Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  Bullfighting fans love to argue, even about what should be simple facts. Ask how many first-category rings there are and some people will say eight, as does the Spanish government; some will say nine, including Pamplona, which is considered first-category by the bullfighters’ union; and some will say eleven, adding Nîmes and Arles, the first-category French rings. Mention the well-known statistic that the noted matador Juan Belmonte performed 109 times during the 1919 season and someone will object that two of these weren’t formal corridas. Ask a roomful of fans the meaning of any bullfighting term and each person will offer a different definition. The discussions of bullfighting experts compare in complexity with those of Talmud scholars. As Hemingway himself once wrote, entire books of controversy have been written in Spain on the subject of how to define a single cape pass.

  Hemingway’s other major insight might seem simple, but it is not one shared by many aficionados. Hemingway understood that death was bullfighting’s primary subject. Many aficionados, including Noël, are quite uncomfortable with this. They are so wrapped up in the culture of bullfighting, so interested in it from a technical point of view, that they can no longer see it clearly. Seated in a bullring, surrounded by well-dressed couples and families munching on snacks, it’s easy to forget that large creatures are being slaughtered down on the sand. But Hemingway never forgot it, and he praised Spaniards for taking an intelligent interest in death and having the common sense to pay a small fee to see it given, avoided, refused, and accepted during an afternoon’s entertainment.

  Well, Hemingway could be an annoying guy. He was highly impressed with himself and always had to be the smartest man in the room. In his final years he was a drunk and a bore, he preferred to play the role of “Papa” that he had created for himself, and he perhaps judged the toreros of the 1950s by the standards of the 1920s. He was certainly the product of his time, and many of his interests and attitudes seem out of date these days. Even people who enjoy his writing concede that when he wrote poorly—which he did with increasing frequency as his life progressed—the results read like a parody of his more successful early style.

  Yet Hemingway was perhaps the most influential writer of the twentieth-century and, along with Goya, Picasso, and a handful of others, was one of the artists whose interest in bullfighting elevated it from an obscure folk art to a topic of international discussion. He was also an important figure in Fran’s life, because the matadors that mattered most to Hemingway, the ones to whom he assigned starring roles in his books, the ones who defined what Hemingway wanted to be as a man, invariably bore the last name Ordóñez.

  22

  Dry Dock

  Madrid, July 12. Fran groaned in agony, his breath coming in tatters through clenched jaws. The day outside was scorching, and Fran was in a small clinic in a neighborhood north of the city center. Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” played on a small radio. Fran sat on a stool in a boothlike room, his left arm perched on a padded table. A physical therapist pressed the forearm down as far as it would go, which wasn’t far. When the forearm reached about sixty degrees above the table, Fran couldn’t take the pain anymore. “Stop, stop, stop!” he said, and the therapist let go, and Fran breathed a sigh of exquisite relief.

  Two weeks had passed since the tossing in Algeciras, and Fran had already missed a half-dozen corridas, including the July 10 date in Pamplona, a tough loss. On that afternoon Francisco Marco, El Juli, and Fran’s replacement, Manuel Caballero, cut a total of five ears off a cooperative and easy-charging string of bulls from the ranch of Gutiérrez Lorenzo. This was the greatest number of ears cut in a single corrida in Pamplona that year and a wonderful opportunity for the matadors on the card to make a splash in the most important bullfighting cycle of midsummer. Fran was still chewing over his bad luck.

  “The bulls were the best ones of the feria, weren’t they?” said Fran. “That sucks.” And then, “This fucking arm.”

  But if Fran was depressed, he didn’t show it. Like all matadors he expected to be knocked out of action for a part of every season. Although he’d never been gored in his career, he had strained or broken a knee, a wrist, or an ankle during previous seasons, and he knew that after such an injury his job was to keep evil thoughts at bay and get better as soon as he could. “Not only have I lost many fights,” Fran said, “but the real problem is that I will not see a bull for a month and I’ll lose my touch. Then I have responsibility for all of my people. I have insurance for myself, so they pay me for every fight I lose after three. But my men don’t get anything. They are losing a lot. A couple of them are looking for a big tree to hang themselves.”

  Tossings and gorings change bullfighters. It is said in the bull world that you do not know how much potential a young torero has until you see how he reacts to his first big goring. Some matadors never recover their composure after a serious wound; some lose it for a while and then get it back again. But every injury in the ring has its effect on the bullfighter, and over the course of a long career such incidents can mount up and give him a sense of doubt when he is in the ring, which can be more debilitating than a broken bone or an open horn wound.

  Fran’s injury wasn’t a serious one, but the afternoon of the tossing was still on his mind. “The bull wasn’t fierce,” Fran said, “but it was unpredictable and it surprised me. At one moment there was a lot of wind, and just then I moved the muleta from one hand to the other, and when I did I lost sight of the bull. And the bull came at me. He attacked me and I couldn’t do anything.” But Fran had come to terms with the injury by explaining it. “I made a mistake. You cannot take your eyes off the bull, ever. All the time you have to keep him in the corner of your eye. All it took was one second for the bull to surprise me. I shook the muleta at him, but he ignored it. He wanted me. Sometimes the bull just catches you, but most wounds come because of your mistakes.”

  Fran led a boring life in Madrid. His hangers-on had all gone back to their homes around Sevilla and Córdoba, and he was staying in the apartment of an honorary aunt, which happened to be near his physical therapist. He awoke each morning around nine and made his way to the clinic for a few hours of painful stretching, followed by weightlifting and thirty minutes of sprinting on a stationary bicycle. Then it was back home for lunch and a nap, and then another two- or three-hour session at the clinic. Evenings he ate dinner with his aunt or caught a movie. At twenty-eight, he had two arthritic knees, resulting from various injuries and overexercise, and a left arm that might never hang straight again.

  “I’m a wreck,” Fran said.

  The only bright spot during this time was the few days Fran had spent in Ronda, where he was the promoter of the local ring. Ronda was the stunning mountain town where the Romero dynasty of matadors established bullfighting on foot in the eighteenth century, and where the Ordóñez dynasty sprang up in the twentieth. Fran had inherited the right to manage the historic and beautiful bullring there from his late grandfather Antonio. The bullring was home to a three-bullfight feria each September, and the centerpiece of this cycle was the Corrida Goyesca, one of the important dates of the bullfighting calendar. A goyesca is a corrida in which the participants wear costumes resembling those worn by toreros in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and depicted in the prints and paintings of Francisco Goya.

  Fran’s grandfather Antonio and his great-grandfather Cayetano Ordóñez, El Niño de la Palma, founded the first goyesca of Ronda in 1954, to honor the two hundredth birthday of Pedro Romero, the most famous of the Romeros. The goyesca was always one of the most popular bullfights in Spain and tickets were hard to come by, but the novillada (junior bullfight) the day before and the corrida de rejones (equestrian bullfight) the day after never attracted as many fans. So that year, for the first time, Fran had offered a subscription for goyesca seats, giving preference to fans who had purchased season tickets, and as a result sales had shot up for the novillada and the corrida de rejones. The upcoming goyesca was scheduled for September 7, with F
ran, El Juli, and an uncle of Fran’s, the matador Curro Vázquez, on the card. Fran hoped that he would be well enough by then.

  Fran finished his physical therapy and moved to the stationary bicycle. Injured or healthy, he was always careful to keep himself in good shape. During the off-season he practiced martial arts, rode horses, ran, lifted weights, stretched, and did pushups and sit-ups. Like most matadors, Fran was young and fit, but toreros did not have to be great physical specimens to perform well. In fact, sickly and elderly bullfighters often continued to practice their trade with success. During Hemingway’s heyday, Manuel García López, called Maera, dazzled crowds in 1924 before dying of the tuberculosis that had been killing him all that season. In 2000, Francisco Romero López, Curro Romero, at the age of sixty-five performed seventeen times, including four dates in Sevilla and a major triumph in Jerez.

  As one famous bullfighter is said to have remarked: “Why do I need to be in good shape? It is the bull that makes all the effort.”

  That afternoon in Madrid, I asked Fran why he had decided to become a matador. Fran didn’t answer my question except to say that he had always wanted to be one. Then he launched into a series of anecdotes from his childhood, each of which had the same basic plot: the young Fran expresses his desire to become a torero; someone tries to dissuade him and this only increases his ambition. The last of these stories took place when Fran was already practicing with his grandfather. Someone gave Fran two video collections of the most terrifying gorings in bullfighting history and told him to watch them from beginning to end.

  “I saw them a couple of times,” Fran said, “and after that I still wanted to be a bullfighter.”

  This talk of videos and gorings led me to ask Fran a question I had been putting off until the end of the season for fear of antagonizing him. Had he ever seen the video of his father’s goring and the footage in the infirmary as the doctors tended to his wounds?

  “Ah,” Fran replied. He paused for a moment, then turned to me. “Yes,” Fran said, “I saw it. But many years later.”

  I expressed sympathy for Fran’s loss, something I had never had the chance to do. But Fran was uninterested in such sentiments. As he had with his tossing in Algeciras, Fran had reduced his father’s death to something explainable. It was an accident, he said, and no worse than any other accident that takes a young man from his family, and it certainly wasn’t the reason Fran had become a matador. Paquirri’s death was just something that had happened. Not a tragedy. An accident.

  “I am sure my father preferred to die in the ring,” Fran added. “Because I think I would prefer that too. Of course I want to die in bed with my great-great-great-grandchildren around me. But if I have to die tomorrow, what would I prefer, a heart attack or the ring? I prefer to die in the ring. This isn’t just a profession. It is a way of life. My father was a bullfighter, and bulls kill bullfighters. I think he died the way he wanted to. I don’t want to be a bullfighter because my father was one or my grandfather was one. I do it because I like being a bullfighter.”

  23

  The Kid

  Cayetano Ordóñez y Aguilera, Fran’s great-grandfather, was born in Ronda on January 4, 1904, a single day shy of seventy years before Fran’s birth. He had no bullfighting pedigree. His father was a cobbler in Ronda with a shoe store named La Palma, at 8 Calle Santa Cecilia. The store failed when Cayetano was thirteen, and the family moved to La Línea de la Concepción, near Gibraltar, where work was easier to come by. Cayetano got a job as a busboy in a local restaurant. He learned English there from the tourists, and about the bulls from the many breeders and toreros who frequented the restaurant and bar.

  This was a real perk, because like most Andalucían boys of his time, Cayetano was besotted with the idea of becoming a great matador. Bullfighting was one of the few forms of mass entertainment in turn-of-the-century Spain, and it was going through what is now thought of as its Golden Age, thanks to the competition between two toreros from Sevilla. José Gómez y Ortega, known as Joselito, became a matador in 1912 at the age of seventeen, skipping the long apprenticeships that were common then. He was tall, elegant, and handsome, and he made bullfighting look easy, placing banderillas with style, commanding the bull with his capote, and killing like a cannon. It was said that there was not a calf born that José couldn’t handle.

  Joselito was the best of his day, but it is important to remember that his day was a primitive one. Picadors’ horses wore no protection. Many died each corrida, and spectators in the front rows were often splattered with the horses’ blood and viscera—something that was portrayed as comic relief in contemporary newspaper accounts. The act of the horses and the killing with the sword were the key elements of this earlier, more brutal form of bullfight. The art of passing bulls with the muleta and the capote was still quite crude. The prevailing practice was, you waved your cape at the bull and then got out of the way or the bull would get you. There was a concept that matadors could stand still and use the cape to direct the horns past their bodies, but few were able to practice it.

  The development of modern bullfighting was a complex process. Many toreros contributed to it, and aficionados love to argue over who contributed what. For sure, one major figure, perhaps the major figure, was a matador named Juan Belmonte. He was born three years before Joselito but became a full matador in 1913, a year later than Joselito. Belmonte was as unlikely a matador as Joselito was a classic one. He was short, ugly, and sickly, with twisted legs that could barely run. Still he drove himself to be a matador. Legend has it that as a child Juan would sneak out of Sevilla into the countryside where he would strip nude and cape bullfighting bulls in their pastures by moonlight. In his ignorance of how to use a cape and in facing the limitation of his bad legs, Belmonte adopted a revolutionary style of toreo. He proved that if he stood still and swung his cape, the bull would follow the cloth and leave him alone.

  It took Belmonte years of blood and struggle to perfect his style, but when he hit the arena, he hit it like an earthquake. People thronged to see him, and one prominent matador of the old school said that people had better see him as soon as they could, because he wasn’t going to be around long. In fact, Belmonte improved each year, and over time his success with his style helped to change bullfighting forever. After Belmonte, the work with the muleta, which had been perfunctory, became the longest, most dangerous, evocative, and dramatic part of the bullfight, until it became the point of the bullfight.

  Many of the other matadors of Belmonte’s day had a hard time keeping up with Belmonte, but not Joselito. He’d been a genius of the old school, and he brought all of his grace and ring science to mastering Belmonte’s technique. From 1913 to 1920 he and Belmonte performed together more than 250 times, driving each other to excellence, creating their golden age.

  Sometime during those years, or so the story goes, Belmonte was in a restaurant in La Linea de la Concepcion, where he was presiding over a table of taurino types, when a thin busboy in an apron, bloody from cutting sides of beef, walked up to him. “Can I help you, son?” Belmonte asked. “Yes, Maestro,” said Cayetano Ordóñez. “I want you to give me the alternativa and make me a matador in the bullring of Sevilla.” “Excellent,” Belmonte replied with a laugh. “When you can kill a bull more cleanly than you can cut him up for steaks, I’ll make you a matador.”

  Meanwhile, aficionados were sharply divided between those who admired Joselito’s elegance (the Joselistas) and those who loved Belmonte’s tragic intensity (the Belmontistas), and often when the two performed together the feelings aroused in the stands were so strong that fans would riot. But by 1919 the public began to turn on both men. Like many matadors before and after them, Joselito and Belmonte were the victims of their own success. Every time they appeared they were expected to perform miracles. They’d excelled for so long that they had begun to compete with the public’s memory of their greatness, and the memories were always better.

  By the spring of 1920 many crowds treate
d them with open hostility. Their last performance together took place in Madrid on May 15. According to Belmonte’s semifictional memoir, the crowd screamed at them both, and Joselito was taking it badly. “Listen, Juan,” Joselito is supposed to have said to Belmonte. “We might as well face it now. The public is furious with us, and the day is coming when we won’t be able to go into the ring at all.”

  The next day, in the village of Talavera de la Reina, on the road from Madrid to Badajoz, Bailador, a bull of the ranch of the Widow Ortega, gored Joselito. The matador’s midriff was sliced open and his innards spilled from his body. As he was carried to the infirmary, he cried out, “Mother, I’m smothering!” Then he died. Although audiences had harassed him to an early grave, forcing him to take greater and greater chances to please them, all of Spain went into mourning over Joselito, including Belmonte, who was devastated by the loss of his rival. Belmonte went on for another season, but his heart wasn’t in it, and in 1921 he fled to South America. Bullfighting’s Golden Age had ended, and for the next few years the world of the bulls languished as the search began for a new savior who could reinvigorate the spectacle.