Hemingway Adventure (1999) (13 page)

Our kind host Jose Luis Soler, an architect, offers us a drink and a piece of sliced sausage and advises us to keep our mouths open during the display as it takes the strain off the eardrums. And don’t use earplugs, let the blast through.

Three shells fired high into the air signal the start of the onslaught. The fuses are ignited, releasing a thunderous wall of sound which rolls towards us, the speed of the explosions carefully orchestrated to vary the pace whilst building up a counterpoint of overlapping echoes. One huge report follows another, the blasts hurling shock-waves across the square, strong enough to send my jacket flapping. The pace accelerates as the fire sprints along the wires of thunderflashes, sending up a ripping, shattering din, and when you think you can take no more, the big mortars start to blow with such force that you can only hang on and let it thrill and terrify. A final, ferocious amalgamation of sound, fed by thunderous explosions on the ground and soaring shell-bursts in the air, builds to a relentless, ear-splitting cacophony, an unbelievably tremendous roar, which, with one last mighty salvo, stops as suddenly as it began. Which was, according to my watch, five minutes and eight seconds ago.

For a fragment of time complete silence falls, then with a great cry, the crowd spills through the barriers and races across to the fence to salute the pyrotechnic team, who emerge like mythological heroes from the shroud of white smoke they have created.

Ticket-touts are out at Valencia’s graceful brick bullring long before this afternoon’s fight begins and the souvenir-stalls are doing brisk business selling scarves, packs of cards, baseball hats, T-shirts and key-rings bearing likenesses of the stars of the circuit, though I notice a range of car-window ornaments offers Jesus and General Franco as well.

I hire my cushion and search out my seat on the bank of long concrete terraces. There is a mix-up however and the seat is already taken. Then, just as I’m desperate, fame comes to the rescue. No sooner am I identified as the killer of small dogs in
A Fish Called Wanda
than I cease to be a troublemaker and am treated most cordially by all. The man whose seat it is introduces himself as Paco and orders his wife and friends to squeeze up and make room for me.

Paco, in a smart grey lightweight suit, looks like a late-middle-aged businessman. Like his wife and friends, he seems to be dressed more for the opera than the bullring.

Each of the three matadors fights two of the six bulls, and Vicente’s first bull is the third of the afternoon, indicated as weighing 600 kilos and hurtling into the ring like a tank on steroids. Vicente, in black hat, blue and gold suit of lights and pink stockings, mops his brow with a towel before going forward.

The most unpleasant face of bullfighting, in which the bull is drawn away to charge a heavily armoured horse (whose vocal cords have been cut to prevent it whinnying) takes longer than usual and the crowd don’t like it.

Vicente draws the bull away with his cape and fights close and is generally thought to have done well.

The fifth bull is fought very stylishly and the matador, Enrique Ponce, has the crowd on its feet in appreciation. He is awarded two ears by the judges, an acknowledgement of great skills.

This is a hard act to follow, and as the sun moves off the stadium and a brisk night chill comes on, Vicente appears to be coping well. The music plays a
paso doble
for him, as it does when particularly artistic moves are executed, but when it comes to the kill, things go wrong. This is the most dangerous moment for the bullfighter, for, although his bull is weak, he must at this point take his eyes off it and hope to bend himself and his killing sword over the still lethal horns to deliver the
coup de grace
. Vicente has to take three serious risks before he can dispatch the bull. The crowd is unappreciative.

When Robert and I get to Vicente’s minibus after the fight, the atmosphere is not good. Vicente is angry with his
cuadrilla
- his support team in the ring - for not preparing the last bull properly. In between tearing them off a strip he has to switch on a flashing smile for the fans thronging the van.

When eventually we manoeuvre our way through the crowds and reach the hotel, there are more adoring fans waiting for photographs, autographs and handshakes. He deals with it all very patiently and delivers grave, long-suffering smiles.

Back in his room his real feelings surface. He is angry at the way things went and is clearly regretting his promise of an interview.

He disappears to the bathroom, leaving us with his valet, a small dark gnome-like older man with very black hair and thick eyebrows who is given to much shaking of the head and muttering. Robert whispers to me.

‘He’s saying this is very irregular.’

Vicente reappears. There is still no sign of our crew. He smiles thinly and stands beside a small table on which I notice pictures of the saints and the Virgin. I don’t like to ask right now, but Robert tells me later that it is a portable chapel, laid out by his dresser so that Vicente can pray before the fight. All bullfighters pray before a fight.

Vicente is completely preoccupied. His hands and body keep repeating the movements of a pass rather as a golfer might replay a putt that let him down.

A mobile phone rings. He looks up. It’s our film crew, calling to say their vehicle is stuck in traffic. Human traffic. The doorbell goes. A woman from Spanish television regards us anxiously. Did we know that Vicente had promised to appear on a live discussion programme in ten minutes’ time?

Vicente’s dresser shuts the door on her.

Vicente looks forlorn, well as forlorn as a bullfighter in a bejewelled suit worth $3000 can look. His face betrays the strain of a profession caught between the demands of ancient tradition and modern exploitation. As we shake hands he apologises. This weekend there is a lot of pressure on him. He is fighting again tomorrow and the night after in Alicante.

‘I’m playing with my life each night,’ he says, almost bitterly. And in his case it is probably true.

Five minutes to midnight in a small square in the heart of the old city. There isn’t room for that many people and those that are here are mainly local. They’re gathered around a tall, Disneyesque Aladdin, centrepiece of an Arabian Nights fantasy with prominent local politicians, nuns, and a bishop or two thrown in for good measure. It’s an elaborate and clever piece of work and those who created it are now busy making sure that they can destroy it just as cleverly. They move around the base of the figure poking an air-hole through here, laying a fuse there. One man is up a ladder at the back of the statue, sticking wires and paraffin bags up Aladdin’s backside.

The mood is serious and celebratory at the same time. I have the feeling that the general success of
Fallas
is considered more important than any single event. The groups compete with each other but only to make the whole festival better. Which is why this festival has been marked by high spirits without violence, drinking without fighting, noise without aggression. And tonight is perhaps the most precarious balancing act of all. Seven hundred bonfires are about to be lit across an urban area of a million people.

At midnight in our quiet square the local queen of the
Fallas
lights the fuse that starts the last act of this extraordinary festival. Lines of firecrackers and flame race towards Aladdin’s buttocks and other strategic flashpoints. For a while the figures prove resistant but gradually the flames take hold and the figures are stripped to their wooden frames and for a half-minute or more the surge of the fire is frighteningly intense.

We make our way towards the main square. Over the heads of the crowd by the market I can see Steven Spielberg’s glasses melting. At the end of one street fire licks round a Harlequin, at another, a Roman Emperor and several naked ladies are engulfed in flames.

It takes most of one hour to make our way the short distance to the main square. A figure of Gulliver fifty feet high towers over us and is duly ignited (this time via a main fuse which runs straight into his fly). As the final conflagration takes hold Gulliver’s head collapses, sending his rather soppy Hollywood-style grin crashing on to the street. The
bomberos
(firemen) spray the nearby palm trees as the flames leap and the heat intensifies and once again we hold our breath not knowing which way it will go.

T
wo-thirty in the morning on the streets of Valencia. The bulldozers and trucks are moving into the main square to remove the remains of Gulliver.

The brushes are revolving on a squadron of natty little cleaning vehicles. A line of orange-clad street-sweepers, with gleaming new brooms and shovels, stands ready to follow them.

Though the celebrations still go on, the party’s over. A sense of loss hangs in the smoke-shrouded air, a muted feeling of anti-climax, a sudden acknowledgement that the city of Valencia is dog-tired.

I know I shall miss being woken by
les despertas
, I shall miss being able to stroll round Spain’s third biggest city as if it were my own living-room, and when in the morning I hear the noise of a city returning to normal - the car alarms, the police sirens - I shall probably miss the explosions too.

There is something intoxicating and dangerous and reckless in the way the Spanish celebrate, which is what must have drawn Hemingway to their way of life. It is physical and hard and colourful and noisy and yet has a rare sense of historical continuity.

Throughout his adult life, with the exception of the darkest years of General Franco’s dictatorship, Hemingway kept coming back to Spain. In a drawer in the house in Ketchum, where he shot himself on 2 July 1961, were tickets to the Pamplona bullfights that were to begin a week later.

‘Who’s that girl?’ Early photos of young Ernest confuse visitors at his birthplace.

Ernest Hall, Sheffield-born grandfather of Ernest (with weapon), Ursula and Marcelline.