Mí Prueba
by Jeff Grieneisen

Outside of Plaza del Toros, a line of bronze bulls marches against smooth granite, and when I stand beneath them, the fifth, center bull seems to look at me with eyes as soft as the cows back home in Pennsylvania fields. My wife Courtney and I walk around the plaza this evening in order to find our own connection to bullfighting. I know that something magnificent, transformative, and heroic happens inside, in the center ring, because I’ve read five books about bullfighting in the past two months. I know that six bulls die slowly as tragic heroes in this ring every Sunday evening between May and September. I know that the crowd, entrenched in the drama, the bravery, and the action, often jumps to its collective feet, transformed, waving white handkerchiefs for a particularly skilled display of the cape and the estocada, the final kill, to award the matador a trophy ear. Having just ascended the Ventas metro stop, I walk here, outside of the bull ring, to gain some perspective on the bullfight. All the books are present in me as I walk around the brick façade of the building. I imagine the spirit of Hemmingway, there alongside the bronze torero Antonio Ordoñez. And I imagine him even earlier, in the thirties, a journalist and novelist looking for his own way into the bullfights for the first time.

***

As each book arrived in its own Amazon box, I checked it off my list, and with each one I responded, “shit. bullfighting again. What do I know about bullfighting?” In a month, I would carry them to my writing workshop in the University of New Orleans study abroad program in Madrid. Where to begin: Hemingway, Muriel Feiner, A. J. Kennedy, Edward Lewine? Naturally, I had to begin with Hemingway, the first word on bullfighting, except that I began with his last word on the subject, A Dangerous Summer. I read on the back steps outside of Leonard Hall, the English department building at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, with a view of the Oak Grove, a stand of oaks that make up the center of the campus, boxed in by the square, brick buildings. The centrality of the Oak Grove is what unnerves me, as I’ve always considered myself a Gatsby, observing but never in the center of things. The center just doesn’t provide perspective, the objectivity necessary to see the truth.

I turn the pages of matadors and rituals in A Dangerous Summer with my thumb holding page 209, the glossary of terms I use every couple of pages to understand terms like picador, natural, veronica. I read about celebrities like Manolete and Cayetano and of the “glory days” of bullfighting for which Hemingway mourned, and which he eventually found to be restored in Antonio.

Hemingway was invited to join Antonio on his 1953 bullfighting tour of Spain. He brought his wife to the feria in Pamplona. In summer 2005, last summer, my wife’s professor invited me to join the class for Indian food on Indiana, Pa’s Philadelphia Street. The class was buzzing with talk of the course work: How can a simulated social event exist if there is no signifier by the virtue of its own deconstruction? Across the table, a balding man in his mid-fifties wearing a button-down shirt and no socks but loafers asked me, “so, what are you studying?”

I pushed some of the orange-hued rice onto my fork, suspended it away from my mouth for a second to answer “poetry.” He nodded. I wanted to tell him that I read Baudrillard and all the other books Courtney reads for the summer, immersing myself in her studies, that I can do critical theory. But I didn’t tell him any of that; I just observed as he resumed a conversation with one of his classmates.

But now, on the steps of Leonard Hall, Courtney’s class arrives like a flock of smoking ducks for their mid-class break. I put down Hemmingway. In a haze of Marlboro and Camel smoke, they ask each other questions like “what was in chapter six? I woke up at four o’clock this morning with the fucking book on my chest.” I listen to their conversations about Foucault, about sleeping four hours, about wives who’ve left husbands and children behind and husbands who’ve left wives and children, all here to work on their doctorates.

“I called my boyfriend,” began Pam to my wife, “and we just talked. Not about academics. Not about ‘theory this’ and ‘avant-garde that.’ It was just, ‘hey, baby, what’s up?’ and that was so damn refreshing.” Pam is a biracial woman who calls herself a “mulatto.” She teaches in North Carolina and drives home on weekends to be with her boyfriend. We know these things about Pam and we know similar details of other students, but we don’t get invited out with them on weekends to Al Patti’s, Kangaroos, The Coney Island, or any of the other half dozen or so bars that once put IUP on Playboy’s map of “top party” schools. The other students, drawn together by mutually missing someone or by just being alone, it seems, have banded together in a kind of impromptu support group that doesn’t include us. But I don’t mind, and I don’t think Courtney does, either. We know them well by the safety of distance.

When students crush out their “hotboxed” cigarettes and return to class, I return to all the sadness, excitement, and manly adoration of Hemingway. I keep flashing back to the cartoon of Bugs Bunny slapping the bull’s face to the tune of a classical-style Mexican song. In a month, Muriel Feiner, an author and matador’s wife, will mention Walt Disney’s friendly flower-sniffing bull. Of course, these are not real. Closer to the reality of the bullfight, from this distance, is that the yellowed, black and white photos on the stiff pages of this used book resemble Courtney’s black Labrador, Poe, with a wet nose stumbling through the cape.

What access am I finally going to have to this, I wonder. The pages turn more quickly as I refer less frequently to the glossary, and my thumb is no longer a bookmarker. Hemingway describes it well over and over again, repeating the ritual almost erotically, from the pics and the music to the three acts “choreographed” by the matador, and the symbolic, climactic estocada, the sensual violence and finality of this dance.

Maybe my access to bullfighting will be a dance. Or a prayer. Perhaps the flamenco of Spain will help bullfighting make sense to me; maybe Courtney and I will go to a Catholic mass as we occasionally do at home, and it will help me understand the ritual of the bullfight. I linger on the notion of ritual for a moment. The National Geographic channel and many PBS specials include violent images of rites of passage and animal sacrifice: what academics might call “the gaze into primitivism.”

I’ve almost finished the account of that dangerous summer through Hemingway’s lens, the outsider perspective that I prefer. Hemingway says that “a bullfighter can never see the work of art he is making,” for he is in the center of the work. I believe him and wonder: how can I access the inside while remaining outside? Is bullfighting a violent, primitive ritual, or an art? The questions linger as Courtney arrives from class and I pack The Dangerous Summer away. Somehow, I know that the answers aren’t here, in Pennsylvania or any other state of the U.S. The answers, I know, will come in Madrid.

***

Courtney has been here two days. I’m supposed to know where I’m going since I’ve been in Madrid for a week and two days, but I orient myself entirely by Paseo de Recoletos, Plaza Mayor, and Banco de España, and I get lost a lot. We reach Calle Leon thirsty, tired, and in need of a bathroom. Through the open doors of Casa Pueblo, we see the old, wooden beams of the bar and double back. This is my first time going out in town with Courtney, and I want to show her that I can order a cerveca.

From our small table across from the bar, Courtney notices the owner’s Golden Retriever lying at the foot of the barstool occupied by the pub owner. “Perro” Courtney calls, and the dog lifts his head. The owner smiles and Courtney motions the question “can I pet him?” The owner, a pudgy, graying man with five o’clock shadow, nods in approval. Courtney wants to ask the questions she always asks when she sees someone with a dog: what’s his name, how old is he, what breed. But without language, or with the first-time use of a language that’s a little rusted from a long period of non-use, what’s the access?

There are only a few people in the bar: the bar owner at the end of the bar, a younger man a few seats down—both are near enough to talk with us—and another, older couple at a table. It’s an intimate setting with Bessie Smith playing in the background. I feel as though I’m in a bar with history and stories to tell.

The younger man with longish brown thinning hair and wire-rim John Lennon-style glasses beckons from the bar, “Hees name es …” and in surprise, I didn’t hear, or else don’t remember the dog’s name. The man, who we learn is named Adán, translates the conversation between Courtney and the dog/bar owner while Courtney strokes the short yellow fur on the thick body of this Retriever.

Adán learned English while living in Brooklyn as a correspondent for a national newspaper. When he asks “what do you do in Spain?” we tell him about school, that I’m taking a class in writing nonfiction for University of New Orleans. He’s been to America. He’s educated. He knows study abroad programs.

I quickly turn from the writing class to the question I need to ask a local Spaniard with good English skills, “What do you think of bullfighting?”

“Aah,” he puts his hand to his chin, looks at the ceiling for a minute and proceeds “It is important part of espanish culture. The bull. They are, how you say, ah, grown, to fight. Some of my friends, they go. But me, I no like. I think it like heem” and he points to the Retriever who’s ambled to his feet to drink from the silver mixing bowl of water. “But also not like heem. They would be, ah, ¿cómo se dice, 'not here'?”

“Extinct?” I ask

“Yes, extinct. And they are brave” he makes two fists in front of his chest and pokes out his elbows to gesture ‘brave.’ “Like I say, it ees important part of espanish culture, but me, I don’t like.”

My wife, an avid animal lover, agrees “yeah, they’re just like a big dog.”

“Yes,” Adán laughs “it es like dog. Like all animal.”

***

When an animal suffers a serious injury but survives, we often hear “it’d be better off dead.” A hunter who delivers a less than fatal shot will “finish it off quickly.” In my own hunter’s safety course in 1982, the man running the course related that he’d hit a deer once and had been unable to track it to its demise. “That is gut-wrenching” he told us. I hunted one time. My father took me into the woods across the street from my grandmother’s rural home in western Pennsylvania. I prayed to not see a deer. When I was seven, I was okay when my brother Chuck rode home with one. From the field across the street, he and my uncle Tom, who he’d been hunting with, loaded the gutted deer onto the hood of my parents’ 1970 blue Pontiac Catalina and slowly eased down the path from the woods, across the dirt road, and down the long country driveway. The deer looked into space with dry, brown eyes, its blue-green tongue wagging out the side, and would soon be hung from the low branch of the chokecherry tree to “cure.” Any men who weren’t hunting came out to see the deer and to hear the story. How still and cunning my brother was. How he lined it up in his site, and delivered one single shot. The deer went down all at once. That was the best way: no suffering, no lingering spears tearing flesh, and no spectacle. Chuck killed the deer quickly, and we would eat venison burgers and steaks for the next year.

***

As Courtney revs up the Handycam to capture the curve of the bullring, she captures instead my expression as I walk toward her from the bronze bulls.

“I can’t wait until you can see this,” she says. “I can’t even describe your expression.”

“Really?” I’m surprised I was that obvious. I can’t bear to know that these animals, beautiful and peaceful even in bronze casting, are speared, pic’ed, and then run through a series of cape passes. And my face says it all.

I know that we’re not going inside. I know what happens there. I’ve heard the reports, and I do not need to witness suffering to know that I don’t like it.

A fellow graduate student, not from my class, admited“by the end, its tongue is hanging out and blood’s coming out of its mouth. Yeah, I think it’s in pain from the start.” Many of the students who reluctantly attended the bullfights have become novice aficionados, cheering on the matadors and caught up in the spectacle of the corrida. They have returned with stories of bravery, describing the matador, if he was good, as a brilliant choreographer in pink, silk stockings moving the cape as fluidly as if it were made of water. But I don’t want to get caught up in the sport that has converted so many others; I don't want to lose my perspective, like the matador, by sitting inside this death chamber..

We walk around the ring, outside, beneath circling bats, past a chubby family of four doing calisthenics, past a bench of two women chanting Spanish prayers into the night. When they leave, we sit on the bench ourselves, gazing at the arched bricks, inhaling the pervasive odor of cow dung or death, and then descend back into Ventas metro station as if descending into a grave.