Jose Antonio feels bullfighting has changed. Like everything else it is adapting to the market, to the needs of television. He used to send his bulls to Pamplona, but they don’t want them any more because their horns don’t look big enough.
Back at the farm, refreshment is provided. The irresistible jamon serrano (cured ham), olives and wine. I practise drinking the farmers’ way - from the spout straight into the mouth, or in my case, down the shirt.
On our way back to Madrid, near the town of Arganda, we stop at a triple-span bridge over the River Jarama. A big new road is being put through here and in amongst the rubble and the electricity pylons is a ten-foot-high metal star, leaning at an angle, surrounded by weeds. A plaque beside it marks it as a monument to the International Brigade, those volunteers from outside Spain who came over to fight against Franco and Fascism in the war of 1936-9.
The Spanish Civil War, the second of three wars in which Hemingway saw action, and the one which produced his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, was the most politically committed time of his life. He wrote commentary and helped raise finance for a propaganda film, shot by a Dutchman, Joris Ivens, and called Spanish Earth.
Orson Welles, enlisted to record the commentary, wanted to change some of the lines which he thought sounded unduly pompous. At a viewing of the film, described by Welles in Cahiers du Cinema, he and Hemingway came to blows, going at each other with chairs and fists, as the armies fought it out on the screen in front of them.
The two American heavyweights were reconciled over a bottle of whisky, and though Welles still gets the credit in some of the early prints, it is Hemingway’s flat, harsh monotone that accompanies the film.
It’s half past eight on a Sunday morning and in the hard dry sunlight a group of prostitutes is working a corner of the Casa de Campo, one of the great straggling parks of Madrid.
Not that that’s why I’m there, though my business in the park at this time is essentially macho. In amongst the prostitutes and the pine trees is an Escuela de Tauromaquia, a school of bullfighting.
Yesterday I witnessed the care and attention that goes into raising bulls to be killed. Today I am to witness the equal amount of care and attention that goes into killing them.
The school, considered the best in the country, has its own miniature ring and whitewashed outbuildings, on which are painted the breeders’ marks, which will be found branded on every bull. They are sometimes letters, sometimes symbols and have an ancient cabalistic feel to them.
Inside the ring the class is assembling. All boys (though there is one potential female matador), mostly in their teens with the quick eyes and lean, combative stance of lads from the streets. But appearances can be deceptive, and one eighteen-year-old, Fabian, turns out to be from a Mexican family who had enough money to send him to school in Texas in the hope of curing his desire to become a bullfighter.
That didn’t work and he has not only been attending classes here for three years, he has also dispatched fifteen or sixteen bulls already. He shrugs off my incredulity. One of the top three bullfighters in Spain, El Juli, is only seventeen years old, he says, and smaller than him.
A portly older man enters the ring and calls the boys together. They address him as maestro and I assume that one day before his stomach grew he was as light and lithe as the boys he’s teaching. He picks up two banderillas, the spiked sticks which are placed in between the bull’s shoulder blades as it charges, and begins to demonstrate the moves.
The bull is, I’m relieved to see, not flesh and blood, but a set of horns and a padded cushion fixed to a bicycle wheel. One boy races this contraption fast across the ring and another has to go close enough to drop the barbed prongs exactly parallel to each other in precisely the right spot. Nine out of ten times they fail, but, as Fabian points out, only one or two of this class of thirty might be good enough to even contemplate fighting professionally.
Under Fabian’s guidance I am allowed to try some moves with the cape, pink on one side and gold on the other, with which the matador tries to tire the bull in the second stage of a fight. The first thing that strikes me is how heavy it is, heavy enough, of course, to maintain its shape in all weather conditions.
Fabian corrects my posture, emphasising the importance of the strut, of thrusting the hips forward, of staring the bull down. I ask him what he thinks when he’s confronted with the bull. Does he have to hate it?
‘No, no,’ he shakes his head firmly. ‘The bull is my friend.’
I’m rather touched by this, until he adds, ‘He makes me look good and make a lot of money.’
How much money?
Fabian considers for a moment. The top fighters? Around $80,000 for a corrida, in which he will fight two bulls. From that he will have to pay his team - his picadors and his bander-illeros - but if he fights fifty times in a season his earnings are into the millions. And then there’s advertising, public appearances, opening supermarkets.
I look around me. A big clear sun beats down on the ring. Half the apprentices are practising their passes with the cape and half are clutching horns and racing at them. I’m struck by how absurd and how deadly serious it is at the same time.
In the dedication required bullfighting has overtones of medieval knights and chivalric orders, of ancient rules and disciplines. Of something almost monastic.
I thank Fabian and wish him well. I suppose a time will come when he will be hurt, does that worry him?
‘Oh, yes.’ He nods and smiles, ‘Oh, yes.’
I must say, understanding bullfighters requires dedication too. Now I have to find somewhere in Spain where I can see them in action.
Atocha Station in Madrid is a rather wonderful combination of ancient and modern, achieved by building a completely new terminal without pulling down the old one.
The platforms are laid out beneath a superstructure of concrete columns, functional and practical and quite severe, while the old nineteenth-century station, cleaned and restored, now houses a tropical garden around which are seats and cafes, from which you can look up at the incongruous cloud of steam drifting from the jungle up to the roof.
We climb aboard a train for Valencia, following in the footsteps of Ernest and Hadley who left Madrid for Valencia in 1925 on their way back from Pamplona.
Hemingway knew there was a story to be written about what had gone on in Pamplona that year, but was torn between his need to write it and his need to see as many bullfights as possible. Valencia, where there was a midsummer feria (a festival with bullfights), seemed the ideal combination. Work in the morning and the corrida in the afternoon. And it worked. The Sun Also Rises was begun in Valencia in July 1925.
We head south-east towards the Mediterranean leaving behind the huge housing blocks of Madrid’s new suburbs and crossing the dry, parched plain of La Mancha. It stretches wide and flat and almost treeless to the horizon, marked by the outline of a range of mountains that never seems to get any closer. An occasional farm, drifting smoke, a gypsum plant, a grain store, a line of white-washed windmills, a castle on a hill, everything seems detached, distant, as if reluctant to be on this great exposed plain at all.
After three hours the line cuts down through the edge of the plateau and in amongst the mass of orange groves from which Valencia has made its money.
Valencia Norte is the loveliest, least rugged, least bombastic of stations. The way out takes you through a turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau concourse, across a brown and white chequered marble floor, beneath a ceiling of coffered wood and walls of multicoloured mosaic tiles to a low white exterior, decorated with stucco oranges and orange leaves.