Margaret Wagner
20th Annual Solas Awards Gold Winner in the Travel & Sports category
The bull fell to his front knees, then struggled and stood up, shaking his head. I exhaled a soft “oh no.” The animal panted, quivering the banderillas, the two-and-a-half-foot red and white sticks tipped with two-inch barbed hooks which had been stabbed into his back. Wet bands glistened from the top of his spine down hefty flanks, blood darkening mahogany hair. I groaned; my stomach flip-flopped.
When I was in a tween in the 1970s, my family visited Spain. We saw flamenco dances in the evening, and no bullfights. Now, in 2025, I was attending one in Madrid, Spain as part of my mission to retrace the seven-month European trip that my mother had taken in 1951.
Although she’d shared many stories about the trip while I was growing up, it wasn’t until after she’d died that I found a letter written home to her parents about a bullfight. She described: “They killed off six simply beautiful bulls – the whole process being a horribly gory sight which produced many shrieks from both Liz and me.”
Despite cringing while reading my mother’s letter that had described all the sickening details she and her college friend had witnessed, I thought if she had experienced this aspect of Spanish culture, so would I. My focus was on the pageantry and ballet precision of the matadors. I couldn’t fully imagine how the bulls were treated…I just thought it was important to be true to my mother’s experience.
In hindsight, this was a mistake. After all, I hadn’t ever glimpsed how any farm animal was slaughtered for the food I ate. In 1951 at age 25, my mother probably didn’t have a clear idea of what would happen either. She was a woman who preferred science and had never read Ernest Hemingway, who celebrated this sport. I had read The Sun Also Rises in high school and puzzled over Hemingway’s line “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.” What would my life look like if I lived it “all the way up?” Was this the way to do it?
At least I made sure our seats weren’t close to the ring, as my mother’s verbal warning stuck in my mind – “it was awful.” That her comment didn’t persuade me to ditch going altogether was perhaps me ignoring motherly advice. But by the time that thought crept up the back of my neck, my friend and I were scurrying across the open space outside the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas, Madrid’s bull ring.
Las Ventas loomed above us, an unmissable, circular, rust-colored brick structure that rose over four stories and was decorated with vine-painted ceramics above each of its arched windows and balcony. The neo-Moorish architectural style was punctuated with a square entry tower topped with flags snapping against the cloudless six p.m. sky.
Caught in the stream of people heading for the entry gate, we wove between open tents with vendors selling hats, soda, and cushions for the ring’s concrete seats. Stopping briefly in front of a bronze statue depicting a living bullfighter, hat in hand, suspended in the air, I realized the back side of it portrayed a matador’s cropped jacket draped over an empty chair with an angel kneeling beside it. Life and death even at the entrance.
We jostled through the main entry tower with the crowd, gazed at more large ceramics in the walls that depicted important matadors, and walked up several flights of stairs and halfway around the circle.
I felt as if I was stepping into a foundation of Spanish history and tradition. Madrid’s bull ring, inaugurated in 1931, could hold over 23,000 people, making it the third largest in the world. Closed during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, it was reputedly used as a concentration camp under General Francisco Franco. Las Ventas, the name of the area in Madrid where the ring was built, was also the name of Franco’s “Model Prison.” There, women and children were severely maltreated.
Was I walking in these women’s footsteps, as I curved around the outside of the box seats? My gait slowed as the walkway emptied, and the left/right of my shoes echoed in the stone hallway. My friend and I looked at each other wide-eyed, unsure if we were in the right place. It didn’t help that a Las Ventas attendant had to unlock the door to our box, which we shared with about ten other spectators.
Once inside and settled into our seats, the atmosphere was festive, with a brass band playing in a box near ours. Two tiers of graceful arches repeated in the first and second balconies around the ring. It wasn’t hard to imagine this space transformed to host events other than bull fights: the Spanish Davis Cup tennis team, Red Bull freestyle motocross competitions, and concerts from the Beatles to Coldplay.
Was a fascination with bulls hard-wired into humans? Centuries ago, Neolithic caves outside the Spanish town of Ronda depicted them on their walls, as Greeks did on vases. Although my brother and I never imagined somersaulting over horns, I bet we played childhood games where one of us swished a cape and the other darted close, snorting with index fingers on either side of their head. Did we not read the book Ferdinand the Bull because the memory of a bullfight was not one my mother wished to resurface?
My mother loved riding her stallion named Sy, so the part of the experience she “would only stand to watch once” involved horses. In the letter, she wrote, “The worst part is where the picador does his part – they are on horses that are padded, blindfolded, and vocal cords cut.” A pair of picadors with long spears each sat on a horse, which was draped on both sides with a protective tan padding falling to just above the hooves. The picadors tried to lance the bull’s back muscles, as disabling the animal was less dangerous for the matador.
During this step at Las Ventas, the bull’s horns seemed to be locked under the protective covering against the horse’s belly. My heartbeat quickened watching this for many minutes. I wanted the team in the ring to do something quickly…why weren’t they aiding the horse? My spine backed up against the bench. At least none of the men in the ring were hurt yet, although one made a quick getaway behind a wood barrier. Finally, the banderilleros (the men who thrust jagged sticks into the bull) distracted the animal with verbal yips and pink capes.
When the bull pulled away from the horse, a large red patch the length of a man’s forearm was evident on the padding. It must be the bull’s blood, as how else would the horse still be standing? My hands flew to my chest, and I gulped hard; my friend leaned her head against the bench, eyes closed.
My mother wrote:
“The bull makes a dive for the horse, butting it horribly with its horns and sometimes even knocking it over, and the picador pushes it away with a spike which he spears into the back of the [bull’s] neck. To top this off, they also nearly killed their best matador – the horn pierced his head around the nostril area when [the bull] pinned him down.”
I had always been squeamish at the sight of blood and still never looked at needles when given an injection. My mother wasn’t much better. As a child, it was a good thing I hadn’t had any serious injuries that demanded more than a band-aid.
And I was sure more than band-aids had been used as this activity developed over the centuries. Slaughterhouse workers were the first to tease bulls by running in front of them. This daring display of courage morphed into jousting – horse riders with spears became a spectator sport supported by the nobility. Then, it became a way to prepare for war, to train men to tame fear and practice agility and technical prowess, until the 1700s when nobles were prohibited from taking part in these fights. In 1726, Francisco Romero introduced the muleta (the red cape) and the sword, and the spectacle shifted to the matador’s skill and grace.
About twenty minutes with the picadors and banderilleros, the matador entered the ring raising his black cap amid applause, his purple pants and jacket thick with embroidered gold.
With his hip jutted toward the bull, he bounced his knee beside the red cape, then shuffled his feet, edging centimeters closer, shaking the cape. The bull’s horn raised up, and the animal jumped toward the crimson cloth. With a few twirls of the cape, the bull rounded the sides of the matador.
The matador’s hat was gone now, fallen on the ring and forgotten in this controlled choreography. He stamped his foot, chanting “Hey, hey, hey,” while hanging the cape over his sword. Sometimes he fell to his knees or strutted away from his target, demonstrating he wasn’t scared to turn his back on a snorting, thousand-plus-pound beast.
The matador and bull stared eye to eye. His sword was poised for the exact spot to sever the aorta, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the final, fatal moment. This bull would die – there was no way around it. Everyone remained quiet in their seats.
In modern times, changing societal norms and animal rights activists have questioned whether there could be “bullfighting without violence.” Some regions of Spain, Catalonia in 2010 and the Balearic Islands in 2017, voted to ban the spectacle, although bull-dodging and bull running would be permitted. However, the Spanish Constitutional Court overruled both instances because it undermined a cultural art form.
But I hadn’t grown up with this Sunday tradition or read about celebrated matadors in my newspaper. Our Sundays were spent taking a hike in the woods. My family did trap squirrels around our house, but drove thirty minutes away to release them in the countryside. Never had my mother nor I plucked a chicken for dinner, and we had an aversion to horror movies.
I would have received as much from this Spanish pageant if the bull had not been harmed. The initial parade of costumed men and horses into the ring, the ritual of tiring the bull by the picadors and banderilleros, and the expertise and courage of the matador were enough for me. The rest was too macabre.
But my mother and I, 74 years apart, had the courage to explore a Spanish tradition.
Although parts were riveting, I still enjoyed flamenco much more.
And I agreed with her – this bullfight was my “first and last.”
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Margaret Wagner is a writer, dancer, and poet who has written articles for World Screen, been published in Arcturus Magazine, Cacti Fur, Coachella Review, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Review, Ghost City Review, I-70 Review, The Ignatian Literary Magazine, JONAHmagazine, The Opiate, Perceptions Magazine, pioneertown, RAW Journal of the Arts, Steam Ticket, and Voices de la Luna, and won four Travelers’ Tales Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing. She has studied with Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Jericho Brown, and Julia Cameron, as well as conscious dance pioneers Gabrielle Roth and Anna Halprin.