Naturally you’re praying half the time.’
The estate house of the Albacerrada bull-breeding farm is two miles up a country road from Gerena; a clean-cut example of purest Andalusian architecture. Decoration is outlawed, the atmospheric quality of these surroundings depending upon white, crystalline façades and the blue mossy shade of cactus and eucalyptus. Adjacent is a small, high-walled ring in which the cows from which the bulls are bred are subjected to a series of tests, known collectively as the tentadero . Tentaderos take place at frequent intervals during the summer months and have come to be treated as a social event, inevitably watched at Albacerrada by the Marqués and a few of his intimates. It is explained that the number of those present on such occasions is kept to a minimum to avoid distracting the animals under test.
When I arrived the testing was already under way. I looked down from the rim of the small arena at a rider on a padded horse, steel-tipped pole in hand, waiting on the far side of the ring for the entrance of a cow under test. The Marqués had just expounded the bull-breeder’s theory that taurine courage is transmitted through the female of the species, and that the male only adds strength. For this reason, only two-year-old cows are subjected to serious testing, and they are certainly no less fierce than the bulls.
The wall of the ring was painted a most profound and refulgent yellow, with the overhead sunshine rippling and showering down its uneven surface. The wall colour was intensified by that of the sand, and there was a yellow reflection in the faces of the onlookers. After a while the unearthly quality of the light seemed even to effect the mood, endowing this scene with a feeling of separateness from the surrounding world. A religious hush had fallen; the spectators were motionless and silent. An element of ritual was discernible here, a flashback perhaps to Celto-Iberian days and sacrificial bulls.
A small black cow came tearing out into the ring, slid to a standstill and swung its head from side to side in search of an adversary. It was big-horned, narrow of rump, all bone and muscle; faster in the take-off than a bull, quicker on the turn and with sharper horns. ‘Ugly customer,’ a herdsman whispered approvingly in my ear. The horseman thwacking the padding of his horse with the pole, called to the cow and it charged, crossing the ring at extreme speed, head down, horns thrust forward in the last few yards, thumped into the quilting over the horse’s flanks and threw it against the wall.
Time and again, it skewered up ineffectively with its horns while the horseman, prodding and shoving down with the shallow, testing pic , scored the hide over its shoulders. Failing to get through the padding it trotted off, then turned back for a second charge. The watching herdsman noted points in their books under four headings: courage, speed, reflexes, staying power; and communicated what might have been approval or disdain with inscrutable signs.
It was this performance with the horse and the cow’s indifference or otherwise to the prickings of the pic that sealed its fate; but when the serious business was at an end, fun for all followed with the cape. Tomás Campuzano had arrived to help the local boys add polish to their technique, conducting a series of passes with a mathematical exactitude that seemed sometimes to border on indifference. The onlookers smiled dreamily. Those that followed the master seemed agitated by comparison and a young Venezuelan bullfighter who had come along appeared a little out of his depth with a beast of this kind, or perhaps the cow was learning quickly from its mistakes.
Surely, I asked myself, the keen-eyed selectors could ask for nothing better than this animal with its limitless vigour and thirst for aggression? But, the experts detected weaknesses overlooked by the outsider, for rejection followed the completion of its trial. And so in the
The estate house of the Albacerrada bull-breeding farm is two miles up a country road from Gerena; a clean-cut example of purest Andalusian architecture. Decoration is outlawed, the atmospheric quality of these surroundings depending upon white, crystalline façades and the blue mossy shade of cactus and eucalyptus. Adjacent is a small, high-walled ring in which the cows from which the bulls are bred are subjected to a series of tests, known collectively as the tentadero . Tentaderos take place at frequent intervals during the summer months and have come to be treated as a social event, inevitably watched at Albacerrada by the Marqués and a few of his intimates. It is explained that the number of those present on such occasions is kept to a minimum to avoid distracting the animals under test.
When I arrived the testing was already under way. I looked down from the rim of the small arena at a rider on a padded horse, steel-tipped pole in hand, waiting on the far side of the ring for the entrance of a cow under test. The Marqués had just expounded the bull-breeder’s theory that taurine courage is transmitted through the female of the species, and that the male only adds strength. For this reason, only two-year-old cows are subjected to serious testing, and they are certainly no less fierce than the bulls.
The wall of the ring was painted a most profound and refulgent yellow, with the overhead sunshine rippling and showering down its uneven surface. The wall colour was intensified by that of the sand, and there was a yellow reflection in the faces of the onlookers. After a while the unearthly quality of the light seemed even to effect the mood, endowing this scene with a feeling of separateness from the surrounding world. A religious hush had fallen; the spectators were motionless and silent. An element of ritual was discernible here, a flashback perhaps to Celto-Iberian days and sacrificial bulls.
A small black cow came tearing out into the ring, slid to a standstill and swung its head from side to side in search of an adversary. It was big-horned, narrow of rump, all bone and muscle; faster in the take-off than a bull, quicker on the turn and with sharper horns. ‘Ugly customer,’ a herdsman whispered approvingly in my ear. The horseman thwacking the padding of his horse with the pole, called to the cow and it charged, crossing the ring at extreme speed, head down, horns thrust forward in the last few yards, thumped into the quilting over the horse’s flanks and threw it against the wall.
Time and again, it skewered up ineffectively with its horns while the horseman, prodding and shoving down with the shallow, testing pic , scored the hide over its shoulders. Failing to get through the padding it trotted off, then turned back for a second charge. The watching herdsman noted points in their books under four headings: courage, speed, reflexes, staying power; and communicated what might have been approval or disdain with inscrutable signs.
It was this performance with the horse and the cow’s indifference or otherwise to the prickings of the pic that sealed its fate; but when the serious business was at an end, fun for all followed with the cape. Tomás Campuzano had arrived to help the local boys add polish to their technique, conducting a series of passes with a mathematical exactitude that seemed sometimes to border on indifference. The onlookers smiled dreamily. Those that followed the master seemed agitated by comparison and a young Venezuelan bullfighter who had come along appeared a little out of his depth with a beast of this kind, or perhaps the cow was learning quickly from its mistakes.
Surely, I asked myself, the keen-eyed selectors could ask for nothing better than this animal with its limitless vigour and thirst for aggression? But, the experts detected weaknesses overlooked by the outsider, for rejection followed the completion of its trial. And so in the
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