Hemingway always comes back
First week of July. World alert. The Sanfermines are coming. Wherever he is - perhaps 7,118.60 kilometres away in Iowa - his world herald, Papa Hemingway, always comes back. The rite of the race between love and death cannot be avoided, nor forgotten, nor changed. There is no one who can resist getting up early on the 7th of July and facing the race of life. Neither San Fermín nor its secular patron saint leave us abandoned.
The drama is sharp and succinct. Like the Nobel's verb. When all the ingredients of a good script come together: a struggle of opposites, progressive action and a torrent of emotions, the attraction of the spectator will be unerringly achieved. Let's put the protagonists between life and death, with a set time and a road movie scenario, with a beginning and an end. And if the story is condensed into an unstoppable sequence of just three minutes, it is guaranteed to be seen again and again, day after day, year after year, because it creates addiction.
This is what the broadcasting of the San Fermín running of the bulls has been, is and will be, bringing together before the television a legion of devotees as crowded as that of the runners in the bullring. In the world's zapping league, the reigning sequence, shown on every television station in the world and in every YouTube window, is the one in which the bulls and the men in red and white run through Estafeta under the watchful eye of the cameras, which rarely have such a brief and intense spectacle in their sights.
Only one event on the peninsula has a secure place in the television agendas of the planet, marking a whole country with the labels of "fiesta", "bull", "madness" ... Improvisers of illusions, as Ciaran said of the Spaniards, ready to take a gamble in a few minutes, to enter the list of those who boast of having run the most dangerous mile with documentary proof transmitted to every cofín. And in the alley, those who take the most challenging selfie on the planet.
The best broadcasting is offered stripped of all trappings and narration. The story by itself. It's happening, you're watching it...and feeling it. Then comes the commentary, the zoom, the double screen, the slow motion, the digital enlargement.... to unravel every detail, stretching the three minutes of the drama to a whole hour to discover moments of risk hidden in the rush. The miracles of the Sanfermines detailed by the camera. Serving the drama live marks the apogee of television. Always a record audience in Spain, amplified to the whole world, which watches in amazement as the bravery of men and bulls is put to the test on the cobbled and narrow streets of an urban circuit.
For a few days, the dance before the horns of the bull is no longer the exclusive domain of the specialist bullfighter. In the encierro we are all - it is anyone - who plays his game with life and death for no reason whatsoever, except that of wanting to try his luck with the calendar set for our lives by the gods. In just three minutes the metaphor of the struggle for life will pass before our eyes. The elbowing for space, the implacable enemy, the goal to achieve with our eyes forward, the illusion and the fear in equal parts. All contemplated by an omnipotent eye, that of the cameras.
Like every morning, the race is on. For the waiting runner, the growing tension is cushioned by jumping up and down with a newspaper in hand, whizzing through the air. Such is the adrenalin that you can't wait any longer for the rocket to break and announce the start. Your stomach has almost gone into your mouth, and your mind wonders whether to force you to rush forward or cling to the boards and put an end to all the anxiety. At least that's how I have felt in my Sanfermines races, where the desire for action always overcame the fear. And you know that it is madness. But the experience of living and experiencing it is more powerful. The bull is about to arrive.
Seen on television, you - the spectator - are running with everyone. You are more overwhelmed than those in the alley by the number of waiters lining the street. And you just wait for it to be over and for the final report of this war to arrive with a hopeful "only minor injuries, who are recovering satisfactorily". But today this sweetened truth is going to turn the tables. Today the race has been rough and confused. The bull has found blood on the pavement. That boy who has fallen does not move. He will play dead so that the pack will pass as the professional canons dictate.
The waiters are already in the bullring, the television shows a ring of improvised bullfighters without lights and the bulls giving the last head-butts before entering the pens. And there appears once again a sign of tragedy, with a long, beaked flagpole dyed blood red. Someone has been impaled. And you, who are tugging at your clothes or rubbing your eyes and see yourself free of wounds, begin to feel the pain anyway. Because Papa Hemingway told us, "ask not for whom the bells weep, they weep for you", that you are part of that humanity that runs through life, and you are not an island unto yourself, but part of the race we are all in.
Neither local nor national, the party is the heritage of the whole world. And of everyone who lives it live. Now it is television, and even more so, the internet, which spreads the shiver of the Sanfermines race to the four corners of the earth. In the Gutenberg era, its greatest apostle was Ernesto Hemingway. A peculiar career, that of Don Ernesto. A journalistic hero for the Republicans in the Civil War, he returned to be crowned as the champion of bullfighting. Today he might be declared persona non grata by animal rights activists. But in the end he has remained a perennial ambassador of a spectacle without equal, in which life and death run parallel, courted by anonymous young men with the same t-shirt and the same scarf.
The cameras are now trying hard to get a close-up when the bull grazes the thigh. But the merit lies in the whole, in the race of everyone, runners and bulls mixed together, friends or dangerous enemies in a three-minute flight. Anyone who has been bouncing with fear in Estafeta until the start of the race will understand that the friend who took you to such an extreme is to blame for the best and the worst moment of your life. You go from anguish to done-it-all ecstasy in less than three minutes. A rush of adrenaline. That's not on TV. In my case, Josechu Sanz and Fernando Erviti were the ones to blame for having drunk from the chalice of the greatest adrenaline, who led me into the torture alley to come out unscathed and happy. And the great instigator Manu Leguineche, who encouraged the Sanferminero baptism and was generous enough to share the adventure that he adored through the streets of Pamplona. Friendship and risk. As happened to Hemingway and as his 'dangerous friends' testify. I remember that title from the memoirs of his closest companion in Spain, the American screenwriter Peter Viertel ('The Queen of Africa'), who ended his days in Marbella, together with Deborah Kerr. "I realised, with some alarm, that as we matured there was a destructive streak in his character."
Perhaps Ernest should have stayed involved in this annual race, full of all sense and none, to be attached to life. To be enlivened in the rite and strengthened in the effort. That is what the race gives us; and you will only see it from the inside if you are lucky enough to have some 'dangerous friends' to tell you the secret. Although seen from today it seems crazy, I am proud to tell it because the luck of overcoming the risk is like a push to keep on living and tempting other fates. Hemingway did not let himself be caught by the bull in Estafeta. He decided for himself that his ego and his stature were too much. He fixed his own date with death, from glory and disappointments. San Fermín was the one who really opened the big door to glory for him with his first novel 'Fiesta/The sun also rises'. He closed the literary cycle between melancholy and the love of senescence for other narrow, cobbled streets such as those of Venice. There he wrote his literary testament. Another walk between love and death. Across the river, into the trees'. As 'Papa Hem' can't miss the first week of July, it is already announced that he will be back. Now, in the form of a film. Once again: a battle of opposites, progressive action and a torrent of emotions. The script is served.