by Kurt Caswell
DEATH IN SEVILLE
Spain, 2009
When I was sixteen, like a lot of young men who want to write, I fell in love with Hemingway. It was his short stories that drew me: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “Big Two-Hearted River,” both parts. It helped that my father, when he was a boy growing up in Michigan, had fished the Big Two-Hearted, and then later gave me a wild and natural boyhood in Oregon. Like the protagonist in “Big Two-Hearted River,” I loved to fish and as a boy always fished in lakes and rivers near our homes, and I loved to paddle canoes. I loved the simplicity of Hemingway’s world, the straight-on style of his writing, the way I thought he was writing about me, the way I thought I would one day write like him. I wondered if Hemingway was not somehow part of me, I so deeply felt him when I read his stories. Certainly, I wanted to be Hemingway.
That was some time ago, and I’ve moved on, the way you move on from a broken heart or idealism. I’ve moved on, but I have not forgotten. I carry with me still that little butterfly feeling that came when I leafed through books about Hemingway and looked at photographs of him, which I did, for hours, in the Hemingway Western Studies Center and the library at Boise State University, where I was a student. In my adult life I’ve come to know the darker parts of him, regard him as something of a sham man, a brawler too, a bully who never quite grew up. But the power of his stories and those images of him stop me still. You know that photograph of Hemingway drinking water from the brim of his hat in Africa. Or the one standing at the prow of the Pilar on the Gulf Stream, his pole bent down and away, tucked in against his right hip, the camera behind him, his shirt off, gazing onto the sea. Or in partial shadow on the front porch of his house in Ketchum, Idaho, where he died and near where I, for a time, lived. Do you blame him for killing himself? I hated him for it, especially when I stood before his grave with my best friend, Scott, at age nineteen on a pilgrimage to that cemetery and to the Sun Valley Lodge and the Hemingway Memorial on the Big Wood River. But I don’t hate him for it anymore.
I didn’t care for his work on bullfighting, but as a boy I thought I should. When I made my first journey through Europe in the spring of 1993, I went on the trail of Hemingway through Paris and Spain. I visited Shakespeare and Company, the Place Contrescarpe, and I gazed up at the windows of his first apartment. I bought a blue beret, and I tried to write in cafés in Paris, as Hemingway did, with a pencil sharpened by my pocketknife. I ordered café au lait and made long lovely sentences in my journal about my solo adventures, and then I made short, clear sentences. It was the best feeling in the world. I tried to drink wine, too, which Hemingway calls “the most civilized thing in the world,” at outdoor cafés, and tried to drink heavily in my room each night. But I didn’t have a stomach for it, and I still don’t. In Spain, it was too early in spring for bullfights, so I walked the empty streets of Pamplona on an empty Sunday morning to gaze at the bust of Hemingway near the bullring. Not this time, I thought, but one day I would find my way to a bullfight.
Seville is hot in summer, unbearably so, and in April you can feel the front end of that heat pushing against you. I had been in Spain for several months now, teaching travel writing in the study abroad program at my university. When my friend John (a professor of Spanish language and literature) and I entered the bullring, the famed Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Seville, on that day, April 22, 2009, the sun was against us. We would be sitting on the sunny side of the ring in the high, cheap seats, and the sun would strike us square in the chest. It would not dip below the top of the bullring opposite us until the final bull. The drama of the corrida de toros, the modern Spanish bullfight, almost always takes place across the ring from the sunny side because wounded bulls, weakened by loss of blood, their heads slung low, retreat to that crescent of cool shade to make their last stand. Or they may retreat to that shade to give up when their spirit has been broken. What the bullfighter wants, and the crowd wants too, is a bull that does not give up, a bull with a will to live that overwhelms its body’s possibility, and so after the sword pierces its body and while the blood is foaming from its nose and mouth, its lungs filling with blood, the bull breathing through this blood, it desires to live, it defends itself from the men in the ring and the sword in its body and the sun bearing down on it and the betrayal of its body that is dying—it will defend itself from itself—its body now a thing apart as the bull shrugs off that body, there in that crescent of shade, before the crowd and the bullfighters, bravely, as if it were not dying, but mastering death by dying.
At John’s suggestion, we purchased disposable hats, a piece of rectangular cardstock folded and stapled in the back and fixed with a stretchy chinstrap. It looked silly but was a tremendous relief while facing the sun. And then we had a cold beer, an Estrella Galicia, out on the open-air terrace behind our seats and overlooking the pit where the picadors were mounting their armored horses. We stood there for some time because there was good shade made by the stands, and we liked watching these men prepare to face the bull. I wondered what it was going to be like to see a bull die. On our walk to the bullring, John and I had stopped at a little place on the calle María la Blanca. The barman had a suggestion for us. “Be sure to take a bag,” he said in English. “To vomit in. It’s disgusting.”
Though he had spent many years in Spain, John had never attended a bullfight. He was doing so today against the preference of his wife, Carmen, a Galician (and also a professor of Spanish language and literature). Bullfighting, she asserts, is not Spanish at all, but rather endemic to specific regions of Spain: here in Andalucia, in Castilla, and also in Navarra. It was Franco who insisted that Spain and the world call bullfighting a Spanish art form. Interesting that in the world of the ring, the term franco, which means “frank” or “open,” is given to a noble bull. Today the country is divided between those who want bullfighting banned and those who do not. Even the king and queen are divided: he is a bullfighting aficionado; she would rid her kingdom of this cruel spectacle. In July 2010, Catalonia voted to ban bullfighting in the region, following the Canary Islands, which banned it in 1991. Some hail the Catalonian ban as a triumph over animal cruelty. Others argue that it is yet another political posture to rally support for the region’s separatist movement, that Catalonians reject everything quintessentially Spanish. So is bullfighting Spanish, or not?
The bullfight is not a contest between a man and a bull, as Hemingway states clearly in Death in the Afternoon, his treatise on the subject. It is not a sport and certainly not a blood sport; it is a tragedy. The bull lives only so that it may die in the ring, and when the bull enters the ring, it is going to die. You need not worry yourself with hopes that the bull will triumph over the man. Its life on the campo and under the open sky is over. It did not ask for this, but this will happen. Even if the bull kills the matador and thus “wins,” it will be killed, because an experienced bull is far too dangerous to ever enter the ring again. Very rarely, perhaps once in a decade or more, a bull may walk out of the ring alive. This is not to honor the bull so much as to humiliate the matador who was incapable of killing him.
The bullfight consists of three acts, the first two of which prepare the bull for the matador to kill. Act 1: The picadors, mounted bullfighters, “pic” the bull with long lances. They get him to bleed, and weaken his powerful throwing muscles at the top of his shoulders. Act 2: The banderilleros, bullfighters on foot, plant three sets of two harpoons covered in colored paper (banderillas) into the bull’s shoulder muscles. Sometimes the matador may place his own banderillas. And act 3: The matador, after a series of passes with the cape (muleta), kills the bull with a sword (estoque). In a typical bullfight, three matadors each face two bulls. Today the matadors would perform in this order: Antonio Barrera, Juan Bautista, and Luis Bolívar.
Luis Bolívar is a striking man. You can see that, especially compared to the other two matadors performing that day: the Frenchman, Bautista, who is pasty-faced
with frumpy hair; and the Sevilleano, Barrera, whose long nose and drooping chin give him the look of John Kerry. You see in Bolívar’s face the heroic ruggedness of a feminine beauty: dark eyebrows over dark eyes, a gracile nose into his perfect lips. His cheekbones are high on his face but not angular. Next to him, the other two men look awkward and uncertain of themselves, generally outclassed. I mention this because it seems that beauty matters in matters of the bullring. Hemingway writes about the feminine beauty of the matador in Death in the Afternoon. Chicuelo, though he is plump and has no chin and a bad complexion, also has the “long eyelashes of a girl.” And Juanito Martin Caro, a “child prodigy,” has the “pretty, pretty look of a young girl.” So it is not only the beauty of the matador’s work with the muleta, his ability to master the bull, but his face too, which also must win the crowd. It’s uncertain whether this has any effect on the bull.
The first bull entered the ring charging, its head up scanning the ring to sweep it clean of dangers, charging boldly and powerfully, the smooth wet hide a shimmer of muscle and sun, the horns like partisans, its pizzle a flow of urine so forceful I heard it slap the yellow sand. The bull is so jacked up on adrenaline when it enters the ring, so crazed with a demonic fire, that it is woozy, punch-drunk, almost exhausted. Whatever moves, it will charge and kill. A bull will even charge whatever does not move—the red walls of the ring—and strike it with its horns.
A spontaneous cheer went up from the crowd as the bull came in. It was nearly impossible to resist. I cheered too, having never decided to cheer. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time and every time after. It was like walking among coastal redwoods; I still cannot believe them. It was like the first time I went backpacking in southeastern Utah and woke to the call of a canyon wren. The bull was beautiful.
This was Barrera’s bull, and he killed it in the shade opposite of where I sat with John. It was the first bull and the first killing I witnessed. I had been thinking about this moment for a long time. What would it be like to watch the bull die? Would I be sick, or sickened, as the barman had asserted, or somehow turned away by the spectacle of it? Would I like it? Would I discover an aberrant quality in myself, a darkness in my pleasure at watching the bull die? But when it happened, I felt neither disgust nor pleasure. The killing of the bull felt oddly natural and perfectly strange. It felt as though it had to happen, as though it had happened already. I watched the sword come up in Barrera’s hand, a glint of light off the blade as he broached the sun-line at the edge of the crescent of shade, the bull like a cat ready to strike the man in front of him, to clear the ring to make it safe, the blood from the banderillas slick now over his back and making him weak, dizzy, sleepy, so that he wanted to lie down as he had done in the middle of the ring just minutes before, no longer interested in charging the man who faced him. He wanted to lie down, as he had done just days before for days and nights on end out in the campo, the fields of the Spanish countryside, lying in the shade of a live oak, say, chewing his cud and lazing away the day. Or perhaps I misread him, as he had had a taste of his own power moments ago when one of the bullfighters, a banderillero, was caught by a horn and lifted twice off his feet. The crowd cheered as the bullfighter rode the bull’s head for a few feet, bobbing up and down violently, then pushed himself off and away to safety. Or maybe there was nothing at all in the bull’s mind, just a tired blankness cued by movement as Barrera sighted along the blade and stepped forward to meet the bull. The bull stood there mostly, his head down, the sun battering him in his fatigue as the sword came in, and then he came into it, and it slid neatly into his body at his shoulders as the muleta was pulled from Barrera’s hand and whirled off and away like a petal on a breeze. The bull with the sword in his back felt a bite of something before the blood came, and as the blood came, so did Barrera’s toreros with their capes to wave the bull this way and that as the bull’s feet drained of his life under his great weight, his feet dying first, dying before he did, and he went down onto his knees and then onto his belly in the shade and twisted his head as if to look at the thing in his back, and then at the crowd who did nothing to help him, and then at the sky, and then his head went down and he never got up.
Hemingway writes in Death in the Afternoon: “What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards . . . the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine.” I think, maybe, I’m not sure, this is what it was like for me too. I did not feel angry or sickened or aggressive, but sad—yes, I felt sad, the way I feel sad when I think about how my dog died that day in Colorado or when I lie next to my German shepherd now and look into her dark eyes and imagine that one day, not so long from now, she will die too. But this is not the sadness of avoidance or denial. When the first bull died in the ring in front of me, I felt privileged and a little embarrassed to witness it, to be part of this most intimate moment in the bull’s life. And I wanted to see it again.
The second bull was for Bautista. It was a feeble effort, and twice the crowd whistled and jeered to signal disapproval: once for the bull and once for the Frenchman, the Frenchman because he was heavy on his feet and uninteresting to watch, the bull because he could not stand punishment, because he came in hard at the muleta with his head so low that he caught a horn against the sand and all of his power went into the sand so that his light back end came up and up until he was standing on his head in the ring, and then he came down onto his back, rolled to the side, his left front leg caught beneath his tremendous weight so that he could not stand. A bull can badly injure himself in the ring, making him impossible to work with, and this is one way to do it. The bull lay there as if he’d had enough, and Bautista’s toreros rushed in to help him up, one pulling on his tail, another at his horn. The crowd whistled and groaned: what a bull, they were saying. What a bull. Bautista didn’t have much to work with, and he wasn’t much himself, and when he killed with the sword, the bull lay down and would not die. It was not his great spirit that kept him alive; he had already given up. He wanted to die, but he couldn’t, like a man who can’t make a decision. One of Bautista’s toreros came in with the dagger (puntilla) to end it. He jabbed the blade in deep just behind the skull, and the bull sank and was dragged out by the mules to be butchered and sold in the market.
Neither of these two bulls, nor the third, fifth, or even the sixth bull, which won Luis Bolívar an ear, carried that beauty and sadness Hemingway writes about, the kind of bull the Spanish call valiente, or courageous. The third bull was Bolívar’s first, and after the estoque went in, it was killed with the puntilla in the sun near my seat. I could hear him huffing and grunting as he died. The fifth bull evoked more jeers and whistles for Bautista, who was taking too long, which meant the bull was suffering. When Bautista killed it cleanly, he looked up at the crowd defiantly, as if to say, see, you do me wrong. And now the sixth bull, which won the day for Bolívar, a Colombian, twenty-four years old. This final bull of the corrida went down lightly, not heavily—heeled over and died. There was blood, of course, wet on the bull’s back, but it was not obscene or gaudy. Bolívar had been nearly flawless. It was one long piece of choreography, the bullfighter and the bull, as if the bull too knew its part and was willing to play it, willing to die. The pañuelos came out in the stands, a fanfare of white kerchiefs, as the audience roused the president to award Bolívar the bull’s ear. With the ear in hand, Bolívar made his way about the ring to offer his grace and gratitude to us—his audience, his critics, his patrons—we who had decided that he had done well, that he was worthy. Was he a hero? Flowers came into the ring from admirers, women and men, girls and boys, and then at last the night sky relieved us of the day.
But though the sixth bull won the ear for Bolívar, it was the fourth bull, Barrera’s second, that won the honor of that name valiente.
But the past is a story of who we were, and we are different now. Despite this difference, the bullfight flourishes in the modern world, as it did in the ancient. Why? I think bullfighting embraces what modernity left behind. Modernism is a wave ridden out from the wreckage of Romanticism, out from the Industrial Revolution, which followed it. As we rode this wave, rode the great promise that technology would solve all our problems, that it would complete us, like religion, like meaningful work, like love, we left the sacred mysteries of the natural world behind. We didn’t need nature anymore. Instead of reverence, awe, and love for the mystery of life on earth, we worship steel, oil, and the silicon chip.