This Will Make a Man of You

“Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.” –Ernest Hemingway

            Each of us stood alone in an anxious crowd. There were so many of us filling the narrow street in Pamplona I had to turn my shoulders and push against the crowd to move. We were all wearing white clothes with red sashes and bandanas bought from street vendors in the small city. The veteran runners’ sashes and bandanas were washed-out red and they had patches sewn on them and shiny pins of bulls and runners clustered over them like Boy Scout bandanas. Most of the people in the street had new and clean red bandanas and sashes.

             Morning sunlight was touching the tops of five-story stone buildings that rise up like walls along the narrow streets in this ancient city built on a plateau in the Pyrenees. At each floor above the first are balconies. These were overloaded with people also dressed in white and red, though the people on them had blood and wine, not fear, in their eyes. The clear mountain air just before 8 a.m. felt as humid as New Orleans in summer within the nervous crowd of runners.

Outside the packed street Music was building and falling as marching bands moved down the canyon streets closer, then away twisting with the curving byways back into the city founded by Romans.

The bulls run every morning at 8 a.m. for eight days in a row. You have to get in the street before 7:30 a.m., as that’s when the police close the entrances through the wooden barricades to the narrow streets where the bulls run. You move to find a good position. You hope you’ve chosen well. You think about when you’ll begin to run. Mostly you stand and wait. Thirty minutes is a long time to ponder riding the horns. It had almost been thirty minutes already.

I couldn’t see how the bulls could make it up the street. I’ve had less trouble squeezing onto Tokyo subways than this tiny street in Spain. I stood feeling as if I was in a mosh pit at heavy metal concert—a concert where someone was about to release bulls.

Each minute loudspeakers hung up and down the street were doing a countdown to the planned stampede. They were giving advice in Spanish, English, and French: “If you are knocked down. Stay down. Don’t stand up in front of a bull….”

As I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with men and a few women in white shirts and pants and red sashes and bandanas, everyone looked up and jeered as a young man and woman climbed a drainpipe. The couple shimmied up the pipe to an empty balcony two floors up. The man went first over the black iron rail and then turned to help the woman. She struggled and almost fell. He caught her arm and dragged her up too forcefully. Her dress caught on the balcony’s rail and everyone in the street got a long look at her bright blue panties. She was caught there with her legs spread and toes pointing at the sky and her dress falling over his chest. The man with his arms grabbing her wrists was almost flat on his back on the balcony. The crowd of mostly young men below began to cheer. She finally tumbled onto the balcony and everyone laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

The light moment flitted away. Stomach acid seeped into my mouth. I again wondered how the bulls could get through the packed street. I looked up at blue sky and saw the onlookers overcrowding tiny steel balconies for five stories above, all longing to witness the mayhem to come. Below them were people perched legs dangling atop the outside wooden barricades all along the jostling street. They’d been there so long their urine wet the pavement below them. There were two sets of barriers. In between the wooden barricades were police officers. The officers were all tall dark men in blue tight uniforms and expressions passing from stoic to bemusement.

I was where the festival began two days before with the chupinazo, a celebration that explodes when the mayor shoots a rocket at noon. When the rocket goes off people pour water and wine from the balconies on a dancing, singing hoard. Since the opening ceremony the wine had mixed with urine, vomit, and other things. I shuffled my feet on cobblestones and hoped I wouldn’t slip on the grimy stone and fall sprawling under the bulls.

I didn’t see Juan Macho, my guide to surviving the encierro (the running of the bulls). I was being pushed one way then back again by people from perhaps every country in Europe and other parts of the world yet I felt more alone than ever before. Soon people began diving from the balconies onto the street that really was a mosh pit for the fleeting minute.

A group of Brits from some football team began singing and locking arms as they bounced on the balls of their feet, finding courage in each other. They knocked into me and everyone else and from above must have looked like a muscle spasm in a long and shuddering snake of people filling the tight streets. Somewhere a pena played. Its drums echoed like a far-off avalanche rumbling to the bottom of a Rocky Mountain canyon.

That recurring announcement broadcast in many languages kept blaring like a conscience: “If you’re knocked down, stay down until the bulls pass....”

Minutes before 8 a.m. medical workers hurried into spots alongside policemen positioned between the double set of barriers on both sides of the street. Runners next to me saw the medical teams and caved in upon their manhood. This is real. It is happening. There is no escape.

The crowd began to shudder in waves like flinches.

One such tremor broke an American next to me. Minutes before we’d been shouting introductions to one another and he’d been relatively in control of himself. Since then he’d become delirious with fear. He shouted some awful thing and tried to crawl under the heavy wooden fence and away.

A Spanish cop kicked him in the head, sending him back out alongside me. Blood dribbled from a small cut on his forehead.

Many other runners were losing their nerve. Some were running early. The Spanish call those who run before the bulls arrive “valientes,” which ironically translates to “brave ones.” With their departure there was suddenly elbowroom. I anxiously stretched. I looked back to where the bulls would come and breathed deep. I glanced left and saw that the American who’d tried to go under the fence looked like someone right out of a Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) paintings.

His eyes were too big. His mouth was roving around his suddenly fluid face. He had gone mad. He had to get out. He dropped onto the ground and rolled under the fence.

The cop waiting on the other side clubbed him with his three-foot long baton and kicked him back into the street. Then the officer bellowed something in the heart-pounding scene I’ll never forget: “You wanted to be a man and run with the bulls; now you must be a man and run with the bulls.”

The Spanish officer’s face was granite. He had the stiff, proud bearing of a drill sergeant. He wasn’t to be trifled with. But the American didn’t want to die. Half the runners had already fled toward the arena. Those still waiting were set like sprinters—though with out-of-control expressions of people who see a car skidding off the road right for them.

“Nooo!”

The American went under the fence a third time. The cop swung his club with calculated viciousness, but the American was too panicked to notice. The officer picked up the American who wouldn’t be a man and tossed him into a brick wall behind the fence. The American fell limp, wetting himself as he slid to the stone street. The cop batted the club in his left palm and looked at the street full of runners as if to ask, “Anyone else?”

8:00 a.m. exploded with a Boom! A rocket announced that the bullpen had been thrown open. No one in the street heard the second rocket telling us all the bulls were out and running up the hill in the first part of the course. We had seconds. A moving roar echoed closer. Spectators on the balconies saw the bulls first. Six black Spanish fighting bulls and six steers running to guide them to the bullfighting arena were almost on us.

            The bulls were stampeding. There is no other word for how the six black fighting bulls and the steers leading them run the uphill portion and then the first two turns of the course. People’s faces were melting as the roar went up from the people in white and red overloading the balconies on the yellow buildings with the upper floors bathed in early sun.

            I ran while glancing over my right shoulder at the mad faces behind me and back again to the parting sea of runners ahead. Someone went down in front of me in a white screaming blur. I leapt over him. Someone knocked me right, near the outside of a bend in the street just beyond the mayor’s mansion. I knew that spot is death, as the bulls run the street like a current—most of the water hits the far bank in a bend and this happens to bulls running on slick stone even more than it does a stream’s current.

            I pushed back left. Wild eyes and screams were telling me the bulls were close. I didn’t need them to tell me this. The bull’s hooves were pounding, slamming into the hard street right behind me. They were deafening.

            I spotted a hole and dodged left between white blurs of people and then the black bulls with the forward-facing horns were by me and pounding away toward the arena where they would die that afternoon.

This is from This Will Make a Man of You.