The Pillars of Hercules

There were some tourists here—British, French, German—making the best of things, praying for the sun to shine. Instead of staying I found a train and took it back to Fuengirola, which was just as awful as Torremolinos. That night strolling along the promenade—the sea was lovelier at night—I saw a bullfight poster, announcing a feria the next day at Mijas, not far away.

There was a bullfight on television in a cafe near my hotel that night. The cafe was filled with silent men, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee. A few disgusted tourists left. I watched for a while with these attentive Spaniards. It seemed just a bloody charade of ritual slaughter, a great black beast with magnificent horns trotting around the ring, snorting and pawing and full of life, reduced in minutes to a kneeling wreck, vomiting blood, as a narrow-hipped matador gloated—this was something that made me deeply curious, even as it filled me with dread.

I went to Mijas and took a seat in the bullring. It was a novillada, a bullfight with young bulls. The matadors here were also young—trainees (novilleros)—nervous, tentative teenagers. One walked out stiffly in tight pants. People cheered. The bull appeared from a gate. It was a small bull, because the matador was still learning; but even so this beautiful bewildered animal made him look like a punk. Attempting to be fearless, the matador knelt and was almost immediately gored. He tumbled, the bull was on top of him. The cape-men distracted the bull and after a while stuck banderillas into the bull’s neck. This tore the neck muscles, the bull lowered its head—an easy target. The matador made an attempt with his sword, but so badly the bull was crazed—surprised, fearful, fighting for its life—and chased the matador into a blind. Confused, dying, the bull bled against its own flanks for a while and then, weak and kneeling, was dispatched with a sword thrust, and the dead thing was dragged away by a mule team.

This was all worse, more farcical, more horrible than I had imagined, because it was so inefficient. People cheered, but pointlessly—the bull was doomed from the start. The bullring is round: there is nowhere for the bull to hide; but the “blinds” allow the matador to hide with ease.

The second bull was less lucky—though all bulls are unlucky—and ended up howling, bellowing as the matador fumbled with the sword and cape. He was butted. The bull was bleeding and roaring. At last the bull was stabbed. At this point about fifteen English tourists left the bullring, muttering with indignation. A third bull entered. A new matador faced this creature and was downed inside a minute. He tried three times to stab this bull, but succeeded only in enraging him. He was gored and limping. He lost his cape. He then stabbed the bull, but ineptly, skewering the bull so grotesquely that the animal was given courage, and it cantered around, bleeding and complaining, with the sword bobbing from its neck. The Mijas church bells tolled, and the pigeons flew out of the belfry, the matador was chased, there was great confusion, until at last the bull was slowly, amateurishly, painfully put to death.

There is nothing in bullfighting except blood—the anticipation of blood, the letting of blood, and the brutally choreographed death of a ramping animal which just a moment ago was bucking and snorting with life. It is the sight of terrible beauty victimized and killed, in style. The word matador is unsubtle. Matar is the verb to kill. Matador means killer. In the larger bullrings, the great corridas, the bulls are enormous, monstrous even, but in minutes, the bull is reduced to a slobbering, drooling wreck, shitting in alarm and desperation, and finally knifed to death. Olé.

The small bullring at Mijas, about the size of a circus ring at a state fair, was almost a century old. Mijas, a lovely town in the hills above Fuengirola, is the scene of In Hiding, by Ronald Fraser, which describes how the Republican mayor of Mijas was forced to remain hidden in his house for thirty years; a good example of the absurd cruelties brought about by the Franco government, which by the way encouraged bullfighting.

Bullfights are as frequent on Spanish television as football games. It is not unusual to find them on three channels simultaneously, three different bullfights. Spaniards, not a people noted for finding common agreement on anything, are almost unanimous in their enthusiasm for bullfighting. It is not a sport, Hemingway said; it is a tragedy, because the bull dies. But the bull dies in the worst possible way, first tortured by knives in its neck and then stabbed—usually clumsily by a prancing man with a sword—and then it bleeds to death.