This is how my time with Caroline should have been. The sun out (though the wind blowing) and there is an unexpeted fiesta in Bianvente. Everything seems more “spanish” and less like the cold raiins of londons winter that followed Caroline.
The festival in Beanvente is a violent one. Running with one bull and a thousand spaniards through the narrow streets that not half an hour ago were filled with marching bands. Waiting for the bull the be released, men are kissing the earth, making the sign of the cross, stretching to get ready, and I begin to worry.
Its exciting and I forget for a moment that it is torture for the bull, until it pauses and staggers, eyes rolling and tongue lolling. White espuma around its mouth. But with its next charge I am sprinting and excited and laughing again. Its serious stuff, I see a man crushed between bull and wall, and another tossed into the air by a horn. The batterys conveniently run out in my camera, but I should have it stowed away anyway, to run faster.
A man buys me a beer, another shoots a thin jet of vine into my mouth from his wineskin, a woman gives me a wedge of cheese from the milk of her own goats. But I leave the party early. It will continue long into the night, and I have seen drinking before.
Pitch my tent late, in the dark. good memories of the day. Leaned against a casasita in the middle of a field, eating my lunch. The small hobbit holes of wine cellars. a woman wrapped against the wind who yells “te queres estar aqui? to you want to be here?” No i’m not lost, this is a beautiful place and I am glad to be off the caminho most travelled.
