INTRODUCTION:

This blog was begun in October 2008 and covers the author’s researches into the world of the Spanish bullfight from then to the present day. As it is being prepared for publication by Profile Books (UK), the number of posts has been reduced to 15, in reverse chronological order, listed on the right hand toobar. For this reason, there are four introductory pages, About the author, About the bull, About the bullfight (covering both the structure and terminology of the fight), and About the people (giving introductions to frequently mentioned characters).

Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez in Ronda

Cayetano at the Feria Goyesca (News Image)

If nostalgia is memory laced with a sense of mourning, the knowledge of the absolute finality and unrecoverability of time past, then it is only right that the memories of bullfights, with their built-in mortality, are more nostalgic than others.

Sitting on a plane on my way to Paris, I can’t help but look back on the feria of Ronda with a sense of loss. It was a remarkable time indeed

On the early evening of Friday, September 4th, my bus wended it’s way through the glacier-slashed mountains down towards Ronda. I felt fresh and vigorous, my mind recharged from a visit to London involving a stag night that lasted three days and involved me at one point going into a field and riding a strange horse under the moon without saddle, bridle or head collar – a story for another time.

Ronda is perched precariously on a landscape sliced in two by some vast tectonic knife. This is the town Hemingway described in his Civil War novel For Whom The Bell Tolls that I am currently rereading. This is the ravine the local conservative Nationalists were hurled to their deaths in by the drunken mob representing the honour of the Republic, who then had even worse terrors inflicted on them when the Fascists took it back in the name of old Spain.

Pamplona – The Real Story

Author - circled far right - running with the bulls in Pamplona (Miuras)

The train from Barcelona to Pamplona is old-fashioned for Spain and yet it still boasts a long bar complete with bar stools where I can sit with tapas and a beer as the arid hills and tall thin trees sweep by the windows. Catalan country makes way for the ancient kingdom of Navarre and its capital, the city of the running of the bulls.

The day before I was in a very different place, at the very heart of the British Army on Salisbury Plain, where I learnt a very different perspective on bullfighting. My day was with General Sir David Richards, Commander-in-Chief of the Land Forces of the United Kingdom (and soon to be Chief of the General Staff). Much of the day was spent driving prototype desert vehicles, testing the limits of the Challenger II tank, using their vast simulators to test my identify-and-kill skills on filmed sequences from insurgency areas and so on. All great ‘boys own adventure’ stuff, but infinitely more interesting were the informal one-on-one discussions with the General and his subordinates, including two Major Generals and a Lieuentant General, (along with a day’s worth of chatter with various lesser ranks including our aide-de-camp for the day, the tirelessly polite and enthusiastic Captain William Squires). My conclusions about the current role of the British Army in Afghanistan I have published elsewhere (to be found here), but what struck me with reference to my work here is the particular type of courage and the particular view of death with which these men are infused.

The Sherry Frontier

Feria de Caballo, Jerez de la Frontera (Photo: Author)

The town of Jerez de la Frontera, once the frontier between the lands of the Moors and those of the Christian Kings, and from where sherry takes its name – and from where the vast majority still comes – is a far less grand affair than that Seville. There are fewer inhabitants and those inhabitants are poorer. This is reflected in the feel of the streets, even in the quality of the paving stones themselves, glossy and overly patterned, without the dignity of dirt nor the charm of stone. And yet it is still richer than Sanlucar de Barrameda down the road, and consequently looks down on it, while Sanlucar looks upon its marginally richer, marginally bigger brother as lacking in authenticity and machismo.

This is not to say that Jerez doesn’t have lovely parts to it, little idylls of unreconstructed Spain. They just don’t seem to be the parts I find myself in, either this time or the last time I visited, somewhere around the turn of the millennium.

I arrive by train – the train networks of Spain being having that continental comfort and efficiency that much richer Britain seems unable to provide. On the journey I call my friend, the journalist Giles Coren whom I know will be in town on a press junket for The Times of London.

Seville Feria: Last Two Fights

Toro bravo (Photo: Author)

On the last two days of the Feria, I came in the company of Madeleine Rampling, cousin of the great English actress Charlotte, and an English aficionada of many years (though, like her cousin, she lives over the border in France). We met at the ring on the first day in amazing seats which she generously supplied near the front in the shade and watched the fights of Luis Francisco Esplá, a fifty-one year old from Zaragoza, El Cordobés, forty-one year-old son of the more famous matador of the same name from Madrid, and Javier Condé, a thirty-four year-old matador from Málaga against the bulls of El Pilar.

El Cordobés (Photo: Author)

Esplá as a matador did nothing for me. However, Cordobés is interesting to watch not least because he showed me what I do not like to see in the ring. He is an insistent matador, and what he insists on his own greatness. His father was immensely famous in the 1960’s for developing a laid-back, floppy-haired style of living and fighting in revolt against the quasi-academic classicism some thought had come to dominate the ring. I suspect that this is a misrepresentation. It was in the early ’60s that Dominguin and Antonio Ordóñez had their famous duel across Spain so well-described in Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer and by all accounts, that was anything if hidebound or staid. My theory is merely that El Cordobés rode on the crest of a worldwide youth-revolt which found it’s voices in the like of Marlon Brando in The Wild One (his one film from the period of On The Waterfront and Streetcar Named Desire which has dated) and the Rolling Stones. The great aficionado (and failed bullfighter), Orson Welles, described him thus to the great theatre critic and Kenneth Tynan:

Seville: Third and fourth fights ‘09

As the air of Seville warms itself to sweating point and I sit listening to my neighbour practising guitar (mediocre) accompanied by his whistling (rather skilled), I throw my mind back to the last two fights in this series (as arbitrarily defined by me), which I join together because I only focused on half of one and was only present for half of the other.

(Wednesday, April 22nd) The sun is hitting the streets hard when I meet with Maria O’Neill and her friends: the ever charming Mariella and Tilda of the smiling eyes (a daughter of the house of Nuñez del Cuvilllo, whose pardoned bulls I described in an earlier post to be found here.) We walk together up the stairs to the politico’s section beside the Presidential box and wait for the fight to begin.

The first bull comes out nicely blood and thunder, 530kg of the breed of Peñajara, moving fast but his energy quickly falling off, even before the cavalry (i.e. the picadores) arrive. When the banderillos come in to place the sticks, he catches one through the chest on his horn and it looks like a fatal wound, but it turns out to be his jacket. It is perhaps the most dramatic moment that the day holds.

Seville: First Fight ‘09

'Toro bravo' (Photo: Author)

I receive a message from my friend Tristan Ybarra (of the excellent Hijos de Ybarra olive oils and husband of Maria O’Neill) saying he has spare tickets for the first bullfight which begins a fortnight-long series before and during the Feria de Abril (Seville is a bullfighting town.) I gratefully accept and find myself sitting in an enclosure of Seville’s political class adjacent to the Presidential box. Far from the action, but also from the rain and thunder which turns the uncovered seats down below into a blanket of umbrellas.

The Saltillo line

Finito de Córdoba vaquilla, picador & author (Photo: Nicolas Haro)

It is an irony that the  injuries sustained during the events described in this post have delayed the writing of it for so long that my memory is rendered incomplete and fragmented, a half-covered mosaic that, in the archaeology of which, I hope to piece together enough tiles of sufficiently vibrant colour to put together a picture. Whether the picture is accurate, I neither know, nor particularly care: l’art est le mensonge qui nous permet de comprendre la vérité, as Picasso put it. (Art is the lie who allows us to understand the truth).

Talking with apes

Panbanisha, a bonobo, with her eldest son Nyota. Photo: Author

It may seem a little strange, but after the continuous barrage I have been receiving on the issues of Animal Rights, Animal Welfare and so on, I thought I dedicate this post to another project of mine relevant to this issue (also because I am currently in London dealing with publishers.)

After I finished my Master of Science at the University of London, on the cusp of beginning a PhD which was not to be (yet), I flew to Atlanta to the Language Research Centre of Georgia State University to meet with the bonobo – or pygmy chimpanzee – Kanzi and the biologist and psychologist Professor Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Below is the piece I wrote on this which took the cover essay slot of the Financial Times Weekend in the winter of 2001.

The Anti-Bullfight Campaigner

Author acting in his play, 'The Pendulum' in London's West End

For some time now I have been dealing with the aftershocks from my essay for Prospect magazine on bullfighting (to be found here), still the most commented article in that magazine’s history. Sometimes I have been attacked by the aficion, although usually on matters of nuance, but the most vituperative attacks have been from Animal Rights activists, and the greatest of these is Mr Jordi Casamitjana of Europe’s largest anti-bullfight lobby group CAS International.

To save people time on wading through the hundreds of comments on Prospect magazine’s blog (to be found here), I enclose some of our conversation. Prospect is a rather ‘high-brow’ magazine, for want of a better term, and althought it is not academic, many notable academics do write for it. As a result, my language and style below differ markedly from my writing in this blog or the book which will be the end result of this project.

Having received complaints about the length of a previous post on this topic, now deleted, I now enclose only the very end of my argument, which contains both the gist and the conclusion. The photo above from my last play (whose website can be found here) may suggest the overall tone. It appears that I am pro-bullfighting in this debate, but that is only because I find the arguments put to me by Mr Casamitjana against it offensive in their lack of evidence or logic. There are perfectly good arguments against the bullfight; these are not they.