Seduced by Ernest Hemingway’s romantic descriptions, a traveler tentatively attends a bullfight in Spain. Torn between her internal morality and cultural curiosity, she explores the tension between tradition and brutality; cruelty and art.
In retrospect, I should have expected the protesters. A mob assembled outside the Granada bullring the evening of the corrida, brandishing cardboard signs painted in dripping, blood-red letters. A line of mounted police separated the protesters from the torero’s trailers and kept them from impeding the lines of spectators entering the arena.
I had never felt so out of place. I was probably the only young woman entering the stadium by herself. The others were all unbothered locals of an older age bracket and families with children. Ashamed before the justified anger of the protesters, I kept my head down as I struggled to decipher the seating arrangement and layout of the arena. Eventually, I was forced to swallow down my social anxiety and ask for help in less-than-fluent Spanish.
My seat was the cheapest option available, which meant that it was high up on a balcony with no sun protection. I was seated on a hard bench squashed between eager spectators with no elbow-room, and periodically splashed with beer as they became increasingly excited and drunk throughout the festivities.
The evening’s entertainment began at 7:30 pm with a fanfare of patriotic music, and the three toreros pranced into the arena on horseback. They looked like they came straight out of the old illustrations and black-and-white photographs, in their spangled traje de luces, with dashing waistcoats and tight, tight pants. After all, they wouldn’t want bulls’ horns to snag on any loose clothing!
They took turns riding up to the stands and tipping their montera hats to the audience, flashing a smile so blindingly white you practically had to squint through the gleam.
Then the arena was cleared, except for the first torero, who wore a celestial-blue jacket. It was time for the first fight to begin. A lever was pulled, the barrier gate was lifted, and I held my breath, expecting a monster. An obsidian-black bull charged into the arena. He was smaller than I expected, almost pitiful in comparison with the torero on horseback.
The bull trotted around the ring, his powerful muscles rippled underneath his sleek coat. He attempted to impale everything that moved. When a waving spectator in the audience caught his eye, he lowered his head and charged. His horns clattered against the wooden planks of the ring, causing the audience to gasp.
An assistant handed the torero the first banderilla (a small, decorated barb). The sharp, silver point glinted in the sun, and the reality of what was about to occur truly sank in. The part of me raised on Disney movies had foolishly thought it wouldn’t really end this way, and in the end, they would show the animal mercy. But by the end of two hours, six bulls would be slowly, brutally slaughtered.
As soon as the torero stuck the first banderilla in the bull’s flank, and he began to bleed, it hit that I was not enjoying myself. However, I am a firm believer that (as Hunter S. Thompson wrote) if you “buy the ticket,” you ought to “take the ride.” So I decided I would force myself to watch every second of the brutality I had helped pay for with my ticket.
Although I always believed bullfighting to be sadistic and unethical, I had been seduced by the romantic accounts of the corrida in its heyday, written by Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon and Ibañez in Sangre y Arena. They depicted sexy, brooding matadors driven by a self-destructive impulse to stare horned-death in the face to prove they were truly alive. The corrida was a work of art, representing the triumph of the human spirit over all the forces of nature, even death.
In these accounts, the matador faces the bull on foot. Horsemanship is reserved for the picadores, the opening act. They confuse and weaken the bull before the matador enters the arena, his red muleta in hand. In the old days, the horses were often gored to death by the bull. The bulls were described as massive, fearsome, and deadly monsters.
However, the corrida I witnessed was not quite the powerful spectacle I had expected to see. First of all, it turned out to be a corrida de rejones, which meant the bulls were fought on horseback.
The torero taunted the bull by prancing in front of him, then feinted out of the way when he charged, demonstrating masterful horsemanship. The goal was to stay close enough to the bull to plant the banderillas without either the horse or rider getting injured by the horns. Neither the horse nor the rider ever seemed to be in much real danger, contrary to Hemingway’s descriptions.
At one point, the torero managed to plant four banderillas in rapid succession, and the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “olé!”
Then he got cocky. He removed his hat and placed it on the bull’s head.
Struggling uselessly beneath the hat, the bull became a humiliated, clownish figure. Everyone seemed to love this, and the hubbub from the crowd rose, mixed with laughter. The orchestra played in the background, keeping time with the gait of the prancing horses’ hooves. People clapped along and the whole arena came alive with a festive rhythm. It was hard to believe that we were witnessing the slow death of a living creature.
The killing blow was dealt from horseback, between the bulls’ shoulders. The bull didn’t seem to notice, but that was because the wound was too deep. He hadn’t realized that he was dying yet.
I wondered if Hemingway would have found this dishonorable, as there was no real risk to the torero. The odds between the bull and the mounted torero were completely uneven.
Then, the torero dismounted. The music stopped. The entire arena held its breath as the torero approached the bull. Finally, the man and the beast were face-to-face. The bull snorted and pawed the sand with his hoof. The assistants on foot waved their capes to distract the bull from the torero, but he dismissed them with a commanding gesture.
They scattered to the corners of the arena, and it was just the bull and the torero.
He shook his muleta and the bull charged. He twirled out of the way, the muleta concealing his movements. This signature bullfighting move is called a veronica. He did a few more veronicas, but the bull’s energy was fading, and he moved slower and slower.
Finally, he dropped his muleta on the ground. The bull took a few steps towards him, preparing to charge again. They were within inches of each other, face-to-face, and everyone waited to see what the torero would do next.
He raised his arms up in the air, and a guttural, resounding yell erupted from deep in his chest. It echoed around the arena and sent shivers down my spine.
The bull went still, then shuddered and keeled over. Dead. There was a moment of frozen silence. Then the crowd erupted.
“Olé, olé!” They cheered, waving white handkerchiefs.
The orchestra started up again. The music was triumphant. The torero flashed everyone another one of his blinding grins and threw his hat into the crowd.
This whole process was repeated five more times, as the three toreros were each given two bulls to kill. It lasted over two hours.
I started to yawn towards the end and thought about going home and reading a good book. After all, the conclusion to every fight was guaranteed. If the corrida was indeed a work of art, it was not one I could connect to. The bull was too weak – and the torero too cruel – for either to be the protagonist. There was no suspense; no real conflict.
By the time I left, it was dark. The protesters had gone home.
In Hemingway’s novels, he described bullfighting as the last place to see old-fashioned values of honor and courage in a corrupt world. Today, Spanish conservatives still cling to the corrida under the all-holy name of ‘tradition.’
The most I can say about bullfighting is that there is indeed something utterly honest in its brutality.
After all, the average American will eat eleven cows’ worth of meat in their lifetime at great cost to the environment, and they will never look a bull in the eye while they take his life.
