With an hour still to go the balconies are filling up with families, friends, and those who’ve rented these viewpoints for thousands of pesetas. At 7.30 police and colourful officials in scarlet berets and tunics begin to clear the course. Anyone poking out of a doorway is pushed firmly back in. At 7.40 a squad of street-cleaners comes through, personal high-pressure vacuum cleaners strapped to their backs, followed by a second line with brushes and black rubber buckets. At 7.45 the live television coverage begins and I can see our street on a screen in the building opposite. With ten minutes still to go, an eerie, unnatural calm descends. The runners, held in groups at different starting points, shift from foot to foot, lick their lips and tighten their grip on the rolled-up newspapers which are traditionally carried with the hope of landing a thwack on a passing bull.
At 7.52 a safety announcement is made in different languages. At 7.55 I catch a glimpse on television of one of the bulls, still in the corral, steam rising gently from his nostrils, his great head framed against the green hills beyond the city. Nothing in the four years of his life so far can have prepared him for what is about to happen.
At eight on the dot the rocket goes off, the bulls are released and all the concentrated energy that has been building up to this moment crackles along the course, a psychic shock-wave that affects the most dispassionate spectator. When the bulls come in sight they seem the calmest creatures in town, running in disciplined order behind accompanying steers, heads lowered, eyes forward, whilst humans scamper hysterically around them flicking their papers and occasionally grabbing at a horn.
In a few seconds they’ve gone past, and everyone looks to the nearest television screen to see what really happened. I see one brown bull run close to a barrier, stripping off its line of spectators one by one. They’re already playing back a goring which took place outside Ana’s Jewellers. Then the second rocket sounds, indicating safe arrival of the bulls at the ring.
To-To consults his watch.
‘Two minutes thirty seconds. That’s good.’ He seems vaguely disappointed.
‘The longest I ever saw lasted fourteen minutes. One bull was detached from the rest and then they turn angry, you know. There was quite a pile-up.’
The runners filter back into the square and soon the bars and cafes are full of tales of daring exploits and valiant feats with rolled-up newspapers.
Rumours of serious injury, even death, chase round the city. One positive fact, reported in the Diario de Navarra, is that thirty tons of broken glass were removed from the streets yesterday.
On Hemingway’s advice I leave the hotel at half past five this second morning to be sure of a ringside seat to watch the amateur bullfight that takes place at the end of the encierro. ‘Pamplona is the toughest bullfight town in the world,’ he wrote in the Toronto Star Weekly. The amateur fight that comes immediately after the bulls have entered the pens proves that.’
This may be Ernest pumping himself up a little for, though there is no evidence that he ever ran with the bulls, there is a photograph of him dodging horns at the ‘amateurs’.
Certainly the ring fills up fast, but the great number of spectators are teenagers, excited boys and girls who throw themselves energetically into Mexican waves and sing-alongs. A tired brass band plays in the middle of the ring. The only really hard behaviour comes from an angry young man with a shaved head who seems determined to take on the rest of the world with a virtuoso display of taunts, leers and obscene gestures.
The crowd takes against him immediately. He is punched and kicked and pushed down the stands into the ring where, to enormous applause, the police lead him off. Support for the authorities seems unanimous.
Eight o’clock comes round and we hear the rocket that means the bulls are on their way. Only seconds later the first wave of runners spills into the ring, jogging briskly. They are followed by a second wave running more smartly, who are in turn followed by a third wave sprinting like hell. Almost unnoticed in the middle of all the human hysteria are the bulls, trotting in resolutely, rarely breaking their stride as they follow their guiding steers across the ring and away into the pens where they will stay until they go out to be killed nine hours later.
This leaves the ring full of several hundred amateurs. A couple of American boys from Arizona who I’d met earlier in the day have run for the second time. Their eyes are shining as they shout at me from the other side of the barrier.
‘It was incredible.’
‘Frightening?’
‘Terrifying! But we did it! We did it!’
‘Now you’re used to it will you become a regular?’
‘No way! No way!’
At that moment a gate swings open and they leap to safety over the barrier. They needn’t have worried. The animal that is released for the amateurs to try their skills on is not a bull, but a thin, though sprightly, cow with the points of its horns taped. It frisks off amongst the crowd, picking off people here and there. The crowd is very fair, any attempt to grapple the cow to the ground or even pull its tail being roundly booed.
After a while the cow is brought back in and there is a brief pause before the next one emerges, which gives a chance for the bolder boys to play chicken by sitting in the ring as close to the gate as possible. Those brave enough to remain at the front can scarcely avoid being trampled by the animal as it’s released.
This mass larking about goes on for another half-hour, and by nine o’clock the bullring starts emptying and the streets start filling again. Outside, by the television mobile trucks, a line of Hemingway fans waits to be photographed at the bust of Ernest which stands under the trees of an avenue called Paseo Hemingway. His head and shoulders seem trapped in the bulky granite plinth as if he’s half stuck in a recycling bin.
The celebrations seem to have mellowed out on this second day. The dangerous sports boys have either crashed out on distant camp-sites or left town, looking for the next adrenalin rush. There are more locals on the streets, more bands playing, more families, more dancing and more entertainments laid on by the infinitely patient authorities of Pamplona. The police, who once fought the crowds here, seem to have learned the lesson that a crowd is only really dangerous when it has an enemy.
At La Perla a woman in a dressing-gown, smoking and agitated, is in the lobby trying to make the receptionist understand that her hand-bag has been stolen from her room. She went down the passage to the lavatory and when she came back it was gone. A moment later it’s found. In her room. There’s a lot of this hyperactivity around but I’ve seen little crime and almost no aggression. But the pace is relentless and there is a sense in the air, if not of self-destruction, then something pretty close to it.
It certainly stimulated Hemingway’s imagination and his third visit here, with his Anglo-American friends in July 1925, provided him with personal intrigues worthy of the location. By the time he left for Madrid he was putting the place and the people together in his mind, and when he reached Valencia, a fortnight later, he was ready to write the novel that immortalised Pamplona.
Seventy-four years later, I’m leaving too. From the train window the sharp-ridged mountains and the twisting green valleys of Navarre are broadening into the plains as I head south to see Madrid and Valencia for myself.