Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Matador Fulton told an equally strange tale. He was born in Philadelphia, Fulton John Sciocchetti, to a conservative middle-class Italian-Hungarian family who changed their last name to Short, so his name was legally Fulton John Short, but in the ring he was known as John Fulton. As an art student at the Philadelphia Museum School he gained high marks, but reading Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon alerted him to the romance of the bullring, and when his military duty took him to camps along the Mexican border he began to train as a bullfighter, and once he did this, he was lost. He kept us chuckling in the mists as he recounted one after another of the misadventures which seem to overtake all bullfighters: ‘I was fighting this time in Tijuana and there was this dippy dame from some society or other in southern California who conceived a passion for bullfighters, one after another, and this week it was “our heroic American matador, John Fulton.” As the fight was about to begin she leaned down out of the stands, grabbed at my hand and told her husband, “I have fallen madly in love with this young man and I warn you that if the bull wounds him I shall leave you sitting here, because my place will be in the ring with the wounded hero.” Her husband looked at her, looked at me, then put his hands to his mouth and bellowed, “Come on, bull!” ’

  Vanderford astonished me by having in his pocket the details of that first bullfight I had seen in Valencia so many years ago. Working in his patient way through the newspapers of the period on file in Madrid, he had found answers to my questions: The fight had occurred on the Sunday after Easter, April 3, 1932, in the plaza at Valencia. The bulls were from the ranch of Don Manuel Comacho of Sevilla, and the matadors appear to have been regular, no more. Marcial Lalanda, so-so. Domingo Ortega, details. El Estudiante, details. He continued with his deflating analysis of the fight which I had remembered as something rather more than regular. But there the record was: ‘The bulls were mansotes y sosos’ (cowardly and dull). Then he stunned me by saying, ‘And the second fight, which you recall as having been held on Monday, actually took place on Tuesday, because on Monday there was a comic bullfight.’ This I couldn’t believe. I knew it was Monday, for I could recall every incident after the first fight and how I had got my ticket for the second and the conversations with the cuadrillas. If I was certain about anything in the past, it was the day on which this second memorable fight occurred, yet there the record was. Tuesday, bulls of no consequence, three novilleros of limited ability who never progressed to full matador. To me they had been good; the bulls had been brave; and the fight had taken place on Monday. I suppose much memory is like that.

  The mists at Roncesvalles.

  Vavra coaxed Bob Daley to tell us how he had got married, and Daley said that as a fledgling foreign correspondent about to sail for Europe for the New York Times he had acquired from a chance acquaintance the name of a girl in Nice whom the acquaintance had seen once and had considered ‘the most beautiful girl in Europe.’ When his ship docked, Daley had headed straight for Nice, had searched for the girl and had married her on the spot. ‘Everybody should be so lucky,’ Vavra said, for all agreed that Daley had got himself a gem. In what spare minutes I could find during San Fermín, I was reading the manuscript of Daley’s forthcoming novel, The Whole Truth, which dealt with a fledgling correspondent covering Europe for New York’s major newspaper, not named, and at last I understood where Daley had got his idea for the central love story in which his young reporter goes to a setting like Nice to marry a girl like Peggy. I was finding Daley’s account of newspaper life overseas faithful to what I had observed in Tokyo, Vienna and Paris but I feared that it would get an adverse review in the New York Times when it appeared, and it did.

  Then someone asked why Roland had sounded his horn at this gloomy spot, and I explained that three events, one historical, two legendary, had been telescoped here, but that no one was required to believe either of the legendary versions. ‘Young Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees in 778 not to aid the Christians of Spain against the Moors but to subdue the fractious Basques. He failed, and on his return a rabble of Basques overtook his rearguard at Roncesvalles and killed some two dozen men, and Charlemagne was unable to do anything about it, for after their victory the Basques vanished. That much is history. Many years later a legend grew up, claiming that when Charlemagne invaded Spain he was an old man dedicated to helping Christians expel Moors. In his entourage rode his nephew Roland, the fairest knight who ever was, and Archbishop Turpin, as good a swordsman as he was a cleric. At Roncesvalles, when four hundred thousand Moors attacked, the archbishop slew four hundred but in the end was killed. Last of the defenders was Roland, who with his sword Durandal propped himself against the kind of tree we’ve been sitting on today and sounded his horn Olifant to summon his uncle back to the fight, but in vain. Turning his face to Spain, so that Charlemagne would know he had died confronting the enemy, Roland perished somewhere near here. That was the first legend. Centuries later another legend appeared, supposed to have been written by Archbishop Turpin, who did not die at the pass but escaped, and this account claims that the reason Charlemagne came into Spain was neither to punish Basques nor to brawl with Saracens but to go on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. It was on his return that the Battle of Roncesvalles occurred, when Roland and his thousand knights perished at the hands of the infidel. I make no choice among the versions.’

  The mists thickened and a kind of darkness covered the valley up whose steep sides we could hear the whispering of birds; it took no imagination to believe that it was in such surroundings that Roland had sounded his horn Olifant, and one could understand how the notes had been absorbed, so that Charlemagne could not hear them. It was a pass, as we saw it then, where brave men had fought and where heroes had died. In the mists the members of our party looked like the ghosts of those heroes, looming now into view, retreating again into the mists, and we lingered on, barely making it back to Pamplona in time for the bullfight.

  It was lucky for me that we were not delayed, for as we entered the patio de caballos, that part of the ring in which the picadors exercise their horses and where the cuadrillas meet to pray in the chapel before the fight, I recognized two figures whose presence in Pamplona could not have been more happily arranged. The first was one of the handsomest toreros, a lithe square-jawed man in his late fifties, with a heavy head of gray hair, who looked as if he might, with a little training, step forth to meet the bulls once more. Only a few years earlier he had appeared in that excellent motion picture Tarde de toros (Afternoon of Bulls), in which he had given a fine performance in the bullring. In the history of bullfighting he was an authentic master, Domingo Ortega, of whose fight in 1932 I had just been speaking with Vanderford.

  Beside him was a taller man who might have been a few years younger, also handsomely preserved and with hair equally gray. He had the lean aquiline face of a professor of philosophy at Madrid University and the clear eyes of a man who had served long as a matador. He leaned forward when he spoke and his voice was soft, controlled. When he smiled it was with the inborn reserve that had characterized his fighting for this was Luis Gómez, El Estudiante the third fighter on the bill that day in 1932.

  What happened next surprised me even though I have often moved in the world of bullfighting and have known the idiosyncrasies of the professionals. I introduced myself to the matadors and they, accustomed to such interruptions whenever they wandered into the patio de caballos, nodded indifferently; but then I said. ‘The first fight I ever saw was in Valencia early one spring when Marcial Lalanda and you and you fought, and I have never forgotten it.’

  Ortega’s deeply lined face broke into a wide smile. ‘I remember exactly. It was in 1932. A great afternoon for me.’

  ‘April 3, 1932.’ El Estudiante nodded. ‘One of my first fights as a full matador.’

  Apparently the afternoon had meant as much to them as it had to me, for they recalled the scene and Lalanda’s role and the fight the bulls gave; it was later that I learned how close Ortega had been
to retiring from the ring before he got started.

  In his first fights he had been desultory, ‘Nada,’ as the Spaniards say, and critics recommended that he quit. It was not until this fight in Valencia at the beginning of the 1932 season that he had demonstrated a classic quality which was to make him immortal: a dry, controlled, ascetic style which was the despair of those who loved flamboyance and the delight of those who respected art.

  When Vavra suggested a photograph, Ortega was no longer indifferent. Smiling broadly, he looked at me and said, ‘It’s remarkable that you should remember.’ It would have been remarkable had I forgot.

  Any man who attends the feria of San Fermín must decide whether or not he will run with the bulls, and since thousands of men run each day for seven days and only a few go to the hospital, with not more than one fatality every eight or ten years, the chances are obviously favorable; yet there is that negative possibility, and on those days when I was not perched on the fence at the chute I had had the bad luck to be stationed opposite the military hospital on the Calle Santo Domingo, into which some of the damaged were hauled on stretchers, and seeing a rather lively trade, I decided not to run. There were also in 1966 special reasons which would excuse me from participating, in addition to which I was practically sixty years old, and runners of that age were not frequent.

  However, on the next-to-last morning when the bulls were run I happened to be at a spot where few foreigners go, and as the dispatching rocket exploded at the corrals I happened to look down the street from which the bulls would appear, and there waiting for them was Hemingway’s tutor, Juanito Quintana! He must have been in his seventies, yet there he was in the street, waiting for the bulls, with no friends around to applaud or no necessity to prove his manhood. The crazy idiot was there for the sheer hell of it, and as the bulls of the Conde de la Corte thundered up the hill, Quintana ran briefly before them, then ducked into a doorway. I think he would have been embarrassed had he known that I had seen him, for this was the action of a foolhardy man acting completely on his own.

  It was also the action of a man who loved bulls, and the sight of him in the street haunted me all that day. I said to myself, ‘You’ve loved the bulls as much as Quintana ever did. In Mexico and Spain you followed them as a young man. You may never be in Pamplona again, and tomorrow is the last running. You belong on the street.’

  I scouted Santo Domingo, for if I were to be anywhere I wanted to be there where the bulls first meet the flying men, and since for extraneous reasons I was not able to run, I wanted to find some doorway in which I could take a relatively safe position. But when next morning I had taken my position, two unnerving things occurred at about two minutes of seven. A friend read me a passage from a recent book: ‘ “Sometimes, when a man knows the bulls are gaining on him, he falls flat on his face and lies still and the bulls go past; or he may do something that can be most perilous, he can step into a doorway and keep still; but there is a chance that a bull will stop and gore him.” ’ More disturbing was a wild-eyed man who took a position near me with a transisitorized tape recorder strapped to his belly. The machine played church hymns nonstop and the man wore a doleful look as if he expected this to be his last morning with the bulls. But seven o’clock was at hand and I could not retreat.

  The first rocket fired and the gates swung open. The second rocket fired, the oxen led the bulls galloping into the street and huge numbers of men, began surging up Santo Domingo. Just as the main body reached where I was waiting, a young man fell in the street and others piled over him. One onrushing bull, distracted by the accident, lunged at the fallen man, missed, trampled him and came on toward my doorway. At the last moment the bull swerved back to join the herd and I vaguely remember a wild pounding of hooves as the animals raced past. It had all happened in a few seconds and somehow the fallen man at my feet had been uninjured, but as I lingered in the doorway talking with him, a stretcher came down Santo Domingo bearing a young man whose face had been crushed by the flat side of a horn; it looked as if he would lose his eye.

  I have written favorably of two ferias, those of Sevilla and Pamplona, and the reader who finds himself with time to attend only one may wish a comparison.

  Ambiente. The surroundings of the two are so radically different as to permit no comparison. Sevilla represents the soul of Andalucía; Pamplona is the heart of Navarra. If I were a first-time tourist and could see only one, I suppose I would learn more from seeing Andalucía; if I knew Spain reasonably well, I would want to see Navarra.

  At dawn each year many foreigners dance in the streets, reaching for a sun that once rose but will not rise again.

  Setting. Sevilla is more interesting architecturally and culturally than Pamplona, but the physical accouterments of the Sevilla feria cannot compare with that charming proximity of bullring and central square in Pamplona. One can get swallowed up in Sevilla, and without money he can miss the feeling of the feria; but in Pamplona, if one can stagger he can find his way to the square, and there the action is.

  Parades. The wild parades of Pamplona, lasting all day and night, with the giants, the big-headed dwarfs and the tipsy revelers, cannot be taken lightly; they are some of the best fun in Europe, and with a red scarf and a bota of wine anyone can participate in the street dancing. As a Frenchman told me in Pamplona: ‘It’s wrong to say there is dancing in the streets. It’s the streets themselves that are dancing.’ But the religious processions in Sevilla are incomparably greater. So, too, are the daily exhibitions of horsemanship in the park and along the casetas, for they are essentially Spanish and imbued with a grace that one does not often witness.

  Music. The only folk instruments in the world that I have ever heard which approach the unearthly oboes of Pamplona are the rhythm drums of Afghanistan, and even against those wild instruments the oboes win by a mile. No matter how sorry the bullfight, when the oboes play during the placing of banderillas one finds three minutes of exquisite beauty. They stand without competition. Yet I cannot forget the soft midnight clapping of hands in Sevilla. Perhaps one should not make comparisons where pure beauty is concerned, as in the case of the oboes and the hands.

  Food. During feria in Sevilla it is quite impossible to get a decent meal; even in fine hotels the food thrown at the customers is disgraceful. In Pamplona I had delicious plates at four places: mixed salad and menestra at the White Horse Tavern; bacalao at Marcelino’s, where Hemingway used to eat; stewed veal at Casa Mauleón, near the bullring, where prices are reasonable; and delicious garlic snails at Olaverri’s at the southern end of town. It is true that I spoke well of El Mesón in Sevilla, but that was only in comparison with the other restaurants in that city; compared with the best in Pamplona it was no more than average.

  Bullring. A friend of mine partial to Sevilla once said, ‘To compare the noble Maestranza of Sevilla with that dump in Pamplona is like comparing Yankee Stadium with the Little League park in Akron, Ohio.’ So far as the interiors of the two rings are concerned, this is not an extravagant judgment, for the Maestranza is incomparable whereas the 1967 additions to the Pamplona ring, augmenting its seats by some six thousand, have only increased its lack of architectural beauty, but when one considers the whole setting, things are different. From the outside, the Sevilla ring cannot be seen; houses and stores encroach on every inch and the outer walls are actually not visible, so that the apparent ring, even though it sits beside a river, consists merely of a pair of undistinguished doors. But in Pamplona the ring sits within a lovely park of trees in one of the most congenial settings in Spain. Broad areas surround it, and fine walks. The architecture is pleasing and the ambiente is total. Inside the ring, during a fight, if one looks off to the southeast he sees high in the air the white marble tower of a neighboring church; the ramparts are filled with priests in black robes, taking in the fight with binoculars. In Pamplona this tower is known as ‘the crow’s nest.’

  The bullfights. In Sevilla one has stately bullfights conducted in classi
c manner and with a noble restraint. In Pamplona one has lively exhibitions in which bulls play an honored role, but often a secondary one to the riotousness of the crowd.

  The running with the bulls. Here Pamplona is so far ahead that it is embarrassing even to mention Sevilla. There is nothing in Europe, or America or Asia either, to equal these early-morning gallops with death, and if one is young and adventurous, even one morning running with the bulls might be worth two weeks of Sevilla.

  Flamenco. Pamplona, on the other hand, has nothing to match the flamenco shows of the casetas in Sevilla, which is to be expected, since Pamplona lies outside the flamenco zone.

  Circus. The circus area in Pamplona is scattered and ineffectual and the circuses that frequent it are small. The area in Sevilla is concentrated and the circuses are delightful. When the carnival area of Sevilla is added, the advantage is all Sevilla’s.

  Picnics. I have already spoken of the pass at Roncesvalles, but I am not forgetting the fine picnics in Las Marismas, and for the average visitor not concerned with Charlemagne and Roland, I suspect a picnic in the Sevilla area might be preferred.

  Acceptance. This is a subtle point that might weigh heavily with younger people, although it is no longer of much importance to me. To be accepted in Pamplona one needs only a white shirt, tennis shoes, a red scarf, a red sash and a bota of wine. With this equipment the town and the square and the bullring are available, and the fellowship continues for eight long days. To be accepted in Sevilla … the phrase is a misnomer. One is never accepted in Sevilla. I have spent much time in that city, during feria and otherwise, and I have rarely received either hospitality or courtesy. I thought perhaps that this was because I didn’t ride, but a distinguished horseman told me, ‘If you ride you’re treated even worse. If your jacket is an inch too short the Sevillanos ask, “You hunting for frogs?” If your hat is not cocked at precisely the right angle, they say, “You boor.” And if your horse is not obviously the most expensive, they jeer, “You cheapo.” ’ To wangle an invitation into a caseta is almost impossible, and I once sat for an entire feria in the Aero Club without once being spoken to, not even by waiters. Some of the loneliest and unhappiest people I have ever met have been Europeans, not Americans, trying to make a go of it in Sevilla. But I have reached the age at which I neither expect nor demand acceptance; all I require is that the local citizens not throw bottles at me, so my preference between the two ferias remains with Sevilla. The privilege of seeing the Holy Week procession before the feria starts, and the daily parade in the park, and the casetas, and the horse fair, plus the superb bullfights in the best of rings is an opportunity I would not surrender, not even when the people who organize these matters are so inhospitable.