The Sun Still Rises — Memories from San Fermin a year later..
The San Fermin festival would be happening in the next few weeks, but after cancellation due to the pandemic, memories will have to do for now
“Please don’t chicos, people are killed every year” was our barista’s advice. My travel companion and I had just informed him in a Madrid cafe of our plans at our next stop across Spain. To the run with the bulls, that was our plan. We arrived in Pamplona after sunset, checked into the hotel and went out. The whole city was getting after it. Everyone was wearing the outfits, white tops and bottoms with a red scarf. Everyone, the bartenders, small children in strollers, dogs. The streets were blocked off from cars as people drank and danced in the street. An older lady, maybe 40, half-jokingly told us we looked like idiots for not being in the appropriate attire as I’m sure we stuck out like a sore thumb, she also advised us to not to run the next day. Word was three people had been gored in the past two days.
We bought the red scarfs and returned the next morning, in all white. People were sleeping on the ground and on park benches, past out and still in their festival outfit from the night before. We followed all the other white outfits to the entrance through an ally way, past ambulances, through a wooden entry way into the starting pen where they just let anyone in, no security, nothing. However, eventually police go through the crowd and try to kick out drunken people and anyone seemingly not fit to run. It was 8am. The run itself is about 1000m and the alleyways are boarded off. Nowhere to run but forward. All down the street, there are people hanging out of windows and posted up on balconies high above the action, like buzzards watching over the savanna as lions and zebras roam. Supposedly, people pay big money to rent the best-located balconies, but it’s free to run. News cameras gave live televised coverage. Police were everywhere. A gun is fired to signal the bulls being set off.
I was positioned about halfway between the starting gate and the arena. When the gun goes off 6 wild bulls with sharp horns are released, the other six are essentially huge cows with sanded down horns trained to run down the middle of the street and herd the bulls into the arena. Like horses, they will naturally all run together. The trained bulls prevent the wild ones from stopping and going after people on the sides of the street or reversing course and cornering people. I instinctively did a few quad stretches to shake out nerves, but I took solace in the fact that I was one of the more athletic people in the crowd and I was sober.
I never heard the gun go off but I heard the roar of the crowd and felt a ball of excitement and fear flow up the street. Heads popped up from the crowd like whack-a-moles to get a better view.
Before the development of languages, Homo Sapiens relied on an innate sense of detecting the feelings of others for survival. This capability helped humans survive with less than impressive physical abilities compared it other animals for thousands of years as our brains developed. I was able to experience this phenomenon in its purest form. When the bulls came up the street and I saw people turn and I could see the panic on their faces as they began to sprint. The realization that there was not going to be anything to stop one of those horns from tearing into my flesh washed over me like a waterfall. No one was going to come and save me. Any sort of intervention would have to be divine.
I ran like Indian Jones ran from the huge round boulder in Raiders of the Lost Arch after he stole the golden statuette, except I running from a palpable ball of fearful energy. Even though I only ran the second half of the course, the bulls caught up to me by the time I got into the coliseum. If you started directly in front of the bulls at the starting gate, there is no way you would make it all the way to the stadium. You’d have to veer off to the side at some point or get trampled. The street narrows and then goes downhill into the stadium through a down sloping bottleneck. The bulls rushed past me just as I took a hard right through the stadium entrance, meeting to the roar of crowd. I saw myself on the news later that day, in the video sequence that showed the bulls triumphant entry through the tunnel into the stadium.
Once all the runners enter the stadium, the gates are closed trapping the runners and bulls are set free in he stadium to charge the runners who taunt them, to the entertainment of the crowd. This I was unaware of. I though it was over after you made it to the stadium. If you have seen the film Gladiator where tigers are released from under the stadium, the same is done but out of sides of the stadium through a gate and bulls are unchained. The bull runs around and tries to bucks people who taunt them. Ever now and then the bull will make solid contact and tabletop someone and the crowd goes “Ohhhhhh!”, like a big hit in a football stadium. Legend has it, that a lifetime of good luck awaits you if you are able to touch one of the bulls. Also, if someone is getting trampled it is considered polite to run by and slap the bull on the ass to distract it and save them from further punishment.
I soon figured out it is safer to run around in the middle on the stadium as I once got cornered by a bull along the edge of the circular stadium. I tried to run up the wall and escape until a female police officer pushed me back in. Never before have I felt more emasculated. Luckily, the bull lost interest in me and ran off. Naturally, I wanted to have good luck for life so I took my chance and slapped one on the ass. I was strategic and waited for the bull to get tired before he was changed out. Like picking a fight in hockey game when the other guy is at the end of his shift, is tired and has less oxygen in his lungs and muscles. I ran by and slapped it on its posterior while it was busy pummeling some other poor soul into the dirt. My joy was quickly canceled when I ran straight into another person. A skinny Australian kid who had blood all down his shirt. The crowd went “Ohhhhh”, not sure it if was my collision or if the bull tagged somebody else. It could have been either. Like anything else, after a while it started to get old. The other participants started taking pictures and mucking it up with their friends in the stadium while the bulls were still running around. We are in there for about an hour. When it was over, they let everyone out of the stadium. Little did I know the day had just begun.
We walked the opposite direction back down the street we had just ran down. Small puddles of blood splattered Jackson Pollock style across the street, I was swelling with pride that they weren’t mine.
The San Fermin Festival is essentially a 9 day party where everyone waits out the time between the run in the morning and the bull fights in the afternoon by bar hopping or chilling out in cafes. I spent the time in-between letting my adrenaline reach domestic levels and walking the same streets Hemingway did almost a century before me. The whole city has bars open, where people stand and drink in the street.
Later that afternoon, we scalped tickets to the bullfights and sat in the upper bowl of the same stadium where we had been the entertainment down on the dirt earlier that day. Anything can be brought into the stadium. So people brought in buckets of Sangria, as one would. Large buckets usually used to carry plaster were filled with Sangria and ice. The crowd had an unofficial band in the upper section, where all the Spaniards sang throughout the bullfights. The locals sang their local football/soccer team’s songs and chants in impressive unison. Osasuna is the La Liga team in Pamplona, which I recognized from my youth, when I used to play season-mode with Real Madrid on FIFA. The locals gave us cup after cup of sangria. Yes, you read that correctly, two American male tourists being given free drinks by the local population. My traveling companion studied four years of undergraduate Spanish, for what that’s worth, so he chatted up some of the locals. Sangria, apart from being delicious, has only about a light beer’s alcohol concentration, so you can drink a lot of it and keep a solid buzz going without getting completely washed. Young locals surrounded us, except for two UCLA Tri-delts or Chi-Os… whatever, who sat front of us. At least that’s what the embroidered sleeve of their polos claimed.
For the bullfight itself, it is exactly what you would imagine except more savage in the flesh. Hemingway’s now almost 100-year-old description in The Sun Also Rises has aged shockingly well. Put plainly, the matadors slowly stab the bull to death. Only skin deep at first then a finishing blow with an actual sword, through its spine. At first, the Matadors hide behind wooden panels along the edges where the bulls charge, only to hit wood and send splinters flying. The Matadors slowly get out into the open, while the bulls take charges at the red sheet, only for the Matador to jump out of the way at the last second, met with an “Olay!” from the crowd, just as you might have seen in your sophomore Spanish class movie day. The Matadors first stick the bull on top of their back with foot long track and field baton-like stick with a sharp little hook on the end as they run by. The hook sticks under the skin, letting blood spill down their rib cage as the baton hangs down like an ornament. This continued for a few more passes, then came the finishing blow with a skinny pointy sword. The first Matador of the day was dialed in, right through the spine. The bull took a few more steps, then collapsed, blood pouring out of its mouth. My buddy and I just stared at each other, our jaws slack in disbelief. The bull lay twitching, its nerves firing for the last time. One of the UCLA undergrads in front of us was now crying. One of them whipped out her phone. The Instagram app was already open. She took a selfie of herself crying with a long message talking about how her vacation was now ruined. They soon left as our new friends refreshed our Sangria cups. The bull was drug out of the stadium by a horse, leaving a trail of blood behind it. This sequence repeated for numerous bulls as different Matadors got their chance to take the stage.
At the bars later that evening, everyone asks you if you ran that morning, if so, instant respect. The majority of people just come to watch. A bartender asked us the inevitable question before refilling our drinks, and we replied “yes we ran today”. Then the bartender gave a gesture of “your money is no good here.” Yes. Again you did not misread. Two male American tourists getting free drinks with alcohol in them from the local population. What a city. What a festival.
We hovered around an open-air bar covered by two very large tents. Pumping Spanish pop music soaked us. All the people out had a sort of unspoken bond between us. Tourists included. I had never seen more attractive, no-makeup, unfiltered girls in one location. They were not in a roped off $10,000 a table bottle service area either. They were mixing with the common people, dancing as mere civilians. My buddy’s Spanish skills proved key again as we were able to chat up a group of local girls. Continuing with the theme of the day they were very friendly. I would try to speak Spanish to them. They would just stare at me then start speaking English to me, as if to say “Nice try, but I’ll take it from here…” A girl named Sara and I hit it off, but communication was rough at best. My grasp of the Spanish language is laughable, while she spoke broken English. At one point in the evening, she said something along the lines of “trying to talk is too painful, you agree?” then drifted off. Only to return ten minutes later. There is only so much a language barrier can do against unadulterated attraction. Conversation slowly improved as I dug into the deepest synapses in my brain to retrieve Spanish vocabulary I had once learned in the 7th grade. Eventually, my Spanish and her English had miraculously improved to the point where we had flirty banter going back and forth. Or maybe it was the fact that the amount of sangria in my system was turning me Spanish. On the walk back to her flat, she started asking me all the universal questions. “You probably do this all the time, huh?”, “Do you have a lot of girls?” Fireworks were now going off above the city.
I was in excellent spirits considering how complete these 24 hours were about to. Running with he bulls was a bucket list item for me as was rolling around in the sheets with someone who I don’t even speak the same language as.
We got to her flat, which was about the size of my college dorm room where my feet used to hang off the edge of the bed when I slept. I was half expecting to walk in on her parents having coffee at the dinner table, considering many Europeans still live at home until the age of 27-28. Just when I thought the day couldn’t get any better, things quickly began to unravel. “Tienes anticonceptivos?”, she said. Again, I don’t speak Spanish but I knew what she meant. Grabbing a condom was the last thing I was thinking about 20 hours ago as I was leaving my hotel to run with 2,000 pound bulls. She dug around her small flat looking for one. It became clear that I would need to go to a drug store and get one or six. I left the flat and the store I found was closed. My phone died. I was too drunk at this point to reverse navigate through the streets to find her flat again. I also didn’t know the code to get in the lobby if I did. I quickly came to the realization that the night was over for me, just like that. Nonetheless, I walked back through the streets in a blissful glow. I eventually found my way back to my hotel just as the sun was rising.
