In the thick of it
Jeremy Clarke
I’ve not been to Pamplona’s famous weeklong ‘running of the bulls’ and bullfighting fair of Saint Fermin since 2002; but every year since, on 6 July, at midday, when the town council lets off the rocket signalling the start of the festivities, I’ve felt a pang of regret that I’ve once again failed to manage my life sufficiently well to be there with the thousands who have.
I first went ten years ago, after reading Hemingway’s bullfighting encyclopedia Death in the Afternoon. After half a dozen chapters of meticulous description of the Spanish corrida, Hemingway admits that it is beyond even his powers of description to convey fully the effect on the senses of a bullfight, and challenges the reader to go to Spain and see one before reading on. It was the first week in July and Pamplona’s religious bull fair was on, so I obediently took the ferry to Santander, then a bus across northern Spain to the old Carlist bastion.
I can’t see why Hemingway is as universally disparaged as he is. He went off the rails a bit in mid-career, I suppose; but his early stuff, by which I mean his short stories and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which popularised Pamplona’s Sanfermines festival, seems to me almost miraculous. In particular there is a passage in The Sun Also Rises in which the narrator takes a bus ride from the square in Pamplona up into the foothills of the Pyrenees to go trout fishing, whose images light up my dim brain far more vividly than any deposited there by lived experience.
So when I arrived in Pamplona, I first made a pilgrimage, by bus, along the route described in the novel, and stayed for a night in the village the narrator used as a base for the fishing trip.
Next morning I was back in Pamplona by 7.30 to take my place in the packed street to wait for the daily running of the bulls through the streets.
You could hardly move for people. The street was narrow — the width of a car — and there appeared to be few, if any, hiding places. I had no idea of what to expect. While we waited, I became acquainted with my immediate neighbours, all Spaniards. One told me he’d prepared for this morning’s bull run by taking an LSD tablet. Another hoisted up his T-shirt to show me a scar running from throat to navel where, ten years before, he’d been unzipped by a horn tip not five yards from where we were standing. Someone else added to my growing stock of knowledge by saying that this morning’s bulls were the unpredictable and gigantic Miuras, notorious for killing more famous matadors than any other breed.
Then everyone sang a lugubrious hymn and when that finished a rocket exploded in the sky, and those crowding the balconies overlooking the street began cheering wildly. The rocket, my sewn-up friend informed me, signalled the release of the bulls from the corral.
The revellers were now bouncing on their toes, trying to see over the heads and down the hill to the corral. I bounced a little also. There was nothing to see except bouncing heads. But I discerned a sort of mass panic rolling our way, accompanied by screams and a sound like rolling thunder. The next moment I looked around and my acquaintances had gone. For the first time I could see the cobbled road we’d been standing on. In the same instant a sprinting mob shot past me, arms flying, knees up to their chins, and behind these I glimpsed enormous bobbing horns. Without waiting to see what these were attached to, I turned and fled also.
The street made a left turn then a sharp right. Just before my heart burst out of my chest, God placed on my left-hand side a shuttered shop doorway about 18 inches deep and gratefully I jammed myself into it. As I did so a huge black fighting bull slid past on his back, eyeing me without malice as it went. Then another slid by. Then four more. They’d toppled over on the greasy cobbles at the sharp turn and momentum was carrying them along upside-down. A young American had also wedged himself in the doorway. ‘Holy s***!’ he said. I don’t ever again expect to hear this trite profanity uttered with such heartfelt sincerity or to be in such perfect accord with the speaker.
The bulls stumbled to their feet and forged on up the street. I squeezed under a wooden barrier and went in search of a strong cup of tea and a ticket for the evening bullfight to continue my education.
It’s said that when Hemingway blew out his brains on 2 July 1962, they found tickets for the forthcoming Pamplona bull fair in his back pocket. His paranoia meant that he couldn’t arrange his affairs to be there that year either. Shooting himself was an extreme reaction. But I can understand why not being there depressed him.
Previous page
