Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Short Note on Morality
Map
Prologue: Fran
THE CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
A Man, a Bull, a Small Town
The Former Phenom
A Tragedy in Three Acts
The Challenge Accepted
The Season Begins
THE STRUGGLE
Melons, Bitter and Sweet
Afternoons of Responsibility
The Melons Opened
The Outsider
Sun and Shadow
The Little Venom
Section Seven
Different Paths
An Inherited Fortune
Death in the Sun
Peons
Craftsmen
They Eat Horses, Don’t They?
A Lapse in Concentration
Running the Bulls
Papa
Dry Dock
The Kid
A Traveling Season
The Supreme Act
First-Class Standards
Good Luck Bad Luck
ALL THE ROADS HOME
Master of Masters
In the Blood
Epilogue
Appendix: How to See Them
Acknowledgments
Notes on Sources
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 2005 by Edward Lewine
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Lewine, Edward.
Death and the sun : a matador’s season in the heart
of Spain / Edward Lewine.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-618-26325-x
1. Bullfights—Spain. I. Title.
GV1108.5.L49 2005
791.82'0946—dc22 2005040424
Excerpts from the following works of Ernest Hemingway are reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group: Death in the Afternoon, copyright 1932 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1960 by Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises, copyright 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed 1954 by Ernest Hemingway. The Dangerous Summer, copyright © 1960 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright renewed © 1988 by John Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, and Gregory Hemingway. Copyright © 1985 by Mary Hemingway, John Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, and Gregory Hemingway.
eISBN 978-0-544-36427-1
v1.0614
BRINDIS:
THIS BOOK GOES FOR YOU, MEGAN, WHO MADE EVERYTHING POSSIBLE.
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.
—Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 26
A Short Note on Morality
THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK is a controversial one. In a formal Spanish bullfight six large mammals are put to death for the afternoon’s entertainment of a paying crowd. The central moral question raised by such a spectacle is whether it is right for people to kill animals for pleasure. Various human activities raise this question. No one in the modern world has a life-or-death need to eat red meat, wear leather, hunt and fish, or attend bullfights. People continue to do these things because they like to. Are carnivores, leather wearers, sportsmen, and bullfighting aficionados behaving in a moral way? That is an excellent and complicated question. But it is not the topic of this book. This is not a book of moral philosophy. It does not tell the reader how the world should be. This is a book of journalism. It tries to show the reader how the world is.
This book tells the story of a single bullfighting season in the life of a Spanish matador, and through that story attempts to reveal a few things about the strange and violent subculture of the bullfight and about Spain. But even though the story is told from the point of view of people who are biased in favor of bullfighting and earn their living from it, this book is not designed to convert the reader into a bullfighting fan or to argue that bullfighting is a good thing. The goal here is to try to explain bullfighting as it is, by taking a hard look at things that are hard to look at, like death and the sun. After finishing this book, some readers may find themselves more sympathetic toward bullfighting, and others more resolved in their dislike of it. Either way, that is for the readers to decide.
Prologue: Fran
Pozoblanco, September 26. The afternoon of the bullfight broke clear and cold under a blue sky etched with gray clouds. Autumn chilled the air. The shadow cast by the falling sun had split the arena in two when a trumpet blast heralded the beginning of the day’s show. It was six-thirty P.M. The bullring was a neat, whitewashed wheel. Twenty-five rows of seats led down to a circular space covered in sand. This was the arena floor, where the action would take place. The sanded floor was about seven feet beneath the first row of seating and encircled by a five-foot-tall red-painted wooden fence. A narrow passageway, formed between fence and stone, ran around the circumference of the ring. In the terminology of bullfighting this passageway is called the callejón. It is where the bullfighters stand when they are not in action.
Pozoblanco is a town of some fifteen thousand residents, situated in a high mountain valley in the southern Spanish province of Córdoba. Most of the time nothing much of interest happens there. This bullfight was an exception. It was a national news story. Print reporters, photographers, and television crews had been pouring into town for days and were conspicuous throughout the bullring. As always, the bullfighting press was on hand, but there was also a strong contingent of people from mainstream media outlets as well as members of the “pink press,” the prensa rosa, which is what tabloid magazines and TV shows are called in Spain. A flock of still photographers crowded the callejón. They pushed and shoved, craning their necks, anxious to get their first glimpse of the man everyone had come to see.
A small brass band, seated up in the last row of seats, clashed to tinny life, kicking into one of those somber military marches called pasodobles that are always played at bullfights. A gate in the wooden fence swung open and the bullfighters stepped out of the dark hole and into the light. They looked like emissaries from a more vivid world, dressed in their costumes of deeply colored fabric decorated with gold tracery and studded with baubles and frills, the sun glinting off the gold, sending darts of light to play upon the dull sand and stone. The first matador had a square head of heavy blond hair and a big grin. His name was Manuel Díaz, but like many bullfighters he performed under a nickname—in his case, El Cordobés (the Man from Córdoba). Next came a tall, knock-kneed fellow named José Luis Moreno. He stepped into line next to El Cordobés.
Then there was a pause . . . and the third matador came into view. Francisco Rivera Ordóñez trotted out to where his colleagues stood, dragging his toes in the sand like a child unwilling to face an angry parent. Fran stood less than five feet nine inches. He was muscled yet limber like a gymnast, and most of his power was in his legs and buttocks. His hair was thick, oily, and wavy, the color of good espresso beans. His skin was smooth and caramel-colored. It looked fine against the ivory tuxedo shirt he wore underneath his gold-encrusted, chocolate-brown matador’s uniform. His face was striking in a matinee-idol sort of way, but it was a matinee idol reimagined as a Gypsy prince: the eyes shone dark and deep above sharp cheekbones; the straight nose ran down to an even mouth of healthy teeth and the strong chin belo
w it. Fran was twenty-eight years old and as good-looking as any man has a right to be.
When Fran appeared the photographers jumped over the wooden fence and rushed at him. Soon they had him surrounded. Fran stood his ground, eyes forward, face stern, trying to preserve the dignity of the moment. Eighteen years before, to the very day, a bull had fatally wounded Fran’s father in this same Pozoblanco ring, and the bulls Fran was about to face came from the breeder that had produced the killer animal. During the course of an eight-year career Fran had never appeared in Pozoblanco on the anniversary of his father’s death, much less with bulls from the same ranch. The other two matadors stood next to Fran, but the photographers ignored them. They were not part of the afternoon’s story. By the established professional etiquette of the bullring, when the matadors first appear the press photographers have a minute to take pictures and then disappear. But many of the shooters that afternoon had never worked a bullfight before, and they kept on clicking. The crowd began to whistle. Finally someone called in the police and they cleared the ring.
The ring was empty. The audience applauded. The matadors saluted one another with hands outstretched, silently giving the classic bullfighting benediction: “God send us luck, one and all.” They crossed themselves once, twice, three times, kissing their thumbs at the end of each gesture. Then they stepped out, stepping out on their right feet for good luck, walking across the ring at a measured pace, walking to the music, their teams of assistant bullfighters on foot and horseback in three neat rows behind them. When the procession reached the opposite end of the ring, the bullfighters stopped, took off their hats, and bowed their heads.
Each year, just before the September 26 bullfight in Pozoblanco, they observe a moment of silence. Fran stood with his weight on his right leg, his left leg bent. His hat was in his hand, and his head was against his chest, eyes down. Everyone in the ring was watching him, wondering what he was thinking, a state of affairs Fran was used to. He had been a prince of bullfighting from birth. Fran’s great-grandfather was Cayetano Ordóñez, nicknamed El Niño de la Palma, a star matador in the 1920s and the model for the bullfighter in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Fran’s grandfather Antonio Ordóñez starred in his own Hemingway book, The Dangerous Summer, and is thought by many to have been the best matador of the second half of the twentieth century. Fran’s father, Francisco Rivera, called Paquirri, died on the road from Pozoblanco and became a tragic legend in Spain. Fran added to the family history by his excellence in the ring and by marrying Eugenia Martínez de Irujo, the duchess of Montoro, the daughter of one of the most titled aristocrats in Europe, the eighteenth duchess of Alba.
The moment of silence ended. The bullfighters bowed to the president of the bullfight, a local dignitary who stood in a flag-draped box midway up the stands. The bullfighters touched their right hand to their forehead, much as the gladiators did in the ancient Roman arenas, and you could almost hear them say, “We who are about to die salute you,” and all that. The audience applauded. The band continued to play. Fran’s face was blank as he went over to the wooden fence and accepted his bullfighting cape, which was handed over to him by his manservant Nacho. Fran skipped backward a few steps into the arena and made some easy, fluid practice passes, watching as an imaginary bull came across his body, painting giant clamshells in the sand with the sweep of his cape. A trumpet blew. The music stopped. Someone swung open a gate. The first bull appeared, lifted its great head, and trotted into the light.
FIRST THIRD
THE CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
MARCH
The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, that is, it is not an equal contest or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather it is a tragedy.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Death in the Afternoon
1
A Man, a Bull, a Small Town
Pozoblanco, September 26, 1984. They couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of them. Within the obsessive compass of the headlights the black road uncoiled, split by the white line, stretching and bending with the land. The BMW sedan was bone white, built heavy, well suited to drone out the thousands of miles a top matador must travel from town to town, from bullfight to bullfight, from February to October, through the eight-month marathon of the bullfighting season. Sometime early that morning—later documents would differ on the exact time—the car pulled into a small town and stopped before a building with the words Hotel Los Godos spelled out over the doorway. The driver got out, opened one of the rear doors, and prodded the shoulder of the man who lay asleep in the back seat.
“Paco,” the driver said. “We’ve arrived.”
His full name was Francisco Rivera y Pérez, but he was best known as Paquirri, a variant of Paco, which is a nickname for Francisco. This Paco, Francisco, Paquirri, whatever you wish to call him, was a bullfighter—in Spanish, a torero. More precisely he was a matador, the category of bullfighter who stars in the bullfight, employs a team of five assistant bullfighters, and finishes each performance by facing the bull alone, playing it with a red cape, and killing it with a sword. The most successful matadors are rich and famous entertainers, like professional athletes or movie stars. It is a hard trade. The elite minority of matadors who work regularly tend to end up in the hospital for a few weeks each season, but at least they work at their chosen profession. The rest of Spain’s matadors spend their time in cafés, waiting for their cell phones to chime with an offer of a bullfight somewhere.
Paquirri never had that problem. He spent many years at the top, as a sought-after performer who by the end of his career commanded ten thousand dollars a bullfight, more than any other matador of the time. Paquirri was also a celebrity to nonbullfighting fans, thanks to two high-profile marriages: the first to Carmen Ordóñez, daughter of the legendary matador Antonio Ordóñez; the second to Isabel Pantoja, a curvy pop star. Paquirri drove the women crazy. He was dark, with ice-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and dimples. He was also a classic tough guy. He could be private, stern, quiet, independent, and full of pride, but he also took pleasure in horses and running and open fields, and was a fierce and loyal friend. He adored each of his wives in her time and always adored his sons: Francisco and Cayetano from his first wife, and Francisco José from his second.
Paquirri’s life was a constant struggle. He was born poor in a small town at the southern tip of Spain, near the port city of Cádiz, and was given his nickname by his father, a failed torero who encouraged his sons to fulfill his bullfighting dreams. Lacking the natural grace that has been the basis of so many matadors’ careers, Paquirri worked and studied and bled, literally, until he had forged himself into a technical master of his craft. He took the alternativa—the ceremony that elevates an apprentice matador to full rank—on August 11, 1966, and sweated for years to gain and then maintain the respect of the small cartel of bullring operators, talent agents, and newspaper critics who control bullfighting, until the mid-1970s when his career came together and he rose to be Spain’s leading matador for six or seven years.
By 1984, however, Paquirri was slowing down. He would appear in just forty-six bullfights that season, a full twenty-six fewer than the most active matador of that year; he was not contracted for a number of the top bullfighting festivals, and to make matters worse he was starting to look fat. His own father had told him he was too heavy to be safe in the ring. “Next year I’m retiring to my ranch,” Paquirri had begun to say. “Then I’m going to invite my friends and cut the pigtail.” (Until the 1920s most matadors grew a small pigtail at the base of their skulls as a professional mark. Today they wear fake pigtails on bullfight days, but cutting the pigtail is still the final symbolic act of the matador’s career.)
Paquirri had not planned to end the 1984 season in Pozoblanco. He was supposed to finish up the day before in the city of Logroño. Then in midsummer the promoter of the Pozoblanco ring called him up and twisted his arm and Paquirri agreed to appear there. As it turned out, the bullfight
in Logroño on September 25 went well, and Paquirri drove all night to reach Pozoblanco and tumbled into his hotel bed. He awoke about noon and wandered down to the lobby, where he invited his assistant bullfighters for lunch. This was unusual. Paquirri tended to keep to himself before bullfights, but he was in an uncharacteristically good mood that morning. The work and worry of the season, and maybe of his career, were about to end. “What a great season we’ve had,” Paquirri was overheard saying. “Not one injury among us!”
The bulls used in bullfights are descended from an ancient strain of wild bull that roamed Spain in prehistoric times. They are bred for beauty, size, strength, speed, and ferocity, and raised semiwild on special ranches whose names and reputations are well known to bullfighting fans. The six bulls used in Paquirri’s bullfight in Pozoblanco came from the respected Sayalero y Bandrés ranch, but they were a scrawny group, the end-of-season dregs of the herd. One of them in particular looked awful. This bull’s name was Avispado, and twice that season it had been shipped to a bullfight somewhere, only to be rejected by local bullring veterinarians for being too small and too ugly to appear in a professional bullfight.
Like most bulls who fail to make it into a bullfight during their fourth year of life, Avispado was headed for the slaughterhouse. Until Paquirri called looking for some animals for a last-minute gig he’d accepted in Pozoblanco. Normally the bullring promoter selects the bulls. But when there is a star matador involved, he also has a say, and Paquirri liked Sayalero y Bandrés bulls because he’d performed well with them in the past. So Avispado and five others were set aside. Then, a few weeks before the bullfight, the Pozoblanco mayor’s office intervened. Pozoblanco’s bullring was city-owned, and town officials had to approve all bulls presented there. But when the officials visited the Sayalero y Bandrés pasture they were displeased by the look of the bulls, declined them, and reserved animals from a different breeder.
Death and the Sun Page 1