#26 The Mountain Won’t Come to Mohammed …
Shamelessly, I belt along to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Looking Out My Back Door, proud that I managed to connect my phone to the car radio without Heidi’s help. Until recently, I had an iPod—I think it was. Using my computer, I bought classical music and songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s from a digital store, which Heidi—my wife, Dutch, like me—sorted into two playlists and copied onto my iPod. With a small cable, I connected the thing to the car radio. I selected a playlist, then Random, and … music. But iPod is history. I make do with Spotify now, and Spotify is algebra to me, though I realize I am making progress when I hear myself belt, “Bother me tomorrow; today, I’ll buy no sorrow.”
I also realize I am driving through a whiteout rather than fog.
At a snail's pace I hope oncoming traffic also respects, I make my way uphill on a country road toward Vilvestre, a village on the edge of the gorge through which the River Duero flows, separating Spain and Portugal here. Just as I decide to drive onto the roadside and wait for the whiteout to lift, I drive out of it, into the autumn sun, the sky pale blue.
“Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn,” I belt, and my heart skips a beat when I see eight or nine black vultures hopping around a carcass beside the road. I drive onto the roadside just the same, come to a halt, wonder how it is possible that I don’t scare away the vultures, now about fifteen meters in front of me, and when, after a brief silence, fumbling for my binoculars in a glove compartment, I hear Esther Ofarim sing That’s my song, the irritability that has been on my heels for months stirs.
Focusing my binoculars on the head of a vulture, I try to concentrate on Ofarim’s voice—the most beautiful voice I know—but the irritability stirs convincingly, and when, after another brief silence, the raw voice of Camarón de la Isla echoes through the car, I surrender to that irritability, which does not prevent me from chuckling inwardly as my thoughts wander to yesterday afternoon, to the moment I asked Heidi why people were filming us.
“People aren’t filming us,” Heidi answered without averting her gaze from what was unfolding in front of us.
“People aren’t filming us…?”
“People are filming Boris,” and I looked at Boris the little terrier, on my lap, who was following every movement of the vaca, the cow, in front of us on the sand, his head moving from left to right and vice versa, his neck slightly stretched as if he did not want to miss anything.
Since Heidi and I, about five months ago, ended up in the village of Montelobado, some fifteen minutes from where I am now staring at black vultures, there has been ample opportunity to attend corridas or novilladas without having to travel far. It was the same in Antequera, a little town in Andalusia, where we lived before settling in Montelobado, but I was reluctant to move in the direction of el mundo taurino, the world of toros bravos, a world of which I was once an intimate part and from which I abruptly and involuntarily broke away. After our arrival in Montelobado, I shook off that reluctance, and in arenas in the cities of Guijuelo, Vitigudino, Béjar, Salamanca, and Ledesma, Heidi and I saw great gods perform. On village squares converted into arenas, we saw lesser gods perform, and yesterday afternoon, at the invitation of an acquaintance, we attended a private event at a ganadería, a breeding farm for toros bravos. Beautiful ganadería! Next to the main building, a small ring, call it a mini-arena, some stands around it, mainly occupied by tourists despite it being December—2025.
I participated in dozens of tentaderos when I was still part of el mundo taurino. During a tentadero, a breeder of toros bravos, an ancient breed of bulls, has some of her or his one- to two-year-old vacas tested by a matador for their bravura, their willingness to attack, which is not entirely correct, for it is unlikely that a vaca of the toro bravo breed would lack bravura. During a tentadero—more correctly—a breeder assesses which of the tested vacas attacks in a manner she or he concurs with. Only with those vacas do breeders breed, which, in an arena, determines the different manners of attack of bulls from different breeders. Virtually all vacas of the toro bravo breed are given the opportunity to demonstrate their bravura during a tentadero. No human comes near the bulls until, at the age of four or five, in an arena, during the last twelve minutes of their lives, they exhibit the aggressive behavior passed on to them by their mothers.
The event Heidi and I attended yesterday afternoon was not a tentadero. The breeder, owner of the ganadería we visited, gave four students of Salamanca’s escuela taurina, Salamanca's school for matadors, the opportunity to each confront one of four vacas with which he had decided not to breed. The vacas had not been tested during a tentadero, the decision not to breed with them solely based on some external characteristics. During that event too, that irritability stirred, and without much effort, I blamed the tourists around the ring for it. El mundo taurino is a subdued world, not a tourist attraction, though I understand the breeder, whose hand Heidi and I shook yesterday, who, by taking care of his business the way he does, even gives value to the bravura of vacas that would otherwise ignominiously fall prey to the butcher’s knife.
Four boys, seventeen or eighteen years old, were given the rare opportunity to try to move an audience face to face with a vaca rather than move no one face to face with imaginary bulls, which is the usual way matadors and young people with the ambition to one day be a matador prepare for their next or first confrontation with a bull in an arena or on a village square converted into an arena. In addition, paying a handsome fee, of course, tourists poured out of two coaches and enjoyed an interesting afternoon.
The ganadería exuded the usual subdued atmosphere, and the farmhands, checkered caps on their heads, their faces tanned, the legs of their jeans rolled up, revealing half the shafts of their leather boots, contributed to that atmosphere as they pulled and pushed steel doors open and shut in the corrals next to the ring until the first vaca stormed onto the ochre-colored sand in the ring. The pounding of hooves on the sand. The dust rising from beneath those hooves. The grazing vacas and bulls in the vast meadows surrounding the ring …
Despite the tourists around us, I felt transported back to one of the most beautiful periods of my life, though I missed some aspects of the tentaderos I once participated in. No picador on his armored horse and no banderilleros in concentrated anticipation of the moment they might have to rush to their matador’s aid. No matadors in their trajes cortos, their elegant riding costumes, but four boys in jeans and in the shirts of their favorite soccer team. No breeder hushing instructions to a matador, but family members shouting encouragement to a boy on the sand. No suppressed biens and olés from a handful of guests, but the clamor of a hundred tourists. Just as during a tentadero, every vaca trotted into the meadows after having chased a pink capote and then a red muleta for about fifteen minutes—and after a farmhand had opened a low, wooden door in the white-painted stone wall around the sand.
Vacas are smaller than adult bulls. They are often well-armed and injure or kill a human with almost the same ease as adult bulls do. No accidents yesterday afternoon, which surprised me. The boys I saw perform were brimming with self-confidence, but in their performances, I perceived little that showed thorough preparation, something I had also perceived while seeing those lesser gods perform in village squares converted into arenas—hence witnessing accident after accident.
For years, by way of preparation, six, seven, sometimes eight hours each day, capote or muleta in hand, I confronted imaginary bulls. In addition—and as part of our employment contract—one of my banderilleros chased my capote or muleta for at least two hours each day, bent over, a tube in his hands with a bull horn duct-taped at each end, and… I startle and do not know whether the vulture I see sliding a huge bone down her or his throat startles me or maybe the sudden realization that it is not irritability that has been on my heels for months, but jealousy—wrapped in irritability. I uh… I would not have been able to stand in the shadow of the great gods Heidi and I saw perform in arenas over the past few months, but I was—and I still am, damn it!—better than the boys I saw perform in village squares converted into arenas and at that ganadería yesterday.
Young people, in recent years, often give me the impression that wanting is enough to persuade the mountain to come to Mohammed. I am the last one to deny the potential of wanting, but wanting without sacrifice will never lead to anything satisfactory and certainly not to being a matador. And that, that should destroy the corrida—insensitive to the criticism of people who, through the cellophane in which fried chicken is wrapped, only see something that makes their mouths water. Nothing will destroy the corrida because el toro arregla todo, the bull has the last word, all aggressiveness his mother has passed on to him available in the blink of an eye—aggressiveness no Western mother still passes on to her child, which, on a somber note, will soon destroy the West.
All over Spain, South America, Portugal, and France, there are still young people who understand that no school—and no escuela taurina either—will ever lead to true success and happiness. Those young people do what I did. They combine wanting with sacrifice and practice, practice, and practice, Camarón de la Isla’s music in the background. Some of them will one day be great gods in arenas, a thought that pushes my irritability into the background, assisted by Dire Straits, whose Sultans of Swing now blasts through the car.
A truck thunders past. With clumsy wingbeats, the vultures take flight, and though I feel the same emotion I felt when I first heard Sultans of Swing—fourteen years old, high school canteen, where, not in that canteen, but at high school, I involuntarily watched success and happiness drift further and further away from me for six long years—I turn off the car radio. I place my binoculars back in the glove compartment, drive on, and a few minutes later, I park in front of a cheese factory in Vilvestre.
“Requesón?” the cheesemaker asks, looking up from behind a steel barrel in which large, mechanically driven spoons stir goat’s milk.
“Por favor,” I answer.
“Kilo?” the cheesemaker asks as he walks to the counter.
“Kilo,” I answer, and yet another few minutes later, at a snail’s pace, I drive back into the whiteout, on the passenger seat a kilo of requesón, a protein-rich byproduct of making goat cheese.
Just before driving into Montelobado, I drive out of the whiteout, and once in the village, I see that municipal employees, led by a concejal, a council member, are busy transforming a five-, six-meter-high, conical wire-frame structure in the village square opposite our temporary home into a Christmas tree, which, I register as I step out of the car after having parked, is not entirely correct, for what is taking shape does not at all resemble a Christmas tree. Municipal employees—more correctly—are wrapping a long strand of dried straw around the wire-frame structure, making it look like a Maypole rather than a Christmas tree.
“Te gusta do you like it!” the concejal shouts. I take another look at what will partly determine my Christmas-related emotions until Three Kings’ Day, wonder why Westerners so passionately allow what calls for a positive emotion to be taken away from them, shout back, “No, no. No tiene nada que ver con Navidad it has nothing to do with Christmas!” and as I walk to our front door, I chuckle inwardly as I realize that Franco's dictatorship would not have lasted until the next Three Kings’ Day if he had decreed that Christmas trees should be replaced by Maypoles. Logically so, for Spanish mothers, in Franco's time, still passed on appropriate aggressiveness to their children, and Franco, therefore, could not afford to make the slightest mistake ...
While shouting from rooftops how successful and happy we are in our democracies, we powerlessly allow even our Christmas tree to be taken away from us, and again chuckling inwardly—my leaps of thought even for me difficult to follow at times—I wonder how humanity would have fared if all Europeans had said, “No, no,” when governments introduced daylight saving time in 1916, if all Olympians had said, “No, no,” when Dutch gymnast Yuri van Gelder was excluded from participating in the 2016 Olympic Games after arriving a few minutes late at his dormitory in the Olympic village one night, if not only in the Dutch town of Urk, but everywhere in the world, people had said, “No, no” when governments in 2020 decreed that pieces of cloth had to be worn over faces to curb the offensive power of a virus, if … our front door swings open. Boris jumps up at me, and as Heidi steps out the door, I realize I will only drink coffee after a walk with Boris.
Requesón in the fridge, Heidi, Boris, and I wander through the fields around Montelobado. Besides sheep and cows, grazing in pastures enclosed by centuries-old stone walls, the grass green from the recent rain, we see birds of prey, deer, foxes, and even two Egyptian mongooses. When I tell her I saw a vulture swallow a huge bone, Heidi—her leaps of thought even harder to follow than mine—says, “I don’t want anything to happen to that Christmas tree tonight.”
“When someone attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan,” I reply promptly, “a Dutch comedian called that a democratic impulse.”
“Nik, I know how you feel about that Christmas tree, and the whole village likely feels the same. But that Christmas tree isn’t our problem. Our problem—one of our problems—is that you called Salvador last night, your old mos… moso …” “Moso de espadas,” I add.
“That one!” Heidi says. “I assume you asked him to send you your capotes, muletas, and swords.”
“Hm…”
“I know you want to get back into the arena. But we both know you won’t survive the twenty-five times you’re required to perform in an arena before people can offer you your alternativa.”
“Huh…?”
“Don’t act stupid now. You still want to be offered your alternativa, and that is impossible. Practice as much as you want, if that betters your mood, but finding a permanent house, building studios to shoot caveman code videos, and publishing your books in Spanish and English take priority now. Sometimes, I just don’t understand what makes you tick,” and in my mind I hear Esther Ofarim sing: “It’s been a good life, but there still is that yearning … that’s my song … hm, hm, hm… that’s my song … hm… hm, hm, hm…”
