Taki's Mag

photo credit: Shutterstock

In 2009 I first came to Pamplona to run with the bulls. I was terrified in that complete and overwhelming way that total ignorance brings, standing on a street corner and waiting for death to come.

I comported myself honorably but not brilliantly and did so again two days later before boarding a train to Barcelona and vowing never to come to the city again. The relentlessly loud and bad music, the all-day drinking by people who clearly hadn’t washed in some time, and the fact that the corridas were made abysmal with music played by multiple bands in the audience in apparent competition with one another, all combined to set me firmly against this Navarran Fiesta. The place seemed crude, cruel, and uncouth compared to the sun-blasted, deathless dignity of Andalusia where my aficion for the bulls was formed.

My two earlier runs in ‘09 to one side, I had spent the year of 2010 dodging toreando cattle around Spain and Portugal, leaping into the streets with a confidence I have not since recovered, running directly between two bulls in my old high-school athletics blazer.

This year I returned for the Festival of San Fermín, the summer fair dedicated to Pamplona’s first bishop.

The obvious advantage of having a bull in front of you in the street is that he clears a path through the 2,000-4,000 people packed into that half a mile. The one behind is the real problem: The picture linked above was snapped at the moment the bull’s horn was cracking the screen of the iPhone in my right pocket, a contemporary variant of the cigarette case stopping the opponent’s bullet in a duel. (I had the detail image as the screensaver on that cell phone, which I never had repaired, as a memento until it was stolen a year later at a bar less than a hundred yards away from that spot. Such is Pamplona. This year I took an actual silver cigarette case in its place just in case.)

Two days after that moment of glory I found myself pinned against the wall by another bull and understood that there was more technique to this than I had at first thought.

I gradually developed a strange, all-encompassing love for Pamplona despite its smells, sounds, occasional vulgarities, and infrequent barbarities. And that love has continued to grow as I realize that its vices, for all the annoyance they cause, are also part of the reason you fall in love in the first place. Going to a town where six half-ton fighting bulls and six one-ton steers are released into the streets by the city council while the police stand by and watch is one of life’s great pleasures.

However, this is no simple act of hedonism. The great runners all have a spirituality or at a least a philosophy of why they run.

I see it as a pagan thing and as such as about the animal within us; this is reflected in the cave art that litters that part of Spain. In this the encierro differs massively from the corrida. What happens in the plaza de toros is the ritualized and stylized killing of an animal by a man every fiber of whose being, from his stance to his technique to the gold braid on his silk costume, shows how far above animals, nature, and even death itself he is. The corrida is not pagan, but is the true embodiment of that odd cocktail of a phrase: Roman Catholic.

It is this pagan nature of the festival, the bacchanal and the abandonment, which allows the extreme depth of bonding between the people involved. If you have been drinking late into the night with someone and then run shoulder-to-shoulder with them as nine tons of hoof and horn rattle the cobbles beneath your feet, they become as brothers and sisters to you.

This also provides a wonderful process of filtration, a vetting of men and women by means of blood. No one who’s boring comes to Pamplona in the first place, and no one weak stays for more than a day. As can be seen in this series of photos from this year, the timing of running “the curve of the death” is everything as the bulls are moving at 20MPH. As yet I have never got it right, either being too late or too early.

My finest run this year was actually on the long road of Calle de la Estafeta, when I set off at a jog in the middle of the street and slowly accelerated to a sprint all while either throwing people out of my way—and that of the bulls—or hurdling them where they lie. The entire herd, a tight pack of six with a couple of one-ton steers in the front, came up on my left-hand side and I looked down admiringly at the silky black flanks pulsing and surging next to me, the modern incarnation of the wild aurochs which in other breeds we have converted to a hornless, harmless box of meat and milk on legs. However, lost in this atavistic reverie, I failed to spot another runner go down in front of me and I hit the asphalt at a flat sprint.

The one rule of bull-running, especially in Pamplona, but even other, more ancient runs such as Cuéllar, is do not get up—the bull’s horns are low for evolutionary reasons, and on your knees your gut appears at the height of the herbivore’s ancestral enemy, the wolf. This was the fatal error 22-year-old American Matthew Tassio made in 1997. (The last death was of a very experienced Spaniard named Daniel Jimeno Romero in 2009, two days before my own first run. Since Ernest Hemingway first went to Pamplona in 1923 and made the city famous, fifteen people have died.)

However, lying in the middle of the street with at least four one-ton oxen and four hundred people about to run over you, I reverted to my torero training and rolled sideways, bringing down a few people on top of me, but infinitely fewer than would have been the case had I stayed where I was. As I reached the gutter I felt two strong pairs of hands grab my shoulders, and I was hauled to my feet by my old friends John Hemingway (Ernest’s grandson) and Graeme Galloway, a Scotsman who is larger than life or any description I have room to give.

I carried on running but the moment and the herd had passed. However, for this year, it was good enough. There will be others. Until then, ¡Viva Pamplona y viva San Fermín!