Chapter 5: La Corrida de Toros

I didn’t hate it. I thought I would hate it. I wanted to hate it. Wasn’t it terrible, what they did to the animals? I mean, they kill eight of them in three hours. And it’s not even like they do it differently,; they do it the same every time. Why not just kill one? And they do it slowly. It is torture, really. But I didn’t hate it. I may have even liked it.

There is no mystery in bull fighting. There is only one outcome: the bull will die. The only thing that saves the bull is if he will not fight, and that almost never happens. The few times it does happen, they kill him anyways, because he won’t fight.

I had never seen anything die before, not right before my eyes. When the first bull died, I watched so carefully, straining my eyes, blocking the sun with my uplifted hand. I thought I would feel a shiver, an ache, a wave of pity and sadness wash over my body, some significant feeling that would be the bodily manifestation of the bulls life leaving the earth. The bull shuddered, twitched, and lay still. And so did I. I felt nothing. And then I felt like a monster. Why couldn’t I feel it? I should be disgusted. Maybe the next bull.

I had not really paid attention too closely to the first bull before he died. I was too distracted trying to be disgusted and horrified. With the second bull, I studied its movements, trying to reconcile the idea that in only 15 short minutes, unbeknownst to itself, it would be dead. Somewhere in my study, I lost track. I was caught in the movements, the prancing, the panting, the angry butting of the head, the frustrated scraping of the ground. My eyes danced with the hot pink and yellow capes, my breath short and quick at each turn. When the red cape came out, the matador, I no longer knew who I was rooting for. I watched as he and the bull fell into step, a dangerous dance for the matador and a deadly one for the bull. It was like a seduction. The blood poured down the side of the bull, so thick I would have sworn it was red paint. But I was enchanted. Lively, adventurous music played in the background, but at the time I would have sworn it was a waltz. The matador was not the murderer but the deliverer of death. He wooed the bull closer and closer, teasing it, letting it just graze the side of his body. He could no doubt feel the heat from the bull’s sweating side. His feet together, arms to the side, his body arched back, the matador was beautiful. He wore hot pink tights and a tight-fitting sequined uniform in a light purple hue, yet he was machismo incarnate. With only a flimsy cape and a thin sword, he defeated the universal symbol of masculine strength and sexual might.

It wasn’t until the eighth bull died that I finally felt it, that redeeming ball in the back of my throat, the tight chest, the blurry vision. Not so much sadness at the cruelty, but sadness for man. Why do we like this? The violence. The beautiful violence. We ritualize something, call it tradition, name it culture, and experience the grotesque act as something sublimely beautiful. When the bull is dragged by the horns through the dirt and out of the plaza, we look away, ashamed at what we’ve done, or enjoyed seeing, paid to witness. We are ashamed at our inclination towards violence, but it only lasts a few short minutes, enough time to refill our cup with pisco, until the next bull charges into the ring.