Hemingway Adventure (1999) (12 page)

I look around me. A big clear sun beats down on the ring. Half the apprentices are practising their passes with the cape and half are clutching horns and racing at them. I’m struck by how absurd and how deadly serious it is at the same time.

In the dedication required bullfighting has overtones of medieval knights and chivalric orders, of ancient rules and disciplines. Of something almost monastic.

I thank Fabian and wish him well. I suppose a time will come when he will be hurt, does that worry him?

‘Oh, yes.’ He nods and smiles, ‘Oh, yes.’

I must say, understanding bullfighters requires dedication too. Now I have to find somewhere in Spain where I can see them in action.

A
tocha Station in Madrid is a rather wonderful combination of ancient and modern, achieved by building a completely new terminal without pulling down the old one.

The platforms are laid out beneath a superstructure of concrete columns, functional and practical and quite severe, while the old nineteenth-century station, cleaned and restored, now houses a tropical garden around which are seats and cafes, from which you can look up at the incongruous cloud of steam drifting from the jungle up to the roof.

We climb aboard a train for Valencia, following in the footsteps of Ernest and Hadley who left Madrid for Valencia in 1925 on their way back from Pamplona.

Hemingway knew there was a story to be written about what had gone on in Pamplona that year, but was torn between his need to write it and his need to see as many bullfights as possible. Valencia, where there was a
midsummer feria
(a festival with bullfights), seemed the ideal combination. Work in the morning and the
corrida
in the afternoon. And it worked.
The Sun Also Rises
was begun in Valencia in July 1925.

We head south-east towards the Mediterranean leaving behind the huge housing blocks of Madrid’s new suburbs and crossing the dry, parched plain of La Mancha. It stretches wide and flat and almost treeless to the horizon, marked by the outline of a range of mountains that never seems to get any closer. An occasional farm, drifting smoke, a gypsum plant, a grain store, a line of white-washed windmills, a castle on a hill, everything seems detached, distant, as if reluctant to be on this great exposed plain at all.

After three hours the line cuts down through the edge of the plateau and in amongst the mass of orange groves from which Valencia has made its money.

Valencia Norte is the loveliest, least rugged, least bombastic of stations. The way out takes you through a turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau concourse, across a brown and white chequered marble floor, beneath a ceiling of coffered wood and walls of multicoloured mosaic tiles to a low white exterior, decorated with stucco oranges and orange leaves.

The next thing I notice is a huge frankfurter driving by, passing a twenty-foot-high brightly coloured statue of a bare-breasted lady, and a long line of women and children in eighteenth-century costume walking behind a vigorous, if discordant band.

We have arrived at the time of year when Valencia goes crazy. The festival of
Fallas
. The time when, we are told ominously, nobody sleeps.

I
‘m woken by a series of sharp explosions in the street below. A salvo of fire crackers. Then another, then another. There is a moment’s calm and my eyes are gently closing when, with a short warning squeal, a pipe and drum band starts up below the window.

Downstairs on the way to breakfast I ask the hotel receptionist what is going on. She tells me, brightly, that the noise and the music are the work of
les despertas
, the waker-uppers, whose job it is to go round the city rousing those who might have defied all the odds and fallen asleep during the night.

‘They want you to go and see
their fallas,’
she explains.

She hands me a brochure called ‘Living
las Fallas’
, which she says will help me enjoy the festival. A quirkily translated introduction advises the visitor to ‘leave your prejudices and timid fears behind’ and to ‘accept human ridicule in an absurd world’.

Venturing out to accept ridicule I find a city out on the streets and not taking itself at all seriously. Crowds amble around inspecting the various colourful, rude, sexy, satirical papier mache effigies they
call fallas
, which are erected in squares and on street corners throughout the city by various neighbourhood groups. There are apparently seven hundred of these sculptures all over Valencia, and all will be set alight at midnight on the feast of San Jose, which is the day after tomorrow.

The origins of
Fallas
lie in the middle of the eighteenth century when the local carpenters would burn all their winter shavings, off-cuts and general rubbish in one big fire which they would sometimes decorate with a makeshift figure of some kind.

They’re a lot more complex and sophisticated nowadays, but the intention remains to poke fun, to be disrespectful and entertaining at the same time.

Hard by a handsome eighteenth-century church in the Plaza del Pilar rises a huge and curvaceous flapper girl surrounded by a grotesquely made-up Mae West stretched out on a couch, alongside beaded madames and crazed sax-players. Outside the central market is a looming likeness of Steven Spielberg aboard the
Titanic
, holding a film camera from which springs the
ET
bicycle.

Politics, the church and the media are popular targets for the designers. At
one falla
I notice a real life TV presenter being filmed in front of a grotesque and joyfully lewd caricature of a trouserless television presenter.

Just as I’m feeling rather thankful for my anonymity, a short fair-haired man hurrying by turns and stops and greets me cordially He says we’ve met before, at one of Graham Chapman’s parties in the early seventies.

His name is Robert Misik and he’s a Dutchman living and working in Valencia. He offers his help if there’s anything we want. There is, of course. Like tickets to one of the bullfights and a bullfighter who will agree to talk to us.

Robert barely blinks at this and, after a quick exchange of numbers, vanishes into the crowds who are now gathering two or three deep along the route of yet another procession. This one lasts several hours as women from the various
falla
groups carry flowers through the city to a forty-foot high wooden effigy of the Virgin Mary. Every offering of flowers is then handed up to a special team which arranges them into a giant floral-tapestry. It sounds awful but it is done with great style and as it seems to give at least half the entire female population of Valencia the chance to participate, it is also truly democratic.

This evening, over a very fine meal of crayfish and delicately cooked, zingily fresh
merluza
(which sounds so much more exotic than hake), Robert brings us the good news that one of the top matadors at this
year’s feria
has agreed to meet me early tomorrow morning, the day before his fight.

V
icente Barrera, grandson of Vicente Barrera the matador whom Hemingway takes to task for his killing technique in
Death in the Afternoon
, is, it goes without saying, slim and good-looking. These seem obligatory qualities for a bullfighter.

He’s also thirty years old, a couple of months older than my eldest son, which is considered, in his profession, to be getting on a bit. Everything about him is neat and restrained, from his taste for plain expensive clothes in autumnal colours to the formal but immaculate cut of his jet-black hair. He looks like a choirboy.

We meet in a very ordinary
meson
, a local bar with tiled walls and hams hanging from the ceiling.

There is a bit of a hiatus as our director, always a stickler for veracity, had been assured that
criadillas fritas
- fried bull’s testicles - are a speciality of the
meson
, and wants me to nibble one or two on camera as we talk. It turns out that, like the Monty Python cheese shop, they have lots of them normally but today the van broke down. Robert is out combing Valencia for fresh testicles.

Whilst we wait, Vicente, in a soft voice and with continual apologies for his English, tells me about his background. He only took up bullfighting six or seven years ago, and like Fabian in Madrid, against his father’s wishes. He had trained as a lawyer, though he adds, with a self-deprecating laugh, that it was lucky for all clients that he never practised. He is now among the top ten fighters in the country, appearing at something like a hundred
corridas
a year, in Spain, France and across the Atlantic, in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia.

Robert arrives, breathless, holding a paper bag. There are no bull’s testicles to be found so he has bought pig’s instead. The director approves and they are sent to the kitchen to be prepared, reappearing quite soon, sliced and fried and ready for the interview.

I ask Vicente why he became a bullfighter.

‘Next to being Pope, it’s the only thing,’ he smiles, but it isn’t entirely a joke.

‘It is the most important thing I can do with my life.’

‘There are many people who think that bullfighting is cruel.’

He turns aside a moment and when he turns back his politely courteous manner has slipped a bit.

‘What do people in an office in …’ He searches for a name, ‘… in New York, know about bulls?
We
know about them.
We
live with them.’

He points at a piece of cooked meat on display by the bar.

‘This animal … what is this animal?’

‘Cow?’

‘Cow, yes, a cow. A cow has six months. A bull has four years, living wild in the country.’ He turns again to the cooked cow. ‘Who is this animal? You don’t know. We know the father, the mother of the bull, we put the name of each one on the bull.’

Vicente is undergoing an almost Clark Kent-ish transformation as he warms to the theme.

Bullfighting, he says defiantly, is something that cannot be done without passion. Technique is nothing without passion. He grabs at his cashmere sweater as if wanting to tear out the heart beating beneath it and show me the passion inside.

‘You live your passion all of the day, you know. You don’t have holidays, you don’t have weekends, you don’t have family, you only have your passion and the
toro
and the fiesta and no more.’

‘Do you still have fear?’

He looks at me pityingly.

‘Of course! If they don’t have fear, they are crazy people! Matador is a person I think normally very intelligent and normal. A brave person is not someone who has no fear!’

I am not sure if this vehemence is the frustration of a highly educated, sensitive man continually forced to defend something at which he is particularly gifted or just a demonstration of the pride and controlled aggression which makes him able to do what he does.

All I know is that I would never describe anyone who stares a charging bull in the face two hundred times a year as normal.

But this is exactly how Vicente seems when the interview’s over. He returns to his soft-spoken, almost solemn politeness, shaking all our hands and inviting us to come and see him fight tomorrow, and to go backstage afterwards.

Whereupon he slides gracefully out into the street leaving me alone with a plate of pig’s testicles, by now greasy, congealed and ready for my close-ups.

T
his morning the pipe band and its attendant explosions passes, with scrupulous punctuality, at ten minutes past eight. This time I don’t take it lying down. I stagger to the window and peer through the curtain.

I suppose I had expected to see young children following the band like a Pied Piper, ebulliently scattering fireworks. In fact, the procession consists almost entirely of elderly men, one of whom pushes a supermarket trolley brimful of firecrackers which his two lugubrious companions light with their cigars and toss across the street.

This is the last day of
Fallas
, the culmination of a week’s festivities. Tonight, at midnight, the statues all over the city will be torched, though the largest one in the main square will not go up until an hour later. Vicente’s bullfight begins at five, so we ask the ever-enterprising Robert how we can best kill the time. He suggests more noise.

At two o’clock every afternoon during the festival there is an event known as the
mascleta
in which the three big pyrotechnic families of Valencia vie with each other to produce the most powerful explosive display, and as today is the last day of the last festival of the century, and the millennium, Robert reckons it will be one of the best.

He calls some friends who have an apartment over the square and they invite us to watch the performance from their balcony.

It is a perfect day, bright, cloudless with a dry, fresh breeze. An hour before the display is due to begin, the Plaza del Ayuntamiento is already impassable. The crowd, estimated at two to three hundred thousand, is kept behind barriers allowing access for the Red Cross emergency teams who occasionally dive in to retrieve someone overcome by the crush. In the centre of the square the men from the fireworks company work quietly away, checking the network of wires from which hang thousands of small packages of explosive, and loading up rows of mortars.