“You are free to choose, free to make mistakes”, always said the father of Léa Vicens, “rejoneadora” star, bullfighter on horseback for neophytes, who is also the incredible heroine of Gaël Tchakaloff’s story Life to death. A heroine who exists in the real world, captivating to the point that the author believes herself to be under the influence, before being put back on track by the rejoneadora: “We actually have to love each other to make a journey towards each other the other is not influence, it is a reasoned choice.” And the road was difficult for the one who cannot stand bullfighting and faints when the blood spurts, but hangs on, out of bravado, out of fascination, out of a desire not to limit herself. And offering us this inestimable gift in these days when every debate ends in harassment, where every nuance is inaudible, where every paradox condemns you, Gaël Tchakaloff honors literature.
I always thought that essays were limited: you only address your side. All it takes is the name of the author and the title to know what intellectual territory we are in, and too many readers prefer to move on. On the other hand, literature is vicious. It ingrains itself in you, hijacks your intimate convictions, installs in the depths of your being other perspectives, different ways of walking, unknown paths. Literature is a machine for crushing beliefs that you thought were eternal.
So it is with bullfighting, this universe as repulsive as it is magnetizing in which the author engages, which takes us into an amphitheater where “the arena overflows with a euphoric living together, arm of honor to the reign from zero risk and zero offense, to the pasteurization of the Western world and its doxas of hyper-precaution”, being surprised to come across educated bourgeois and working people, united in the same passion. And this passion is not the enjoyment of the spectacle of blood and ferocity, but a symphony of life which orchestrates the killing. The public is not hungry for death, but for beauty, and Léa Vicens is the beauty: “Her grace, her magic extinguishes every form of villainy, of sterile ferocity that the human soul gives birth to. […] The work of art that she sculpts within the arena dominates the abuse and death of the bull as much as moral, emotional or intellectual considerations.”
The future will be as feminine as it is masculine
Yes, we are indeed in the presence of this gray, elusive territory, beyond good and evil, to which there is no question for Gaël Tchakaloff of pretending to adhere: “The images haunt me. I have no I forgot nothing, I forgave him everything.” Difficult to grasp, difficult to accept for those steeped in assumptions about an ancestral practice, which commonly speaks of human barbarity more than love of the animal world. And yet. In addition to Léa Vicens, who cohabits with “a being capable of killing and showing so much tenderness and kindness”, who disorients both the author and the reader, we discover Alexis, a specialist in pachyderms who one day saved an elephant from the circus of Moscow with an acidity deficit by going around the Parisian greengrocers to buy 150 kilos of lemon which he pressed down the animal’s throat. Five years later, the elephant recognizes him and cuddles him for half an hour. Alexis’ son tells this story with tears in his eyes, while working on the rejoneadora ranch – absolute respect for animals and bullfighting, one certainly not excluding the other.
Don’t even attempt a pout of disgust, don’t try to resist the unknown, this world that is the opposite of ours, it is rich in life lessons, because “it kills animals at the time of animalists, sanctifies the death that our societies entrust to embalmers to escape reality, refuses gender and denounces victimization in full neofeminism”, while drawing its water, planting its vegetable garden, feeding its animals. And closing life to death, I couldn’t hold back a smile, telling myself that, definitely, the future will be as feminine as it is masculine, and will have the saving ambiguity of Léa Vicens.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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