Hemingway Adventure

Series: Hemingway Adventure
Chapter: Madrid, Spain (third day)
Country/sea: Spain
Place: Madrid
Book page no: 113

Madrid, Spain (third day)

Madrid, Spain
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At the bull-fighting school. Cabalistic signs of the bull breeders.

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.