Hemingway Adventure (1999) (10 page)

What seems to be absolutely obligatory is that you drink as much as possible and what you don’t drink you spray all over your friends. So bottles of
cava
, Spanish sparkling wine, are popular, as is a cheaper alternative called
kalimotxo
, a mixture of wine and Coca-Cola made to a simple recipe - buy a litre bottle of Coke, drink half and fill it up with wine.

From our camera position at a third-floor window we watch a group of young men and women, some in green plastic hospital gowns, rush into the square carrying a bucketful of booze, two large bags of flour and a stack of egg boxes. Now I know why half the balconies are shrouded in plastic sheeting. Within minutes flour and eggs are flying from all sides.

With half an hour still to go before midday, the crowd is glued together in one single, sticky mass, a pulsating human pancake, dancing, shouting and chanting on a carpet of slime and broken glass. A boy with short, spiky, peroxide blond hair leaps onto one of the columns on the town hall facade and, thrusting out his chest like a modern-day St Sebastian, screams at the crowd to throw things at him. Bottles of
cava
are shaken furiously and released in a thousand mini-orgasms as the crowd hysteria builds towards the one great unifying climax of the midday rocket.

It sounds like hell, but it is a hell of exuberance - a manic, but largely good-natured, yell of liberation. I’m just noting down this
bon mot
when there is a crack on the glass, followed by a roar of approval as a second egg whistles in, scoring a direct hit on our sound man.

At a minute or two before twelve, those cameras not disabled by edible missiles can send their viewers throughout Spain and the rest of the world pictures of the town officials, in braided frock coats and old-fashioned tricorn hats, stepping out on to the ornate Town Hall balcony to an immense reception.

‘San Fermin! San Fermin!’

Trumpeters step forward and blow a fanfare which no one can hear, after which, accompanied by one last cataclysmic bellow, the midday rocket goes up and eight and a half days of non-stop partying begins.

Below us the mass of people squeezed near to suffocation point begins to shift and break up as it spills out of the square and into the surrounding streets, which are full of sodden, egg-and flour-encrusted groups imploring those on the balconies above to tip buckets of water over them.

Up one side street is a drinking fountain with a central tower about fifteen feet high. This has been colonised by young Australians and New Zealanders who dare each other to climb up and throw themselves off. The only safety net between them and the pavement is the crowd itself.

By the time we get back to La Perla the Plaza del Castillo has been transformed. Young, unsteady people of all nations are swaying about. A flopped-out figure wakens to find his friends have tied his hands to the bench he’s been sleeping on. High-pressure water jets scour the space around the bandstand sending an arc of plastic and glass bottles scudding across the ground towards the circling garbage trucks.

I talk to two regular American visitors. Curly is tall with a stack of grey hair; his friend, who introduces himself, without irony, as John Macho, is short and stocky. As the rubbish swirls by behind them they declare themselves Pamplona addicts. They love the fiesta, the people, the bulls.

Most of them know somebody who has been hurt in the bull-run and Curly has had his leg broken. His injury, as with most others, was not caused by a bull but by someone trying to get out of the way of the bulls. A fifty-something man from Austin, Texas, offers me several reasons why this will be his fifth consecutive year on the bull-run, of which the most intriguing is: ‘It’s an aphrodisiac, Michael. Believe me.’

Believe him or not, I can’t help thinking Viagra would be a lot easier.

Whoever you speak to, the talk is all of the next high - the
encierro
(running of the bulls) which will begin tomorrow morning at eight o’clock sharp.

There is not much rest to be had in Pamplona tonight. Those who have run with the bulls before will try to sleep as best they can. Those who haven’t will, likely as not, have been awake most of the night saucing themselves up. Those of us who are here to film have to be getting into positions on the course by six o’clock. And the noise goes on. It’s like the night before battle.

S
tepping out of La Perla into that half-day, half-night just after the dawn breaks is like stepping into a time vacuum. All the people who were on the square last night are still there, wearing the same clothes. The same music is playing from the same bars. The same street-cleaners are cleaning the same patches of street. Only the smell is different. Fortified by the excesses of the night, the town radiates a sweet, sickly smell of stale booze. An indoor smell that’s been let out. The soles of my shoes stick to the flagstones of the arcade. The religious and the bacchanalian seem to merge seamlessly at the festival of San Fermin.

The
encierro
is the name given to the driving of the bulls from their corral on the outskirts of town to the ring in which they will fight later in the day. Over the years it became a feature of the Pamplona
encierro
that locals and visitors would try and run before the bulls along a course of just over half a mile. The event was in full swing before Hemingway whetted the world’s appetite by describing it in his first bestseller,
The Sun Also Rises
. Later, James Michener helped things along with his book,
The Drifters
.

With endorsements from authors like Hemingway and Michener, running with the bulls became one of the great international tests of maleness, a chance to participate in an ancient tribal rite, still surviving in the midst of modern Europe. More recently, women have been allowed to run. Whether this will eventually deal the macho tradition a mortal blow remains to be seen.

Not that I can see many women on the streets this chilly morning. The participants are almost exclusively male and range from the experts, mostly Spanish, who take it seriously and will remain as close to the bulls as possible, to the young, already drunk college kids for whom this is just another stop on the dangerous sports circuit.

I have been invited by Alf and To-To, the two Swedish
aficionados
, to watch the run from the balcony of the room Hemingway took at La Perla. This gives directly on to the narrow street called Calle Estafeta. Before they reach here the bulls will have run uphill from the corral into the Town Hall square, left at Chargui Ladies Lingerie, past Liverpool Video Club and Compact Disc Centre and sharp right at Ana’s jewellery shop. There are no barriers in this street, and nowhere to hide, so man (and woman) and bull will get pretty close to each other.

With an hour still to go the balconies are filling up with families, friends, and those who’ve rented these viewpoints for thousands of pesetas. At 7.30 police and colourful officials in scarlet berets and tunics begin to clear the course. Anyone poking out of a doorway is pushed firmly back in. At 7.40 a squad of street-cleaners comes through, personal high-pressure vacuum cleaners strapped to their backs, followed by a second line with brushes and black rubber buckets. At 7.45 the live television coverage begins and I can see our street on a screen in the building opposite. With ten minutes still to go, an eerie, unnatural calm descends. The runners, held in groups at different starting points, shift from foot to foot, lick their lips and tighten their grip on the rolled-up newspapers which are traditionally carried with the hope of landing a thwack on a passing bull.

At 7.52 a safety announcement is made in different languages. At 7.55 I catch a glimpse on television of one of the bulls, still in the corral, steam rising gently from his nostrils, his great head framed against the green hills beyond the city. Nothing in the four years of his life so far can have prepared him for what is about to happen.

At eight on the dot the rocket goes off, the bulls are released and all the concentrated energy that has been building up to this moment crackles along the course, a psychic shock-wave that affects the most dispassionate spectator. When the bulls come in sight they seem the calmest creatures in town, running in disciplined order behind accompanying steers, heads lowered, eyes forward, whilst humans scamper hysterically around them flicking their papers and occasionally grabbing at a horn.

In a few seconds they’ve gone past, and everyone looks to the nearest television screen to see what really happened. I see one brown bull run close to a barrier, stripping off its line of spectators one by one. They’re already playing back a goring which took place outside Ana’s Jewellers. Then the second rocket sounds, indicating safe arrival of the bulls at the ring.

To-To consults his watch.

‘Two minutes thirty seconds. That’s good.’ He seems vaguely disappointed.

‘The longest I ever saw lasted fourteen minutes. One bull was detached from the rest and then they turn angry, you know. There was quite a pile-up.’

The runners filter back into the square and soon the bars and cafes are full of tales of daring exploits and valiant feats with rolled-up newspapers.

Rumours of serious injury, even death, chase round the city. One positive fact, reported in the
Diario de Navarra
, is that thirty tons of broken glass were removed from the streets yesterday.

O
n Hemingway’s advice I leave the hotel at half past five this second morning to be sure of a ringside seat to watch the amateur bullfight that takes place at the end of the
encierro
. ‘Pamplona is the toughest bullfight town in the world,’ he wrote in the
Toronto Star Weekly
. The amateur fight that comes immediately after the bulls have entered the pens proves that.’

This may be Ernest pumping himself up a little for, though there is no evidence that he ever ran with the bulls, there is a photograph of him dodging horns at the ‘amateurs’.

Certainly the ring fills up fast, but the great number of spectators are teenagers, excited boys and girls who throw themselves energetically into Mexican waves and sing-alongs. A tired brass band plays in the middle of the ring. The only really hard behaviour comes from an angry young man with a shaved head who seems determined to take on the rest of the world with a virtuoso display of taunts, leers and obscene gestures.

The crowd takes against him immediately. He is punched and kicked and pushed down the stands into the ring where, to enormous applause, the police lead him off. Support for the authorities seems unanimous.

Eight o’clock comes round and we hear the rocket that means the bulls are on their way. Only seconds later the first wave of runners spills into the ring, jogging briskly. They are followed by a second wave running more smartly, who are in turn followed by a third wave sprinting like hell. Almost unnoticed in the middle of all the human hysteria are the bulls, trotting in resolutely, rarely breaking their stride as they follow their guiding steers across the ring and away into the pens where they will stay until they go out to be killed nine hours later.

This leaves the ring full of several hundred amateurs. A couple of American boys from Arizona who I’d met earlier in the day have run for the second time. Their eyes are shining as they shout at me from the other side of the barrier.

‘It was incredible.’

‘Frightening?’

‘Terrifying! But we did it! We did it!’

‘Now you’re used to it will you become a regular?’

‘No way! No way!’

At that moment a gate swings open and they leap to safety over the barrier. They needn’t have worried. The animal that is released for the amateurs to try their skills on is not a bull, but a thin, though sprightly, cow with the points of its horns taped. It frisks off amongst the crowd, picking off people here and there. The crowd is very fair, any attempt to grapple the cow to the ground or even pull its tail being roundly booed.

After a while the cow is brought back in and there is a brief pause before the next one emerges, which gives a chance for the bolder boys to play chicken by sitting in the ring as close to the gate as possible. Those brave enough to remain at the front can scarcely avoid being trampled by the animal as it’s released.

This mass larking about goes on for another half-hour, and by nine o’clock the bullring starts emptying and the streets start filling again. Outside, by the television mobile trucks, a line of Hemingway fans waits to be photographed at the bust of Ernest which stands under the trees of an avenue called Paseo Hemingway. His head and shoulders seem trapped in the bulky granite plinth as if he’s half stuck in a recycling bin.

The celebrations seem to have mellowed out on this second day. The dangerous sports boys have either crashed out on distant camp-sites or left town, looking for the next adrenalin rush. There are more locals on the streets, more bands playing, more families, more dancing and more entertainments laid on by the infinitely patient authorities of Pamplona. The police, who once fought the crowds here, seem to have learned the lesson that a crowd is only really dangerous when it has an enemy.

At La Perla a woman in a dressing-gown, smoking and agitated, is in the lobby trying to make the receptionist understand that her hand-bag has been stolen from her room. She went down the passage to the lavatory and when she came back it was gone. A moment later it’s found. In her room. There’s a lot of this hyperactivity around but I’ve seen little crime and almost no aggression. But the pace is relentless and there is a sense in the air, if not of self-destruction, then something pretty close to it.