After the Run with the Bulls

Some of the guidebooks tell you to count the fighting bulls when they pass you on the street so you can be certain the six fighting bulls are gone and there isn’t a suelto making its way through the crowd toward you. I always wonder if the authors of these guidebooks ever ran and so tried to count running bulls in a crowded street as your heart is in your churning feet. 

            This time the bulls had all passed and, as always happens in this moment of relief and joy, the street began to smile. People were checking themselves. A few were limping. The air was cool and mountain clear again. Medical workers were helping a man with a bloody leg. A young man from Canada had blood on his face. He was laughing. I ask what happened. He said excitedly, “Oh, someone pushed me over from behind and I went sliding along on my face.”

            There was black bull hair on the back of his white shirt. I pointed this out to him and he pulled a few off and got this saucer-eyed expression and really started to laugh so hard he had to bend over and put his hands on his knees.

I put my right hand on his shoulder and while laughing with him told him I’m buying the drinks. We were instantly friends. We went through the barriers and up a side street that was still wet from being hosed clean yet still smelling like a wet basement after a teenage all-night kegger. There were empty beer bottles and plastic cups in the gutters. There were a few blurry-eyed people sitting drunk in the detritus.  

We stepped into Pamplona’s central square, wide as two football fields and as long as four. The sun was hot already and people everywhere were streaming in smiling life with their white clothes sweaty and smudged and their red sashes swinging as they walked.

Bars with wide flapping awnings run around the Plaza del Castillo. Many of the tables were already crowded. Some were filled with Basques, but many were foreigners. Two legends attempt to explain the red-and-white uniform almost everyone wears all during this festival: One says it’s to honor the Catholic Saint San Fermín, white for the saint and red showing he was a martyr; the other says that the runners dress like the butchers who began this tradition.

When Hemingway first came to Pamplona in 1923, before popularizing this festival in The Sun Also Rises, only the Basques and the Spanish came. Now half the crowd comes from all over Europe and from points across the world.

            Photo shops along the plaza would soon have photos of the run. They put prints up on boards and people spend hours looking for themselves in the encierro and will buy prints when they find their tragic expressions.

            My new friend was taken away by a crowd of arm-in-arm men and women from his pena. He shouted he’d be at the Windsor all day and that he expected that drink.

I spotted Juan Macho, my guide to this misunderstood festival, and his crowd of veteran runners at the Bar Txoko up in a corner of the main plaza. Juan is a jolly little Cuban who becomes fierce when he tightens his eyes. He has the physique of Anthony Hopkins and a bearing that shifts from sage to matador in a blink of his brown-gray eyes. He has a gray goatee and most of his silver-streaked hair and a walk that says he’s a self-made man who has burned out his angst and now is at peace with himself. He is in his late sixties now and each year he takes a few wards to Pamplona to show them the depths of the festival. He keeps running each year to stay in touch with his mortality and his manliness. Now he typically runs the “suicide run,” the beginning of the course where a few runners sprint directly at the bulls before dodging to the side of the street. He doesn’t run every day anymore. He is transitioning to retirement. In his silver years he prefers to teach. His old knees now protest his runs toward bulls. He has seen many injured in the run because they didn’t know how to run. He wants to help those he can.

Juan was born in Cuba and emigrated to the U.S. when he was 12 years old. He has taught college courses on Latin America and spent much of his career as a consultant for American companies looking to invest in Central America, Caribbean nations, or South American countries. He first came to Pamplona because, like most, he was drawn to the party. He ran with the bulls and learned something about himself. This something began to straighten out his life. He began living more boldly, more honestly, with more purpose. He found running somehow made him a better man. He went back. He met many of the great runners and learned from them. He felt stronger and his eyes opened. This running, this facing your mortality along with bulls—beasts that are 1,200 pounds of muscle and power that will probably die before an audience that day at the hands of bull fighters who might very well die too—tapped into something, some essence of his life. But that wasn’t enough. He’d sipped this brew of manliness and wanted more. He wanted to understand it, not just swim in its testosterone as so many do at the San Fermin festival. He began to read and to visit with Basques who knew the history. He found there are religious depths to the San Fermin festival. San Fermin is, after all, a Catholic saint in a very Catholic country. He found Hemingway understood this and used this to create the characters he did. Juan joined the Hemingway Society and continued to investigate and learn.

            I saw Juan standing outside the Bar Txoko in the bright morning sun drinking an amaretto and brandy from a plastic cup with many others. He looked at me and nodded solemnly as he said loudly, “Now you’ve glimpsed your mortality.” As he said this he handed me some churro, rounded sticks of fried dough covered in sugar. This pastry is made each morning in a Basque bakery where men churn flour in an ancient cauldron according to a medieval recipe.

            I asked, “Where were you? You said you’d run with me.”

            “Yes,” he replied with devilish calm, “it’s better to run alone your first time, as we face our mortality alone.”

            A dozen veteran bull runners laughed at me and then with me. A tremendous man named Tony, a construction worker from Queens who had this wonderfully profane New York working man manner of speaking, bellowed, “Just before the bulls were on you I saw your fuckin’ face twisted up like the fuckin’ Reaper just found your ass. Wish I had a fuckin’ photo.”

            The veteran runners were laughing with me and Juan leaned close and said, “Remember, you’re just beginning.”

As I looked at Juan and the diverse group that makes up his pena I saw that when you pursue an icon, as the Hemingway man surely is, you go down a rabbit hole into something unexpected, something designed to rip down your ego and send you packing if you can’t handle what’s to come. Sure, you know basically what is going to happen—in this case that bulls would be coming—but not how it would feel and if you can take it and if you want to keep taking it. You stand up to it by degrees. You become addicted to the rush, even the fear. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe you fail and become Francis Macomber. If you do you’ll have to redeem yourself like he did in that jarring story about a man learning to stand up and be a man. Or you can live on with a secret hole right through your manhood. It’s up to you.

Most people, of course, only run with the bulls once. It’s a thrill. They check it off their bucket list and go on about their lives not much changed at all. Though a profound experience, that’s not a rite of passage. It’s only a validation of being alive and that you have some balls. One morning this darling little American college girl with curly blonde hair clomped by me in the crowded street minutes before the bulls would come. She was wearing rubber boots many sizes too large for her little feet. Someone pointed at her boots and shouted, “You can’t run in those.” She yelled back with this little-girl spite crinkling her cute nose, “I didn’t know I was going to do this so I don’t have anything else to wear.” She was probably backpacking Europe on the wings of her parent’s credit card. She found herself in Pamplona and when everyone at the bars said they were going to run she followed along on the slippery slope of peer pressure. Her heels or who knows what just wouldn’t do so someone gave her the boots. She probably made it through the run unscathed by clinging to the side of the street with so many others, but to call what she did a rite of passage is to mock the whole thing. She likely learned nothing. She didn’t respect the ritual and wasn’t trying to understand. She was only following peer pressure into something dangerous. Now she has an adorable tale for cocktail parties.

The men, and a few women, I met after my first run view running with the bulls as something more. They want to be in sync with the running bulls in the moving crowd. They are driven to come back again and again for the fleeting connection of wild moments on the edge. They keep coming back because something is alive in the San Fermin festival that is difficult to find anywhere else after the trials of youth have passed. This rite of passage isn’t as obvious as three months in boot camp, but is no less real when taken with eyes and mind open.

As I met the people in Juan’s pena I found they were of different backgrounds and ages and that some were rich and others poor and that this didn’t matter. There was a plumber from Lowell, Mass., who was only there his second time but had come back with a massive tattoo of a black fighting bull on his right arm. There was a gray-haired Hollywood producer who was on his thirtieth year who told me: “Those not living on the edge are taking up too much room.” There was a white-haired homebuilder from Atlanta named Richard who told me: “My wife says Pamplona is cheaper than therapy.” There was a heart surgeon, JJ, who has become the charismatic leader of Juan’s pena. When I asked where he’d gotten a silver pin of a fighting bull he had pinned on his bandana, he replied, “I earned it. This was bestowed on me by Basques in a very exclusive pena.” I nodded respect.

There was this happy spark lighting all their eyes that has something to do with the want for a party, but also for the search for a tangible meaning—for what Hemingway called the “authentic life.” None of them say this. When I ask why they keep coming back they tell me to see their amigos. Honest enough, but true friends are always made by shared experience—friendships become stale and end when the something in common (school, a job, a hobby, or running on the horns) ends. That something in common is why they’re really in Pamplona. That something has everything to do with life, as Somerset Maugham put it, on the razor’s edge.

It wasn’t always this way.

Before The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, in a 1923 story for The Toronto Star Weekly, Hemingway witnessed the run for the first time and treated it as an example of extreme sportsmanship. He said the run with the bulls “is the Pamplona tradition of giving the bulls a final shot at everyone in town before they enter the pens. They will not leave until they come out into the glare of the arena to die in the afternoon.” This was only his first impression.

Hemingway likely never ran with the bulls. He never claimed to have gotten into the street to run with the bulls and Hemingway wasn’t above boasting or even purposely stoking a true anecdote into a flamboyant lie if it added to the Hemingway-man persona. Hemingway boasted he’d had sex with the gorgeous girlfriend of the notorious gangster Legs Diamond outside the 21 Club in New York City. He claimed that he threw an African lion out of Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. He told his friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner that he married an 18-year-old Wakamba girl named Debba while on safari with his fourth wife, Mary. He said he slept with Mary and Debba on a goatskin 14 feet wide. Hotchner couldn’t find anything to substantiate this or the other tales. Hemingway claimed to have “fucked very well” a World War One spy named Mata Hari, but Hotchner writes “such an encounter could not possibly have taken place since Mati Hari had been executed by the French in 1917 and Hemingway had first gone abroad in 1918 as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy.”

Such boasting led James Michener to write that “Hemingway’s whole public life was dedicated to the creation of a legend.”

That is certainly has truth in it, but Hemingway wanted to be judged at the last as a writer. In a 1950 letter to Robert Cantwell, Hemingway wrote: “I asked both Cape and Scribners not to use any publicity about any military service and it is distasteful to me to mention it and destroys any pride I have in it. I want to run as a writer; not as a man who had been to the wars; nor a bar room fighter; not a shooter; nor a horse-player; nor a drinker. I would like to be a straight writer and be judged as such….”

What Hemingway did do was get into the arena with the vaquillas—cows with leather on their horns. After the bulls run up the streets and into the arena, the bulls are herded out of the bullfighting arena in view of a packed stadium. The fighting bulls will be held in the dark by themselves until they’ll run back into the arena in the afternoon to fight and die. But when the bulls leave it’s not over for the runners who have run into the arena. The door at the entrance to the Plaza de Toros will be closed and vaquillas, cows with leather on their horns, will be released into arena with the runners. Hemingway called this spectacle “the amateurs,” as some of the runners would use their shirts or other improvised capes to attempt passes with the vaquillas. But these cows are not new to bullfighting, as the fighting bulls are. These cows have learned how to aim for the person, not the cape. Hemingway, and some of his companions, did get into the arena to play with the vaquillas. Hemingway even boasted they became crowd favorites.

Still, despite all the hyperbole, and even if Hemingway never ran with the bulls, Hemingway’s image has become entwined with the people wearing white clothes and red sashes and bandanas during the San Fermin festival and with the people who run with fighting bulls. Though he likely didn’t step into the street with fighting bulls, and nor did his character Jake in The Sun Also Rises, they are still stirred into the mystery of its rituals.

            So went my first run in 2007 and I thought it was the rite of passage until it was done, then I knew it was only the first terror and confusion. Not being in control of what is happening but nevertheless being caught in the roar of all its heady rapture is the confusion. Being under the power of something else, something you can’t reason with and that can hurt you very badly, is the terror. Learning to suspend your imagination and keep your head when all others are losing theirs, as Rudyard Kipling said in his perfect poem If, is what the Hemingway man requires.

            All this had happened before. Decades ago, just after my head had been shaved to stubble, a drill sergeant gave me his first go at tearing down my ego and I thought that was the rite of passage. The first time I’d belayed off a cliff and had to jump for a hold to climb back up, I again thought that was the rite of passage and that everything would change after that first terror and confusion. The first time I stepped into a boxing ring with a professional fighter who’d been told to see if I could take a punch—and so would be worth training—I also thought that must be the rite of passage. Now I know these jarring trials are simply the first explosive and ego-humbling step of a real rite of passage to becoming all we want to be.

Actually, thinking of a first run with the bulls as a rite of passage is like thinking a first beer as a rite of passage. Maybe it is in modern parlance, but it’s not the full ancient rite of man addressed in this book. A first beer or a first time behind the wheel is a first step into a rite, but there is so much more to it than this exciting first experience. Drinking, after all, isn’t manly. Knowing how much to drink, and not to drink, is manly. Driving isn’t manly. Driving well is manly. Not understanding this is a large part of the reason for the state of so many of today’s men.

Realizing that the terror and the confusion is only the first step opens you up to the dimension a true rite of passage presents—to the rites developed and honed by Spartans, Apaches, Samurai, and every other group, tribe, nation, or organization that knew or knows men who can be counted on must be built; that the safety and future of their tribe, army, organization, or club can’t be left to chance; that men must be humbled and then emboldened as they are fused to the code of values of the group. 

So I’d been rattled and would be again, but these men were laughing and their eyes were wide open and their voices alive. These men who’d each run 100 times or more with the bulls and were drawn back every year to this festival and its encierro were the officers and I was a mere recruit.

This was the beginning, not the end. That realization drew me back into the street on following days and back again in 2013 for a deeper investigation of the Hemingway man with the group going from Paris to Pamplona. We’d travelled by trains to San Sebastian, Spain. We spent the night in that port city before driving in a rented van over pine green mountains to Pamplona the following day to run with the bulls and where I’d enter a fraternity of runners living this part of the Hemingway man no one has ever explained.

I knew my terror and confusion in this rite of passage had passed but I was about to find that the real trouble was ahead and always present. Confronting what you’re afraid of to become a more confident man is what the terror and confusion portion of a rite of passage is about, but next comes the gauntlet which leads to more profound things.

I saw this from a different vantage on my first day back in Pamplona, before the first run of the bulls in 2013’s festival. Juan and I walked in the midday sun over a small bridge to where the fighting bulls are held in corrals enclosed in a building. You must pay five Euros to see them. We did and looked through Plexiglass windows at the bulls lying placidly with steers to keep them calm. Later in the evening the six of these bulls that would fight the next day would be driven down a winding barely two-lane road and across a bridge over a brown river to a pen the size of an average American’s living room. There they’d wait under guard until they’d be driven up the streets at 8 a.m. with all the people to the arena.

Seeing them there in a sort of zoo before they’d run together and perhaps hurt or even kill people and before they’d find themselves alone in the arena in the afternoon was humbling and sad. It reminded me of the hunt, which is always both exciting and humbling and, when you kill, melancholy. All that is very primal and honest if you hunt ethically and respect and eat what you kill, but is also hard to explain to anyone who has never taken the responsibility of killing their own meat, or at least, raising their own vegetables and therefore being forced to defend their sustenance from deer, rabbits, birds, and insects—from reality.

I told Juan this and he explained that the running of the bulls and the bullfight grew from the Coliseum yes, but before that from the hunt. It is a throwback to when men had to slay dangerous beasts for meat. The Romans, and for centuries after, the Spanish, fought bulls from horseback with spears. This was but a step away from what hunters did on horseback. Hunters, on foot or on horseback, used brutal and primitive weapons to kill big game. As they did they had to master themselves as they stalked animals that might, if not killed cleanly, come and destroy them.

Juan said simply, “The run with the bulls and the bullfight is this ancient reality ritualized into a tragedy.”