The Drifters

  For nine days there will be dancing in the streets, twenty-four hours a day. You will be coming home at two in the morning after drinks in some bar; you will turn a corner and find yourself in the midst of perhaps sixty people of all ages and nationalities, dancing the jota, and they will accompany you for a block or two, and when you leave them you may run into another group, closer to your destination. At dawn, at high noon, after dinner and especially through the night, there will be dancing in the streets. Many visitors to Pamplona will never see a bullfight—they have come merely to hear the music and to dance.

  The crowds this year seemed unusually well behaved, and presentable in appearance. Our group was typical. Harvey Holt dressed every day in the same manner: white trousers, white shirt, red scarf, red belt, white canvas shoes with red laces and rope soles. In time the shirt would become stained a pale red from the wine that Harvey spilled as he drank from the many wineskins that were passed to him; he liked to hold them far from his lips, with a small jet of wine leaping into his mouth. I wore rope-soled shoes, a faded navy costume and a beret. Joe, his heavy beard unkempt, wore very tight western slacks, no shirt, a leather vest with a sheepskin lining and Texas-style boots. Cato, with his innate sense of style, kept his beard trimmed and his very modern clothes meticulous; while Yigal wore whipcord pants, army boots, a military jacket and the little Israeli idiot-cap.

  The girls had a special problem. They wanted very much to wear their pretty minidresses, but quickly found that to do so in the freewheeling crowd at Pamplona led to adventures they were not ready to pursue. Britta said, ‘I never knew a thousand men could have eight thousand hands,’ so the girls switched to slacks; but if on some special evening we ate at a restaurant they wore their most modish dresses and, since they were such striking girls to begin with, always created a stir.

  When I commented on how clean the crowd looked this year, with a minimum of the rowdy types in filthy clothes that I had anticipated, Joe laughed and said, ‘You know why, don’t you?’ I didn’t, so he drove the pop-top some distance out the Zaragoza road and we watched as motorcycle police stopped any incoming car with beatnik types and told them, ‘Wash up, dress up, clean up. Or go back.’ If the occupants protested they had no other clothes, or if they refused to cut their hair or comb it, the police turned the car around and sent it in the opposite direction. ‘It’s the same on the roads from France,’ Joe said. I asked, ‘How did you get in?’ and he said, ‘I may look scruffy but I don’t smell.’

  That night I learned why Pamplona was able to absorb these myriad visitors with so little apparent trouble. At ten-thirty, when we had taken our places in the central square to watch the fireworks, two unusually obnoxious Americans accompanied by a drunk from South Africa began pestering us, and after a while they deduced that Cato must be dating one of our girls, so in spite of all Holt and I could do, they made themselves even more objectionable, but before real trouble could start, the fireworks came on, a lavish display by Caballer of Valencia, and we were able to forget the hecklers, although no sooner had the fireworks ceased than they began once again to badger us.

  I wondered why the police did nothing, for they saw the affair, but they merely watched. Monica took Cato’s hand and said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ whereupon the three began to chant, ‘Nigger lover, nigger lover!’ Holt, who felt as offended as they did about Cato’s dating a white girl, nevertheless considered it his obligation to protect any member of his table, and he was about to launch into the trio, having first signaled to Joe and Yigal, when he was stopped by the police, who slowly shook their heads and wagged a forefinger.

  Holt and the young people left, but I stayed behind to talk with some old hands from California, a doctor and his wife who often came to San Fermín, and they, having watched the incident, were as irritated as I. ‘It’s ironic that a colored man should be insulted at the feast of San Fermín,’ the doctor said, ‘in view of the fact that Fermín himself was a Negro.’ I said the Pamplonicos were touchy on this point, and whereas the statue of San Fermín, which would be carried through the streets tomorrow, was coal-black, the legend claimed that the saint was from North Africa and merely sunburned.

  I had no more than completed my comment when the three troublemakers spotted me and lurched over to abuse me as ‘another of those nigger lovers.’ The doctor, a man almost as old as I, was ready to fight, and I supposed I would be drawn in too, but again the police stationed themselves so that we could see them and wagged their fingers.

  Then, at three o’clock in the morning, when the crowds had thinned out, a car drove quietly into the square and parked near us. Six policemen moved slowly among the tables, encircled the three bullies, and with sickening effectiveness punched them to the ground, then hauled them off, and we saw them no more.

  On July 7, at five-thirty in the morning, everybody in Bar Vasca woke up. In fact, everybody in Pamplona woke up, for at that hour bands of txistularis began circulating through the city, blowing their pipes and thumping their drums, so that sleep became impossible. And within a matter of minutes we were dressed and headed at a brisk clip for the bullring, as were thousands of others, converging from all directions. ‘Do we have to walk so fast?’ Monica called petulantly, and I replied, ‘To do it right we have to,’ and she called back, ‘The one thing we insist upon is doing it right, don’t we, Girl Guides?’

  The reason for my haste became apparent when we reached the bullring, for even at this early hour more than three thousand people jammed the area, waiting for the doors to open at six, and unless we were lucky, we would miss the exciting introduction to Pamplona. By good luck, we were able to elbow our way to a favorable position, so that when the doors finally opened I could scamper up the flights of concrete stairs like a frightened rabbit and dash to a spot not inside the arena but on the stairway overlooking the streets outside.

  ‘Taken, taken!’ I shouted to strangers who tried to muscle in, and thus I held seven places until the young people came puffing up to range themselves beside me. Britta and Gretchen were at my elbows, and I explained to them that we would now stand in the cold for one hour.

  ‘Will it be worth it?’ Monica asked, and I pointed to the huge crowd that had already formed behind us, eager to glimpse even a portion of what we were to see in perfection.

  ‘We’ve done this for twenty seconds of excitement,’ I explained.

  ‘It better be a good twenty seconds,’ Monica retorted, and I assured her it would be.

  By seven there were twenty thousand inside the arena, fifteen thousand on the plaza outside, where some had even climbed onto the head of the Hemingway statue Suddenly, from across the city, a rocket exploded with a roar that could be heard in all parts of Pamplona. Those of us who had seen the run before waited apprehensively, and in a few moments were relieved to hear a second rocket, signifying that the six bulls had left the corrals in a compact group. ‘If the second rocket is delayed,’ I explained, ‘you know that one of the bulls has lagged behind, and that means trouble.’

  With the explosion of the rockets many things began to happen in the plaza. First, the police who had been keeping order in the runway which the bulls would follow on their gallop into the arena, left the scene and climbed to safety. Second, everyone in the area grew tense. Third, those who were to do the running began bouncing up and down, knowing that within two minutes the bulls would be upon them. Even blasé Monica grew excited and grabbed Joe’s arm, squealing, ‘How’d you like to be down there right now?’

  The distance from the corrals to the bullring was about a mile, and since a man can run a mile in four minutes and a bull in something over two, it was obvious that anyone running before the bulls must ultimately be overtaken and forced to protect himself in some way as the bulls dashed past. Britta cried, ‘Look!’ and we saw men dashing furiously into the plaza as if hell were at their heels, and a moment later the first bulls appeared, large dark figures running purposefully ahead, looking from side to side but not chop
ping with their horns. A mass of runners seemed to clog the way before them, but as the bulls reached any given spot, the crowd mysteriously opened, only to close as the bulls passed.

  When the animals reached the plaza they ran straight ahead for about one hundred yards, then, at a large office building called Teléfonos, they turned left to enter the narrow chute which would bring them directly under our feet and into the arena. This morning, as the speeding bulls tried to turn the corner into the chute, the men running before them piled up for a moment, and I heard Monica scream, ‘My God! Look at that one in blue!’

  A runner had fallen and it seemed inevitable that the bulls must trample him, but miraculously all six maneuvered their hooves so that the fallen one escaped injury. ‘His angel was watching,’ Monica said limply.

  Now the bulls were well into the chute, dashing in our direction, with hundreds of men before them running, falling, struggling, kicking. I think each of us on the balcony caught a sensation of terrible power as the bulls crashed through all obstacles and swept on. ‘Oh!’ Gretchen gasped as the surge of men and bulls came toward us, blurred in an instant of wild excitement, and passed beneath us into the arena.

  ‘Hurry!’ I shouted as the last bull vanished, and we rushed up a long flight of stairs, down a corridor and out into the bright morning sunlight of the arena. We reached our seats just as the last bulls were being herded into the pens from which they would emerge to fight at five-thirty that afternoon.

  What we saw next was a kind of divine buffoonery, for the sand below was jammed with young bodies in white uniforms, red sashes and belts, each with a rolled-up newspaper in his right hand. ‘Watch that gate,’ I said, and as I spoke, it swung open, and out into that mass of supple bodies catapulted a fighting cow, her sharp horns encased in leather. With a fury that I cannot describe, she threw herself at the multiple targets about her, knocked grown men over with a brush of her head, and created such harmless havoc as to keep the watchers in continuous laughter. I judged that during this cow’s eleven minutes in the arena, she must have knocked down about ninety men. At times she looked like a bowling ball, elusive and destructive. The rule was that no runner could grab her in any way, neither by the horns nor by the tail. All he could do was push her away or swat her with his rolled-up newspaper, but if he did the latter, she was likely to turn upon him, drive her head into his gut, and send him spinning.

  Five such cows were released each morning—sometimes in pairs—and the last always seemed stronger than the first; or perhaps the runners were tiring. At any rate, it was a raucous way to begin the day and it set the pattern for what was to follow. By eight the arena was empty. As we trailed out, Cato said, ‘Them females sure knows how to handle,’ and Yigal said, ‘The whole thing’s ridiculous.’ But Joe said nothing. He seemed to be remembering that surge of dark power as the bulls turned into the chute.

  Holt disapproved of our three young men: Joe because of his pacifism and his beard, though not necessarily in that order; Yigal because of his outspoken opposition to bullfights and his hesitancy about adopting America as his home; Cato because he spoke ill of religion and was sleeping with a white girl, and again my order is arbitrary.

  His reaction to the three girls was more complex. He distrusted Gretchen’s attitude toward the police, believing that anybody who got on the bad side of the law, pretty likely had it coming; also, he suspected young people who fought with their parents, even though he had fought with his in order to get into the marines, but that was different. Monica he did not like. He thought she considered herself superior because she was English and spoke with an accent that was popular with far west radio announcers in the 1930s, and he despised her for having an affair with a Negro. Also, her humor was apt to be cynical, an attribute which he prized in elderly people but abhorred in youth. Britta was suspect because how could a girl like that smoke marijuana, and he wasn’t pleased that she talked of her father with disrespect, especially if he had been the hero she said he was during the Nazi occupation.

  But like all tech reps, he had a difficult time believing that girls as beautiful as these three could have any problems. ‘Life is so damned easy for them,’ he told me one day, ‘no problems at all, and yet they want to make waves. You sort of feel that they ought to be spanked, but I guess even if you are well off and beautiful, things sometimes look confused.’ When I said that Gretchen really had a miserable time with the police, he snapped, ‘Probably smoking pot and they caught her.’

  This day at lunch his reactions to the young people crystallized. Things began well, with various Spaniards stopping by to congratulate him on his running, and Yigal taking pains to be conciliatory, saying, ‘You must have shown them something.’

  ‘Just like Humphrey Bogart running his boat out of Cuba,’ Holt said reflectively. ‘No great sweat if that’s your job.’

  ‘I thought it was Errol Flynn who had the boat in Cuba,’ Monica said.

  ‘That time he told Lauren Bacall to whistle,’ Holt explained.

  ‘Oh, you mean a movie! Never saw it.’

  The others hadn’t seen it either, and Holt asked, ‘You mean to tell me not one of you saw one of the greatest dramatic moments in movie history …’

  ‘Bogart didn’t make any movies during the last decade,’ Gretchen said. ‘At least I don’t remember any.’

  ‘He’s been dead twelve years,’ Holt said. ‘When was it made?’ he asked me. ‘That great Hemingway story?’

  ‘I saw it in Libya during the war.’

  Holt said he couldn’t believe it had been so long ago.

  ‘I saw him in one movie,’ Yigal said. ‘It was excellent.’

  ‘What was he?’ Holt asked.

  ‘You know, that classic—Beat the Devil, with Robert Morley and that superb cast.’

  ‘Oh, sure!’ Monica cried. ‘That wonderfully nutty thing about Tangier.’

  ‘They should all have been arrested,’ Holt growled.

  ‘Who? Morley and Bogart?’

  ‘The producer, the director, anyone responsible for such a waste of Bogart’s talent. That picture was a disgrace, the only poor one Bogart ever made.’

  ‘Are you talking about the Truman Capote–John Huston classic?’ Gretchen asked.

  Holt apparently did not recognize the names. ‘What I’m talking about,’ he said, ‘is that miserable picture which somebody threw together and made Bogart look like a fool.’

  ‘It’s the only good thing he ever did,’ Gretchen said firmly, and the others agreed.

  Holt exploded. ‘You mean that piece of trash …’

  ‘Mr. Holt, it had style, wit.’

  ‘Did you see the time when he and William Holden were both in love with Audrey Hepburn?’

  ‘Who directed?’ Gretchen asked.

  ‘Directed? Who the hell cares who directed? Did you see the time when he fought with Leslie Howard in the desert? Or when he was in Europe … just like you kids … only he was in love with Ava Gardner?’

  This last rang a bell with Cato. ‘Yeah, I caught it on a late, late show one night. A prime stinker.’

  It was obvious that Holt was trying to control himself, and he asked, ‘You don’t really know any of the great pictures, do you? Like when Spencer Tracy was teaching Freddy Bartholomew to be a man?’

  ‘Please,’ Cato broke in. ‘Give me names. What was the picture? I think I saw something like that. It was in Death Valley and there was the Gila monster and Spencer Tracy stepped on it with his heel.’

  Holt bit his lip, then asked, ‘You never saw Mr. Tracy when he fought for the soul … the future of Mickey Rooney? That time when Tracy was a priest?’

  Gretchen tried to intrude with the statement that for her generation Spencer Tracy never made a picture that related in any way to real life and that girls like her simply dismissed his pathetic old flicks as …

  ‘Goddammit!’ Holt cried, banging the table. ‘You’re a bunch of illiterates. You really know nothing. How do you suppose a man gets c
haracter? By seeing the great plays and movies and reading the great books. Every one of you young punks would have had more character if you’d seen Spencer Tracy as that Portuguese fisherman …’

  ‘It was a Cuban fisherman,’ Gretchen corrected, ‘and he was trying to catch a big fish … and it was a perfectly dreadful picture.’

  Holt turned completely around in his chair so that he could stare at Gretchen. ‘It’s just dawned on me. Sometimes you’re stupid. You got fine marks in college, I’m sure, but you’re stupid. You know, if you had seen those great pictures in which Mr. Tracy and Miss Hepburn tried to adjust to each other—good man, good woman, but all man and all woman …’ He hesitated, then said quietly, ‘Maybe, Miss Gretchen, you would now know how to get along with men better than you do.’

  Gretchen flushed and for a moment it looked as if she would lash back at him, but her natural good manners stopped her, and she said with conciliatory warmth, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Holt. I did see Mr. Tracy once when he was excellent. As the corrupt cop in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He showed a true sense of comedy.’

  That did it. Holt slammed down the fork with which he had been eating pochas and asked, ‘Why is it? Of all the fine work done by these two actors … why do you choose the worst picture each of them made? That trashy Bogart film. That ridiculous thing they put Tracy into when he was an old man and needed the money. It was an abuse of talent. Yet that’s what you remember.’

  ‘His pictures were mostly corn,’ Cato said. ‘Some of my white friends took me to see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? What crap.’

  Suddenly Holt shot his hand out and grabbed Cato by the arm. ‘Don’t ridicule what you don’t understand,’ he said grimly; then, seeming ashamed of himself for having lost his temper, he stomped upstairs and a few minutes later we heard streaming from his tape recorder “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “From the Halls of Montezuma.”