Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  “I would like to maintain, at least at the margins, my privacy,” Fran was quoted as saying. “I am not my mother. You see, I have not sold an exclusive interview or photo to anyone, ever.”

  Three weeks had passed since Fran’s second corrida in Madrid, and during that time Fran had performed in the cities of Granada and Toledo; in Plasencia, where he’d cut an ear; and in Elda, where he’d cut two ears. Then, in the three weeks following his corrida in Tolosa, he was scheduled to take part in nine bullfights in Spain and one in France, a series of dates that would culminate in his most important appearance of midsummer, an afternoon of responsibility on July 10 in the big ring in Pamplona at the height of the running-of-the-bulls feria.

  The hotel in Tolosa had a cool basement restaurant, which was lined with bulging casks of hard apple cider, and Fran’s cuadrilla assembled there for lunch around one o’clock. There were twelve of them, and Fran was paying every one of their salaries. Fran sat at a round table with his manservants Nacho and Antonio, the old picador Francisco López with his wooden-Indian face, Fran’s driver Juani, the manager’s driver Jesús, the junior picador Diego Ortiz with his big hands, and the apoderado himself, Pepe Luis Segura. The three banderilleros—Poli, Joselito, and slope-shouldered José María Tejero—arrived late, as always, and took a smaller table to one side with Pepe, who drove the team minibus.

  Keeping track of a large group of Spaniards can be confusing. It seems that most men in Spain are called Juan, Antonio, Ignacio, Francisco, Manuel, or José, while most women are Ana, Teresa, or Maria. Last names too are limited. For this reason, the Spanish employ nicknames and diminutives and use the surnames of both mother and father. Without such measures it would be hard to distinguish people. In Fran’s cuadrilla there were five Josés, but the banderilleros were called Joselito, José María, and Poli; the driver went by Pepe, a nickname for José; and the apoderado was a José Luis, who used Pepe Luis. Both the matador and the senior picador were Franciscos, but one was Fran and the other was often called Paco. Then there was a Juan, known as Juani, and an Ignacio, known as Nacho, and to round things out an Antonio, a Diego, and a Jesús.

  Many books about bullfighting insist that toreros eat lightly before a corrida because of the fear, and because a full stomach would impede any surgical procedure that might be needed after an injury. It is a dramatic detail, and most writers repeat it. But it isn’t true. At lunch after lunch, all season long, Fran’s team consumed copious repasts before every bullfight, as did the cuadrillas of other matadors. In Tolosa they had a three-course meal consisting of soup, salad, and plates of asparagus and omelets to start; steaks, chops, and fish for the main course; and ice cream and cake for dessert. Many drank beer or wine. To be fair, Fran usually ate a bit less. That afternoon he confined himself to tomato juice and a plate of squid stuffed with rice in a sauce of its own ink.

  The conversation at lunch was much like the conversation at any precorrida lunch. As with everything else in bullfighting, the way bullfighters relate to one another is governed by tradition. There was a well-defined hierarchy in a typical cuadrilla, and everyone understood his role. The matador was stern and aloof, a prince among his subjects. His banderilleros were his knights, his brothers in arms, and there was always a senior banderillero who acted as a trusted counselor. Picadors were a breed apart and kept to themselves. The apoderado might be a father figure, or akin to an older brother, or a mere employee, depending on the matador’s age, his status in the profession, and the age and professional standing of the apoderado. Finally, the rest of the staff—the drivers and the manservants—often were the butt of jokes. They were considered lower-class buffoons, a recognizable stock character that has had an honored place in Spanish culture at least since Miguel de Cervantes created the manservant Sancho Panza in Don Quixote.

  In Fran’s cuadrilla, it was Juani who performed the main Sancho Panza role. Like Sancho, Juani came from a small town, and like Sancho, Juani’s education and outlook were confined to what could be learned within the boundaries of that small town. Like Don Quixote, Fran was alternately exasperated and amused by the antics of his servant, and like Don Quixote Fran was sometimes bested in conversation and in life by the servant’s street smarts. But while Don Quixote tended to treat Sancho Panza as he thought a knight should treat his squire, Fran teased Juani as an older brother does his younger sibling.

  Juani was to be married that October, at the end of the bullfighting season, and he’d spent most of the spring sick with worry over the mounting cost of his wedding and trying to devise various schemes and strategies to make it a more economical event.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Juani said. “I’m not inviting too many people.”

  Fran greeted this news with a look of deep concern. “But you have many, many guests to invite,” he said.

  There were knowing smiles around the table, and Juani looked more worried. Fran started running through a list of people whom Juani must invite or else court social disaster and perhaps expulsion from Fran’s inner circle. The list included Fran’s family, which was enormous on both sides, and the family of Fran’s father’s second wife, and all of Fran’s many friends from around the world. As the list grew, Juani squirmed in his seat. Then he saw the others laughing at him.

  “Okay,” Juani said to Fran. “And you’ll come with all your girlfriends.”

  Nobody laughed.

  “I’ll be coming alone,” Fran said quietly.

  There was another table of bullfighters across the restaurant from Fran and his cuadrilla, but they weren’t laughing or fooling around. They were eating without talking, their heads down. At the center of their table was a clean-cut matador named Francisco Marco. He was twenty-eight years old, the same age as Fran, and was what the Spanish would call a torero de la tierra, a local bullfighter. This meant Marco had some fame in the region where he’d been raised, but nowhere else. Marco was from Navarra, the region next door to the Basque Country, and those were the two parts of Spain where he worked, performing, in a good year, eight or nine times. This was not enough work to support a fixed team, and so Marco used picadors and banderilleros hired by the day, men whose luck with the bulls had been as hard or harder than his own.

  By contrast, Fran had always been among the top twenty matadors, those who appear in more than forty-two corridas a season in Spain and France and are thus required by Spanish union regulations to keep a full cuadrilla of five assistant bullfighters and pay those assistants the mandated top rate, about a thousand dollars a bullfight. The date in Tolosa was a minor one for Fran and his team, members of bullfighting’s elite. For Francisco Marco and his struggling banderilleros and picadors, men who worked day jobs to feed themselves, this was a key afternoon of the year, one of the few days they could call themselves toreros—an afternoon of responsibility if ever there was one. The Marco and Rivera camps traveled on two different paths of the bullfight world. They did not speak to each other in the restaurant before the corrida, and there was no sense of foreboding when everyone finished eating and went upstairs for the siesta.

  14

  An Inherited Fortune

  Tolosa, June 16. The bullring smelled of earth and wood. It was a pretty little ring of wooden beams and whitewashed plaster, and it seated five thousand, which felt painfully small after a week of corridas in big, old Las Ventas. It was also striking how different the fans were. In big rings like Madrid’s, the audience was composed of adults, typically couples and groups of men. In small plazas like Tolosa’s, however, whole families attended. It was not unusual to see babies, toddlers, and school-age children happily sitting through the bloody deaths of six bulls. No one had told them they should be horrified by it all, so they weren’t. The bullfight should have been an attractive one to local fans: it featured Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, the local kid Francisco Marco, and Juan Serrano, called Finito de Córdoba, the matador who had led the escalafón the year before with 122 corridas. But the stands were only two-thirds full whe
n the matadors paraded across the ring, perhaps because the World Cup soccer matches were on television that afternoon.

  True to Joselito’s prediction, Fran’s first bull was a manageable creature and Fran gave it a fine performance that drew olés and applause and finally, when the passes came smooth and linked, a serenade from the band. But Fran blew his chance at an ear when it took him numerous sword thrusts to kill. His second bull was less accommodating than his first had been, and Fran couldn’t piece together a satisfying performance with his muleta, and he failed with the sword again before ending the bull’s life. Fran had always had problems killing, and this was shaping up to be yet another afternoon ruined by his lack of regularity in this facet of bullfighting.

  Francisco Marco was the matador with the least seniority, so he faced the third bull of the day. It was the biggest animal in the corrals, a high-backed bull with full-sized armament and a good defensive intelligence. This was a bull that seemed to understand that the easiest way for it to defeat the bullfighter was to ignore the urge to charge the cape and attack only when the man had come in close enough to expose his body to the horns. Seeing that he had no choice, Marco moved into the bull’s immediate vicinity and offered the cape for a series of shaky verónicas that opened the performance. Then the trumpet sounded and in marched the picadors, who took up their classic positions beside the barrera fence, one picador in the shaded half of the ring, the other on the sunny side.

  Marco and bull were holding each other off in the center of the ring while the horsemen settled in. Then it was time for Marco to move the bull in front of the picador on the shaded side of the sand for the first pic. Marco raised his cape and swept it back and the bull followed, but it stumbled on its left foreleg and came up limping and in pain. In a first-class plaza the president might have sent such a bull back to the corrals in favor of a replacement animal. Tolosa, however, couldn’t afford to replace bulls except in extreme situations, so there would be no such reprieve. Marco was going to have to make do with what he had, a defensive animal that was now injured.

  He moved to within five feet of the bull, held out his capote, shook it, and gave a shout. The bull stood its ground. Its head lolled; its sad eyes stared at Marco in reproach. Marco shuffled toward it a few steps and offered the cape again, and again the bull stood its ground. Finally, Marco got right up in the bull’s face and tried one more time. The bull thought for a second and attacked, thrusting its head down, then flicking it up, lancing its horn into Marco’s thigh, sending him fifteen feet in the air.

  This last bit is not poetic license. One second Francisco Marco was a matador citing for a pass, and the next he was an indistinct mishmash of limbs flung into the sky. He fell hard and lay like a dropped knapsack on the sand. The bull wheeled and raced at Marco’s prone body, its battering-ram head lowered to send Marco skyward a second time. By then other bullfighters had entered the ring. Someone flashed a cape in the bull’s face, and the bull, delirious from the thrill of having hit something solid, turned with the cape and charged away from Marco. Fran and a banderillero were the first to get to Marco, and they picked him up and ran him into the callejón and under the stands to the infirmary, with Fran’s hand pressed on Marco’s wound to stem the bleeding. The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

  The bullfighters in a corrida are responsible for defending each other while there’s a bull in the ring, regardless of which matador and team the bull corresponds to. During the act of the picadors the two matadors who are not in action stand to the left of the horse, ready to save either the picador or their fellow matador. During the banderillas there are numerous people in the ring, and during the matador’s faena his banderilleros crouch in burladeros, waiting to spring to his aid should anything bad happen. At least that is how it should be. The reality is that over the course of a long and tiring season, many toreros let their concentration wander when they should be watching out for their colleagues, and so are often out of position when something goes wrong. One exception to this rule was Fran, who was famous in the bull world for his punctiliousness and concentration in the ring. For that reason, Fran made more saves than most of his colleagues.

  A few minutes after Marco’s goring, Fran returned from the infirmary, and Nacho washed Marco’s blood off Fran’s hands with water poured from a plastic bottle. During Fran’s absence Finito de Córdoba had killed Marco’s bull, quickly and without attempting to make a show of it. Since Marco was gone for the day and Finito had handled Marco’s first bull, Marco’s second animal, the final bull of the corrida, now belonged to Fran. The bull was named Heredado, which was appropriate to the situation, since it means “inherited.” The bull looked like a winner out of the chute, red brindle in color, heavier in muscle than its fellows, and charging easily. Fran must have liked what he saw, because he ordered a gentle pic’ing and a fast act of banderillas. He didn’t want to wear out the bull before he’d had a chance to perform with it.

  The preliminaries finished, Fran came into the ring alone with his muleta. He cited the bull in the middle of the sand and gave it two series of passes with the right hand, working the right horn, working with conviction. The bull was willing to charge, but it didn’t follow the cape well at first and the series were a bit disjointed. Fran stuck with the animal, passing it smoothly, holding the cape on a steady plane, trying not to jerk the bull’s head up or down, keeping the cape in the bull’s face, making the cloth seem just within reach so the bull didn’t lose confidence and learned to enjoy the game of the cape. On the third series the performance jelled. Then the passes came in long rhythmic figures, Fran lengthening the passes out, pass by pass, slowing the bull down, and attenuating the moments of danger when the bull was passing close to his body.

  The music started. Fran switched the cape to his left hand and took his partner through a classic set of naturales, bringing the animal across his legs with the red cloth dangling from the stick. It was one of those ecstatic moments that come rarely in bullfighting. It wasn’t scary or tragic or moving. It was pure joy. Fran was in total control, and Tolosa loved it. Then he began passing the bull with his eyes on the audience and not on the animal. It was a parlor trick that his father, Paquirri, had liked to use, a trick that wouldn’t pass muster in a first-class ring but was just the sort of thing to get a small-town crowd excited.

  At the end of the last series, Fran walked up to the bull, dropped his cape to the ground, and thrust his chest at the horns. He was in front of the bull with nothing to protect him, no cape, no sword. There was nothing but an inch of air between Fran and the horn. The bull shook its head. Fran leaned into the horn, pressing its gray tip against his chest. All the bull had to do was chop and it would have popped a hole in Fran’s heart, but the bull was fully dominated. Fran turned his back and walked away. While the ovation died down, he walked to the barrera and took the steel sword from Nacho. Fran lined up, ran in, and managed to sink the sword about halfway into the bull, the blade entering the body in a good place. The bull died and the crowd waved its handkerchiefs and Fran collected an ear and made a lap around the ring.

  There was a sizable crush in the hotel lobby after the corrida, and a big crowd gawked in from the street. This was an event for the locals, since toreros were the only famous people who ever came to Tolosa. After a short beer at the bar and some autographs Fran and his team gathered again in the same hotel restaurant, at the round table they’d used at lunch. The group was alone in the room this time: Francisco Marco was in the hospital, and his cuadrilla waited there with the family until they had heard the outcome of his operation. When Fran sat down at the table he noticed that Poli and Joselito hadn’t come downstairs yet. They were still in the hotel lobby, chatting up some girls. Fran waited for a while, growing increasingly irritated. He was in full prince mode this evening, expecting proper etiquette from everyone around him. Finally, Poli and Joselito appeared.

  “We’re always waiting for you two,” Fran said, his voice harsh and loud in t
he empty restaurant. “It’s rude.”

  Poli mumbled an excuse. Joselito stood behind him, looking terrified. Then Poli came over to sit down.

  “You go and eat at another table,” Fran said. “You are banned from this one!”

  “Fine,” Poli said. “I’ll eat all by myself, alone.”

  “Poor baby,” Fran said. Then he made a show of speaking to the person seated next to him.

  The corrida had been a satisfying one, but Fran would never condescend to be happy about it. He was a star, a figura of the bullring, and an ear in Tolosa was not something he was going to celebrate.

  After dinner the men headed to their vans and took off for Sevilla, a nine-hour drive. There was never any thought of spending the night in Tolosa. There were three full days until the next corrida, and the cuadrilla wanted to spend that time at home with family and friends. Meanwhile, Francisco Marco was nursing a sutured wound in his right thigh, a plastic tube sticking out from the stitches, draining the suppurating fluids. The terse report in the morning paper would describe his condition as “reserved,” a good prognosis, and Marco’s manager guessed his boy would be ready for his next scheduled corrida, which was in Pamplona on July 8, or the following one, also in Pamplona, on July 10, with Rivera Ordóñez on the card. Until then, Marco was in what bullfighters call dique seco (dry dock). It is a place most toreros are all too familiar with.