Pilgrim in the Palace of Words. Glenn Dixon

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СКАЧАТЬ the cows you eat are penned up and force-fed. They live a miserable life. These toros —” he swept his hand over the arena “— they live their whole lives on the open range.”

      “And then they die a horrible death.”

      “No,” he said. “That’s exactly where you’re wrong. They die a noble death. They die fighting.”

      “A death all the same,” I argued.

      “Have you read Hemingway?”

      “Yeah, well … some of his stuff.”

      “Then you must read Death in the Afternoon if you want to understand.”

      And I did want to understand. For hundreds of years the Spanish have been flocking to see this spectacle. It’s as deeply ingrained in their culture as Catholicism. So why was it, to me, a sickening and disgusting affair?

      One of the important features to know about a bullfight is that in Spain every bull is killed one way or another, which doesn’t seem fair. They stick things in the back of the bull, for God’s sake. Eventually, they slide a razor-sharp sword into the bull’s neck. Properly done, the sword severs the aorta, and the bull dies instantly. That almost never happens, however. The sword bounces off ribs and slides between organs. It usually takes a minute or two for the beast’s knees to buckle. Blood spews out of the bull’s mouth, and then when the animal finally buckles, the matador takes something resembling an ice pick and slams it into the creature’s forehead. The bull’s legs quiver once and then the animal is still. The carcass is dragged away after that, and though I’m told the meat is divided up and eaten, I was still shocked at the brutality of everything.

      Mark shook his head sadly. “You don’t understand. Perhaps foreigners never do.” He seemed to have forgotten that he was a foreigner, too. “All things die,” he continued. “Even you’ll die one day. The whole thing’s a metaphor.”

      Another bull was entering the ring.

      “It’s not unusual for a matador to be gored and horribly wounded even in this day and age.” Mark looked hard at me. “I can see that this is what you’re hoping for. You’re cheering for the bull now, but you’re wrong. All things must die. That’s not open for debate. The real question is how we live. Do we live bravely? With courage?” He paused and took a deep, self-satisfied breath. “The matador lives and dies bravely, and so does the bull. It’s all about pundonor.”

      “What?”

      “Pundonor. In Spanish it means honour, but it’s something more than just honour. It’s also courage, self-respect, and pride all in one word. Pundonor to a Spaniard is as ‘real as water, wine, or olive oil.’” Mark was quoting Ernest Hemingway, and Papa was right. This was the key to understanding it all.

      Later I did have a look at Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. The book isn’t a novel. It’s an extended essay on the bullfight for which Hemingway was an aficionado. “Bullfighting,” he said, “is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” The people still talk of the great matadors of the past. They talk of their bravery, their moves, their gory deaths.

      Every move has a name and a history, Mark explained as we watched. When the matador swept his cape over the back of the bull, several thousand voices shouted “¡Ole!”

      “You see,” Mark said, “that was a veronica.”

      “A veronica?”

      “Yes. Listen, are you Catholic?”

      “No.”

      “Well, then when Christ carried his cross from the trial to the place of his crucifixion, all the little events that happened to him were detailed. They’re called the Stations of the Cross.”

      I remembered that, of course, from the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. I recalled the pilgrims weeping and carrying their rented crosses across the cobblestones.

      “The sixth station,” Mark said, “is where a woman, Veronica, came out of the crowd to mop Christ’s forehead.”

      Okay, I was starting to get it. The cape of the matador became the cloth of Veronica wiping the brow of the condemned prisoner. She mopped the brow of the one who was about to die. An interesting analogy. So there was a lot more to this than met a tourist’s eyes.

      It was, I realized, another one of those symbolic systems, as full and as subtle as any other. Once you understood what the symbols stood for, once you understood that it was a metaphor, well … you were almost there.

      But I still didn’t get it.

      Down even farther into Spain, into Andalusia, I came to Seville and Granada, the ancient Moorish capitals. The Moors were Muslims who had come up from Africa in the ninth century. This Moorish paradise lasted for more than five hundred years. It was a time of great scientific advance, an era of religious tolerance and true enlightenment.

      In1469 Ferdinand, king of Aragon, married Isabella, queen of Castile. With their combined military might they expelled the Moors from Spain in what was to be the final battle ever fought by armoured knights on horseback. Granada was the last of the Moorish strongholds to tumble. The palace fell in 1492, the same year Christopher Columbus sailed to America for Ferdinand and Isabella, a strange but true convergence of history. It was the end of one world and the beginning of the next, a massive sea change in human history. For a while Spain would become the most powerful nation on the planet.

      Also in 1492 a linguist named Antonio de Nebrija put together the first book of Spanish grammar. When he presented it to Queen Isabella, she was confused. “What is this for?” she asked.

      “Your Majesty,” he replied. “Language is the perfect tool for building empires.”

      In the Alcázar palace in Seville a wide tapestry hangs on a wall. It shows the first Native brought back by Columbus from the New World. He has fallen to his knees in the massive cathedral of Seville, humbled before the altar. To me, though, he isn’t prostrate before the power of the Catholic Church; he’s collapsed in the face of the absurdity of everything. From the distant thatch huts of the Caribbean Sea to a stone edifice as big as a mountain was more than his fragile heart could believe.

      In Granada I lined up to see the Alhambra, the fabled Moorish palace. In its heyday it was a place of sunlit rooms and gardens, a magnificent edifice that shamed the grim Dark Age castles of the Europeans.

      The queue snaked around a garden. Even early in the morning the line was hundreds of metres long. For two hours I stood there by myself. Everyone around me was speaking Spanish, so I sort of withdrew into myself. After an interminable time, the young man behind me, who had been speaking Spanish to his girlfriend, suddenly said in perfect English, “Listen, if you want to take a break, we can hold your place.”

      I can’t begin to tell you how surprised I was. I went to the washroom, and when I returned, we started talking. His name was Carlos, and he had studied for a year in the United States. Carlos, I’d noticed earlier, was from the New World. Judging by the features of СКАЧАТЬ