The Drifters (73 page)

We looked at the sign with varying degrees of interest, surprised at how far north Pamplona lay, and how nearly on the London meridian. When I left, Britta remained,
picking out each of the places with her finger, trying to visualize them in their various climates.

In some ways July 6 was the most pleasant day of San Fermin. There was no bullfight, and hence no running of the bulls, but we met for breakfast and while Holt had his
pochas
the rest of us had some of Raquel’s semi-solid chocolate drink, so bitter and at the the same time so sweet. Old customers, as they took their first sip of the lethal stuff, toasted, ‘Goodbye, liver,’ but with hot croissants it wasn’t bad.

At noon we went to the town hall, where a monstrous crowd had gathered to hear the mayor of Pamplona launch the fair with a cry of ‘
Viva San Fermín!’
—firing at the same time a rocket which seemed to rip the roof off the administration building. As soon as the echoes had died, the true glory of San Fermín began. It has been said that Pamplona does not have music; it is music, and now Holt and I had a chance to hear again those sounds which had lived with us during the past eleven months.

Most impressive were the bands—huge, clangorous combinations built around the biggest and noisiest drums that men could carry. I don’t know what there was about the drums of Pamplona that gave them their power, but they seemed to carry farther than most, and throughout the days to come I would hear them at almost every hour, throbbing in some part of the city.

The txistularis were flute players who carried with them their own drummers. They played shrill music much appreciated by the citizens of Pamplona, and they were hired by the municipality to circulate through the streets for folk dancing. Wherever they went they were attended by young people.

Next came a form of music no stranger would expect to hear but which he would remember as one of the great events of the fair whenever he recalled San Fermín—the bagpipe players, countrymen from the mountain districts who tucked their goatskins under their left arms and played sad music on their chanters until the streets they walked were filled with lament.

The accordionists that followed were delightful, some playing small octagonal instruments with piercing note,
others the larger, sweeter kind known in Italy. They played a lovely music, and wherever they appeared, there was dancing.

Finally came that strange instrument which has meant Pamplona to me since that first day I heard it coming at me from an alley near the plaza where they sell the strings of garlic. I can hear it yet, no matter where I am, if I close my eyes and whisper the name Pamplona. It came from the country oboes, ancient ancestors of the reed instrument we know today, played in pairs, accompanied by a drummer who also clanged a pair of tiny cymbals. The music was of haunting simplicity, songs that spoke of medieval days and tourneys; in the crush of this day they were somewhat lost, but in the days to come, when they were met by themselves, in back streets accompanied by teams of dancers, they would be memorable, the best sounds of this echoing week.

In the late afternoon excitement developed, for word circulated that the giants were coming. From various quarters they marched to the town hall, towering figures on stilts accompanied by squatty little mannikins with fantastically large papier-mâché heads. Men who operated the latter carried inflated pig bladders, and whenever they saw a child they dashed at him, belaboring the infant harmlessly but evoking squeals of terror. The giants represented kings and queens and pirates and Moors, and they would stalk among us for the ensuing days, so that when I say later, ‘We walked back to Bar Vasca,’ you must imagine that as we go we occasionally encounter these giants roaming the streets and the big heads swatting children with their pig bladders, but always we come upon a band, or a group of bagpipers or, if we are lucky, a pair of oboes.

For nine days there will be dancing in the streets, twenty-four hours a day. You will be coming home at two in the morning after drinks in some bar; you will turn a corner and find yourself in the midst of perhaps sixty people of all ages and nationalities, dancing the jota, and they will accompany you for a block or two, and when you leave them you may run into another group, closer to your destination. At dawn, at high noon, after dinner and especially through the night, there will be dancing in the streets. Many visitors to Pamplona will never see a
bullfight—they have come merely to hear the music and to dance.

The crowds this year seemed unusually well behaved, and presentable in appearance. Our group was typical. Harvey Holt dressed every day in the same manner: white trousers, white shirt, red scarf, red belt, white canvas shoes with red laces and rope soles. In time the shirt would become stained a pale red from the wine that Harvey spilled as he drank from the many wineskins that were passed to him; he liked to hold them far from his lips, with a small jet of wine leaping into his mouth. I wore rope-soled shoes, a faded navy costume and a beret. Joe, his heavy beard unkempt, wore very tight western slacks, no shirt, a leather vest with a sheepskin lining and Texas-style boots. Cato, with his innate sense of style, kept his beard trimmed and his very modern clothes meticulous; while Yigal wore whipcord pants, army boots, a military jacket and the little Israeli idiot-cap.

The girls had a special problem. They wanted very much to wear their pretty minidresses, but quickly found that to do so in the freewheeling crowd at Pamplona led to adventures they were not ready to pursue. Britta said, ‘I never knew a thousand men could have eight thousand hands,’ so the girls switched to slacks; but if on some special evening we ate at a restaurant they wore their most modish dresses and, since they were such striking girls to begin with, always created a stir.

When I commented on how clean the crowd looked this year, with a minimum of the rowdy types in filthy clothes that I had anticipated, Joe laughed and said, ‘You know why, don’t you?’ I didn’t, so he drove the pop-top some distance out the Zaragoza road and we watched as motorcycle police stopped any incoming car with beatnik types and told them, ‘Wash up, dress up, clean up. Or go back.’ If the occupants protested they had no other clothes, or if they refused to cut their hair or comb it, the police turned the car around and sent it in the opposite direction. ‘It’s the same on the roads from France,’ Joe said. I asked, ‘How did you get in?’ and he said, ‘I may look scruffy but I don’t smell.’

That night I learned why Pamplona was able to absorb these myriad visitors with so little apparent trouble. At ten-thirty, when we had taken our places in the central square to watch the fireworks, two unusually obnoxious
Americans accompanied by a drunk from South Africa began pestering us, and after a while they deduced that Cato must be dating one of our girls, so in spite of all Holt and I could do, they made themselves even more objectionable, but before real trouble could start, the fireworks came on, a lavish display by Caballer of Valencia, and we were able to forget the hecklers, although no sooner had the fireworks ceased than they began once again to badger us.

I wondered why the police did nothing, for they saw the affair, but they merely watched. Monica took Cato’s hand and said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ whereupon the three began to chant, ‘Nigger lover, nigger lover!’ Holt, who felt as offended as they did about Cato’s dating a white girl, nevertheless considered it his obligation to protect any member of his table, and he was about to launch into the trio, having first signaled to Joe and Yigal, when he was stopped by the police, who slowly shook their heads and wagged a forefinger.

Holt and the young people left, but I stayed behind to talk with some old hands from California, a doctor and his wife who often came to San Fermín, and they, having watched the incident, were as irritated as I. ‘It’s ironic that a colored man should be insulted at the feast of San Fermín,’ the doctor said, ‘in view of the fact that Fermín himself was a Negro.’ I said the Pamplonicos were touchy on this point, and whereas the statue of San Fermín, which would be carried through the streets tomorrow, was coal-black, the legend claimed that the saint was from North Africa and merely sunburned.

I had no more than completed my comment when the three troublemakers spotted me and lurched over to abuse me as ‘another of those nigger lovers.’ The doctor, a man almost as old as I, was ready to fight, and I supposed I would be drawn in too, but again the police stationed themselves so that we could see them and wagged their fingers.

Then, at three o’clock in the morning, when the crowds had thinned out, a car drove quietly into the square and parked near us. Six policemen moved slowly among the tables, encircled the three bullies, and with sickening effectiveness punched them to the ground, then hauled them off, and we saw them no more.

On July 7, at five-thirty in the morning, everybody in Bar Vasca woke up. In fact, everybody in Pamplona woke up, for at that hour bands of txistularis began circulating through the city, blowing their pipes and thumping their drums, so that sleep became impossible. And within a matter of minutes we were dressed and headed at a brisk clip for the bullring, as were thousands of others, converging from all directions. ‘Do we have to walk so fast?’ Monica called petulantly, and I replied, ‘To do it right we have to,’ and she called back, ‘The one thing we insist upon is doing it right, don’t we, Girl Guides?’

The reason for my haste became apparent when we reached the bullring, for even at this early hour more than three thousand people jammed the area, waiting for the doors to open at six, and unless we were lucky, we would miss the exciting introduction to Pamplona. By good luck, we were able to elbow our way to a favorable position, so that when the doors finally opened I could scamper up the flights of concrete stairs like a frightened rabbit and dash to a spot not inside the arena but on the stairway overlooking the streets outside.

‘Taken, taken!’ I shouted to strangers who tried to muscle in, and thus I held seven places until the young people came puffing up to range themselves beside me. Britta and Gretchen were at my elbows, and I explained to them that we would now stand in the cold for one hour.

‘Will it be worth it?’ Monica asked, and I pointed to the huge crowd that had already formed behind us, eager to glimpse even a portion of what we were to see in perfection.

‘We’ve done this for twenty seconds of excitement,’ I explained.

‘It better be a good twenty seconds,’ Monica retorted, and I assured her it would be.

By seven there were twenty thousand inside the arena, fifteen thousand on the plaza outside, where some had even climbed onto the head of the Hemingway statue Suddenly, from across the city, a rocket exploded with a roar that could be heard in all parts of Pamplona. Those of us who had seen the run before waited apprehensively,
and in a few moments were relieved to hear a second rocket, signifying that the six bulls had left the corrals in a compact group. ‘If the second rocket is delayed,’ I explained, ‘you know that one of the bulls has lagged behind, and that means trouble.’

With the explosion of the rockets many things began to happen in the plaza. First, the police who had been keeping order in the runway which the bulls would follow on their gallop into the arena, left the scene and climbed to safety. Second, everyone in the area grew tense. Third, those who were to do the running began bouncing up and down, knowing that within two minutes the bulls would be upon them. Even blasé Monica grew excited and grabbed Joe’s arm, squealing, ‘How’d you like to be down there right now?’

The distance from the corrals to the bullring was about a mile, and since a man can run a mile in four minutes and a bull in something over two, it was obvious that anyone running before the bulls must ultimately be overtaken and forced to protect himself in some way as the bulls dashed past. Britta cried, ‘Look!’ and we saw men dashing furiously into the plaza as if hell were at their heels, and a moment later the first bulls appeared, large dark figures running purposefully ahead, looking from side to side but not chopping with their horns. A mass of runners seemed to clog the way before them, but as the bulls reached any given spot, the crowd mysteriously opened, only to close as the bulls passed.

When the animals reached the plaza they ran straight ahead for about one hundred yards, then, at a large office building called Teléfonos, they turned left to enter the narrow chute which would bring them directly under our feet and into the arena. This morning, as the speeding bulls tried to turn the corner into the chute, the men running before them piled up for a moment, and I heard Monica scream, ‘My God! Look at that one in blue!’

A runner had fallen and it seemed inevitable that the bulls must trample him, but miraculously all six maneuvered their hooves so that the fallen one escaped injury. ‘His angel was watching,’ Monica said limply.

Now the bulls were well into the chute, dashing in our direction, with hundreds of men before them running, falling, struggling, kicking. I think each of us on the balcony caught a sensation of terrible power as the bulls
crashed through all obstacles and swept on. ‘Oh!’ Gretchen gasped as the surge of men and bulls came toward us, blurred in an instant of wild excitement, and passed beneath us into the arena.

‘Hurry!’ I shouted as the last bull vanished, and we rushed up a long flight of stairs, down a corridor and out into the bright morning sunlight of the arena. We reached our seats just as the last bulls were being herded into the pens from which they would emerge to fight at five-thirty that afternoon.

What we saw next was a kind of divine buffoonery, for the sand below was jammed with young bodies in white uniforms, red sashes and belts, each with a rolled-up newspaper in his right hand. ‘Watch that gate,’ I said, and as I spoke, it swung open, and out into that mass of supple bodies catapulted a fighting cow, her sharp horns encased in leather. With a fury that I cannot describe, she threw herself at the multiple targets about her, knocked grown men over with a brush of her head, and created such harmless havoc as to keep the watchers in continuous laughter. I judged that during this cow’s eleven minutes in the arena, she must have knocked down about ninety men. At times she looked like a bowling ball, elusive and destructive. The rule was that no runner could grab her in any way, neither by the horns nor by the tail. All he could do was push her away or swat her with his rolled-up newspaper, but if he did the latter, she was likely to turn upon him, drive her head into his gut, and send him spinning.