The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

WorldVoices: Ravi Kumar, Host

This issue's view of Spain seen through the eyes of Federico Garcia Lorca, its most famous playwright and poet, ties in with Barbara Knott's essay on duende and The Grapevine's thematic focus on the quick and the dead. What follows is a close look at Lorca's short piece called "Poem of the Bull," from the book cited above, pp. 82-5.

When one thinks of Spain, one remembers its shape on the map. Children know that France is shaped like an espresso pot, and Italy, a riding boot. They can see the elephant’s trunk of India giving a gentle push to Ceylon, and they know that Sweden and Norway are a curly-haired dog swimming in a sea of cold … Perhaps little children cannot imagine the shape of Spain, but we adults know–our teachers told us so–that Spain stretches out like a bull’s hide. Spain is not an anaconda, like Chile; it has the shape of an animal hide, and a sacrificial animal at that. In this geographical symbol lies the deepest, most dazzling and complex part of the Spanish character.

Soon we focus in with Lorca on that symbol as it comes alive to the ear:

Out of the Iberian summer comes a bellow that makes children cry at the breasts of their nannies and people bolt their doors .... The bellow comes not from a stable, with its sweet, sleepy straw; not from an oxcart; not from the horrible provincial slaughterhouses, filthy with the unending kill. It comes from a bullring, from an ancient temple, and it zigzags across the sky pursued by a hailstorm of warm human voices.

Then he draws us closer to the bullring and reminds us of the "ancient communion" that takes place in these bullring altars.

Man sacrifices the brave bull, offspring of the sweet cow, goddess of the dawn, who is alive in the dew. And the huge heavenly cow, a mother whose blood is always being shed, demands that man, too, be sacrificed. Each year the best bullfighters fall, torn apart by the sharp horns of bulls who, for one terrible moment, exchange their role of victims for that of sacrificers, as though the bull, obeying some secret instinct or unknown law, had chosen to carry away the most heroic torero, delivering him (as in the tauromachy of Crete) to the purest, most delicate Virgin.

There is a litany of names of bullfighters, "a chain of glorious deaths": "the deaths of Spaniards sacrificed by a dark religion which almost no one understands. That religion burns like a perpetual flame before the gallantry, refinement, generosity, and ambitionless bravura of the Spanish people."

The Spaniard feels swept away by a grave force which makes him play with the bull. This is an irrational force which cannot be explained, even by the person who feels it. Perhaps it comes to us from the dead, who stare at us from the motionless fence around the bullring of the moon.

He denies that the torero goes to the ring to earn "money, prestige, glory, applause." Instead,

He goes to the ring to be alone with the bull, an animal he both fears and adores, and to whom he has much to say.... Each person in the audience fights the bull along with the torero, not by following the flight of the cape, but by using another imaginary one that moves differently from the one in the ring.... And thus the torero bears the yearning of thousands of people, and the bull plays the leading role in a collective drama.

The presence of bullfighters in the bullrings is perpetuated generation after generation by cultural desire:

Among working-class boys, this longing to go to the bulls is so agonizingly strong that it makes them risk death. For the sake of a few passes with the cape--passes which often end fatally--many of them leap the fence at the bullring with only a piece of red cloth for a cape and a stick for a sword.... Not long ago, a boy who wanted to be a torero told me, "I was alone in the fields yesterday, and I suddenly felt so much love that I began to cry."

... From the bells of Salamanca (steeped in Renaissance culture) to the bells of Seville (burnished by the medieval Orient) there is a rosary of wounded beasts, a zigzag of golden tassels, and a huge black bull. Black bull of shadow whose bellowing slams doors in little villages and sounds clarions of death in the heart of poor boys, the ones who long most deeply for the bull.

Federico Garcia Lorca, In Search of Duende. New York: New Directions, 1998, pp. 82-5.