And the amazing thing was, the bullfighting people ate it all up, relishing behavior in foreign fans they would have scorned had it come from Spaniards. But then Spain is a hierarchical country and the foreigners occupied a position comfortably outside the recognized hierarchy, and could therefore get away with strange behavior. Furthermore, as practitioners of a narrow folk art, bullfighters and bull breeders were always starved for recognition beyond the borders of their homeland.
As a non-Spaniard of Spanish sensibility, Noël was somewhat embarrassed by the behavior of his fellow non-Spanish aficionados. But as a non-Spaniard, he couldn’t resist dabbling himself. Noël’s great hero was Fran’s grandfather Antonio Ordóñez, and Noël was proud that he and Don Antonio had exchanged letters and always greeted each other in bullrings. Noël was in the audience for Fran’s historic debut in Sevilla, and given Noël’s love for Don Antonio, it took him only seconds to fall for Fran. That first season, Noël attended eighty of Fran’s ninety corridas, and eventually Fran and his cuadrilla began to notice Noël’s face in the stands each afternoon. The two men met during Fran’s second season, in the lobby of some provincial hotel. They ate dinner together and became friends. Kind of.
It was not a friendship of equals, because it depended on Noël’s pursuit of Fran. Noël had managed to attend about four hundred of the six hundred bullfights Fran had participated in, but Noël maintained a certain formality around Fran. Noël rarely dropped by Fran’s hotel rooms, saving that honor for special occasions, and when he did say hello he was careful not to act as though he and Fran were close. For his part, Fran tended to treat Noël with amused detachment. But he showed great respect for Noël’s knowledge of bullfighting; he was always careful to refer to Noël as his “friend,” something he did not do with everyone; and he showed genuine concern about Noël’s health. Fran honored Noël each year by inviting him to the end-of-season dinner he gave for his traveling crew.
“I know Noël doesn’t call me so often because he doesn’t want to put me in a bad position,” Fran explained. “But he is a friend of mine, so he doesn’t have to call me all the time.”
Noël Chandler was a tall man and well made. His head was large, oval, and bald, with a wreath of shaggy black hair. A bushy M-shaped brow dominated his face. Beneath this hairy cornice, each feature seemed to sag somewhat into the feature beneath. The eyes drooped into a downward-turning nose, which hung over a mouth that frowned its way to a strong chin. It was a face that might have given the impression that its owner was a timid, melancholy fellow, were it not for the ready smile that flashed in the mouth and the eyes, and the fierce crosshatched scars on each cheek, trophies of violent work done in Her Majesty’s West Indies Regiment and on the rugby field. Seeing Noël on a fine spring morning in Madrid, happy and fit, you would not believe he was sixty-eight years old.
That afternoon Noël had to go see his scalper, whom I will call El Grande. “Why does my life revolve around this man?” Noël said.
El Grande and Noël did plenty of business, because the Madrid feria was the longest and most varied bullfight fair of the season, a marathon bull slaughter that ran from May 11 to June 8 and encompassed twenty-four regular corridas, three novilladas, and three corridas de rejones—thirty events in all, twenty-nine of them back-to-back. Noël planned to attend most of them, and as it happened had inherited the season pass of a journalist friend who was too ill with cancer to use it. But the pass was only a single seat, and Noël had promised to buy tickets for various friends from out of town, and that was where El Grande came in.
Each time Noël needed tickets from El Grande, he followed the same routine. Noël lived in the center of Madrid, in the old part of the city known as the Madrid of the Austrians, after the Hapsburg kings who ruled Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Making his way through tight, winding streets barely wide enough for cars, past spired churches and dusty little shops, Noël walked to the Plaza Santa Ana, a large square lined with tapas bars. On the square was an unassuming restaurant that was a notorious taurine hangout. (Any person, place, or thing related to bullfighting can be described as taurino in Spanish, taurine in English.)
Once inside, Noël went to the bar, ordered his first beer of the day, and waited. (Like many people who follow the bulls, Noël was a committed and accomplished consumer of alcohol.) At around two-thirty, the doors of the bar swung open and in marched a phalanx of about ten seedy-looking men engrossed in some argument, shouting theatrically, shoving and gesturing at one another, filling the small bar with their presence. These men were involved in the resale of bullfight tickets. They were part of a loose gray market comprising legitimate brokers dealing in tickets with a government-sanctioned twenty percent markup, scalpers who sold whatever tickets they could scrounge, and people who did a bit of both. At the center of this group was a tall, aging gray man in a tall, aging gray suit. He was bald and had the barrel chest and ham-hock fists and megaphone voice of an army drill sergeant. This was El Grande.
There was no way for Noël and El Grande to miss each other in that small bar, but El Grande made a great show of ignoring Noël, and Noël did not get up from his seat. Five or ten minutes passed. Finally Grande looked around, pretended he’d suddenly noticed Noël, rushed over, and clapped him on the back. “Ah, No-ayyyl,” Grande shouted in his howitzer voice. “How’s it going?” Grande insisted on buying Noël a glass of wine, and he launched into a discussion of his favorite topic, which was his own honesty and forthrightness.
“We are old friends, aren’t we?” said Grande with a grin.
“Yes, we are,” agreed a much less enthusiastic Noël.
“I always give you the best seats, and for good prices,” Grande continued. “I never make an excessive profit on my friends.”
“No, no, you always are very kind.”
“Well, you see, I am from Aragón . . .”
Aragón is a landlocked region in the foothills of the Pyrenees, on Spain’s border with France. Aragón is famous for being windy and sparsely populated, for the terrible battles fought there during the Spanish Civil War, for being the birthplace of the painter and printmaker Francisco Goya, and for breeding the most honest people in Spain—a bit of folk wisdom that has wider currency in Aragón than anywhere else.
After a half hour of everyone’s life had ticked away, after the ignoring, the drink-buying, and the chatting, El Grande stopped and said, “So, you want some tickets for the corrida today?” This was a rhetorical question, since Noël had given Grande a wish list of tickets for each corrida of the feria some weeks before. But Grande liked to hear again what Noël wanted. So Noël ran through the information and Grande took out a sheet of paper and made extensive notes. Then he extracted a wad of crumpled tickets from somewhere within the folds of his suit, counted out the number and type Noël had requested, and pressed them into Noël’s hands.
The process was nearly over, but not quite. Because at that very moment, when a price should have been set and money exchanged, Grande suddenly walked away from Noël and rejoined his pals. Noël went back to the bar. Time passed. Again Grande made a show of rediscovering Noël. Again he clapped him on the back. Again a glass of wine was shared. Then, and only then, did Noël ask for a price, and Grande told him, but briskly, as though the naming of a price and the proffer of money were a dirty piece of business and a distraction from a lovely afternoon’s meeting between old friends.
Noël could now return home. It was exhausting, but he had to do it every time he wanted tickets, because El Grande sold only day by day. This was an involved type of relationship to have with a scalper, but it came out of El Grande’s sense of personal honor. Personal honor is still an important thing in Spain, and it colors most dealings between people. Spanish culture is innately aristocratic. As one writer famously said, in Spain even taxi drivers behave like dukes. This means that no one in Spain will admit to doing anything for money alone. That would be unseemly. Work may be done for pride, for artistry, t
o strengthen bonds of kinship and friendship, to support society, and to uphold tradition. But it is never done solely for profit. El Grande was a scalper, and one supposes he did it for the money. Why else scalp tickets? To maintain his sense of honor, however, he felt the need to act as if he and his clients were old friends who happened to run into each other at their favorite bar, shared a few drinks, and, oh yeah, bought and sold tickets.
One day during that feria, Grande and Noël were in the middle of their ritual when a slender man dressed in a slick suit and coifed like a game-show host interrupted the proceedings. This was a man I’ll call El Cabello, a rival scalper who dropped into El Grande’s bar on a break from his usual post in another taurine hangout on the Plaza Santa Ana. When El Cabello saw El Grande with Noël, he came up and shot both of them an angry stare. Immediately El Grande glared back.
“Noël,” said El Cabello, who looked hurt that Noël wasn’t buying from him, “we’ve known each other for thirty years, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” Noël replied, “we have.”
This was a direct challenge to El Grande, who couldn’t let it stand. (Honor!)
“Well, I’ve known Noël for twenty-nine years myself,” Grande insisted.
El Cabello shot Noël a sharp look, as if to say, “Is this true?”
Grande stared back at Cabello, as if to reply, “You bet it is.”
Noël was besieged on two fronts. Cabello was right on the facts. Grande was doing a bit of exaggerating. But Noël wanted to keep El Grande in his good graces, because his sense of honor led him to charge comparatively little for his tickets, usually no more than the twenty percent markup. Whereas El Cabello was somewhat less encumbered in the Spanish-honor department and charged as much as he thought he could get. Later that day, Noël told an anecdote about El Cabello. One afternoon Noël was walking outside the bullring of some Spanish town when Cabello drove into view at the wheel of an enormous, shiny new Mercedes-Benz.
“That’s a nice car you have there, Cabello,” said Noël, not without a trace of condescension.
Cabello pulled the big car alongside Noël and leaned out of the driver-side window.
“Do you like it?” Cabello asked.
“Yes, very much.”
“That’s good,” Cabello said, “because you paid for it.”
10
Sun and Shadow
Madrid comes as a disappointment to the casual visitor. Its streets are congested with traffic. Its people can be gruff and unfriendly. The weather is almost always too hot or too cold. Most of all, Madrid doesn’t look like the tourist’s idea of a European capital. The predominant architectural style is modern and utilitarian. This is partly due to the fact that Madrid is a young city by European standards, not much older than Boston or New York, and so it lacks the quantity of beautiful and venerable buildings that adorn other Old World capitals. It is also due to the horrible damage Madrid suffered in the fierce fighting of the Spanish Civil War and to the rampant development carried out by the right-wing dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, which lasted from 1939 until Franco’s death in 1975.
Nevertheless, once a visitor knows Spain, he can’t help loving Madrid, which manages to be the most cosmopolitan city in the country while reflecting the enduring essence of the Spanish people and their culture. Madrid is a desert town. It sits more than two thousand feet above sea level, atop the high Spanish meseta. The summers are ghastly hot, but summer nights are cool and the outdoor cafés stay open till dawn. The winters can be freezing, but the air is crisp and clear on cold days and the snowy mountains of the Sierra Guadarrama are visible in the distance. Madrid may be a young city with little indigenous culture in comparison to a place like Sevilla, but all of Spain is in Madrid, in its museums, its churches, its royal palaces, in its restaurants, and even in its people, a grand mix of immigrants from across the country.
Most cities come to a halt during their ferias, but not Madrid. The city is too big and too obsessed with business to slow down for the annual Feria de San Isidro. During the fair—which is dedicated to the local patron saint, a peasant who saw a vision—the city government sponsors exhibitions and performances at various venues. But apart from the deafening concerts in the city’s vast main square, the Plaza Mayor, it is hard to see much evidence of a feria around town. Executives and secretaries continue to fill the bars for their traditional eleven o’clock breakfast break. Rich ladies go on shopping in the Salamanca neighborhood. Families stroll the Retiro Park. Ministers debate in parliament. Lines form to see the paintings by Titian, Rubens, Bosch, Velazquez, and Goya in the Prado Museum, and tourists and students wander the tapas bars in the old town.
Madrid’s feria is most strongly felt at the bullring, the Plaza de Toros Monumental de las Ventas de Espiritu Santo. Las Ventas, as it is known, opened for business in 1931. It seats twenty-three thousand people and is the largest bullring in Spain. (The largest in the world is Plaza Mexico, the forty-five-thousand-seat monstrosity in Mexico City.) Las Ventas is also the most prestigious ring in the world. A bullfighter who has taken the alternativa in another ring must repeat the ceremony the next time he performs in Madrid, to “confirm” his status as a matador. Despite its renown, most toreros dread appearing in Las Ventas, and would avoid it if they could, because it is an uncomfortable place to work. The wind gusts constantly on the arena floor, threatening to blow the bullfighters’ capes in the air, exposing their bodies; the bulls purchased for corridas there are always the largest and meanest available.
But the worst thing about Las Ventas, from the torero’s perspective, is the crowd. It is a big-city crowd, the kind that revels in its reputation for being knowledgeable and demanding. On an average day, a Madrid audience ranges in emotion from total indifference to raging hostility. Fran once said the people in Madrid don’t come to the bullring for enjoyment, they come to give matadors a final exam. It is emblematic of the Las Ventas attitude that it is one of the only rings in Spain where the band doesn’t play when a matador is doing well. In Madrid, music is seen as a frivolity. The bullfight may be an art form in the rest of Spain, but in the capital it is a bloody struggle, and the fans make it that way. Said Fran: “In Madrid you fight with the wind, you fight with the bulls, you fight with the people.” Apart from its scale and the roughness of its fans, however, Las Ventas is a typical bullring. It consists of a circular stadium surrounded by outbuildings, which include corrals for the bulls, stables for the drag mules and the picadors’ horses, an infirmary, and a chapel for the toreros to pray in. (By law, all bullrings must have chapels.) Like most Spanish rings, Las Ventas is equipped with an aging sound system that is almost never used—the music is provided by an unamplified band, there is no electronic scoreboard, and the interior of the ring is devoid of advertising. There is no law prohibiting advertising in bullrings, but by tradition the important rings refrain from spoiling the atmosphere with billboards. Bullrings in Latin America are much less fastidious on this front.
As in all bullrings, the sanded floor of Las Ventas is painted with two concentric circles, the first circle about seven and a half yards in from the fence that surrounds the ring, the second some ten yards farther in. These circles divide the sand into a three-ringed bull’s-eye pattern, which provides some visual order to the geography of what would otherwise be featureless, and helps the picadors to correctly position their horses when receiving the bull’s charge. The outer band of sand, between the fence and the first painted circle, is called las tablas. The narrow middle band is los tercios. The area generally corresponding to the inner circle is los medios.
The wooden fence around the sand is called the barrera. It is about five feet high and made of thick red-painted wooden planks set into grooved stone posts. A low, white-painted step runs along the base of the fence, inside and out. This gives the bullfighters a toehold when they need to vault in or out of the ring under duress. For more relaxed entries and exits, the barrera is broken by a series of narrow openings, each
with a section of fencing set about a foot in front of it, leaving enough space for a man and not enough for a bull. These protected openings are known as burladeros, from the Spanish word that means “to trick” or “to joke.” Between the barrera and the first row of seats is the passageway called the callejón.
Until the eighteenth century, bullfights mostly took place in city squares and palace courtyards, which may be why the Spanish name for bullring is plaza de toros, simply an open space in which bullfights are held. In Madrid corridas were mounted in the Plaza Mayor, which could accommodate fifty thousand spectators. From the beginning of the seventeenth century until 1855, around 250 so-called royal bullfights were staged in the Plaza Mayor to celebrate an event in the life of the royal family. These weren’t like the bullfights we know, with a matador on foot, but the archaic and aristocratic type in which horsemen, usually nobles, used spears to kill bulls, with the assistance of commoners on foot.
As bullfighting on foot grew in popularity during the eighteenth century, Spaniards began constructing stadiums for their bull events. This does not seem unusual from a modern perspective, but it was viewed as a radical step at the time. The new plazas de toros of the eighteenth century were the first stadiums erected in Europe since the last great arenas of the ancient Romans fifteen hundred years before. One of the oldest active plazas is in Béjar. It was first used in the 1500s. Other early rings include the plazas at Campofrio (1718), Zaragoza (1764), Sevilla (1761), and Ronda (1785). These rings were built by charities, which held the exclusive right to mount bullfights, to raise money. In the nineteenth century rings were built purely for profit. Important nineteenth-century plazas still in use include those of Valencia (1851), El Puerto de Santa Maria (1880), and Valladolid (1890).
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