The journalist and export of the Toro de Lidia Charolaza Foundation (San Sebastián, 48 years old) who accompanied the Russian writer Eduard Limoov to his first afternoon of bulls in Madrid, and at the end of the celebration he confessed shudder and with a voice thread: “reminds me when I went to the war for pleasure.” That afternoon in Las Ventas, the bull of Baltasar Ibán took the bullfighter Román Collado in the third and waved it as a bloody flag. After that, Limoov revealed that what he felt was above taste, that the bull party had to do with the pride of being mortal and concluded with a phrase that his interlocutor still remembers and reproduces in English by force he has: “This is not contemporary bullshit”. “This is not contemporary garbage.”
This anecdote was narrated this Saturday morning Apaolaza from the rostrum of the Circle of Labradores de Sevilla, where he delivered a bullfighting proclamation to announce the spring of the city and the days of bulls that have already begun. “Ask for the Seville Fair in Seville,” he said, “it is equivalent to giving Mass in the Vatican; I am going to talk about spring …, it would be like talking to Noah of waters.”
He alluded to the Russian writer to affirm that “the supernatural is linked to bullfighting in all its forms. In the rite that nobody now understands, for example, in the presence of the finite and of the infinite on the same piece of earth.” “You can’t be a bullfighter if you don’t believe in God,” he added. “You can’t be a bullfighter without knowing that she really dies, and that she really is resurrected in another life.”
He remembered the teacher of San Bernardo, Pepe Luis Vázquez son, who died in July last year. “When a bullfighter leaves, a mirror is broken in which to look at himself, but in this case he also lost a lot of bullfighting Sevillian, who is the daughter of naturalness that the missing teacher we miss so well represented today,” he added.
And the preacher also remembered his father, Bullfighting critic Paco Apaolaza, who died in 1988, to explain the passage in Seville of Holy Week to the joy of the resurrection, ‘From crying to the song’ was the title of a text signed by his parent to explain the Sevillian miracle of spring.
Chapu Apaolaza did not quote the Plaza de la Maestranza, or more bullfighters than Román, Morante, Curro Romero and Spartaco, the last two present in the act, and Pepe Luis, and preferred to transcend in a poetic, spiritual language and at times intricate and mysterious about life and death in bullfighting and the current confrontation between the party of bulls and the animalist current.
“The bulls are the most notable, complex and current expression of our culture,” he said, “and that makes bullfighting into an intolerable phenomenon by the enemies of civilization, and we have the duty to defend it. For true life, for freedom and against censorship, and by the humanistic hierarchy against animalism that pretends that the animal commands on the person.