TAURUS RISING
The running of the bulls of San Fermín
The Daily Telegraph, Saturday magazine, 2015
At someone's nod, I forget whose, we neck our coffees, bin the styrofoam and move as one, picking our way through a whooping, unsteady crowd. We clamber through a barricade intended to keep the underage, the improperly dressed and the obviously wasted off the streets, where the mood is markedly less festive. We, the runners, are out in number, and many of us have been out all night, but fear – let’s call it what it is – has cleared our heads.
There’s some waiting to be done, so we mill about. We might look like protesters if what was in our heads was fit to put on a placard. Fear soon turns into nerves, and with our feeble jokes, cracked knuckles and pissoir whistles, we do a lousy job of keeping them to ourselves.
The thing is, we know what’s coming. Although we don’t really, not exactly, and that's the problem. This is an unpredictable business. Another twenty minutes pass. I follow some locals down to the beginning of the course, where a niche in a high wall holds the statuette of a saint. We beseech him to keep us safe, and return to our “lucky” spots, newspapers rolled tightly in our fists.
Not long now. We examine our phones, the soles of our trainers, the backs of our hands. To check the time, the company we’re keeping, for signs of wear and tear – looking, as one does in tea leaves, coffee grounds and chicken bones, for proof that today is not our day, and that we would do better to duck out and let this madness be. Those of us who care to, and many of us who don’t, make the sign of the cross.
At 8am a rocket sounds. A gate opens in our heads, and nightmares briefly swarm. A few beats later a second rocket goes off, and panic or preparedness – which is nothing but heavily drilled panic – takes over.
Before we know it, they’re upon us, although we don’t see them immediately. The first wave to strike us is human, and that wave – already ragged – breaks when its legs give out, unable to outpace six peak-condition fighting bulls and their companion steers.
In turn, we move, scattering like dice, trying our luck, some of us keeping up with the herd, or darting ahead of it for a few jubilant seconds, while others – others, we hope – succumb to the stampede, falling under feet and hooves, or flatten themselves against a wall, guts sucked in, wishing they were shadows or smoke. A glancing blow from one of these toros bravos will open you up like it's Christmas.
And so the run continues, section by section, for just over half a mile, the bulls averaging half a ton and 15mph – even on these winding streets – and the runners hoping that whichever god or philosophy they cling to is paying attention. And that medical help is standing by.
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Yes, I’m in Pamplona, in the Navarre region of northern Spain, and it’s the third day of the 424-year-old festival of San Fermín, which is held each year from July 6 to July 14 and has the encierro, or bull run, at its heart. There's a run each morning from the seventh, starting at the foot of the Cuesta de Santo Domingo, where the bulls are released from a corral, and finishing at the Plaza de Toros, where they meet their end in the afternoon.
Most mornings, about two thousand people take to the streets. They're a mixed bag, the runners, the corredores, the mozos. A good many of them are locals, and the bulk of those are Basque, a people whose relationship with the bull runs Minoan-deep. There are the usual suspects, too, of course: self-styled daredevils who have run out of bungee cord; and scores of gap-year bucket-listers in white tees bearing the logos of the tour operators who dumped them on a wasteland campsite a few miles out of town as part of their “executive package”. And then there are the fiesta heads, the foreigners, or guiris, whose passions – Spanish culture, cooking and wine; tauromachy; American ex-pat literature; and plain old sybaritism – return them to Pamplona year after year.
I, too, am a recidivist, though this is only my third time back, which in San Fermín terms means I’m still gumming my rusks. My non-fiesta friends who are not appalled by my enthusiasm for “that barbaric spectacle” are mystified by it, but that’s on me. Outside of July, when I'm asked to defend my position, I hum and haw. I talk about the trench camaraderie of the run. How the festival is like a school reunion – maybe a reformatory school reunion – except no one had their head flushed down a toilet at the San Fermín Academy for Errant Boys. And it's all true, but it isn't the full story. Part of me doesn't want to expose the magic of fiesta to the chill light of language, and the other parts of me know that I would be wasting my time. Because the magic can’t be recounted – it must be felt – and the encierros and corridas are merely the most obvious signs that something other is going on.
That something is a religious festival, a celebration of Basque and Navarrese culture, and a riotous debauch all rolled into one. For nine unsleeping days Pamplona, an ordinarily sedate, conservative town with a population of some 200,000, hosts one of the biggest parties of the year, a Club 18 Months-to-90 holiday for a million-plus people. Its streets, squares and parks can’t move for concerts, readings, folk dancing, puppet theatre and demonstrations of Basque rural sports (such as ingude altaxatzea, or anvil-lifting); and then there are the brass bands of the 16 peña social clubs, the roaming life, soul and occasional menace of the party, who are apt to pressgang passers-by into bacchic service.
And it's all for one man. Well, for one reputed man, anyway. San Fermín is a saint, yes – a co-patron saint of Navarre, no less – but what we know about his life prior to his canonisation is split between fancy and conjecture. The story mostly goes that in Roman Pamplona, some time in the 3rd century, Fermín, a heathen son of a senator, was converted to Christianity by a disciple of Saturninus (later Saint Saturninus), the first bishop of Toulouse. Though local legend maintains that Fermín was then ordained and returned to Pamplona to serve as its bishop, the Church has him settling in Amiens, having been named its bishop, and being beheaded there for evangelising on September 25, 303AD.
The Abbey of Saint-Acheul in Amiens was founded in 1085, and San Fermín’s body is said to have been discovered in a vault beneath its choir. When relics of the saint were delivered to Pamplona in 1196, the city decided to mark the occasion with an annual event. It was first held on October 10, but celebrations were moved to their current slot, a time of livestock fairs, in 1591.
The sacred and profane – benedictions and bulls – have been bedfellows ever since, though, contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t Fermín, but Saturninus who was tied to a bull by his feet and dragged to his death. And precisely when the little cape, the capotico, of San Fermín was first reckoned to confer protection on encierro runners isn't a matter of record.
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On the morning of July 7, a polychrome wooden effigy of the saint, and his relics, are carried from his chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo to Pamplona Cathedral. I watch the cortège make its laboriously deliberate way across the Plaza del Consejo, raising perfectly uniform puffs of dust. This is Pamplona in full pomp: the complete set of religious and civic dignitaries in their best bib and tucker; a royal court of papier mâché giants and their escorts; the municipal brass band and a choral group ready to unleash a jota. Beside me, a man in his very early twenties unwraps a smile as thin as his moustache is hopeful, but stows it when he catches my eye. I introduce myself and my business in the city, but he keeps me waiting a couple of minutes before giving up his name.
A serious young man who wears his seriousness like a heavy overcoat at the height of summer, he sighs, then informs me, air-quoting, that he is “David Usher, an American Catholic in his third year at the University of Navarra”.
The university where Usher is studying for a doctorate in medicine and health was established by Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic organisation that believes the secular life can provide a path to sanctity. Usher, who admits to being a member, won't be drawn on descriptions of Opus Dei as a secret society whose initiates have a fondness for medieval self-mortification (namely, the cilice, a spiked garter worn around the thigh), but he is "happy" to share his thoughts on Sanfermines.
"It's a perversion of a religious festival and an affront to good taste. The procession of the saint still moves me, and lots of other people, as it should. Just look around you – they have their hands on their hearts, they are crying. But after this is over, Pamplona turns into a den of vice, a place of intoxication, violence and lechery. The streets become rivers of urine and vomit. Tell me, do you come here for that?"
Now, I may not have religion, but I am a great believer in San Fermín, and I am not alone among the heretic multitudes. Our attachment is worshipful, even if our heaven is vacant.
I first saw the light of fiesta over a bottle of rioja with Larry Belcher, a rodeo rider in Texas turned professor of translation at the University of Valladolid. Larry has given the whole of his adult life to bulls, books and Spain, and his exuberance is unbroken after 40 years of encierros. He is, for me, Pamplona's proselytiser in chief, so it's entirely fitting that, with his curtains of white hair, empyrean-blue eyes and highly animated demeanour, he brings to mind a Dust Bowl preacher. Except it is always a joy to sit down to one of his sermons.
"To watch Pamplona's transformation is to watch the performance of a marvellous trick. I can't tell you. This enchanted place seemingly materialises out of nowhere, like Brigadoon, and disappears before the regular world has had the chance to normalise it. It is a world unto itself, with its own rules and standards, and it changes everyone who comes by it. Hell, it reaches into their souls. A million people each fiesta. Remarkable. Breathtaking. And they keep coming back for that shot of something they can't get anywhere else."
Not that you'd get any of that from the press. At best, foreign news coverage of the event is luridly cartoonish, painting Pamplona as an open asylum where idiocy and cruelty combine to the disgust of anyone interested in animal rights. And it tends to recount the tramplings, gorings and deaths of the runners (there have been 16 fatalities since 1910) with a sniggery relish and overuse of the word “karma”.
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The Plaza del Castillo, the city’s drawing room, is filling up after the encierro. Families seek coffee and palmeritas in the shade of the arcades. In states of nervous exhaustion and clothes that could do with a boil-wash, last night's revellers pass out on the fast-scorching grass. And the runners? They head to a bar. You can tell them by the minor liberties they take with the dress code: retaining the white trousers, red pañuelo neckerchief and red faja sash tied round the waist, they generally opt for a rugby or football shirt rather than a white top – out of superstition or because, much more likely, it makes them easier to spot in the photos of the runs that crowd the windows of the town’s souvenir shops.
I stroll to Bar Txoco with a first-timer, a painter and decorator from South Shields who's built like a caber tosser. Geoff Wanless turned 50 today and his run was his present to himself. When I ask him why, the sound of his voice, a mix of shaken and stirred, is familiar to me, and laughter erupts from him as and when it pleases, which is often. Wanless learnt an important lesson this morning: no one is as big as they look. "Why did I do it? It's hard to remember anything right now. Back home, my standard line was ‘I'm going to run because I'm having a midlife crisis and can't afford a Porsche.’”
I take a mental register, and within half an hour I'm satisfied that none of my friends is putting the paramedics to work. Cut, yes; bruised, doubtless; but fully anaesthetised by adrenaline and bouncing on their toes, heads bobbing, talking hurriedly and clinking tall glasses of iced cognac and flavoured milk, the traditional post-run drink, which, though it packs a punch, is more of a leveller than a livener – a calm-me-down rather than a pick-me-up.
Pleasantries soon turn to unpleasantries, to the uglier aspects of the morning's sport; to the strangers who had to be stretchered off, who were tossed like salad. There but for the grace of San Fermín go us, eh? Then, with the dangers of our calling safely established, we discuss our own performances, our feats of daring and athleticism. Lacking both in any discernible quantity, I am spared the temptation to boast but I hope that my coolness under inquisition sounds a quietly heroic note.
None of us wants a repeat of last year, when "Buffalo" Bill Hillmann, a notable runner who gives beginners “inside track” tours of the course, was gored in the thigh, just shy of his femoral artery.
Hillmann is the last to show up. The 33-year-old Chicagoan, a former Golden Gloves boxing champ, is grinning beneath his trademark duckbill cap, like a newsboy who's made the front page of the paper he sells. Beside him, propped against a table, is the stuffed and mounted bust of Brevito, the bull that almost killed him. I’ve heard of matadors decorating their bachelor pads with the heads of their worthier opponents, but not runners.
Hillman's relationship with the bulls borders on the devotional, though, and he has much to thank Brevito for. He managed to write a memoir, Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain, while convalescing from his cornada (horn wound). It's a story of personal redemption in which he strongly identifies with the suelto, or loose bull, a regular feature of the encierro. Should a bull be impeded, distracted or lose its footing, it will almost certainly misplace its herding instinct and go rogue.
“Running with the bulls turned my life around. Before I came to Pamplona ten years ago, I was in a gang, dealing drugs. I was totally lost. Like a suelto. Full of fear and rage. Lashing out. Capable of terrible violence. The encierro opened my eyes and gave me focus. A good runner can lead a lost bull back to his herd. I wanted to be that runner. To rescue the bulls that rescued me.
“Brevito had a chance to kill me – it was close – but in a way he handed me my life back. I've learnt so much here, in Navarre. Spain is the country of my rebirth.”
Hillman's words may sound to general readers like sentimental anthropomorphism at its soggiest, but all the regular runners I know have a profound affection for the bulls. It is no ordinary love that understands its romance must end in a blood sacrifice, of course, but the connection the mozos feel to these fierce creatures is genuine, sometimes possessive and – feel free to rubbish the very notion at your leisure – protective, too.
They take considerable risks in trying to coax sueltos to follow them to the arena, though it isn’t their job: that falls to the pastores, the shepherds in green polo shirts whose dual role is to defend, with the use of the same cane, the bulls from human interference. (It’s worth noting here that, regardless of the carnage they create, the bulls are not tranquilised, there’s no escape for the runners, and Red Cross volunteers will tend to the seriously injured only when it is safe to do so.)
These animals are more than freakish composites of heft and horns, of course. Fighting bulls are bred like racehorses. For speed, yes, but also aggression and indomitability. To this end, they are raised wild, from the saddle, in the oak forests and grazing land of the dehesa of central and southern Spain. Toros de lidia (to give them their official title) must come from ranches with confirmed bloodlines (some of which are more than a century old) and each ranch prides itself on its encaste, or sub-breed, on producing bulls that are not only dependably gifted where it matters but present challenges of character that are all their own.
From July 7, each day of Sanfermines is run and fought by bulls of a different ranch. To appear in Pamplona, one of just eight First Category bullrings in Spain, they must be aged between four and six and weigh no less than 460kg. Just as the aficionados have their favourite encastes to watch in the arena (in English, aficionado first denoted a bullfighting enthusiast), I know mozos who pick the mornings they run based on which bulls will be joining them (and several of them have been tattooed with the hierros, or brands, those bulls sport).
Generally speaking, the clearer and more present the danger they pose, the more popular they are, though popular is perhaps the wrong word. Heading a fearsome list, accounting for a death apiece in the past 35 years, are the bulls of Cebada Gago, from Cádiz, which average almost two gorings per run; the Torrestrellas, which killed an American, in horrific fashion, throwing him 20ft in the air, in 1995; and the Jandillas, from Extremadura, which have a habit of tossing their heads and slipping their herds, inviting mayhem (their encierro of 2004 led to a record eight gorings).
The Miuras, which traditionally run on the final day of fiesta, have their admirers, too, though they earned their sobriquet “the bulls of death” in the ring, not on the streets, where they are generally fast, nimble and stick together. They appeal to the historian and aesthete who room with the class-A bonehead inside most runners. Prehistorically proportioned with a particularly prominent morillo (the complex of muscles over the neck and shoulders), they are the only encaste to still carry a significant amount of Cabrera blood, the Cabrera being one of the founding castes of today’s toros de lidia.
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Foreigners started running with the bulls here in small numbers in the early 1950s, and a few of them left more than their signature. The name of Matt Carney, who died almost 30 years ago, is regularly invoked, and his presence felt as though he’d just bought you a beer. An Irish-American Marine officer, who fought at Iwo Jima and went on to model, act and write, Carney ran with a remarkable facility, as though born to it. Graceful, courageous and brimming with alegría (the unfettered joy of fiesta), he made an appearance in Iberia, James Michener’s travelogue about Spain, and as a character in The Drifters, the novelist’s potboiler about a cadre of Vietnam-era backpackers, which spends a chapter in Pamplona. Some of Carney’s cuadrilla – his crew, younger than him then, in their seventies today – continue to come back, and one, Joe Distler, still runs. A New Yorker teaching English literature in Paris, “the iron man of Pamplona” has barely missed an encierro since 1968.
Carney’s daughter, Deirdre, 37, a teacher and photographer, took up running only recently. Women weren’t allowed to enter encierros before 1974 and today comprise only a small minority of the participants. As there’s little point in contesting that machismo is the dominant culture here during San Fermín – the testosterone can leave an acrid taste in the back of my throat – I wonder, with reference to a recent spate of sexual assaults, does Carney fille ever find the atmosphere simply too toxic for women?
“Look, this is a fiesta for everyone – for families, the elderly, children, mothers. You won’t see such a mix of people at any other festival. And at all hours. I feel incredibly safe here, but I’m older now and don’t party in the backstreets at 3am. In the 1990s, when I was 18 to 25, I used to get grabbed some, to the extent that I wouldn’t wear a skirt. But things have improved enormously, which is not to downplay what continues to happen, but that is men, not fiesta.
“People who hate bullfighting will reach for anything to bash it with. ‘It encourages primitive behaviour, and what else is primitive? Rape.’ But you’re less likely to be hit on or be groped here than you are at any music festival in the States or the UK. This is a family event, not a bunch of young people getting off their faces – which, whatever they say, is the selling point of Coachella and Glastonbury – and the authorities here have listened to the campaigners and increased police presence where there has been trouble before. Though few of us run, women are not secondary characters here – we are not the sidekicks or accoutrements of men having their fiesta.”
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At the breakfast tables in Calle de la Merced, I hear someone refer to San Fermín as “Hemingstein” – that is, a monster of Ernest Hemingway’s making. English-language writers and filmmakers have been drawn to the festival since Papa chose it as the backdrop to his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises – but what was once a site of literary pilgrimage has become its own creative industry. As well as Hillman’s latest book, this year sees publication of the waggishly humorous Bulls Before Breakfast by Peter N Milligan, a Philadelphia lawyer with more than 70 runs under his belt, and the release of a feature-length documentary, Chasing Red, by Dennis Clancey, a 32-year-old Iraq infantry vet who now leads Team Rubicon, a nonprofit specialising in disaster response.
Would Hemingway have approved? Well, one Hemingway does. Son of Gloria (née Gregory), Ernest’s youngest child, John has been attending since 2008. He runs – something his grandfather never did – with a ragtag collective of new recruits and old hands called the Pamplona Posse, the drinking man’s cuadrilla, who were my introduction to fiesta.
In his memoir, Strange Tribe, Hemingway writes movingly about his family – its almost imponderable dysfunction, in particular – but he wears the name lightly here, and he’s never in a hurry to share it. He felt no blood obligation to turn up to San Fermín – a friend talked him into it – and his attachment to the festival is the same as every other returnee’s.
“It took a while for me to get used to the weight the name carries here. I did a lot of media when I first came to Pamplona, and by the end of fiesta I was stopped everywhere I went. In Montreal, where I live, the name means, well, not nearly so much. Things have calmed down for me since I first came here, and that’s good because I just want to enjoy it, the same as you do. The camaraderie, friendships old and new, the atmosphere of a nine-day party that is both a pagan bacchanal and a Christian festival, and of course, the encierros and the corridas – I love it all.”
Corridas: that’s right, bullfights. Tauromachy isn’t the subject of this piece, but there’s no getting around it. Everyone who visits Pamplona is helping to finance it, even if they’re not tipping the matadors, and the runners are a moving part of the industry. I’m not going to argue bullfighting’s case, though I’m content to argue my own.
There is much about the corrida that discomforts me. And much about it that fascinates me. And often they are the same thing. “Bullfight” is a misnomer: the corrida isn’t a fight, unfair or otherwise; it is a dance of death, a highly stylised one with steps going back centuries. It offers no apology for what it is and, when poorly mounted, with sloppy bulls and bungling matadors, what it is can be very grisly indeed. Aficionados aren’t in it for the gore, however. They are there for shows of grace, bravery and artistry under siege (every matador is gored once a year on average, and the death toll would be much higher if it were not for modern medicine).
Sixty Minutes, Australia, 2013: an interview with Larry Belcher, the best of men
Opposition to bullfighting is widespread outside of Spain and growing within it (Catalonia banned it 2010). For the past 14 years, on July 5, the animal-rights group PETA has protested against it in Pamplona to headline-grabbing effect. Their invariably semi-naked displays of outrage have become part of the festival calendar. According to the number of breasts on display, the locals either shrug, applaud from bar doorways or, trading elbows with photo journalists, turn the Plaza de Toros into a soft-porn shoot. An unrepentant propagandist organisation, PETA would have you believe that the bulls are routinely nobbled – beaten with bats, doped, their horns shaved, their eyes smeared with vaseline – before they enter the ring, ignoring that the spectators can tell a fix with their eyes shut and that there’s a huge amount of money riding on good, clean contests.
I watch a few of the corridas. The arena, which sits 19,700 people, is mostly full. The aficionados I’m sat with talk me through the action, though they’re united in wishing there was more, and better. A star cast of matadors – Juan José Padilla, El Juli and Miguel Angel Perera – put in poor performances against below-par beasts. It bears the taint of a blood-spattered circus.
Known affectionately as the Cyclops of Jerez, due to losing his left eye to a horn that came out of its socket, Padilla can draw and hold a crowd, but the aficionados want art – vigorous bulls, audacious caping and clinical kills – not a ringmaster.
I discuss it all with a friend of Padilla’s, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, an Old Etonian whose training as a bullfighter is the subject of his book Into the Arena. The 39-year-old saw his first corrida 16 years ago and was not an instant convert.
“I saw many moments of brutality but I was surprised that I could also perceive, intermittently, a kind of beauty that was entirely new to me. Each time I went to the corrida thereafter I went with a little more understanding and a little less aversion. Had I became more sensitive to the aesthetics or more inured to the ethical implications of the fight? I don’t know.
“Meat-eaters* may want to bear in mind that the toro bravo pays for its five years wild on the ranch with 20 minutes in the ring. The beef cow is put out of its misery after 18 months in a factory farm. And the bulls are eaten. The meat is sold before they enter the ring, which is licensed as an abattoir under European law [bullfighting grew out of the slaughterhouses – the mataderos – of Seville]. But if that were not the case, the argument that killing for food is not the same as killing for entertainment is bogus. We eat meat because we like the taste, not because we need to – it's entertainment for our palates.”
As for encierros, they happen all over Navarre (close to 1,500 will be held this year), and Fiske-Harrison, who has stayed trim enough to run in his last school blazer, has tested his legs in the taurine fiestas of Tafalla, Tudela and Falces (where mozos career down a precipitous mountain path, which drops sheerly on one side); as well as Cuéllar, in Old Castile, where, in Spain’s oldest documented bull run, toros are herded a little over three miles by some 200 horsemen through pine forest and across stubble fields before they reach town.
“I was watching from the place where the horsemen hand over the bulls to men on the ground. It was like the cavalry charge scene from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. This army of horses, their riders carrying lances to protect their mounts, descending the dusty slope to town, accompanying a stampeding herd of cattle. As Hemingway said of Pamplona when it still applied, it was ‘the real old stuff’.”
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Day eight, and it’s my fourth run of the festival. Two days before, my third encierro, the bulls of José Escolar, Pamplona debutees, created grave disquiet, when one of them, the suitably named Curioso, stopped on Santo Domingo, turned around and headed back to the corral. The mozos were primed for a suelto to come tearing up the street any moment, but such was the animal’s agitation, it was decided he would take no further part in the morning. With four gorings, the encierro had been a lively one, so perhaps it was deemed that the runners had already given their pound of flesh.
With only one more San Fermín to their name, today’s bulls, from the Garcigrande ranch, are no veterans, but a Basque friend who’s seen them in the ring tells me they’re not so easily distracted.
I’ve avoided calamity so far, but no two runs are the same, even if the “rules” don’t vary much: run fast and true, which involves getting in no one’s way, and if you take a tumble, stay down, flat as you can. You’re unlikely to be scooped up or get a hoof print between your shoulder blades, because bulls, for all they are happy to impale a vertical runner, have poor vision and they are very picky about where they put their feet.
I wonder, not for the first time, what I’m trying to prove, and to whom. I ran my first encierro in 2013, six months after coming out of a coma, having been put there by three crackheads who turned on me the hammer and four-by-two they were threatening a young woman with (almost amusingly, given it happened in Whitechapel, I collected my massive brain trauma outside the Jack the Clipper barber shop, a “a cut-throat business” that promises “the closest shave of your life”). When I told my daughters of my decision to go to Pamplona, they joked that multiple bangs on my head had failed to bring me to my senses. But they were not happy, and neither should they have been.
Fact is, I’ve courted danger since I could tie my own laces – or, preferably, leave them untied. I have a “death wish” every bit as greedy as a Hollywood sex drive. My doctors agree that it comes with my “mental health condition”, bipolar 1 disorder. That’s to say, my version of it. It can seem suicidal, but I am not. My mania has no interest in my extinction, but it’s in no doubt that death’s presence can sharpen one’s appetite for living.
Death couldn’t be less interested in my fourth run, but embarrassment spies an opening. The Garcigrandes keep right on Santo Domingo, horns catching the occasional spark against the wall, and I veer further right, ready to merge with the masonry, when I’m suddenly sandwiched between a heavy-set Frenchman and a cast iron drainpipe. I feel something pop.
Adrenaline keeps the extent of the damage – two cracked ribs – a secret for a while. Of course, it makes laughter – yawning, coughing and leaning over to type this – a distinctly unfunny business, but as San Fermín sorrows go, it’s the equivalent of denting a bumper in a 2,000-car pile-up.
Regardless, I carry it like a war wound, clutching my chest as though a bullet has just zipped through it. I spend the last day of fiesta not running with the Miuras, eating pinxtos, watching swifts perform their flights of fancy over the Arga river and drinking paxtaran (a sloe-flavoured anisette liqueor that I suspect contains trace elements of fly agaric and HP Lovecraft). All the while steeling myself for the closing ceremony in the Plaza del Castillo, where a mournful crowd will hold up their pañuelos and sing their farewells to the festival and each other as the sky prepares to fill with fireworks.
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The weather breaks after ten days of swampy humidity as I lug my laundry, like it will ever see white again, to Pamplona bus station. It’s an Old Testament production, the rain coming down like judgement on cobblestones that, when refreshed, bear the imprints of all the bones that have broken against them. Thunder shakes its metal sheet, and all the children clap. It sounds like a convoy of bin lorries, or a herd of Jandillas. I turn quickly, hoping to sneak one last look at Brigadoon, but it has already slunk off into the mist, leaving nothing but a whisper on the air, “Ya falta menos!”**
The header photograph is of my friend Sam Lights on the fourth day of the last Sanfermines I attended, in 2017 (credit: Javier Martinez de la Puente). Few photographs capture the alegría of the encierro like this one. All the other shots are from 2015, unless otherwise stated.
* After this piece was published, I received a lot of death threats. Of course, in this age of social media and armchair activism, death threats don’t carry as much menace as they used to, and I read mine with some sympathy. I have started to need proof of purpose or quality of life before I tuck into anything that once drew breath. Or to have killed it myself. I was taught by a poacher uncle to take the deaths that feed me very seriously.
I didn’t welcome the threats I received from vegans, but I understood them (though if they were to stick religiously to their least-harm principle, in a wider – planetary – context, they would be too busy killing themselves to kill me). Because the only creature I harbour any animus towards is Homo sapiens. Trouble is, it’s illegal to hunt humans and I doubt I’d be able to stomach eating any of the people I’d shoot with an untroubled conscience.
** Meaning “not long now” or “it’s almost here”, it marks the countdown to fiesta.
