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.