Plus ça change...

Sitting in a cafe yesterday I saw once again scenes from Pamplona on the television. In the midst of a crowd of scared looking young men in white t-shirts and red neckerchiefs you could see the enormous head of a wild-eyed bull, probably as scared as the young men. Nobody, neither bull nor men, seemed able to move. And then there was a surge and the bull clambered over the young men and into the bull ring. It transpired that the bulls had run quickly, more quickly than usual, through the streets of Pamplona. At the entrance to the bull ring was a crowd of “mozos”, the young men in white and red. Suddenly the bulls arrived and the mozos were blocking the entrance. Chaos ensued! 

Now, we sometimes get the impression that this bull running business, the San Fermines, is just a Pamplona thing but I have my doubts. That may be the case now, although I suspect that there are other places doing their own small thing, but I think it was more general in the past. Pamplona is just the place where it has become a huge international tourist attraction. 

I am currently reading a book by someone called Max Aub, an Italian by birth, I think, who lived and wrote in Spain. His book, Campo Cerrado, tells the story of Rafael López Serrador, a young man born early in the 20th century in a small town in the Valencia region and, so far as I have read, his involvement in various left wing groups in Barcelona. 

The interesting thing from the bull running point of view is that he describes the “Fiestas de Septiembre” in the small town of his childhood. For a week the main square became a bull ring and young bulls were run through the streets of the town. Those who had money and influence watched proceedings from balconies on upper floors; marriageable daughters, “las hijas en edad de merecer”, were incidentally shown off to potential suitors from appropriate families. Lesser mortals got to watch things from behind barriers at ground level. People came from outlying districts and made a holiday of it all. 

 One of the highlights of the fiesta is the “toro de fuego”, the fire bull. A fierce old bull with magnificent horns – the star of many a fiesta in the area, taken from place to place by his owner, supporting my idea that this was a common event – has tar-soaked rags tied to his horns. These are set alight and the beast is set free, late in the evening on probably the last night of the fiesta. Trying, no doubt, to escape from the flames, he charges through the streets of the town, making the whitewashed walls glow a rosy red that can be seen fifty yards ahead. 

He finishes his run in the bull ring / town square. Exhausted, the fire of his horns less fierce now, he stands in a corner and the “brave” men of the town come out to taunt him. Our hero, Rafael, fantasises that the bull will turn on his tormentors and destroy them, knock down the walls of the town and cause mayhem, but it doesn’t happen. 

I’ve heard of this “toro de fuego” tradition before, but done with fireworks tied to the bull's horns. Nowadays, of course, that kind of thing can’t happen, mainly because animal rights groups protest about it. However, the other day I saw a photo of a “toro de fuego” in Pamplona. This was a mock-up bull’s head attached to a kind of wheelbarrow, the sort of thing that is used in training sessions for young would-be toreros, but this time with fireworks attached to the horns and rushed through the streets by a man who presumably wasn’t afraid of fire. Old traditions don’t die; they just evolve. 

Finally, something for my friend Colin who remarked recently in his blog about the South American Spanish use of the prefix “re” as a superlative for adjectives, as opposed to the Iberian Spanish suffix “ísimo”, making a very pretty girl “re-guapa” rather than “guapísima”. Well, in Max Aub’s book I came across a description of farm workers returning from the fields and commenting on the visiting holiday-makers staring goggle-eyed at the bulls in the field down by the river. One of them remarked, “¡Paece que nunca hayan visto animales, re-Diós!” – “You’d think they’d never seen animals, by bloody God!”