San Fermin

The festival of San Fermín in Pamplona was like nothing Holly had ever seen before.

Yesterday, she had stood in an ocean of white shirts and red scarves, crushed by stranger's bodies, jabbed at by their elbows, breathing in their smell of their skin. She had been one of half a million people packed together against the old stone walls, jostling and pushing, singing and shouting and happy. She had been drunk. They had all been drunk, and most of them had been throwing wine over each other. The wine throwing had taken some getting used to. The being sweated on by strangers had as well.

But that had been yesterday.

Now Holly was in a narrow cobbled street, between high wooden fences, looking up a hill, through a crowd, waiting for the bulls.

Here in this street, in this place, with the rest of the brave and bored and boastful. The brave, and also all those too afraid to tell their friends no.

The morning was cool. Yesterday had been hot and muggy. Yesterday she'd ended up damp from other people's sweat and sticky with spilled wine, but now, this morning, was better. She felt better. The air was cooler, and the crowds not nearly so dense.

She had been up early, because her guidebook had told her to be. She had gone with the crowd, and prayed to a statue of the saint who would keep them all safe. They had gathered and shouted and then spread out down the route, and that, apparently, meant they were ready.

Now they were all going to run.

There were a few hundred people near her, many more up and down this short stretch of street. Most were looking in the direction Holly was, the direction the bulls would come, quietly anxious. Anxious, or excited, or drunk with fear. Or just drunk. There were police among the crowd, removing people who were too obviously intoxicated, but not everyone who'd been drinking was giving themselves away. There were a few people, Holly noticed, who didn't seem to be anxious. A few who were stretching, and laughing, and seemed to be catching up with friends. Those were mostly older men. They probably ran every year, and for them it was a reunion. For everyone else, the wait was just silence and anxiety.

Holly waited, wondering how sensible this was.

Yesterday, in that crowd, she had been sure. Yesterday, packed together in the hot sun, smelling wine and sweat and incense, this had seemed to mean something. Yesterday, everyone in the crowd had been fervent, each person in their own way, and Holly had been fervent along with them. There were different fervors for everyone, for the devout and the drunk, the lonely and horny, the backpackers and robed Catholic priests. Some had prayed, some had laughed, some simply had fun. Each was different, but all were lost in a passion, and that passion had decided Holly. She had wanted to feel too, and had joined in, and decided she would run.

Once she'd decided she had got tipsy. She'd got more than tipsy. Strangers had kept handing her wine. She had been in the crowd for hours, watching some kind of ceremony. She still wasn't sure if it had been religious or just a parade of town councilors. There had been important people being solemn, but also giant puppets and masks. Holly didn't quite understand, but she had watched, and taken wine from stranger's hands, and drank enough she'd become dizzy and happy in the hot sun. At sunset, long before the party was over, she found her way back to her bed in the city of tents on the outskirts of town, and had slept, listening to distant drunks and songs and fights, wondering if she should go through with this after all.

Wondering if she should do what she was about to do. What she was doing now, here, this morning.

She looked up the cobbled street, towards the bulls, and waited.

Holly was here because of Hemingway, and because she hadn't gone to a war, and because she needed to feel like she'd lived before she went home to a career and a mortgage and settling down and children. She was here because she'd broken up with Rachel right before she left on this trip, and she still hurt so much inside she that sometimes she couldn't bear it. She was here because she was six months into her post-uni, post temp-work, mid-recession trip through Europe, and it had seemed like a good idea at the time, a week ago, in Berlin, when someone said that Pamplona was about to happen.

She had come because she wanted to do something, and this was the most memorable thing she could do.

She felt brave. She thought she was brave. She wasn't completely sure why she was here, but it was to find something, or to find out something, and that seemed good reason enough.

*

Holly looked around. She tried to find something to look at to take her mind off her fear.

There were a few women running, but not many. Through the crowd, past people's heads, Holly saw someone else. She was dressed like Holly, in white and red, the proper colors for the festival. She was dressed in white and her skin and hair were dark enough that the white clothes actually suited her. On her those clothes looked right. On Holly they just looked like a costume.

Holly stared.

She looked at the way the other woman was standing, patient, brave, waiting calmly, for all the world like someone about to start a marathon or waiting in a supermarket queue. She was calm.

Holly wished she was that calm. She wished she had that self-control.

The other woman was calm, and was also somehow alive, standing there in the crowded street. Alive, and deeply herself. There was something slightly magical about her, in that street, standing that way.

Holly wanted her. For the way she stood, waiting. Holly wanted her, and knew it, and was almost embarrassed.

The woman looked up, and they met each other's eyes.

Holly raised her hand, almost waving, and the woman raised her hand back.

It was enough.

*

San Fermín wasn't what Holly had expected. She'd thought it was religious, something almost sacred. A party, but a calmer one, like a twenty-first birthday with the grandparents still around.

Instead, it was sordid.

It was a sordid, tourist-trap, binge-drinking party that reminded her of the Greek islands. It was being too drunk to stand, and passing out in doorways and gutters, and the perpetual smell of spilled, stale wine. It was the midnight roar of street-cleaning machines as often as happy crowds, and it was constant hammering as fences were taken down and then rebuilt each day. Mostly San Fermín was death, not the noble death of bulls and dueling in the sun, but a slow death by greasy food and too much drink. It was a disappointment, and just a little shameful.

It was unbearably noble, too.

It was old. Holly was from Australia and didn't often see old. This was old, from before churches and saints and city councils and civilization. It was so old that everyone had forgotten why they were doing this, and yet they still were. It was a thing from a time when bulls were gods, and sacrificing yourself, or risking yourself, mattered more than who you were. It was something important that the world had almost lost, and ought to keep, and Holly didn't quite understand why. It had bothered her at first, that she didn't understand, but then sometime the night before, in the seething crowd, she'd realized. She didn't need to understand to take part.

It was enough that it mattered. Some things just mattered, even if she couldn't explain them with words. This mattered enough that she was standing in the street, where bulls where about to run, and waiting.

And trying to stay calm.

She'd taken some care where she stood. She was halfway down the street which led to the arena, and so away from the worst of the crowds. She was in the middle of the street as well, away from the most frightened people, who felt safer close to walls. Holly understood that need, she wanted to be standing against a wall as well. She wanted to, but didn't allow herself. She knew what she had to do. She stayed out in the open, deliberately and obviously, and noticed other people who were too. The little groups of older men, and the woman Holly had noticed earlier.

The woman was down the street a little way, out in the open. She was watching Holly again. She looked at Holly, at where Holly was standing, and nodded and smiled.

I know, Holly wanted to say. I understand as well.

This crowd, these people, they didn't understand, but Holly did, and she wanted to explain. She wanted to say that to the woman down the street, but she couldn't move, not now.

Not this close to the start of the run.

She waited instead.

*

Holly had talked to a Spanish man on the train on the way to Pamplona, an older man who'd told her how to run. It might have begun because he was trying to flirt, Holly thought. She wasn't completely sure. He might just have been trying to help.

He'd been sitting opposite her on the train, and she'd been reading Hemingway, trying to learn what she needed to know from a half-century old book by a suicidal drunk. The Spanish man had known enough English to read the cover, and Holly knew enough Spanish to understand him when he spoke. He'd asked if she was going to Pamplona, and she'd said yes, she was going to run. He'd seemed surprised, and then not. As if a world where women ran with the bulls surprised him, but not so much that he especially cared. He said he ran too, that he had every year since he was twenty, and did Holly want him to tell her what to do.

Holly said yes. Because he had asked, instead of just starting to tell her. Because he didn't assume he could, or that she needed to know. And because a half-century old book by a suicidal drunk might not have been the best way to learn how to do something this dangerous.

"Please," she'd said, and put the book away, and the Spanish man had told her.

He'd told her to stay in the middle of the street, where she could run freely, and avoid the walls where the terrified hid. Scared people grabbed at each other, he said, and held each other back, unthinking, suddenly panicking because a bull was near them, and that taken by surprise like that, she could be caught, and helpless, and die.

"People will grab me?" Holly had said, a little surprised, and the Spanish man had nodded, and told her yes, they would. And that a goring was worse against a wall because she would be trapped between the bull and the wall, as if between two colliding cars, and would be crushed and die against the stone. Out in the middle of the street, if she was lucky, she would bounce away and the impact would be less and she would live.

"Oh," Holly had said, taken aback.

The Spanish man kept talking. He told her where to run. He said Estafeta Street was safest, because the bulls slowed to turn, and that Telefónica before the arena was the most dangerous, because it was a funnel, and crowded, and people tripped and slipped and fell and then twenty others were down too. He told her not to take a rolled-up newspaper even though many people did because it just filled her hand and got in the way if she suddenly needed to climb. He told her to remember she couldn't outrun a bull, that no-one could, and she had to stop somewhere and let them pass. He told her she didn't need to actually run, that she could stand still, on the inside of the corner, and simply let the bulls pass her. But stay still, he said, so she didn't catch their eye, and they didn't stop and turn, because when a bull turned, people died. People always died. Just stand at the corner and let them pass. That was enough, he said. Unless Holly wanted to actually run.

"I want to run," Holly had said, and he'd looked at her for a moment, very grave.

That moment had seemed odd, Holly thought afterwards. As if she was on a quest, in a magical forest, surrounded by castles and elves. Not here, on a high-speed train, racing through suburbs and market-gardens. Not air-conditioned, behind tinted windows, watching motorways and orange groves slide past. As if there had been a test she hadn't known about, and she had passed, and was to learn something important.

The Spanish man had nodded, and said in that case she should be in the middle of the street. Stay in the street, he'd said, and stay on her feet. That was all, he said. That was all he could tell her.

"Okay," Holly had said. "Thank you."

And the Spanish man had shaken her hand, quite solemnly, and wished her luck, and then stood up and walked off down the train. That was the strangest thing of all, Holly had thought, watching him go. They way he just walked away. It probably meant nothing. He was probably just going to the bathroom, or to find the service carriage and get a drink. Probably they all did this to tourists, just to give them chills, but Holly had chills. She felt like she'd been given something. Something had been passed to her, something she now needed to carry.

Probably it was her imagination, she thought. Probably reading Hemingway on a train on the way to San Fermín was a terrible idea, exactly because of this.

Because she hadn't been sure she was going to run, when she left Berlin, but now she utterly was.

She was going to run.

She was going to run because both Hemingway and a stranger on a train wanted her to. So she would, even though one was dead and the other she'd never see again, she would run.

It didn't need to make any more sense than that.

*

Holly stood in the street, and waited, and thought about what the Spanish man had told her. She stood out away from the walls. She looked at the people around her, and edged away from those who looked drunk or afraid, those who might grab at her and get in her way.

She waited, and looked at the woman standing near her, and wanted to explain that she knew. She understood, she wanted to say. She might not look like she belonged here, but she knew the secrets too.

She stood there, and waited, and tried to stay calm.

She was calm. She was ready.

She looked over at the other woman, and smiled again, and knew it was almost time. The woman saw her looking, and shouted something.

"Find me later," perhaps, but Holly didn't quite hear.

There was a bang in the distance. The firecracker announcing the gates of the bullpen had been opened. The crowd stirred, and shifted, and began to look up the street.

In the distance, as a howl growing nearer, the crowd began to cheer.

And Holly began to run.

*

Running was nothing and it was everything.

Holly ran, and people pushed her, and she pushed them too. It was desperate. It was terror. It was shoving others out of her way so she could get past and they would be hurt instead of her. It was knowing she was doing that and not caring. Not caring what happened to anyone else, right then, in her fear, because she was worried about herself. It was as much what this was as anything else, she decided, and she only understood it once the run began.

She ran, and saw that the Spanish man on the train had been right. Already, to either side of her, hundreds of people were scrambling and shoving and pulling each other off the wooden fences. But out here, in the middle of the street, she had no-one in her way.

She ran.

She ran a short distance, a few seconds, fifty steps. She heard something behind her, loud and clattering, and didn't need to look. There were shouts, and a scream, and a heavy thudding like she'd never heard before.

She didn't wait. She went sideways, towards a doorway. She pushed past a man who seemed to be motionless with fear. Pushed past rather than helped, which was monstrously heartless, but she didn't care. She shoved, and got him out of her way, got her hand onto the edge of the doorway, and pulled herself inside, pressing against someone who was already there.

The woman she'd been looking at earlier.

They stared at one another, breathing fast, standing still. A bull went past, but Holly hardly noticed.

Another.

"Two," the woman said. "Don't move. Don't draw their notice."

Holly nodded.

They were on the inside of a slight bend. It was a good place to be. The bulls were going past at full speed, not needing to slow down, looking ahead at other runners, not at them. They'd be safe unless a bull skidded and fell and then stood up looking at them, confused. Holly knew that from her guidebook, and from Hemingway, and from the man on the train.

Another bull went past.

"That's four," the woman said.

More thudding hooves.

"Five," Holly said.

The woman shook her head. "A steer."

There were steers running with the actual bulls, to keep the herd moving. Another animal passed, and Holly didn't know which, and didn't know how the woman in the doorway with her could tell.

"That's five," the woman said.

Holly waited, watching the woman, not looking sideways at the street. If a bull fell here she would die, and if she was going to die she didn't want to know until it happened.

"Six," the woman said, and reached out as the bull went past. She stroked it, brushed the tips of her fingers along it's side, smiling strangely, looking at Holly as she did.

Looking at Holly, not at the bull.

Then the bull was gone, and the crowd was running after it, and the bull-herder in green with a long thin stick was past too, and then they were alone.

Almost alone.

In their doorway they had a little privacy, despite the crowded, shoving, bustling street.

The woman looked at Holly, still breathing hard. She had her hair tied back, and sweat on her face, and was grinning, inanely, about nothing.

As Holly probably was too.

"I'm Ana," the woman said, and Holly said she was Holly.

Holly was scared and relieved and surprisingly, still alive. She was still alive, and she suddenly realized she was aroused, too. More than aroused, she was so wet she could feel herself. Her nipples hurt, and her skin felt flushed, and she was breathing far too much for the short distance she'd run.

She wanted to fuck Ana.

She started to grin. She didn't know why, but she was alive and she wanted Ana, and that was enough to be happy about.

Ana was looking back at Holly, and smiling too. As if she knew. As if she was feeling the same. Ana was breathing the same way, and smiling the same way, and had just done what Holly had. Probably Ana was horny too.

"Do you want to go to the ring?" Ana said. "We could go together."

Holly shook her head.

"It is a part of this," Ana said. "We should go."

"We?"

Ana just looked at her, knowing. She could hear Holly's breath, see her skin. She could probably smell Holly, they were so close together.

"We should go," Ana said again.

"I know we should," Holly said. "But I don't want to see them die. Not after that."

"Oh," Ana said, and nodded slowly, as if she understood. "Yes."

Holly stood there for a moment, wondering if Ana did understand. Wondering she understood what this ought to mean. That this ought to be more than just being drunk and running fast. She decided Ana probably did.

Ana probably did, so Holly kissed her.

It didn't quite make sense, but it did. Holly was horny and scared and glad to be alive, and she hadn't kissed anyone she actually wanted to kiss in a long time, not since she'd left Australia, and she missed it.

And she was alive.

She kissed Ana. And Ana kissed her back.

They kissed, and then Holly was grabbing Ana's clothes, grabbing Ana, trying to get her hands inside the fabric, trying to reach Ana's skin.

"Wait," Ana said, breathless. "Not here."

Holly looked around. They were in crowd, in the street, but no-one really seemed to be noticing them. Probably they were all still too caught up in themselves, and their own survival, just as Holly and Ana were.

Holly looked at Ana, desperate, needing her.