Love and death

"Eight brave bulls!" it says on the poster in Malaga. Well, the five that we saw certainly did their best, but each of them ended its twenty minutes or so in the ring dead, nevertheless.
For 15 Euros each, we buy our tickets (sol y sombre, which allow us to sit in a part of the bullring that's in full sun at the beginning of the corrida, but shaded by the time of the fourth bull) and join the crowd. It's made up mainly of enthusiastic, evidently well-informed, Spanish - mostly couples and families - and the merely curious like us. The Plaza de Torros is a circle of raked sand surrounded by stepped stone terraces where the "groundlings" sit and topped with covered galleries for the richer clientelle. It feels Roman. At 6:00 pm exactly, the wind-band, sitting high up in a covered part of the terraces, begins to play and two dignified old gentlemen dressed rather like musketeers and mounted on white horses, enter the ring. They ride across to the other side at a walk, followed by the rest of the equipage, mounted and on foot. There is polite applause from the crowd and some appreciative calls as the various matadors carry out practice passes with flamingo-coloured capes. Now a smaller band, of snare drums and trumpets, sounds a flourish and a horseman with a lance appears. He is splendidly dressed, hidalgo-style, and puts the horse through its paces, high-stepping, side-stepping and generally lording it. Great cheers from the crowd. Another fanfare from the trumpets, a gasp from the crowd this time, and the first bull bursts out of the pen and into view. The job of the unmounted matadors with their flamingo cloaks now becomes clear. They take turns to attract the bull's attention and to make passes before retreating behind wooden barricades; this performance evidently allows the main act to assess the bull's behaviour and stamina and to decide how much it needs to be slowed down before he can engage with it. This slowing down is done by picadores. Mounted on heavily padded and blindfolded horses, they come up alongside the bull and with heavy, short-pointed lances, stab at the hump of muscle between its shoulders as it tries to gore them. The crowd doesn't like the picadores very much; they know that they can take the fight out of a bull before things have even begun if they're too heavy handed. There's hissing and whistling as one of the picadores stands in the stirrups and bears down hard on the bull, turning the lance in the wound. The picadores retreat, and the bull is left panting and confused in the middle of the ring. Not for long; the solo rider returns armed with a light lance. A furious dance begins between the rider and the bull, accompanied by pasadobles from the wind band. The rider, trailing the reversed lance to draw the bull's attention, wheels and turns the horse around it at close quarters. The knowledgeable among the crowd applaud or shout "bien!", or simply "eehhh!" at passes that are particularly good. Eventually the band stops playing, the lance is abandoned and a second rider, who is the matador, enters the stage. He sticks the bull with successively smaller sets of banderillas, decorated barbs. Placing these requires the rider to move in closer and closer to the bull, and with each strike the crowd cheers and the bull starts as if bitten by a fly. For the final scene, the matador dismounts and chooses a scarlet cloak and a heavy sword with a curious cross-piece about 15 cms behind the point. The action takes place in silence. There are a few passes, raising quiet approval from the crowd, before the matador stands still, facing the bull. He takes sight along the sword, rises on tiptoe and falls forward, at attention, towards it. The sword is intended to enter immediately behind the skull, where it joins the neck, to cut the spinal cord. This will drop the bull instantly. But the thrust isn't accurate and the bull rears, turns away, and then faces the matador again, panting, angry, confused and very much alive. The crowd cheers the bull. What began as an elegant, formal final movement, though, has become a messier affair that takes two more attempts before the blade hits its target and the defeated animal falls onto the sand, suddenly onto the sand, suddenly dead. The matador turns away, the crowd applauds and a team of three white asses, with colourful bridles and jingling bells, trots into the ring. The bloody carcass is hitched by a chain to the bar they are carrying, and dragged off , to the sound of the merry bells, to be butchered. There it is then, our first, and likely to be only, experience of a bullfight.
As we walk back to the car, we pass through an enormous street party. Evidently, here in Malaga, Cruces de Mayo is celebrated differently from in Antequera. There is food and drink, anyone can join in, and most of the women and girls are wearing flamenco dresses. We stop and buy a beer and a tapa, listening to the women taking turns to sing flamenco love-songs while the children dance. Behind them, the excavated Roman amphitheatre glows rosy pink, its terraces empty, echoing the wailing music back into the square.