We heard the horns. We saw the runners come around the corner of death, and from above, we heard the pounding of the bull’s hooves on the brick streets of the city. We made bets as to who we thought would get gored below us. The guys who had not stopped drinking from the night before had our money.
The bulls never made the corner and slammed hard into the barrier and the wooden slabs that owners put in front of their tiendas. And then the bulls were gone. They ran down the street with gobs of red sashed people around them.
The experience makes me think of the Minutemen album titled “Why Do Men Start Fires?” I wonder, why do men run with bulls. And why do Tacoma based couples on balconies secretly wish someone might get tossed? The night came, and with bull fight tickets in hand, we entered the Romanesque stadium. The perfectly circular coliseum filled with red and white. We brought chips and made another red wine/coke concoction. We sat with our backs against the concrete edge of the back wall of the stadium.
With gigantic fanfare and show, the matadores, picadores, banderilleros entered the stadium. The match began. The picadores and banderilleros did their thing, weakening the bull with spears and flags. Then the matadore comes to kill the bull after several acrobatic moves. He stabs the bull through the heart with his sword.
When I entered, I had told Mary all the stuff I felt necessary to help her stomach what happened in the ring: it’s just a dumb animal, it dies quickly, we kill cows and bulls every day, and they don’t even get to run or fight. By the end of the killing of the second bull, I repeated all these things to myself. The little words of rationalization worked for neither of us – we left after the second bull. We did not stand and clap. We drank our wine and ate our chips and left early.
