Long life
Blood sports
Nigel Nicolson
Until last week I had never seen a bull- fight, and then I watched it only on televi- sion, in a hotel in Spain. They say that the experience is less dreadful in the actual arena because one is more remote from the bloodshed and shares something of the emotion of the crowd. Seeing it alone and in close-up I found it horrifying. The corrida did not follow the ritual that I had expected from reading Hemingway. There was no prodding of the bull with pikes, no padded horses, no climax with the sword. After the parade, a solitary horse- man planted the banderillas into the bull's neck, first singly, then in pairs, prancing
around the stupefied beast and raising his hat to invite applause for every successful strike. Then there was a business with scar- let capes which seemed to me a mere teas- ing of the bull, whose flanks were now streaming with blood like spilled paint.
I waited for the coup de grace, but there was none. A team of six youths advanced in file, on foot and without weapons, shouting something provocative, and the bull met them in a lumbering gallop that skewered the first four and flung them to the ground, where the enraged beast turned on them with horns flailing like scimitars. I do not think that any were killed, but as they were carried off the cameras zoomed in on their ghastly wounds. The bull was then despatched, as far as I could observe with daggers, and its carcass hauled off by a pair of mules.
As this was my first bullfight, I must cer- tainly have missed its subtleties, apart from the gyrations of horse and rider at the start. The rest of it seemed to me grotesque. Afi- cionados say that there is beauty in match- ing human agility against brute strength, Ariel against Caliban, and that it is more like a ballet than a fight, but while I was stirred by the courage of the young men who expected, indeed invited, that brutal charge, it was horrible to watch.
Spaniards have a stoical indifference to suffering and death which we lost some- where in the 17th century. The purpose of the bullfight, they say, is not to inflict pain but to witness the heroism of man and beast in conflict. They claim that we are hypocritical in denouncing it, for the hunt- ing of stags and foxes is just as cruel. I believe this to be a false analogy, since in hunting, the victim does have some chance of escape, and its death is witnessed by very few, not by yelling thousands. The true analogy, I contend, is professional boxing.
A century hence people will think it extraordinary that we tolerated for so long the spectacle of two half-naked men attempting to knock each other senseless. Though we dignify boxing by calling it an art and trivialise it as a 'sport', there is little art or sport about it when for most of the bout the boxers are grappling each other in an ungainly maul, their faces contorted by effort, fear and pain. That most champions in the heavier weights are black cannot do much good to race relations: it suggests a breed of gladiators.
Apart from the permanent injury they may do to each other, there is the awful- ness of the spectacle, and of its spectators — including women, the tricoteuses of the ringside — who scream for more action by the fighters or sit comfortably at home lis- tening to Harry Carpenter's ghoulish com- mentaries on their anguish. We pride ourselves on having eliminated duelling from our society. But that was a private affair. What I deplore in both bullfighting and boxing is the repulsiveness of paying money to watch men and animals suffer abominably at each other's hands.
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