It's now bullfighting season, which means there are fights every weekend at Las Ventas, the beautiful Moorish style bullring which students have described to me as the Wembley of bullfighting.
Now, whether to go and see a bullfight or not is an ethical call you have to make for yourself really, but for me, living in Spain, it was something I wanted to experience. I don't like the idea of killing animals for sport, and it's little consolation that the bulls are well treated before and eaten after the fight, but it has such a rich tradition and important place in Spanish culture (for better or worse) that I thought I wanted to see it enough to justify supporting it with the €6.80 ticket price (for the cheapest seats in the house, at the top in the sun).
Stupidly, I didn't take my camera but got my friend to take some on his iphone (you won't see anything too gory by clicking on these pictures by the way). The bullring really is quite a spectacle, and holds upto 25,000, although it was fairly empty on the more expensive shady side when we went. First of all, all the people involved from the toreadors (they don't actually say 'matador' in Spanish) right down to the groundsmen parade around the ring, including horsemen riding heavily armoured horses. Why were the riders wearing metal shoes, we naively wondered? And why were the horses blindfolded?
After the pomp, the band plays a little intro and in charges a lively looking bull. They are impressive animals, big, heavy and muscular, and when running at speed they look like they have enormous momentum. The first 'act' involves about four guys with pink capes which they wave around to tease the bull towards them before hiding behind a small section of fence on the edge of the area. The bull, utterly stumped by this, then stands there looking baffled until it's attention is caught by more flapping of pink across the arena. All this was seeming quite fun, playful and harmless until they waved it over to where one of the horsemen was waiting. Not knowing what to expect, we gasped as the bull charged into and attempted to gore the horse while the rider (out of the bulls reach apart from his metal-clad feet) fended it off with a spear, stuck inbetween the bulls shoulder blades. After having a go at the astonishingly calm horse for a few minutes the bull finally retreats at which point the next act begins. The pink caped fellas return and get the bull to charge their capes before whipping them out of the way, while two others collect barbed spikes covered in ribbons from the side of the arena. These two then have the brave task of running up to the bull, which is now mad as hell, and stabbing the spikes into its back where they stick.After a few more minutes of this, the band play another major-note, minor-note flourish and the main toreador steps into the centre ring with a bow and places his hat on the floor. He is now, for the first time one-on-one with the bull which is by now bleeding quite heavily. He makes a show of cajoling and shouting at the bull and uses his red cape to make it charge past him. In the first fight we watched, the toreador got into some difficulty, and at one point lost his cape, right in the middle. Suddenly he wasn't so clever and the bull caught him slightly on the leg before the pink capes arrived to distract it away. It's a crazy rush of emotions that fly through your head when that happens. Part of you is sort of cheering on the poor bull but at the same time you suddenly realise that that's a real person down there and you might be about to see them die or get seriously injured.
After the toreador had been restored with his cape and sword and a bit more of the luring with the cape, he stood facing the bull and adopted a different stance with the sword poised above his head. With intense concentration, he took a couple of hip-thrusting steps to the side and took a leap forward, plunging the sword into the bulls back. The idea is to make a clean kill through the heart, but this guy didn't quite manage it first time and had to try again. The crowd do not like this and boo loudly. On the second attempt the sword went in right to the hilt and the pink capes come out and surround the bull making it twist and turn so that the sword in its torso does more damage. Within 30 seconds, the bull drops to its knees and then quickly keels over before a pink cape comes and brains it with a knife just to be sure. At this point a carriage pulled by three mules comes on, ropes are attached and the heavy corpse is dragged ignomiously out of the arena to the cracking of the mule drivers whip. It's horrific, and we were all pretty horrified by what we'd just seen. It's brutal and bullying, unfair and unbalanced. A tradition and cultural curio it may be, but an art form? I don't see it. I don't quite get why killing it is necessary at all. Anyway, soon enough another bull charged into the arena looking fresh and chipper, completely oblivious to the bloody smear left across the floor by the last one being dragged out. Although slightly unpredictable, the fights run in a very similar way, and what was shocking was how quickly the four of us became desensitised to it. The second we took much more lightly, the third we watched with detachment, and during the fourth we were talking about something else while watching it. After that we decided that we'd seen enough and left.
All in all, I wouldn't go again but I'm glad I went. It's pretty horrible and more than a little cruel but it's perhaps worth suspending your morals to have the experience. It's a very Spanish thing, and combines a lot of attributes that you notice in general in Spain. The lack of political correctness, the disregard for health and safety, the red bloodedness. Curious about what people thought, I set it as a debate topic in my classes last week and heard a lot of different and interesting views on it: there are other forms that don't involve killing the bull (Portuguese), the bull has to be killed to test it's courage (a 'good bull' apparently gets braver when wounded), it should be banned outright, it's no worse than battery farming and so on. The most common view, however, was more or less 'It's not for me but it's part of Spanish culture and I wouldn't ban it'. It's a prickly subject though, and I stopped using it after the debate got quite heated in one class between two for banning and one enthusiast.
So there you go, that was my experience of it. You'll have to decide for yourself whether you want to go or not.
Anyway, we also did do some less bloody activities, including going boating on the lake at Retiro, which is well worth the €4.50 for 45 minutes, and eating and drinking a lot, with a great afternoon on a hidden little terrace in Tirso de Molina. I'm going to write more about bars in the next post unless something comes up so I'll leave our nightime adventures for there.
I cycled past a Partido Populare (right wing opposition party) rally today down by the river. There's some elections coming up (I think local but I'm not sure) and there are PP posters everywhere, but not many PSOE (socialist government) ones. The PP are currently in power in the Communidad de Madrid and are responsible for the river regeneration project and were using the opportunity to show it off with a tightly co-ordinated gathering where the entire crowd were bizarrely wearing purple cowboy hats. The people standing around were noticeably better dressed than the usual crowd by the river (all dresses and blazers), and it's pretty clear who their key constituency is. I stopped to listen to one of the speeches for a while and was surprised at how much I could understand. A large part of this, though, I realised halfway through, was that it sounded like exactly the same kind of annodyne political-speak you hear British politicians spouting. Speaking of which, I didn't sort out my postal vote in time, and thus didn't get to vote in the council elections or referendum on Thursday. Not that it would have made any difference as people bafflingly voted for less choice in the referendum. Sigh.
Word of the day: cambio - change (much used in the PP speech)
