Our last stop on our vacation was in Manizales for their annual feria, where we lucky enough to housesit for our friends Brett and Heather while they were out of town. Manizales is only a couple of hours from Armenia and it has much the same culture. After trekking through the jungle, sunning on the Caribbean coast, and hanging out in the big cities like Medellin, it was time to come back to the countryside.
The evening we got in, we parked ourselves on our hosts’ couch and watched some TV, which, on a Thursday night in Manizales, was a little thin. There were some B-list Hollywood movies dubbed in Spanish we gave a miss. Then we tried to watch some Colombian Telenovelas (soap operas) with men with gargantuous mullets and women with gravity-defying buttocks, but our Spanish still wasn’t good enough to really understand what was going on beyond the “you slept with my sister, you bastard” by-line. Finally we settled on a local channel which was a sort of a dog show for cattle farmers. It was simply endless footage of men parading bulls and cows across a field. Each cow and it’s owner were filmed from three successive angles, so that you could appreciate the fullness of the cow’s haunch, and info on the age, breed, and weight of each cow was displayed at the bottom of the screen. The best part was the techno dance soundtrack that was overlaid on top with a tempo that matched the cows’ brisk pace. We were clearly close to home.
The next day, we went and saw a bull fight, which is the central attraction of the feria in Manizales. The ring filled up fast, everyone had a hat on and was drinking rum out of leather wine-skins. It was just like Hemingway. We saw three fighters, Juan Mora, Luis Bolivar, and the undisputed favourite, Manuel Jesus “El Cid”. They fought two bulls each, but it was more fancy execution performance art than fighting. You had to feel sorry for the bull, running around and getting aggravated and stabbed by various people in sparkly costumes. Every once in a while, the bull would get the upper hand and bonk someone over, but the Spaniards always managed to get up again.
There was a whole team of men for each bull, some with capes to exasperate and tire him out, some with little frilly harpoons to stick in his back, some on armoured horses with pikes. Once the bull was bleeding thoroughly and getting tired, the Torero would come out and play with the bull with his sword and red cape. In between making the bull run circles around him, he would dance, mince little steps, waggle his finger at the bull, lean back and present his great pants bulge, etc. The crowd was really into it and shouted “Olé” compulsively. Eventually, once the bull was looking really the worse for wear, the Torero would pull out his sword and bury it in the bull’s back. If his aim was really good, it would hit the bull’s heart and the bull would stand there for a second while the Torero stroked its head and then made it fall down with his intense stare. If he missed, then they had to bleed it a bit more before he killed it with another sword in its brain stem. It didn’t seem as brutal after the first one died, and besides, most of the people in the crowd looked like they slaughtered bulls all the time anyway.
One of the bulls got to live. The last bull had this habit of sitting down, which was a sign of defeat I suppose. After the Torero had made the bull dance and dance for ages, the bull started running away from him. Finally, he chased the bull out of the ring to great roars of approval from the crowd. I don’t think the testicles of those bulls are as prized as the others.
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