Getting One at Pamplona

Yesterday the bulls finally got another one at the festival that is held every year in Pamplona, in Spain. The doer of the deed was named Capuchino. He is being called a "rogue bull" because he hooked a 27-year old Spanish guy in the neck as the man, who had already been gored though more lightly moments earlier, was trying to get away as fast as he could by crawling under a wooden barrier, and the bleeding caused by Capuchino's final thrust came too quickly and too generously. But Capuchino had merely gotten separated from the other bulls, and that caused him to lose his cool and to get more serious about bulling his way out of there, instead of just running with the pack.

Trying to put the best face on things, so as not to hurt the popularity of the festival, the reports on the man's death are playing around with words, by saying that it was the first goring death at Pamplona in nearly 15 years. But in 2003, only six years ago, another man, who happened to be 63 -- the reckless at Pamplona are not all young -- was sent into a coma by being trampled in the head by a bull, and he died a few months later, and the question I ask is, what is the difference between being gored and being trampled in the head, when the end result is the same?

The running of the bulls at Pamplona is one of my favorite sports. I take part in it faithfully every decade or whenever it comes to my attention. I do this from my eminently sensible front row seat at home in Virginia, thousands of miles to the west of Pamplona. And in that contest between the human public and the thundering bulls through that town's narrow streets lined with thousands of obviously drunken people mostly dressed in white and wearing red neckerchiefs, with a great many of them, all males quite naturally, taking turns running just ahead of the bulls, it's a miracle that the bulls don't score higher fatality-wise, and instead usually they settle for ordinary injuries that have to happen during such close contact of mobs of highly excited men with a juggernaut of equally excited bulls on a stampede to where they do now know, except that it's always straight ahead.

Bullfights leave me cold, because they are so ritualized, and because they almost always result in the death of the bull, and because it redounds to the credit of "sports heroes" called matadors who are armed with concealed weapons in the form of swords about which the bulls have not been informed, and I thought that Ernest Hemingway went way overboard in his endless praise of the activity, in what nevertheless has to be his best book, "Death in the Afternoon."

But the running of the bulls at Pamplona is something else, because -- especially if you already have an excessive amount of good wine coursing through your head and your blood stream --there the public, far from being spectators, can jump down into the arena and actually take part by running or staggering or whatever just ahead and to the sides of not one but dozens of bulls who have been sent charging down a long series of streets. It must be intensely exhilirating to tempt the fates like that, especially with loads of senoritias watching admiringly from the balconies overhead, just as Goya pictured the mayas in their seductive mantillas, in his paintings of several hundred years ago. And I suppose that it must even amount to a lifetime of glory to be one of the few to be sent from this world in that manner.