WHEN I WAS YOUNG AND FOOLISH
It was the recent watching of the excellent six-hour PBS special on the life and career of Ernest Hemingway that poked my memory and led me to exhume this remembrance of my one “bullfighting” experience. The year was 1955. I was in the U. S. Air Force and stationed on the mid-Atlantic island of Terceira, a weatherman working with Portuguese airmen under the NATO shield. It was there, in the Azores, that I met my first bull, and lived to write about it. Here is that memory written many years ago.
Maybe it all comes of an overdose of Hemingway. A romantic urge of the time. Or maybe there is some thrill missing from American Life. Whatever, a number of Papa’s followers just must go to Iberia when the bulls are out. And being a spectator at the arena, watching a matador in his suit of lights gracefully doing in a fighting bull, just doesn’t always satisfy the onlookers’ blood lust. Those spectators want to get into the action themselves—an urge they share with the locals.
The running of the bulls at Pamplona is perhaps the most celebrated of the “street fights.” But there are others—in Portugal as well as Spain—where the common man gets a chance to live out his macho fantasy in an atmosphere of fiesta. Often the occasion is a particular saint’s day that is locally significant, and the actual release of the bulls in the street is preceded by much merrymaking and cheap-wine-imbibing.
Then comes the moment of truth. Or call it the moment of mayhem. The bull pen is opened and it’s every brave drunk for himself…as I was to learn. There’s no denying that the element of risk makes for a rush of excitement—directly proportionate to one’s close-up participation in the event. There’s also no denying that participation can be hazardous to one’s health.
Many years ago when I was young and slightly more foolish than I am now, I had my fling at “bullfighting.” It was September 1955 in the village of Praia on the Portuguese island of Terceira in the Azores, where I was stationed as a weatherman in the United States Air Force. It was a sunny day and a fiesta was in progress in the village, only a mile’s walk from my base at Lajes Field.
In Praia the bulls are not released en masse, but singly, into narrow cobble-stoned streets flanked with five-foot-high walls of the native volcanic rock, from which fans safely look down to view the action. Around the released bull’s neck is a thick rope—maybe 200 feet long—held onto initially by a band of young men who are pulled along behind the charging beast…until the bull turns and starts reversing his tracks. Then the two-legged guys let go the rope and scatter. And then the alleged fun begins.
The way one proves his manhood (I saw no women risking their womanhood) is to leap off the wall into the path of the bull. You get points for taunting him, for getting as close as you can to him—before you get his attention and then run like hell! The hope is that before the horned head can find your soft behind some other brave hombre will drop down and distract the animal, haze him off.
I spent two hours trying to photograph the frolic from atop my perch on the lava wall without much success, while steadily sipping red wine that sold for the most civilized price of 14 cents a liter. It was not long before I started overhearing remarks being made in Portuguese, peppered with a smattering of English, from the crowd around me, that apparently I was meant to overhear. Was this American content to be a mere picture taker? Wasn’t I going to get in on the fun? Or was I perhaps lacking in courage?
Wine has a way of lowering your threshold for an insult, naked or veiled. About three in that hot afternoon I dropped downward from behind the wall, pushed through a wooden gate onto the street, camera in hand, with a sullen black bull pawing the cobblestones about thirty feet away. The crowd around me roared their approval of my bravery…or were they thinking of some fun to come at my expense?
The bull was looking up the street, away from me. Why not get a close-up of that animal? I inched toward him in baby steps. I focused. I clicked. He didn’t see me, didn’t move. I moved closer, then refocused. The black ears flicked and the horns bobbed. But his attention was still directed elsewhere. I inched closer and clicked a few more off. Then, with only some ten or 15 feet separating us, the great black head turned in the direction of the clicks. My way. Now I had his undivided attention.
I began my slow, inch-by-inch retreat from the big dark eyes that seemed to change from puzzlement to malevolence. The thick body of the bull turned my way in a shuffle of hooves. It was time to fly—right back to through that wooden gate whence I’d come, behind that protective wall. I spun and ran right into my moment of truth.
Shut! I tried to pull the gate open. Secured from the inside! Bastards! I tried to climb it—all six feet of smooth, vertical wood—while raucous laughter spilled into the street. No use! I hung for an internal moment from the gate top, camera slamming against the boards, spread out, my backside a perfect target at horn level. My terror was pure.
Then, to my everlasting thanks, a teenage boy leapt down from the wall between me and the approaching bull in time to turn the animal by ninety degrees, and another chase was begun. Only then was the gate opened to me, with cheers and a few hearty backslaps from the thick-tongued celebrants. So the American was a brave one; worthy of sharing their red wine with. I accepted, though I knew it would coat my teeth black.
That dusk, when the village streets were cleared of bulls and fiesta-goers, I began my walk back to base, only to run into Humberto Souza, a Portuguese buddy, exiting a cantina, well lubricated. “Aha!” he said with grin. “I am told you have a lion’s heart.”
“So you heard,” I said.
Humberto began explaining how fast and far “news” travels on the island when we were stopped by a weeping woman dressed in black; she had a can in her hand and thrust it out toward me. What does she want? I asked Humberto, who had suddenly become quiet. “Her husband was killed by a bull this day,” he said after a slight delay. “It is tradition to give money.”
The wine glow dimmed. I reached in my pocket and withdrew a few escudos and dropped the coins in the can. “There was also another widow made this day,” Humberto added, as though it was sad but to be expected. Then and there, at that very moment, I decided, no matter how noble the sport or art, or manly the act Papa said it was, I would give up bullfighting…while I was still called “brave.” And I did. No regrets. Only the memory stays.