Pamplona (Vicarious vision through Hemingway)

Pamplona, Spain, Running of the bulls and it smells like shit.

The stench of the arena is thick as fog on a hot day after a cool shower. People push in all directions. They are herded like bulls toward a large square where fireworks explode and drunken meat puppets sway like an ocean.

If I saw this from above, I’d want to stay away just as I wouldn’t dive into murky waters with a visible scent for fear of leeches among the crowd or pond. Like a scourge of Piranhas fighting for meat and people so thick back touches abdomen without moving an inch.

I’ve got Sangria on my shirt and my shoes are covered in the solid grunge that becomes the visible odor and makes the street smell so foul. Everybody for some reason is wearing white. As if they expected this day to practice savage tie dying.

The droplets of Sangria make me think bitterly about the crowd as I look into their joyous, drunk, smirking faces being stained with blood rain and think about the bullfight earlier on in the day:

The eyes of the ferocious animal I was about to run from were looking me in the face as I sat in the first row of the bullfighting ring and watched it killed in cold blood. It screamed out to me in my thoughts as if to say: “Murderers!” Then, it was gored and stumbled around the ring like a wounded pup. It was getting slower but it still charged with full spirit. The bull made me think of its passion and its struggle with a hairless monkey. I envisioned in my head, a rodent fighting a scorpion. Its teeth bared and sharp, yet the stinger of the scorpion killing without a fight by stabbing it in the back before it got a chance. It almost made me want to fight the bull myself…

The crowd is beginning to move away and a runway is being set up with wooden fences. People are screaming, “Encierro” all over the place. It’s not constant, but I hear it in sparse shouts as I listen to the great din of thousands of people. Among them are Americans, Spaniards, Germans, French, Italians, Dutch, and dozens of nationalities dying to get close to the mighty beast.

Many of them stand in the runway but a few of them are hopping over the fences back and forth as crowd control tries to keep it from becoming a blood bath. A second becomes an hour and soon all I hear is a high-pitched ringing in my ears as the giant doors are opened and the bulls charge into the streets.

I run along the fences to get a better look and find only madmen who gore themselves to death by standing just a centimeter too close. My hearing comes back as I watch people being flung twelve feet into the air only to come down onto a natural spear ending their small but fortuitous excitement.

One missed step could mean you trip and never get up again.

As the bulls get to a corner that is blocked off by a gate I find myself running into it and falling face first about 70 paces from the first running Spaniard. I begin to run and everything once again goes deaf. All I can hear is ringing and my heartbeat as I run 50 paces to the next fence and hop over it. I stop and sit down on a bench as the bulls, runners, and crowd rush by me.

I would go home on a jet later that evening but for the next couple of days, I would have a constant eye on the bull that chased me all the way home.