Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  Their coats were sleek and shining. Four of them were black and two were a dark chestnut color. Their faces were short, with short noses and wet muzzles. The horns were as thick as a man’s fist at the base, and spread out a few inches, then turned forward and rose to sharp black tips. Their necks were long, and at the top of each neck was the bulge of tossing muscle that crests and shivers when the bull feels danger. Their backs would have reached above the waist of a tall man. Their bodies were thick and covered in sturdy knots of muscle. By comparison, their legs and hooves were delicate and thin. Their tails were long with a tassel of silky hair at the end. Each weighed more than a thousand pounds.

  “These are the bulls for Sevilla,” Reyes said. The bulls we were looking at had been earmarked for a corrida on April 14, with Fran on the card. Reyes stared at the bulls for a minute in silence. “The bull in the country is a magnificent sight, isn’t he?” he said.

  Reyes was right. When a bull entered the stone enclosure of the bullring, surrounded by the atmosphere of the city, it was an exotic and theatrical presence, a menacing emissary from nature, a circus performer sent into the modern world to excite a jaded public. But in the fields of a great ranch like Jandilla, the bulls displayed a different side of their character. They were frightening, yes, but not horrifying, because they were suited to their setting.

  As I watched them, I became aware that my window was down and there was nothing between those horns and me, and I panicked. Without thinking, I grabbed at the knob and tried to roll up my window as fast as I could. I was pumping away when Reyes grabbed my arm, stopping me short. I had made a sudden motion, and a chestnut bull with a splotch of white hair on its forehead swung its head in my direction. I froze. My face reddened and sweat beaded. The bull looked at me for a few seconds. Then it dropped its head and shook off some flies. The moment had passed, but the fear of it stayed with me. Later I realized it wasn’t the horns or the bull’s size or its power that had struck me. It was the eyes. They were cold, shark eyes.

  Before we said goodbye I asked Reyes if his years of raising bulls had given him any insight into whether the chestnut animal I had met was going to perform well in Sevilla on April 14.

  Reyes smiled. “A bull is like a melon,” he said. “You can’t tell if he is going to be sweet or bitter until you open him up.”

  Like all bullfighting bulls, the bulls of Jandilla were wild animals, in the sense that they lived in the open, took care of themselves more or less, and were too ferocious to coexist with humans in close quarters. Certainly they were as wild as any other animal in this world, where wilderness has dwindled and even the most feral creatures live constrained lives in national parks. Yet wild as they were, Spanish bullfighting bulls were also the highly refined products of human tinkering, the result of three hundred years of selective breeding designed to produce specific characteristics—although those characteristics have changed over time as bullfighting has changed.

  The people of Iberia have always killed the wild bulls that are indigenous to their land. Early humans hunted bulls for meat. But from the beginning of recorded history, the societies founded by each of the successive conquerors of Spain have also killed bulls for entertainment. The ancient Romans staged bull killings by gladiators in their arenas, and some of these spectacles may have included the use of red capes. During the Middle Ages, Arab and Christian nobles hunted bulls on horseback with the assistance of peasants on foot, and there were also occasions—most often the birth, wedding, or coronation of an important lord—when bulls were rounded up alive and killed by the nobles themselves before an audience of their peers in what we might recognize today as an early version of the corrida, though an aristocratic version that was always on horseback.

  The modern bullfight on foot arose during the eighteenth century, a time when Spain was in decline as a military and economic power and its once proud aristocracy was falling into decay. The king at the beginning of the century, the French-born Felipe V, discouraged aristocratic equestrian bullfights at his court, which caused the nobility to lose interest in performing in them. This void was filled by a new breed of bullfighters, men of humble birth who acted as paid entertainers, killing bulls on foot, with cape and sword, before large audiences drawn from all strata of society. This switch from the aristocratic to the plebeian was a symptom of a fundamental trend in Spain. At a time when western Europe looked to its aristocracies for cultural leadership, at a time of the advances in rational science and philosophy known as the Enlightenment, Spain became obsessed with bullfights, flamenco, and popular theater.

  These three newly constituted art forms had roots in antiquity. Far from being rational, scientific, or aristocratic, they were coarse, energetic, irrational, intoxicating, pagan, style-obsessed, and low class. The bullring, flamenco party, and dance hall performance gave rise to a modern Spain that developed on its own, separated from the rest of Europe by its growing tendency to look inward, by its irrelevance in world affairs, and by the physical barrier of the Pyrenees. Bullfighting was so central to this idiosyncratic development that in 1948 the noted Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset made this oft-quoted observation: “One cannot write the history of Spain from 1650 to our own time without keeping the bullfight clearly in mind.”

  Like many before and after him, Ortega y Gasset viewed bullfighting as emblematic of Spain’s singular and backward nature. There is, however, another way to look at it. As one of the first forms of mass entertainment, as an early commercial spectacle, as a triumph of popular culture, and as an art form that created national celebrities, bullfighting was one of the most advanced aspects of eighteenth-century European society, a signpost to the culture of today. The first star matador emerged in the mid-1700s. A former carpenter, Francisco Romero, along with his matador sons and grandsons, came from a hilltop town in eastern Andalucía by the name of Ronda, a town that would produce a twentieth-century torero dynasty, the Ordóñez clan.

  Traditionally, the bulls meant for bull spectacles were provided in haphazard fashion, but by the time the Romeros were getting the modern bullfight going, Spaniards were breeding wild bulls. These early breeders were among the first people in the world to practice selective breeding, keeping records of the characteristics of their animals and attempting to mate certain individuals to produce desired traits in the offspring. By the middle of the eighteenth century things had become advanced enough that one can speak of original strains or castes of bullfighting bulls. There is some controversy about how many original castes there were, five or six. But it is generally agreed that most of the bullfighting stock in Spain comes from the Vázquez, Vistahermosa, and Cabrera lines, which were founded in the eighteenth century by three gentleman breeders in the town of Utrera, just south of Sevilla.

  Don Borja’s Jandilla brand can trace its lineage back to one of those herds, the one formed by Vicente José Vázquez in the 1770s. After Don Vicente’s death, his herd passed to his children, who sold it to the bull-crazy king Fernando VII in 1830. Some twenty years later, Cristóbal Colón de la Cerda, the duke of Veragua, bought most of the late king’s herd. The duke’s name is the Spanish form of Christopher Columbus, and Colón was indeed a direct descendant of the famous explorer. The duke was equally famous for his bulls, which acquired great renown in the nineteenth century. History records a number of notable specimens, including the bull Aborrecido, who took five pics and killed two horses in San Sebastián on August 30, 1886; Regalón, who withstood six pics, killed two horses, and died fighting in Madrid on May 12, 1890; and Confitero, who took an astounding twenty-four pics in the Valencia ring on July 24,1877.

  These old accounts stress two statistics—pics received and horses killed—that are of no importance today, because of the profound ways in which bullfighting has changed as a spectacle. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the points of the picadors’ lances were rather small and their horses unprotected. This meant the first act of the bullfight was a prolonged affair, and it took
many pics and often the deaths of a few horses to wear down a single bull. During this era, the matador’s muleta was seen as a functional tool used to give a few choppy passes to get the bull into position for killing. But in the 1920s the horses were given padding, and over the ensuing decades the standard pic was made bigger and more destructive, thus shortening the first act of the corrida to a small number of pics. At the same time, matadors improved and embellished their muleta technique, to the point that the cape work with the muleta replaced the act of the horses as the focal point of the spectacle.

  As the bullfight changed, so did the kind of bull desired by audiences and bullfighters. Old bullfighting required a big, tough animal that was hard to dominate and could endure the pain of repeated pics, whereas modern bullfighting called for a bull with speed, good eyesight (to see the cape), a taste for charging repeatedly, the stamina to keep charging, and the type of personality that would bend to the dominating will of the matador.

  In 1910, the heir of the old duke of Veragua sold his cattle, which ended up in the hands of Juan Pedro Domecq y Núñez de Villavicencio, the founder of the Domecq bull-breeding dynasty. Juan Pedro Domecq moved his new cattle to his ranch, Jandilla, and died in 1937, leaving his land and bulls to his son, Juan Pedro Domecq y Díez. It was this Juan Pedro who developed the Domecq strain of bull, which has taken over contemporary bullfighting. After Juan Pedro Domecq y Díez died, his herd was distributed among many heirs, and today there are Domecqs sending bulls to top bullrings under various brands: El Torero, Torrestrella, Marques de Domecq, Santiago Domecq, Juan Pedro Domecq, Zalduendo, Martelilla, and Jandilla. The owners of Domecq bulls have also been more than willing to sell their animals to other breeders, so that today just about forty percent of all bulls sent to the ring are related somehow to Juan Pedro’s original herd.

  Domecq bulls are popular for a simple reason: they make it easy on matadors. Since the early days there have been two basic philosophies of bull breeding. Some breeders create bulls to help bullfighters, while other breeders produce bulls to make life harder for them. The so-called hard bulls are bred large and tall with wide horns, to make it difficult for toreros to work near them. These animals are less likely to follow the cape, less likely to charge straight, more likely to go on the defensive, and more likely to learn that the cape is a trick and to go gunning for the man. The so-called easy bulls are bred lower to the ground, smaller, with smaller horns. They are more likely to concentrate on the cape, charging it straight and true and never catching on that there is a man manipulating that cape.

  There are different types of Domecq bulls, and the Jandilla ranch is known for producing the fiercest animals among the various Domecq herds. Still, according to Julio Fernandez, the bull geneticist for the Unión de Criadores de Toros de Lidia, which is the top association of breeders, the Domecq bull on the whole is the ideal matador-friendly bull. Domecq animals are short of stature and long-necked, which means that when they drop their heads following the punishment of the pics, they carry their horns low to the ground and away from the matador’s vital organs. More important, Domecq bulls are said to “grow” as the bullfight progresses, attacking the cape with vigor and stamina, charging and charging again, allowing matadors to shine. “These bulls have been adapted well to the modern bullfight,” Fernandez said. “They give the toreros the type of bullfight that toreros want.”

  Like most modern matadors, Fran dreamed of facing the ideal modern bull, a creature that charged repeatedly, straight and true, with enough personality to evoke a sense of fear in the audience. Sadly, however, such bulls rarely appeared. Despite the efforts of Spain’s best breeders, the average bullfighting bull fell short of ideal. Some bulls were ugly, skinny, small, or had twisted and malformed horns. Some were too myopic to see the cape. Some bulls fell down from having weak legs. Some bulls charged but hooked at the matador, while others stopped in the middle of each pass. Some refused to charge, backing up against the fence and defending themselves. Others sat down in the sand and mooed. There was also a measure of cheating when it came to bulls. Undersized bulls were stuffed with grain at the last minute to bring them up to the legal weight minimum for appearing in proper corridas, and this produced sluggish animals that tended to fall. A picador could ruin a good bull by punishing it too severely, leaning too hard on the pic or shooting it back on the bull’s spine.

  Another deception was horn-shaving. A few days before the corrida, the bull would be immobilized, often in the crate used to truck it to the arena. Then someone would saw a few inches off the end of its horns, filing what was left to give them points again and dyeing them black so they looked like normal horns. Many aficionados believe that a bull with shaved horns is handicapped, because its sense of the distance it needs to strike a target is thrown off by a few inches, and because the shaved horn will be tender the way a human nail is when it has been trimmed too close. The bull world had suffered through a few horn-shaving scandals, notably in the 1950s, when the practice was revealed to be widespread. But even more recently horn-shaving was indifferently policed, and it was generally thought that some bulls used in provincial rings had doctored horns. Nevertheless, if bulls were being shaved, it did not seem to be making bullfighting any less dangerous. The rate of injury to bullfighters had not fallen over many years.

  In the end, the biggest frustration for a matador was coming to a bullfight hoping to give a great performance, only to be confronted with animals that rendered such a performance impossible. It was a constant problem, one that was magnified many times over when the bullfight was an important one, like Fran’s upcoming corrida in Sevilla, Fran’s hometown and the capital of the bull world. “You have many days and nights thinking about what is going to happen in Sevilla,” Fran said, “looking forward to Sevilla, working hard, waking up early in the morning to practice. Then you go to Sevilla and the bull comes out and says, ‘No!’ Among bullfighters, we say many times, ‘Man proposes, God disposes, and the bull discomposes.’”

  7

  Afternoons of Responsibility

  By mid-April the bullfighting season was six weeks old and Fran had appeared in eight corridas, which put him fourth on the escalafón (leader board) of active matadors. The escalafón comes out weekly in the two national bullfighting magazines, 6 Toros 6, published in Madrid, and Aplausos, published in Valencia. But the escalafón isn’t a league standing or world ranking in the sports sense of those terms, because there is no National Bullfighting League or Professional Bullfighters’ Tour to oversee or regulate an official ranking. Instead the escalafón is more like a bestseller list. It ranks matadors solely by how many bullfights they’ve performed in during the current season, the theory being that the best matador is the one who gets the most offers of work.

  The idea that the best matador is the one who works the most comes from the fact that work has always been scarce for matadors, something the escalafón illustrates with eloquence. The final escalafón of the season in question showed that about two hundred matadors had appeared at least once during the preceding eight months. But approximately half of those matadors had performed fewer than five times, and only twenty—the group at the very top—had performed more than forty or fifty times. The reality was that no more than forty matadors in Spain worked with any regularity. The rest of them spent their days practicing and waiting, or working at other jobs. One fairly successful matador named Pepin Jiménez—he performed thirty times that season—was also a middle school math teacher.

  It is generally true that the best matadors in Spain at any given time are the top forty on the escalafón, but not exactly true. Some matadors worked a lot because fans loved them, while the elite aficionados and critics despised them. Some matadors who weren’t fan favorites worked because their apoderados were well connected, or they sold their services cheaply, or they weren’t picky about performing in low-end bullrings. There were matadors who could work as much as they wanted but kept their number of performances small because of a
nagging injury, or fear, or the simple choice to shoot for quality of performance over quantity. As in most art forms, in bullfighting there was no direct correlation between popularity and quality.

  In addition to number of corridas performed, the escalafón also lists the number of ears and tails cut by each matador—another misleading statistic. Cutting ears and tails is a tangible way for a matador to prove he can impress audiences, but the value of those ears depends on where they were won, since ears cut in small-town bullrings are worth much less than those cut in the big arenas. In any event, Fran, who’d cut eleven ears and a tail in his eight performances that season, was happy to be among the top five matadors on the escalafón so early in the year—and his good showing reinforced the growing impression that he was on his way back to glory.

  It was all very encouraging, but Fran knew that escalafón rankings, ears, and tails, were not what he needed to reestablish his reputation. Those things would all take care of themselves if only he could rack up a few triumphs in the very top ferias. Just as the leading professional golfers and tennis players are judged by their performances in the handful of so-called major or grand-slam tournaments, so matadors are judged by what they do in the small number of prestigious ferias. These blue-chip corridas are known among bullfighters as “afternoons of responsibility,” because in order to succeed in them a matador takes on the heavy burden of performing without cutting corners, facing every danger head-on. Or as Fran’s grandfather put it: “A bullfighter who really wants to be great has to not worry about his life four or five days a year.” Those days are the afternoons of responsibility.