Memories of summers spent in Seville, Jerez, and Cadiz with my family as a young child remain to this day. The complex fragrances, of Jasmine, Sherry, and tobacco curl up into my nostrils. No matter how soft the scents, the scene of my sense memories is equally harsh and bloodcurdling, when I recall La Corrida—The bullfight.

No one ever made apologies for the ancient tradition, or attempted to paint the fighters, Los Torero as anything less than brave. Not my family, not the spectators housed in the ring. No one. I would close my eyes, a young girl sitting mere feet away from the dance floor and hear the rumble and grunts of a nine hundred pound bull charging towards an equally young toreador at fifty miles per hour. My Uncle Manolo Manzorro a renowned painter and Art Professor at the University of Seville would laughingly beg me to keep my eyes open:

“Ana, you’ve been an American child for too long! These are your roots and they are as old as Roman times. Don’t ever apologize for it. Never forget!” Many years later, I still have to brace myself for the pageantry, tragedy, and guilt of what I knew was to come.

In October of 2010 I visited my family in Madrid and flatly refused to attend the family to their favorite weekend tradition. My uncle challenged me once again: “Who are you to judge? Who are you to judge something that’s happened since before Christ? Who are you to judge the beauty and death of this? Would you rather us hit the bull between the eyes and treat our bulls like they do with American Cattle? Who are you?” He paused, and then added, flippantly: “Choose what you believe in with conviction. Not because a cosmopolitan PETA Organizer came to your University and told you it was bad and that you’re breaking the rules.”

I found myself walking arm in arm with my uncle down the Avenidas de Americas, the most direct route to the Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas.  In 2004, Barcelona banned bullfights. But Barcelona is not Seville and it is certainly not Madrid. The bullfight is as ingrained in my personal history, the answer to my uncle’s question: who I am, as the jasmine that grows in these cities of my family. It is the symbol of an ancient culture and tradition, steeped in pride and pageantry—all without apology.

By Ana Lola Roman

By Natalie Renée Fasano

I attended my first and only bullfight at Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas in the fall of 2005.  I was living in Grenoble at the time, a junior in college with friends scattered throughout Western Europe purportedly studying abroad. I arrived in Madrid during siesta hours, the streets were completely barren of any traffic save those walking home, locking up shop on their way to sleep. In the silence that surrounded, my lovely hostess and high school friend, Erin, informed me of our weekend itinerary. She had bought me a ticket to the corrida as part of a university sponsored, cultural day out.  Sure, why not.

One of my favorite books as a child was The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, illustrated by Robert Lawson.  Ferdinand is a peaceful bull, more prone to sit beneath the cork trees and smell the flowers than try like the others to impress the matadors from Madrid. One day, Ferdinand is stung by a bee and is transported into a fit of painful rage. A visiting matador is impressed, and takes his reluctant bull to the corrida:

“What a day it was! Flags were flying, bands were playing…and all the lovely ladies had flowers in their hair…First came the Banderilleros with long sharp pins with ribbons on them to stick in the bull and make him mad. Next came the Picadores who rode skinny horses and they had long spears to stick in the bull and make him madder. Then came the Matador, the proudest of all—he thought he was very handsome, and bowed to the ladies. He had a red cape and a sword and was supposed to stick the bull last of all. Then came the bull, and you know who that was don’t you? —FERDINAND.”

We walked to the bullfight the following afternoon, down a deserted sloping street dusted with fallen leaves and outlined in a steely chain link fence. As we came nearer to the stadium, a dull hum could be heard in the distance. It soon became was a roar. The pomp that surrounds the Spanish bullfight is awe-inspiring, and a bit frightening.  The eruptions of  incessant chatter, the stomping and whistling of the crowd lay in stark contrast to my experience with silence upon arrival, or Ferdinand’s beneath his cork tree. My understanding of the bullfight was limited to children’s literature; I did not know what to expect, though I felt guiltily excited at the prospect of seeing a fight to the death.  Blood, gore.  And all of it real.  Mine was a superficial and distanced excitement; I was wholly unprepared for what was to come. 

A bullfight begins with a test of the bull’s mettle. With the first prick of the Banderilleros’ spear, blood begins to flow across his broad back.  If the crowd deems him worthy of a fight, the picadors are summoned to further enrage. Mounted on armor-clad horses (before 1928, the horses were bare) and equipped with long pointed lances, they dance around their quarry awaiting the inevitable charge.  A particularly skittish horse rears, paralyzed with fear. The bull senses its weakness and charges, violently knocking it to the ground and unseating his mount. The crowd jeers the picador’s foolishness, showering their applause upon the worthy bull. They await the matador, and the final confrontation.  The poor picador is forgotten.

The bullfight is a violent engagement between man and animal, but it is not the product of blind blood lust.  The tradition of honorable death is rooted in the fight, and the crowd treats a worthy bull with reverence.  They do not cheer a drawn out death, but one’s honorable confrontation with it.  There is no question of whether the bull will die or not; it is almost always killed. Ferdinand’s pardon at the end of the children’s book is not the true fate of the bull.  He most probably would have been booed by the crowd for his unwillingness to fight and led from the ring in humility—surrounded by bell-clad cows—to be killed behind closed doors. Life for the bull, and possibly for his oppressors, begins and ends in the ring.  The spectacle of life and one’s ultimate confrontation with death is the crux of this ghastly romance, between the matador and his bull.

Rivulets of blood drip from the bull’s heaving chest, at times erupting from deep wounds unsettled by the violence of the charge.  Its life is taken most honorably when a matador is able to land the perfect blow.  He stands still, pointing his muleta (sword) directly at the bull, eyeing the precise point between the shoulder blades that harbors the heart.

I still love the story of Ferdinand and its message of the triumph—of peace over brutish violence. In the well-fought match, however, there is nothing of whimpering prevarication in either the matador or the bull.   I do not pretend to speak for the bull, but only convey what I felt in witnessing a beautifully executed match.  I saw acknowledgement in both, a mutual understanding that consumed them to lustful distraction of anything (or anyone) else but the task at hand—to live.

I will always remember the haunting beauty of the well-won fight.  The glistening of blood and golden threading in the twilight, the smell of dust settling and surrounding the feet of the precise matador, and the harrowing sound of the bull’s final, heaving breath. I recall the silhouette of a man bending over a blackened body, removing a sword from its a broad back as a lover and walking away, silently, to ear splitting applause from above.   

The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf can be found here

(Source: goettlicher-photo.com)