an infinite pass of red cape

Around five years ago I was sharing a joint with Antonio, a new friend, and his girlfriend, whose name escapes me today, in the garden outside the royal palace in Madrid. About three hours prior to this moment, she, the girlfriend, had found me sitting alone in a bar in the city center, and I was very glad to be found. Antonio was a college student and poet. I don't know much else about him, in terms of details, but I can attest to his generosity and genuine nature, the first of which can be faked but the latter being both undeniable when experienced and at the same time only perceivable through intuition.

I hadn't at this point ever thought about bullfights, but I was obsessed with the idea of writer-as-identity or writing as a reflection of character. This would have been about two years before, in an act of maybe moral grandstanding, I swore to quit writing myself. In the garden that night, however, I only knew that I was incapable of writing honestly. I knew that a large part of me was a liar, and I suspected that maybe that lying part was the one that thought I should be writing. Sometimes calling yourself a liar is the most honest thing one can say, and that isn't nothing. 

I would see my first bullfight that week, in which I would be shown without then being able to comprehend the great lie upon which that show is based: the death of the bull, or it might be better to say: the fact of the sword existing behind the cloth. And maybe the most comforting idea about such a spectacle is that, in spite of its painfully honest depiction of tragedy and struggle, it also offers the fantasy of the sigh of relief that comes when it is over, when the muleta rises into the air and is replaced, for the bull, with blinding sun and the pardon of the sword.

Five years have passed since that summer in the gardens outside the royal palace with my friends in Madrid. Ever since, I have been in a way mesmerized by the idea of the bullfight, at times convinced in my bones that I am being manipulated into passes as I am slowed by the javelins of some unseen cuadrilla, that the gods Bukowski says "await to delight in [us]" have been enjoying this show for quite some time, for generations maybe. But that sword never comes. Maybe there is no sword (isn't that terrifying?), just an infinite pass of red cape. That is, maybe, the real tragedy that staged tragedies in their design avoid.