To Run Across the Sea (11 page)

Chugging behind the tractor into the bull pastures was accepted as a minor adventure. The bulls stood, heads lowered, a few yards away, to watch our approach with steadfast, myopic eyes. Their relative invulnerability has relieved them of the necessity to develop acute vision, but their hearing is exceptionally acute. Thus we probably appeared no more than a vague, invasive shape, but lulled by the soft clatter of the diesel and its promise of mash, they did nothing about it. It rains hardly at all in summer, and the bulls spend the day in ceaseless foraging for pasture, moving always very slowly and with great, ponderous dignity. The animals in each herd settle quickly to mutual tolerations, undoubtedly realising that an inbred policy of no-surrender means the death of one of the disputants of any quarrel that is allowed to arise. They learn quickly. When Don José Luis’s boxer decided to try his luck with a five-year-old, the animal soon realised that the dog was too fast to be caught by the horns, so, adopting an invitingly passive stance, he lured the boxer within easy reach and removed several of its teeth with a kick.

Under the protection of the tractor and its soothing noises no scene could have been more arcadian and nothing more appropriate to this Andalusian setting than the bulls, viewed either in majestic silhouette against the green-grey wash of olives or as they wandered ruminatively, deep in the strong tide of sunflowers that had burst through the fences of their enclosure.

‘Whatever the financial loss, the bulls are my life,’ the Marqués said, having taken us at the end of our visit to the palace for an inspection of his most treasured possessions. Once again I found myself confronted with mounted heads. These were of two Albacerrada bulls ‘pardoned’ following extreme bravery shown in the ring; one in Madrid in 1919; the other in Seville in 1965—an historically unique event. Despite some reluctance on the part of the traditionally minded authorities of the Maestranza (as the ring at Seville is known), they were obliged by the insistent demands of the crowd to break their rule. And so the Marqués’s bull
Laborioso
(hard-worker) was returned, appropriately fêted and garlanded to the herd. It had taken seven thrusts of the
pic
, and had overturned seven horses, three of which had to be replaced. Its wounds were healed through massive injections of penicillin, and it lived on until 1976.

Bullfighting, practised in one form or another since Celto-Iberian times, not only in towns but in innumerable villages throughout Spain, began to fall into decline in the post-war period. Spanish attitudes were much changed by the tourist influx. New rings were opened in many northern areas where bullfighting was previously unknown, but the uninstructed demand of a ninety per cent foreign audience was for pure spectacle. Bullfighting taken straight was seen as tedious so bullfoonery was often added with the provision of clowns and dwarves in bullfighting gear who threw custard pies in each others’ faces, or the procedure might be livened up by performing dogs. Since the foreigners hardly knew one bull from another it was an opportunity for disreputable breeders to supply sub-standard animals at cut prices, and there were cases of low quality, underpaid bullfighters refusing to tackle bulls without artificially shortened horns. This was the period when ambitious but inexperienced youngsters (known as
capitalistas
) were paid small sums to invade the ring and join the fight, sometimes with tragic results. Bullfighting began to suffer from the competition of football, and promising village boys aspired to become pop-stars rather than matadors.

Rock-bottom may have been reached in 1981 when the concluding corrida of the Seville season had to be put forward a day because it coincided with a home match by Seville FC, the promoters realising that otherwise the ring would have been empty. Of this melancholy occasion a leading newspaper critic wrote: ‘Thus the present decadent season draws to its end. It has offered little but boredom for the public, and bad business for the promoters, with half the seats unsold.’ The bulls, said the critic, had been uniformly atrocious: small, lame, numbed-looking, and inclined to totter about like calves on shaky legs. The sad and insipid bullfighters spread boredom like a disease. ‘When they trundled on the sixth bull, I said to my colleague, “Perhaps I’ll take a nap. Wake me up if anything happens.” He didn’t because he, too, fell asleep.’

From this disastrous year, there was a steady recovery. The commercial backers had come to understand that it was a matter either of drastic reform or, for them, the end of the road. They paid more for their bulls, and for their bullfighters; got rid of the clowns, suppressed the circus antics of such as El Cordobés, and his imitators and then attracted a new generation of matadors. As a result, 1985 was adjudged ‘brilliant’ and 1986 ‘excellent’. As part of this renaissance, a bullfighting school opened near Seville in January 1987 with 16 young pupils ranging from 9 to 16 years of age. The event was sufficiently important for it to be attended by the representative of the Ministry of Culture responsible for what is officially entitled ‘the taurine art’, who spoke enthusiastically of the performance of the children in their encounter with bull-calves of appropriate size.

Alcalá de Guadaïra, site of the bullfighting school for promising boys, is a small, white pyramid of houses dominated by a vast Moorish fortress defending the old approach to Seville. Otherwise it is notable for mining the high-grade sand, supplied to bull-rings which can pay the steep price for it, and for the richly chromatic earth that provides the yellow paint for Seville’s baroque buildings, and for the interior of the Marqués de Albacerrada’s miniature amphitheatre. This place suggests the persistence of an ancient half-submerged bull-cult, for once again the mounted heads are everywhere, and every tavern and bar is glutted with fight-posters, photographs and prints. Within hours of arriving in Alacalá I received an invitation from an olive-growers’ association: ‘We’re having a bit of a fiesta up at the inn this evening. Just a few friends. No more than a glass of wine and a sandwich. We’ll probably kill a bull.’

The school is in the honeycombed building next to the ring itself; a single dim room cluttered with scholastic objects, exercise books, desks, a blackboard, plus piles of harness, plastic matador’s swords, and a miscellany of horns. The largest of these is fixed to the front of a formidable contraption like a handcart on bicycle wheels used for chasing would-be
banderilleros
. Special respect, and possibly some magic virtue, attaches to these particular horns, as they were removed from a bull killed in a fight with another bull.

Students receive instruction for two hours a day on three days a week, about a third of this time being devoted to ring tactics and the rest to practice in the ring. Funds have been allocated to the school by the Ministry, but, through ‘delays in legalisation’, these have not yet arrived. Since it cost the equivalent of £75 to hire a second-class fighting cow for two hours (a first-class cow costs twice this sum), there is little practice with animals, and a great deal of make-believe in which masters, horns in hand, pursue their pupils all over the empty ring.

Joselito Ballesteros, aged 9 but looking hardly older than 7, gave an impressive demonstration with the cape, shaking it in a taunting fashion, and making defiant bullfighter noises at his father, one of the teachers. The father, shoulder hunched, head down and horns thrust forward, scraped with one foot in the sand in the manner of a bull who is about to attack. In due course he was despatched as Joselito lunged forward with his imaginary sword, an
estocada
loudly applauded by the bystanders. In another part of the ring the mature student of 16 skipped aside to avoid the charge of an instructor manipulating the simulated bull on wheels, raising himself on tip-toe to plunge the pair of
banderillas
into a padded leather surface where the neck muscles would have been.

‘In this profession, as in others,’ Ballesteros the father said, ‘everything depends on an early start. Joselito started training at 5. At the moment he can hardly see over an animal’s back, but he could be giving private performances by the time he’s 14. He can’t be accepted as a professional for four more years after that.’ Ballesteros described the principles inculcated by the school. ‘The art of the ring is wrapped up with moral attitudes,’ he said. ‘We keep a close check on their behaviour in the day school as well as in the home. We are engaged in the development of artists and believe that art is inseparable from life.’

‘How many children like this can expect to become great bullfighters?’ I asked.

‘Five per cent.’

‘And how many will die in the ring?’

The question startled him, and his face crumpled.

‘When they’re properly trained, as these boys will be, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s the old-timers trying for a comeback, and the kids that will do anything to get a start. The bulls cut them down, but they don’t make the papers. How many of them go that way? There’s no knowing.’

He seemed depressed at the turn our talk had taken. Perhaps it was something he wanted to put out of his mind. The boys were dancing round us with their capes, striking attitudes of defiance, sizing up phantom bulls, coming close to the imaginary horns. Now the master’s attention was taken up, a little horseplay had been brought in.

‘Above all we teach our boys to master fear,’ Ballesteros said. ‘That’s the most important thing of all.’ Almost plaintively he added: ‘You see, the horns are very sharp. It’s bad for them if they get scared.’

The more I saw of these Spaniards of the deep south the more it became clear to me that it was a misapprehension to believe that their feeling for bulls was anything less than an almost obsessional admiration and respect. Near Alcalá a handful of olive-growers had clubbed together to pay an enormous price for a bull to be killed at their annual fiesta. Whatever their excuse, this could not have been anything but a sacrifice to ensure a good harvest, and understandably, only the most splendid of animals could be offered to the gods. Noble is the adjective never out of Spanish mouths when they speak of the bulls, to whom they frequently attribute such human qualities as candour and sincerity. This is F. Martinez Torres, himself a bullfighter, on the subject of courage: ‘The bull is the only animal in creation that is not daunted by any wounds he receives. He does not possess the treacherous or bloodthirsty instinct of other animals that crouch unseen and spring on their prey from behind. He attacks nobly from the front. Face to face, there is no animal that can beat him.’

This is only part of the story, for the bull is capable of enduring friendship, and never forgets a face—or a voice. ‘There have been some bulls,’ Torres tells us, ‘which during the fighting, on being called by the herdsman they knew, have broken off the fight and trotted meekly over to the place where their former custodian stood, allowing him to stroke them from inside the fence, or at times in the arena itself. When he has finished doing this, they have returned to fight with the same fierceness as before.’

The hard-bitten professionals of the Spanish press, bull-lovers to a man, are saturated with the pathetic fallacy. Here is a passage from Antonio Lorca’s account in
El Correo
of a
novillada
for young bulls in Seville at the time of my visit. Lorca cannot stomach vulgarity and believes that the bulls feel the same. ‘Such a bull as this demanded at least a token authority to direct its noble charge. A real fighter would have provided inspiration and, faced with a tasteless fidgeter, it showed indifference, even impatience.’

Manuel Rodriguez of ABC, also covering this event, noted that the fourth (inevitably ‘noble’) bull gave the matador Fernando Lozano two warnings of the danger he placed himself in through misuse of the cape. Rodriguez too, abhorred vulgarity, ‘Elsewhere they might have thrown cushions. Here in Seville we correct such lapses with an icy silence.’

Back to Lorca. ‘Four bulls received huge applause from the crowd as they were dragged from the ring. As for the fighters, it was a mediocre harvest of a single ear. Again I ask myself the question, is a bullfighter born, or made? From what we saw yesterday I can only conclude that he is born. Nevertheless, it is his duty to himself and to us to continue to grow. Shame it was to see great bulls thrown away in this fashion.’

W
HEN I FIRST WENT
to Haiti there were 6,000 generals in its army out of a total force of 20,000, and now one of the survivors of this legion of high-ranking officers sat at the bar of the modest but charming Hotel Meurice, watching the world through a whisky glass he rotated in such a way that its cut facets projected golden spearpoints of reflection on the ceiling and walls. The general was rubicund and genial, very black, as most army officers were, but with a bronze burnishing of the cheekbones of the kind that in Haiti advertised the good life. He was at the hotel to deliver a fresh supply of Papa Doc Duvalier’s ‘gold’ postage stamps, commemorating the fifth anniversary of Papa Doc’s assumption of the title of President for Life. Mr Johnson, the owner, was required to top up his stock, and also display a stamp on a newly designed showcard on his reception desk. He was expected to persuade at least 50 per cent of his guests to buy a stamp, costing the equivalent of £8. The general asked me if I had made my purchase, and I excused myself saying that I had only checked in that morning. ‘Be advised by me,’ he said. ‘Acquire all you can. This is philatelic rarity that will soon double or treble in value, and you are getting in at the bottom of the market.’ He gave me a beautifully engraved card.
Vincent Deshayes
.
Général de L’Armée
. ‘You are a friend,’ he said. ‘Come to me privately if you desire to make a substantial purchase at a good discount. You will make a killing.’ He drained his glass, patted me on the shoulder, picked up his swagger stick, and sallied forth into the impeccable Haitian day.

Mr Johnson watched him go, hatred and gloom expressed in what could be seen of his face, which was largely swathed in bandages. He was just out of hospital where he had been detained for a week after an encounter with one of the general’s subordinates who had beaten the living daylights out of him. The captain had side-swiped Johnson’s car in passing in his Jeep, and Johnson’s fatal mistake had been to sound his horn in protest. The captain pulled up and sauntered across.