Iberia (89 page)

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.

 

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 classic 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.