Today begins the Festival of San Fermin. At eight o'clock in Pamplona, the rockets went off and they opened the gates of the corrals letting six fighting bulls and six steers run the half mile through the slippery cobble streets to the bullring, the Plaza de Toros. The entire trip takes about three minutes. If you arrive with the bulls, you enter the bullring with them.
I did.
The moments before the bulls are released, we, donning our white shirts and red neck kerchiefs, gathered with the others at the statue of San Fermin, secured our newspapers, and had a shot of liquor with the rest of the crowd.
When the flares go off, a hush falls over the crowd and you hear the rumble of the coming bulls. Barricades line the streets, and to my surprise, people were climbing them to get into those masses assembled to watch. Often, those on the other side of the barricades try to push the would-be runners back into the street.
Then coming around the corner, you see the bulls and suddenly you wonder what the fuck you were thinking.
And you run.
But the bulls run faster, and suddenly you are among them. The idea is to touch a bull on the nose with the rolled up newspaper you are carrying. As you run, one of the big dangers are the runners in front of you. Many of them fall. You do not want to fall in the street for that is where people get trampled. Maybe they slip on the cobblestones, but it seemed that many were merely fainting, their legs buckling beneath them from fear. And so you must look back at the coming bulls and forward to avoid the bodies lying in the street.
I would like to tell you I hit a bull on the nose, but I can't. I hit one on the ass as it went by, though. And I continued running with them all the way to the bullring. I was among the runners who made it into the ring.
Along with two of my group, my dead ex-friend Brando and a six foot six 'roid boy I had known since he was a kid from the gym. At one point he weighed 290 pounds but was now a trimmed down 250. We had him psyched to grab a bull by the horns. And so. . . we waited. Once all the bulls and steers had been herded out of the rings into the waiting pens, the thick, heavy wooden doors, the Puerta de Toriles, are closed.
And the next event begins.
It was haunting, really, standing on the hard packed sand of the bullring made famous by Hemingway in "The Sun Also Rises," looking up into the stands filled with onlookers cheering (or jeering) those who had made it inside the ring.
Second act--the release of the vaquillas. These are young heifers, smaller than the bulls that would fight that afternoon, but much more agile. Men lined up before the Puerta de Toriles sitting on the ground before the heavy gates, waiting, and the arena went silent. When the gates opened, the first vaquilla rushed out and young men sprung up to avoid being trampled, but a few were not agile or quick enough and could only hope to avoid the heavy hooves. The crowd was now cheering and the game was to keep away from the horns. Those small horns were capped by pitones embolados, rounded balls that reduce the chances of puncturing the skin, but the heifers still knock runners to the ground or easily flipped them in the air, much to the crowd's delight.
I looked up and saw my gymroid buddy approaching the heifer. He had one horn in his hand and then the other. He had now grabbed the vaquilla by both horns, and the crowd went mad. The entire stadium was whistling as the big gymroid struggled to hold on. He was obviously trying to throw the "bull."
But the whistling was not encouragement which he didn't understand. Rather than cheering him on, they were denouncing him, and within seconds, two men in blue smocks ran up to him carrying large bamboo sticks and began beating him on the back and shoulders and legs until he let go.
And they took him away, out of the arena after threatening him with arrest, and put him out on the street.
Later we met our friends back at the Cafe Iruna in the main plaza for breakfast and a drink. We waited for the papers. Each morning during the festival, the local newspaper would produce extensive coverage of each encierro. The newspaper posted large printed pages outside its offices or in display cases where anyone could stop and read them. This was long before cell phones and the internet, so crowds would gather in front of the display cases, reading over one another's shoulders. People were looking to see whether friends had appeared in the photographs, find out who had been injured, and how serious the injuries were.
I had hoped for one thing--to be pictured running with the bulls. Rather, however, it was the big gymroid. I was pissed. In that picture, I was running right beside him. There I was, or rather, there was my shoulder and hand.
I was crestfallen. But yea, that big guy sure stood out in a crowd.
We had tickets to the bullfights that afternoon. Or we were supposed to. We'd paid for them, but typical of Brando, there were none, just as the rooms in the main square were a fiction, too. If we wanted to go to the bullfights that day, we'd have to purchase tickets from a local shyster with an overcharge. Of course, I did. The tickets were for sol y sombra, sun in the early fights, shade later on.
I won't detail the fight as many would not approve. I'll only report that we went with wine filled botas and were covered in wine from the antics of the crowd before the fights were finished.
There is more. . . much more. . . and maybe I'll tell it over the next week as the festival continues. I've been told that the festival has changed much from what it was then, that was more wild and free and violent and of the tradition that the Sun crowd would have recognized.
But for now, I must take care of mother.
The photo? Oh, just another kind of Running with the . . . .
I couldn't do this now. It makes me very sad.
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