Despite the violent political upheavals of the twentieth century, the Spanish continued to construct bullrings at a merry pace. An 1880 government census found there were around 105 plazas in Spain; by 2001 that number had risen to about 350, with more being built. Most of Spain’s bullrings are small, with an average seating capacity of 5,000, and a mere handful seat more than 15,000. The government classifies the plazas of Barcelona, Bilbao, Córdoba, Madrid, San Sebastián, Sevilla, Valencia, and Zaragoza as first-category rings, meaning they are large and each one mounts more than fifteen bull events a year, at least ten of those being proper corridas. (Though it isn’t by law, Pamplona is also considered to be first-category.) The rings of provincial capitals, as well as a handful of other rings of some importance, are classified as second-category, with all remaining fixed rings as third-category. Portable rings are fourth-category. The regulations controlling bullfights are less stringent in the lower-category rings, and toreros and breeders are paid less to perform in them. Seats in bullrings are priced according to their proximity to the sand and whether they will fall in shade or sunlight during the corrida. Seats in the shade cost twice as much on average as seats in the sun. There are two reasons for this. First, when the bullfighters aren’t in action they stand in the shaded half of the callejón, and this is where the bulls are pic’d. Second, most fans will pay top price to avoid the savage power of the Spanish sun. In the early evening, when most corridas are held, the sun sinks quickly, casting the ring in ever-increasing shadow, and the visual drama of the plaza bisected into sun and shade is a vital part of the aesthetics of the event. “The theory, practice and spectacle of bullfighting have all been built on the assumption of the presence of the sun,” wrote Hemingway, “and when it does not shine over a third of the bullfight is missing. The Spanish say ‘El sol es el mejor torero.’ The sun is the best bullfighter, and without the sun the best bullfighter is not there. He is like a man without a shadow.”
The seating in a bullring is divided into pie-wedge sections called tendidos. The Madrid ring has ten of them. Tendidos one, two, nine, and ten are sold as sombra, meaning they are in shadow throughout the bullfight. During the season in question, the best sombra seats in Madrid cost $105 each. Tendidos three and eight are sol y sombra (sun and shade), meaning they begin the bullfight in sunlight and end it in shadow. These seats are priced less than sombra. The rest of the ring is sol (sun), the cheapest seats. They cost as little as $3.50 each, for the back rows. In Madrid, the sol sections are tendidos four, five, and six, as well as the notorious and reviled tendido siete, section seven, where the toughest hecklers in bullfighting sit.
Most bullrings do not have seats, in the commonly understood sense of the word. The standard bullring seating consists of rows of stone steps with numbers stenciled on them to mark a place for each spectator. The steps are cold, dirty, and unyielding to human flesh, and every plaza in Spain has a cushion-renting concession, usually run for the benefit of a local charity. For less than $2 you are given a small padded square to put between your backside and hard reality. The seating is hellishly cramped. Fans sit thigh to sweaty thigh, with knees pressing into the back of the person in the row ahead. In a different country this might provoke fisticuffs on a regular basis, but the Spanish are endlessly good-natured about this sort of thing and brawls during corridas are rare.
Given how expensive, difficult, uncomfortable, and unrewarding it is to follow bullfighting, it is amazing that anyone becomes an aficionado. Few forms of entertainment yield their pleasures as slowly or sparingly. To properly understand a bullfight, the spectator needs technical knowledge of the execution of scores of passes, of pic’ing, of banderillas, and of killing, as well as a grounding in the history of bullfighting and its multitudinous local traditions—not to mention a knowledge of bulls, which is a subject complex enough for a lifetime of study. Without a good bit of this information, the spectator will never view bullfighting as anything more than an intermittently thrilling, but mostly boring, spectacle that can also be a revolting bloodbath.
It is axiomatic among aficionados that bullfighting is almost impossible to comprehend fully, even for Spaniards, even for toreros. “This is a very difficult subject to know about,” said Fran’s great-uncle, the famous matador Dominguín. “I would say that only ten percent of matadors have any real understanding of bullfighting.”
The technical side is just the start for the aspiring aficionado, however, because the only way to become a true connoisseur is to attend a large number of corridas—and that’s a thing not many people can do. The fact is, there are few bullfights to see. In Europe, they are held regularly in Spain, France, and Portugal; in the Americas, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia mount corridas. But Mexico and Spain are the only countries with enough bull events to provide a steady diet, and even a Spaniard or a Mexican would have to do a fair amount of traveling within his or her country to see a large number of bullfights, since a mere handful of cities mount more than five corridas a year, and this travel would be too expensive and time-consuming for any save the idle rich.
Bullfights do appear on television, especially in Spain and Mexico, but a televised corrida is to a live corrida what pornography is to sex. You can learn a lot from video, but not what you really need to know, which is the emotion of the thing. Bullfighting is an art of feelings, and it depends for its effects on the charged atmosphere of the ring and the visceral impact of being in the presence of a large wild animal—things that are not well conveyed onscreen, and that’s assuming the bullfight is a good one. In fact, most bullfights are awful. For a great bullfight you need ferocious bulls matched with matadors willing to risk themselves, a combination that rarely occurs. As a Spanish proverb goes, “When the bulls are great the matadors fail to show, and when the matadors are willing the bulls are lousy.”
Despite its ornery nature, and in defiance of the millions of people worldwide who would like to see it banned, bullfighting thrives, even flourishes, around the globe. The most concrete evidence for this assertion is that the number of corridas mounted each year has been rising sharply throughout the past hundred years. According to the Spanish government, there were 864 corridas in Spain alone during the season chronicled in this book. That’s up from the 513 corridas in 1990, the 323 in 1960, and the 209 in 1904. A similar sort of growth is chartable in France and Latin America, though bullfighting as a spectacle seems to be dying out in Portugal, where it is illegal to kill the bull in public.
In Spain, the surprising growth of the bullfight is usually attributed to three things. First, the Spanish economy boomed in the post-Franco years, and greater wealth has led to greater demand for leisure activities. Second, Spain joined the European Union during this time, and that internationalist move spawned a predictable backlash of interest in all things seen as singularly Spanish. Third, tourism has risen dramatically, making Spain the second-most-visited country on earth, and many tourists like to catch a bullfight.
Anti-bullfighting advocates are fond of claiming that the bullfight would die in Spain if not for the support of tourists, but the facts don’t bear this out. Government statistics show that the majority of corridas are held off the tourist track—for example, in places like Murcia, Gijón, and Albacete, provincial cities that do not overflow with foreigners. And even in the big tourist centers it is still Spaniards who support the bullfights. Take Madrid and Sevilla. Both rings are packed during their spring ferias, the bullfights that the Madrileños and Sevillanos want to see. Yet both rings are virtually empty during their non-feria bullfights, even though these take place in midsummer, at the peak of the tourist season.
Bullfighting is everywhere in Spain. The newspapers cover it. Television broadcasts it. Posters for corridas fill the streets, as they have done since bullfighting was invented, announcing corridas in grandiose language that is familiar to aficionados everywhere. “With permission of the authority,” the posters typically read, “and if the weather
does not impede the spectacle, six wild and beautiful bulls will be pic’d, banderilla’d, and put to death by the sword.” Restaurants and bars display bullfighting photos. Bullrings dominate city architecture. The countryside is riddled with bull-breeding ranches. Bullfighting is often called la fiesta nacional, and it has a semiofficial status. Most bullfights are presented with some financial assistance from the government, especially in small towns, and most bullrings are municipally owned. Political leaders are often seen at big corridas, as are members of the royal family. It is no accident that bullfights are held during ferias, which are civic celebrations. There’s a sense that attending a bullfight is a way to support town and country, king and culture.
Yet it would be a gross distortion of reality to suggest that Spain is a land of bulls and bullfighters. Most Spaniards go about their lives in blissful ignorance of bullfighting, spending their leisure time and money on television, movies, music, the Internet, and professional sports, especially soccer. The so-called national festival of bullfighting isn’t really. Polls taken on the Spanish public’s attitudes toward bullfighting show that around half the country disapproves of the spectacle, with around thirty percent enthusiastically for it and the rest indifferent. But the people who say they are against bullfighting can’t be very against it or they would do something about it, and the fact is that there is little organized opposition to bullfighting in Spain. It exists, but it fails to generate much of a response.
Bullfighting is not part of the local culture in every corner of Spain. The four great areas of bullfighting are the south (Andalucía), the center (Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla-León), the northeast (Aragón, Navarra, and the Basque Country), and Valencia. There’s hardly any bull culture in the northwest (Galicia and Asturias), and there is outright hostility to bullfighting in Spain’s second city, Barcelona, which prides itself on being a pan-European capital, and where the bullfight is associated with Españolismo (always said with a sneer), which means anything having to do with traditional—read: backward—Spain.
Even in places where the people love bullfighting, the number actually willing or able to buy a ticket and see a corrida is relatively small. Sevilla, which has a population of around eight hundred thousand, may be the most bull-crazy city in Spain, but the Maestranza bullring seats fewer than thirteen thousand, and most of those seats are filled by fans with season subscriptions who occupy their seats day after day. Thus, in total, a small number of Sevillanos actually attend a corrida during the feria—certainly less than ten percent of the population. Nor is there a large television audience for bullfighting. The number of corridas broadcast on the national networks is tiny in comparison to soccer matches.
But for that haunted minority of fans, the bullfight is an overwhelming obsession. It is the only spectacle left in the world that offers such a mixture of beauty and violence, art and blood, national pride and primordial urge, the fascination of wild animals and of death. Both the bullfighters and their fans are addicted to the emotional buildup of the corrida day: the waiting and worrying; then the bullring with all its theatricality, ceremony, and music; the big crowd, the tension of the bullfight itself, and the moment when the tension breaks; when man and bull find their rhythm, and what was violence and ugliness resolves itself for a brief moment, perhaps, into something more.
11
The Little Venom
Madrid, May 15. Silence . . .
The sun was high in the sky, but inside the two-room hotel suite the curtains were drawn and the double-paned windows blocked out the noise of the city. Everything was quiet and dark. There was a click at the door and Nacho padded into the luxurious sitting room, which was all done up in Christmas colors, reds and greens. Nacho held a teacup filled with olive oil, a candlewick floating on the surface. He put the teacup down on the table, went to the door that led to the bedroom, and eased the door open. A television glowed inside. Fran was curled up on the bed, a rumpled shape beneath the covers. Laid out on a chair beside him was a light blue bullfighter’s costume.
Nacho puttered around a bit, and soon Fran stirred. He said something and Nacho replied and the two men took up the thread of what seemed to be a continuing conversation. After a few lazy moments Fran climbed out of bed, got down on the floor, and began his stretching routine. He wore blue pajama bottoms and one of those T-shirts sold in the tourist shops of Sevilla. The shirt read, Joé, que caló! (Fuck, it’s hot!) Except the proper Spanish—Joder, que color!—was spelled phonetically to render the sound of a thick Andalucían accent, in which certain consonants and all word endings are swallowed.
Fran sat on the floor, straightened his legs, and touched his toes. Nacho sat on the edge of the bed, watching his boss at work. Nacho was a heavyset man in his late thirties. He was dressed like an executive, in a dark blue suit, dress shirt, pink necktie, and brown tasseled loafers. The first of Fran’s two afternoons of responsibility in the Madrid ring was about to begin, and Nacho knew better than to show up in anything less than his best clothes. The matador didn’t tolerate personal sloppiness from his staff on a day like this one.
“I’d do some stretching myself,” Nacho said, “but I’d split my pants.”
Fran smiled and headed for the shower, and soon there was steam coming out from under the bathroom door. After a few minutes Fran emerged in his signature white towel, his wet black hair neatly combed. Fran dropped the towel. He took a pair of flesh-colored pantyhose and rolled them over his legs, thighs, and buttocks and up to his midriff. Then he slipped on a white tank-top undershirt. Fran sat on the bed and pulled on his socks. These were the traditional bullfighter’s socks: salmon-colored with an arrow design over each calf. The socks went over the knees, where they were held in place with tight plastic garters. Then it was time to put on the bullfighter’s costume itself, known as the traje de luces (suit of lights), because of the way the sun shines off the elaborate gold decorations, filigree, baubles, tassels, and beads.
Fran stood up, cupped his genitals in both hands, and shifted them to his left thigh. Nacho stood holding the knee-length breeches of the costume open and Fran stepped into one leg and then the other. Nacho hiked the pants up, holding them by the back of the waist, pulling hard until he had lifted Fran into the air, wedging the fabric into the crack of Fran’s bottom, pressing Fran’s penis and testicles against his left thigh like shrink-wrapped meat in a grocery freezer. Crammed into his pants, the fly still unbuttoned, Fran went to the writing table beside the bed and laid out the framed and unframed images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Family, an assortment of saints, and crosses, medals, and amulets. There were more than forty objects in total and they covered the table.
Fran took a clipper and cut and filed his fingernails—this to prevent a stray nail from getting caught on the fabric of the capes while he worked. Nacho set out Fran’s shoes, the traditional black-leather pumps with a neat bow over the toes, and Fran stepped into them and then buttoned his fly. Slowly, so as not to muss his hair, Fran put on his bullfighter’s hat. This was a deep skullcap of black woven fabric with a ball of the same material over each ear, which at some angles looked not unlike a Mickey Mouse hat. Nacho attached a fake pigtail to the hair at the back of Fran’s head with a bobby pin, just beneath the cap. Then Fran slipped into a ruffled tuxedo shirt, tied a thin black necktie around his neck, and shrugged himself into the braces attached to his pants. Nacho wound a sash around Fran’s waist and helped Fran into the vest of the suit and the heavy waist-length jacket with wide epaulets and holes in the armpits for greater mobility.
Silence . . .
Fran took a deep breath, blowing the air out through his nose. Then he did it again. Nacho closed the curtains in the bedroom, turned off the lights, brought out a bottle of cologne, and sprayed a few shots into the air. Nacho retrieved the teacup of olive oil from the sitting room and placed it in front of Fran’s saints. Then Nacho retired from the bedroom, now bathed in cathedral gloom. The air was purified by the perfume. Fran
stood before his saints. His back to the world, like a priest saying Mass in the old Roman rite, Fran crossed himself, took each saint off the table, kissed it, and laid it down again. Fran struck a match and lit the wick in the teacup. He bowed his head and prayed, slowly and with care.
The ritual was over. Fran turned and walked away, shutting the door behind him. No one would be allowed to enter the room or to disturb Fran’s saints or the candle until Fran had returned safely from the bullfight. It was time to go. Nacho and Fran walked out of the suite and into the empty hallway of the hotel. The elevator arrived, and it too was empty. Nacho and Fran rode down in the elevator saying nothing.
Silence . . .
The elevator doors swung open and they were in the world again. Heat. Brightness. Mirrors. Lights. People shouted. Doors slammed. Cameras flashed. A group of Japanese tourists stared. Paparazzi and tabloid TV cameramen shoved each other, trying to get a good shot of Fran. Telephones rang at the reception desk. “Hola, buenas tardes, Hotel Wellington.” Someone called to Fran in Spanish: “Fran, Fran, may I have your autograph?” Nacho and Fran made their way through the crowd and out the front door of the hotel. Air. Sun. Traffic. Shoes clicked on the sidewalk. More shouting. The lights of video cameras were in their faces. The minibus was at the curb and Fran’s cuadrilla of assistant bullfighters was inside. Fran and Nacho hopped in and the doors closed with a thud.
Silence . . .
The minibus took off, heading north on the Calle Velazquez, and no one in the bus had much to say. The atmosphere was uptight, even a bit somber. The buss engine hummed. Three paparazzi on motorbikes zigged and zagged around the bus, trying to get some footage of Fran through the windows. The sad story of Fran’s marital troubles was still raging in the pink press. Eugenia was giving interviews, saying things like, “If Fran says he is the guilty one, then he must be.” There was also news about Fran’s mother. It seemed Carmen Ordóñez had checked herself into a Madrid clinic to be treated for addiction to sleeping pills, this following a television appearance in which she had seemed intoxicated to many viewers.
Death and the Sun Page 11