My Meeting with Fragile

Two cars were dashing ahead of me yesterday, dueling amongst the traffic in some breast-thumping dance of road rage. They were fast enough that their movements had the unreal, unsettling speed of cockroach legs. I kept well back and began, in the two or three seconds I watched them, to make my plans in case one flipped and rolled and caused a pileup. My plans did not get as elaborate as they usually do in such situations. I did not imagine myself rushing to their assistance, didn't start thinking about how I would stop the bleeding. I was distracted, imagining a driver ejected from a car, hurtling through the air with the strawman look of a torero tossed by the horns of a bull.

It is no surprise to me that bullfighting is dying, even in Spain. There was a time in the recent past, when my family lived in Andalucia, when there were live animals in the open air markets, animals that were slaughtered then and there. Perhaps this is still current in parts of Spain, but I am sure it is being phased out by EU health standards. If my mother wanted a chicken, the vendor, whom my father remembers as a burly woman, would coolly break one of her chickens' necks without a second thought. If slaughter per se is familiar, the killing of a bull does not carry the same shock value. This is not to say that the bullfight wasn't always heavy with meaning. But all those meanings became distorted as a new meaning emerged, the bullfight as a pointless and cruel killing. Once the killing of an animal - any animal - became unfamiliar enough to be shocking, any justifications of the corrida became polluted and perverse. The bullfight is now the moral equivalent of putting a cat in a microwave or pulling the wings off butterflies. Everyday life is sufficiently sanitized that even meat eaters are repulsed by the inhumanity of watching a bull bleed and die.

I cannot argue for a tradition of inflicting pain on an animal for its entertainment value. But I have thoughts on bullfighting. It is indeed great existential theater. We know that in all likelihood the bull will die, and this itself is a tremendous happening. All that coiled force, all that testosterone packed into a bomb of fury - all that life, in short, and yet it will die. The life will pump out of it drop by drop until it faces the torero's blade, shining like the scythe of death, come to take him to greener pastures. Then, of course, there is the torero himself. He is an idol of virility, yet he is tiny, he is a dancer. His powers are evasion, intellect and art. He is as beautiful as a woman, as a virgin, and he has come to face his own sacrifice. If he will survive, it is only through the intercession of his beauty. He is like the virgin queen who alone can disarm the unicorn with her kiss.