1.
On the morning of the first encierro I ever saw, the first encierro of the year in question, I found myself on a balcony overlooking the square outside the town hall. It was before the first police lines had broken and thousands of people, mostly young men, were packed in tight as they awaited their fate.
Unlike most of the foreigners among them, I had been given the opportunity to speak to some of the veteran runners and to ask for their advice prior to the first bulls being loosed: almost all of them had advised me not to run on the first two days, if at all, if ever, and to make sure that I’d watched at least two encierros, or three, or a hundred, before I decided to go into the streets myself.
I knew at least one person in the crowd hadn’t had that opportunity, and I knew, too, that even if he had he wouldn’t have listened to the advice on offer.
“If I don’t run on the first day I’m there,” my younger brother, Sam, had told me when we first discussed the encierro, “I’ll never run.”
Sam and I had agreed to catch up in Pamplona, but neither of us had any way of contacting the other. Which is to say that he had no way of contacting me. I had no phone, my laptop was on the blink, and, after all, couldn’t we just find each other amongst the throng? This is honestly what I had thought at the time, and this is because I am an idiot.
And yet, despite the near-identical costume of those assembled, and despite the sound of a thousand voices that couldn’t but drown out that of the individual, I spotted my brother across the square.
“Sam!” I screamed from the third-floor window. “Sam!”
He looked around, then up.
“Matt?” A look of recognition. “Matt!”
I thought he looked nervous. He’s a brave enough guy, my brother, and he’s good at hiding it when he’s not, too. But I thought he looked nervous down there in the square, preparing for something he knew nothing about beyond how dangerous it was. I felt a surge of pride for him. He was down there and I was not. And I thought he looked nervous.
“Good luck!” I shouted through cupped hands.
“Thank you!” he shouted back, smiling.
I was staying in the city and he was staying at a campsite. He had gotten drenched in wine and sangria at the chupinazo the day before and I had been at a champagne luncheon. This was the moment that our two fiestas were bound to meet and collide: the moment, indeed, that everyone’s fiesta, however base, however exclusive, however unlikely to encounter the other on the street at almost any other time of the day, must needs collide. Much more than the corrida, the encierro is the only event of any given day that is certain to command the attention of everyone in town who is not passed out or in the process of passing out. It sounds impossible, but this much I knew: if I had any chance of contacting my uncontactable brother, it would be by attending the first encierro. He may have been nervous, but he was brave enough to be there.
“I’ll meet up with you after the run!” I yelled, holding up my palm and spreading my fingers. “In five minutes!”
“Yes!” he yelled back. “In five minutes!”
Then the police lines broke and I lost sight of him as everyone on the course moved into their position of choice. Sam disappeared somewhere down Mercaderes and we didn’t see each other for the rest of the fiesta.
Which is why one shouldn’t make plans in Pamplona.
2.
I was at an Irish pub with a friend when a young Irishman with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth approached us and, incorrectly assuming us to be locals, gave the internationally-recognised thumb-flicking gesture for: “Do you have a light?” We said we did and offered it to him, whereupon he gushingly told us how pleased he was to finally find someone who could speak English.
“I’ve been in this fecking town twenty-four fecking hours and you’re the first fecking people I’ve met who speak fecking English!” he sweared. “It’s so fecking good to meet you! Do you mind if I join you?”
We said we didn’t.
He proceeded to tell us, in his inimitable manner, how he had come to be in Pamplona for fiesta. He was a musician, he said, doing some shows in Bilbao and San Sebastian, and he had been told that the busking scene during fiesta was mad, which it is, and that he should check it out, which he was wise to. (He played the wood flute and was very good. I later saw him jamming on the street with a steel guitar player he had only just met and they were deservedly drawing quite the crowd.) “But you know,” he said, repeating what so many others have said before him, including myself, “I’m really here because of Hemingway. I read The Sun Also Rises and I just had to see what he was on about for me self.”
“I’ll tell you what, though,” he added after a sip of his beer, “that guy was a fecking cunt.”
My friend and I nearly choked on our drinks.
“Excuse me?” said my friend.
“A cunt,” the Irishman repeated loudly. “Ernest Hemingway was a fecking cunt.”
“How so?” my friend inquired politely.
The Irishman proceeded to enumerate the ways in which the Nobel laureate was a cunt, from his treatment of his various wives to his vindictiveness towards his former friends, especially writers like John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald, summing up his argument with a declarative if slightly slurred: “The cunt.”
“Ernest Hemingway was my grandfather,” said my friend, John Hemingway, who also happens to be Ernest Hemingway’s grandson.
The colour drained from the Irishman’s face. “You’re fecking kidding me?” he asked.
John wasn’t.
Of all the bars in all in the towns in all the world. Then again, of all the towns in all the world, this one more than any other is one in which one should consider the unlikely coincidence likely.
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Everyone has a story about The Bomber. Which is to say that everyone who knew him for one or two fiestas has a story about him. Anyone who knew him for more than one or two fiestas has rather more stories about him, and those who knew him for twenty or thirty have stories numbering in the thousands. Unfortunately, I belong to the former group, having made his acquaintance much too late, during what would turn out to his final fiesta: he died eight months later.
To be honest, my story isn’t even much of a story: it’s just this vague and slightly ridiculous sense that I had, when I finally did decide to run with the bulls, that Bomber was the only thing keeping me from getting killed.
Now, anyone and everyone mad enough to run with the bulls subscribes to a superstition of some kind. The religious pray to San Fermín or to the Virgin, others follow the tradition of buying, rolling up and carrying the morning’s newspaper with them as they run, and still others wear the same jumper or jersey or Eton athletics jacket that they first ran in so many years ago. But these are all to some extent pre-encierro rituals. My superstition was one I couldn’t prepare in advance: I could only have it confirmed for me after the dust had settled. During my first fiesta, I ran three times, and each time I finished the first familiar face I saw was always that of Bomber. He would shake my hand, enquire about my run (“I didn’t fall, I didn’t cause anyone else to fall, and at one point I saw what looked vaguely like a bull,” I would usually answer), and I would walk away convinced that he was somehow responsible for the fact that I wasn’t dead: my guardian angel in Ray Bans. (The Bomber, “whose eyes no living man has seen,” as my friend the British torero Alexander Fiske-Harrison once put it.) It didn’t surprise me at all when, towards the end of my time in Spain, immediately prior to my trip to Israel where I was due to visit the Lebanese and Syrian borders as well as the West Bank, Bomber was one of the first of my new friends to wish me luck on Facebook. It wasn’t surprising, but, given my superstition, it sure was comforting.
If you want to know what Bomber looked like—and the chances are that you’re going to hear rather a lot about him in your travels, so you may as well—I advise you to find a photograph of the American actor Sam Elliott. Not only was Bomber the spitting image of Elliott, some of the Navarran locals, who had known him for years, even assumed that he was Elliott. There’s more than one blog post online in which young American travellers, visiting Pamplona for the first and only time in their lives, inform their readers that a local shopkeeper had assured them that Sam Elliott runs the curve every year in Ray Bans that prevent him from being recognised. Actually, Bomber had an eye condition than necessitated the glasses.
I will find another superstition, I’m sure, now that my first one is no longer available to me, though an atheist at an ostensibly religious fair is automatically at a disadvantage. Then again, I say that knowing full well that I don’t believe in guardian angels, either. Yet I believed in this one absolutely. This is hardly surprising: as you walk out onto those cobblestones each morning, you’ll take whatever reassurance you can get. I don’t know how I’m going to go this year in the knowledge that Bomber isn’t out there anymore, but I’m sure that something will pull me through the barriers. Indeed, it will probably be his memory. It’s either that or I start believing in God for fifteen minutes a day. And frankly I’d rather believe in The Bomber.
4.
I don’t know if Bomber knew about his illness during his last fiesta or not. If he did, he hid it very well. On the other hand, there was something nostalgic and eulogistic about the way he would talk about the event in general, especially to the people he considered to represent the next generation, like Fiske-Harrison and younger foreign runners like Bill Hillmann and Angus Ritchie, and even to wine-sodden wannabe aficionados like myself. An intrepid traveller and obvious lover of world cultures in all their multiplicity—indeed, someone who believed that singular cultural traditions like the corrida de toros have an important role to play in an increasingly homogenised world—he described the fiesta, memorably, as a gift.
It took me a little over half of my first fiesta to fully realise quite what he meant by this. Assuming that you, dear reader, are a first-timer, let me save you a lot of time and heartache by spelling it out explicitly: San Fermín is not a gift being given to you, but one that you give, that requires you to give of yourself. For the first five days of my first fiesta, in part because I’d never been to anything like it before and didn’t know how to pace myself, I partied like a madman, occasionally became indiscreet, and usually tried to make up for it by buying people drinks.
But no one is interested in a free bottle of wine: they’re interested, believe it or not, in the person buying it for them. Don’t get me wrong, a bottle of wine is great, but only if it is accompanied by your personality, your character, unalloyed and honest. In Pamplona, as in Spain more generally, a spirit of generosity means nothing unless the person who possesses it is also generous with his or her spirit. Not only did I hold back for my first five days in Pamplona, I also stood apart, I think, observing journalistically, in part out of habit, and trying to analyse where I should have been engaging. One of the most confronting questions I was asked in my whole time in Navarra was why I had gone there in the first place. Before I went, I knew I would probably run with the bulls, though it wouldn’t have killed me if I hadn’t. I wanted to see corridas in Spain, too, though I knew that in terms of the crowd’s noise and the size of the bulls that would be fighting there were better cities and towns in which to do so. In short, when confronted with the question, I had no idea why I was there.
The answers supplied themselves, unbidden, over the course of my ten days in town: in conversations with Fiske-Harrison about honour; in Tom Gowen’s apartment as he played the guitar and sung a lament for years passed and friends fallen, bringing tears to the eyes of everyone present; and in the moments before the final encierro of the fiesta, when Bill Hillmann, Angus Ritchie, John Hemingway, Gary Masi and I shook hands and wished each other ¡buena suerte! in the entry hall of the building in which the Pamplona Posse was then headquartered and walked silently into the street for the final time that year, to meet our fates in the same way my brother had done a little over a week before. I believe in fate as little as I believe in guardian angels, which is to say that, that morning at least, I was happy to delude myself. Perhaps we are drawn to the things we most need in our lives at any given moment? As I took my place at the top of Estafeta, where the buildings finally give way to the sky and the wooden barriers start curving left towards the Plaza de Toros, I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t come to Pamplona to be a better person than the one that I had been in the past. The best runners—Matt Carney, Joe Distler, Tom Turley, Bill Hillmann, not to mention the countless Basque and Navarran divinos whom the countless foreign backpackers who come here every year will never really know except from the amazing shots of them taken every morning as they lead the bulls to the place where the animals are to die—are said to run in a style that is noble y brava. But this is not merely a style of running. It is also a way of living. One doesn’t need to run in the encierro to receive, or to give, the gift that Bomber was talking about: one merely needs to show up in Pamplona in order to learn what it is to be noble.
5.
Of course, one may not always succeed at this. Even someone as inherently noble as Fiske-Harrison can have a vodka too many and wind up losing, not only an encierro to fate, but most of the day on which it occurred as well.
The day after my first fiesta was over, I found myself sitting at the train station drinking coffee and reading The Sun Also Rises. (I had planned to read it during the fiesta, which in retrospect strikes me as an insane thing to have planned.) A lanky Australian approached me and sat down.
“Hey, man! Good to see you! You heading to Madrid or Barcelona?”
“Madrid,” I said, putting the book away.
“Awesome, awesome,” he nodded. “I’m off to Barcelona.”
I nodded, too, not exactly knowing why.
“Man,” he said, “the other night was epic. I was completely fucked up after, like, the first bar.”
While most of my personal ignobility—as well as most of my drunkenness, indiscretion, and so on—occurred during the first five days of my first fiesta, I did allow myself, on Graeme Galloway’s insistence, one final night of hard-core debauchery after the penultimate corrida of the feria.
Actually, I say hard-core, but it was really quite tame after the first three hours of slightly manic imbibition: we bar-hopped until about five, I remember having a strange bilingual conversation with a local in a park, and then the last men and women standing had a photo together on the route of the encierro seconds before the street cleaners came round in order to make sure that none of the bulls or the people running away from them were liable to slip up on the revellers’ vomit.
“You got home all right, though?” I said.
“Oh, yeah, man,” he said. “I fucking ran the next morning.”
“Really? How’d you go?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” he said, “I fell over.” He glanced at his watch. “Anyway, I should probably board my train. You ever been to Barcelona?”
“No,” I said. “I hear it’s nice.”
“Yeah, man, yeah,” he said. “Anyway, you should look me up when you’re back in Australia.”
“I will,” I said. “That’s a great idea.”
He wandered off towards the back of the queue that was forming for the train to Catalonia. I still had a half hour or so and opened up the Hemingway again. I was up to the part where Jake and Bill go fishing in the Pyrénées and leave their bottles of white wine in the stream so as to get it nice and cold while they sleep in the shade. I would later give this copy of the book to an American guy at my hostel in Jerusalem, a stone’s throw from the Damascus Gate.
I looked up at the end of the chapter and the lanky Australian was at the front of the line. He showed the fellow his ticket, made eye contact with me, and raised the now-scanned ticket in his hand in a wave.
I smiled back, waved as well, and wondered to myself: “Who the fuck was that guy?”
You will make plenty of friends like this in Pamplona.
First published in Running the Bulls with Hemingway (& Other Pamplona Tales) by Graeme Galloway (ed.)
