#8 The Buttplug Gnome …

It’s warm. Dry, warm, pleasantly warm. The spicy scent of the surroundings. The clear blue sky. The sun, low on the horizon. Most toros bravos in the vast fields we overlook are no more than black dots in the distance, but some twenty meters in front of us, six enormous specimens drank water from a stone trough. Motionless, they now stare at us, menacingly. They are beautifully proportioned, heavily armed, and muscular and dry, like bodybuilders in competition. Relics from the days when life was still life. I eh… I struggle to breathe. For the third time today, I feel my tears burning as I reach into my backpack for what I need to make tea and coffee. Heidi lowers herself beside me in the dry grass and looks at the bulls. Despite the sadness simmering inside me, I feel happy and realize that duende is taking hold of me, that wondrous emotion that combines sadness and happiness, an emotion hardly anyone beyond Spain’s borders is familiar with. Melancholy comes close, but duende is so much stronger than that …

The splendor of the six bulls staring at us reminds me more convincingly than I had anticipated of el mundo taurino, the world of the corrida, a world I once was part of without having the right to be part of it. The most beautiful world imaginable and the most meaningful world for those who dare to open their eyes to it. A world that provides an uncorrupted form of art, the only form of art, according to Ernest Hemingway, in which the artist is in danger of death. We laugh at that. Of course we laugh at that! But our laughter is conditioned, just as much of what we feel, think, and know for certain today has been conditioned—and is therefore worthless.

Art, we’ve been conditioned to believe, is the exclusive domain of those who have studied it—have learned to create it or have learned to validate it—and of those who can afford it, although the latter isn't entirely true. Most societies invest heavily in what qualified art connoisseurs validate as art, enabling every member of those societies to be moved by art or to let it nudge them toward reflection or perspective, and I feel my cynicism stirring when I think of the traffic chaos that often occurs on the Eendrachtsplein—the Square of Unity—in Rotterdam, where I was born and raised, because too many people, seized with emotion, crowd around the Buttplug Gnome, on display on that square since 2008.

Without trying to trivialize the Holocaust or, say, the Arab slave trade, I think that the abandonment of art and culture—along with the abandonment of our life as hunter-gatherers—is among the most disastrous tragedies humanity has allowed itself to endure over the past ten thousand years. And as I wonder, face to face with toros bravos, how it’s possible that I allow my cynicism to overshadow the duende taking hold of me, I realize that a petition to ban the corrida and a petition calling for more tanks to be sent to Ukraine could today be presented on the same form, requiring only a single signature.

Our gas burner snores under a kettle I’ve filled with water. I spoon rooibos into a small paper bag and place it on Heidi's Stanley thermos, spoon coffee into the filter I’ve set on the rim of my own thermos, and look up at the bulls ahead of us. Rising warm air is all that moves until one of the bulls charges at us. I clench my teeth and dig my heels into the sand. Nothing must betray the terror I feel. No matter how life sometimes pushes our limits, fear doesn’t help us. Elegance is key, and so I subtly move the hand holding my muleta. I notice the bull shift course slightly, hear its hoofbeats, feel its flank graze me, hear thousands of people chanting the word bien the way people do in Rotterdam when they manage to break away from the Buttplug Gnome and follow what is called the sculpture route along the Westersingel, coming face to face with expressions of art so intense they feel touched to the depths of their souls, and … often, like now, I wonder if my cynicism doesn’t border on the obsessive …

Tuesday, August 6, 2024. Last Wednesday, Heidi and I arrived from the Netherlands at our new house in Antequera, a town north of Málaga, in southern Spain. We had seen photos of the house online, and assuming the owner would at least want to talk to us to convince herself we would make suitable tenants, we had journeyed south. To our surprise, the formalities with the owner’s daughter were completed in two seconds, and Heidi and I are now officially living in a tiny cave house beneath Antequera’s castle—although I may be using the word officially too loosely.

Before Europe became a united entity, validating migration within Europe required little more than a visit to a police station in one’s new municipality of residence. Today, a European trying to validate migration within Europe faces a series of frustrating visits to a multitude of offices. Over the past ten years, Heidi and I embarked on that series of visits eight times. This time, things were supposed to run more smoothly because we are migrating within Spain. Until two months ago, after all, we still lived in Catalonia. We paid a work-related visit to the Netherlands, journeyed from there to Andalusia, so technically, we are migrating within Spain. Still, our first success came only this morning. The document confirming our residency in Antequera, our empadronamiento, could be printed. At the office where the empadronamiento would be printed, we presented the documents justifying its printing, which we had gathered last Thursday and Friday. But it took us so long to convince the official in charge of printing empadronamientos we had gathered sufficient documents that we cancelled our visit to the office where we had hoped to begin the procedure that would ultimately lead to replacing our Catalan health insurance cards with Andalusian ones.

Walking home after that empadronamiento adventure, we saw an old woman struggling to hold open the large oak door of a historic building while trying to lift her shopping cart up two steps into the hallway beyond the oak door. I suppressed a strange urge to time how long it would take for someone to come to her aid, sprinted across the street—dodging cars, mopeds, electric scooters, and people staring at their phones—and discovered that the door spring was heavily adjusted, that the woman’s shopping cart was heavily loaded, and that she had quite clumsily trapped herself between the door and its frame. Just as I felt my cynicism stirring for the first time today, suggesting that the woman might misinterpret my intentions and call for help, Heidi—not as fast on a twenty-meter sprint as I am—came to the rescue. The woman and her shopping cart made their way into the hallway. Past Heidi, who was leaning against the door to keep it open, I made my way out of that hallway, and just as Heidi tried to step back onto the pavement, the woman called her to a halt. She rummaged through her purse, gave us each a cellophane-wrapped candy, and man, I know it’s not normal to be rewarded for helping elder people, but staring at that candy, I felt transported to the days when life was still life. For the first time today, I felt my tears burning, and eh... whatever.

It didn’t take long before I felt my tears burning for the second time today. From an email I opened after returning to our cave house, I learned that Carlito, one of the banderilleros who traveled with me through Spain when I was still part of el mundo taurino, had unexpectedly passed away.

After having our empadronamiento printed and after our planned visit to the office where health insurance cards are handled, we had intended to drive to Catalonia. In the village of Roses, close to the French border, we wanted to pick up some of our belongings, which we left in a storage facility there about two months ago. It was too late to start that thousand-kilometer journey, so I suggested we drive to Sahagún instead, a village in the northwest of Spain—Catalonia is in the northeast—not as far from Antequera as Roses. In Sahagún, José Juan, one of my other two banderilleros from back then, runs a hostal for pilgrims on their way to Santiago de la Compostela. José Juan doesn’t maintain digital contact with the world, and I know he’ll appreciate hearing from me in person of Carlito's faith. We didn’t leave until three o'clock this afternoon, some two hours ago, and I knew that here, just north of Seville, not far from the main road, we would find toros bravos.

I pour boiling water over the coffee in the filter on the rim of my thermos, pour boiling water into Heidi’s thermos, lower the bag of rooibos into it, screw its cap on in a way it traps the upper part of the bag of rooibos, pour more water over the coffee, and, to take my mind off Carlito, I force my thoughts to the day, ages ago, I first met José Juan.

For two months, I filled page after page in my diary until I admitted that the repulsion with which I had fled a plaza de toros in Spain after attending a corrida had been conditioned. To investigate the world of the corrida—which felt like an obligation after that two-month diary argument with myself—I sought and found work as a farmhand on a farm where toros bravos are bred, a ganadería. I learned to speak Spanish, learned to ride horses, lived the most authentic life I could possibly live, discovered nothing that could justify the revulsion with which I had once fled that plaza de toros, and after two years among toros bravos, I decided to intensify my investigation into the world of corrida by attempting to become a matador.

At the ganadería where I worked, I would have been laughed at for what I had decided, so I called an acquaintance whom I hoped could help me. That acquaintance made an appointment for me in Málaga, at Café Flor, across from the plaza de toros, with a man who introduced himself as Pepe Sánchez. I guessed him to be in his sixties. We ordered coffee and chatted. Pepe had once been a matador. Having long since retired, he spent his time mentoring aspiring matadors—girls and boys of about fifteen, where I, apart from being Dutch, was in my thirties at the time—and I understood why Pepe was the man my acquaintance had referred me to. When I explained to Pepe that I was looking for a full-time trainer to help me become a matador, he burst out laughing, and his laughter proved infectious. For a few minutes, I was the center of amusement at Café Flor. Cross, I paid our coffees and walked back to my car, Pepe's eyes on my back. Just before I returned home, still cross, a certain José Juan Sánchez called me on my cell phone. He suggested meeting the next day at Café Flor in Málaga.

José Juan, when I met him the next day, told me that his father had nearly driven him to suicide in his attempts to make a matador out of him. Only after more than ten years of training—when, in a plaza de toros, he faced his first bull, which made short work of him—did his father give up, and did José Juan become a banderillero. It was impossible for me, José Juan was clear about that, to ever become a matador, but no one, he told me with a chuckle, would stop me from trying. The salary he asked was reasonable, and the very next day, I reported for my first training session on the ochre sand of Málaga’s plaza de toros.

José Juan had assumed that after an hour of working out with a capote, I would realize my mission was impossible. Neither of us knew that we were on the eve of an unimaginable adventure that would last for years, that would take us to plazas de toros all across Spain, that would make us friends for life, and that ... “Thank you,” Heidi interrupts my thoughts as I, lost in those thoughts, hand her the mug into which I poured rooibos tea. The spicy scent of our surroundings mingles with that of the coffee I pour myself. The silence. The rising warm air. Those six bulls still staring at us.

I eh... I was sad and happy, in a constant state of duende, on the sand of Spanish plazas de toros, where the advancing shadow represents the inescapable passing of time, where death is inevitable and accepted for the greater glory of life, and where a person either succumbs to her or his fears or faces them head-on. We laugh at that. Of course we laugh at that! But ... “If it were up to me,” Heidi interrupts my thoughts again, “we’d sleep here, but you promised José Juan we’d be with him before midnight. Is he called Curro in Immaculate Perception?”

“Yes, José Juan is Curro in the book.”

Until darkness falls, we see bulls in the vast fields along the road north, and once in Sahagún, José Juan and I embrace and embrace again. The pilgrims in José Juan’s old-fashionedly cozy hostal are asleep, and of course I don’t object when he asks me to light a fire in the hearth. It takes a while for José Juan to recover from the news of Carlito’s death, but then, late into the night, as the firelight dances on our faces, he tells Heidi stories about our time together that I have long since forgotten, my role limited to providing linguistic assistance whenever José Juan’s Andalusian accent—he only migrated north a few years ago—leaves a question mark on Heidi’s face.

Behind us, the sun sinks toward the horizon as we enter Catalonia the next day. No bulls in the vast fields along the road east. In Catalonia, cattle live in excessive numbers in barns that are too small, and the repulsion Heidi and I too often experienced while hiking the Catalan countryside wasn't conditioned. The stench. The green containers in front of each barn we passed, filled with the carcasses of animals that hadn’t survived the preceding hours …

It’s warm in the storage facility in Roses, where Heidi and I move as much of our belongings into the back of our Berlingo as possible. Humidly warm, unpleasantly warm—though not as warm, I suspect, as in the barns around us, where animals live out their short lives, or in tanks in Ukraine, made available by the West, in which young Ukrainians pray to still be alive at the break of dawn.

With the back of our Berlingo fully loaded, we drive out of Catalonia just after midnight with a strange sense of relief. Shortly after, I turn into a country road I recognize from the map study I did on Google Earth, one I know will lead us toward a ganadería. Grass and weeds rattle against the underside of the Berlingo until I stop. It’s pitch black when I turn off the engine and dim our lights. A new moon. The air I breathe as we step out is fresh and full of promise.

After pitching our tent on a seemingly flat patch of grass—to sleep free of mosquitos tonight—Heidi and I, by the light of the Petzls on our heads, play backgammon, our sleeping bags over our shoulders, drinking the tea Heidi made while I pitched the tent. Then, finally, we decide to call it a day. We crawl into our sleeping bags and sleep like never before. Dawn finds me hunched over our gas stove, on which water is coming to a boil in a kettle. As Heidi crawls out of the tent, I point at four enormous bulls some twenty meters in front of us, lying in the dry grass behind a fragile-looking barbed-wire fence. Motionless, the bulls stare at us, not menacingly—they are lying, rather peacefully—but it’s clear they are beautifully proportioned, heavily armed, and muscular and dry. The rising sun. The snoring stove. Those bulls staring at us. I feel duende stirring, and life, I suddenly realize, is still life …

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