Red flags at breakfast

Posted on 18 June 2018

Our columnist finds that fantasies of heroism can easily be gored.

Photo by Karan Jain.

I’m no fan of bullfighting. I’ve never been to a bullfight but I don’t like the idea of them. I saw one once on a fuzzy television in a hotel room in Yemen, and I’d been long enough without television that I would have watched toenails growing if that’s all that was on, but I turned it off after 10 minutes. It seemed cruel and cowardly and I didn’t see the point.

I was recently in Ronda in Spain and I met an old bull fighter at a sidewalk cafe. He had a cane and a heavy limp, and he kept holding his hip and sighing. He spoke no English but his niece did. She told me about going to watch him when she was small, how afraid she was when he was in the ring, how magni cent he seemed – so much larger than life. It didn’t seem likely. Men get smaller with age but he couldn’t have been much to start with. The knife and fork looked enormous in his hands. He had feet like teacups. He waved a bread roll and yelled something in Spanish.

‘The worst day of his life,’ his niece translated, ‘was the day of the accident. His career ended that day.’

I didn’t feel like his war stories. I felt like a walk. Just down the road was his old place of work. The Ronda bullring (pictured above) is the oldest in Spain, which I assume means the oldest in the world. It’s low and blank and round, a faded Spanish yellow. Bull fighting season had just ended but members of the public could take an unsupervised tour of the place and wander about unhindered.

It was just before closing time, so I had the place to myself. Inside, I walked through a pair of wooden gates and found myself on the pale, swept sand of the bullring itself. The sun was setting with an Iberian golden light and I was startled to feel a sudden quickening of my pulse, a trembling in my muscles.

The place was much smaller than I had imagined. The stands were steep and close to the sand. It was intimate. I stood in the very centre and imagined the crowd, the thunder of hooves. In my nostrils was suddenly a strange metal smell. I’ve been in empty boxing rings before, and in places where terrible crimes have been committed, but I’ve never felt such a sudden density of the air, such palpable presence. I still didn’t understand the appeal of bull fighting but I could feel it: a visceral quickening, a shameful, thrilling animal excitement.

I hurried back to the cafe, hoping to catch the man and his niece. I wanted to hear what it was like. I wanted to know about the accident. Had he been careless? Had the bull been quick or smart? Did the horn take his hip? Had the crowd roared at the sight of his blood?

They were still there but he was tired now, it was time for a nap. I told him how much the bullring had affected me and he nodded and shrugged. I asked him to tell me some stories before he went. He wasn’t keen until I asked about the worst day of his life, the day he was injured.

‘It was a day like today,’ his niece translated. ‘Hot and bright.’

I could picture it: the colours, the sound.

‘He was very hungry and wanted some breakfast.’

This was an unexpected detail.

‘He was crossing the road to the cafe and didn’t see the motorbike.’

Wait, I said. Motorbike? What about the bull? No, she said, he broke his hip when a boy on a motorbike rode into him. He was coming the wrong way down the street.

The old man yelled something and thumped his  st on the table.

‘Motorbikes should be banned,’ his niece translated. ‘They are very dangerous.’

 

This story appears in the July 2018 issue of Getaway magazine.

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