Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  There were many ways that Paquirri and Avispado might have avoided each other. Paquirri might have refused the Pozoblanco contract, or chosen other bulls, or allowed the officials to turn down the bulls he had chosen. Avispado might have been killed in an earlier bullfight or sent to the slaughterhouse. Instead Paquirri said that either he got the bulls he wanted or he wasn’t going to perform. So little Avispado and his fellow Sayalero y Bandrés bulls were shipped to Pozoblanco. The morning of the bullfight, representatives of the three matadors performing that day met at the corrals to divide the bulls. Each bull had a number branded on its side, and the men wrote these numbers on slips of paper, balled the papers up, and tossed them into a hat. This was when the last piece of luck fell into place. Paquirri’s assistant reached in and pulled out the piece of paper with the number 9 on it, Avispado’s number.

  Pozoblanco begins all of a sudden out of the rolling plain at the center of a valley called Los Pedroches. The twisted medieval alleyways of the older part of Pozoblanco are lined with the one- and two-story whitewashed dwellings that are typical of southern Spain. Up a hill is the newer section of town, which has wider and straighter streets and modern buildings. The main highway runs through here, heading south across the Los Pedroches plain and down out of the mountains into the big city of Córdoba, about fifty-five miles away as the crow flies. In recent years the government has spent millions to make this route easier to drive; in Paquirri’s time it was a hellish mountain road of hairpin turns, unnerving to traverse by day, terrifying by night.

  There is now a hospital in Pozoblanco, but in Paquirri’s day the only medical facility was the bullring infirmary, a rough room with two tables, a sink, and a shrine to the Virgin Mary. It may seem odd that Pozoblanco should have its own bullring, but many small Spanish towns and even some villages do, and those that don’t can rent a portable ring or close off a public square for bullfights. One way or the other, many places in Spain of any size or importance will hold at least one bullfight or bull event a year, usually during the local feria. A feria is like a civic festival or celebration. The Spanish are mad for local traditions of this sort and maintain them with a fervor that is unmatched in Europe, and there is a feria somewhere in Spain most days of the year. Ferias differ from region to region, but most are dedicated to a local patron saint, and most include religious processions, an outdoor market, and some kind of bullfight or bull-related event.

  By the time Paquirri arrived in Pozoblanco, the town was well into its feria. The municipal fairground on the outskirts of town was full of people eating, drinking, dancing, shrieking on amusement park rides, and riding horses. As afternoon became evening a crowd began to assemble at the town bullring, and by six P.M. the ring was packed under a strong evening sun. A trumpet sounded, the bullfighters marched in, and the festivities began. The first half of the bullfight went smoothly and each of the three matadors killed his bull with minimum fuss. Then it was time for Paquirri to face his second and final bull of the day. The gate opened and Avispado spilled into the ring. Paquirri came out, planted his feet, and swung his cape, using the cloth to lure the bull into charging back and forth across his body, and each time the bull chugged safely past Paquirri’s legs, the crowd chanted “Olé!” in approval.

  It was after the first series of passes that something went wrong. It might have been a miscalculation on Paquirri’s part, or it might have been the bull that tripped or swerved unexpectedly. But as Avispado charged past Paquirri one more time, it bumped into him, spinning him around, sending his hands, still holding the cape, into the air. As long as Paquirri had the cape between himself and the bull he was relatively safe. Suddenly he found himself unprotected and with his back to the bull. He staggered around to face the bull again and yanked the cape out of the air, sliding it over to get it in front of his legs. Had he been a beat quicker he might have gotten the cape down before the bull had a chance to react to it. But Avispado was following the cape, and as Paquirri swung it over, the bull pursued the cloth straight into the matador’s right thigh, sinking the horn deep into the flesh.

  Somewhere in the audience a woman shrieked. Avispado thrust its head upward, flipping Paquirri feet-first into the air, the horn still in the leg. Four bullfighters ran up to Avispado, but the little bull was too fast and too strong and all they could do was watch. Avispado rushed forward. In a desperate attempt to extricate himself, Paquirri swung himself upright, which only made matters worse, causing his full weight to bounce up and down on the horn, producing more damage. After nine full seconds, Avispado wheeled, lowered its head, and Paquirri fell away. He stood for a moment, then collapsed. Several bullfighters picked him up and ran him from the ring. A matador named José Cubero, El Yiyo, stepped onto the sand. By law it was now his responsibility to kill Avispado.

  As soon as Paquirri was tossed, Dr. Elíseo Morán left his place in the callejón and rushed to the bullring infirmary. Dr. Morán had a thriving surgical practice in Córdoba, but he spent summer weekends as the chief of the medical team in small bullrings around the province. By the day of Paquirri’s goring, Morán had treated dozens of horn injuries, and was confident he could open and clean Paquirri’s wound, stop the blood flow, and stabilize Paquirri so he could be taken to the hospital in Cordoba, where the proper facilities existed to help doctors reattach any severed blood vessels and close the wound. “Let’s go,” Dr. Morán told his fellow surgeons when he saw Paquirri in the air. “We’ve got a big one.”

  The infirmary was silent as the doctors scrubbed up, laid out needle, thread, anesthesia, and bags of blood. “Where are the toreros?” they asked themselves. “Why haven’t they arrived yet?” No one spoke, and their eyes flicked to the room’s glass doors. Then the doors flew open, shattering the glass. In came Paquirri, borne on a litter of hands and arms, and in his wake a small crowd of bullfighters, entourage members, and gawkers. They laid Paquirri out on the operating table. His thigh was sliced open like a Sunday roast and blood pooled on the table beneath it. The doctors trained their strong surgical lights on the wound and cut Paquirri’s pant leg off, exposing his leg to the hairy genitals.

  Among the people at the periphery of these events was a video cameraman from TVE, Spain’s national network. Shooting under the surgical lights, he was able to capture a few minutes of Paquirri’s agony. This footage would be shown again and again around the country in the weeks, months, and years that followed. As one writer described it, this video footage would become the Spanish equivalent of the Zapruder film, which captured the second when the bullet struck John E Kennedy. The film begins with the camera at Paquirri’s feet. Then the camera pans up his ruined thigh, his torso, to his face. Paquirri flinches now and then, but he is calm. His voice is firm, his face impassive. He takes control of the room, making sure everything is done right. This is his ninth serious goring.

  “A moment please, Doctor, I would like to talk with you,” Paquirri says. “The goring is a deep one. It has two trajectories. One through here and one through there.” Paquirri gestures up and down, showing the paths of the horn inside his body. “Open me where you need to open me,” he continues. “I place my life in your hands.” The din in the room increases. “Quiet, please,” the matador says. “Please wet my mouth with water.” He drinks and then spits. The tape ends.

  Out in the arena, El Yiyo killed Avispado. Then bullring servants attached chains to the bull’s horns and a mule team dragged Avispado’s carcass from the ring and into the bullring butchery, across an alley from the infirmary where Paquirri was being treated. A short time after the butchers had turned Avispado into cuts of meat for local markets, about eight o’clock, Paquirri was carried to a waiting ambulance, and the big white Citroën pulled out of town, siren yowling, and flew down the highway, careening along the twisting mountain roads. Around fifteen miles from the gates of Córdoba, Paquirri cried out, “Help me, I can’t breathe.” The ambulance screeched to a stop and a doctor worked on him by the side of the road. When Paquirri lo
oked a little calmer, he was put back in the ambulance, which reached the hospital shortly after nine o’clock. It had taken less than an hour to get to Córdoba, but Paquirri was all but dead on arrival. He was thirty-six years old.

  In the weeks that followed, Paquirri’s death would remind many writers and commentators of some lines in “The Song of the Rider,” a short poem written in the 1920s by Spain’s best-known poet, Federico García Lorca, who was himself a bullfighting aficionado.

  Through the plain, through the wind,

  Black pony, red moon.

  Death is watching me,

  from the towers of Córdoba.

  Oh what a long road!

  Oh my brave pony!

  Oh that death awaits me,

  before I arrive in Córdoba!

  Spain plunged into frenzied mourning for Paquirri. Newspapers picked over the grisly details of the goring and the race to Córdoba until the entire story took on the quality of legend. Many people second-guessed the doctors, wondering whether they had handled the wound in the right way. Strangely, amid all the fuss, it was never made clear just what had killed Paquirri, shock, loss of blood, or something else. The funeral took place in Sevilla. The prime minister was unable to attend, but sent his wife. The crowd that assembled in front of the apartment building where the body was laid out stretched for five miles. When the coffin was brought out, the massive throng wouldn’t let it be placed in the hearse. Instead Paquirri was carried to Sevilla’s bullring, where it was marched around and around to chants of a single word, “Torero.” In certain parts of Spain there is no greater compliment.

  Paquirri was buried in the cemetery of San Fernando, where his tomb faces the mausoleum of José Gómez Ortega, Joselito, perhaps the best bullfighter of all time, who was killed by a bull on May 16, 1920. Buried with Joselito is his brother-in-law, the matador Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who killed the bull that killed Joselito. Fourteen years later, another bull killed Sánchez Mejías. Killing a murderous bull had brought bad luck to Sánchez Mejías (or so it was said), and this same misfortune pursued those who performed with Paquirri in Pozoblanco. In 1985, a bull gored El Yiyo in the heart, killing him instantly. He was twenty-one. In 1988, a gunman marched into the office of Avispado’s breeder, Juan Luis Bandrés, and shot him to death. That case was never solved. In 1994, the third matador on the card that day, Vicente Ruiz, El Soro, injured his right knee. It ended his career, leaving him with a deformed leg.

  Though it might have been bad for his fellow performers, Paquirri’s death was a good thing for bullfighting. By the mid-1980s the bullfight had been losing ground as a popular spectacle for years, to soccer, television, and movies, in part because people believed bullfighting was fixed, that the matadors weren’t really risking their lives. Paquirri’s death changed that. Not only did it legitimize bullfighting as a serious thing, but it brought newfound admiration for matadors. Paquirri wasn’t the first prominent matador killed by a bull. But he was the first one killed during the television age, and what was seared into the Spanish consciousness was not so much his death as the composure and humble bravery he showed in the infirmary video.

  In the 1990s bullfighting would undergo a strong revival, driven in part by a new generation of young matadors who remembered Paquirri’s death as a formative event. One of these was his own son, a ten-year-old named Fran, who went to bed that night thinking he had a father and was fast asleep when his mother came in to tell him he no longer did. Fran says he can’t recall how he responded to this news. His mother remembered, however, and so did another person who was in the house that night. Apparently, when Fran heard what had happened, he looked up at his mother and said, “I am going to be a bullfighter.”

  2

  The Former Phenom

  Las Majadillas, March 12. It was all over the news. Eugenia Martínez de Irujo, the duchess of Montoro, and her matador husband, Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, were separating. You could read the gossip magazine headlines at every newsstand across Spain. “Eugenia Breaks Her Marriage,” blared the cover of Semana magazine. “End Point: Fran and Eugenia Break Their Marriage after Various Attempts at Reconciliation,” screamed Lecturas. “Fran and Eugenia: How It All Went Wrong,” said Diez Minutos. The pink press worked the story from every angle. There were timelines of the couple’s courtship, reports and photographs of the alleged love affairs that had broken up the marriage, hackneyed laments about a fairy-tale romance gone wrong, and unattributed quotes from so-called friends and family.

  Eugenia was hiding from the press behind the walls of La Pizana, the seventeenth-century monastery-turned-villa she had shared with Fran just outside Sevilla. Fran’s mother-in-law, the duchess of Alba, had fled to Paris. Fran’s mother, Carmen Ordóñez, was giving interviews left and right. But no one knew where to find Fran. He had disappeared with an army of tabloid reporters on his trail. In fact, he was on an estate named Las Majadillas (Little Barns), in an empty countryside of squat oak trees thirty miles west of Sevilla. The estate, laid out on a hillside overlooking a winding valley, comprised a whitewashed mansion, a courtyard with a fountain, a stable full of sleek horses, and a parking lot filled with snazzy SUVs. The rest of the estate was devoted to the raising of bullfighting bulls. The owner was a rich man’s son, a friend of Fran’s who, like many Spanish aristocrats and millionaires, dabbled in bull breeding.

  The afternoon was sunny and fresh and the air smelled of wood smoke. The bullfighting season had just begun, and up north the city of Valencia was holding the first important bullfighting festival of the year. At Las Majadillas young calves were being put to the test, a process that can also serve as practice for toreros. The private bullring was made of whitewashed cement. There was no seating, but there were two raised platforms, one opposite the other, at twelve and six o’clock. The breeder, his wife, and a few friends visiting from Mexico stood on these. Around the ring stood tough, sunburned men wearing tweed caps and oilskin coats. They were ranch hands and bullfighting professionals, hard country folk who smelled of earth and sweat and were not invited to sit with the rich people. They had come to see Francisco Rivera Ordóñez perform with live animals, something a big crowd would be paying to see a few days hence in Valencia.

  A female calf stood in the center of the ring. It was two years old and about half the age and size of a full-grown bullfighting bull, meaning it weighed some six hundred pounds and had the same dimensions as a motorcycle. The little cow was in a state of shock. It had been released into the ring just moments before and had been confronted by a mounted horse covered in padded armor. Following its instinct, the cow had charged the horse, and just as the cow had dug its horns into the horse’s protective padding, the man riding the horse had shot a metal-pointed spear, which Hemingway referred to as a pic because there is no single Spanish word that describes it, into the cow’s withers. This was part of the test. If the cow had broken away from the horse at the pain of the pic, there would have been a mark against it, and it might have been sent to the slaughterhouse for meat. But this cow had ignored the pain and charged the horse again. As long as it performed well with Fran, it would be released into the fields, where it would mate with seed bulls to produce cattle for the ranch.

  “Hey! Hey!” Fran stalked toward the cow, speaking to it as he came. He wore the bullfighter’s standard practice uniform: leather boots, skintight trousers that rose to his breastbone and were fastened with braces, a white button-down shirt, and a dusty sweater. His head was bare. He held a bullfighting cape in his right hand. This type of cape is called a muleta, which means “crutch.” The muleta consists of a half-circle of heavy red cotton twill lined with yellow fabric. The cloth is folded over and tacked onto a short wooden stick, from which it hangs like a curtain from a rod, except the stick is so short that half the cape falls limp at one end. A muleta may be any size, but most matadors prefer the fabric of the cape to be long enough so that the end of the cloth will brush the ground when the matador holds the muleta belt-high.

/>   Fran gripped his muleta by the stick with his right hand, keeping the limp end of the cloth away from his body. He also held a lightweight practice sword in his right hand, positioned behind the cape so that its blade spread the limp end of the cloth to its full size. Cherry-red blood pooled in the gnarled black hair of the cow’s back at the place where the horseman’s spear had injured it. The cow waited, watching Fran approach. When he came within a few feet of the cow, he stopped. He was just to the left of the cow’s left horn, outside the line the animal would take if it charged straight. Fran shuffled across the cow’s face, keeping both feet on the ground, making sure his movements didn’t provoke the cow, until he’d worked himself between the cow’s horns. At this point, Fran stepped toward the cow with his left leg, so that the leg was in the direction of the cow and between the horns, while his right leg was farther from the cow and just outside its left horn.

  Fran offered the cape and shouted, “Hey!”

  The cow lowered its head, raised its tail, and sprang forward. Fran put the muleta in the cow’s face, and at this moment a kind of magical transformation happened. The flimsy cloth hanging from the stick seemed to stop the cow in its tracks. It was as though the cape had a magnetic energy that held the cow in place. Then Fran swept the cape back and the cow was tugged along, its mad charge ratcheted down to a slow-motion trot by the cape. Fran kept the red fabric just ahead of the wet muzzle and pulled the cow through a slow, slower, ever slowing and deepening arc, taking the cow past his left leg, across his belly, brushing the cow past his outthrust right leg, twisting his wrist at the end to angle the cape and bring the cow behind his back, leaving the cow as far behind him as he could make it go. This was the first pass.