Radiating buliness
Jeremy Clarke
Ceret Six bulls of Hernandez Pla, a Madrid strain reputedly descended from the legendary Santa Colomba breed. The bullring is tiny — more like a cock pit than a plaza de toros. I'm in the front row, jammed between two English racehorse trainers and a bloodstock agent and his wife. Immediately behind me, with her kneecaps in my back, a young French woman with 'Jesus is my boss' embroidered on the front of her baseball cap is drawing on a seven-inch Havana cigar. This year Hernandez Pia is supplying two strings of bulls only for the bullfighting season: one for the posh San Isidro festival in Madrid, the other for the three-day bullfighting festival at Ceret, near Perpignan in the south of France. We are in the front row at the Ceret shindig.
Bull number two comes thundering into the ring. Tasquero he's called. He's an absolute beauty — black, and simply radiating bullness. A murmur of approval from the crowd — then absorbed silence as the capemen get to work. The thud-thudding of Tasquero's hooves in the sand echoes from the circular wooden barrier that separates him from us.
But instead of rushing confidently around the ring and charging anything that moves, Tasquero stops and looks around him, taking stock of his situation. The capemen flick the pink serge at him to get him on the move, but he's not tempted. He won't charge. He seems to think he's a paying member of the audience.
My companions speculate learnedly about the bull's state of mind. Is he a manso, they wonder? (A manso is a bull that lacks candour; is less than fearless.) 'Half manso,' judges the bloodstock agent.
'Barmy,' asserts one of the racehorse trainers. Several among the hypercritical, hyperintelligent, often quite wrong (it seems to me) French crowd start booing the bull. They are roundly shushed by others who think the judgment too hasty. A trumpet blares and in comes the mounted picador.
My horseracing friends are well informed about the picadors' horses here at Ceret. The man in charge of horses at Ceret has bred a smaller than usual picadors' horse, apparently, an innovation beginning to catch on in Spain. Furthermore, he has redesigned the protective padding to make it lighter but no less durable. All in all, they say, this makes for an altogether more manoeuvrable horse than the usual cart horses traditionally employed by Spanish picadors.
I'm expressing my admiration for such a sensible innovation in an otherwise intensely traditional affair, when Tasquero decides that here at last is a target worthy of his attention. From halfway across the ring he steams into the horse and does his utmost to kill it. Undeterred by the lance jabbing furiously into his back, and in a frenzy of upward hooking, he lifts horse and rider off the ground and smashes them against the barrier, 0 la la!
Off comes the picador, a fat bastard. The capemen get the bull away from the horse finally, and several pairs of willing hands heave the unwilling picador back on. But he's injured, or so he's making out. He's holding his side and grimacing like a big baby. So they let him take his horse to a quieter part of the ring and bring in picador number two.
Old Tasquero's having none of it. The moment he sees they've brought in another horse, he pins it up against the barrier and hooks that picador clean out of the saddle as well. Then he peels off and shoots across the ring to have another go at the first horse. 0 la la la la la! Fatty is too busy nursing his side and looking miserable to see it coming. He thinks he's hors de combat. The expression on his fat face as the bull piles into his horse is that of a ham actor in an early silent movie registering surprise. Huge cheers, Applause for the bull, who, 20 minutes later, and after much further ado, goes the way of all brave bulls and is dragged out of the ring by a team of festively decorated horses.
The next bull, called Venti Lado, not only hooks the picador off, he gets the horse on its back and gives it such a pasting we all think it's dead. The innovative picador horse breeder is so beside himself with worry he leaps into the ring and tries to haul the bull off his horse by pulling on its tail. An extraordinarily brave act, say the racehorse trainers, but I am horrified on behalf of the bull at the indignity of it. A few seconds later, however, the horse staggers to its feet, seemingly none the worse for wear.
'Fucking hell,' says one of the racehorse trainers after Venti Lado is eventually killed and dragged out, and we are waiting for the next one. 'This is turning out to be some corrida But back at the campsite afterwards, it was a point of view that le patron, who was also there, strongly disagrees with. 'Utz corrida catastrophe!' he wails. 'Un catastrophe terrible!'
Previous page
