The Interest In Death

San Isidro, Sant Isidre, Saint Isidore. There are two Isidores. One was Isidore of Seville, the Archbishop of that city from the seventh century, considered to be "the last scholar of the ancient world". The other was Isidore the Farmer, aka Isidore the Labourer and so in Spanish, San Isidro Labrador. He was born in Madrid, probably in 1070. There is some uncertainty as to when he died. Almost certainly it was in 1130, though the only known official documentation of his death suggests that it was in 1172, which represents a fair difference. Isidore the Farmer was someone of great piety who performed miracles and who didn't, unlike many a saint, meet a gruesome end; nor did Isidore of Seville either. When his end came, and despite the 42 year variance in the year of his death, it was on 15 May. Feast days often celebrate death, and Isidore the Farmer is no different.

Among other patronages, Isidore is the patron saint of farmers (naturally enough) and also of Madrid, again naturally enough. He has lent his name to the city's Feria de San Isidro, which started last Friday. The fair will go on for a whole month. It is one that has been called the greatest in the world, but it depends what is being considered when granting the fair this accolade, for the fair is, more than anything, a celebration of bullfighting: on every day from 8 May to 7 June, there is a bullfight in Madrid.

The significance of the fair is enormous. It symbolises everything about what might be dubbed an "old" Spain and a "new" Spain and about political clashes and rivalries between the Castile of Madrid and the Catalonia of Barcelona, which have their roots in centuries past. When Catalonia banned the bullfight, the ban was denounced by bullfight supporters as a political act, one against "Spain". To an extent, the ban was precisely that, though the impulse behind it had been popular legislative petition.

While the fair symbolises changes in attitudes of Spaniards - bullfighting as a whole is now less popular than it once was - it can also be said to be symbolic of attitudes of foreign observers. There has never, as far as I am aware, been a survey of tourist and foreign resident opinion, but were there to be, the finding would almost certainly indicate opposition to the bullfight. Yet, there was a time when such foreign attitudes were different, and Ernest Hemingway voiced them better than anyone.

Hemingway's support of bullfighting - one of only three sports in his estimation (along with motor racing and mountaineering) - has to be viewed in the context of the time when he was writing and also of his contrariness: here, after all, was someone who lent his support to anti-fascism and to Catalonia as well. But then bullfighting was not used as a symbol of political difference in those days, albeit that Hemingway's point of reference for bullfighting was what he observed in Castile.

In a "New York Times" article of September 1932, which was a review of Hemingway's "Death In The Afternoon", a book devoted to bullfighting, the author was quoted thus: "The only place where you could see life and death, i.e. violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bullring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death".

Of course, Hemingway was to be proven wrong when it came to wars, but what he observed was what he felt was a human and societal condition in Spain. "If a country is to love bullfights," the article continued "the people must have an interest in death" and they did so, he argued, in Castile. Strip away the trappings of the spectacular, the notions of honour and of sport, and what was left was death - that of the bull, of the horse, of the matador.

Hemingway was seduced by a certain romanticism and by his desire to discover an alien culture. But this was the 1930s. The romanticism has long ceased to be, Spain is no longer alien. Yet, does something linger? Is Hemingway's thesis regarding an "interest in death" still current? Is it this from which bullfighting derives its support?

Hemingway's Spain was the "old" Spain, one whose societal attitudes certain politicians, notably Felipe González and José Luis Zapatero, have understood and have sought to alter. The attitudes of "new" Spain are reflected in a variety of ways that, for example, reject the conservatism of the church or the death in the afternoon. Yet, the "old" Spain is clung to. It is a comfort of tradition, the greatest fair in the world, the interest in death.