The blood on their hands
Bullfighting may be brutal, but at least it’s honest about who we are
hree months ago, I
was sitting in the Las
Ventas stadium in
Madrid, waiting for a bullfight to begin. It was a Sunday evening and I was sipping a whiskey and water that I had bought off a vendor who called it “ weekie” and had a grey handlebar moustache. My arm was in a sling — I had broken it two weeks earlier. When the matadors walked out to parade the bullring and salute el presidente, they too wore what appeared to be slings, but were in fact their capes folded intricately around their cocked right arms. They doffed their black braided caps and bowed. The shining trumpets signalled from a patch of band on the opposite side of the stadium, the sound at once jaunty and portentous.
I had been to a bullfight the summer before in Pamplona and appreciated the blatant honesty of the proceedings — not a euphemistic turning away, but the acknowledgment of blood lust as an aspect of the human psyche. A matador had been gored. One of his testicles was caught on camera flying through the air above him. It was terrible and compelling. A friend said it was the last time she would go to a bullfight, while I simply felt more intrigued by the whole sport. By and large, the bulls do not stand a chance against the onslaught of picadors, banderillos and, finally, the matador himself. However, none of these roles is without risk. I once saw a picador trapped underneath his horse after it was knocked over by a bull that was bearing down on it, horns jabbed and locked into the quilted mattress around the horse’s ribs. He was pinned for several minutes.
I remember thinking how the spectacle was a healthy reminder that killing is a part of eating meat. The bulls have a good life until they enter the ring — downright pampered. After
Ttheir deaths, they are slaughtered immediately and every last bit of them is trucked out of the stadium to restaurants around the city. A few days earlier I had ordered bull’s tail at a restaurant on the Plaza Santa Ana. The waiters were fussing over a man at a table next to ours. The man was small, elegant and lightfooted as a heron. “ He’s a famous matador,” my friend said. “ He comes from a poor family in the Basque country, but he’s a celebrity in Madrid.” When the bulls are killed, four high- spirited mules drag them to an abattoir located on the premises. During a bathroom break between bullfights, I found myself watching a butcher sling a bull up by the tail with an industrial- sized hook. The bull rose up like the Titanic on a slow hydraulic winch. The butcher sawed the head off and slung it across the floor to be tagged and labelled, along with the innards: heart and liver. Then he peeled the hide off like a heavy canvas sail. The butcher used a power saw, knives and axes. In under eight minutes, the bull had been reduced to manageable blocks of wet, red meat. What a lesson. I had never seen an animal that size butchered. I was standing on a trail of bull’s blood beside a father and his two young sons. This was a good lesson for them to learn, too, I thought. It showed the source, the impressive bulk and hot life still steaming up from the ground. The boys’ solemn quietude gave me hope that a kind of respect was being learned, some atavistic value system reinforced. Look, boys, this is what we live off. It all comes from the earth. It was one life being offered up for another: a sacrifice. And watching, it seemed like paying homage, because you couldn’t help but be impressed. Between bullfights a man in a red blazer and navy pants with a red stripe down the outside seam would come out like a circus ringmaster to announce the stats on the next bull: its pedigree, its weight, its name. He held these facts aloft on a board fastened to a pole. He reminded me of the bikini- clad ladies between fights at a boxing ring. At one point, another man came out to re- chalk the inner circle drawn onto the sandy floor of the bullring. It made me think of a baseball diamond and how different things are in America. I wondered if there wasn’t some kind of analogy here: the matador as the pitcher, the bull as the lone batter — the individual against the mob. Only in baseball, nobody gets hurt. North Americans: the stadium was littered with them. Tourists like myself. If they weren’t too outraged to attend in the first place, they were here for the catharsis of a real blood sport, something we don’t have much of in North America. With the exception, perhaps, of professional boxing and the fights that have become standard fare at an ice hockey game, we don’t approve of brutality. Not in a public, ritualized performance, and certainly not involving animals. Because animals are innocent — though we still consume their flesh at an astonishing rate. How squeamish North American culture has become and yet how violent it still is. I can’t help but feel a certain hypocrisy at work. It’s almost as if, influenced by the idealism of the puritans, we would like to appear better than we are. But is there a connection between this bombastic piety and the quiet proliferation of our worst tendencies? And what purpose could a bona fide blood sport like bullfighting serve? What I find so refreshing about bullfighting is how a blunt truth is at work. There is blood and there is death. Nobody is trying to convince you otherwise. And the whole spectacle provides you with an opportunity to analyze your own relationship to those two things. To be honest, I felt excitement at the matador’s risk. I felt a primal desire to see more gore, and when I did, as in the case of the matador who lost a testicle, it was wonderful and awful at the same time. I felt the urge to witness the matador’s pain at the same time as my chagrin at having that desire. I didn’t really, in the end, wish that pain on him. But whatever impulse I may have to witness the pain of another human being was stimulated, examined and deflated in a vicarious way. This is the purpose of catharsis. The ancient Greeks understood the benefit of this exercise. The death of the bull is always tragic. You see how blameless the bull is, how innocent and, in this respect, how superior to the human being. Its behaviour at times is heartbreaking. How did I get here, you see the bull ask himself. All he knows is that he must protect himself. When the matador has done his work, the other bullfighters come out to assist in the bull’s demise, like inverted paramedics. They flash their fuchsia capes to make the bull wag its head from side to side, thus tricking the animal into shredding its own innards with the sword shoved to the hilt between its shoulder blades. The matador serves the death blow with a small knife, severing the nerves at the base of the skull. When the bull finally slumps lifeless to the ground, it is the end of something big. It is momentous. It has resonance. It is both literal and metaphoric. However, the new Spanish generation is becoming squeamish, too. They would prefer to disavow their own brutal traditions. The bullfight in Madrid was badly attended.
I feel sorry for the matadors, seeking their glory at such high expense to a dwindling crowd of mainly old people. Their way of life is dying out, but the youth of Spain no longer want to be associated with an outmoded blood sport. They, too, have entered the age in which it is not okay to club a seal, but it is okay to bomb Iraq. But these are not brave politics; they are the politics of squeamishness. And squeamishness has so much more in common with sentimentality than it does with compassion.