course of the morning six aspirant cows came and went. It was a spectacle providing its own special brand of addiction, preferred by many enthusiasts to the commercial bullfight itself. Spain’s leading painter of bullfighter posters, present on this occasion, later admitted that he never missed a tentadero if he could help it. Both he and Don José Luis, although a little stiffened by middle age, gave brief but confident displays with the cape and came off intact, although the Marqués’s boxer dog (always addressed in English) broke into the ritual calm with yelps of hysterical anguish at the sight of its master exposing himself to such danger. Of six cows, four rejects were subjected to the ignominy of having a few inches lopped from the end of their tails after the test. In this way they were marked for the slaughterhouse. The two accepted, to be kept for breeding, had the dangerous ends of their horns removed. Both operations—the second performed bloodily with a saw—were carried out forthwith and in view of the onlookers.
From the ring we moved back to the estate house for a snack served in the yard. This took traditional form: thick, solid potato omelettes cut into cubes to be eaten with the fingers, slivers of hard farm cheese, white wine of the last year’s vintage (still a little murky) from the estate vineyard, which, spurred on by Don José Luis’s assurance that it contained only five degrees of alcohol, guests downed like water. The informality of such occasions is much appreciated in Andalusia—and referred to approvingly as simple . To this slightly feudal environment Tomás Campuzano had been admitted as an admired friend. Part of the reward of a famous bullfighter is an escape into the Nirvana of classlessness.
The bulls inhabit an untidy savannah of old olives, thorn and coarse grass entered a few hundred yards from the estate house. There are upwards of 600 of them kept in two separate herds, the four-year-old novillos and the five-year-old bulls in the full vigour of life. Throughout the summer months their numbers dwindle steadily as the bulls are sent off, six at a time, to fight in the big city rings where the management can afford to pay for the best. For a corrida of six four-year-olds, the Marqués expects to be paid three million pesetas; for the five-year-olds the price is four million. He loses money on the bulls, he complains, but keeps afloat on the slight profit the estate makes from sunflower oil, wheat and olives.
All guests are taken as a matter of course to inspect the herds. They ride in a trailer drawn by a tractor from which fodder is distributed in times of dearth, and which is therefore acceptable to the bulls. The trailer has high steel sides and is heavy enough not to be turned over by a charge. The tractor’s engine is always kept running because the bulls have learned to associate its sound with food. Still, the excursion is not quite in the same bracket as a trip through a safari park because a fighting bull is more aggressive than anything encountered in the wild, and if annoyed is liable instantly and unforeseeably to charge the offending object, whether animate or otherwise. A Spanish treatise on the subject of bulls speaks of the bull’s docility on the ranch. ‘It is more than likely,’ it says, ‘that the vast majority of fighting bulls would allow themselves to be stroked. To attempt this one must put away the almost insuperable fear that their presence and proximity inspires.’ None of those present on this occasion seemed inclined to put the author’s theory to the test.
Chugging behind the tractor into the bull pastures was accepted as a minor adventure. The bulls stood, heads lowered, a few yards away, to watch our approach with steadfast, myopic eyes. Their relative invulnerability has relieved them of the necessity to develop acute vision, but their hearing is exceptionally acute. Thus we probably appeared no more than a vague, invasive shape, but
From the ring we moved back to the estate house for a snack served in the yard. This took traditional form: thick, solid potato omelettes cut into cubes to be eaten with the fingers, slivers of hard farm cheese, white wine of the last year’s vintage (still a little murky) from the estate vineyard, which, spurred on by Don José Luis’s assurance that it contained only five degrees of alcohol, guests downed like water. The informality of such occasions is much appreciated in Andalusia—and referred to approvingly as simple . To this slightly feudal environment Tomás Campuzano had been admitted as an admired friend. Part of the reward of a famous bullfighter is an escape into the Nirvana of classlessness.
The bulls inhabit an untidy savannah of old olives, thorn and coarse grass entered a few hundred yards from the estate house. There are upwards of 600 of them kept in two separate herds, the four-year-old novillos and the five-year-old bulls in the full vigour of life. Throughout the summer months their numbers dwindle steadily as the bulls are sent off, six at a time, to fight in the big city rings where the management can afford to pay for the best. For a corrida of six four-year-olds, the Marqués expects to be paid three million pesetas; for the five-year-olds the price is four million. He loses money on the bulls, he complains, but keeps afloat on the slight profit the estate makes from sunflower oil, wheat and olives.
All guests are taken as a matter of course to inspect the herds. They ride in a trailer drawn by a tractor from which fodder is distributed in times of dearth, and which is therefore acceptable to the bulls. The trailer has high steel sides and is heavy enough not to be turned over by a charge. The tractor’s engine is always kept running because the bulls have learned to associate its sound with food. Still, the excursion is not quite in the same bracket as a trip through a safari park because a fighting bull is more aggressive than anything encountered in the wild, and if annoyed is liable instantly and unforeseeably to charge the offending object, whether animate or otherwise. A Spanish treatise on the subject of bulls speaks of the bull’s docility on the ranch. ‘It is more than likely,’ it says, ‘that the vast majority of fighting bulls would allow themselves to be stroked. To attempt this one must put away the almost insuperable fear that their presence and proximity inspires.’ None of those present on this occasion seemed inclined to put the author’s theory to the test.
Chugging behind the tractor into the bull pastures was accepted as a minor adventure. The bulls stood, heads lowered, a few yards away, to watch our approach with steadfast, myopic eyes. Their relative invulnerability has relieved them of the necessity to develop acute vision, but their hearing is exceptionally acute. Thus we probably appeared no more than a vague, invasive shape, but
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