after Bullfight, by Elaine de Kooning (USA) 1959
The humidity was relentless, and the throngs were intimidating. I wanted to run, but the whole thing was my idea. I wanted to go to a bull fight before they were outlawed. I was a former vegetarian with a squeamish side, but also a thing for intense experiences. I had to. It was a Sunday in Lima. Naively, I expected to be a rare woman there, enlisted two men to accompany me. But it was an event where revelers went to see and be seen, and the women in their finest screamed the loudest for the blood.
My spare Spanish was enough to get the gist, but the macabre ballet transcended language and I let the choreography of the oldest story take me onto its plane. The gamut of emotions was an initiation I had braced for: I knew I was entering into deep mythology, attending a spectacle where the borders of life and death were under ritual enactment. Once I’d asked my husband why he loved boxing the most of all sports, and he said, because it’s a real fight, not a game. The whole fight club ethos had never been appealing, but his honesty made me understand the draw. The game that’s not a game. The bullfight was, still, this. More than all the drama and fanfare and the crowds, it was all about going through right to the end. Not the edge of it, not just theatre, but to the intersection of life and death, and past it. Going all the way there. Until one was fallen.
My first response was a feminist one. How the great warrior sent to battle and overcome nature was actually feminine. It was all elegant calisthenics, lime green satin, sleek, slender, tender, slippered. Velvet and glitter. My second emotion was an endless sadness, watching the tamed beast dragged around and around the track, trailing blood, while the crowd lust roared wild in the searing Sunday sun.
That matador, victorious. The best outcome, of course, although the alternative was a roulette he had consensually courted. Even so, to witness the goring of this young, effete toreador would have scarred me for life, even as I’d paid those pesos for my ticket to chance it.
We walked for miles, afterward, looking for a cab. Couldn’t quite believe what we’d just witnessed. That defeat, that fallen beast, the myth and the strange power of it, the pyramids crashing down to silence.
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