Closure

I once famously held off five bloodthirsty students, preventing them from killing a spider which was running out of our tent, only to see it squashed moments later by a five year old girl holding a big red balloon. If I remember correctly she even spat at the deceased insect. As you see from this example, I am – by definition – the ultimate naïve pacifier.

Yet, this weekend saw me fulfill a wish I have had for most of my adult life: dress up as a killer of bulls – that very Spanish personification of, well, death.

As I scaled the wobbly chair to salute my adoring crowd (of cheerleaders, golf players and, yes, even a sextet of aerosol spray cans all chanting to-re-ro, to-re-ro) I found myself dancing to the summit of modern musical culture, the YMCA and had, therefore, plenty of time to reflect on my perverse – yet very real – desire to don the suit of a matador.

There is a very good Pedro Almodovar movie called Matador which explores the theme. It is about Diego Montes, a bullfighter, who is forced into early retirement by a horn-inflicted injury. He then switches his prey from bulls to women: after making love to them, he finds that killing them is his only way of reliving the intense emotions of the sunny afternoons of his past.

So, is this what I secretly want? No of course not. If Carnival is about achieving your deepest yearning of becoming something you actually want to be I would dress up as a singer-song writer, a NASA-scientist, or indeed, a Great Galapagos Sea Tortoise.

I reached this conclusion as I was replaced on my wobbly chair, which had rapidly turned into the bar’s centre stage in just over a minute, by what I can only describe as a large insect-like grasshopper from a distant planet, from let’s say Mars. He or she continued my YMCA dance but the crowd turned – to my surprise – against my replacement. The insect saw it was losing the audience so I was pulled back into the act as he or she (I still couldn’t tell) pointed to his or her heart. It was obvious what I, the maestro torero, had to do: I had to kill this funny looking creature off with my plastic sword. The crowd was back in and the mesmerizing chanting of to-re-ro had started yet again. Nobody – not even the large group of gypsy fortune tellers which accompanied us that night – could have realized that by finishing of this extraterrestrial bug I was revenging that little girl with the red balloon who had jeopardized my reputation all those years ago. Psychologists would call that closure.

Closure or not, it became clear to me why I wanted – for one night only – to be a bullfighter. In daily life – I remember from a distant uni class – human beings are expected to act according to specific social settings. Sociologist Erving Goffman uses the metaphor of a theatre, and that we all act according to what is expected of us to avoid confusion. One of his famous quotes was that "society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way” (don’t worry I had to look that up!).

Carnival, luckily, messes that all up, and this is what relaxes the mind. However, I noticed that everybody did keep to their role; the cheerleaders flirted, the golf-players acted posh and the aerosol cans, well, I guessed they just stunk. And the Martian insect? It got killed by a bullfighter.

El pez sano

So, as my name was called out in almost perfect English, it all came to an end this morning with a solid ‘Thomas Reeve, sala 17 por favor’. It wasn’t the first time I had spent lingering in the ageing waiting room of Hospital San Carlos, but hopefully it will be my last.

I congratulated the doctor with the pronunciation of my name, which sounded rather smug coming from me as I struggled myself over the 4-syllable word ‘pronunciación’. Ironic. She chuckled. I was not sure if this was out of self-satisfaction or to bury my own incompetence. Either way, she wasted no time in getting to business and she said I was perfectly ok. She based this conclusion on some tests lying on the table, only handed over to her seconds earlier by a Joe Pesci look-alike. Some weeks earlier I had undergone a blood-test and an ‘ecografía’ to see if there were any nasty side-affects after the operation. Luckily, there were none. And so ended our last appointment which went smoothly until a somewhat uncomfortable tug-of-war for my blood analysis which I wanted to take home and she wanted to keep for administration. I won the battle; she won the war with a subtle ‘we don’t need it anyway’.

I left the hospital feeling good, like a pez sano, a healthy fish. I also felt a bit philosophical. Just two weeks ago another doctor had told me that ‘I had been bloody lucky surviving as I could have been anywhere but close to a hospital when my spleen finally ripped.’ He also told me that I should now ‘do something with my life as it was obviously someone’s wish that I was still here’.

I wasn’t sure how I should take his comments as this is the same doctor who had me confused for minutes whilst scanning my insides blabbering ‘blaaaaahdaaah, blaaahdeeeeer, blaaadder’, referring as we discovered later to my bladder. He later told me that as a kid he had lived for three weeks with a family in Birmingham which is where he learnt all the 'intestistnes' in English. I played a long as it was obvious he was trying to impress the nurse. I think he was grateful for this as he gave me a manly pat on the shoulder as I left, quipping ‘you can’t have a decent fight on the streets these days without being sent to hospital’ which left me a bit disturbed and concerned at the same time.

Just as I thought ‘this show had finished’ he yelled “so what do you think about the crisis?” Another attempt to impress the nurse perhaps? Or maybe he was just happy to have a fellow university graduate in his practice – certainly no strange thought judging from the crowd in the waiting room. “Well,” I stammered – struck by this surprise parting question as only moments ago we were debating on how to pronounce ‘kidney’ in English – “estamos bien jodidos, I think that many people made many mistakes due to the fact that their greed was fuelled by flawed opportunities which made even more people materialistically blind infecting almost the entire western world in believing that there was no end to financial growth (failing completely to use any economic terms whatsoever).

“Ya,” the doctor said pondering on what I just said as if I had just explained the Conundrum of Complicity. “Do you know what my wife thinks?” Wow. Now, this was unexpected, I thought, being unsure if Mrs Doctor would approve of her husbands loose lips. “No,” I replied, delivering my doc a platform to stage his final performance. “She is unsure about the rescue package offered by the president of the United States. The numbers are just so big she thinks its confusing so she made a small calculation, do you want to hear it?”

I had already overstayed my welcome so I gathered that five extra minutes wouldn’t hurt. “She asked me why not give the 700 billion Euros to the whole population of the world? If there are 6.7 million people living on this planet this means that every human being would get something like 104 million Euros!” He let this number sink in to create a dramatic effect although he didn’t keep quiet for long. “And that’s per person, I have five kids you know, giving our family well over 700 million Euros!” Another pause, he could see I thought his wife had a point. “Do you know how many pesetas that are?!!??!” (I have always been bemused with the remaining dependence of ALL Spaniards on the peseta calculating EVERY amount above 45 EUR to their old currency to comprehend the scale of things) I didn’t know and frankly didn’t care but he gave me the answer: 17263 million pesetas!

So, Englishman, tell me “what the hell should I think of that?”