The Last Arena

In order of appearance – in my life, if not the blog. To those not mentioned, please note, this is not an aknowledgements:

JORDI CASAMITJANA

Casamitjana is the campaigns’ co-ordinator of CAS International. a pressure group which began as the Comité Anti Stierenvechten (Anti-Bullfighting Committee) in the Netherlands and have since expanded out to become the largest single-issue lobbyists in this field worldwide.

I first met Casamitjana when I was asked by a friend to appear as a balancing voice on a “views from the studio” segment about bullfighting for Al-Jazeera TV UK. One of the producers, Tristan Redman, was desperately looking for someone who, if not pro the bullfight, at least could see both sides of the argument. Having read my Prospect magazine article on bullfighting a fortnight before, he thought that I would fit the bill. When I arrived, I met Casamitjana who seemed unremarkably quiet and pleasant. However, the views he put across in the studio seemed rather hysterical (in his own words, “I do not eat meat and I do not keep any sort of pet”) and, to me, ill-informed. Once the interview ended, he returned to his original avuncular manner, asking me about acting and why I was there: he had yet to see the Prospect magazine piece. The next day, however, on the already heated weblog of Prospect under the entry for my article appeared a post by him saying,

“The author of this article, despite his deliberate attempts to appear somehow coming from a neutral position – and he is not – and his perhaps unwilling [my emphasis - AFH] attempts to misguide the reader with wrong information… possibly because he has fallen deeply into the jaws of the bullfighting industries propaganda…” etc. etc.

This all despite the fact that I had only ever seen five bullfights at the time, didn’t speak a word of Spanish, had never met a soul involved in the industry and had, aside from the accounts of the anti-bullfight industry (and various animal behaviour books on ungulates like cattle) only read the American novelist Ernest Hemingway, the English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, the Scottish novelist A L Kennedy and a Canadian historian’s book on the economic origins of the bullfight. There is a reason Casamitjana is first on this list – he is the first person from the world of the bullfight I ever met.

So, having falsely impugned my impartiality in print, and after a rather silly argument about “if stabbing people is bad, stabbing bulls is too”  (an argument right up there alongside meat is murder, pets are slaves, animal husbandry is gang rape and pest control is genocide), he ends his post with the sentence:

“I would imagine that it would not be too late for the author to return to the times when he was an animal lover, before he was contaminated by this disease, and be free to use his many talents to a full potential for the greater good.”

There followed an exchange of tens of thousands of words between the two of us, beginning with animal behaviour and moral philosophy and ending in near-libelous mud-slinging which led to the entire thread being deleted (the end can still be found in my post here). I must say that I was not exactly at my best – call me a fool, call me a liar, but please don’t patronise me. Sometimes I was wrong about points of animal behaviour, but I learned the truth from observation as I knew both sides of any debate like this are invariably in the wrong.

This is really why I have almost never agreed with Casamitjana. Not just because I don’t believe having a bachelor’s degree in biology from Barcelona entitles you to call yourself a scientist, or that I find risible his claims of sweet little bulls just wanting to “push away” the matador with their horns or “begging for mercy” at the end of the fight. It is entirely because he is paid to promote and coordinate the campaigns of an anti-bullfight organisation.

FRANCISCO AND CASA MATÍAS

Francisco, ”Gurro” to his friends, is the main bartender at the finest little bar in all Seville, tucked away on Calle Arfe near the bullring. I first met him in 2005 when my friend Hugh Dancy found the bar when we were there on holiday together (no bullfights attended). However, unlike Hugh I spoke no Spanish in those days, and so only really got to know him and the other regulars at this little haven in the winter of 2008. As I say on the blog (original post to be found here):

“I don’t like to write at home, preferring the dark and cramped wooden interior of ‘Casa Matías’, an old and decrepit bar round the corner from the bullring, where I sit on my own under the stuffed head of a giant bull and eat crude tapas delivered by my friend Francisco, the bartender, and the first person to ever call me Alejandro.”

Gurro, in his mid-20s, is a true, grass roots supporter of the bullfight, and has been since childhood. His friends are usually either unsuccessful novice matadors who drink too much, or are gitano (gipsy) flamenco guitarists who drink even more. The bar is a flamenco bar of some note, although in the traditional sense: spontaneous, drunken, with no “show dancing” but occasionally astonishing guitar and singing, often by all in the bar (it can only hold around thirty people) – including by Gurro’s uncle, Matías himself. However, it invariably empties when the bullring is open…

GERARDA DE ORLEÁNS-BORBÓN

A few days after meeting Casamitjana above, I was at the wedding of my friend Dominic Elliot, a wedding where many things about this book came together. There I mentioned to our mutual friend, the novelist Chloe Aridjis my ideas for the book. Chloe hates the bullfight and is a staunch vegetarian and animal lover. However, after some time spent arguing the various points involved – and my own impartiality – she put me in touch with her godmother Gerarda. I met ‘Geri’ in London and she expressed her own doubts about the bullfight (largely stemming from her ability to identify with the bull, particularly the deadly agony in its neck at the end after a near fatal injury of her own in the same place.) However, Geri has not only opened many doors to me – most especially her own at her family’s lovely Botanical Gardens in Sanlucar de Barrameda – but she has adopted me into her family. She also introduced me to my friend and collaborator, the photographer Nicolas Haro, her son-in-law.

As Geri’s surname indicates, she is a cousin of the King of Spain, although she never mentions it. By my own calculations, of her eight sets of great, great grandparents, three were reigning monarchs – including Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander II. And in the generation above that she has Louis-Philippe, the last King of France.

NICOLAS HARO

‘Col’ has become a good friend on this adventure and a frequent collaborator, taking many of the photographs on this blog (the better ones), some of which I hope to put in the book (if I can afford them). He also took the photograph for my piece on the matador Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez for the Sunday Times and the photographs for its sister paper The Times when their journalist Giles Coren came out to visit me. My first impressions of him were as follows (from the post, ‘The Idylls and the Ring’),

“From here I set off in November to meet my first bull, driven by my friend the photographer Nicolas Haro. Nicolas has deeply mixed feelings about the bullfight, despite growing up surrounded by it, and has been putting together a documentary about a rare phenomena in bullfighting, that of the  class=”hiddenSpellError” pre=”">toro indultado, the pardoned bull. These are the bulls who through extreme bravery, and at the urging of the crowd, matador, or both, are reprieved by the president of the bullring. They are sent back to the breeder’s ranch, patched up, and live out their lives in rural splendour, breeding new generations of fighters.

So we set off down the routa de toros, the main road that connects Seville and Cadiz through fighting bull country, a beautiful and epic landscape with rolling plains and ice-topped hills in the distance, all around herds of bulls roam between meadows and woodland, all underwritten by the bullfight’s audience– there is no corporate sponsorship in the ring, no room for logos on the suit of lights. The bulls that fight have at least four years out here learning how to use their horns. British beef cattle are slaughtered at eighteen months, with the majority still coming from factory farms. A very different life, but then a very different death. Fifteen minutes in the ring or a moment in the abattoir. To put them side by side: four years on free-release and then the arena, or eighteen months in prison and then the electric chair. Nicolas can see the logic, he says, but his eyes see the cruelty just as clearly.

The finca, or ranch, we are headed to is owned by the Núñez del Cuvillo family – these are the pardoned bulls I read about in Madrid, one of whom had fought José Tomas.”

ADOLFO SUÁREZ ILLANA

Coincidentally, also at Dominic Elliot’s wedding, the best man Andy (and my oldest friend) suggested that I should meet Adolfo Suárez Illana, as he was not only the son of Spain’s first post-Franco Prime Minister, Adolfo Suárez González, but also a bullfighter. Adolfo was to prove an absolutely invaluable introduction to this very closed world, a true friend and a loyal brother-in-arms-and-arts. However, when we first met in Seville, my impressions were thus (from the post ‘Death is Watching‘):

“Adolfo is a lean, well-dressed figure in his mid-forties. He speaks English immaculately without a trace of Spain or America in the accent (he spent time at Harvard). Everything about him projects confidence along with a knowledge of people and a skill in dealing with them – he has the air of a political matador.  Which is not to say anything Machiavellian lurks behind the ready smile. He merely possesses the self-awareness and multiple levels of thought that are required in his twin spheres of politics and the law. However, he is also un aficionado practico, a fan who does. And bullfighting, unlike football, does not admit of unskilled amateurism – not twice anyway. Perhaps it is the rough camaraderie and brutal honesty of the corrida which allows him to escape the trap of coming across as  ”un lobo que sabe” – a wolf who knows.”

Of course, it is now my opinion that it was not the bullfight that kept him honest, but his honesty that drew him to the bullfight. See Adolfo’s own blog here.

* A note on Spanish names. The first surname, in this case Suárez, is that of the father. The second, is the first surname of the mother, which comes from her father in turn. Neither party changes their surname upon marriage. So Adolfo Suárez González married Amparo Illana Elórtegui. Their son Adolfo Suárez Illana married Isabel Flores Santos (daughter of the great fighting bull-breeder, Samuel Flores), and so their eldest son is Adolfo Suárez Flores: the most common use of the second surname being to distinguish parent and child as the Spanish like to name their first children after themselves. It was the custom, now only used in formal situations, to conjoin the surnames – i.e. Adolfo Suárez y Illana.  

JUAN JOSÉ ‘PADILLA’ BERNAL

The first matador I met was Juan, a man who now refers to me as his ‘English brother,’ using up two of the five words he speaks in the language. Now 36, Juan began life as the son of – and later apprentice to - a baker in Jeréz de la Frontera. He sold bread to pay his way through bullfighting school. I met him at the same time as Adolfo as they were being interviewed on television together and Adolfo had invited me to attend. My first impressions of Juan were as follows (also from the post, ‘Death is Watching‘),

“[Adolfo's] good friend Padilla is another animal entirely. Large side-burns, a sharp suit, a flash of gold on the wrist and a vastly larger than life manner, he gets away with it all through sheer charisma. There is something of the movie star about him, not in looks, but in charisma. And when you get up close you see the scar in the neck from the horn that pierced his oesophagus. You don’t see the one that shattered his spine. Or the others that criss-cross his body in dense and irregular patterns like coiled ropes.”

I would add that he has about him a gypsy spirit and style which led my mother, on first meeting him, to pronounce, “he is like Raphael Sabatini’s character Scaramouche, what was the first line of that novel? He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.“

TRISTAN YBARRA & MARIA O’NEILL

After getting to know Nicolas Haro, I moved into an apartment in the house of his mother, Consuela Fernandez de Cordóba, in the old Jewish Quarter of Seville. There, at a party of her younger son Kinchu’s, I was introduced to their cousin Tristan where we discussed marine biology (it was his degree and I had been living with one for a few years prior to this project). It was later that I found out he was descended from one of the greatest breeders of fighting bulls. Tristan works in what is now the family business, the olive oils of the Count of Ybarra. Funny because he is usually bored, and energetic because he is usually tired, he dwells in contradictions but is always excellent conversation. His wife, Maria, describes him as her Miura, a breed of bull of whom Juan Belmonte said “they kill so many matadors because when they are inside the cape, they always keep their eyes open.” I can believe this of Tristan. The first bull fight I went to with Tristan and Maria is described in the post here. Maria is probably the staunchest, and most intelligent (and best looking) defender of the bullfight in all Spain. Her name may be Irish (her father has the wonderful title Marquess of the North) but she is as deeply Spanish as any I have met – her father’s primary title is Marquess de la Granja. Deeply Catholic, but widely read and a former student of philology, she is also amongst the best company Seville, especially when playing torera to her Miura husband.

ENRIQUE MORENO DE LA COVA & CRISTINA YBARRA

Tristan also took me to the tertulia (a regular gathering for drinks or discussion, less formal than a salon) held at the the hotel Las Casas de la Judería in Seville. Although the hotel belongs to regular guests, the Duke of Segorbe and his wife, the Princess Gloria de Orléans-Braganza, the tertulia belongs to Enrique and Cristina. A renowned businessman and member of the noble order of the Maestranza of Seville, Enrique also owns the Saltillo line of bulls. I described him in my post, ‘The Saltillo Line’ (to be found here) thus:

“…our friend Enrique Moreno de la Cova, [is] a figure of great importance in Seville in both politics and bulls. Enrique is one of Nature’s true conservatives: politically, of historic buildings, of bloodlines and of the Andalucian way of life. A bullfighter as a young man from a family which owned ranches, he now devotes time and money to the restoration of the Saltillo line of bulls, one of the original four bloodlines of fighting bulls along with Murube, Parladé and Santa Coloma.”

Cristina, his young wife, is a painter of some note in Seville, and a sister of Tristan. Her efforts at restoration are devoted more towards their palace at Las Palmas de los Rios than the bulls who live nearby. Without their generosity – and good company – my time in Seville would have been infinitely less enjoyable and successful than it has been.