‘You got to git one of these rascals with horns goin’ straight out!’ he calls apropos of nothing when the bidding flags a little. He is taking bids from the internet picked up by two women with laptops sitting on a platform above the ring.
‘OK, here’s the deal! You bid on her, you pay the money, you get the calf!’ he tells another bidder who seems to have lost enthusiasm for his purchase. ‘It’s just a hundred bucks, dude,’ he urges another who won’t go again. ‘Cash or check, we take it all here! It’ll be the best thing you’ve done all day. It only hurts for a little while! I know you want the cow. You’ll be proud of what you done when you get her home!’
The buyer looks for approval from the woman sitting with him, and the ringman sees this and shouts, ‘Don’t worry about asken her! I’m a licensed marriage counsellor and Ah’ll make it all right!’
There’s more shouting and whooping and then the auctioneer says, ‘Guess what! You’ve just bought the cow! Thirty-seven hundred!’ and everybody cheers. ‘Thank you, sirrr, for staying with me. Thank you, ma’am.’
After two or three lots, Russell stops the auctioneer and announces that he has ‘forgotten to introoce a famous author from the north of England’ who is here to find out about Longhorns for his next bestseller. I have to stand up and turn from side to side, thanking the crowd for having me and giving me their Texan welcome.
‘He’s called Phullupp Walling – dubbya ay ell ell ah enn gee!’ And they all clap.
And so the sale goes on, for four hours, with a great buzz created by a combination of the crowd, the auctioneer and the ringmen.
The last lot is a cow called Jamajawea. ‘We have loved her, loved her, loved her! She’s a great mama. And though she’s open, she’s a guaranteed breeder. We will guarantee her. We flushed her and got lots of babies from her. Sixteen embryos. That’s why she’s taken a bit of time to git bred again. Here’s the deal! Have I got three thousand? Thirty hundred? Thirty hundred anywhere? Twenty-fahve hundred then?’
‘Yep,’ barks the ringman and points jubilantly into the crowd. ‘Don’t let him scare ya, ma’am! You know you want this cow. You just bid. You’ll be happy when you get her home! She’s a nice big prutty cow!’
The bidding hots up, with the ringmen yelping and whooping back and forth and pointing to bidders on their respective sides of the ring.
‘Yep!’ from one side.
‘Hup!’ from the other.
‘Yep!’
‘Hup!’
‘Yep!’
‘Hup!’
‘Sixty-two fahve!’ shouts the auctioneer.
‘Hee-haw!’ whoops the right-hand ringman.
‘Sixty-fahve! I got sixty-fahve,’ yells the auctioneer.
‘We got seven thousand?’ asks the left-hand ringman of the woman he’s encouraging to bid.
‘Nope. Sixty-seven and a half,’ replies the auctioneer.
‘We do finance if you like, ma’am! You can’t go home with an empty trailer! If they say guaranteed, you’d better take it. I know these guys.’
The bidding edges up. ‘Eighty-fahve hundred dollars. Last shout today … Eighty-nine hundred? Make it ninety? Ninety it is! Thank you, sirrr! Make it ninety-one?’
The woman shakes her head.
‘Nine thousand dollars! Ladies and gentlemen, Ah just sold a cow for nine thousand dollars!’ and he bangs his hammer triumphantly on the rostrum. General whooping and clapping.
These cattle are a long way from the fabled old Longhorns. They might be thrifty and tough, but they are tractable and docile. They patiently negotiate the pens and the ring, and although they could do a good deal of damage with their outrageous horns, if they did, it would only be accidental. I saw only nervousness, not aggression. They do have a kick like a horse, both feet backwards at the same time, but that is only in reaction to something startling them.
Texas used to be called the ‘Rawhide State’, and it was said that ‘What a Texan can’t mend with rawhide ain’t worth mending.’ Rawhide is, as the name suggests, the raw, untanned skin of cattle – originally the Texas Longhorn – and was part of the culture of the country. The earliest Spanish grants of land were measured not in chains but in riatas, ropes made of rawhide.
Rawhide has passed into myth, like much of the pioneering life of the nineteenth century. Films, adventure stories and folk tales have turned the very word into a romantic ideal totally at odds with the truth. In a parched land with almost none of the products of the soil that they were used to, the settlers turned to the most versatile and readily available substance to hand: the skin of the almost unlimited cattle with which they shared the country. Texas was ‘bound together with rawhide’.
Tanning preserves the skins of animals and makes the resulting leather supple so that things made from tanned leather will remain in the shape they are crafted in. Just think of your shoes or handbag. But rawhide is the untreated hide of the cow, with the meat and fat scraped off. It contracts as it dries and expands when wet and is immensely strong and almost untearable, with the capacity to stretch to enormous lengths. When properly dry, it becomes as hard and durable as wood.
There are many stories about rawhide’s almost unbelievable power. Some are true, some exaggerated and some pure fiction, and it is hard to distinguish between them. I suspect this one is in the fiction category. A settler went to a creek to fetch water with his ‘lizard’ (a sled that carried a barrel and was dragged by a horse). After he had filled the barrel, a storm blew up, and to shelter himself from the driving rain he walked on the lee side of the horse back to his house. At the kitchen door, he turned to see the horse was still attached to a pair of long, thin, stretched-out rawhide traces leading back down to the creek, but no sled.
The settler unhitched his horse and threw the hames (where the traces are attached to the animal) over a tree stump. The rain stopped, the sun came out and the earth started steaming in the fierce sunshine. He settled down in the shade to chew tobacco and wait. At length the sled with the barrel on it came into view, pulled by the contracting hide, inching its way home and eventually stopping right at the tree stump.
Another story, which I would like to be true, is about a haulier travelling with two wagons each drawn by eight oxen. One of the wagons got bogged down in black peat in a creek, and even attaching all the oxen to it failed to extricate it, despite the fact that oxen are good steady pullers, not lungers like mules or horses. Presently a Longhorn range bull bellowing some way off gave the haulier an idea. He sneaked up on the animal, shot him and had his men skin him. While the hide was still warm, fresh and pliable, he soaked it in the creek for an hour or two and cut it round and round into a long strip. He tied one end to a tree on the bank, then stretched the strip of hide tight and fastened the other end to the wagon’s drawbar.
The sun shone fiercely all afternoon while the haulier and his men sat in the shade, drinking coffee and smoking their pipes. He took a nap and filled his pipe again and watched the wagon for signs of movement. At length he noticed the spokes of one wheel move slightly. The sun beat down all afternoon, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, the wagon wheel moved again, but only a fraction of a revolution. When the sun went down, the wagon had moved slightly forward. The haulier unfastened the rawhide and soaked it in the creek overnight. Next morning, he fastened the strip to the wagon again and let the sun do its work. The rawhide pulled slowly but inexorably, and by nightfall the wagon had moved another infinitesimal amount. He soaked the rawhide again for the second night, and on the third day attached it again, and during the day it drew the wagon out of the mud and up the bank.
Not all the uses for rawhide were benign. One Mexican who had conceived a dislike for Spaniards used to sew up any he caught in fresh hides and leave them in the sun for the rawhide to dry and slowly crush the unfortunate captive to death. In South America it is said that prisoners were disposed of by tying their limbs to four posts with fresh rawhide. They were exquisitely quartered as effectively as if they
had been hitched to horses driven in opposite directions.
This ruthless exploitation has become transmuted by sentimentality into the tourist attraction that is the Fort Worth Stockyards and the adoption of the horns of a Longhorn as the symbol of Fort Worth, and into all the other myths about the cowboy and the Wild West. But when the industrial killing of millions of Longhorns was going on, many places would never have been free of the noise and smell of terrified cattle, their blood, urine and muck running down the streets. It is almost an affront to the memory of the Longhorn’s elemental vigour and pride to see the pampered steers plodding down the street in Fort Worth twice a day; too painful to dwell on the cruelties that would have been routinely inflicted on millions of terrified animals by desperate men whose greed drove the Longhorn closer to the brink of extinction than ever the buffalo was.
The Longhorns pushed through the ring at West and those that live in pampered luxury on their modern owners’ ranches bear only a superficial similarity to the cattle that once grazed the western ranges. They have little of the old Longhorn about them that Dobie so admired: that ‘adamantine strength, aboriginal vitality, Spartan endurance and fierce nobility … that made one associate them with Roman legions and Sioux warriors’.
CHAPTER 18
The Spanish Fighting Bull
Bullfighting is the only reality.
Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
Any man can face death, but to bring it as close as possible while performing certain classic movements and do this again and again and again and then deal it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which you love is more complicated than just facing death. It is facing your performance as a creative artist each day and your necessity to function as a skilful killer.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
DOWN THE AGES, mankind has chosen his domestic cattle to be tractable. Docility was as valued as durability. The oxen that plodded the croplands of the world were our willing companions, with never a thought of freedom from their yoke; the uncounted droves from the furthest parts of the kingdom, fording rivers and crossing seas; the patient dairy cow whose milk has sustained us from the dawn of time: in all of these we bred and valued obedience.
But there is one kind of cattle, reared in large numbers across southern Spain, into which exactly the opposite characteristics have been bred; beasts selected over the centuries for their ferocity and intractability. The toro bravo is unique to the Iberian peninsula. Where it came from and how it got its character will never be known for sure, but it has existed for many centuries for the single purpose of dying nobly in the arena in a twenty-minute ritual sacrifice, at the hand of a man who risks his life time and time again in the tragic spectacle.
All over Spain, the most ubiquitous image is the Osborne bull, first used in 1957 to advertise the firm’s Veterano brandy. The iconic black silhouette could be seen beside nearly every major road in Spain and Portugal until 1994, when the EU prohibited all advertising of alcoholic drinks closer than 150 metres to a road and ordered the image’s removal. Following a public outcry, a compromise allowed the images to be retained, but with all words blacked out. Osborne moved them back from the roads to comply with the 150-metre rule, but cleverly enlarged them, with the result that the new silhouettes are even more dramatic than the originals. And when the EU court ruled that the signs had become part of the landscape and had ‘aesthetic or cultural significance’, the Osborne bull became the symbol of Spain.
My son’s wife’s family, the Caballeros, live in Seville and have been making sherry on the delta of the River Guadalquivir for many generations. This part of Spain is also fighting bull country. One of the Caballeros married a Miura, a family that has been in the premier league of fighting bull breeders for over 175 years. So I used this connection to get an invitation to Zahariche, the Miura brothers’ ganadería, near Lora del Río, in Andalusia. Don Antonio Miura was a little hesitant when my son first phoned him, and I wondered if it was because he feared this Englishman would be critical of his work. But that wasn’t the case at all, because the Miura family has had a lot to do with Englishmen over the years. Don Antonio’s nephew, Eduardo Miura, befriended the Englishman Alexander Fiske-Harrison and taught him enough about bullfighting to get into the ring and kill a bull. (He wrote about it in 2011 in Into the Arena.)
The metal gate from the public road into the Miuras’ land, held up by three old telegraph poles, is an extreme example of home welding. ‘Miura’ is emblazoned along the top in rough letters two feet high, fashioned from what look like bits of scaffolding pipe. It is flanked by two bleached bovine skulls complete with horns, reminiscent of the entrance to a ranch in a cowboy film. The huge gate catch can be opened by a rider without dismounting by pushing a long lever that sticks up above the top bar of the gate.
Recently one of the Miura bulls got out onto the public road and so terrorized the stretch of highway that despite his value, the police shot him rather than attempt to recapture him. It took thirty 9 mm bullets to kill him. The reputation of the Miura strain, nicknamed the ‘Bulls of Death’, has passed into legend. Juan Belmonte, one of the greatest bullfighters in history, said of them that ‘no bull ever showed greater offensive and defensive capacity in the face of the bullfighter. All the other bulls I have ever fought could eventually be brought to the point of absolute submission; the Miuras never.’
Ernest Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon that ‘There are certain strains of bulls in which the ability to learn rapidly in the ring is highly developed. These bulls must be fought and killed as rapidly as possible with the minimum exposure by the man, for they learn more rapidly than the fight ordinarily progresses and become exaggeratedly difficult to work with and kill. Bulls of this sort are the old caste of fighting bulls raised by the sons of Don Eduardo Miura of Sevilla.’
No other strain of bull has killed more men than the Miura. They are the only bulls to have caused a matadors’ strike. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the death toll of leading matadors killed by Miuras grew uncomfortably long. In 1908, 15 top matadors refused to fight at all unless they were paid double to face a Miura. The promoters responded by bringing on young fighters who were aching for a chance to make their names and thus broke the strike. The 15 matadors were forced to capitulate. As if to prove their point, two of them went on to join the illustrious band of matadors killed by a Miura: Pepete in 1862, El Espartero in 1894, Domingo Del Campo in 1900, Félix Guzmán in Mexico in 1943 and, most famously, Manolete in Linares in 1947. That is not to mention the amateurs whose names have not been recorded in the official record, or those who have been disabled or seriously injured.
The injuries are bad enough. The great banderillero (the man who places the barbed coloured sticks – banderillas, ‘little flags’ – into the bull’s shoulders), José Antón Galdón, ‘El Niño de Belén’, lost his hopes of reaching the top as a matador, along with his right eye, to a dangerous bull. The legendary Juan Padilla lost an eye and one side of his jaw when he was gored in the face in September 2011 at Zaragoza. The horn entered his neck and emerged through the eye socket.
The Miura breed began in 1842, when Juan Miura bought 220 Gil de Herrera cows, and 200 José Luis Alvareda cows and bulls. These came from the Gallardo family, who farmed near El Puerto de Santa María, where the Caballeros have a bodega, and where my son and daughter-in-law were married. Other cattle were added over the years from historic Spanish breeds, including Cabrera, Navarra, Veragua and Vistahermosa-Parladé. These have all gone into making the formidable cattle reared at the Miuras’ ganadería at Finca Zahariche.1
The low buildings at Zahariche are whitewashed against the summer heat and roofed in yellow-brown fireclay tiles weathered into beauty; the woodwork is bright blue and the whole ensemble forms a defensive square around a large courtyard with a narrow gate on one side, characteristic of haciendas all over the Spanish-speaking world. The courtyard is paved with little rounded cobblestones gathe
red from the land, sorted into sizes and colours and set in complicated pleasing geometric patterns.
In the middle of the courtyard, water trickles from a pump into the hexagonal trough decorated with blue and white ceramic tiles. Various large dogs, chained outside their kennels to rings set in the walls, are curled up sleeping on the cobbles in the December sunshine. Three long-legged grey-speckled Andalou horses are quietly waiting on their tethers, tacked up with high-backed vaquera saddles with sheepskin covers, and the traditional stirrups (estribos), that look like a cross between a coal scuttle and a garden trug. The whole foot rests on a plate with triangular steel guards welded to each side to protect the ankles from blows and to make it easy for the rider to remove his foot in an emergency. Draped across the front of the saddles are manta estribera, traditional shawls woven from undyed white, black and brown wool. These protect the stockman (vaquero) from the weather and give him something in which he can wrap his victuals. From each brow band hangs a mosquera, a long fringe of leather strips that swish with the horse’s movement and fends off flies in the summer.
Now and again one of the waiting horses lifts a hoof and puts it down again emphatically on the cobbles with a hollow clack that echoes round the walls of the still courtyard. Men in riding boots, tweed caps and studded leather chaps emerge from doors. One is carrying a bucket, another a piece of harness; another is stuffing his arms into a brown leather jerkin and striding towards a horse.
Then it dawns on me that these elegant horses are tacked up for us! I haven’t ridden a horse in 30 years, and even then it was only a quiet little fell pony. And I can’t recall my son, who I’ve brought along to interpret, ever having ridden, although he might have done since he came to live with the Caballeros. I’m not sure he would have offered to come if he’d realized he’d be expected to ride out amongst fighting bulls. I’m just coming round to the idea of giving it a go, stiffness notwithstanding, so long as somebody gives me a leg up, when a battered little white Suzuki reverses into the yard. Don Eduardo Miura emerges, and with grave courtesy introduces himself and invites us to get in.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 28