Bulls, by Javier Reverte

It's not that I am a crazy bullfighting enthusiast-I usually go two or three times a year-but I am sure that the day they disappear, I will regret it. Saying this is not politically correct these days, and for me, it's not a matter of cruelty, which is the argument on which the rejection of the so-called National Festival is based. I know people who are radically against bullfighting and yet support the death penalty. The issue, in my opinion, is almost a cultural matter.

I have seen bullrings in the most unusual places that the reader could imagine. For example, in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, a country that was a Portuguese colony where many Spanish bullfighters performed during colonial times. It is a splendid arena that now serves as a Sunday market, and within its premises, there are auto repair shops and even, in the former bullpens, the offices of a religious sect. I don't know what's worse, a wild bull or an evangelical headquarters. There's another beautiful bullring in Oran, an Algerian city where there was a significant Spanish colony for centuries. Solidly built of stone, the ring is now used by kids to play soccer. It must be the only round soccer field in the world.

Twenty years ago, while wandering the old streets of Zanzibar, I came across a store selling old photos of the city, almost all from the 1950s. I was amazed to see that in one of them, a Zanzibari was clumsily cape-ing a huge Zebu bull with some kind of rag in a public square in Stone Town. Both Zanzibar and Pemba, a neighboring island, were Portuguese colonies from 1505 to 1629. That's where they got the practice of bullfighting, which had survived through time three and a half centuries after the Portuguese left.

I don't know if there are any more bullrings left in Africa, in places where there were Portuguese or Spanish colonies. But it is somewhat sad to see those spaces where, like in Roman circuses, the stone is now silent, where the voices of joy or fear from the spectators have forever been silenced. History flies, and that unavoidable fact produces a certain vertigo. They are like the old temples of dead religions, from which the gods have escaped in search of their own eternity. Let them be.

Imagine, two hundred years from now, what children will understand when someone tells them, for example, "you shouldn't watch bulls from the barrier." Or expressions like "hit a wall" or "grab the bull by the horns." Will those beautiful names of bull coloration, such as soapy or black Zaín or brindle or black with spots, disappear from the dictionary?

And what about art? Will future generations understand the paintings of Francisco de Goya, Pablo Picasso, or Joan Miró? And the countless lines written by so many poets for the bullfighting festival? That one about... "on a bay horse, covered in finery and gold, requests a city license, to lance a bull, a Christian knight." Or that other one about... "like the bull, I was born for mourning."

And what will they do in Catalonia with Salvador Espriú's great poem The Skin of the Bull? Will they change its title? Will they ban its reading?

Last autumn, I attended a bullfight in Madrid on a sunny afternoon. With a full arena, the colors of the sand and the bullfighter's outfits brightened the autumn air. Some lethal bulls came out, and the matadors risked their lives against them. The spectators held a lump in their throats during the two hours that the event lasted. And amidst the foreboding tragedy and the plastic beauty of some cape work, banderillas, and muleta moves, I felt something very primitive stirring inside me, as if my distant ancestors were crying out from some remote place in my soul.

I have taken my children to bullfights, and they are indifferent. My wife hates them and finds them a spectacle bordering on barbarism. I will try with my grandchildren when their parents aren't watching. And I feel a genuine sadness that something so humanly primitive, so beautiful, and so wild at the same time, is dying. How beautiful is the word wild!