skepticlawyer

At one point when I was living in Italy, I paid for mum to come and stay with me for a couple of months. She’d never travelled to ‘the Continent’ as the Irish so quaintly put it, and her last holiday had been on the boat on the way over to Australia - in 1950. We did all sorts of odd and not so odd things, and mum got to go to town with her photography. This was something at which she excelled, but didn’t get to do (semi) professionally until late in life. As much from idle curiosity as anything, we went to a bullfight in Nîmes, Languedoc, a place known for its rugby, for its odd language and - alas - for being next to Provence, which is much more heavily touristed. On her return to Australia, mum’s photography and my scribbles inspired artist Lydia Miller to do the graphic that appears over the fold (along with my scribbles, of course).

The sky in Provence is the colour of lapis lazuli and the sun burns my forehead as I queue. Beside me a Spanish man is complaining loudly. In Spain this would not happen, I keep hearing. I understand that much. The windows of the ticket office are decorated with brilliant posters advertising Féria de Nîmes, glittering in the hard light. I lean against the wall, determined to be patient. A boy weaves his way through the queue selling raffia hats at twenty francs each. His black hair is slicked back with pomade. The scent makes me sneeze.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it’, my mother says, despairing. ‘Bloody continentals couldn’t queue to save themselves.’ She marches across the street, sets up her camera and tripod, preparing to photograph the sight. She looks at me from behind the shutter. I admit, I’m standing in an extraordinary non-queue. A disorganised lump of citizens spills across the road. There are three open ticket windows with harassed vendors but no-one seems to be moving. Cars drive around the waiting buyers and toot their horns. Men lean out of the windows of their cars and shake their fists. I step politely aside, avoiding one angry driver. The expression of shock on his face is boundless. He fixes me with a dazzling smile.

There is a bumper-sticker I’ve seen only once but never forgotten. On the rear bumperbar of a beaten up Peugeot in the University of Queensland senate carpark. Showing a bull with long horns and soulful eyes. A question underneath in thick black type: If I could speak, would you still eat me?

Roberto is reading La Repubblica when I arrive. He looks up at me, his eyes bright, almost mischievous. When will you be in Provence? he asks in Italian. I think, arrange the phrasing of my answer. Last two weeks in May, I tell him. Bene! He exclaims. Bene! Pentecôte! Provence a Pentecôte! If you want to write about the Romans, he says in a rush, you must go to the corrida, the bullfight. And you will be there for Pentecôte, the bullfighting season. He’s warming to his topic now, lets the newspaper slip to the floor, barely notices the waiter bringing us our antipasto. They still use their Roman amphitheatres. In Nîmes and Arles. It’s wonderful if you go in the evenings when the sky is velvet blue but still too light for stars. Roberto has elegant fingers and he spreads them before my eyes. He makes no comment about wrong or right and I keep my mouth shut, reminded for a moment of my place on the periphery. Without songs, architecture, history: The emotions and superstitions of younger lands. I catch myself working an inexpensive piece of magic: buy a European newspaper and watch Australia disappear. Roberto’s eyes shine as we eat and drink and talk.

Les arènes looms over us but provides no shade. The Spaniard is still complaining. At the ticket window my spotty French fails me completely and I resort to Italian. The ticket-seller sweats and apologises for the delay and tells me obligingly his father is Milanese. He smiles. I am instantly excused, transformed into an anonymous Continental. In any case, we are not on a site of tourism. I have heard no other English speaker. I have seen no information in English - or the tortured diction known as Franglais that passes for English in this part of the world.

I collect a glossy programme, sit in the park under a tree and struggle with the French. The programme is full of articles about Cristina Sanchez, native of Madrid and female matador. Her fame has spread far and wide. Later, riding the metro in Paris, I see a woman reading a full page article on Cristina Sanchez. In Libèration, a national paper. Sanchez is twenty-four years old, striking, taut, wasp-waisted. Libèration has an atmospheric photo of her, out of costume, hair loose, eye to eye with a bull. The programme in Nîmes is not so fussy. Lots of glossy, sensual shots of her in costume, her face streaked with sweat, facing down heavy, bleeding bulls.

In Arles, the city of van Gogh’s captivity, I meet with Denis, professor of ethics and philosophy at an American university. I’m deliberating at the moment, high in the sunscorched tower above the arena. ‘In medieval times,’ says Michael Grant ‘the amphitheatre at Arles was inhabited by two thousand people speaking a dialect of their own.’

‘No’, Denis is saying. ‘I don’t have any problem with it. Ethics is often a matter of perception. I perceive animals as very different to human beings. Of course, this is contested. Peter Singer - ‘
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know Peter Singer. He is very famous in Australia.’
‘Peter Singer,’ he continues, ‘argues against this. Argues against the ethics of perception, in favour of animal liberation.’

He pauses, looks out over the town. A palette of the reasons for Provence’s fame: fragrant countryside, Roman ruins, too blue light.

‘Animals,’ he says. ‘I mean, I eat them.’

The classicists tell how the corrida is a direct descendent of Roman venationes, beast hunts. The order is identical, they say. The mentality similar. Although the Romans were bloodthirstier, enjoying it just as much when the bestiarius - the matador - was gored. A mosaic in Rome’s Galleria Borghese shows elaborately costumed bestiarii battling with leopards, tigers, lions, bears and bulls. But the classicists are mostly British and German, and maybe that is why they miss something very important about Roman feriae, Spanish fiesta, Provençal féria. How much fun they have. I think of Roberto. You know something, he says. People forget that the Romans were Italians. Latins. Mediterraneans. This is the culture that gave us Carnivalé, Mardi Gras and machismo. You don’t see that in I Claudius, he argues, crossly. You read Robert Graves, and you’d never know the Romans were wogs.

We walk down the boulevard between clustered stalls selling crépès and sangria. A barker with balloons sings his sales pitch accompanied by guitar. People hug and kiss. Men and women dance in circles, their steps intricate and magical, arms linked around each others’ shoulders. Sometimes they look at us, at our red hair and slow longlegged Australian gait. Their gaze is friendly, unspoiled by tourism. Some even want to practice English.

‘Hello madames. Nîmes is welcome you.’

We tell them Nîmes is beautiful in our bad French. They smile and keep dancing. The road is mottled with sun and shade. We lean against the pillared remains of a Roman temple - the lovely maison carreé - and watch the world pass us by.

It’s Cristina Sanchez matador I don’t want to confront right now. Her pretty face in the programme blends with Juvenal’s revolting descriptions of female gladiators. Suetonius’ eavesdropping titbit that the emperor Domitian liked pitting trained women against trained dwarfs.

‘If persons of non-conformist political opinions were thrown to the lions every Sunday at the Albert Hall,’ says George Bernard Shaw in his preface to Androcles and the Lion, ‘no doubt the stalls would be full of people, quite as civilised as you and me, who cared not a whit for the politics involved, but had simply come to see an interesting and unusual spectacle.’

‘Members of the gladiatorial profession, if they enjoyed success’, adds Michael Grant, ‘were adored by females in much the same way as pop stars are now.’

What do you think of Mickey and Mallory, ay? Wayne Gale asks an audience of screaming adoring young women in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.

An Australian newspaper swipes a photo of Martin Bryant and doctors the light in his eyes to make him look more convincingly evil.

‘We do not mythologise the banality of evil very well,’ writes Greg Dening. ‘The evil of those who hide their personal responsibilities behind the rule and role imposed upon them comes too near our everyday bad faith to let us make myths about it.’

We blame. We demonise. We seek to protect. Offices of Film & Literature Classification. V-chips. We want the censor to save our souls. Or at least save us from wicked books and wicked films and wicked pictures.

One of my classics lecturers told me that the Romans had little street crime and low levels of interpersonal violence. ‘Purged all the aggression out of their system in an officially sanctioned way,’ he says. For some reason I find myself praying he’s wrong. I think of the Michael Leunig poem:

A clever creature is the snake
Who spends his winter not awake
He snuggles in his long thin bed
And brews up venom in his head.The human is a different sort
He spends his winter watching sport
He yells abuse in concrete stands
And empties out his poison glands.

We climb the steep steps into les arènes. Nîmes amphitheatre is first century A.D., one of the best preserved Roman monuments in the world. It still holds nearly twenty thousand people. We emerge into bright light and find a spot on a sunwarmed slab of marble. Suddenly I’m very happy with our fifty franc seats in the ‘outer’. Roman amphitheatres steeple alarmingly, their seating looming. We’re quite close enough.

The corrida is like a dance, graceful, alternating fast and slow, ritualised, with toreros to wound the bull before the matador takes his turn. The horse on which the picador is mounted is completely blindfolded, standing dumbly while its rider plays havoc with his spear. The bull does his utmost to gouge out the horse’s gut. Sometimes he succeeds.

Cristina Sanchez will appear tomorrow. Today we see three young male matadors, one Provençal and two Spaniards. The crowd waves programmes and white handkerchiefs to signal its approval. Of the man. Manhood. Machismo. They don’t cry olé in Provence: here it is olí. As Roberto promised, the sky turns deep violet velvet. Beyond the walls of the arena, on the other side, a knobbled, gargoyle encrusted cathedral spire is caught by the last light from a sinking sun. We are slowly swallowed by creeping shadow. The matador kisses the sand. Women throw roses at him. Horses cart the bull’s carcass out of the arena with ropes, leaving a trail of blood in the sand.

Around us curious locals watch my mother manipulate her telephoto lenses and hand held flashes between fights. Finally a young woman with a six year old girl seated on her knees asks us if we are from the National Geographic. Ah, the National Geographic. Sent to photograph quaint native customs. The crowd is singing now. People launch themselves out of their seats for the local boy, a young man of the people. This is a communal experience, but we are not in it.

Michael Grant does not tell that you can smell the blood.

Words displayed on an animal rights poster, depicting a dog held in a sort of vice, twisted three ways, horrendously: This is vivisection.

I wish I could make a clear statement. One way or the other. Ernest Hemingway or Peter Singer. Pro or anti. But I don’t. I am at once ambivalent and voyeuristic. I balance the camera tripod over my shoulder as we walk slowly along the boulevard to our hotel. Past the cheery vendors and their savoury treats. Past the singing man with his balloons. Past the ticket office, shuttered and abandoned now. Past the beautiful Roman temple.