Death in the Afternoon

My father was quite an aficionado of the Spanish bullfight and over the years I attended a lot of bullfights with him. But none was as memorable as July 11, 1987 in Pamplona for two reasons, I was almost killed in the encierro—the running of bulls—and, later that afternoon, I watched a picador narrowly escape death by the one of the same bulls.

I have to admit that in the ten years that I regularly ran the encierro in Pamplona I was always the most apprehensive about running the bulls from two particular ranches—the Muiras, which have the reputation of having killed the most matadors, including Manolete, and the Pablo Romeros, which were the biggest bulls in Spain. That particular Saturday morning, the fifth day of the Fiesta of San Fermín, we were running the Pablo Romeros, known by the American runners as the “boxcar” bulls. Since it was my third year attending the fiesta, I had not run in more than a dozen encierros, so it’s not surprising I made mistakes, serious mistakes.

I started the run in a position that only an experienced runner should take, near the top of Calle Domingo, only a few hundred feet from the corral, which meant that the bulls would catch me at the 90 degree turn where the course heads up the dreaded Calle Estefeta. The Estefeta is a straight and narrow uphill street of shops shuttered for the run. The street holds no quarter for runners looking to bail out other than a small alley that bisects the long two-block stretch.

In my short time running the encierro, I was aware of the particular dangers of the course and one of them was that turn, which was difficult for the bulls and even some of the lead steers to negotiate. I was told that I didn’t want to be on the outside corner as the bulls skidded into the turn and to be between a 1200 pound bull and the heavy wooden barricade.

But on that chilly July morning that’s exactly where I found myself, at exactly the wrong time. One of the bulls skidded into me and hit me with his hind-quarter so hard that I flew about 10 feet into the barricade well ahead of him and out of his path. It felt like getting hit by a car.

It was an inglorious encierro for me. I lost all the skin the entire length of my left arm and, unknown to me until I returned to the States, had dislocated a disc in my vertebrae. That morning, however, the medics at the makeshift enfermaria, bandaged me up and sent me on my way.

Aching all over as I was, I knew I had to bare the pain to see these bulls fight that afternoon. If my father didn’t have a date for the bullfights, I could wrangle his other ticket in his abono from him. I enjoyed seeing a bullfight with my father as he was quite knowledgeable. He also had a press pass, which he occasionally used to get us into the callejón, the passageway between the barricade and the stands to get closer to the cuadrillas, the bullfighters’ entourages, and the action. That he said I could go with him.

Of course, the Pablo Romeros did not disappoint. I remember the hush that fell over the crowd when the door from the stalls opened and an even larger bull came out for the second fight of the afternoon. His name was “Chivito,” little goat, and weighed 651 kilos or 1435 pounds. I couldn’t imagine why he was given such a name, but it would soon became apparent.

Chivito ran the length of the ring twice then trotted out to the center and, after turning abruptly as if something had caught his attention, charged the barrera and leaped over it, landing in the callejón, where he chased mozos through the narrow passage before being led back out into the ring.

“He’s big enough he can see over the barrera,” my father observed. “He’s attracted to any movement behind it.”

Then the first picador, a horse-mounted torero with a lance, came out along with another torero carrying the traditional magenta and yellow cape to draw the bull’s attention. The bull immediately charged the horse and hit it so hard that the picador flew off. He quickly got to his feet, but would have been gored if not for the torero attracting the bull’s attention with the cape. The picador scrambled over the barrera into the callejón. The bull turned again to the now rider-less horse, and butted his head under the horse’s belly like a goat and proceeded to lift the horse completely off the ground and with a flip of his head tried to send the horse over the barrera.

As the mozos held his now battered but yet unbroken mount against the barrera the picador climbed back on his horse, while the torero caped the bull a few more times. Again the bull, ignoring the torero, charged the barrera and leaped over it. Again mozos ran for their lives in a chase to lead the bull back into the arena.

By then the second picador had come into the ring. Chivito immediately charged the horse, pinning it against the barrera and then got his head under the horse and proceeded to lift both man and horse off the ground. If it hadn’t been for the mozos pushing back from the callejón, he would have flipped both man and beast out of the ring.

The bull turned his attention back to the first picador and charged him again. The picador got his lance into the bull just as it met the horse, got under it again and gave it a toss. Because the picador was leaning over so far, the toss caused him to fall off the horse and be impaled on the horns of the bull. The bull started violently tossing his head, throwing the picador off who was stuck to his horns.

The bull was eventually distracted long enough for the medical team to pick up the fallen picador. As they raced out of the ring with the picador on a stretcher, he managed to give the crowd a thumbs up, which they acknowledged with cheers and bravos.

“That’s always a bad sign,” my father said. “He’ll be dead before they get him out of the plaza. I’ve seen it too many times before.”

Finally, the first banderillero came out and placed the first pair of banderillas in the bull. I noticed, due to the sheer size of these bulls, it was difficult for the banderilleros to get their barbed sticks, banderillas, over the horns and into the back of the bulls’ necks. They were arching way over and leaping higher than I’d ever seen them to avoid the lethal horns.

It’s not uncommon for the matador himself to place one of the three pairs of banderillas into the bulls neck, but that day the matador who was to fight Chivito, Luis Francisco Esplá, refused and was jeered by the Pamplona crowd and even had a bottle thrown at him. After all six banderillas had been placed and Chivito was showing signs of tiring, Esplá came out to fight.

Esplá’s fight was mediocre, not worthy of such a fine bull, but eventually death came to Chivito, but not to the picador, Victoriano Cáneva, who survived his cornada. I found out later, that the horns of the bull had punctured a lung and his liver. He was in surgery for two hours in a Pamplona hospital and spent the next 11 days in intensive care, after which he was moved to a hospital in Madrid. Luis Francisco Esplá vowed that day he would never again fight in Pamplona.

Fraulein Clausewitz

I spent the Christmas of 1990 with my German girlfriend Anke and her family in Hamburg. While we were there we took some trips through what was until a few weeks prior, East Germany. Germany had just been reunified a couple of months before and you could drive from Hamburg to Berlin, for the first time in over 40 years, which we did. We were thinking about opportunities there might be in the newly-unified city. I had never been there and was eager to see what it looked like before the wall that surrounded the western half of the city was completely torn down. I grew up on spy novels and Berlin was, of course, ground zero in the Cold War, the gateway between East and West through the Iron Curtain.

By the time we returned home to Brooklyn, we had decided to move to Berlin the following summer. I had to break the news to my parents. My mother would be fine as long as she could meet the girl with whom I was making the move. The problem was meeting my father was always a potential deal breaker in any relationship I’d had.

I remember introducing him to a beautiful girl named Cornelia I was dating in college. We were at his house in Philadelphia one evening and I remember my father handing off the phone to me while talking to one of my sisters. While I was talking on the phone, my father offered to show my girlfriend his war room in the basement where he had a giant table set up with a World War II battle scene with toy soldiers, artillery and tanks. When they came up from the basement Cornelia glared at me. She took the first opportunity to tell me that my father had made a pass at her in the war room.

That’s the way it was with my father. If he liked a girl I was dating, he eventually ended up making a pass at her and if he didn’t like her, he was vicious and cruel toward her. So you can understand my apprehension. I wasn’t concerned whether my father would like Anke, but that he wouldn’t at least be civil to her and she would come away from the experience wondering what kind of family she was getting involved with. Add to this the fact that Anke herself was very quiet and unassuming.

A few months after coming home from Germany, my father called to say my sisters were coming to Philadelphia to spend their spring break there. He invited me and my girlfriend  to come for the weekend and I thought it would be a good opportunity for Anke to meet my sisters and, of course, my father, if ever there was a “good” opportunity. So we drove down to Philadelphia from New York.

At first everything was going well. I think my father was on his best behavior because of the presence of my teenage sisters. I don’t remember what we ate, but it was probably one of my father’s great pizzas he made from scratch, having spent the afternoon picking up ingredients at the Italian Market in South Philly. Anyway, family gatherings with my father usually converged around the playing of a board game, in which he would berate us on the stupidity of our moves and otherwise humiliate us in the company of whomever had the misfortune of letting themselves be dragged into this private hell known as game night.

 I think in my father’s mind the choice of the game was decided by the fact of Anke being German. The Second World War would be reenacted in a game of Risk. As my father handed out the different colored playing pieces, he looked at Anke and—in a bad German accent—said, “And SS black for za fraulein,” as he gave her the black tokens. The pained expressions on the faces of the rest us showed embarrassment, if not surprise, at my father’s typical bad taste. I knew this wasn’t going to end well.

I never understood by father’s fixation with the military. The full extent of my father’s service was being bounced out of ROTC after being classified 4F for bad eyesight, bordering on legal blindness and flat feet. But it never seemed to dampen his interest in all things military. In his library of over six thousand books, there were over 500 books on war and military. He had a toy soldier collection that once belonged to Hermann Göring. He knew by heart the dates of all the great battles in history. A game of Risk then was mere child’s play for a great amateur war strategist. Except that the black tokens were slowly spreading across the board from Europe and into Africa, Scandinavia and Russia.

The Risk board was beginning to look a lot like those maps in World War II newsreels showing what would happen if Nazi aggression went unchecked. When my girlfriend Anke made any kind of unconventional move in the game, my father would stroke his chin and say, “Verrry Interrresting,” like Arte Johnson in a German uniform peeking through a potted plant. He started referring to her as “Fraulein Clausewitz,” alluding to the great German military tactician, which, coming from my father was the closest she’d ever come to receiving any kind of compliment.

It was not my father’s finest hour as Britain fell to Fraulein Clausewitz’s army, which she then used as a stepping stone to Greenland, Canada and eventually the United States. One by one the rest of us were eliminated from the game leaving my father and Anke battling it out in what was left of the U.S. My father was beginning to seethe as Anke clearly demonstrated her Aryan superiority and more importantly seemed to be immune to my father’s remarks, which always had the effect of throwing us, his kids, off our game, allowing him to win.

Finally, my father conceded the game to Anke by throwing down his cards and saying, “I’ve had enough. I’m going to bed,”

“You surrender?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he answered curtly.

“Unconditionally?” I added.

“Smartass,” He said and without so much as a by-your-leave stalked upstairs to bed. Suffice to say that the atmosphere for the rest of the weekend was chilly.

Although my relationship with Anke ended that following summer in Holland, just 10 kilometers short of the German border, I don’t believe that in this particular instance the breakdown of the relationship had much, if anything, to do with my father being an asshole. But I underestimated my father’s ability to hold a grudge until some four years later when I was going through my father’s papers after his death and found a version of his will, almost identical to the version that was ultimately probated except for a few minor additions and deletions, that excluded me from any inheritance if I was married to “that Nazi bitch, Anke [Last name misspelled].”