While in Madrid I saw a bullfight.  Actually I saw three, the evening’s entertainment consisting of six fights, and my having left half way through.  I have been struggling to write anything about it, not out of some deep scarring but because I couldn’t quite reach the right metaphor, which just came to me on the plane from Barcelona.  It felt like watching an audience humouring an old prestidigitator, once great and still much-loved, but whose fingers no longer have the dexterity to amaze and confound as once they did.  All the old showmanship is still there, the twinkle and the flair, but they know how the trick works now, and he knows that they know.

 

Maybe it was me.  Maybe it was the knowledge gleaned at the museum in Seville.  Maybe it was the fact that the stadium was half empty, or that I was in Madrid not in the south, or that the only show in this off-season was the novillados, young bulls facing less experienced matadors.  Maybe if I saw a legendary bullfighter in full pomp, in the salad days of the [festival] in July, in the Plaza del Toros de Sevilla, facing down a giant of a bull six years bred and fed for the fight… maybe it would be different, maybe it would be truly gladiatorial. This though… it was a circus, and not the kind Pompey knew how to throw.

 

When the bull emerges, and however young these were they were still, y’know, bulls, he is an intimidating sight.  Almost five foot high at the shoulder, perhaps half a ton or more of stamping, charging, horned bepuzzled fury, he tears and kicks out into the stadium where half a dozen men with pink capes lure him this way and that, enraging and exhausting him.  But whatever the circumstances and however reasonable the provocation, there is something clownishly comic about a full grown man running away – as if given the order by Graham Chapman –  and as often as not that’s exactly what these men have to do, to retreat behind their walled hiding places around the circumference of the bullring.  Had they been wearing big shoes and a funny wig and being chased by a fire engine, they would have looked no less ridiculous and emasculated.

 

Once the animal has started to tire, the cavalry approaches.  The greatest danger of bullfighting in the past was to the horses, but these days they wear full armour to their shins, looking like a cross between the steed of a herald at Agincourt, and, well, a horse wrapped in a leather mattress.  The mounted bullfighter spears the bull behind the shoulders, wounding deeply with a barbed lance, while 500lb of confused and enraged beef tries ineffectually to gore horse and rider.

 

Thus bloodied, the bull  is engaged by the pink-cape-brigade again, the draw its attention while the bandilleros [I’m not sure that’s quite right but I’ll clean up this and other Spanish once I have better access to wifi] approach and dig and twist the coloured three-foot staves into his back.  I have no idea why they do this.  Certainly it amplifies the effect when the animal rears and tosses his head, the sticks bouncing from side to side.  And there is some skill in it to be sure – you have to get almost within an arm’s reach and stabbing and twisting in order to make them stick is not something at which they succeeded at each attempt.  Nonetheless, even beyond the work of the matador itself this seems the most barbaric, taunting, archaic moment.

 

The bull has therefore chased the capes, fought the horse and charged the bandilleros by the time the matador swaggers onto the field of play, so has pretty much run himself to a standstill.   The bullfighter’s art therefore, it seemed to me, was not as I had supposed in evading the charge,  but rather in provoking it.  By the third fight I had learned from the crowd’s cheers that  what impressed was getting the bull to go for the cape several times in quick succession: flick-shout-charge-sweep-turn…flick-shout-charge-sweep-turn….  After a few of these even the bull has started to cotton on to the futility of the exercise, so stands panting and immobile, while the matador puffs his pigeon chest to its fullest extent and in a daring feat of faux-bravado, turns his back on the bull to reposition himself a few paces away.  The crowd reacts every time, as if they can’t see the streams of drool running uncontrollably from the panting animal’s mouth; as if they can’t feel his impotent exhaustion in the sun.

 

This goes on for five minutes or so, the bull decreasingly willing to participate in the charade, until the sword is unsheathed and the dance becomes more intimate.  It would be tempting now to use words like “the moment of penetration”, but if this is about sex, it’s rape.  The swordstroke has to be deft, to give Mr Shiny Pants his due, and just because a large, angry bull’s horns are moving slowly towards your midsection, it may be fair to acknowledge that the critical word in that sentence is not “slowly”.   To count, the sword must go in beyond the shoulder, not easy to reach and it takes a few passes before the stroke is attempted.  If done well, it goes in to the hilt on the first attempt, if not it strikes bone and sticks out juddering and foolish until the bull throws it free.  Even when the killing stroke is cleanly delivered however,  the bull doesn’t die from it.  Pink capes re-emerge and work with the matador to coax a few more doomed half-charges from the animal before it is clearly incapable of moving any further.  Then the executioner leaps forward with a dagger and jabs deeply just behind the head, I think with the intention of severing the spine if the result is anything to go by.  The cleanest coup de grace I saw still lasted over two minutes (I timed it), from the moment only the hilt of the sword was left visible sticking out of the bull’s back, until it finally keeled over dramatically, four legs out rigidly parallel to the sand .  The worst involved perhaps twenty attempts by the executioner to deliver the killing stroke, to a baying crowd which was clearly incensed by the poor performance, rather than by the repeated hacking and slashing of the animal’s neck.

 

The fallen creature is tied by its horns to a team of horses which drags it from the stadium.  Everyone goes for a beer, and five minutes later another bull, peppered up and raring for the fight, bucks and kicks his way into the stadium.  An hour into the proceedings I concluded that if you’ve seen three bullfights, you’ve seen them all, and left before the second half.

 

Am I pleased I went?  The cheap ticket cost less than 5 euros, for the sun-exposed seat high above the action, so if this is unconscionable barbarism I’ve done relatively little to fund it.  It is a long-established practice, with what it’s adherents would call a noble heritage, and this trip is about the culture and the heritage of the places I’m visiting.  I can saw that I’ve seen a bullfight, and my children may well be prevented by law from ever being able to say such a thing.  But would that be a bad thing?

 

I don’t know.