In Giron
by Melanie Pappadis Faranello

I wake at 5:15 am for the Fiesta de Torros, the festival of the bulls—an annual sacrifice in Giron, Ecuador, about an hour’s bus ride south of Cuenca. The moon is still out, and the night dogs are fighting over garbage in the street. A drunk man stumbles on the cobblestone as I make my way toward the bus station. The rising sun casts an orange glow off the station’s tin roof. My gringa friends are easy to spot—a silver-haired woman from New Mexico wearing a fanny pack and her zoom lens camera; a twenty-two-year-old blonde from Iowa who is taking a semester to learn Spanish; and a lively red-head, the most fluent of us, who has been in Cuenca the longest and works in the hostel. 

It’s mid-November and I’ve moved to South America for a teaching job. My work visa differentiates me from a tourist, but my foreignness differentiates me from a local. I exist somewhere in the space between. Or somewhere in the outer rings if there were such a thing as gradations of belonging.

 We pack ourselves onto the crowded bus until we arrive in the small mountain town of Giron. It’s only a few minutes before a pick-up truck with a wooden bed slows, welcoming our hitchhike, and we climb into the open back. The truck takes us up the mountainside, a steep and bumpy ride along a rocky path. On top of the mountain, a stone-colored house sits in the middle of a field, a wide expanse of grass rolling out in all directions, a pale blue sky streaked by a few harmless clouds. 

Two men are waving their arms, beckoning the guests drifting onto the edges of their property. “Hurry!” one of the men shouts in Spanish as we climb out of the truck bed, “the bull is already drunk!” 

Children and adults spill across the field. Women dressed in bright red skirts, white blouses with dark shawls, and men with long black braids wearing Panama hats cluster together alongside other Ecuadorians wearing blue jeans, baseball caps, and t-shirts sporting North American logos.

The host of the fiesta is an uncle of a friend of a friend who has invited the red-headed girl who has invited us. Which means we do not really know anyone. But we are known, we are the outsiders–the gringas invited by the niece who is friends with the foreigners who have come to watch.

It is 7 a.m. and seven men are chasing an enormous bull around the mountaintop. Hands grasp for the bull’s beastly torso, its pointy ears and thick wide neck. But each time they try to seize it, the bull grunts, heaving its massive body away. It seems impossible they will be able to overcome the strength of this animal. It snorts and snarls, whipping its head up and down as it runs jagged circles around the men. 

We find a patch of grass and sit. A three-person band plays–flute, guitar, drums– and the music drifts through the air. A man carries a communal shot glass, passing sugarcane liquor. He approaches and pours, and we each take a shot.

The men are drunk. So is the bull. Their collective human weight does not come close to matching the weight of the animal. They’re shouting, throwing themselves at the bull, grabbing for its head, racing in mad dashes left and right, a blur of humans and beast merging into one chaotic heap of movement. 

I’m supposed to be rooting for the men, but each time the bull escapes their grip, I am relieved. I’ve moved to this country to experience another culture, to integrate as much as possible, but I feel a familiar disconnect as I settle into this liminal space between foreign spectator and local guest. An uproar rises from the crowd when the men manage to grab a hoof, and I worry for the bull, though I’m yearning to break through the cultural barrier. An ancient sense of remove settles over me. How does one claim a side when straddling fragments? A question that has resounded in me for many years, having grown up with multiple cultural identities, wondering to which side, if any, do I fully belong? Can a whole consist of several parts?

The men twist the bull’s head by the horns, up and down, back and forth. Spit flies from the bull’s mouth as it heaves free from their clutches. I wonder if they are trying to break the bull’s neck or just disorient it. My red-headed friend pulls a compact from her bag and opens the mirror. I glimpse her mouth in the reflection. She smiles ironically at me through the mirror. Another friend cups her lens, squinting through the viewfinder. The pourer circles past with more sugarcane liquor. We take the offered shots, wincing as it burns. The sun is hot, or maybe it’s the liquor warming through me. I try to see what I am seeing, but none of it feels real. I succumb, let the dizziness take flight.  The bull will win, I think. Its muscles too grand, its presence too permanent. I am sure of the bull. It is one-hundred-percent Bull. No other identity to straddle or question to which part it belongs. 

What are you? nobody will ask the bull. 

The familiar refrain I remember from the schoolyard’s playground. Children’s insistent demand for simple definitions. Both was provocative, irritating, wrong. What are you? pleading for an answer, one thing or another, a check box, a multiple-choice question. Christian, Catholic, Jewish. My classmates answered unequivocally, fast and assured, knowing one identity and claiming it. I was envious. Sometimes I answered half and half as though two halves could make me whole. Every day the need for categorical satisfaction whipped that refrain across the playground, sliding, swinging, chasing in circles, What are you? What are you? as though maybe I’d finally choose one. 

Being raised by a Greek father and a Jewish mother, I enjoyed experiencing a multitude of parts inside my forming identity. But when trying to fit them together into one, the answers always felt wrong. At the Greek church, I loved the smell of incense pouring swirls from the priest’s swinging chain, but when it came time to sit or stand, or cross oneself, everyone else in the pew knew what to do, and I worried they’d know I was an imposter. At the Jewish temple, I loved the bright sun shining down through high-ceiling windows and filling the airy space with its light, but when it came time for the congregation to read aloud together, repeating allegiance to our people of Israel, I only mouthed the words, silently apologizing to whatever God might be up there listening to me pretend. 

I watch the bull’s liquid eyes spin past now as the men wrestle its body to the earth. They’ve managed to roll the bull onto its back and strain to pin down its limbs. The inner crowd is rowdy, while those on the outer edges of the property are more subdued. Despite their drunken bravado, the men suddenly appear frail, and the bull, despite the enormity of its strength, appears vulnerable. They have somehow found common ground in this final moment before the tilt where one side will outweigh the other. 

Someone brings the host a carrot-sized knife. It does not look big enough or sharp enough to do the job. It’s no longer than a kitchen knife, one used to cut vegetables, and the blade looks dull. It seems impossible. He pulls the thick hide of the bull’s neck and begins to slice. The balance shifts. The men become beasts, and the bull, in its frailty, something akin to man. As he draws the dull blade back and forth with effort, a spray of deep red blood bursts forth. The crowd cheers as blood covers his forearms. 

My gringa friend opens her compact again and purses her lips in the tiny mirror. She draws on bright lipstick as the bull succumbs a few yards away. The color of her lips in the mirror matches the color of the bull’s blood. I look away.

With the single knife and their hands, the men slaughter the bull. But is slaughter the right word? It’s a sacrifice. A sacred ritual. An offering. A community gathering in honor of culture, history, tradition. It’s not my first sacrifice. I’ve seen animals killed for religious offerings by the hands of men in Nepal. Goats, chickens, birds. But this feels different. This seems like a dance, something with a narrative, a story unfolding over the course of many hours. In other words, it’s not a quick kill. There are innuendos and dynamics; there’s a relationship between the men and the animal, and it is being celebrated, challenged, revered. 

When a goat was killed outside my host-family’s home in Nepal, where I was studying abroad a few years prior to moving to Ecuador, the village butcher was hired to do the job. The family had brought the goat home one day and leashed it to the metal railing outside. The goat was scrawny with a greyish-white wiry coat, and it remained there for days leading up to the holy holiday. Despite the father’s protest, my host-brother befriended the goat. Daily, he fed it and sat beside it. On the sacrificial day, the butcher arrived with a large shiny knife. Squatting before the goat, in one quick swoop, he chopped off the goat’s head. I watched my host-brother cry as he stared at the blood spilling from the neck. My host-mother made goat stew, and the butcher took the goat’s head away as payment. It was efficient, transactional. The killing had taken less than a few minutes. 

The bull is still breathing when the man reaches into its open neck. The torso heaves up and down as the man dips a metal mug into the bull. He fills the cup with blood. The crowd cheers. He lifts the mug to his lips and drinks, dips again. The red spills forth, vibrant with life, staining everything–his arms and legs and face and torso and hide and hoofs and boots and earth. The bull is still breathing, somehow the bull is still alive. 

I cannot feel my body. I am dizzy with heat and liquor and the massacre before my eyes. I want to hold up my disposable camera, put a lens between myself and the scene, but I cannot manage to do so. My silver-haired friend cradles her zoom lens, her visor protecting her from the sun. My red-headed friend laughs beside the uncle.

With a final show of fervor, the host plunges both his bloody arms deep into the bull’s severed neck. 

Then the bull is dead.

He dips and passes the mug. To drink the blood like wine. 

I finally snap a picture. Twenty years later, I still grapple to understand that photograph. It is held in place beneath the album’s worn plastic page. The bull’s blood is the brightest red I have ever seen.  

My second sacrifice was in Greece, a year after the Nepalese goat. I was visiting my Papou’s birth village in the mountains of Greece with my parents. My father spoke broken Greek with his relatives, and as I watched him work his way through the language, I felt an extra layer removed. My father, after all, was the bridge between these two worlds, the one my Papou had left behind at age thirteen when he sailed alone to The United States, the country in which I exist, in part, because of this endeavor. It was a religious celebration outside a small Greek church on the mountaintop, and I sat on the grass around a low makeshift table with many extended cousins and family members, some of whom I’d just met. The goat’s head was carried outside on a platter for everyone to honor before the feast was served. It had been slaughtered in private. 

But this is public. An intimate union between animal and man, a communal affair for the invited guests. And it is far from over. 

Men, women, and children move closer to the bull and begin to tear the dark leather hide from its torso, grabbing a loose end, yanking. Ripping away the bull’s skin exposes the pale underside and its organs. Every bit of the bull will be used, cooked, eaten, worn, honored, celebrated. They drag out the enormous, inflated ball of its stomach. The pale organ sits on the grass as they wipe the ribcage with a bloody rag. 

The puncture is audible. The enormous stomach deflates quickly. I will never forget the sound it made, or the heat that seemed to escape, or the smell that caused one of the young boys to cover his mouth and run away. 

It is 9am. Shots of sugarcane liquor pass from hand to hand. I drink again, letting it burn my insides. Hip-hop music blares from a boombox. 

After they cook the bull, the guests line up inside the host’s house at long rows of tables, similar to the mountaintop feast in my Papou’s Greek village. Everyone is served soup with bull meat; potatoes and rice with bull meat; trays and trays of endless mounds of bull meat. It is a celebration of life. An honor to ingest the animal. I search inside myself for a hallowed feeling. It had been ten years since I stopped eating meat. In Nepal, at my host family’s house, and in Greece at my relative’s village, it was the same question: how can you not eat our meat when it is a privilege to do so? I accept a small piece of bull on my plate and fork it tentatively. But my stomach clenches. I do not eat the bull. 

Twenty years have passed, and I still cannot reconcile where I belonged that day at the Fiesta de Toros in Giron. Like those diagrams showing layers of old rocks from different time periods, or the earth from core to crust, maybe there are gradations of belonging. Maybe if you choose one identifier—Christian, Jewish, Ecuadorian, American, Man, Beast—there are still multiple layers of belonging. Maybe with each new experience, we overlay what came before, until we become a compilation of identities. I wonder if I am further removed from that second layer of belonging to the Greek culture ever since my father died. I long to ask him what it was like to visit his father’s homeland and wrestle with the language, if he ever felt he belonged. I long to ask my Papou if he mourned his birthplace after he left it behind, if he ever felt he fit in when his accent always gave him away. Is it possible to grieve geography? Perhaps it means more than land and language. 

I married a man who grew up Italian Catholic and Jewish, both baptized and bar mitzvah’ed, who understood that liminal space, a divide, which, as I get older, seems less of an in-between and more of a whole unto itself. Who’s to say a whole cannot consist of fragments? Like a thousand shards of a kaleidoscope. 

When the meal is done, everyone returns outside to the mountaintop to watch the final part of the ceremony. The bull’s carcass lies on the grass, its hooves sprawled like tossed off shoes. Someone has removed the bull’s spinal cord. It looks like a long pinkish sea creature. He carries the cord to the host who sits beside his wife at a small outdoor table covered in a pressed white tablecloth. They both wear white button-down shirts and hats. With quiet formality, he wraps the spinal cord loosely around the host’s neck, ties it in a knot and lets it drape, hanging over his shirt. 

A pale lining, a protective layer to the bull’s organs, has been torn from the bull’s belly and laid out to dry in the sun.  Four people carry the sun-dried sheet across the field now to where the host and his wife sit. Like a delicate cape, they wrap it carefully around the husband and wife’s shoulders and the couple bow their heads with honor. They slowly stand, and the crowd applauds. 

Then begins the dance of the bulls. A large group grabs the bull’s hooves and begins running in circles around the mountain, dragging the hide by its hooves in celebration. The host couple follows with the bull’s internal lining wrapping them together as they parade proudly behind the carcass. 

Salsa music blares from two speakers propped in the open windows. My red-headed friend wearing lipstick is salsa dancing with an Ecuadorian man, their arms moving up and down and up and down. The festivity echoes far and wide across the fields. A young man holds out his hand, asking me to dance, but I am swimming in the hot glaze of the sun, rendered speechless by the cultural significance drifting like floaters across my eyes, there, but too elusive to fully capture. 

The couple parades slowly across the field, shoulder to shoulder, wearing the insides of the bull they’ve ingested. They have become one—human and animal. A transformation has occurred, a shift toward an inner ring of belonging, as though they have attained an ultimate union, together with the bull.

I accept the young man’s outstretched hand as the couple begins to dance, draped together in the beast’s delicate lining, the beautiful spinal cord still dangling around the host’s neck, the sundried sheet wrapped around their shoulders like a marriage shawl. 

Melanie Faranello is a writer from Chicago living in Connecticut. Her writing has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her novel-in-progress won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminars. Her stories, poems and essays have been published in numerous publications including StoryQuarterly, Swamp Pink, Hippocampus, Blackbird, Catamaran, StoryStouth, HuffPost Personal, and elsewhere. She is also the founder of Poetry on the Streets. Read more of her work at www.melaniefaranello.com

Photo source: Muhammed Zafer Yahsi/Unsplash

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