Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  In 1924 wild rumors began to circulate that the new idol had been found. He was a novillero named Cayetano Ordóñez, who performed under the name El Niño de la Palma (the Kid of the Palm), after his father’s old shoe store. El Niño, as he was soon called, had worked his way into the bull world and up the ranks year by year until he erupted onto the national stage with two triumphs in Sevilla. The day after the second of these, which took place on May 4, 1925, the noted critic Gregorio Corrochano, of the newspaper ABC, published a review that contained the most famous line of praise ever written about a bullfighter: “Es de Ronda, y se llama Cayetano”—He is from Ronda, and his name is Cayetano.

  The full impact of this sentence doesn’t come across in translation, but it was magic to many Spaniards, because it summed up the hopes of their generation of aficionados. Joselito was dead, Belmonte had retired, but here was a new hero. He came from Ronda, the town where bullfighting was born, and his name was Cayetano—like Cayetano Sanz, one of the nineteenth century’s great matadors. In many ways El Niño found himself in the same position that Fran would seventy years later. By virtue of circumstances neither one had any control over, each of these young men was thrust into the role of the anointed one, the matador who was going to live up to the legend of a dead hero or be judged a failure.

  Like Fran, El Niño took his alternativa ceremony in Sevilla before he’d gained enough experience and skill to justify the elevation in rank. (As it happened, Juan Belmonte returned to Spain just in time to give El Niño the ceremony.) And like Fran, El Niño had the talent and bravery to defy his own inexperience and justify everyone’s expectations of him in his first season, his one true season of brilliance.

  Mythologized by a Spanish bullfight critic in May of 1925, El Niño would have the luck—good or bad—to be mythologized by an American novelist two months later. By then Hemingway had published his first short story collection and was launched as a writer. The next step in his career would be a novel, and he was on the prowl for a subject. He found one in Pamplona that summer. Hemingway had brought along a ragtag band of friends to the feria that year, including a doomed blonde and her alcoholic boyfriend, a Jewish writer who’d slept with the blonde, and some bohemian types. There was tension over the girl, and Hemingway would take that tension and build a novel around it, adding a single crucial character to the mix, a young matador who catches the blonde’s eye and brings the plot to its climax.

  In that novel, The Sun Also Rises, the matador is Pedro Romero—Hemingway giving his bullfighter the name of the revered Romero family of Ronda matadors. But as Hemingway would later write, the model for his Pedro Romero was El Niño, and all the bullfighting sequences in the book are true to what Hemingway saw Cayetano Ordóñez do in the ring in Pamplona in 1925.

  “Romero never made any contortions,” Hemingway wrote in his novel. “Always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bullfighting gave pure emotion because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness.”

  El Niño had a kind of innate wisdom about bulls. From the beginning he knew just how to approach each animal, and he combined this with a natural panache in performance wedded to the serenity to pass the horns close to his body. That was on his good days, however, and El Niño was never a consistent performer. He was a mercurial figure, happy and giddy and ready for a party one day, melancholy and lethargic the next.

  During the 1926 season, his second as a full matador, El Niño did well, but not as well as he had in 1925. He also caused a stir that year when he stated openly what everyone in bullfighting knew, that many critics accepted bribes in return for favorable reviews. But El Niño refused to name names, which alienated the entire bullfighting press. The crooked critics hated him for exposing their scam, while the honest critics were furious because, by refusing to say who was on the take, El Niño had cast doubt on the innocent as well as the guilty.

  The 1927 season, El Niño’s third, was also a successful one for him, but not as successful as 1926, and even less so than 1925. There were days when he had the spark. Yet there were more and more days when it seemed the whole thing bored him, and when the crowds complained, El Niño would retreat into a resigned stubbornness that pleased neither himself nor his public. That July he married a part-Gypsy silent-movie actress and flamenco dancer named Consuelo Araujo de los Reyes. By all accounts the couple was happy, too happy, as Consuelo had a taste for all-night parties that did El Niño’s bullfighting no good. Midway through the 1928 season, his reputation as a matador falling, El Niño retired. He was only twenty-four, already starting to look old, and was roundly judged to be a failure because he couldn’t live up to the legend of Joselito.

  He returned to the bulls in 1929 and clung to the wreckage of his career for another two decades, eventually sliding into the role of banderillero when the public would no longer have him as a matador. During this time Gregorio Corrochano, the writer who had made El Niño’s reputation, became his harshest and most persistent critic. Hemingway went the same route. “If you see Niño de la Palma,” Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, “the chances are you will see cowardice in its least attractive form; its fat-rumped, prematurely bald from using hair fixatives, prematurely senile form.” El Niño appeared in his last bullfight in 1950. He died, broken in body and spirit, in the autumn of 1961, a few months after Hemingway’s suicide and a few weeks before the death of Gregorio Corrochano.

  The parallels between El Niño’s life and Fran’s were notable. Both sprang onto the scene with impossible legacies to live up to and little experience. Both had success for three seasons, only to watch their reputations decline. Both were distracted by high-profile marriages to strong women, and both forged hostile relations with the press. But Fran had one thing going for him that his great-grandfather did not: he was still alive. There was time for Fran to write a different ending to his story—not as much time as there had been, but time enough.

  24

  A Traveling Season

  Málaga, August 10. “We’re all so tired,” said gray-haired Poli, lifting a cold bottle of Heineken to his lips, “and we shouldn’t be, because we’ve had so much time off.”

  “I think we’re tired because we’ve had all this time off,” said Pepe the driver. “You need to accustom yourself to this life.”

  Fran’s cuadrilla was eating its post-bullfight dinner in a neighborhood restaurant near their businessmen’s hotel downtown. Fran wasn’t with them. He preferred to stay in the fancy hilltop resort hotel with its commanding view of the old bullring and the high-rises around it and the bay in the distance. It was midnight, and two days had passed since Fran’s return to work following his June 29 injury in Algeciras. The strained elbow had kept him out of action for forty days, a layoff that had caused the predictable disruption to pocketbooks, bullfighting skills, and psyches. The team had missed twenty corridas, Fran had slipped to twelfth on the escalafón, and they’d lost the invaluable opportunity to rack up a consistent stream of successes and get in mental and physical shape for August and September—the traveling season when the corridas would come every day.

  In retrospect, the first half of August, the weeks after Fran’s return, were the absolute low point of the season. The joyous anticipation of the winter, the grim determination of spring, and the resigned concentration of the injury layoff had all dissipated, and in their place a kind of disengagement with the task at hand had set in. There was nothing acute about it, but Fran didn’t seem motivated. He was distracted and lifeless in the ring, giving up on bulls that might have yielded ears with a little effort from the matador. He no longer mixed with his cuadrilla during off hours, but spent his free
time locked away in hotel rooms, going to the movies with Nacho, or flying off to fit in short visits with his daughter, who was staying with her mother at the duchess of Alba’s summer retreat in Marbella.

  The cuadrilla members were also in a dark mood. They’d lost a lot of money during their enforced summer holiday, and when they started performing again the matador wasn’t cutting ears the way a top-ranked matador should. This upset them on many levels. As businessmen they were worried that if Fran kept going on this way he would fall from the top rank and there wouldn’t be as much work for them in the future. As toreros, they wanted the pride of being able to say they traveled with one of the elite matadors in Spain and the pleasure of working in the first-class rings and big ferias. And simply as people, it hurt them to see Fran not doing as well as he could. “Please, God, let him cut a few ears!” said the assistant manservant, Antonio, one evening. “Let him cut a few ears!”

  Fran returned to the ring on August 8 in the shockingly large plaza de toros of Palma, the capital of Mallorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean off Valencia. For the only time that season, Fran and his assistant bullfighters took a plane to a bullfight, leaving Pepe to drive the cuadrilla minibus overland and hop a ferry from Barcelona. The corrida took place on a soft summer evening. The arena was full of people on holiday, and King Juan Carlos was seated in the first row. As is customary on such occasions, Fran dedicated his first bull to the monarch, but killed badly and lost an ear. He was better on his second bull and did cut an ear. It wasn’t much of a result given the indulgent crowd that night, which had granted two and three ears to the other matadors on the card.

  Palma de Mallorca was everyone’s first look at how the injured left elbow was going to hold up under bullfight pressure, and it was not a promising sight. Even at a distance it was easy to see that Fran was still in a lot of pain and favoring the arm. It was unable to bend the way a healthy arm should. It hung at Fran’s side at a funny angle, and he held it against his hip when he wasn’t using it, and tried not to use it too much. To reduce the load the arm had to carry, Fran had taken to hugging his capote to his chest during downtimes in the ring and carried the muleta as much as possible in his right hand. These were things Fran would continue to do until the end of the season.

  On August 9, the day after Palma, Fran was down in the southern tip of Andalucía for a bullfight in the grand old plaza at El Puerto de Santa Maria, perhaps the largest and most impressive small-town ring in Spain. Fran drew bad bulls that evening and couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort to make something out of them. That brought him to August 10 and the first of two corridas he was scheduled to take part in that month at La Malagueta, the venerable ring of Málaga. On that evening, with a small, ugly, but willing bull from the ranch of Daniel Ruiz Yagüe, Fran snapped out of his prevailing funk, only to have a fine effort spoiled by a stubborn bullring president who, for some unaccountable reason and in defiance of bullfighting rules, ignored an arena full of handkerchiefs and denied Fran the ear he deserved.

  (As the crowd spilled out of the ring that night, one local aficionado explained that this president—the aficionado actually referred to the president as a “son of a bitch”—was trying to raise the reputation of the Málaga ring by making it harder to cut ears there.)

  Fran’s cuadrilla had already had three corridas in as many days, and the week ahead was going to be just as grueling. They were in the thick of the typical inhuman schedule of a working team of toreros in the late summer of a Spanish bullfighting season. During the eight days from the tenth to the seventeenth of August, they would perform in seven corridas, driving overnight on six nights and passing two in hotels. Their shortest overnight journey would be about 240 miles, from the Mediterranean coast at Málaga to Ciudad Real, in the central plain of La Mancha. Their longest overnight trip spanned 620 miles across the very length of Spain, from Gijón, hard by the Atlantic Ocean, to Málaga, on the Mediterranean. In all they would travel some 2,200 miles that week. This was approximately the distance from New York to Los Angeles, or from Madrid to Moscow by airplane. But they were not flying; they were driving in cramped vans through the second-most-mountainous country in Europe.

  “How long is the trip to Huesca?” asked José María. They had a corrida the next day in Huesca, in the region of Aragón.

  “It’s about nine hundred kilometers,” Pepe said—about 560 miles.

  “I couldn’t drive that overnight,” José María said. “I’ve never driven that far before, least of all when everyone else is asleep.”

  “You could, you could,” Pepe said. “You learn how to do it.”

  “No,” said José Maria. “You have a special skill.”

  “When I started out in this, no one in the business paid much attention to who they hired as a matador’s manservant,” the big picador Francisco López said. “The drivers were the ones who got all the respect.”

  Fran’s team of three banderilleros, two picadors, two manservants, and a driver traveled in a Mercedes minibus that was a bit taller and wider than the average American van. Most matadors plastered their name, face, and Web address on the sides of their cuadrilla bus, but Fran’s was painted a plain forest green. It had three rows of seats and storage space in the rear. Each night after a corrida, Antonio and Pepe loaded up the back of the bus with nine suitcases of everyday clothes, five or six of Fran’s bullfighting costumes, another six or eight costumes belonging to the banderilleros and picadors, the heavy armor the picadors used to protect their legs from the horns, three bags of heavy capotes, five muletas, the leather case for Fran’s swords (the case had belonged to Paquirri), and many boxes of banderillas, in white and in the red and gold of the Spanish flag. The picadors’ lances were provided by the arena.

  Fran’s costumes were made to order for him by Santos, one of the handful of bullfighting tailors, all of which were located in Madrid. The handmade suits cost around three thousand dollars apiece, and Fran ordered at least three or four new ones each season. The colors of the suits are mentioned each morning in newspaper accounts of any corrida, and the colors have evocative names such as verde manzana (apple green), celeste (heaven, a shade of blue), and sangre de toro (bull’s blood). A top matador like Fran would wear a suit no more than ten or fifteen times before giving it away to a less fortunate torero. Fran always wore a new suit when he appeared in Sevilla and Madrid, saving the used ones for lesser arenas.

  Fran also ordered his bullfighting shirts, his ties, his socks, his slippers, and his fake pigtails from Santos, as well as his capotes and muletas. Each cape came from the tailor’s with Fran’s name stenciled into it in black ink. As Fran did with his suits, he used newer capes in the better rings, saving the worn ones for smaller plazas. To keep the capes straight, Antonio wrote pet names on them, such as Princesa de La Pizana (La Pizana was the home Fran had shared with Eugenia) and San Juan Evangelista. It could cost as much as fifty thousand dollars a year to keep Fran fully stocked with costumes and gear. The care and maintenance of all this was one of Antonio’s main jobs on the road. After a corrida Antonio, and sometimes Nacho, would fill a hotel bathtub with cold water and soak the jacket, vest, and pants, working on any bloodstains with soap. Once the suit was clean, Antonio would hang it next to the front seat of the minibus to dry. It rode there next to Pepe like a ghostly reminder of the owner of the bus.

  Most members of the cuadrilla brought pillows with them to make the ride more comfortable. But more important to one’s comfort on the bus was being seated in a spot with something close at hand to prop the pillow on. Seating was assigned by seniority. Pepe, of course, drove. As the employee closest to Fran, Nacho rode next to Pepe in the shotgun seat, which provided ample space for him to put up his feet and sleep against the window. The craggy old picador López sat just behind Pepe in the coveted second-row left-side window seat. Next to him was Antonio, who endured life in a middle seat, which meant he was forced to sleep upright. Then came the junior pic, Diego. He had a window
seat, but the seat was an uncomfortable few inches from the window, to allow access to the back row. Poli had the left-side window, third row. More often than not he’d stretch out on the floor, leaving the other two banderilleros to share the back seat.

  Pepe had estimated that the 560-mile drive to Huesca would take at least seven hours that evening. But this haul did not seem to factor into what the toreros ordered for dinner. They sat down around midnight and ate their typical massive meal, washed down with plenty of wine and beer. Whether it was due to practice, professional pride, or something in the water, they were all able to get through long overnight trips without a rest stop, even after big boozy feeds.

  They left the damp Mediterranean soup of Málaga at one o’clock in the morning, heading from palm trees and sand toward the interior. There was little talking. Pepe chewed on sunflower seeds as he drove, spitting out the shells like a baseball player. The old picador snuggled his massive craggy face into his puffy pillow and began snoring. Antonio smoked. Diego looked out the window. Joselito arranged his gangly frame in the back seat and listened to headphones. Poli was down on the floor and José María leaned against the wall in back. Within an hour everyone except for Pepe was asleep.

  It was the height of summer by then, and the days were as hot as you would imagine Spanish summer days to be. But the nights were fresh with the windows open and the mountain air rushing into the minibus. This was fortunate, because the bus’s air conditioning had broken down the season before, and everyone had voted not to fix it.

  The miles began to pile up. After a few hours the van climbed through a dark wood of piny trees, coming over the top of it and down the other side. This was the famous pass of Despeñaperros, the only practical route through the mountains of the Sierra Morena, which divide Spain into north and south, separating sunny Andalucía from the arid plains of La Mancha and Castilla. (Partisans of the Andalucían bullfighting tradition love to say that no great bull or matador was ever born north of Despeñaperros.) Then came the flatness of La Mancha with its massive farms and warehouses, and then the suburbs of Madrid.