Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  These charged afternoons came during the top ferias, which comprised less than a tenth of the 850 corridas that would be mounted that season, and which were spread over the eight-month bullfighting calendar. From a matador’s perspective, the bullfighting season was divided into three parts. During part one—March, April, and May—there were few corridas, but the most important ferias took place then. During part two—June and July—the frequency of corridas increased, but aside from Pamplona and Valencia, there were few prestige ferias. Part three—August and September—was the high season, when there were so many ferias of all degrees of prestige that the bullfighters lived in their vans, driving night after night from corrida to corrida until October, when the season would end with a diminishing trickle of dates.

  The crucial ferias were those of Valencia in March, Sevilla in April, Madrid in May, Pamplona and Valencia in July, Bilbao in August, and Zaragoza in October. But head and shoulders above the rest were Madrid, first, and then Sevilla. Why were some ferias more important than others? There is no logical explanation. It was more or less a matter of tradition. In many ways, though not in all, bullfighting was as tradition-bound as anything that has survived into the modern world. Why did the two top ferias occur at the beginning of the season rather than as a climax at season’s end? Tradition. Why were toreros always clean-shaven? Tradition. Why did matadors employ two picadors when one was enough? Tradition. Why did matadors take their hats off when performing with the muleta at the end of the bullfight? Well, you get the picture.

  As soon as Fran plunged his sword into the back of his second bull in Valencia, washed the bull’s blood off his hands, and walked out of the arena, he began to dream about the two corridas he was contracted for in Sevilla. More than anywhere else, Sevilla was Fran’s home. He had lived there much of his life, married there, raised his daughter there, and lived his greatest bullfighting triumphs in the city’s ring. Sevilla was where Fran’s father was buried. His grandfather had lived in a flat in a small building on a short alley—the famed Calle Iris—that ends at the wall of the bullring. The very stones of Sevilla reminded Fran of who he was.

  But it wasn’t just bullfighting history or family tradition that made Fran love bullfighting in Sevilla so much. It was the atmosphere of the city’s magnificent and ancient bullring during the April feria. Sevilla is at the center of the greatest section of bull-breeding country in Spain, and so it is home to more toreros, breeders, and other bullfighting professionals than any other city in Spain, and most of the people who attend the April bullfights there have some connection by trade, blood, or friendship to the bull business. For this reason, the crowd in the Sevilla ring demands good bullfighting and knows good bullfighting and treats events in the ring with a kind of reverence that is unusual, if not singular, among bullfighting audiences.

  During the Sevilla fair, people come to the corridas dressed up: men in suits, women in their best ensembles. In Sevilla they sit in rapt silence, watching events unfold with the intensity of an opera audience on opening night—until something good happens, and then the Sevillanos erupt into cascades of applause and olés, and the bullring band plays, and the ring is awash in alegría, that special kind of wild joy that is native to southern Spain. Above all, it was this mixture of refinement and alegría that made Fran love Sevilla so. “The way the people in Sevilla feel the bullfight is different than in any other place,” he said. “In Sevilla you have to do things better, because all the bullfighting world is here.”

  Sevilla is the largest and most important city in southern Spain and the capital of Andalucía. Its skyline is dominated by an expanse of small whitewashed buildings that honeycomb out from the colossal Gothic cathedral—carved from a medieval mosque—and by the Giralda, the cathedral’s bell tower, which in the Middle Ages was used by muezzins to call the Muslim faithful to prayer. On the cathedral’s eastern flank is a labyrinth of whitewashed houses, ramshackle palaces, broken-down churches, and tiny squares. This was the Jewish quarter until 1492, when Columbus sailed for the Americas and the heroic “Catholic king and queen,” Ferdinand and Isabella, expelled the Jews from Spain. Today this area is called Barrio de Santa Cruz, the Neighborhood of the Holy Cross, as if the Jews had never existed.

  To the west of the cathedral is the Arenal, a district of restaurants and inns. The Arenal is bound by the curving sweep of the Guadalquivir River and the avenue named Paseo Cristóbal Colón, which runs along the water. Across the river is Triana, the old Gypsy quarter, which has been the birthplace of more famous matadors than any neighborhood in the world. Bullfighting, like its sister art flamenco music, has always been associated with Gypsies and Gypsy culture. Some of the most famous matadors, including Joselito, were Gypsies; Fran himself had Gypsy blood. From the bridge that joins Triana to the Arenal, the Guadalquivir washes south and west through a fertile plain—past Utrera, where the first bullfighting bulls were raised—some seventy miles before it spills into the Atlantic Ocean at Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

  Just down from the Triana Bridge, on the cathedral side of the river, is an elegant wedding cake of a building—whitewashed with ocher trim and an austere yet beautiful main gate decorated in marble. At first sight, this building looks as if it might be a Baroque church or the palace of a cardinal or prince. In fact, it is the most storied bullring in the world, the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla. The Maestranza, as it is known, is owned by the Maestranza, an order of nobility dedicated to horsemanship. These aristocrats built the ring in 1761 and have refurbished it several times over the centuries. The Maestranza may not be the most important ring in Spain—that title would surely go to the monumental ring in Madrid—but in many ways it is closest to the hearts of bullfighters, for its age, its beauty, its location, and the fact that every great matador in history has performed there.

  No two bullrings are alike, but the Maestranza has a number of striking peculiarities. It is one of the oldest rings in Spain, and it isn’t a true circle: it bulges out at one point, perhaps because of an eighteenth-century engineering glitch. The sand used on the arena floor comes from a special quarry and is the rich golden shade found so often in bullfight paintings and so rarely in life. The rows of seats end in a section that’s covered by a roof of antique white, black, and blue tiles and supported by a colonnade of mismatched marble columns. A domed chapel belonging to the Maestranza club sits alongside the ring, and the ring’s back façade is encrusted with houses that have been there for ages. The overall effect of the ring and its setting by the river, with the Giralda bell tower peeking over it in the distance, is stunning day or night.

  Eleven months a year Sevilla is a lazy and quiet place, more like a country town than a city of eight hundred thousand people. But each spring the regular life of Sevilla stops in its tracks while its citizens pitch themselves into six weeks of celebrations, sacred and profane. First comes the observance of Semana Santa (Holy Week), the week that leads up to Easter. During this time the streets fill to bursting with tourists and locals, who come out to watch religious brotherhoods and clubs on parade, carrying on their shoulders heavy platforms topped with statues of saints and scenes from the Bible. The atmosphere is laden with religiosity and repentance, and it is difficult to get around or find a hotel room.

  Then, after about a fortnight’s break, the two-week Feria de Abril begins. This is the fanciest, most insular and elitist feria in Spain. Like many fairs in Andalucía, the action is not in town but on the outskirts, at a fairground. Here locals set up large pavilions called casetas, which are constructed on the same patch of ground each year, along streets named after famous bullfighters. The casetas range in size from singlefamily affairs, large enough to accommodate a dinner party, to gigantic structures erected by businesses, clubs, political parties, and unions. No matter what the size, the standard caseta consists of an eating area, a bar, a kitchen, and a stage of some sort with a speaker system. Twenty-four hours a day, the casetas are full of dancing, chatting, smoking, and laught
er. But the parties are by invitation only, and can be rather off-putting for tourists and other outsiders.

  The month of April was a wet one that year, but Sevilla was at its prettiest in time for the fair. The streets had been washed clean by the rains, and the cobblestones were black and slick. The orange trees that line many of the city’s sidewalks were in bloom, and the sweet citrus smell mingled in the evening air with the scents of good cigars, fruity red wine, horse manure, and food frying in a thousand kitchens. Spaniards had come from around the country, and there was a strong foreign contingent: mostly French, with some Germans, Italians, British, and Americans, South and North. Those who knew how to behave as the locals do dressed formally or in traditional feria outfits: Spanish cowboy suits for men and frilly polka-dot flamenco dresses for women, their hair pinned up with tortoiseshell combs, silk shawls covering their bare shoulders, red carnations behind their ears.

  The city woke up late during feria and took its time getting started. Nothing happened before noon. Lunch was taken after two. Tourists ate in restaurants or their hotels. Sevillanos and their guests dined at home or in the casetas. In the afternoons it was nice to walk down to the fairgrounds and watch the Andalucían gentlemen—can there be any finer-looking men anywhere?—riding their Arabian chargers. Dressed in tight-fitting cowboy suits, their flat-topped hats tilted at a rakish angle, young ladies riding sidesaddle behind them, these caballeros cantered about, showing themselves off, stopping at this caseta or that to lean over their saddles and accept a cool cup of sherry from an equestrian bar. Mixed in with the caballeros were the gleaming carriages of the local nobility, many of the carriages centuries old, attended by footmen in livery and drawn by teams of horses.

  At half past five, the focus of the city turned away from the fair for a few hours and shifted to the area of the bullring. About this time the bars near the ring began to do a brisk trade in cold beer, gin and tonic, and whiskey on ice. Plates of boiled shrimp and plates of sliced ham and nibbles of cheese and olives made their merry way around. By six the crush was tremendous. People hugged and kissed and smoked and jostled. There was a lot of talk about the separation of Fran and Eugenia. (Semana declared the estranged couple to be the “stars of the feria.”) Sellers of nuts, candy, cigars, and water bottles hawked their wares alongside vendors of bullfighters’ pictures, posters, books, videos, and other bric-a-brac. Big television trucks rumbled and coughed, generating power and gearing up to broadcast the corrida across the country. It was the best moment of the day, the time of anticipation before the start of an afternoon of responsibility.

  8

  The Melons Opened

  Sevilla, April 14. Fran leaned against the dusty brick wall of the tunnel leading to the bullring. He looked ill. His face was washed out. His lips clenched in a bloodless scowl. His eyes were clouded and unfocused. Just above him, the Maestranza was filling with the best people of Sevilla and elite aficionados worldwide. It was six-thirty on a Sunday evening and the eleventh corrida of the feria was about to begin. The people in the stands were festive, as they should be in Sevilla at fair time. But it had rained all day and the air was still damp, and the ring servants used wooden rakes to push pools of water into drains along the margins of the sand and dumped dry sand over the wettest patches.

  Down in the tunnel, the bullfighters stood around smoking cigarettes and adjusting the heavy, embroidered capes they wore for the opening parade. Federico Arnás, the roving reporter for Via Digital, the cable network that was broadcasting the bullfight to its subscribers, pushed his way through to where Fran was standing. “Today we have bulls from the ranch of Jandilla,” Arnás said into the camera in front of him. Then he turned to Fran and stuck a microphone in his face. “At the very least, it has to give you some comfort to think you will be performing with the same bulls that you did so well with last month in Valencia.”

  “Jandilla is a ranch that I like very much,” Fran replied in a dry whisper. “It produces bulls that are very good for my style. But, well, Sevilla is very hard. It is a hard place. But you have to hold your head up and move forward.”

  Arnás stepped away from Fran and looked into the camera, waiting for a comment from his colleague in a booth in the stands. “It’s a pretty tense atmosphere down there,” said the disembodied voice.

  “Oh, yes,” Arnás said. “You can almost feel the nerves of the bullfighters. But look, this is a feria of high responsibility, and you always feel this kind of tension before a corrida in a Sevilla, or a Madrid, or a Pamplona, or a Bilbao.”

  “What a hard job we have,” said the voice. “Going down and asking these bullfighters questions at moments when they are so nervous they can barely speak.”

  Just then, a splendidly turned out Andalucían gentleman in a crisp blue suit, white shirt, and pink necktie made his way down to a good seat near the sand. This was Don Borja Domecq, the proprietor of Jandilla. Don Borja seemed calm and cool as he shook hands here and there with friends and admirers. But inside he was almost as agitated as the matadors beneath him. Each time a breeder’s bulls appear in a bullfight, especially in a ring like Sevilla’s, that breeder’s reputation is on the line. After each bull is killed the audience has a chance to whistle and jeer or applaud it, and the breeder, who is usually in the ring at the time, will get the message.

  “I am as nervous as can be before a corrida,” Don Borja said. “The bulls are a vehicle for the matador to triumph with, and the public have paid their money to see this and enjoy themselves. If the bulls are not up to the mark, it’s a disaster for all concerned.”

  The first bull was named Recitador. The program said it was four years and two months old, was dark chestnut in color, and weighed about 1,260 pounds. Recitador dashed out of the bullpen and attacked the capote of the veteran matador José Ortega Cano. The bull took two pics, pushing hard against the horse on the first encounter but jumped away from the pain of the spear on the second encounter. The bull behaved well during the act of the banderillas, running at the toreros and lowering its head. But it arrived at the final act of the bullfight a bit winded, becoming more and more lethargic under Ortega Cano’s cape work. When Recitador began pulling up and stopping in the middle of each pass, Ortega Cano lined up and killed it.

  When the attendants hitched the bull to the mule team and dragged it from the ring, the audience offered up some polite applause—faint praise for Don Borja, who sat in his seat studying a piece of paper in his lap. He’d been taking notes during the performance, and now he summed up the bull for the records of his ranch. On the plus side, Recitador had charged the capote well and had been strong during the first pic. On the minus side, the bull had broken away from the second pic and lacked the energy to charge well during the final act of the muleta. On a scale of one to ten, Don Borja gave Recitador a seven for bravura, which meant ferocity and willingness to charge. He gave the bull another seven for what he called toreabilidad, “bullfightability,” meaning the bull’s capacity to help the matador by lowering its head and following the cape without hooking left or right. In Don Borja’s mind, Recitador had been a good bull overall. Not great, but good.

  The chestnut bull with the splotch of lighter fur on its forehead, the one that had scared me in the fields of Jandilla, was Fran’s first. The bull’s name was Radiante, four years and three months old, weighing some 1,240 pounds. Radiante came out in sluggish fashion and meandered along the fence surrounding the ring, only to perk up when Fran offered it the cape. Radiante did charge well in the horses and the banderillas, but deteriorated in the third of the muleta, refusing to lower its head and cutting many of its passes short. This bad characteristic seemed to grow worse during the three series of right-handed muleta passes Fran managed to coax out of the bull, and by the time he tried a few left-handed passes, Radiante was all but immobile and therefore useless. Fran killed with a forceful sword thrust and received some applause.

  Don Borja added up his impressions. The bull had run well until the end, when i
ts charge had fallen off. He gave Radiante a six for bravery and a four for bullfightability. Not a good bull.

  The third bull was Vicioso: black, 1,230 pounds, four years and three months old. It was the first bull of the third matador, a young Madrileño named Eugenio de Mora. Vicioso was a great bull. It charged the capote with energy and class, lowered its head and pushed under the pics, and was everything a matador could ask for in the muleta. It attacked long and hard and charged with rhythm, allowing de Mora to unfurl a full repertoire of linked passes. The audience got aroused. The band played. But just when everything seemed to be going de Mora’s way, Vicioso displayed a touch of the bad humor of its two cousins who’d died before it, and hooked into de Mora’s leg.

  The matador jerked skyward and thudded to the ground. The bull hit him again, knocking him for a somersault, then sliced its horn into his right buttock. When de Mora finally got to his feet, blood was welling through the fabric of his costume. His banderilleros begged him to go to the infirmary, where the doctors were already preparing to deal with the wounds, but de Mora shook them off, gave the bull a few more passes, and killed it with a single sword, winning a hard-earned ear. Don Borja gave the bull a six for bravery and a nine for bullfightability. When all was said and done, Vicioso was the best bull of the corrida. That was of little comfort to de Mora, however, who went off to the infirmary, not to return that day.

  Ortega Cano’s second bull of the afternoon, the fourth of the bullfight, was named Pomelo. It was black, four years and three months old, and weighed in at around 1,240 pounds. Pomelo took a good initial rush at the capote, but showed an unfortunate desire to wander off at the end of each pass rather than wheel around and come back for more. The bull pressed on under the pain of the horseman’s lance, but reverted to its escapist ways in banderillas. Like Recitador before him, Pomelo began cutting his charges short during the final act, making it hard for Ortega Cano to link his passes. The matador seemed unnerved by the bull, and killed it.