Living the life
Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon is a personal account of bullfighting in Spain during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Hemingway came to love the sport and love Spain among other things. He tries to share his passion with his readers and in the process we learn as much about him as we do about bullfighting.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 4:
"The town is Velasquez to the edge and then straight Goya to the bull ring. The ring itself dates before Goya. It is a lovely building in the style of the old ring at Ronda and you can sit in a barrera seat and drink wine and eat strawberries in the shade with your back to the sand and watch boxes fill and we see the girls from Toledo and all the surrounding country of Castille come in and drape their shawls over the front of the boxes, sitting, with much fan waving, to smile and talk with the pleasant, conscious confusion of amateur beauties under inspection. This girl inspection is a big part of bullfighting for the spectator. If you are near-sighted you can carry a pair of field glasses. They are taken as an additional compliment. It is best not to neglect a single box. The use of a good pair of glasses is an advantage. They will destroy for you some of the greatest and most startling beauties who will come in with cloudy white lace mantillas, high combs and complexions and wonderful shawls and who in the glasses will show you the gold teeth and flour-covered swartness of some one you saw last night perhaps somewhere else and who is attending the fight to advertise the house; but in some box you might have noticed without the glasses you may see a beautiful girl. It is very easy for the traveller in Spain seeing the flour-faced fatness of the flamenca dancers and the hardy ladies of the brothels to write that all talk of beautiful Spanish women is nonsense. Whoring is not a highly paid profession in Spain and the Spanish whore works hard to keep her looks. Do not look for beautiful women on the stage, in the brothels or the canta honda places. You look for them in the evening at the time of the paseo when you can sit in a chair at a cafe or on the street and have all the girls of the town walk by you for an hour, passing not once but many times as they walk up the block, make the turn and come back, walking three or four abreast; or you look for them carefully, with glasses in the boxes at the bull ring. It is not polite to focus the glasses on any one not in a box, nor is it polite to use them from the ring itself in those rings where the admirers of girls are allowed to stay in the ring to circle about before the fight and congregate before any special beauties. To use glasses when standing on the sand of the ring is the mark of a voyeur, a looker in the worst sense; that is a looker rather than a do-er. But to use the glasses on the boxes from a barrera seat is legitimate, and a compliment, and a means of communication and almost an introduction. There is no better preliminary introduction than acceptable sincere admiration and there is no way admiration at a certain distance can be conveyed or any way response noted better than with a good-looking pair of racing glasses. Even if you never look at girls the glasses are good to watch the killing of the last bull if it is getting dusk and the bull is being killed on the far side of the ring."
What a time, what a place to be! It was a time when intelligent adults knew boundaries and celebrated life! What a writer! What a man!
What would a modern radical feminist say?
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Hemingway made annual trips to Pamplona, where bullfights were held in connection with the religious festival of San Fermín. Pamplona became the setting for the climactic scenes of The Sun Also Rises (1926).
In the late 1960s I had the experience of watching a traditional bullfight that ended with the killing of the bull in Marbella, Spain. I didn't have field glasses and I was fairly high up in the stadium, but it was an exceptional experience with the ceremony and the music.
It sounds like you enjoyed it?
Did you know they made a law over there that every bull who fights in the ring must be killed, win or lose?
At one time if the bull won, he'd live to fight again. The problem was they became all too clever (almost unbeatable) after their first experience in the ring.
No.
Yup, the Pope even got involved. A long time ago a bull became so successful that he killed 16 matadors and many horses over a long career and many fights.
Killing animals for entertainment is primitive.
The bull that killed 16 Matadors and had become famous eventually got old and was sent to a slaughter house. There the family of one of the victims waited. They asked people who worked there if they could gouge the bull's eyes out and spit in the eye sockets. They were thus allowed. (It's in the book)
and ?
[DELETED]
I suppose some may say that the life of a bull in Spain is short to begin with. Other than the minute few who are used for breeding, very young bulls are tested for courage right from the beginning. Those who fail the test are sold for slaughter for Veal meat. Those who show courage and are in good condition are reserved for the ring where they have their one very final performance at the age of 3 or 4. Either way they don't have a long life.
Killing animals for human amusement is depraved behavior. I dont care how you dress it up with wordage.
"You went to the bullfight? How was it?
It was disgusting. I couldn't stand it.
All right, we will give you an honorable discharge but no refund.
How did you like it?
It was terrible.
How do you mean terrible?
Just terrible. It was terrible, awful, horrible.
Good. You get an honorable discharge too.
How did it seem to you?
I was simply bored to death.
All right. You get the hell out of here.
Didn't anybody like the bullfight? Didn't anybody like the bullfight at all?
No answer.
Did you like it sir?
I did not.
Did you like it Madame?
Decidedly not.
Old Lady: I liked it very much.
What did you like about it?
Old Lady: I liked to see the bulls hit the horses.
Why did you like that?
Old Lady: It seemed kind of homey.
Let us go to the Cafe Fornos where we can discuss these matters at leisure.
Fornos is a cafe only frequented by people connected with the bullfights and by whores. (Chapter Seven)
How do you feel about hunting for animals that are not killed for food? Once in a while I've read stories that they actually bag a human.
Strange seed, apparently references to Rouben Mamoulian films and Ibanez novels are depraved.
Don't bring up Bob Dylan either