Low life | 24 May 2018

Six Partido de Resina (formerly Pablo Romero) bulls for Rafaelillo, Thomas Dufau and Juan Leal. The first corrida of the week-long Nîmes feria. I haven’t seen a bullfight for 15 years; Catriona never. Catriona dislikes cruelty, but was persuaded to try to understand what those who defend the Spanish bullfight actually like about it.

At Nîmes, the bullfights are held in the arena of a Roman amphitheatre. We sat in the cheapest, uppermost tier on a row of cut stone blocks. From there we could see over the rim of the amphitheatre across the city rooftops to the hills beyond. You could smoke up there and we had carried our plastic cups of sweet white wine from the bar below. We each had tied around our necks a cheap, blood-red bull feria neckerchief, bought on a festive impulse from a souvenir stall outside the amphitheatre about five minutes earlier.

The most sensational moment of a bullfight, to my mind, is when the first bull comes galloping out of the gate and into the ring. Unlike your average dairy bull, a well-bred five-year-old Iberian fighting bull is an agile, lithe and beautiful creature. Pablo Romero bulls are exceptionally beautiful. Of all the modern strains of fighting bull, only they and the famous Miura bulls can trace their descent to the foundational Cabrera bloodline. I reasoned that if Catriona could just see a fighting bull with a dash of Cabrera blood come galloping out on to the sand, and never mind the rest of it, she might go away impressed, at least from a zoological point of view.

Majorico, the first bull of the evening, was a stunning ‘negro entrepelado’ (black with grey patches). He was born on 27 February 2014, remained attached to his mother for one year, achieved maturity after three, and now here he was weighing in at just over half an imperial ton and as light on his feet as a circus pony.