Hemingway was always more intrigued by bullfighting than bull-running. He was fascinated by matadors, whom he described memorably in Death in the Afternoon (1932) as ‘affable, generous, courteous and well liked by all who are superior to them in station, and miserly slave drivers with those who must work for them’.
When he first visited Madrid in 1923 he was still starry-eyed and chose to stay at the Pension Aguilar in Via San Jeronimo ‘where the bullfighters live’.
We are quartered in the Hotel Suecia where the Hemingways took a suite on his last visit to Spain thirty-six years later. The hotel does not seem to know, or care, that he stayed here, which is quite refreshing in a way, if a little odd, as the cultural centre next door is running an exhibition called ‘Hemingway y Espana’, consisting mainly of photographs of Ernest on that trip in 1959.
The pictures are quite sad. His powerful build is much reduced and the white beard and wispy white hair make him look more like some venerable old prophet than a man only just out of his fifties.
A first visitor to Madrid could do worse than follow the Hemingway trail, not just because so much of it still exists, but because he was a man of taste and did not waste his time on the second-rate.
Across the road from the hotel is the Prado, one of the world’s greatest collection of paintings, where Hemingway caught up with his beloved Bruegels and Goyas and where I could spend an entire visit in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights.
Then follow him, for refreshment, into the old quarter west of the Prado, where the narrow streets bear the names of writers like Cervantes and Lope de Vega and take a beer at the Cerveceria Alemana, a 96-year-old bierkeller with Spanish tiling and an open unfussy interior, which was one of Hemingway’s favourites. (If you feel oppressed by the presence of the Great Man, I recommend La Venencia just round the corner in the Calle Echegaray, of which there is no record of him ever entering. The speciality is sherry served from the cask and the peeling walls are stained a rich tobacco brown.)
Hemingway would likely have repaired at this point for a cocktail in the Art Deco elegance of Chicote on the Gran Via, a cocktail bar founded in 1931 ‘to promote talk and opinion’. Chicote earned Hemingway’s undying loyalty by never closing throughout the bombardments of the Spanish Civil War. There’s another photo of him here, from 1959, frail and bearded.
Though you may be hungry by now, remember that Spanish restaurants don’t expect you for dinner until well after nine. Hemingway fans will take his recommendation and head straight for Casa Botin, which has been serving meals for over 200 years and whose wood-fired ovens turn out herds of roast suckling pig every night. It’s easy to find. Down the steps at the south-west corner of the Plaza Mayor, into Calle Cuchilleros (Knife-maker Street) and it’s practically next door to a restaurant with a large sign, ‘Hemingway Never Ate Here’.
As it is inconceivable that anyone but an invalid should be in bed in Madrid before one-thirty, I’m easily tempted into a post-prandial night-cap. We head for the focal point of the old city, the wide cobbled expanse of the seventeenth-century Plaza Mayor with, at its centre, a fine statue of Philip III on a charger. The Plaza is grand, but car-free and friendly and full of bars which make it almost impossible to cross without feeling thirsty.
Bar Andalu, like Botin, is traditional, but ‘traditional’ in Spain is not so much of a tourist board cliche as it is elsewhere, and generally means something still very close to the spirit of the country.
Three great bulls’ heads loom out of the wall surrounded by an exhaustive collection of framed photographs showing matadors in moments of cape-swirling glory or gory and gruesome injury.
Machismo drips from its tiled and trophied walls, and it is perhaps no coincidence that, as I eventually leave to totter home, I notice for the first time the truly heroic proportions of the testicles on Philip III’s horse.
Hemingway, Spain and bullfighting are inseparable. After his visit in 1923 in which he wanted to live where the bullfighters lived, he was, as you might say, hooked.
He returned year after year. The bullfighter first appears in his books in The Sun Also Rises and, a few years later, in an exhaustive aficionado’s guide called Death in the Afternoon, which James Michener called a kind of Bible of bullfighting. It still is one of the best books on this arcane art.
Hemingway returned to the subject in 1959, when he crisscrossed the country to chronicle the series of mano a mano (one-to-one) contests between two leading matadors. Life magazine had commissioned a 10,000-word piece, but he turned in a first draft of 120,000 words, reduced to 45,000 after his death, and published in 1985 as The Dangerous Summer.
Whatever I feel about bullfighting, I can’t come to Spain and avoid it. I decide to follow the advice Hemingway gives in the opening chapter of Death in the Afternoon.
If those who read this decide with disgust that it is written by someone who lacks their … fineness of feeling I can only plead that this may be true. But whoever reads this can truly make such a judgement when he, or she, has seen the things that are spoken of and knows truly what their reactions to them would be.
So here goes.
Thirty minutes south of Madrid, in flat hot countryside, is a farm where bulls are bred for the ring. It is owned by Jose Antonio Hernandez Tabernilla, a lawyer whose family has bred them since 1882. He has records that trace the ancestry of each bull as far back as 1905.
Jose Antonio and his wife are a tall, handsome couple, courteous, well informed and much more comfortable with English than I am with Spanish.
The farm is functional, with low outbuildings and nothing fancy other than a barn in which are displayed old stirrups, halters, bridles, saddles and various other taurine and equestrian accessories. Framed bullfight posters hang on the walls, of which the most curious is one detailing a corrida (the Spanish word for a bullfight) specially laid on for Heinrich Himmler in 1940.
Apparently the famous Nazi found the whole thing too cruel and left after the second fight.
They introduce us to a stocky man in early middle-age who wears a T-shirt and a white straw hat with ‘Benidorm’ on the ribbon. This is Serafin, the farm manager. He is shrewd, and taciturn. More comfortable with bulls than the BBC. We are piled unceremoniously into a farm trailer, and with Serafin driving the tractor, and two or three dogs running on ahead, we’re hauled along a bumpy track into the fields where a hundred and forty Santa Coloma fighting bulls are kept. Most of them appear to be sitting comfortably in a pear orchard at the far end of a wide paddock. They like the shade there, says Jose Antonio, and they love the pears.
Jose Antonio explains that they mustn’t have too much contact with humans, as this may compromise their fighting ability later. In fact the calmer and quieter a state they can be kept in the better.
There is a sudden commotion at one end of this taurine health farm as two of the ash-grey bulls spar up to one another. Instantly the dogs race off and separate them. Which is quite something to see. These are two- and three-year-old bulls and look quite big enough to me, but by the time they have reached the fighting age of four they will weigh between 500 and 600 kilos - over 1200 lbs.
Serafin examines each bull with a critical eye, the strength of their shoulders, the size of their horns, already singling out those that will make the best fighters. Jose Antonio says that though he’s proud of rearing good fighters, Serafin ‘suffers terribly to see his animals die.’