Born not far from Spain, before the last world war, in an old bargeman’s house on the shore of the Garonne, my brother and I loved to watch, without anyone suspecting it, through a kind of transom or round dormer window that opened in the attic, our rope-maker neighbor, alone, twist the hemp into long thick ropes on his spool; indolent like those who repeat ancient gestures, his waist surrounded by yellow strands and tied like a spider to his bobbin, he slowly made progress in front of a low wall beyond which opened up, like a volcano, the oval-cratered arena in which bulls were put to death five to six times a year. Nothing could be older in my memory than the luminous matador before the black beast in the midst of the yells or in the lull of the great white silence beneath the sun; nothing could be more remote in my flesh, except perhaps the gigantic tumult of the floods. Cheek to cheek, squeezed, pressed together by the narrowness of the window, panting, eyes bulging, we were waiting, drowned in the tide of fury, for the wild animal to collapse all of a sudden at the strike of the sword. Neither my brother nor I chose any other vocation for ourselves than that of torero, and we would train in the corridor, face to face, after class, instead of doing homework, one of us mimicking the horns, the other hanging the banderillas on the first’s shoulders, quickly passing to the stomach cavity. Up until the moment when rugby overshadowed the bullfight and humdrum work the ancestral games.
The trumpet call resounds; it’s time for the kill. Facing the beast, the flat and curved sword aiming for the small of the shoulder, the free horn in front of the groin, facing the man, both of them, muffle low, entrails offered, suffer the short eternity of narrow anxiety: they rush one toward the other; he who charges receives a charge.1 A suspended moment, solemn and resolving, in which it’s unknown whether the sword or the horn will penetrate deeply into the groin or the shoulder, a red and black wedding at its apex, statuary immobility. The half-human half-animal group has existed since Antiquity: faun, sphinx, centaur; we see it in this flash of a moment, an ox backside with a black tail, a torso and head of light, striking each other down. How are fetishes born?
No, the bullfight does not merely consist in killing the animal, but in the fact that the matador links the passes of the faena to perfection, as close to the bull as possible, in a long sequence of movements such that one can see at certain moments amid the cheers the whirlwind of two bodies melt into a single immediate statue.
To rediscover the secret of the centaur or the sphinx, I have to go back to the intuition that I had at that age during the very second of the kill. I have to remember—the nether side of the time whose roaring new culture, sports, motors, radios, forgetfulness of pain, killed the running of the bulls;2 the nether side of at least ten wars; I was not quite eight; Manolete was making his entrance in glory and had to await the end of the world butchery to die in his own blood in Linares;3 at home, at the height of the Spanish Revolution, we nursed the Whites and the Reds, wounded, dying, each with their own ideas, both with the same death, just before receiving the enormous tide of refugees from the north; I have to remember, to feel once again the odor of the attic, the dust and dried prunes, the odor of slightly rotten hemp, to see again the colors, sky blue and sky white, yellow and black, to feel my cheek pressed against my brother’s, my neck breaking against the hard frame of the dormer to the point of strangulation, to hear again Spanish swearwords coming from the bottom of the house for and against the two parties, indistinctly, and the hurly-burly of the hideously impassioned crowd in the arena-crater, but why does the organ thunder of the Garonne’s inundations predominate?—Here is the symmetrical instant where the two shadows fall toward each other, where the matador’s sword is raised above the muleta and the beast abruptly lifts its head, an immemorial solemnity, a marriage, a mixture, an alloy of two races; no, I don’t remember this moment from my childhood now, I remember that at that time I remembered what had been lying in my flesh in a nascent state since my most distant ancestors, that at that instant I remembered the birth of the divine.
Everyone around me, my brother, myself, the rope-maker tied by his waist to the turning post, the Reds and the Whites, the crowd with a thousand mouths, the brown eddies of the furious river, we all were commemorating, without knowing it, the moment when man was born from ceasing to kill man by killing an animal. A celebration of the pass. The being that’s dying in the center of the turbulent cone no longer has a name close to ours, it bears horns: a Minotaur in the labyrinth of my memory.
We didn’t know who was going to die, the bull or Manolete. We knew perfectly well who was going to die: the bull, six times in the afternoon. We played at exposing Manolete, who risked himself so much that, in fact, he was going to die in twenty years’ time in Linares. Accidentally and after having killed hundreds of bulls. The play-acted uncertainty, with odds unequal a thousand times over, celebrated the substitution, progressed with the possible death of the man toward the remembrance of the day when, for the first time, our fellow man did not die, but rather the animal, when our violence changed species. I remember that in those days I remembered that the rumblings of thunder brought the stream of time to the reminder of that day. We were commemorating by shouting the instant whose memory we had lost, the moment of passage, of lieutenancy or substitution or vicariance of the victims.4 Before that statutory moment, man would regularly die; after it, an animal was executed in his place; at the exact instant of the passage, the two, together, insert the horn and saber into the groin or the shoulder of the other and fuse together forever in the virtual of death. A thin fissure of time from which the ritual gushes, a symmetrical instant in space or a limit through logic, but above all primary, original and founding of our history and its time: mankind delivers itself from death, is born, by making the point or center of the cone of violence hang over a living being of another species. The terrifying cries drowning my child’s body, the overflowing inundation, the Spanish civil war and the world war, the militants of every color, the spectators, my brother and the spider slowly climbing and descending endlessly around its bobbin all celebrated with a multiple cry the birth of the first man who at that instant I recognized in me, a kid fabulously old in his flesh.
The statue with the human head and hindquarters of an animal—centaur or sphinx—immobilizes or represents the instantaneous passage from human to animal sacrifice, in which the beast represents man. Monstrous fetishes divinize this boundary stone, from three o’clock in the afternoon on. Statues of substitution.
The new culture established by ten wars, whose product, remainder, or survivor I feel I am, has for a long time forgotten how fetishes are born. I believe myself to be obliged to tell, today, for the sake of my grandchildren, how I lived, in those immemorial times, such daybreaks. We participated then in sacrifices before attending mass, pagans from before Christianity, Christians preceding the newness, scientists after.
Did I perhaps know all of history?