by Norman Lewis
The festival for which we were bound, the lady of the five-tiered parasol assured us, was quite extraordinary. She had sat on its organising committee, and to make quite sure that it excelled in the friendly competition that existed between pagodas over such arrangements, a mission had been sent across the border into Siam in search of the most up-to-date attractions. As this wealthy, independent, and highly Westernised state was regarded in Indo-China as the Hellas of South-East Asia, we could expect singular entertainment.
Within the pagoda enclosure, indeed, East and West met and mingled like the turbulent currents of ocean. Monks tinkered expertly with the wiring of amplifying systems over which, that night, they would broadcast their marathon sermons on Pain, Change and Illusion. Dance hostesses from Siam, dressed as hula girls, with navy-blue panties under their grass-skirts, traipsed endlessly round a neon-illuminated platform, to the moaning of a Hawaiian orchestra. They were watched, a little doubtfully, by a group of lean-faced young men with guitars on their backs, who, the police lieutenant assured us, were Issarak guerrillas who had joined forces with the Viet-Minh. The Issaraks, he said, had probably come down for the festival from a nearby village they had occupied some days before.
Loudspeakers howled in space, like disembodied spirits, and then were silent. A few outdoor shows attracted early audiences. Thai-style boxers slogged and kicked each other – breaking off to bow politely between the showers of blows. A performance of the Manohara, the bird-woman of the Tibetan lake, had drawn a circle of country-people in gold-threaded silks, rustics whose untainted imagination still showed them the vast range of the Himalayas in a sweep of a player’s hand, and a rippled lake’s surface in the fluttering of fingers. Many flower-decked stalls attended by lovely girls displayed the choice merchandise of the West: aspirins and mouthwash, purgatives, ball-pointed pens, alarm-clocks – the spices and frankincense of our day. For those who dared to defy the abbot’s ban on the traffic in intoxicants within the holy precincts, there were furtive bottles of black-market Guinness, which, mixed with Benedictine, had become a favourite aphrodisiac in Siam. Ignoring the major’s horrified appeals, the princess bought a tartan skirt and a plastic shoulder-bag.
But the ultimate triumph of the festival, and chief testimony of the organising committee’s enterprise, was concealed in a gay-striped Tartar pavilion erected in the centre of the enclosure. Towards this the ladies now led the party, and having bought the candles and posies of champa flowers which served as admission tickets, we took our seats on a bench facing a low stage with footlights, curtained wings, and a back-cloth painted with battle scenes between humans and javelin-armed apes.
A young man in a shirt decorated with Flying Fortresses blew a trumpet, and five thin girls dressed in beach suits came tripping on to the stage. They were well-known ballet dancers, the ladies whispered. Their whitened faces, set in tranquil death-masks, obeyed the convention imposed by the performance of the Hindu epics. Their hands were tensed to create an illusion of passion and incident. While the audience sat in silent wonder, the young man blew his trumpet again, and as the eloquent fingers fumbled swiftly with zips, hooks and eyes, garments began to fall. ‘Regards-moi-ça!’ exploded the major. ‘Un striptease!’
The trumpet was heard for a third time, and the five thin girls placed their hands, palms together, and bowed to the audience. Then, gathering up their clothing, they turned and tripped daintily from our sight. Outside, night had fallen, and we walked in a fluorescent glare that leeched our cheeks, and painted on us the lips of vampires. The ladies were subdued and thoughtful from the cultural experience they had undergone, as they might have been after a visit to an exhibition of abstractionist art. The major said: ‘If you wish to suggest that, in the sense of building railways and roads, France did little or nothing for Laos, then I agree. In other ways – and I say this proudly – we preserved it with our neglect. As you’ve observed tonight, we can’t keep progress out for ever. It was a wonderful country; and if you want to see what it will be like in a few years’ time, just go and have a look at Siam. Of course, the Viets maytake it over. In any case, the charm we’ve known is a thing of the past. As for the future, you might say it’s a toss-up between the striptease and the political lecture.’
The Manohara, as we passed it again, had reached a moment of supreme drama, when the wandering prince, having stolen up behind the unsuspecting bird-woman, is about to snatch off her wings. A gasp of intolerable suspense went up from the crowd. At that moment the steel guitars began a rumba, and the supposed Issarak guerrillas plucking up courage at last, clambered on to the stage, and went grinning and posturing in the wake of the hula girls. There was one small member of the band who hung back, it seemed from shyness, but with the rest he had bought his ticket, and a girl came and knelt at the edge of the stage and sang to him – probably about a dream land far away.
4
The Bullfight Revisited
WHEN I FIRST LIVED IN SPAIN, I went occasionally to a bullfight. It used up an afternoon in one of the big vociferous cities when I had nothing better to do with my time, and although I saw the leading bullfighters of the day go through their smooth, carefully measured-out performances, I never witnessed any sight that nailed itself in my memory. The bulls came, shrewdly chosen for weight, horn-breadth and ferocity (not too much or too little), and they died in the correct manner at their appointed time; and the bullfighters, borne on the shoulders of their supporters to their waiting Cadillacs, went off with the stars of the nascent Spanish film industry. The bullfights used up some of the sad afternoons for me, but I never became a regular. I missed all the fine points, and in still shamefully enjoying seeing the man with the sword tossed, although not injured, I demonstrated a lack of natural passion for the art of tauromachy.
After that I moved to Catalonia, where the natives are seriously addicted to football but do not care for gladiatorial spectacles; so until the spring of 1957, when I found myself at a loose end on a Saturday in the southern town of Jerez de la Frontera, a period of many years had passed since I had sat on the sharp-edged tendido of an amphitheatre and witnessed, a little uncertain of myself, and with incomplete understanding, this ancient Mediterranean drama of men and bulls.
I went to Jerez to arrange a visit to Las Marismas, the great area of desert and marsh at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, where the last of the wild camels, presumed to have been brought in from the Canary Islands, but first recorded in 1868 by a naturalist called Saunders, have only recently been captured and subdued to the plough. At Jerez it happened that the man who owned most of Las Marismas was away for two days on his country estate, so while waiting for his return I went on to Sanlúcar de Barrameda for the annual feria of the Divine Shepherdess. Sanlúcar is twelve miles south-west of Jerez, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. It was the Las Vegas of Spain in the Middle Ages before the completion of the Christian reconquest, famous in particular for its homosexuals – a tradition which lingered until the Civil War, when the puritans on both sides used machine-guns to suppress entertainment by male dancers, who went in for long hair, women’s clothing, and false breasts. Across the river from Sanlúcar there is nothing but desert and marshes almost all the way to the Portuguese frontier. The half-wild fighting bulls roam in the wasteland beyond the last house, and its men are fishermen and bull-herders as well as producers of splendid sherry. It is one of the many mysteries of the wine trade that an identical vine, growing in identical soil at Jerez de la Frontera, should produce a fino sherry, while at Sanlúcar it produces the austere and pungent manzanilla.
The road to Sanlúcar went through the whitish plain of the frontierland between the ancient Moorish and Christian kingdoms. A few low hillocks were capped bloodily with poppies; there was a distant sparkle of solitary adobe huts; some bulls were moving quietly in the grassy places on short, stiff legs; and storks planed majestically overhead in the clean spring sky. The peasants, holiday cigars clenched in their teeth, were coming out of their fields for t
he fiesta; hard, fleshless men in black serge and corduroy who bestrode the rumps of their donkeys with the melancholy arrogance of riders in the Triumph of Death. The countryside smelt of the sweet rankness of cattle, and the villages of dust, saddlery and jasmine. Sometimes, as the car passed a scarlet thicket of cactus and geraniums, a nightingale scattered a few notes through the window.
Sanlúcar was a fine Andalusian town laid out in a disciplined Moorish style, white and rectangular, with high grilled windows and the cool refuge of a patio in every house. The third evening of the feria, which is spread out over four days, was flaring in its streets. There had been a horse show, and prizes for the best Andalusian costumes; and now family parties had settled round tables outside their house doors to drink sherry and dance a little in a spontaneous and desultory fashion, for their own entertainment and that of their neighbours. It was the time of the evening when handsome and impertinent gipsies had appeared on the streets with performing dogs, and a street photographer with the fine, haunted face of an El Greco saint had already taken to the use of flash bulbs. In the main square, where a great, noisy drinking party was in progress, trees shed their blossom so fast that it was falling in the sherry glasses, so that sometimes a glass of sherry was thrown out on the decorated pavement, and a gipsy’s dog rushed to lick at the sweetness, and sometimes a little white blossom remained on the lip of the drinker. Down by the waterside, where eight hundred years ago the first English ships arrived to buy wine from the abstemious Moors, a catch of fish had been landed and spread out with orderly pride on the sand. A hunchback chosen for his mathematical ability was Dutch-auctioning the fish at a tremendous speed, intoning the sequence of numbers so quickly that it sounded like gibberish. Girls frilled at the shoulders and flounced of skirt strolled clicking their castanets absently through the crustacean fug, and distantly the dancers clapped and stamped in all the water-front taverns.
In Andalusia a spirited impracticability is much admired, and Sanlúcar had squandered on its fiesta in true patrician style. Tens of thousands of coloured electric bulbs blinked, glared, fused, and were replaced, over its streets, and every mountebank in this corner of the ancient kingdom of El Andalus had gathered to sell plastic rubbish, penicillin-treated wrist-straps, ‘novelties from Pennsylvania and Kilimanjaro’, hormonised face-creams and vitamin pills. Only music and the dance were tenacious redoubts in the creeping uniformity of the modern world. The ancient orient still survived in the pentatonic shrilling of panpipes bought by hundreds of children, and although the professional dancers engaged to entertain the rich families in their private booths went in for sweaters and close-cut hair, in stylish reproof of the frills and curls of their patrons, they gyrated with snaking arms to Moorish pipe music and deep-thudding drums. The gestures of the dancers too, that trained coquettish indifference, that smile, directed not at the audience but at an inward vision, were inheritances from the palace cantatrices of Seville and Granada, not yet discarded with contempt.
The bullfight of Sanlúcar which was held at five in the afternoon of Sunday, the next day, was a novillada; a typical small-town affair of local boys and local bulls (which happened in this case to be formidable enough), fought in a proper ring and watched by a critical, expert, and indulgent public unable to afford stars but determined to have the real thing. Besides the formal corrida de toros – the bullfight seen by most foreigners – Spain offers many spectacles involving the running, the baiting, and even the ritual sacrifice, of bulls. At one end of the scale are the corridas, which are a matter of big towns, big names and big money, and at the other end are the Celto-Iberian Bronze Age ceremonies of remote villages of Castille and Aragon, sometimes involving horrific details which are properly left for description to scientific journals. In between come the capeas and the novilladas. The capeas are village bullfights, where the bull is rarely killed, for the village cannot afford its loss, but is played with capes by any lad who wishes to cut a public figure in a ring formed by a circle of farm-carts. The amateurs with the capes fight not for money but for the bubble reputation, sometimes receiving the bull’s charge seated in a chair or in another of a dozen facetious and suicidal postures, and so many aspiring bullfighters meet their deaths in this way that often the newspapers do not bother to report such incidents. The small towns possessing a real bullring hold novilladas in which apprentice bullfighters, who are badly paid by bullfighting standards, fight bulls which have not reached full maturity. In theory these should be inferior spectacles to the corrida, but often enough this is not so, owing to the dangerous determination of the young bullfighter to distinguish himself, and the fact that the bulls, although perhaps a year younger, are often larger and fiercer than those employed in the regular corrida, where they prefer the bulls not to be too large or fierce. There is less money for everyone in a novillada and therefore less temptation for behind-scenes manipulations; but on a good afternoon you can see inspired fighting, and plenty of that kind of madness sent by the gods, and most of those who meet their end in the bullring do so at this particular kind of fight.
Sanlúcar’s novillada held the promise of unusual interest. In the home town of the breeders of the great bulls of Andalusia – which dwarf those of northern Spain and of Mexico – it would have been audacious to present any but outstanding bulls; and these, fresh from the spring pastures, would be at the top of their condition. Moreover, the first of the five superlative bulls looked for by well-informed local opinion was to be fought by a rejoneador – a horseman armed with a lance instead of the matador’s sword, and mounted on a specially trained horse of the finest quality, and not a broken-winded picador’s hack supplied by a horse-contractor. The rejoneador in action is itself a rather rare and interesting spectacle, surviving from the days of the old pre-commercial bullfight, and in this case there was an additional interest in the fact that the horseman was a local boy, who it was supposed would be out to cover himself with glory on his home territory. Finally, one of the two novilleros who would fight the remaining four bulls on foot was already considered an undiscovered star, equal to any of the much-advertised and top-grade matadors and certain to become one himself very shortly – if he did not push his luck too far and get himself killed in the present apprentice stage.
I spent the morning correctly, as all visitors to Sanlúcar are supposed to, tasting sherry in the different bodegas, and after a siesta, was driven stylishly in a victoria to the bullring, timing my arrival for half an hour before the fight began. The bullring was a small, homely structure of pink-washed brick, in the heat at the far end of the town. There was little refuge from the sun, which kept the storks, nesting on the thatched huts all round, rising stiffly to let their eggs cool off, and water-sellers with finely shaped jars were waiting at the entrances. When I arrived, a pleasant confusion was being caused by the three picadors, who were riding their horses at a creaking, shambling gallop into the crowd waiting outside, and practising bull-avoidance tactics on convenient groups of citizens. A woman protesting at being charged admission for a beautifully dressed little girl of five cried out with such passion that ripples of emotion and fury, dissociated from their origin, were stirring the fringes of the crowd a hundred yards away. Over to one side of the plaza, small boys were running about under some pine trees, clapping their hands and uttering inhuman cries, in an attempt to dislodge the doves sheltering in the foliage above, and drive them over the guns of a number of Sunday sportsmen whom we could see crouching like bandits in ambush wherever they could find cover. Occasionally one of the old sporting pieces was discharged with an enormous blast, and the girls screamed prettily, and the picadors, struggling to calm their horses, swore those terrible Spanish oaths denounced ineffectively in wall posters all over the country.
In due course the promising novillero arrived, in a veteran Hispano-Suiza with a tremendous ground clearance and lace on the seats. He was in full regalia, and accompanied by three aged woman in stiff black, and his manager. One of the old women was clutching
what looked like a missal. The manager was a fat, gloomy and nervous-looking man, and wore a grey Sevillian hat. He and the driver lifted down the worn leather trunk containing the tackle for the fight, the swords and the capes, and the manager opened the trunk and began to forage in its contents while the others stood by, the novillero smilingly indifferent and the women with practised resignation. Something was missing from the trunk. ‘I told you to count them before you put them in,’ the manager said fussily. ‘I don’t see why you couldn’t have checked them from the list. It would have been just as easy.’ He closed the trunk clicking his tongue, and the old woman with the religious book said, ‘I made sure of the cotton. I brought it myself.’ After that they went away to their special entrance. The promising novillero, who had the rather fixed serenity of expression of a blind man, and who smiled into the sky, didn’t look in the least like a bullfighter (bullfighters on the whole are dark, and a trifle saturnine in a gipsy fashion); he looked perhaps more like a cheerful and promising hairdresser’s assistant. Inside the bullring the crowd had separated into its component castes. The townsmen in stiff, dark, bourgeois fashions, with their regal wives, had massed in the best shade seats. The cattlemen, drawn together, each on his hard foot of bench, were a solemn assize of judges in grey sombreros, ready to deliver judgment on what was to come. A hilarious clique of fisherfolk in gaudy shirts and dresses kept their own slightly tipsy company. Above them all, in the gallery, a posse of civil guards under their black-winged hats, brooded down on the scene, rifles held between knees. Only the girls in their splendid Andalusian costumes were missing. It turned out that they had gone off to watch the bicycle race, which was the competing attraction of the day and something of a novelty in the bullfighting country.