The Bull Fight in Marcara

The Bull Fight

In a town called Marcara, in the Ancash province of Peru, everyone knows each other.   Spanish and Quechua are interchangeable in the local market.  Quechua is an old language with clicks and guttural pops.  The Quechua people are direct descendants of the Incas.  They live in small adobe houses in the hills and they farm and work the land.  Their feet are brown and cracked from years of walking with sandals made of tires.  

You get around by paying a couple dollars and jumping into one of many combis that race between villages and towns.  The combis are minivans filled with peasants traveling the highway to trade and work... Carhuaz, Caraz, Mancara, and big cities.  I am writing from Huaraz, Ancash, a large center of climbing.  In the not too far distance are snow capped peaks.  We are in a bowl surrounded by some of the biggest mountains in the world.  In Huaraz, from where I'm writing, city life is prominent and pollution from old cars gets in your eyes and lungs and you have to get into higher parts of the city and windy alleys to escape being suffocated by car and motorcycle exhaust.  I came to Huaraz by combi.  The combis smell like farm animals - goats mostly, and urine and human body odour.  I'm becoming immune to the smells.  Am I a smell?  I packed Antonio Banderas cologne.

Back to Marcara, a small village.  Cows, pigs, goats, chickens, burros (donkeys) are everywhere here.  The women wear elaborate colored clothing and seem very wise.  The people are dark and have deep brown eyes, black hair.  Their skin is the color of earth, and they have rosy cheeks and they seem to be in very good health.

A former mayor of Marcara, a 71 year old man who stands straight and is Protestant and has big bushy eyebrows, has 10 children.  He is now an agronomist, working to help the quechua campositos (farmers) responsibly use modern chemicals to boost production.   One of the mayor's daughters is Carmen, perhaps 28 years old.  She is westernized and looks like a short New Yorker and she is a flirt and loves to dance and grab and twirl.  She plays between the cousins.  Gabby is 18, and Federico is 40.  

The first festival I wrote about on this blog took place in Marcara.  We met Carmen there and she took us into her world.  We drank and shared glasses with all the people on a grassy field lit by brass bands and fireworks.  I woke up with a pounding headache and a brass band and fireworks were drowning the tiny town.  Everything is adobe and concrete in the town, and the farms surround it and extend along dirt roads into the mountains and hills.

I have been called gringo many times.  I stand at least a foot above the crowd everywhere except for in Lima, and there I am bigger than average.  But Marcara and its people accepted us.  I have danced with old women and I have seen the Quechuans huddle under their elaborate rainbow dresses in the dark and then slowly metamorph into the party, spinning and dancing little local jigs.  They love the way we dance.  I broke a fist fight between two teens and a friend I was drinking with grabbed me and said, "No, this is not for you."  And everyone watched them fight until it ended with a kick to the head.  Dominance.  

In Marcara there was a bullfight in an old circle enclosed by a high wooden fence.  A company comes in with bulls and matadors and the stands are filled, packed to the gills by the townspeople and anyone else who wants to come.  There are people everywhere, standing on houses to see into the mini arena without paying the 7 soles ($2.70).  And there is a parade.  This is all festival... fireworks by crazy men who may have fought in Peru's civil war in the eighties and early nineties.  Loud fireworks are always going off here.  Dynamite at 2 AM, 7 AM, 5:30 AM.  1 PM.  All of the sudden you're jumping and thinking a gun is shooting.  

The Procession is led by the Mayor Domo and his wife.  They are the organizers of the bullfight.  It is a great honor.  The whole bullfight is to the music of a brass band from Lima in blue jackets and they cost 20,000 soles to rent for the day.  That's about 8,000 dollars.  Who knows what the bulls and matadors cost.

The Procession has the Mayor Domo and wife on two great steeds.  The honored hosts are wearing crowns of flowers.  This bullfight is to honor Jesus Christ, so there are Christ t-shirts thrown into the crowd.  Candy, cans of soda and beer, plastic bowls, balls.  They are thrown into the crowd.  And then the matadors, Argentinians and Spanish and Chilean.  This is a Toro Meurte fight.  Bulls will die.

The bulls are tortured with blades.  They have no chance.  All the great excitement of Hemingway's bullfights is predicated upon the artful skill of the matador.  He is always close to death and can kill the bull with skill and finesse.  These matadors were traveling salesman of torture and death.  I wanted to see the matador die a painful slow death.  They went for the kill of the first and third bull, a quick hard jab to the spine, right behind the head, with a trident shaped blade.  And they missed and missed and missed.  And when they finally dropped the lolling bull, they bowed and we whistled.  Whistling is booing in Peru.

The second bull was a beautiful white animal.  He came out of the stall with a slit eye.  His eye was bleeding and hanging out of its socket.  They tortured him to anger.  And he did not fight.  He was too terrified to fight and shit himself continuously.  They twisted his tail, kicked him, stabbed him.  He would not fight.  Finally they got him back into his stall.

I hated Peru.  I wanted to kill the matadors and everyone for miles.  I am superior to you.  But what of our American chicken factories?  They do not exist here.  And our slaughter factories?  They also are not here.

Church called me in.  A big old Spanish church with wide open doors and flowers among candles.  I walked into this ship, old hard wooden beams above.  The priest, an old Italian man who looked like Hemingway, sat among his flock in the pews.

Outside there was a party with beer and fireworks and a big brass band.  Inside was me and my God.  And my God is everyone I’ve ever met.  And the bulls were floating up in the rafters.  The bulls who were tortured and stabbed, eyes cut out, struck down by Spanish matador cowards to make a buck.

Crying, sobbing in the pews, wishing I could be home, wishing I could be with my love, wishing love and peace to everyone from my little socket in that Spanish church amplifier.  Could you feel my waves?

So what is an adventure?  What the hell is my purpose on this rock?  Patience melting away and under all the wax is just bony old me, sick and tired of these backward brown people and their comida… chicken, trout, pig, and cow.  Rice and beans and lettuce that gives me the shits.

Maybe I should get on a bus and go as far away from what I know as possible, disappear entirely, never come back.  But hey, what about Lima and Helen?  Hang on sloopy, hang on.  Be here now.

What I’ve learned is: family trumps all.  It is what you make it.  These people have families who stick together, as far as I can see.  Am I ready to become the pillar of a family?  Am I working hard enough?  I am sad because I’m so alone.  I can’t talk to anyone in my own tongue.  I just want to be held.

So then I talked to the locals as best I could to understand why they liked the death.  They didn't.  They were very hurt by the pain of the bulls.  I believe they too prayed for the bulls.