Intoxicated at the bullfight
On a wine trip to Jerez, I attended my first and only bullfight, and wrote something about it for a magazine. I’m republishing it here.
On Saturday 9th July 2016 in front of a live television audience a bullfighter, Victor Barrio, was gored to death by a bull named Lorenzo. The horn went through his chest and pierced his heart and lungs. Barrio is the first bullfighter to die in the ring since 1985 and as such his death was a global news story. Rather than sympathies for his widow, Raquel Sanz, comments under British articles were uniformly along the lines of isn’t it good to see the bull winning for a change.
“The British have a knee jerk response to very idea of bullfighting” Jason Webster told me. He is the author of a crime novel set in the world of bullfighting called Or the Bull Kills You. We didn’t used to be so squeamish. In the past American and British papers regularly carried articles about bullfighting. My daughter has a children’s book from the 1930s about a bull who called Ferdinand who is a pacifist and just wants to smell the flowers. His fellow bulls, however, long to fight at Las Ventas in Madrid. There is no animal rights subtext.
When I was at school, the Spanish teacher would try to get us to have debates about the ethics of bullfighting but I didn’t really have a view either way. This changed last summer when I was in Jerez for the annual Feria (horse fair/ gigantic piss up) as a guest of a sherry company. They had a spare ticket to the Plaza de Toros so on a whim I went.
I expected to be horrified but at first I was just baffled. There were no matadors. The entire thing was conducted on horseback. I later learned that these mounted bullfighters are called are called rejoneadores and this form of fight is a speciality of Jerez. They fight the bull with a lance just as knights would have done in the middle ages. One of them looked like a prosperous Wiltshire farmer with the hair of Donald Trump. The first bull wasn’t very big and rather than a clean kill with the lance, they had to dispatch the poor creature with a dagger to the neck. A woman from New Zealand next to me started crying at this point. The moment the bull coughed up blood and collapsed, she left looking pale and shaky.
For the next bull though, something magical happened, a girl, she can’t have been much over twenty sitting with some friends stood up and started to sing. It was a sound that could have come from North Africa, like the wail of the muezzin. Everyone including the bull stopped to listen. She sang for a couple of minutes. When she had finished there was a moment of absolute silence followed by cries of ‘olé!’. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Then the band struck up a passo doble (at least I think it was a passo doble, my knowledge of Spanish music is shaky) and, as if on cue, the bull charged.
The atmosphere was transformed now. The bullring seemed more intimate. There was a complicity amongst the crowd. A man in the seat in front began explaining things to me. The rejoneador with the Donald Trump hair was legendary Jerezano Fermín Bohórquez Domecq (yes, of the Domecq wine dynasty) and this was his farewell corrida. I’d inadvertently stepped into a bit of bullfighting history.
I stayed until the end of the fight. I think there were six bulls in total. They seemed to get bigger and fiercer each time. The crowd literally gasped in awe as the final one entered the ring. There was more singing and moments of almost balletic choreography between the rider, the horse, the bull, and the music. I never became inured to the sight of the bull dying but I left feeling that I had witnessed something sublime.
Hemingway wrote that “the bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, that is, it is not an equal contest or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather it is tragedy. . .” To the Spanish, it is an art form. Bohorquez’s final corrida was written up in the culture section of El Pais (where I learnt that the girl who sang was actually a well-known Jerezano singer called Maria Carrasco.)
For some all this is just window dressing for an activity that is no more noble than bear baiting. Organisations such as the League Against Cruel Sports and PETA want a worldwide ban. They claim that the bull is drugged and abused before the fight to make it easier for the men. Alexander Fiske-Harrison, author of a book about bullfighting, Into the Arena, says that he has never have seen any such practises in his research which included training as a matador and killing a bull.
He argues that as we eat meat for pleasure rather than necessity it is as much of a form of entertainment as bullfighting: “we have utterly false view of our dealings with animals in this country. In Britain we kill millions of animals for entertainment every year.”
Factory animals lead a life of permanent torment whereas fighting bulls live a semi-wild existence until their date with destiny. Fiske-Harrison claims that the bull isn’t in agony for the fight, the banderillas don’t penetrate that far because the bull’s hide is half an inch thick. Besides the bull is angry and fired up on adrenaline. If the dispatch is clean then the bull should die instantly. He does have a certain ambivalence, however, when the bull’s death is botched: “how can something be good when done well and evil when done badly?”
In an article for the Guardian, the Irish writer Colm Toibin described the audience at a fight he attended as baying for blood. Nobody was baying for blood in Jerez. The excitement came from the proximity of the matador to death. The moment when the great beast collapses and you see the life leave him is unutterably sad. “The great bulls are revered and receive a kind of heroic mortality, not something that happens to the steak on your plate“ as Fiske-Harrison put it.
Toibin went on to say: “banning bullfights on Catalan territory from the beginning of 2012 would be the beginning of Catalonia's sweet revenge. “ Revenge for years of repression under Franco and a way of asserting their difference from the rest of Spain. This gets to the heart of the debate in Spain, it’s about politics more than animal welfare. Catalans will never miss an opportunity to let you know their disdain for bullfighting. They claim it is an alien activity though Jason Webster cites evidence of fights in 14th century Catalonia. Catalonia still allows bull running where fire is put on the bull's horns which terrifies the animal. Banning bullfighting is a way of thumbing their noses at Madrid. French Catalans, in contrast, see bullfighting as a way of asserting regional identity and showing that they are different to the rest of France. On both sides of the border, the politics of bullfighting are used to resist centralisation. Fiske-Harrison told me “ the bullfighting scene in France is now some of the best in the world.”
Mexico is another stronghold. The greatest matador of the modern era, José Tomás, began his career as a matador in the 1990s there after struggling to gain a foothold in Spain. He retired in 2002 but in 2007 he electrified the bullfighting world when he returned with, according to Webster, “a new dangerous pure style based on the bull coming very close.” The death of Victor Barrio might owe something to the trend for this dangerous style of fighting. Tomas himself came very close to death at a fight in Mexico City in 2010 when he was so badly gored that he needed a 17 pint blood transfusion. Tomas has never explained why he retired and is explanation for returning was simply that ‘living without bullfighting is not living at all.’
Tickets for his rare appearances in Spain or Mexico change hands for thousands of dollars. Before the return of Tomás, bullfighting was in trouble in Spain with attendances down. Webster told me that fighting had become too ‘safe.’ Now it’s in more robust shape. I hope this continues. The fight I went to was a genuinely popular cultural event attended by people of all ages and social classes.
The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote “ it is impossible to know Spain without understanding bullfighting.” I’ve spent a lot of time in Spain including at one point in my teens having a certain proficiency with the language but I’d never felt closer to the Spanish culture than at Plaza del Toros in Jerez. Flamenco music has taken on a new vitality after hearing Maria Carrasco sing. It’s not just flamenco, the poetry of Lorca gains an intensity from having been to a bullfight, not least ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’ about a bullfighter who was like Victor Barrio was killed in the ring.
But more than being intrinsically Spanish, it is a living link with a pre-Christian past. Bullfighting has its antecedents in taurine fertility rites that were once common across the Mediterranean. It’s a form of ritualised sacrifice. I am sure most British readers won’t mourn bullfighting if the animal rights activists have their way but if it goes something vital will have been lost. Go whilst you can and make your own mind up.
This originally appeared in The Oldie magazine.
An extremely well written article from someone who truly learnt to understand the practice . The increasing polarization of viewpoints , exacerbated by the immediacy of social media , means that any well reasoned piece about bull fighting is bound to attract the wrath of the loud minority whereas the majority are more ambivalent . Am so fed up these days with any healthy debate being hi-jacked by the most vociferous ie PETA , Just Stop Oil etc…