by Norman Lewis
He started informal training at the age of seven at whatever bull-farm could be persuaded to allow him to practise his cape-passes with a calf, and appeared as a professional in the ring at the legal minimum age of 17. Now aged 30, and earning about £7,500 per fight, he has reached the height of his career, a modest, friendly man who smiles a great deal, and has remained unspoiled by success.
Tomás was born in Gerena, about 10 miles from Seville. It is the archetypal Andalusian hilltop village, put together from stark, white, geometrical shapes, raised above a prairie of pale wheatfields, patched here and there with great brassy spreads of sunflowers. In Gerena the narrow streets are calm and immaculate. Dignity of appearance and personal style is much cultivated. Men walk slowly, held erect, and few women are to be seen. It is a spare, silent place, a last refuge of the Spain of the past. Almost the whole of the hill’s summit is occupied by the low-lying, blind-walled palace of José Luis García de Samanieco, the Marqués of Albacerrado, who owns all that is visible from his rooftop of the almost Siberian landscape of this region of Andalusia, as well as one of the great ganaderías of fighting bulls.
Tomás, whose father was once a shepherd on the estate, has moved down with his family to take over one of the large new houses at the bottom of the village. It is a place to which he returns continually between fights, and where he is a living legend, a poor boy who has shot to the top of what in rural Andalusia still remains the most glamorous, and the most honourable of professions.
The new Campuzano house is an extended and softened version of the seventeenth-century peasant dwellings that present austere profiles to the village from the top of the hill. A big sitting-room holds modern furniture of the best quality, gathered under a vast chandelier, but with the retreat from simplicity there has been a loss of strength. Otherwise custom prevails. When I visited, the voices of women and children could be heard faintly beyond the ornate doors, but only men with a certain solidity were present: Tomás’s father, still moving as if in control of sheep; an exceedingly genial brother who manages Tomás’s affairs; a couple of old sun-cured uncles leaning upon their sticks. The mother flustered in with coffee on a tray, flashed a nervous half-smile and withdrew. Tomás’s wife—clearly, from her photograph, a beauty of the highest order—did not appear.
This, in some way almost oriental, gathering was dominated by the huge mounted heads of two of Tomás’s most difficult and memorable bulls, whose challenging eyes it seemed hard to avoid. Tomás said that they were masterpieces of the taxidermist’s art, and that the facial expression—different in every bull as in every man—had been most successfully preserved. He invited me to join him on the landing half-way up the staircase, at a point where the most fearsome-looking of these animals, Abanico by name, could be viewed from precisely the angle at which Tomás had been exposed to its stare six years before in the ring at Málaga. ‘I’m off to Madrid on Monday,’ Tomás said, ‘and whenever I go on a trip I stand here and look into this brute’s eyes, and tell myself, at least they can’t throw anything at me worse than this one.’
At this point the subject of fear came up. It seemed a doubtful one to raise with a man generally accepted as among the most courageous of all toreros, but he cut across my attempts at tact. ‘Was fear something you could come to terms with?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘never.’ The fact was that it got worse and worse, strengthening with each increase of a man’s responsibilities. From the day he got married the fear increased, and now that his wife was expecting a child, it was closer again and more insistent. In summer, he said, when he could be fighting twice a week, a bullfighter’s family was constantly overshadowed by fear. While the fight was on no telephone calls to the house could be made by friends—to keep the line clear for any emergency—and only close relatives were invited into the home, to maintain what amounted to a silent vigil. They were exceedingly devout, and crucifixes and rosaries hung everywhere about the home. Another minor bullfighter who had drifted in said, ‘We take our troubles to the Virgin of Macarena. She’s a Sevillian—almost a member of the family you might say. Imagine two fights in two days. Naturally you’re praying half the time.’
The estate house of the Albacerrada bull-breeding farm is two miles up a country road from Gerena; a clean-cut example of purest Andalusian architecture. Decoration is outlawed, the atmospheric quality of these surroundings depending upon white, crystalline façades and the blue mossy shade of cactus and eucalyptus. Adjacent is a small, high-walled ring in which the cows from which the bulls are bred are subjected to a series of tests, known collectively as the tentadero. Tentaderos take place at frequent intervals during the summer months and have come to be treated as a social event, inevitably watched at Albacerrada by the Marqués and a few of his intimates. It is explained that the number of those present on such occasions is kept to a minimum to avoid distracting the animals under test.
When I arrived the testing was already under way. I looked down from the rim of the small arena at a rider on a padded horse, steel-tipped pole in hand, waiting on the far side of the ring for the entrance of a cow under test. The Marqués had just expounded the bull-breeder’s theory that taurine courage is transmitted through the female of the species, and that the male only adds strength. For this reason, only two-year-old cows are subjected to serious testing, and they are certainly no less fierce than the bulls.
The wall of the ring was painted a most profound and refulgent yellow, with the overhead sunshine rippling and showering down its uneven surface. The wall colour was intensified by that of the sand, and there was a yellow reflection in the faces of the onlookers. After a while the unearthly quality of the light seemed even to effect the mood, endowing this scene with a feeling of separateness from the surrounding world. A religious hush had fallen; the spectators were motionless and silent. An element of ritual was discernible here, a flashback perhaps to Celto-Iberian days and sacrificial bulls.
A small black cow came tearing out into the ring, slid to a standstill and swung its head from side to side in search of an adversary. It was big-horned, narrow of rump, all bone and muscle; faster in the take-off than a bull, quicker on the turn and with sharper horns. ‘Ugly customer,’ a herdsman whispered approvingly in my ear. The horseman thwacking the padding of his horse with the pole, called to the cow and it charged, crossing the ring at extreme speed, head down, horns thrust forward in the last few yards, thumped into the quilting over the horse’s flanks and threw it against the wall.
Time and again, it skewered up ineffectively with its horns while the horseman, prodding and shoving down with the shallow, testing pic, scored the hide over its shoulders. Failing to get through the padding it trotted off, then turned back for a second charge. The watching herdsman noted points in their books under four headings: courage, speed, reflexes, staying power; and communicated what might have been approval or disdain with inscrutable signs.
It was this performance with the horse and the cow’s indifference or otherwise to the prickings of the pic that sealed its fate; but when the serious business was at an end, fun for all followed with the cape. Tomás Campuzano had arrived to help the local boys add polish to their technique, conducting a series of passes with a mathematical exactitude that seemed sometimes to border on indifference. The onlookers smiled dreamily. Those that followed the master seemed agitated by comparison and a young Venezuelan bullfighter who had come along appeared a little out of his depth with a beast of this kind, or perhaps the cow was learning quickly from its mistakes.
Surely, I asked myself, the keen-eyed selectors could ask for nothing better than this animal with its limitless vigour and thirst for aggression? But, the experts detected weaknesses overlooked by the outsider, for rejection followed the completion of its trial. And so in the course of the morning six aspirant cows came and went. It was a spectacle providing its own special brand of addiction, preferred by many enthusiasts to the commercial bullfight itself. Spain’s leading painter of bullfighter posters, pre
sent on this occasion, later admitted that he never missed a tentadero if he could help it. Both he and Don José Luis, although a little stiffened by middle age, gave brief but confident displays with the cape and came off intact, although the Marqués’s boxer dog (always addressed in English) broke into the ritual calm with yelps of hysterical anguish at the sight of its master exposing himself to such danger. Of six cows, four rejects were subjected to the ignominy of having a few inches lopped from the end of their tails after the test. In this way they were marked for the slaughterhouse. The two accepted, to be kept for breeding, had the dangerous ends of their horns removed. Both operations—the second performed bloodily with a saw—were carried out forthwith and in view of the onlookers.
From the ring we moved back to the estate house for a snack served in the yard. This took traditional form: thick, solid potato omelettes cut into cubes to be eaten with the fingers, slivers of hard farm cheese, white wine of the last year’s vintage (still a little murky) from the estate vineyard, which, spurred on by Don José Luis’s assurance that it contained only five degrees of alcohol, guests downed like water. The informality of such occasions is much appreciated in Andalusia—and referred to approvingly as simple. To this slightly feudal environment Tomás Campuzano had been admitted as an admired friend. Part of the reward of a famous bullfighter is an escape into the Nirvana of classlessness.
The bulls inhabit an untidy savannah of old olives, thorn and coarse grass entered a few hundred yards from the estate house. There are upwards of 600 of them kept in two separate herds, the four-year-old novillos and the five-year-old bulls in the full vigour of life. Throughout the summer months their numbers dwindle steadily as the bulls are sent off, six at a time, to fight in the big city rings where the management can afford to pay for the best. For a corrida of six four-year-olds, the Marqués expects to be paid three million pesetas; for the five-year-olds the price is four million. He loses money on the bulls, he complains, but keeps afloat on the slight profit the estate makes from sunflower oil, wheat and olives.
All guests are taken as a matter of course to inspect the herds. They ride in a trailer drawn by a tractor from which fodder is distributed in times of dearth, and which is therefore acceptable to the bulls. The trailer has high steel sides and is heavy enough not to be turned over by a charge. The tractor’s engine is always kept running because the bulls have learned to associate its sound with food. Still, the excursion is not quite in the same bracket as a trip through a safari park because a fighting bull is more aggressive than anything encountered in the wild, and if annoyed is liable instantly and unforeseeably to charge the offending object, whether animate or otherwise. A Spanish treatise on the subject of bulls speaks of the bull’s docility on the ranch. ‘It is more than likely,’ it says, ‘that the vast majority of fighting bulls would allow themselves to be stroked. To attempt this one must put away the almost insuperable fear that their presence and proximity inspires.’ None of those present on this occasion seemed inclined to put the author’s theory to the test.
Chugging behind the tractor into the bull pastures was accepted as a minor adventure. The bulls stood, heads lowered, a few yards away, to watch our approach with steadfast, myopic eyes. Their relative invulnerability has relieved them of the necessity to develop acute vision, but their hearing is exceptionally acute. Thus we probably appeared no more than a vague, invasive shape, but lulled by the soft clatter of the diesel and its promise of mash, they did nothing about it. It rains hardly at all in summer, and the bulls spend the day in ceaseless foraging for pasture, moving always very slowly and with great, ponderous dignity. The animals in each herd settle quickly to mutual tolerations, undoubtedly realising that an inbred policy of no-surrender means the death of one of the disputants of any quarrel that is allowed to arise. They learn quickly. When Don José Luis’s boxer decided to try his luck with a five-year-old, the animal soon realised that the dog was too fast to be caught by the horns, so, adopting an invitingly passive stance, he lured the boxer within easy reach and removed several of its teeth with a kick.
Under the protection of the tractor and its soothing noises no scene could have been more arcadian and nothing more appropriate to this Andalusian setting than the bulls, viewed either in majestic silhouette against the green-grey wash of olives or as they wandered ruminatively, deep in the strong tide of sunflowers that had burst through the fences of their enclosure.
‘Whatever the financial loss, the bulls are my life,’ the Marqués said, having taken us at the end of our visit to the palace for an inspection of his most treasured possessions. Once again I found myself confronted with mounted heads. These were of two Albacerrada bulls ‘pardoned’ following extreme bravery shown in the ring; one in Madrid in 1919; the other in Seville in 1965—an historically unique event. Despite some reluctance on the part of the traditionally minded authorities of the Maestranza (as the ring at Seville is known), they were obliged by the insistent demands of the crowd to break their rule. And so the Marqués’s bull Laborioso (hard-worker) was returned, appropriately fêted and garlanded to the herd. It had taken seven thrusts of the pic, and had overturned seven horses, three of which had to be replaced. Its wounds were healed through massive injections of penicillin, and it lived on until 1976.
Bullfighting, practised in one form or another since Celto-Iberian times, not only in towns but in innumerable villages throughout Spain, began to fall into decline in the post-war period. Spanish attitudes were much changed by the tourist influx. New rings were opened in many northern areas where bullfighting was previously unknown, but the uninstructed demand of a ninety per cent foreign audience was for pure spectacle. Bullfighting taken straight was seen as tedious so bullfoonery was often added with the provision of clowns and dwarves in bullfighting gear who threw custard pies in each others’ faces, or the procedure might be livened up by performing dogs. Since the foreigners hardly knew one bull from another it was an opportunity for disreputable breeders to supply sub-standard animals at cut prices, and there were cases of low quality, underpaid bullfighters refusing to tackle bulls without artificially shortened horns. This was the period when ambitious but inexperienced youngsters (known as capitalistas) were paid small sums to invade the ring and join the fight, sometimes with tragic results. Bullfighting began to suffer from the competition of football, and promising village boys aspired to become pop-stars rather than matadors.
Rock-bottom may have been reached in 1981 when the concluding corrida of the Seville season had to be put forward a day because it coincided with a home match by Seville FC, the promoters realising that otherwise the ring would have been empty. Of this melancholy occasion a leading newspaper critic wrote: ‘Thus the present decadent season draws to its end. It has offered little but boredom for the public, and bad business for the promoters, with half the seats unsold.’ The bulls, said the critic, had been uniformly atrocious: small, lame, numbed-looking, and inclined to totter about like calves on shaky legs. The sad and insipid bullfighters spread boredom like a disease. ‘When they trundled on the sixth bull, I said to my colleague, “Perhaps I’ll take a nap. Wake me up if anything happens.” He didn’t because he, too, fell asleep.’
From this disastrous year, there was a steady recovery. The commercial backers had come to understand that it was a matter either of drastic reform or, for them, the end of the road. They paid more for their bulls, and for their bullfighters; got rid of the clowns, suppressed the circus antics of such as El Cordobés, and his imitators and then attracted a new generation of matadors. As a result, 1985 was adjudged ‘brilliant’ and 1986 ‘excellent’. As part of this renaissance, a bullfighting school opened near Seville in January 1987 with 16 young pupils ranging from 9 to 16 years of age. The event was sufficiently important for it to be attended by the representative of the Ministry of Culture responsible for what is officially entitled ‘the taurine art’, who spoke enthusiastically of the performance of the children in their encounter with bull-calves of ap
propriate size.
Alcalá de Guadaïra, site of the bullfighting school for promising boys, is a small, white pyramid of houses dominated by a vast Moorish fortress defending the old approach to Seville. Otherwise it is notable for mining the high-grade sand, supplied to bull-rings which can pay the steep price for it, and for the richly chromatic earth that provides the yellow paint for Seville’s baroque buildings, and for the interior of the Marqués de Albacerrada’s miniature amphitheatre. This place suggests the persistence of an ancient half-submerged bull-cult, for once again the mounted heads are everywhere, and every tavern and bar is glutted with fight-posters, photographs and prints. Within hours of arriving in Alacalá I received an invitation from an olive-growers’ association: ‘We’re having a bit of a fiesta up at the inn this evening. Just a few friends. No more than a glass of wine and a sandwich. We’ll probably kill a bull.’
The school is in the honeycombed building next to the ring itself; a single dim room cluttered with scholastic objects, exercise books, desks, a blackboard, plus piles of harness, plastic matador’s swords, and a miscellany of horns. The largest of these is fixed to the front of a formidable contraption like a handcart on bicycle wheels used for chasing would-be banderilleros. Special respect, and possibly some magic virtue, attaches to these particular horns, as they were removed from a bull killed in a fight with another bull.
Students receive instruction for two hours a day on three days a week, about a third of this time being devoted to ring tactics and the rest to practice in the ring. Funds have been allocated to the school by the Ministry, but, through ‘delays in legalisation’, these have not yet arrived. Since it cost the equivalent of £75 to hire a second-class fighting cow for two hours (a first-class cow costs twice this sum), there is little practice with animals, and a great deal of make-believe in which masters, horns in hand, pursue their pupils all over the empty ring.