15
Death in the Sun
On July 9 in the bullring of Pamplona a young matador from Sevilla got it bad. Antonio Barrera was in the middle of his muleta performance when a big bull from the Santiago Domecq ranch jabbed its horn into Barrera’s thigh and sent him skyward. Bullfighters spilled into the ring as Barrera fell to earth, landing hard on the sand. While some of the banderilleros lured the bull away from Barrera’s prostrate body, a matador named Miguel Abellán picked him up and tried to help him to the infirmary. But Barrera wrenched himself free of Abellán and waved him away with a dismissive sweep of the arm. This was Barrera’s first appearance in Pamplona, a big chance for him to earn his stripes with the fans up north, and he was going to kill that bull if it killed him to do it.
Serious gorings often take place after a matador has already been tossed, and the Pamplona crowd was worried about Barrera, with good reason. He was wobbly on his feet as he made a few final passes with the bull and went over to the fence to get his killing sword. Then he set himself and made a firm run at the bull, going over the horns and landing the blade between the shoulder blades, and everything looked fine—until, at the last second, the bull raised its head. Barrera went shooting off the horns. Later media reports would say that he had taken a direct hit to the scrotum and that one testicle was all but destroyed. This time Miguel Abellán had no problem getting Barrera to the infirmary, but when Abellán returned to the ring some of the fans heckled him for letting Barrera perform after the first tossing.
“What could I do?” Abellán said with a Latin shrug. “He’s a torero.”
Bullfighting’s critics are fond of pointing out that the corrida isn’t a fair fight at all, that the bulls are murdered in cold blood by matadors who work in relative safety. This is accurate, but beside the point. Bullfighting fans know the bullfight is not a fair fight, and they come to the arena assuming that the day’s events will end with the bulls dead and the toreros unharmed. Far from being an embarrassment, it is this very imbalance in danger between man and animal that redeems bullfighting and makes it possible for it to exist in the contemporary world. Imagine if the bullfight were a fair fight—that is to say, a pitched battle that resulted in the deaths of half the bulls and half the men on any given day. Would such a throwback to the bloody death matches of the ancient Roman arenas be more acceptable to bullfighting’s critics?
The modern bullfight is an artistic exhibition that results in the deaths of six bulls. While the death of the bull is the climax of the spectacle, it is not its dramatic focus. There is no suspense in the bull’s death. Instead the drama comes from the possible death or injury of the bullfighter. In a sense, the bullfighter’s medium is danger. The bullfighter takes danger, in the form of the bull, and plays with it, bringing the horns close to his body and sending them away again, creating patterns of danger and safety, standing near the horns, teasing them, avoiding them, until both the bullfighter and his audience are emotionally spent. In bullfighting any action the man takes, from placing banderillas to passing the bull with the cape to killing, is considered better and more interesting in direct proportion to how dangerous it is.
People attend bullfights for many reasons, but the biggest emotional reason is to be frightened. This is the same motivation that causes people to go to scary movies or ride roller coasters or walk through haunted houses, the only difference being that the danger in bullfighting is real and the audience has a role in creating it. Bullfighters like to say the most dangerous beast in the ring is the crowd. It is the crowd that urges the bullfighters to take greater and greater risks, and it is the crowd that voices its disapproval when the bullfighters play it safe. The crowd comes to the bullring hoping on some level for the ultimate thrill that a bullfight can provide: the death of the matador. And it is the crowd’s ambivalence about this murderous urge that makes the bullfight so exciting and elevates the object of the crowd’s aggression, the matador, to an object of worship.
According to Ramón Vila, the chief surgeon of the Maestranza bullring in Sevilla, there are around 120 major injuries suffered by toreros in the ring during the course of a typical Spanish season of 850 formal corridas. That’s a big injury every seven bullfights, and it doesn’t count pulled muscles, minor broken bones, cuts, bruises, and other small mishaps. Picadors suffer the fewest injuries, because the modern picador’s horse rarely falls, since it is a big, healthy animal wearing padded armor. Banderilleros suffer the majority of injuries, because there are three times more of them than of matadors. But on a percentage basis a matador is more likely to be injured than a banderillero, and matadors’ injuries tend to be more severe.
According to Dr. Vila, about seventy percent of all wounds suffered by matadors occur in the area between the belly and the knees, because that is where the bull holds its horns during most cape passes. But gorings in the eyes, head, neck, trunk of the body, and lower legs are also common, as are tossings that result in broken ribs, necks, backs, and limbs. One way or the other, most matadors spend a few weeks in the hospital each season, and many are punished cruelly by the horns year after year, coming close to death on multiple occasions. Interestingly, Fran hadn’t been gored once in his eight seasons as an active matador, in spite of the fact that he had been tossed repeatedly, particularly at the beginning of his career.
Bullfighting histories tend to be both sketchy and inaccurate, but the history books suggest that there have been at least five hundred recorded incidents of toreros killed by bulls worldwide since bullfighting on foot came into vogue in the eighteenth century. The real toll is probably higher, given the number of bullfights that surely have been forgotten by history, especially in South America. Nevertheless, if we accept the figure of five hundred deaths and look back over three hundred years, that averages out to a little more than one and a half deaths in the ring each year. Of the bullfighters known to have been killed, a good 60 were full matadors, some 180 were apprentice matadors, 160 were banderilleros, 75 were picadors, and around 20 were Portuguese-style equestrian bullfighters.
Certain periods of history have been more lethal for toreros than others, but bullfighting has become less dangerous thanks to improvements in emergency medicine. For example, between 1900 and 1920 46 banderilleros were killed in the ring, compared to 9 killed between 1960 and 1980, a time when there were many more bullfights. Penicillin is credited with saving the lives and especially the limbs of many twentieth-and twenty-first-century bullfighters who might otherwise have suffered horrible infections from dirty horns. For this reason, many Spanish cities have streets named for the man who first isolated penicillin, Dr. Alexander Fleming. There’s even a statue of him outside the bullring in Madrid.
The majority of toreros who’ve died from injuries suffered in the ring have been anonymous types, but it is striking how many famous ones have been killed. Two of the three greatest matadors of the twentieth century died on the horns: José Gómez, called Joselito, was killed by a bull of the Widow Ortega, in Talavera de la Reina, on May 16, 1920; Manuel Rodríguez, Manolete, was killed by a Miura bull, in Linares, August 28, 1947. One of the greatest of the eighteenth-century matadors, José Delgado, called Pepe-Hillo, was gored to death in Madrid in 1801, as was one of the heroes of the nineteenth century, Manuel García, El Espartero, in 1894.
Pepe-Hillo, Espartero, and Manolete would be considered all-time greats even if they’d died in bed. Yet it has to be admitted that being killed in the ring does wonders for a matador’s reputation. Fran’s father was a fine matador and a star of his generation, but he became a legend in death. Or take Manuel Granero. He performed for less than two seasons as a matador, but he’s famous to this day because in 1922 a Veragua bull named Pocapena (Little Pain) spiked him in the right eye in the Madrid ring, sending him into the history books. Being involved in a fatal incident is also good for the bull’s reputation. No one remembers the names of most bullfighting bulls, but any good aficionado can tell you that Bailador killed Joselito, Islero
killed Manolete, and Avispado killed Paquirri.
The deaths of important matadors have always been powerful national events in Spain and moments that the Spanish rather enjoy on some level. Of course they grieve. They wail, they moan, they write maudlin poetry, and participate in lavish funerals and ceremonies. But Spanish culture is deeply tradition-bound, and bullfighting is the most tradition-bound aspect of the culture, and it is a tradition in bullfighting that it is right and proper for a matador to die in the ring; that it is the matador’s destiny and his calling. So when this happens, it is as though all the fairy tales were coming true.
“It is hard for Americans to understand why all this fuss about one bullfighter,” wrote the American author Barnaby Conrad of Manolete’s death. “Yet when he was killed, he died such a beautiful dramatic Spanish death that I swear, in spite of the great funeral, the week of national mourning, the odes, the dirges and posthumous decorations by the government, that in his heart of hearts, every Spaniard was glad that he had died.”
At the same time there is also a strong tradition that a matador should never, under any circumstances, court death actively, or take risks in the ring deemed unreasonable by bullfighting standards. The essence of bullfighting is control. The matador must control his own emotions and the behavior of a wild animal, and as long as he stays in control of both, he’ll be applauded for taking big risks. But when the audience senses that the man has lost his grip on himself or the animal and is simply throwing himself at danger, it will turn on him and beg him to stop. This is what happened in Pamplona. The people in the crowd wanted Antonio Barrera out of the ring after the first tossing because they could see he was in no shape to handle the situation. Sadly, they were right.
Barrera’s goring was one of the 166 injuries sustained during that bullfighting season, according to 6 Toros 6, making that year notably violent. There was no logical explanation for this. The bulls were no fiercer. The bullfighters were no braver. Perhaps it was just a run of bad luck. “The bull respected no one,” wrote the editors of 6 Toros 6. “He sunk his horn in where he could, with cunning or ferocity, with blind fury or self-assurance. This season has been one of the bloodiest in the last ten years, and without doubt it created more absences of important matadors than any year in recent memory.”
The first top-level matador to go was Eugenio de Mora, gored in the buttocks in Sevilla on April 14, the same day Fran performed. That injury put Eugenio in dry dock for six weeks. Two days after that, in the same feria of Sevilla, the veteran matador José Ortega Cano was hooked into the air and came down on his left elbow, breaking it. He was out for two months. Later in the same corrida, Enrique Ponce, one of the top two or three matadors in Spain for more than a decade, suffered a footlong wound in his left thigh and was knocked out for a month. He returned in mid-May and performed in another thirteen corridas, until June 23 in Leon, when a Zalduendo bull tossed him. The doctors thought he had sustained a broken rib and nothing more. Then Enrique stopped breathing, and they realized the rib had punctured a lung. Out another month.
The matador José Miguel Arroyo, called Joselito, broke his right leg in three places when a bull knocked him down during a spring corrida in the ancient Roman arena in the French city of Nîmes. The injury might have ended his career, but Joselito came back. He was still limping and his leg was a bit misshapen when, in the feria of Zaragoza, he took on a full corrida of six bulls by himself and the leg held. Then there were the trials of José Tomás. He was tossed in Granada, on May 13, breaking a rib and badly bruising a leg, which put him out until June 9. Then he was gored twice in Badajoz, on June 26, but stayed until the bullfight was over, a stunt that put him in dry dock for a month. He made his comeback, and in Huesca on August 10 a bull broke a bone in his left hand. In great pain, he continued his season. Five days later, he took a shallow horn wound in the chest. That autumn he retired from the ring, citing the constant pressure of danger as one of the reasons for his decision. He was twenty-six years old.
Fran’s father was killed by a bull in 1984, and one of his companions in the Pozoblanco ring that day, José Cubero, El Yiyo, was killed by a bull in 1985. Six peaceful seasons followed. Then on May 1, 1992, in the Maestranza, a sometime-matador-turned-banderillero named José Manuel Calvo Bonichón, nicknamed Manolo Montoliu, was killed by Cabatisto, a 1,320-pound bull from the ranch of the Heirs of Don Atanasio Fernandez. The bull lifted its head at the wrong moment during the placing of a pair of banderillas and punched its horn into Montoliu’s chest, splitting his heart in two. Less than five months later, on September 13, in the same Maestranza, a bull named Avioncito (Little Airplane), from the ranch of the Conde de la Maza, killed a banderillero named Ramon Soto Vargas. From that day until the writing of this book, no torero has been killed in the ring in Spain—twelve years, the longest span in the history of bullfighting on the Iberian Peninsula without a death.
16
Peons
Tolosa, June 16. They had finished dinner, the cuadrilla bus was packed, and the last minutes of Sunday night were ticking into the first minutes of Monday morning when the bus pulled out of town. They headed west to Burgos, due south through Madrid and Córdoba, and west again to Sevilla, a six-hundred-mile trip that took less than nine hours, and by Monday afternoon José Jesús Sánchez, Hipólito, was out of bed and puttering around his house. Poli was Fran’s banderillero de confianza, which meant he was Fran’s senior adviser in the ring and the first among his assistant bullfighters. Poli was forty-two years old. He was tall and thin as a teenager, had blue eyes, a protuberant nose, a small mouth, and a fine head of graying hair. He was sharp and funny, formal in his dealings with the world, profane in speech, cynical about bullfighting, grumpy even when happy, and fierce about protecting his relationship with Fran, who he’d been with since Fran’s first corrida.
“This is where I rest from the shit of this life,” Poli said to me. “My house is yours and I am at your service.”
Poli lived twenty minutes west of Sevilla, in Espartinas, which had once been a town but had become a dot in a sea of sprawl. Poli’s white stucco home, built in what Americans might call Mediterranean style, was in a recently built community in a row of similar houses on a street that ended all at once in farmland. It was a landscape straight out of Southern California, antiseptic and rootless, thrown up at the last minute to meet the suburban aspirations of a growing populace. The house had two airy floors with bedrooms enough for Poli and his wife, their children, and an older relative, along with a kitchen, living room and dining room, an office space with a computer, and a den area centered around a flat-screen TV and DVD player. The family car was parked outside, and a luxurious swimming pool jiggled blue in the scorching back yard.
Espartinas is a poor place and bull-crazy, so by local standards Poli was both a financial success and a minor celebrity. He might not have been a star matador, but he was a torero, a bullfighter: a man who had escaped the workaday world to travel, consort with rich and famous people, and make a good living at the bulls. Banderilleros and picadors are hired and paid by matadors. They earn money on a bullfight-by-bullfight basis according to a scale established by their union, which is located in a small office on the Calle Fuencarral in Madrid. Because Fran had performed more than forty-two times the season before, he was classified by the union as a group-A matador and was thus required to retain a full team of two picadors and three banderilleros and pay them the top rate. This was about a thousand dollars a corrida for the picadors and the two senior banderilleros and about eight hundred dollars for the third banderillero. Everyone’s pay doubled when a corrida was televised. Since Fran expected to perform in about seventy corridas that season, some of them on TV, Poli could earn close to eighty thousand dollars—which would go a long way in Espartinas. But Poli’s story, like the stories of most banderilleros, was a story of failure.
Poli was born into a family that could boast toreros dating back to the beginnings of bullfighting in the eighteenth century.
His childhood dream was to become a famous matador, and so he started out on that well-worn and treacherous path and became a novillero, an apprentice matador who takes part in junior bullfights called novilladas, which feature immature bulls. He began at the lowest level of novillada, the kind that has very young bulls and no picadors. After two seasons of performing in at least twenty-five of these, Poli was able to jump to novilladas with slightly older bulls and with picadors.
After this apprenticeship, a novillero is eligible to become a full matador and appear in a proper corrida with mature bulls. But a promoter won’t offer a contract for such a corrida until the novillero has attracted substantial positive attention from fans and the industry. The afternoon of his first proper corrida, the novillero participates in a simple ceremony. At the start of the corrida the senior matador on the card cedes the killing of the first bull—which would be the senior man’s responsibility—to the novillero, who would normally kill the third bull of the corrida. After the first bull has been caped and pic’d, the senior matador and the novillero stand in the ring and the novillero exchanges his capote for the muleta and sword of the matador, while the other matador on the card that day looks on. Then the novillero goes over and kills the bull. After this he is officially a matador—with one catch. If his alternativa takes place in a ring other than Madrid’s, the new matador must confirm his status by repeating the ceremony in Madrid.
In most bullfighting programs matadors are listed with the facts of their alternativas: the date, the bullring, the name of the matador who performed the ceremony (the “godfather”), the name of the other matador on the card that day, the official witness, and the name of the bull, its weight, and its breeder. Fran’s alternativa was on April 23, 1995, in the Maestranza. His godfather was Juan Antonio Ruiz, Espartaco, and his witness was Jesús Janeiro, Jesulín de Ubrique. The bull was Bocalimpia of the Torrestrella ranch, which weighed 1,155 pounds. Fran confirmed his alternativa in Madrid the following year during the Feria de San Isidro.
Death and the Sun Page 15