The hall was dark, the only light coming from the red and orange spotlights shining on the surface of the ring in the centre. I followed Luis down concrete steps into the clashing noise of hundreds of raised voices, unnerved still by the growling Rottweiler at the door, its strange forehead-marking giving a fleeting, disturbing impression in the gloom that it had three eyes. Two boys of no more than eight years old were playing with bright-yellow space-fantasy machine-guns that flickered scarlet sparks and gave off a high-pitched scream every time they pulled the trigger. As the warehouse was built half underground, the late-night summer air seemed stickier and clammier than outside, where the occasional gust of sea breeze might bring momentary relief. Down in the hall the only movement came from the hot breath of the crowd. Most of the people there appeared to be young muscular men dressed in T-shirts and shorts, with stout necks and cropped hair – the kind you saw hanging around outside the entrances of gyms with their arms slung over one another as they looked the girls passing in the street up and down. Slouched on white plastic chairs aligned in rows, there were a few women dotted in among them – girlfriends and wives, perhaps – some with young children cuddled on their laps. One of them was smiling, her broad white teeth seeming to shine in the dark, shoulder-length hair fixed in an artificial wave as though she had just come out of the hairdresser’s.
Luis led me to our seats – a slow and lengthy process, as he stopped to greet friends and acquaintances along the way. Many of them, I noticed, were wearing baseball caps with an embroidered silhouette of a bull on the front. It was the same bull you often saw dotted around the Spanish countryside – huge black billboards originally put up as adverts for Osbourne sherry, but which had since become something of a national symbol. Years back, when the authorities had talked about taking them down, there had been a public outcry and protection orders had been placed on them. Now you sometimes saw the same image on car stickers, or as an emblem on items of clothing, as here.
‘I’m going to a fight,’ Luis had said a couple of nights before when I’d bumped into him in the street. ‘Why don’t you come along?’
As well as the farm, Salud and I kept a small flat in the coastal city of Valencia, where I had come to spend a few days after Salud had unexpectedly been called away on a flamenco tour abroad. One of the girls in the troupe couldn’t make it and so she had been called in as a last-minute replacement. It looked as if she was going to be away most of the summer. I’d arrived looking for a dose of the city stimulation that was lacking in the mountains, and was slowly getting used to being on my own again for the first time in years. In other circumstances I might have turned down Luis’s invitation, but caught up in the lightness of being temporarily single, and thirsty for excitement, I agreed to go along.
Luis was an old acquaintance from fencing school in Valencia. Small and wiry, his face always wore an apologetic expression, and his hair was rapidly greying as he fought an ill-tempered custody battle over his children with his ex-wife. Caught up with other things, I’d stopped attending the fencing classes, but in the village atmosphere of our part of the city we’d see each other out and about and sometimes get together for a drink. It was the usual way in this Mediterranean environment, where socializing always happens outside, often spontaneously, sometimes with people with whom you have only the most casual of connections. Luis had been the first one to recommend looking for a place in the Maestrat, where his family had had a summer house when he was a child.
‘Come along. Just a few beers and a laugh.’ I thought he meant a wrestling match, or perhaps boxing, which I knew was another interest of his. It would be fun, I thought. I remembered the comical wrestling performances I’d seen on television as a child: huge men in leotards bouncing off the ropes and pretending to hurt one other, each bout a kind of primitive struggle between good and evil, light and dark.
After more talk and handshakes we finally made it to our seats. We were seven rows up from the ring. At a glance I reckoned some three, perhaps four hundred people were there. Next to me was a man in his early twenties wearing a white vest, his brown flesh carved into hard bulges around his shoulders and arms. He turned and leaned to shake hands with Luis, pushing into me roughly with his bulk. Spots bulged on the back of his neck where he’d shaved.
‘Just a friend,’ Luis said in reference to me. The man sat back in his chair, giving me a quick hard look. I held out my hand to him but he pretended not to notice.
‘They’re just a bit nervous,’ Luis whispered in my ear. ‘They’ve had a few problems with these events. Red-tape stuff. It’s all good fun, though. People just want to control things and they got the wrong impression.’
I had no idea what he was talking about, but alarm bells were already beginning to ring inside me. I’d always liked Luis, though. He was the kind of man who made friends with anyone immediately. There was something unthreatening about him and, with his dimpled smile and high-speed chat, you could easily spend an entertaining evening with him.
I looked again at the musclemen taking up most of the seats around us. At the side of the ring there seemed to be an area set aside for VIPs; more children were playing there, running in and out of the adults and scrambling over them as if they were living climbing frames. I’d always loved this side of Spain – the way children were included in everything, even late-night events and parties. A great contrast to the ‘seen but not heard’ mentality that had still prevailed in the England of my childhood.
‘Luis,’ I said, turning towards my friend, ‘what type of a fight is this?’
At that moment a roar went up and the lights, which had been focused on the centre of the ring, started dancing around the hall like fire-flies. Everyone rose to their feet, cheering and clapping. After several minutes of whistling and shouting, I caught sight of a half-naked man moving through the crowd towards the centre. He was young and wore tight shorts and padded fingerless gloves. His body was powerful and well built, but not in the sculptured way of so many dumb-bell pushers. The muscles under his skin were smooth and taut. No overdeveloped pectorals, no washboard stomach, no skinny ankles. Everything about him spoke of strength. The man raised his two fists above his head as the audience cheered him on, but the atmosphere lacked something of the theatricality I had expected. There wasn’t even the overdone seriousness and intensity of boxers when they are led to the ring draped in hooded capes. He smiled and waved, but as though he really didn’t care about the audience. You got the impression he had simply come to fight, and win. Pleasing the crowd came a very low second. As he climbed into the ring I couldn’t help but notice how different he was from other fighters preparing for a bout. He didn’t jump up and down to warm up, or jerk his head from one side to the other to loosen the muscles – all signs of nerves. Standing straight and tall in one corner, he remained still and calm, sometimes looking at the crowd around him, occasionally pushing his right fist into the palm of his left hand as though testing the knuckle padding on his gloves. His skin shone under the lights. He was ready for combat.
‘He’s a local boy,’ Luis shouted in my ear. ‘Our champion.’
The cheers continued for a few moments as his opponent seemed to slip unnoticed towards the ring, but once the crowd saw the dark shape of the new man swaggering towards the centre the shouts quickly turned to whistles and screams.
‘Hijo de puta,’ came a cry from behind us. Son of a bitch!
The opponent was darker skinned than the local fighter – a mulatto, perhaps. He looked Brazilian. The alarm bells began to ring slightly louder. I struggled to remember what someone had told me once about a Brazilian style of martial arts.
The whistling continued as the darker man climbed into the ring. He tried to give off an air of confidence, flicking his legs out in a kind of strut while raising a fist up in salute to the baying crowd, but his head was just a fraction too high, his eyes seeming to look inwards, towards himself, rather than out to the audience. The local boy stood in the corner, motionless.
A man dressed in black who appeared to be the referee came to the centre of the ring. He went up to the fighters and directed a few words to them individually in their corners, spending considerably more time with the white man, then clapped his hands. A bell was struck at the side and the combat began.
There was an upsurge in noise from the public, but then the screaming, whistling and shouting quickly dropped to a low murmur. The two men approached each other, circling like crabs, their shoulders raised, hands ready to clasp one another. Then with a low, dull clap they came together in a huddle, grasping at each other’s breastbones, trying alternatively to stamp on each other’s toes.
‘¡Venga!’ Come on! came the cry from a woman sitting at the side of the ring. Her little boy had jumped off her lap and was perched on top of a stool, his chin resting on the edge of the canvas that fenced the ring, his bright blond hair almost as white as his T-shirt.
For a few seconds the fighters barely seemed to move, caught in a tight struggle of strength, then with a flip they fell to the ground and began writhing over each other like snakes, twisting and sliding between grips and holds. The audience roared again: the local champion had his opponent by the neck and was turning upwards and sideways, as though trying to snap the man’s backbone. The mulatto was clearly in pain and banged his fist against his opponent’s arm. But the local boy was in a bad position, not able to control his opponent with his weight, and with a slicing motion the mulatto swung his leg round and kicked the Valencian on the side of the head. It was enough: for a second the white man’s grip loosened and his opponent jacknifed up into the air free from his grasp. The Valencian immediately rushed towards him, but the local boy was hurt: the kick had cut the side of his head above the ear and blood was beginning to drip down on to his shoulders. He seemed not to care, though: with a torrent of fists he attacked the mulatto, who covered his face with his gloves. Then came another kick to the side, like a Thai boxer, and the two were on the floor again. The audience rose as one to its feet.
‘Dale, dale,’ came the cry. Go on, give it to him.
This time the mulatto had his opponent in a tight neck hold, his forearm pressed against the Valencian’s throat, slowly choking him, while his right hand rained punches on to the top of his head. His teeth were clenched, spittle foaming from his mouth. The Valencian was turning red, his fingers clawing at the arm that was pressing the life out of him. Reaching for the mulatto’s fingers he gave a jerk, and suddenly the hold was loosened. He slipped out and head butted the other man as they both sat on their knees on the canvas.
‘Dale,’ shouted the little boy at the side of the ring. Behind him his mother was jumping up and down hysterically.
Blood was now seeping all over the ring, the mulatto’s nose smashed by the force of the Valencian’s forehead. He stood up in a red haze but was submitted at once to a new barrage of blows. The Valencian held him at arm’s length with his left hand while his right fist bludgeoned down again and again on to his face. His glove became wet with blood, while red spatters covered his neck and chest. The mulatto began to weaken, unable to defend himself against the heavy blows distorting his face. The referee was nowhere to be seen. In any other kind of fight he would have intervened much sooner, given the amount of blood both men were now losing. But I now realized what type of fight this was: the kind where anything goes, and these two were giving each other hell.
The muscleman at my side was on his feet, barging violently from side to side as he raised and dropped his clenched fists in excitement at the events unfolding in the ring. His arms were tensed, a powerful scent of anti-perspirant radiating from every pore. In his mind he was clearly in there himself, pummelling the mulatto with all his rage. For a second I looked around in the half-light at the other spectators. Countless bulging eyes feasting on the bloody spectacle were fixed on the centre of the hall. On my other side, Luis was punching down into the darkness at an imaginary foe.
But my own attention could not drift away from the fight for long. Within seconds I was drawn back to the two men in the ring, as if in a nightmare. The mulatto had fought back now and was pushing the Valencian against the ropes, fingers pressed hard into his shoulders as he tried to drag him down to the floor again. A stream of red poured down from each nostril and he spat to clear his mouth of the blood. His opponent was too strong for him, though: as they fell to the canvas the mulatto found himself twisting in mid-air and with a slap landed face up. The Valencian was straddling his chest in an instant, pinning him down with his weight. The mulatto couldn’t move. And then the punches started once again: left, right, left, left, right. His face became a mass of pulp, arms flapping uselessly at his sides as his opponent decided to finish him off.
‘Mátale, mátale,’ came the cry. Kill him! The little blond boy at the side of the ring was slapping the canvas again in excitement. ‘Mátale.’
Not a single person was seated now, the entire audience chanting and screaming, shouting and whistling. Spaniards, whom I had always thought of as the most sympathetic and compassionate of people, were howling like mad dogs.
The mulatto appeared to be almost motionless, but still the punches hammered down. How did one of these fights end, I wondered. I couldn’t believe – didn’t want to believe – that it could be a struggle to the death. But the mulatto was going to fall unconscious, or worse, if it didn’t stop soon.
Finally, with a weak downward motion he gave a tap on the floor as a signal of submission. The Valencian was on his feet in a flash, jumping around the ring in jubilation, the cut above his ear now congealed into a black mass. The mulatto lay still, his stomach and chest rising and falling sharply as he gasped for breath, blood dripping on to the canvas beneath him.
The audience was out of control. People were jumping on to their chairs, waving and screaming. The man at my side was shuddering with excitement, bubbles of white saliva spilling from the corners of his mouth as he bellowed hoarsely like an ox. I was gripped by a sudden urge to get out, half suffocated by the mass of bodies now surging in an orgiastic crush, half disgusted at what we had seen, at what my own eyes had followed and watched from start to finish. But there was no way of leaving: the press of bodies was too strong.
In the ring the winner was being towelled down and handed a prize of some sort. There was little attention for the mulatto – just a helper nursing him back to his corner, trying to push a bottle of water into his broken mouth. The man needed a doctor, but there seemed to be no medical attention available. As he crouched on his stool, the Valencian came up and put his arms round his opponent’s shoulders in a victorious gesture. The mulatto acknowledged him then let his head drop, supporting his forehead with his hands. He had done his job – victory for the local boy had never been in doubt.
I found myself trembling as the crowd slowly began to disperse and we were at last able to make it to the door and out of this hellhole. From a corner of the hall I could hear shouting: Arriba España, ‘Up with Spain!’ Perhaps, I thought, in the minds of the crowd, the fight had turned into some kind of nationalistic battle – the local boy against the foreigner. Their cries were an echo from the past. There seemed to be a fervour and aggression in the room I was unused to in Spain; although perhaps it was more in tune with the bloodier country it had once been. The screaming of the little blond boy for the mulatto to be killed had chilled me: it seemed so out of step with a people I knew for their love of children and their cherishing of human life.
The boy scrambled past me as we climbed the steps up back towards the exit. ‘Mátale, mátale,’ he was shouting, like a chant. His elder brother ran after him, giggling.
‘Eso es, hijo,’ one of the crowd shouted in encouragement. That’s it, lad. Like the others I’d noticed at the start, he too was wearing a baseball cap with an embroidered black silhouette of a bull.
We came out into the open at last. The dog with the strange marking was still there, checking everyone that walked past with brutish condescension, like a bouncer. I breathed in deeply, as though trying to cleanse myself of what I’d just witnessed. The fight had been short, just the one bout, but the crowd had seen blood, that was all that mattered. It felt like a warm-up spectacle for a night on the town, a clandestine fix to quicken the nerves before staying up till dawn dancing and drinking. I wanted to leave straight away, but out of politeness decided at least to say goodbye to Luis before heading off. I’d seen enough here. There was no point hanging on too long.
Luis was held up inside talking to his friends, though, and as I waited for him to appear from the hall I caught sight of some posters on the outside walls. I pushed past the crowd and walked up to have a closer look, grateful to have something to distract me momentarily.
IMMIGRANTS OUT! screamed one. SPANIARDS FIRST, said the other. The writing was laid over images of sub-Saharan Africans and Moroccans huddled in little wooden and rubber boats, the kinds that thousands travelled in every year as they tried to reach Spain and cross into Europe. Many died in the attempt. Near the top of the posters I noticed the same Osbourne bull everyone seemed to be wearing that night. The text was an angry rambling attack on everything from Brussels to ‘blacks’, with a scattering of hackneyed phrases like ‘stealing our jobs’ thrown in. It also mentioned contests like the one I’d just witnessed, and attempts by the authorities to ban them. But the authors were defiant. It was time for ACTION. They weren’t going to take anything LYING DOWN. Then at the bottom came the signature: the director of some political party I’d never heard of, in conjunction with the Spanish Falange.
The Falange. The Spanish fascist party, the party that had supported Franco during the Civil War. I was surprised to see it still existed. And so openly, like this. Were they behind what I had just witnessed? It felt bizarre that what I had assumed to be a ghost of Spain’s violent past should still be in existence and connected to this bloody spectacle. What’s more, it was taking place right here in Valencia, a city I felt so at home in. The cries of Arriba España I’d heard inside the hall began to make sense: it had once been the rallying cry of the Falange and the Nationalists. Yet instead of resting safely on the pages of a history book, it was being shouted here right in front of me: it was happening now. Silently I cursed Luis for having brought me here. It had been such a casual invitation. Did he think this was normal? Was Nationalism, Francoism, still active in Spain today? I’d thought until then that only old men and nostalgia junkies still hankered for the days of the dictatorship.
Luis came over and placed his hand on my shoulder. He was smiling broadly, as though we’d just come out of a cinema or a comedy show.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what did you think?’
I struggled to find something to say. I had just witnessed one of the most brutal acts I had ever seen, with hundreds of people screaming and shouting in blood-crazed lust. Children had been there, running around, baying out with the rest of them. I was used to bullfighting in Spain, but here we were watching human beings rip each other apart. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened. Spain, despite its faults, was for me a country where people felt the pain of others and never failed to be moved by suffering. But this, what had happened here, went against all my assumptions, all the ideas I’d built up about the country after a dozen years living there. And to make it worse, the event was being sponsored, perhaps even organized, by fascists, like some dirty secret left over from the dictatorship and the Civil War. For a moment the image of the mass grave I’d seen back near the farm flashed in my mind. What had been happening here in Valencia during that time? Had men been killed and dumped as mercilessly in the city as they had been in the country? Had the place been split in two, divided between Left and Right? There was a side of Spain that I had not wanted to acknowledge, and yet here it was, on my doorstep. I’d thought it was part of history. Now, it seemed, I had walked into a world where distinctions between past and present were less clearly discernible.
‘It was a bit heavy, right?’ Luis answered for me. ‘The mulatto will be all right. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. It looks worse than it actually is. He’ll be fine in a couple of days. Just a few bruises, that’s all. But it was a good fight. The local boy did us proud.’
I felt part of me was already moving away, had already gone home and was back at the farm, reeling from the violence and cocksure pantomime we’d just seen. I needed to get as far from here as possible.
‘Do you want to come for a drink with the others?’ Luis asked. ‘There’s a disco near here.’
‘No, thanks,’ I finally managed to say. ‘I’ve got to get back.’
‘Sure. I’ll see you around, then.’
I walked away from the crowd of heaving, sweating, inflated muscle buzzing under the lights of the entrance and headed into the night, alone. Hoping, above all, that I would never again see Luis or the side of my beloved Spain he had opened my eyes to that night.