Witnessing Cockfights in Puerto Rico

by Richard Kostelanetz (August 2017)

 

Fighting Cocks, Sir Robin Philipson

—academics mostly—would ever take me there. Some claimed not to know where it was, even though a branch of their favorite Cuban restaurant, Metropole, sits next door.
 

Entering on my own one Saturday evening, I found a venue different from what I expected. A precipitously sloped theater in the round with six rows of seats. At the bottom of the seats was a circular floor perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. The seats and floors were well-scrubbed, almost antiseptic. It stank far less than the live poultry store down the street from me in Ridgewood, Queens, incidentally, where edible animals are killed before your eyes.

 

 

 

Quite various are the matches. Some end in less than a minute with one rooster quickly wiping out the other left lying on the floor. In another match, one rooster lay down on his back for a few seconds, only to pop back up and continue to fight. In yet another, the winning rooster appeared blinded by the ordeal, simply spinning around frantically at the end. A fourth match was so boring I dozed off twice. My favorite rooster simply ran around the edge of the rink, even climbing up the rim separating the floor from its audience, only to have spectators push him back into the rink. What makes these gamecocks more interesting that human boxers, say, is that they are at once more stupid and yet intelligent.

 

Once either rooster lies on the floor, the supervisor started a second digital clock that gives the fallen bird sixty seconds to rise. He also repeatedly intones a word I could not understand. When the match ends after the regulation fourteen minutes, this second clock continued counting, I guess to give the fallen bird a chance to stand up for a draw. More than once I saw a fallen bird, sometimes down for many seconds, come back to win.

 

All through the match men were betting not against the house, as in a horse race, but with each other, pointing with hand signals that apparently indicate how much money was being wagered. And here, unlike a horse race, they could bet after the match begins, sometimes with improvised odds. Especially the front row, whose seats are more expensive, men were screaming at each other and at the birds, I guess hoping that those they raised would understand encouragement. How the hell the bettors could evaluate these birds, not only before the match but during it, utterly mystified me.

 

Anyway, once a fight ends, the birds both dead and alive are brought to the juez de valla who clips off their spurs and then deposits them in dark bags that are given to their handler/owners. While the loser might have some gamey meat to eat, I doubted if most winning survivors would ever fight again. As wagering monies changes hands, the floor is promptly vacuumed. And the next pair of roosters could be seen moving onto the scene from their clear cage under the ceiling. As I left, the man in front of me had two dark bird bags draped over his shoulders. Whether his charges were dead or alive, I could not tell. How classically Roman it all seemed.

 

In barnyards around the world gamecocks fight with each other; that’s what they naturally do. Denying them their innate instinct is the sort of man-made conceit that many of us would judge priggish and unacceptable if raised to apply to other issues. Even a group of hens establish a pecking order, as it is commonly called, albeit less ferocious. I recall seeing a field of more than thirty roosters short-leashed to decrepit automobile tires lying flat on the ground, each bird strategically out of range from the others to which each would nonetheless scream. In his classic Cockfighting Is Here To Stay (1950), reprinted in The World of John Lardner (1960), the author recalls a singularly dumb Ohio sheriff who, after arresting a cockfight, put all the confiscated birds into a single cell. “In the morning, he found them all dead but one. This one happened to be the winner of a bout that had ended just before the sheriff made his pinch. He still had a gaff on; but even he was not in very good shape.” Any claim to cure gamecocks of this instinct reminds me of claims to cure gays of homosexual sex. Fuhgeddaboudit.
 

 

My second thought was that this neat venue with its small stage and precipitous slope, otherwise empty all week, could be used for other kinds of performance, say solo dance or chamber music. Since some of my Puerto Rican friends are composers and theater artists, I advised them to check it out. They might be as surprised as I was.

 

 

___________________________________________

NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.

 

To help New English Review continue to publish thought-provoking articles, please click here.

 

If you enjoyed this article and want to read more by Richard Kostelanetz, please click here.