back to the central square, where the waiter whispers, ‘Pssst, move over here!’ Hot coffee and croissants are the order, and in many languages people discuss the events of the morning. At eleven, enterprising photographers appear with their postcards recording that day’s excitement, and one shows Matt Carney, wild grin on his face, going down before a stray bull, while Tigre’s son and John Fulton can be seen artfully dodging the pack as it sweeps by. A lot of astonished people in America and Scandinavia are going to receive these cards in a few days, showing their neighbors in extraordinary predicaments.

  At high noon Don Luis Morondo will lead his a cappella group in a concert of sixteenth-century motets and at three a company of comedians from Madrid will perform in La tía de Carlos (Charley’s Aunt), which is as funny in Spanish as it was in the Brandon Thomas original.

  At four-thirty parades start to form in various parts of the city, the best one originating at the town hall, where the morning’s barriers have been expertly removed and stacked. A brass band of about a dozen pieces, all playing fortissimo, lines up behind the members of a drinking club whose banners, brightly painted in comic-strip style, proclaim their faith in Navarra, good wine and predilected bullfighters. Huge leather botas of wine appear on many shoulders, plus bottles of beer and gin. At five a group of picadors on their way to the bullring appear on horseback and the parade sets forth, a noisy, raucous wonderful gang of men who won’t be sober for six days. They march through the streets at a leisurely pace, shouting the songs of San Fermin and alerting the populace to the fact that the bullfight is about to begin.

  In 1966 the theme song was the first two lines of Verdi’s splendid aria from Rigoletto, in which Gilda realizes that she is in love with the duke who masquerades as a student:

  Caro nome che il mio cor,

  Festi primo palpitar …

  For eight days I was to hear this melody chanted twenty-four hours a day, never more than the two first lines, never less. It became the haunting leitmotiv of the feria, the half-mad cry of happiness. I am sure the incessant repetition has permanently ruined Rigoletto for me and that if I were tomorrow in an opera house where Joan Sutherland started ‘Caro nome che il mio cor,’ I would rise and bellow, ‘Viva San Fermín.’ I am sure that whenever I hear this theme again I shall smell Pamplona and taste the flow of red wine from the botas. Never has a musical theme so swamped a city

  Now from everywhere appear pairs of men lugging plastic buckets, and even tubs, loaded with bottles. They converge on the Calle Estafeta, where an ice company is ready to fill their buckets with ice, so that the beer will remain cold during the fight. If Pamplona provides an excess of music, it also provides an abundance of beer and wine, and there is no bullring in Spain where so much is consumed during the fights. The result is that the public, especially the part occupying the cheaper seats in the sun, is always ready to protest violently the less fortunate performances in the ring, even to showering seat cushions and chunks of bread on the hapless bullfighters. This tense atmosphere means that the actual bullfights at San Fermín are apt to be mediocre, and some of the best matadors prefer not to show themselves in this rowdy city. Others, because of the hostile ambiente, quickly lose whatever enthusiasm they may have brought to the fight. Many people blame the mediocrity of the fights on the early-morning running of the bulls, believing that the pounding of their hoofs on the hard stone paving blocks weakens their legs and that the presence of thousands of runners frays their nerves. Since Pamplona’s is the only major fair in which the bulls are run through the streets, it is easy but perhaps not accurate to blame any deficiency in the condition of the bulls on this circumstance.

  Spanish women at a table in the plaza during San Fermin.

  Take the fifth day of the feria in 1966, when everything went wrong. On July 11 three matadors of excellent reputation, Ordóñez, Murillo and Fuentes, were to face bulls from one of the better ranches, that of Don Alvaro Domecq. As the drinking clubs marched into their sunny-side seats, accompanied by their bands, they were excited, because this promised to be a great afternoon. It is difficult for one who has not been to Pamplona to imagine what that half-hour prior to the fight was like, because in the tightly packed stands seven different full-sized bands blared away, each attending to its own tunes, and the noise passed comprehension. From it there was no retreat, only surrender to the deafening salvos of raw sound.

  Well, when the first bull appeared he looked wonderful, and since he was to be fought by Ordóñez, a recognized master, it looked as if the promise of the day might be fulfilled. The bands exploded with joy, but before Ordóñez had made even one pass, a peon had the misfortune of luring the bull against a post in such a way that it suffered a concussion and had to be destroyed in the arena. The crowd broke out in an angry demonstration, partly against Ordóñez and his unlucky peon, partly because this was the fourth such accident of the fair, and partly because it was not yet apparent whether the judge would allow a substitute bull. The substitute was granted, Ordóñez made a few passes, the bull fell down because of weak knees, and Ordóñez dispatched it with unseemly haste and with a sneaky, low-blow sword thrust, whereupon the crowd’s protests were renewed.

  The second animal proved difficult and Murillo could do little with it, so he killed it quickly to a chorus of protests. The third bull looked pretty good, but once more, as a peon was putting it through its first passes, it grazed a horn against the wall and snapped it off at the base. According to bullfight regulations, bulls injured after they are fairly in the arena are not to be replaced, but the judges frequently do allow such substitution, in part to avoid the public’s wrath. A tremendous protest now broke out, which was increased when the judge, having ignored the regulations in the case of the first bull and having allowed a substitute, now decided to enforce them; he refused to grant a substitute. When a matador fights a bull that has lost one horn, honor requires that he never pass it on the side of the broken horn, but this afternoon the public was unwilling for Fuentes to pass this one on either side and insisted that he kill it forthwith, which he did.

  As for the fourth bull, it remains in my memory as the worst-fought animal I have ever seen, for it was a fine-looking bull and brave with the horses. But Ordóñez, sick of the afternoon and the Pamplona mob, gave a few trial passes, noted that the bull had a slight tendency to hook to the right, and said the hell with it; and the audience had to sit in the stands and watch this fine bull wasted. To show his contempt for the crowd, Ordóñez deliberately killed in the most disgraceful manner, with a running, sideways swipe of the sword, a punctured lung, the breathing-out of the bull’s blood through its nostrils. The protests began as soon as his intentions became apparent and finally became so clamorous that I feared a riot must ensue. It was a shame-filled conclusion to a shameful performance.

  On the fifth bull it was clear that Murillo, a man noted for his pundonor, hoped for a triumph. He did a competent faena, during which the band played, but on the whole it was a lackluster performance that didn’t get through to the public, with the result that he killed the bull perfunctorily, to a moderate chorus of protests. And this was a real pity, because some of us in the stands knew that Murillo, from the neighboring region of Aragón, had always been looked
upon with a certain favor by the natives of Pamplona, and this was his farewell performance in the city, since he was to retire at the close of the season.

  The sixth bull came weak to the fight, and poor Fuentes, a young matador who could not afford the luxury of a shameless performance like that of Ordóñez, tried his level best to make up for the disappointment of not having been able to fight his one-horned bull. And he did accomplish a few good passes, because the band played for his faena. But he tried so hard and so long that, running into unexpected difficulty on the kill, he heard the humiliating trumpets sound a warning. And so ended a representative, but nevertheless interesting, Pamplona bullfight.

  Fights in this city have a unique feature, the singing of the audience.

  ‘Navarra, Navarra, número uno!

  Como Navarra no hay ninguno.’

  (Navarra, number one. Like Navarra there is no other.) When a matador is doing poorly, through lack of pundonor, one row of chanting people starts swaying to the left, the ones above and below to the right, so that the whole plaza seems to be in motion, and if you look at the alternately swaying figures you become dizzy, and all the while the swaying figures are bellowing a song whose shouted refrain consists of the phrase ‘Todos queremos más.’ (We all want something more.) At the fight when Antonio Ordóñez refused to try, the stands bellowed:

  ‘Ordóñez, Ordóñez, sinvergüenza!

  Ordóñez, Ordóñez, paga la prensa.’