The Drifters (74 page)

Five such cows were released each morning—sometimes in pairs—and the last always seemed stronger than the first; or perhaps the runners were tiring. At any rate, it was a raucous way to begin the day and it set the pattern for what was to follow. By eight the arena was empty. As we trailed out, Cato said, ‘Them females sure knows how to handle,’ and Yigal said, ‘The whole thing’s ridiculous.’ But Joe said nothing. He seemed to be remembering that surge of dark power as the bulls turned into the chute.

Holt disapproved of our three young men: Joe because of his pacifism and his beard, though not necessarily in that order; Yigal because of his outspoken opposition to bullfights and his hesitancy about adopting America as his
home; Cato because he spoke ill of religion and was sleeping with a white girl, and again my order is arbitrary.

His reaction to the three girls was more complex. He distrusted Gretchen’s attitude toward the police, believing that anybody who got on the bad side of the law, pretty likely had it coming; also, he suspected young people who fought with their parents, even though he had fought with his in order to get into the marines, but that was different. Monica he did not like. He thought she considered herself superior because she was English and spoke with an accent that was popular with far west radio announcers in the 1930s, and he despised her for having an affair with a Negro. Also, her humor was apt to be cynical, an attribute which he prized in elderly people but abhorred in youth. Britta was suspect because how could a girl like that smoke marijuana, and he wasn’t pleased that she talked of her father with disrespect, especially if he had been the hero she said he was during the Nazi occupation.

But like all tech reps, he had a difficult time believing that girls as beautiful as these three could have any problems. ‘Life is so damned easy for them,’ he told me one day, ‘no problems at all, and yet they want to make waves. You sort of feel that they ought to be spanked, but I guess even if you are well off and beautiful, things sometimes look confused.’ When I said that Gretchen really had a miserable time with the police, he snapped, ‘Probably smoking pot and they caught her.’

This day at lunch his reactions to the young people crystallized. Things began well, with various Spaniards stopping by to congratulate him on his running, and Yigal taking pains to be conciliatory, saying, ‘You must have shown them something.’

‘Just like Humphrey Bogart running his boat out of Cuba,’ Holt said reflectively. ‘No great sweat if that’s your job.’

‘I thought it was Errol Flynn who had the boat in Cuba,’ Monica said.

‘That time he told Lauren Bacall to whistle,’ Holt explained.

‘Oh, you mean a movie! Never saw it.’

The others hadn’t seen it either, and Holt asked, ‘You mean to tell me not one of you saw one of the greatest dramatic moments in movie history …’

‘Bogart didn’t make any movies during the last decade,’ Gretchen said. ‘At least I don’t remember any.’

‘He’s been dead twelve years,’ Holt said. ‘When was it made?’ he asked me. ‘That great Hemingway story?’

‘I saw it in Libya during the war.’

Holt said he couldn’t believe it had been so long ago.

‘I saw him in one movie,’ Yigal said. ‘It was excellent.’

‘What was he?’ Holt asked.

‘You know, that classic—
Beat the Devil
, with Robert Morley and that superb cast.’

‘Oh, sure!’ Monica cried. ‘That wonderfully nutty thing about Tangier.’

‘They should all have been arrested,’ Holt growled.

‘Who? Morley and Bogart?’

‘The producer, the director, anyone responsible for such a waste of Bogart’s talent. That picture was a disgrace, the only poor one Bogart ever made.’

‘Are you talking about the Truman Capote–John Huston classic?’ Gretchen asked.

Holt apparently did not recognize the names. ‘What I’m talking about,’ he said, ‘is that miserable picture which somebody threw together and made Bogart look like a fool.’

‘It’s the only good thing he ever did,’ Gretchen said firmly, and the others agreed.

Holt exploded. ‘You mean that piece of trash …’

‘Mr. Holt, it had style, wit.’

‘Did you see the time when he and William Holden were both in love with Audrey Hepburn?’

‘Who directed?’ Gretchen asked.

‘Directed? Who the hell cares who directed? Did you see the time when he fought with Leslie Howard in the desert? Or when he was in Europe … just like you kids … only he was in love with Ava Gardner?’

This last rang a bell with Cato. ‘Yeah, I caught it on a late, late show one night. A prime stinker.’

It was obvious that Holt was trying to control himself, and he asked, ‘You don’t really know any of the great pictures, do you? Like when Spencer Tracy was teaching Freddy Bartholomew to be a man?’

‘Please,’ Cato broke in. ‘Give me names. What was the picture? I think I saw something like that. It was in Death Valley and there was the Gila monster and Spencer Tracy stepped on it with his heel.’

Holt bit his lip, then asked, ‘You never saw Mr. Tracy
when he fought for the soul … the future of Mickey Rooney? That time when Tracy was a priest?’

Gretchen tried to intrude with the statement that for her generation Spencer Tracy never made a picture that related in any way to real life and that girls like her simply dismissed his pathetic old flicks as …

‘Goddammit!’ Holt cried, banging the table. ‘You’re a bunch of illiterates. You really know nothing. How do you suppose a man gets character? By seeing the great plays and movies and reading the great books. Every one of you young punks would have had more character if you’d seen Spencer Tracy as that Portuguese fisherman …’

‘It was a Cuban fisherman,’ Gretchen corrected, ‘and he was trying to catch a big fish … and it was a perfectly dreadful picture.’

Holt turned completely around in his chair so that he could stare at Gretchen. ‘It’s just dawned on me. Sometimes you’re stupid. You got fine marks in college, I’m sure, but you’re stupid. You know, if you had seen those great pictures in which Mr. Tracy and Miss Hepburn tried to adjust to each other—good man, good woman, but all man and all woman …’ He hesitated, then said quietly, ‘Maybe, Miss Gretchen, you would now know how to get along with men better than you do.’

Gretchen flushed and for a moment it looked as if she would lash back at him, but her natural good manners stopped her, and she said with conciliatory warmth, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Holt. I did see Mr. Tracy once when he was excellent. As the corrupt cop in
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
He showed a true sense of comedy.’

That did it. Holt slammed down the fork with which he had been eating
pochas
and asked, ‘Why is it? Of all the fine work done by these two actors … why do you choose the worst picture each of them made? That trashy Bogart film. That ridiculous thing they put Tracy into when he was an old man and needed the money. It was an abuse of talent. Yet that’s what you remember.’

‘His pictures were mostly corn,’ Cato said. ‘Some of my white friends took me to see
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
What crap.’

Suddenly Holt shot his hand out and grabbed Cato by the arm. ‘Don’t ridicule what you don’t understand,’ he said grimly; then, seeming ashamed of himself for having lost his temper, he stomped upstairs and a few minutes later
we heard streaming from his tape recorder “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “From the Halls of Montezuma.”

On July 8 the five-thirty serenade outside Bar Vasca consisted of three bass drums of overpowering intensity, thumped for thirty minutes on one extended fugue. The all-night drunks invited the drummers into the bar, from which the hideous hammering could be physically felt in one’s stomach, even on the third floor. We assembled downstairs, and since there was no reason to hurry this morning, had coffee in the bar, watching with admiration as the three drummers continued their exercise.

‘It’s sort of beautiful,’ Monica screamed over the noise.

‘It feels good in the gut,’ Yigal said. ‘Like a mortar going off, continuously.’

At about six-thirty we walked slowly up the hill to the town hall, where we started to occupy perches on the barricades, but changed our plans when an attendant in uniform whispered, ‘Hssssst! The señoritas like a good spot?’ I nodded, and for a few pesetas he led us into a door of the town hall and up a flight of stairs to a balcony that commanded the entire portion of the run. ‘We like to please our pretty visitors,’ he said in Spanish, and Britta replied, ‘And we like to please our courteous friends,’ giving him a kiss. Touching his cheek, he responded, ‘Today shall be inscribed in the book of gold.’

I explained that what we would see this day would be quite different, more classic in a way, more Spanish. ‘The bulls will be charging up the hill we just climbed, and when they reach this spot they must turn sharp left. They will cross directly beneath us, then dash straight down that lovely street called Doña Blanca de Navarra. Who she was I don’t know, but now she’s famous. At the end, the bulls turn right and enter the greatest of the streets, Estafeta, which we’ll see tomorrow.’

Joe asked if we would see Harvey Holt from this spot, but I said, ‘No, he runs in a different place. The ones who run here love the openness, the thrill of seeing the bulls come up over that rise, the sudden twists and turns. I used to run here.’ Joe looked at me and said nothing.

By quarter to seven the plaza was jammed, and Gretchen said, ‘So many people! You’d think there wouldn’t be any
left over for the bullring. But I suppose it’s crowded too.’ When I nodded, she asked, ‘How many people see the bulls each morning?’ I had never tried to calculate, but I guessed, ‘A hundred thousand. Maybe more.’ And she said, ‘In this little town.’ She looked to her right at a church that must have been five hundred years old and at the plaza that had known Roman legionnaires. ‘Many ghosts run in these streets,’ she said, and I thought of those I myself had known in the middle years of this century who were no longer in the streets. They’d had a good run.

At seven the first rocket went off, then promptly, the second. We held our breath, and after a proper interval, saw runners exploding from the street to our right, followed by those dark torpedo-like bodies. Here the bulls were fresher and ran with greater speed, so that the runners before them seemed to fly, and in an instant all was past and men who would never dare to face a bull were leaving the safety of the barricades and climbing into the street so that they could say, ‘I ran with the bulls at town hall.’

Of course, there were bullfights each afternoon, but the less said about them the better. The fact that the bulls had pounded through the streets in the morning meant that in the afternoon they were tired and excited, which in turn meant that the fights were usually bad … and always rowdy.

About an hour and a half before fight time, in various parts of the city, taurine clubs in traditional white trousers and distinctive cotton blazers would begin to assemble behind their individual bands, which contained few musicians but some of the greatest noisemakers in Spain. Members would arrive in pairs, two to a bucket loaded with ice and canned beer. Some would report with their buckets sloshing sangría, an excellent drink made of cheap red wine and fruit juice. In each club a special committee had the responsibility for making forty or fifty sandwiches consisting of huge slabs of cheese and ham slapped between crusty rolls a foot long and wrapped in foil.

An hour before fight time these clubs, marching in wild fashion behind their bands and carrying banners proclaiming their identity, would begin to circulate through the
city, each on its own route, and as they progressed they picked up casual followers who would dance along the streets, so that by the time the bands began to converge on the bullring, there would be hundreds of raucous followers behind each one.

Inside the arena, the bands observed one rule: each must play as loudly as possible in its own tune in competition with all others, who played their own tunes unceasingly. The result was a cacophony which echoed back and forth across the arena like waves of sound from Krakatau in final explosion. In the interval between the third bull and the fourth, the sandwich committees stood on the top row of the arena and pitched their foil-wrapped rolls far into the air, so that they descended like submarines over the heads of the crowd. If you were lucky enough to catch one, you had lunch for three.

Now drinks were passed, and the beer presented no problem, but the buckets of sangría were something else, because when only a quart or so remained in the bottom of the bucket, it was traditional to pour it over the heads of the crowd sitting below, and if a man came to San Fermín with only one good shirt, it was soon stained an attractive wine color. When the wine was used up, other liquids were thrown on the people below, and whenever the police caught men urinating in paper cups, they frowned.

At the bullfights, Holt and I had good seats in the shade, across from where the bands played, so we escaped the rowdyism, but the young people sat in the sun and were surrounded by the wine throwers. Joe and Cato and the girls accepted the frenzy as a generic part of San Fermín and even struck up friendships with some of their neighbors—the rowdy element invariably whistled when the girls came down the aisles and threw bits of paper and bread at them—but Yigal grew increasingly irritated and voiced his complaints freely.

This exasperated Holt, who asked at dinner on the fourth night, ‘If you don’t like bullfights, why bother with Pamplona?’

Yigal, not wanting to get into another argument, said, ‘I’m mad because they throw all that wine on me, but never a sandwich.’

This attempt at humor did not placate Holt, who asked, ‘Are you afraid of the bulls? Is that it?’

‘I’m disturbed by the ridiculous behavior of grown men who seek their thrills this way. That’s all.’

‘You mean us?’

‘It strikes me as silly … twenty thousand men in a ring, tormenting a defenseless calf whose horns have been padded.’

‘You ever been hit by one of those defenseless calves?’