The Stain on Spain

19 September 1992

More than 30,000 bulls will die this year in the name of Spanish sport. Opponents are vocal but can do little to dampen the passion or staunch the flow of blood. ERIC ELLIS reports from Huelva

 
"I didn't come here and pay 5,000 pesetas to watch this crap. Kill him, KILL HIM." 

Our interlocutor was the very image of Modern Spanish Euro Man: immaculately dressed, BMW key-ring, attractive wife, family man, fluent in three languages, self-employed, doing well.

But he was bored, as bored perhaps as the bull was terrified. The matador had fluffed his third attempt at a clean kill and the crowd was restless. It hissed at the matador, it hissed at the VIP box and it hissed at the "cowardly toro", which hadn't put up much of a contest.

The fourth attempt was more success-ful. The bull was the 41st to be killed in the Plaza de Toros of this historic Andalusian city of Huelva this first week of August, one of 30,000-odd that will be killed in Spain this year in the name of sport.

EL PAGANO, the 598-kilogram pride of Rancho Celestini Cuadri, charges into the ring, petrified, confused, snorting mucus, scraping a hoof on the sand in fear as much as anger. He charges the taunting torero, who darts behind the protective alcove. El Pagano leaves the tip of his right horn in the wooden fence. Dripping blood, his nerve ends dangle in the breeze.

We had come to Huelva to witness one of the most revealing contradictions of 1992 - Spain's Year of Wonders - when the New Spain, the Progressive Spain that has embraced modernism so vigorously, would celebrate its re-entry into the inter-national mainstream with a glittering array of events.

Five hundred years earlier, from this very port, Christopher Columbus's caravels had sailed to discover the New World in the name of the Spanish Crown. That voyage and the theme of discovery was common to all of Spain's celebrations this year.

In nearby Seville, once-impoverished Andalusians were discovering at the Universal Exposition a future as the Silicon Valley of Europe. At the same time in Barcelona, the host nation was discovering that its sportsmen and women can beat the world's best, winning 13 gold medals and tripling Spain's tally from all previous Olympics. In Madrid, tourists were surveying the extraordinary talent of Goya, Velazquez, Picasso and Miro.

And in Huelva, they were celebrating all of this and Columbus, too, by killing bulls.

"Spain has really progressed, hasn't it?" says a disgusted Man-uel Casas, president of the Barcelona-based European Asso-ciation for the Defence of the Rights of the Animal (ADDA).

 "I find there is great irony in all of this. It is 1992, Spain is famous all over the world and still we have this black shadow over us."

The banderillero plants two barbed darts into the back of El Pagano's neck, adding to the four already embedded. The darts are the colours of Spain, Andalusia and Huelva. Or rather, they were. The green and white of the Andalusian banner has turned deep burgundy from the blood gushing from the wound on to the sand. El Pagano stoops to smell his own blood.

Animal rights campaigners consider the professional bullfight to be the least objectionable of the hundreds of fiestas and ancient traditions involving the mal-treatment of animals in Spain.

"We have a very big problem with some of the things that go on, unregulated, in the small pueblos," says ADDA's Manuel Casas. "It is here where these practices are so very barbaric. I do not know what possesses these people."

On Easter Saturday in the village of Robleda de Chavela, near Valencia, cats, birds, squirrels and other small animals are captured and put into pots, which are suspended overnight from a pole in the square, 10 metres above the ground.

After the solemnity of a ceremony in which images of Christ and the Virgin Mother are carried through the village streets, townsfolk take potshots with rocks at the hanging pots. The object is to smash the pots so the birds can fly away. The animals are not so fortunate.

In the Andalusian village of Vejer de la Frontera, south of Seville, a bull is let loose to run through the tiny streets on Easter Sunday.

Wooden balls that are strapped to the bull's horns impair its balance and sense of direction. As the bull runs aimlessly through the streets, villagers standing behind protective bars jab at it with sticks and swords while others run before it.

Vejer's running of the bulls is supposed to prove the machismo and courage of the young Vejeriegos who take part, but the opposite seems the case.

Most of those running never actually see the bull and are guided more by the waves of fear from fellow runners that ripple down the streets than by any perilous confrontation with the beast itself.

If anything, the running serves to confirm the cowardice of the men, evident by their panic at something which, for the number of times they actually see it, might as well not exist. After 90 minutes the bull collapses from exhaustion.

In the town of Morella, this barbarism takes on a fiery personality when villagers attach a flaming metal contraption, dipped in wax, to the bull's horns. It burns for hours as the bull is chased through the streets until it, too, eventually drops dead from exhaustion. This fiesta is held to celebrate the local manhood's induction into mili, Spain's national military service.

In Manganeses de la Polvorosa, the vil-lagers celebrate the feast of San Vincent by hurling a goat from the 15-metre high church tower, while in another village in Castile roosters are suspended from a wire and blindfolded youths try to behead them with a sword. The fiesta, again marking San Vincent, is supposed to ward off the devil.

"These are the sort of things that we know about," says Manuel Casas. "If someone did this in England or Australia, I am sure they will be arrested. Here in Spain the Government promotes these things as culture."

Blindfolded and drugged, the picadors' horses enter the ring. El Pagano charges one of them, lifting it high into the air. The horse has no reaction, even when El Pagano gets under its saddle padding to tear open its abdomen and spill its guts on to the sand. The picador, all 110 kg of him, bears down and spears El Pagano with the pic. The bull's neck muscles slice open like over-ripe peaches.

"I have run out of all rational reasons to explain why (the) Spanish love the bullfight so much," says British writer John Hooper, author of The Spaniards, the 1987 book which is considered the benchmark study of the so-called New Spain.

"I've tried to rationalise this phenomenon so many times but every theory leads up a blind alley."

Hooper generalises that Spaniards are "substantially incapable" of putting themselves in another's position, be they humans or animals. "That's partly to do with their extraordinary sense of individ-ualism," he says. "They are quite ego-centric and extremely self-conscious.

"There is the other, Catholic, theory that animals don't have a soul but that is confounded by the lack of any similar sort of phenomenon in Italy, for example."

Unlike many in the animal rights lobby in Spain and abroad, Hooper does not foresee an end to bullfights for some time.

He cites the totalitarianism of the Franco regime as the reason why bull-fights will remain second only to soccer as the national sporting passion.

"There's a widespread avoidance of studied recrimination after Franco in Spain," says Hooper. "Franco had his eyes and ears in every neighbourhood, the proverbial knock on the door in the middle of the night, father being 'away on business' to explain his sudden disappearance ... 

"Now there is this tolerance theme running through Spanish society, to mind your own business to the degree where people will not complain if the stereo's too loud ... If you like bullfighting, you will be allowed to like it and no-one will tell you it's wrong to like it."

The matador rises up on his toes and plunges the espada (sword) into El Pagano's neck. The aim is astray and the espada sticks askew from a neck muscle. Blood spouts from the new wound and flows down the bull's flanks. The matador jabs repeatedly with a spike at the beast to position its neck for another go, then rams the spike home. El Pagano topples and his snorts turn to bellows. He is finished off with a dagger. The ears are removed and handed to a girl in a white dress. Her ecstasy is topped only by that of her mother. El Pagano is dragged from the ring.

"NUNCA (never)" The old boys gathering in the balmy night outside the Huelva plaza are in no doubt about the future of la fiesta nacional. "It will never end. Nunca, nunca,. nunca."

Yet these men, and most aficionados Good Weekend approaches, are unable to explain what it is about the bullfight they find compelling. The best answer, indeed the only answer given, is because it is traditional or because it is la fiesta nacional. (La fiesta nacional is a propaganda term coined in the mid-1980s after the bullfighting hierarchy feared that the entry of Spain into the European Community would herald the bullfight's end.)

"Even the King likes it and he is the symbol of Spain," says one. King Carlos's reputation as Spain's most famous fan cannot be understated. Universally admired for foiling the 1981 coup attempt that threatened to topple the young post-Franco democracy, Juan Carlos caused a stir in 1986 when he said the bullfight was a "vital element" in the traditions of Spanish life.

Meant as nothing more than an aside, the remark elated a besieged bullfighting industry and riled anti-corrida campaigners.

"If you agree with that, you might as well bring back the Inquisition, the Conquistadores, Francoism even," says Manuel Casas. "All these are part of Spain's national tradition."

As another bull charges into the ring, the blade of the carnicero (butcher) slits El Pagano's neck. Another blade hacks into his cranium, exposing the brain and the occasional artery, which spurts blood in the carnicero's face. "Mierda " he spits. "Shit."

Casas recognises that the 5,000 members of ADDA and its associate organisations have an uphill battle to stop the bullfight, but he believes some progress is being made.

He cites a recent opinion poll by the Gallup organisation for the International Fund for Animal Welfare that suggests that Spaniards are turning away from la corrida. "For the first time more than half of Spain is either against the bullfight or not interested in it. Ten years ago this was not the case."

The Spanish Government was recently presented with a petition of 2.4 million signatures from 63 countries imploring Madrid to "end the carnage". Some 37,252 came from Australia, the fifth largest grouping on the petition. Britain, the land of the hunt, provided 1.6 million. Only 3,024 Spaniards signed up, even less than the ADDA membership.

The old boys in berets drinking beer in front of the Huelva plaza snort at these findings. "I think only five per cent are against la corrida and they are not Spanish," says one. "It is mostly foreigners who have never seen la corrida who are creating this bad image for Spain. The foreigners who come and understand it like it very much. It is the true Spain.

"Do they understand la corrida in Australia? You have something like this with the kangaroo, no? That sounds very exciting."

El Pagano's horns are prised off, souvenired by a young fan. The skin is peeled, the rib cage chopped open, the guts removed. Five minutes after his death in the plaza five metres away, El Pagano is a third his former size. Our interest in proceedings prompts one of the blood-spattered workers to look up. "Pity we didn't wear our suits," he says.

WHAT YOU NEVER WANTED TO KNOW 
1. The bulls always die, up to 30,000 each year in Spanish bullrings. 
2. An average of three toreros are gored to death in the ring each year. 
3. The bullfight has been yuppified in the New Spain and is becoming more expensive and more popular. Some rings are introducing corporate boxes. 
4. The most prominent aficionado is King Juan Carlos, Spain's most important political figure. 
5. A bull's horns are its navigational aid. They are often filed down (sometimes, allegedly, a blow-torch is used) before a fight to disorient it. 
6. Bulls are colour-blind and are attracted by the cape's movement. 
7. Rare is the bull that dies instantaneously in the ring. It often takes the matador three attempts to kill it with a sword or, failing that, up to six blows with the dagger to sever its spinal column and end its life. 
8. Drugs are often administered to both horse and bull - to pacify the former and rile the latter. 
9. The bullfight attracts wide support, with all sections of Spanish society re-presented among the spectators. Women and children are among the most enthusiastic aficionados. 
10. Animal rights campaigners consider the bullfight to be the least barbaric and objectionable of Spanish cultural traditions involving the abuse of animals. 
11. Bullfights are televised daily during the season by the national network, Television Espanola. 
12. The Portuguese claim their bull- fights are more humane because the bull is not killed "in the ring". The animal is killed immediately after it leaves the stadium. 
13. The bull's eyes allegedly are often smeared with Vaseline to blur its vision. The bullfighting industry denies the practice. 
14. Horses badly wounded in a goring by a bull allegedly are denied adequate veterinary treatment. 
15. Paint solvent is injected into a bull's anus to rile it, claim animal rights supporters. This practice is also denied by the industry. 
16. Dead bulls are cut up and sold at the bullring for human consumption. Freshly killed meat is considered best.