Stitched Together

by Bob Thompson

  Sangria

  It was Cinco de Mayo and a large party slowed service at the Mexican restaurant. I took our table’s drink order and headed to the bar. Other thirsty and impatient patrons had arrived at the same idea and I was third in line. As I watched the bartender, gauging his speed and efficiency, I noticed the large glass container on the bar filled with colorful fruit soaking in wine: sangria, red wine punch, a concoction at least as old as the Roman Empire, a staple of European culture for thousands of years, and the traditional drink before and during a bull fight, something else the Spanish got from the Romans. Literally translated, it means “blood.”

  The sight of sangria took me back forty years to a table, crowded with international vagabonds, just across the street from Madrid’s most famous bullring. The diverse group, representing Montana, Texas, Columbia, Cuba, and Kentucky, had all met the day before in the streets of Pamplona, lured to the Fiesta San Fermín by Hemingway’s first novel, the Sun Also Rises. We’d slept on the floor of the crowed overnight train, arriving in the fabled city of the Bear and the Strawberry Tree at 7:00 on a bright Sunday morning. Bernard, a young Columbian architect, led us to a student hostel that charged 80 peseta (60 cents) a night. After much-needed showers, we stowed our backpacks in coin lockers and headed over to the nearby Museo del Prado, taking advantage of free Sunday admission. At one of the world’s great art museums, we stared in stunned silence at the masterpieces of Goya, Bosch, El Greco, Rubens, Titian, and Velázquez.

  In the early afternoon we wandered through the shady and watery Parque del Buen Retiro, for centuries the private garden and center of Habsburg court life when Spain ruled the world. We rode the Metro from the Retiro station four stops to Las Ventas, buying tickets for the evening bull fights and settling into the nearby café. First we ordered pitchers of sangria, and on Bernard’s recommendation I ordered my first—and best-ever—plate of paella. The pitchers were kept full by the attentive staff and we solved many of the world’s problems there on the outside tables: Watergate, the Munich Olympics massacre, and Vietnam.

  Around 6 we started over to the Spanish version of the Roman Colosseum, the red-brick Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas, built in the late 1920s. Hemingway had spent many Sunday afternoons there. I didn’t understand Bernard’s insistence that we rent seat cushions until I saw the bare concrete steps that served as seats for commoners. The upper patios and the royal box had more comfortable accommodations. We regretted not being able to buy seats on the shady side of the arena. The round dirt floor of the arena was about sixty yards in diameter, with a sturdy red wooden fence surrounding it. I tried to imagine what it had looked like eight years before when the Beatles played there.

  Trumpets blared, one of the large wooden gates opened, and what could have been a medieval parade began. First came two grim horsemen dressed in seventeenth-century black and white costumes complete with plumes. The Aguacil, sheriffs of the bullfight, marched somberly toward the president’s box. Next came the stars of the show: three matadors wearing their rainbow-colored suits of lights, the sequins and reflective golden embroidery dazzling in the sun, then six equally colorful banderilleros, their suits decorated with silver sequins with black adornments. Behind the acrobatic banderilleros came six more riders in broad, flat-brimmed hats astride heavily padded horses, the picadors. Trailing behind were the teams of mules that would drag the dead bulls from the arena. The trumpets fell silent as the procession stopped in front of the president’s box. I had visions of gladiators saluting Caesar’s box and shouting, “Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you.”

  It is not lost on anyone in the stands that everyone and everything down in the arena is expendable, the humans voluntarily.

  The president handed the key to the bull’s gate to one of the Aguacil. As the sheriffs rode over to unlock the gate, everyone left the arena floor except the matador with the most seniority and his team. The gates swung open and a massively muscled fifteen-hundred-pound animal rushed into the arena.

  The seared-in memory of my close encounter yesterday in the streets of Pamplona sent involuntary shudders up my spine. These were not the Hereford, Jersey, and Guernsey varieties of my youth; these were Spanish fighting bulls, Miura, Andalus, and Castilian, bred for aggressiveness, who have never known human kindness in their four or five years of life and have never witnessed a man on the ground.

  Act 1 began as the matador, studying the bull’s every move, walked out to meet his adversary wearing his big fuchsia and yellow cape, the capote. The bull charged and the torero worked the cape to guide him past, gauging his reaction, his every tendency. The bull’s razor-sharp horns, sensitive and accurate like cat whiskers, literally able to spear a falling leaf, passed infinitesimally close to the man.

  When it appeared to the president that the matador had control of the bull, he signaled for the two picadors to enter. They positioned their horses on opposite sides of the arena wall, now with a patch over their ringside eye to keep them from panicking as the bull charged into their padded sides. In Hemingway’s time there was no padding and blood flowed much earlier in the event.

  While the bull stuck his horns into the pads, the picador, with long, steel-pointed poles, attempted to slice the bull’s neck and shoulder muscles, degrading his ability to make quick upward movements of his head and ensuring that he carry his horns a few inches lower.

  When the matador had sufficiently assessed the bull’s reaction to the pain and duress of the picador, the trumpets sounded again for act 2, the banderilleros. I could have done without the picadors, but the banderilleros were fascinating, by far the most athletic and entertaining of anyone. They are armed only with two ribbon-festooned yardstick-sized poles. With arms outstretched in a V above their heads, teasing the angry bovine with the target of their open chests, they stood steady in front of the ground-shaking charge. At the last possible moment, they leapt into the air, twisted their slender bodies sideways over the horns, and implanted the fish-hook barbs into the same muscles the picadors had sliced. When these bullfight ballerinas left the ring, the bull had six of the brightly colored sticks angrily flopping against his shoulders. This act had allowed the matador to study the bull’s charge.

  Act 3 is where death occurs.

  No matter how revulsed I was by the barbarity and cruelty of the spectacle, I was mesmerized by the courage of the matador. To stand there in nothing but a pair of frilly tights, pink socks, ballet slippers, and a cape while a hurt, angry, and only slightly diminished fifteen-hundred-pound bull barrels down on you, intent of impaling you on his eighteen-inch horns, takes nerves. I’d had some experience with angry bulls, but nothing like these.

  I found bullfighting to be morally indefensible but nevertheless irresistible. I’d read too much ancient history and Hemingway not to be curious about this most manly of spectacles. Here one witnessed the last remnants of the cruelty and spectacle of the Roman arena, the pitting of one life against another as performance art.

  The crowd expects the matador to thrill them, but he has to strike an artful balance between suicide and survival, and this one made me gasp in disbelief at his insanity and athleticism; with his back to the bull and on his knees just a few short feet from the enraged animal, he was waving to the crowd as if he just sunk a twenty-foot putt to win the Open, seemingly oblivious to the snorting heaving death a step behind him. In cultures where bullfighting is popular, matadors are worshiped like gods—cool and fearless, the epitome of masculinity. This one was at the pinnacle of his career.

  The real contest is not between the matador and an animal; it is the matador’s internal struggle with his own mortality. The matador understands he is likely to be seriously gored at least once a year and has about a one-in-three chance of being killed in his career. The bull is the only one who doesn’t know he will likely die. It is an exhibition of death and injury, an ancient testosterone-pumping blood sport, not for the faint of heart.

  Back at the restaurant bar it was my t
urn to order. It took me a second to recover; my heart was pounding with the memory of it all. Finally, I gathered my thoughts and remembered: margaritas for Cathy and Heather, a Corona Extra for Tim, and for me, for the memory of the bullfight, a glass of sangria.

  When the margaritas were ready, I took them back to our table and returned to find the bartender adding some fresh strawberries to the sangria. Addressing me, the young man said, “She’s not allergic to strawberries, is she?” as he put an umbrella in the drink.

  There are some gulfs between life experiences that are just too wide to bridge in the short time available. “No,” I said, “she is not,” as I smiled and stuffed a couple of dollars in the tip jar and went back to the poignant spaces between everyday notes.