incessantly. He loved bullfighting from the very first moment. In his letters to me, he talked only of the courage of the toreros and the bulls, too. The whole thing was a great and moving tragedy that you could see and feel, close enough to raise the hair on your neck.
When he came back a week later, he was brimming with enthusiasm. He practiced the dramatically flared passes he’d learned in Ronda and Madrid with a tablecloth in our apartment.
He turned parallel to our table, the only bull available for the moment. “There’s an incredible calm as the matador watches the animal come, only thinking of what he has to do to bring him in correctly and not about the danger. That’s where the grace is. And the difficulty, of course.”
“I’d love to see it,” I said.
“You might find it hard to watch,” he said.
“Maybe, but it sounds like something I wouldn’t want to miss. The fights might even be a good influence on the baby,” I said.
“Yes, he’ll be a real man before he’s even born.”
“What makes you so sure it’s a boy?”
“What else would it be?”
We made plans to go back together in July, to the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, where Gertrude and Alice had gone the summer before. It was supposed to be the very best arena for bullfighting, drawing the most murderous bulls and highest-skilled toreros. Although I’d expressed only excitement at the prospect, Ernest was determined to prepare me for the violence.
“Not everyone can stomach it,” he said. “McAlmon drank brandy all through his first bullfight. Every time the bull rushed the horses, it made him go green. He said he couldn’t imagine anyone ever finding anything to love about it, and if they did, they were deranged.”
“I don’t think the two of you are meant to be friends.”
“Maybe not, but it’s looking like he and Annie want to do a book of stories for me. Or maybe stories and poems.”
“Really? If you hate him so much, why would you want him to do the book?”
“Someone’s got to. Now I only have to write the damned thing.”
All of Pamplona was awake when our bus lumbered into the walled city in the middle of the night. The streets were so crowded with bodies that I wondered how the bus could budge at all, but the dancers moved in a ripple away from the rumbling engine and then filled in again once we’d passed. We continued to climb the narrow streets toward the public square, and when we reached it there was such a blur of noise and motion-dancers whirling, musicians drumming and blasting reed pipes, fireworks exploding in loud bursts of white smoke-we nearly lost our luggage. Once we had it securely in hand and found our hotel, our reservations, which Ernest had made weeks before, had been given away.
Back on the street again, Ernest told me to stay and wait for him while he looked for lodging. I watched him borne away by the crowd without feeling much hope that he’d find a room, much less make his way back to me. The streets themselves seemed to be shifting. I backed against a thick stone wall and tried to stand my ground as dancers spun by in blue and white. The women wore flaring full skirts. They circled each other, snapping their fingers and stamping their black-heeled shoes on the cobblestones. Their hair was loose and beautiful. Some carried tambourines or bells, and though the music sounded chaotic to me, with shrill fifing and drumming that shook the bones of my knees, the women seemed to hear a clear rhythm and move to it perfectly, their legs lifting in time, their arms arcing out from their sides. The men wore blue shirts and trousers, with red kerchiefs at their necks, and danced together in large groups. They called out to one another with happy yelps that were instantly absorbed. It was all like nothing I’d ever seen.
Somehow Ernest navigated the madness. He returned to collect me, and though all the hotels were booked and had been for weeks, he’d managed to secure us a room in a private house nearby, six nights for twice what we paid in rent each month in Paris.
“So much?” I said, feeling a bit ill at the amount. “How can we possibly afford it?”
“Chin up, Tiny. We’ll be paid back in sketches. I need to be here. I feel that so powerfully.”
I couldn’t argue with his instinct and was dead on my feet besides. We took the room and were grateful for it, but in the end we might as well have stayed on the streets all night like everyone else. The whole city had been waiting all year for this week, this joyful night. They could dance forever, it seemed, and it struck me as funny that we’d been keen to come here to escape the chaos of Bastille Day in Paris, when this was as frenetic if not worse.
I finally got out of bed near 6:00 a.m., knowing there would be no rest for me, and walked out onto the balcony. On the street beneath me, there were as many people about as the night before, but they seemed more focused and directed. It was nearly time for the running of the bulls, but I didn’t know that. I only knew something was happening. I went inside and dressed quietly, but Ernest woke anyway from his very light sleep, and by the time we were back at the balcony together, a cannon had sounded with a crack. We saw its white smoke scatter above the public square, and then the crowd gathered there began to sing. Our room was perfectly situated. We could see and hear everything from where we stood at the railing. A group of men and boys sang a passionate song in Spanish. I understood nothing, but didn’t really need to.
“I think it’s about danger,” I said to Ernest over the din.
“Happy danger,” he said. “They’re excited to test themselves. To see if they can outrun their fear.”
He knew the bulls would be released soon. Gertrude and Alice had relayed in great detail all they’d seen at the fiesta the year before, and so had Mike Strater. But Ernest wasn’t content to hear what it was like; he wanted to know it firsthand. And if I hadn’t been there with him, I knew he wouldn’t be standing on the balcony at all. He really wanted to be down in the square, preparing himself to run.
“
The cannon sounded again as the bulls were set loose, and we saw the runners coming very fast along the cobbled streets below. Everyone wore white shirts and pants with bright red scarves around their waists and necks. Some carried newspapers to wave the bulls away and all wore an expression that seemed ecstatic. After the runners, six bulls thundered past with such power the house shook under our feet. Their hooves rang on the cobblestones and their thick dark heads ducked low, looking murderous. Some of the men were overcome and had to scramble up the side of the barricades lining the street. Onlookers reached to help them escape, but there was also a palpable anticipation as the crowd waited to see if some unlucky one wouldn’t be fast or limber enough.
There was no goring that day, at least not that we saw, and I was very relieved when the bulls were safely in the arena. The entire ritual took only a few minutes, but I realized I’d been holding my breath.
We breakfasted on wonderfully sweet cafe con leche and dense rolls, and then I tried to nap in our room while Ernest walked the streets of Pamplona taking notes on everything he saw. It was all poetry to him, the heavily lined faces of the old Basque men, each one with the same blue cap. The young men wore wide-brimmed straw hats instead and carried hand-sewn wine skins over their shoulders, their arms and backs well muscled from hard labor. Ernest came back to the room excited by it all, and talking about the lunch he’d just eaten, perfectly crisped river trout stuffed with fried ham and onions.
“The best fish I’ve ever eaten. Get dressed. You have to try it.”
“You really want to go back to the same cafe and watch me eat?”
“Watch nothing. I’m going to have it again.”
Later that afternoon when the first fight began, we sat in good
“Look away now,” he said when the first horseman set the long, barbed
We sat in the
