The Spanish Temper

by V. S. Pritchett

  The high moment of Seville is at Easter, when, after a week of the most ornate and pagan processions in Europe, in an atmosphere of theatrical piety and picturesque remorse, the Fair begins and the Andalusian riders in their high hats and leather trouser-facings go by. This is the moment of street parties, pride and ceremony, the supreme moment of display for the women of the city. There is a heavy, torpid beauty. And it is the time of the great bullfights.

  Not all the bullrings of Spain are fine. Many of them rise like great red gasworks outside the cities, but the bullring in Seville by the wide slow river is one of the prettiest in Spain. Seville is the city of the bull. The very day when Fernando VII closed the university in Seville, he opened a school for bullfighters there—a characteristic gesture of Spanish reaction. Outside the city are the estates where the fighting bulls are bred. In any Spanish town it is common to see boys playing at bullfighting. One sees them waving their shirts at dogs, pretending they are bulls, and the thing to notice is that they are neither playing nor fighting in any violent sense, but going through the stances, the passes, the exhibitions of the national ritual. Outside Seville it is common, at some noisy fair, for someone to shout out: “The bulls!” and for the boys to race down the hill, clamber over the stone walls, and jump down among the bulls to drive them away or to bait them. There is a respect for the bulls. There is admiration of them, but there is no fear, and indeed, in their herds, the bulls are not dangerous. All the same, the Spaniards never lack the courage to make the heroic gesture. The bull is admired, almost worshipped, as the horse is in Ireland. He is admired because he is great and capable of fury, and the Spaniard requires that furious force against which to display his singularity—the most precious of his possessions—and his courage. Always an extremist, he likes to test his courage and his whole personality to the utmost, and he has so contrived the phases of the bullfight that each one has the crisis of decorative perfection that he loves.

  Bullfighting is not a sport, and it is therefore not a cruel sport. It is a ritual and a ceremony. It is primitive, barbarous, possibly religious in its remote origin, a descendant of the gladiatorial contest and the mediaeval tournament. There are ugly moments in the bullfight, for there are good and bad fights; but since it is conducted in hot blood and in an atmosphere where the swell of great emotion is natural, the killing of the bull is not a sadistic performance; nor does it awaken, I think, cold sadistic emotions in the audience. Their senses are stirred by danger, for the wounding or killing of the bullfighter himself has often occurred. About this one can only say that the Spaniards retain something primitive in their character which was possibly fostered by the autos de fe of the Inquisition. Here indeed a terrible and gloating sadism was displayed by the public, sanctified by the Church and approved by the rulers. The Spaniards have strong stomachs. They do not flinch when the blood gushes out of the bull’s mouth as he goes down heavily to his death, but in their eyes one sees that proud, frightening brilliance of the conqueror who has emerged from great emotion, who is elated by victory and satisfied by performance. Spanish religious art and the work of Goya reveal a people who do not shy from strong feeling or from the horrors that fall upon the human body. Above all, they are caught by the drama and the supreme dramatic moment. Undoubtedly they experience the tragic purgation. Undoubtedly there is something savage in it. All historians and the soldiers who have fought against them in the great ages have mentioned the lack of all fear of death in the Spaniards, their stoical indifference to it; all have mentioned the “furia español” We know that the Civil War was fought without remorse of quarter, and that indeed the bullrings and vacant lots of the Spanish towns were the scenes of atrocious mass executions. The barbarian is strong in the Spanish people.

  The most damaging criticism of the Spanish taste for bullfighting is rather different: the bullfight suffers from the monotony of sacrifices, and it is one more example of the peculiar addiction to the repetitive and monotonous in the Spanish nature. Many foreigners who have known Spain well have noted this taste for monotony. The drama of the bullfight lies within the frame of a foregone conclusion: whatever danger the bullfighter may be in, whatever may be his fate, the fate of the bull is certain. This fact alone removes the bullfight from the complete uncertainty of a sport. It is never certain that the fox will be killed or the boxer knocked out. Inevitably, an English writer is swayed a little by the passionate feeling for animals in England, and will forget the extreme danger to the man. He will forget his bear-baiting and cockfighting past; but even if he does not, and argues that his civilization has come out of that brutal phase, he will fail to notice that although Spain often looks like a modern country, it is not. The life of Spanish cities runs much closer to what life was like in England in the seventeenth century; indeed, if one wants to imagine the habits of London life in the time of Defoe, one cannot do better than study Madrid or Seville.

  Logically the Englishman ought to protest against the annual casualties in horse-racing and the hunting field, in a monstrous race like the Grand National, where fine horses are killed every year. We ought to see that in the bullfight the danger is to the man. A number of excellent bullfighters have died in the ring, for the risk is supreme. In the seventeenth century, when the bullfight was conducted by the aristocracy—under more dangerous conditions than are seen today—the Pope tried to stop the fights because of the great number of deaths. In northern countries, in the course of the refinement of our civilization, we have developed a peculiar perversion: better that a man should be killed than a poor helpless bull! Not all the hypocrisies are one-sided in this foolish controversy: the Spaniards grimly reply that they need no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Spain. In fact, they have such societies in the religious orders. The fatalistic neglect of poor children in Spanish cities is hardly touched by charity.

  Our final emotion in the bullfight is not with the bull, which was bred to fight and would, in any case, have gone to the slaughterhouse, but rests upon the triumphant fighter who has not only pitted his wits against a savage animal and outdone him, but who has done this with the skill, the decorative grace and panache of the artist. It is a male triumph, achieved by courage, art, and obedience to traditional rules.

  But the horses? This is a question which has been explained and argued many times since Hemingway became the first Anglo-Saxon apologist of the bullfight. To most people who are sensitive to spectacle and are capable of pleasure in strong feeling, the sight of these wretched nags blindfolded and weighed down by absurd cushions is grotesque. Before this protection six thousand horses were killed every year. They creak stiffly in like old people, ghastly in their bandaged eyes, repellent in their suggestion of a public hypocrisy. If the bull is killed in hot blood and at the supreme moment of his raging life, the horse is generally injured, and though he might have gone to the knackers the day before, his last moments are ones of terror. To Hemingway, the horse introduced the grotesque note, the necessary element of parody in the spectacle, the counterpoise of low comedy and calamity to the tragic intention of the ritual, for the picador is traditionally an absurd and clumsy fellow, the poor man of the ring. This is an ingenious literary argument; when we consult our reactions at the time we do not find that they confirm Hemingway’s definition. Is it really low comedy such as Shakespeare pushed into his tragedies to catch the attention of the low audience? The elegance of the ritual is broken up by these ghastly buffoons, who are lifted up bodily by the enormous shoulders of the charging bull. Even when we are told by sound authorities—and I would refer the reader to John Marks’s excellent book To the Bullfight—that horses are indispensable, for only a rider has the reach, the strength, and the position for paralysing the formidable neck muscles of the bull, and that, until he does that, the man on foot has no chance of handling the beast—even when we know this, we squirm at the sight of the pitiful and absurd cavalcade, which now looks like the man-horse of the comic circus. And for myself, Hemingway makes the gre
at error of thinking this comic even in the macabre sense. It is merely ghastly, a mess; and now that the horses are cushioned, a cruel and hypocritical mess. Yet Hemingway has this on his side: the Spanish devotees of the bullfight—the aficionados—have never objected to the horses, cushioned or uncushioned: the mass of Spaniards have a rage for tradition; and the bullfighting public is “the people” par excellence. The objections have come from abroad. There is in Spain a static indifference to animal suffering, or at any rate a passive, unperturbed regard of it which, after the primitive barbarities of the Civil War, cannot be denied. In the days of the autos de fe, it was the foreign guests at the court who turned their heads from the terrible ceremony in Valladolid and other cities; the Spaniards, either with passions roused or with their customary emptiness of mind, their capacity to experience with their senses, their limited imagination, looked on. I think we must say that the world has not been wrong about the Spaniards: they are, many of them, cruel or undisturbed by cruelty. Either their cruelty is forced up by passion or it is the kind of wayward, unchecked habit of people who have little curiosity, who have long periods of inertia and formlessness in their lives, who do not care to be made to become anything else. A spiritual indolence dwells inside the hard shell of the stoic.

  In saying this, one has to recall the very large number of Spaniards who have no taste for the bullfight.

  “I went once. I didn’t like it,” the shopkeeper says.

  “Foreigners keep it alive,” says the waiter contemptuously.

  “I have never been to one. Complete barbarism,” says a famous writer.

  “Football is killing it,” says a football fan.

  “Reactionary,” says a politician. “It represents everything we have been fighting for generations.”

  In the last thirty years a puritan opposition to the bullfight has certainly grown up in Spain. It began with the intellectuals who refused to have anything to do with the fights, and spread especially among the Left-wing groups. The typical Left-wing, anticlerical professor of the Spanish revival in the 1920’s and early ‘30’s would say: “The Jesuits told us to go to as many bullfights as we liked, but to avoid the theatre where one picks up dangerous ideas.” The liberals and socialists, those engaged in educational, social, and religious reform, thought of the bullfight as the opium of the people.

  The bullfight is essentially a passion of the Andalusians, though great bullfights are held in all Spanish cities. In the northern provinces it is less highly regarded. Or rather, there is a form of bull-baiting in the Basque provinces which has no relation to the almost religious ritual of the southern bullfight. Only in the Basque provinces and in Navarre is bullfighting a sport. The most famous, picturesque, and alarming example of it takes place in Pamplona once a year, where the bulls are turned loose in the town and pursue the male population. In the main square of Pamplona the scene is gay, riotous, and terrifying; hundreds of young men are tossed by the bulls, everyone is running, injuries are innumerable. The Navarese and the Basques are a tough, sporting race, great jousters and acrobats, delighting in physical power and resilience. Between them and the Andalusians, there is not merely that dramatic difference of race which is found in many regions of the peninsula, but the difference between the sportsman and the artist.

  The bullfight is thought to be indigenous to Andalusia. The Moors held fights in the ruins of the Roman coliseum at Mérida, and Moors and Christians competed in the fights. The great Christian hero of Spain, the Cid, is said to have killed a bull, but the first bull was killed by a Spaniard one thousand years ago. By the time of Columbus, the bullfight was an aristocratic tourney. The Emperor Charles V killed his bull. So did Philip IV. The weapon used was the lance, which was presently changed to a short spear. After the decline of its aristocratic phase, the people took over the bullfight and changed it. They fought the bull on foot. The short sword, or estoque, now used for killing, appeared in 1700, and the muleta, the red cape, also. Gradually the present bullfight has evolved its present rigid form. The picador, with his armoured legs and his clumsy peasant air, is the last memory of the nobleman with his lance. Now bull-breeding on the estates in the south is a rich industry, and in the last few years the number of fights has risen to 288 a year. The normal demand for bulls—I quote from John Marks’s To the Bullfight—“is 3000 three-year-old bulls and 1500 between four and seven years old, and the price of a set of six for the corrida is about £1250.” It hardly seems that the bullfight is declining in its popularity, and, in any case, as far as the rivalry of football and bullfighting is concerned, the two share the year between them, for football cannot be played in the Spanish summer, when the ground is hard and grassless. But when Hemingway wrote Death in the Afternoon in 1932 and recorded so intimately both the facts and the gossip of the bullfighters’ bars, he noted that the point of decadence had been reached. In Manolete—who was killed and has become a kind of saint to the very emotional following of the bullfight—and in the strange, twisted, intellectual, revolutionary, Belmonte, the art (Hemingway thought) had reached a refinement too great for the spectacle. And as the art changed—or so people complain—the bulls are smaller, faster, but not as furious as they used to be. In Madrid today one hears that the days of the great bullfighters are gone.

  The ring is packed, silvery with men’s suits, black with women’s dresses and then (the only public function in Spain to begin somewhere near time) the great doors open and the traditional parade of the officers, the matadors, and their cuadrillas (each a team of seven) steps in brilliant costume across the sanded arena, followed by the mule team that will drag the bodies of the dead bulls out of the ring. The president of the corrida throws down the key to the bull pen, the procession leaves, and only three men of the cuadrilla, its humblest members, are left in the oval under the sun to receive the first charge of the bull. We have heard him snorting and thumping in his pen and then the gates are opened. Out he comes. He looks either side of the gates, and then across the arena he catches sight of the flick of a cape and suddenly gallops towards it. From this moment one’s heart is beating hard, one’s blood is up. This animal is black, massive, dangerous with a brutal stupidity. The speed of those small legs under the heavy body is remarkable. This first charge of the bull sets the tone of drama; it is a pursuit; the men scurry off, lead him from one to another, and then he viciously decides on his victim and chases him to the stockade. The man vaults over only just in time. I have seen a bull jump the stockade, but there little harm came of it; the crowd bewilders the bull. He is a beast with only one idea at a time.

  The bullfight is a play in three acts. First there is the act of the picadors, the horsemen, gross parodies of the mounted noblemen, which is a violent rough-and-tumble. At least nowadays there is no disembowelling. One hears the shock of the bull against the padded horse, and sees the strength of those shoulders that can lift the animal on to its hind legs and perhaps throw the rider. The picador is a much-scarred man, always being pulled from under, and if the bull gets the picador against the stockade the moments are tense, muddled, nasty. The task of the picador is to put his spear into the neck muscles of the bull and paralyse them. The blood spreads like slow paint down its shoulders.

  The second act is the moment of the banderilleros, the footmen who receive the charge of the bull or buzz about him like dragonflies. They hold a pair of eighteen-inch darts with paper streamers on them high above their heads and leap to place them two at a time in the shoulders. And here one has the first sight of the masculine grace of bullfighting, the sight of the male body taut, springing, and accomplished. Four pairs of darts are put into each bull and there they nest and dangle like wasp stings, and yet, also, with a touch of wantonness in their swinging colours.