How could I possibly write a three-book series set in Andalucía without including that most controversial and iconic aspects of Spanish culture: the bullfight?

I was a young woman when I first attended a corrida. Then, I was much like Alexandra, my heroine in Indiscretion, a curious onlooker:

Fascinated, Alexandra watched people from all walks of life pack onto the crowded terraces that sizzled in the baking sun. There were foreigners passing through, simple onlookers curious to see the spectacle, and committed lovers of bullfighting. Aristocrats and respectable middle-class men squeezed in with workmen and peasants. Another group of aficionados ate and drank noisily a few boxes away, while elegant women and pretty señoritas in flamboyant clothes, their arms loaded with flowers, chattered as they looked for their places, or simply sat in their seats expectantly. They were all there to take part in this fierce entertainment, mingling with each other regardless of social class, oblivious to the heat and dust.

That afternoon, I learned a great deal about Spain – and about man and beast. My reaction, ultimately, was similar to Alexandra’s:

The mules were hauling the carcass out of the arena to the frenzied whistling of the crowd, while the areneros, armed with rakes, cleaned and smoothed the surface of the ground, throwing fresh sand on the splashes of blood.

The trumpet sounded once more, the red gates fell back with a crash and in rushed a fresh bull in a cloud of dust. Alexandra had had enough. Though this game fascinated her, she also found it repellant. Fight after fight would be played out in the same setting, the first act of a scenario where the form and content are always the same, yet where the outcome remains uncertain. Which of the two actors will die: the man or the beast?

Alexandra knew she would never again attend another bullfight.

There were six bullfights that afternoon; six fights and six killings. Alexandra had never in her life witnessed such monstrous butchery.

My own experience of a corrida has doubtlessly coloured my writing. But I did not want to write two-dimensionally, which is why it was important to me, while writing my Andalusian Nights trilogy, that I give a rounded picture of Spanish culture, showing all the facets and all the glorious colour. When it came to the corrida and Running of the Bulls scenes, that meant drawing upon the descriptions and opinions offered by a famous literary great some ninety years ago.

Have you read Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon? Unless you are a) keenly interested in bullfighting in 1920s Spain and/or b) an admirer of Hemingway’s prose and desirous of learning from his craft, you probably have not picked up a copy of the book, which is essentially a treatise on bullfighting.

Having been inspired by the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Hemingway spent the summer of 1929 researching his book.According to Hemingway, he saw 1,500 bulls ‘killed on the field of honor’ and read some 2,077 ‘books and pamphlets in Spanish dealing with or touching on tauromania’.

He wanted to educate readers on bullfighting, because he thought it was of immense importance: ‘of great tragic interest, being literally of life and death’.Hemingway explained the theme of his work as follows:

‘The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.’

While the book is a thorough look at the corrida and the matador, it is also a deeper examination, of courage versus fear, right versus wrong. Hemingway wrote:

‘So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very normal to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but also very fine.’

What’s most interesting about this book, for me, is the power in Hemingway’s prose. He is such a superb writer that it is quite difficult not to be swayed and fall in love with the corrida:

‘All supposed exterior signs of danger that a bull gives, such as pawing the ground, threatening with his horns, or bellowing are forms of bluffing. They are warnings given in order that combat may be avoided if possible. The truly brave bull gives no warning before he charges except the fixing of his eye on the enemy, the raising of the crest of muscle in his neck, the twitching of an ear, and, as he charges, the lifting of his tail.’

There is such beauty in the writing; I found it very stirring in my research for Andalusian Nights. Not only is Hemingway’s writing artistically inspiring, but his depiction of bullfighting runs along the same lines. From the original New York Times review of Death in the Afternoon (September 25, 1932):

‘But bull-fighting, though as Mr. Hemingway says, “a decadent art in every way,” is an art, indeed, “if it were permanent it could be one of the major arts.” It does not seem absurd to Mr. Hemingway to compare it with sculpture and painting, or to set Joselito and Belmonte side by side with Velasquez and Goya, Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Shakespeare and Marlow. Even such refined elements as the line of the matador’s body at the critical instant or the “composition” of bull and man enter into the intelligent “aficionado’s” enjoyment. Bull-fighting is thus presented as an art heightened by the presence of death and, if the spectator can project himself into the matador’s place, in the terror of death.’

Of course, reading Death in the Afternoon is nothing like attending a corrida in person. Hemingway was a little scathing of those who’d rather read than experience: ‘For one person who likes Spain,’ he wrote, ‘there are a dozen who prefer books on her.’ In this instance, I prefer the book to the reality! But I have always been glad I did go to a corrida in my twenties. It was an experience that moved me profoundly, and I am glad to have infused my novels with some of the death in the afternoon I witnessed back then – but also, so much of the life in that afternoon.