Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  All fancy arguments aside, most people’s beliefs about bullfighting are formed in the same way as their beliefs about religion. That is to say, most people believe, or at the very least tolerate, what they were brought up with. Most people raised in a certain religion tend to stick with that religion for the rest of their lives, with varying degrees of commitment. The same is true of the bullfight. People who were not brought up around bullfighting are much more likely to be shocked and horrified by it than those who were raised in an environment that had bullfighting in it. This does not absolve bullfighting from charges of cruelty. It is cruel. But it does mean that most people’s reaction to bullfighting says more about their culture than it does about the morality of bullfighting.

  26

  First-Class Standards

  Huesca, August 11. The evening after the corrida was a rare one without travel, and some of the bullfighting people in the hotel where Fran and his crew were staying decided to use their free time to visit a brothel. These people did not want their names used in a book. But it should be said that most of them weren’t bullfighters working for Fran, and Fran wasn’t with them.

  Someone in the group suggested they visit a well-known whorehouse outside of town, on the highway to Zaragoza, but no one wanted to drive there. So they asked a waiter in the hotel restaurant and he pointed them toward the downtown red-light district. Sometime after midnight a small group of men slipped out of the hotel, crossed the darkened square in front of the hotel, and made their way through streets filled with feria revelers until they came to a seedier neighborhood and found a small tavern with a pink and blue neon sign in the window.

  This tavern was a whorehouse. In the front was an open room with a bar, where a woman was selling drinks to a group of beaten-down men, most of whom were senior citizens. Ten women lolled against a wall at the other end of the room. They wore nothing but underclothes and appeared to have come, or been brought, from North and Central Africa. By the looks on their faces, they seemed bored. Some of the men at the bar leered at the women, but no one was making use of the small rooms in the back that were clearly set up for assignations. It was a slow Sunday night in Huesca, and the brothel was kind of like an eighth-grade dance: boys on one side, girls on the other.

  Like professional entertainers everywhere, bullfighters are known for their sexual exploits. Being successful with women is part of the classic torero’s persona, and many bullfighters do their best to live up to it. It is said that many matadors cannot relax after a corrida without releasing some of their built-up tension with a woman, and there is no shortage of women willing to help out. Groupies haunt the hotels where bullfighters stay, and if the amateur talent is lacking, there are always professional ladies available. For centuries Spanish society maintained a strict, almost Koranic control over its women, especially in matters of sex. As a result of this, some might say, prostitution was always a force in Spanish life. A study conducted in the mid-1960s found that two thirds of Spanish men said they’d lost their virginity to a prostitute.

  Forty-odd years later, things had changed a great deal. Spanish women had won a large measure of liberation, and studies have shown that fewer and fewer men were having their first experience with a hooker. But Spanish culture persisted in the view that women were either Madonnas or whores. It was no accident that the word puta (whore) figured prominently in Spanish putdowns and curses. However, to call something de puta madre (whore-motherish) meant it was wonderful—the Spanish idea being that anything that combined maternal comfort with the pleasure of illicit sex must be fantastic. The sex trade was big business in Spain. Prostitution was legal, and even though pimping and operating a brothel were illegal, they were much on display. The Spanish euphemism for whorehouse is club, and there were a few such clubes on the highways outside any Spanish city.

  Despite the expected locker room boasting about sex, and despite ample opportunities to put words into action, there was little evidence of womanizing in Fran’s crew. It seemed that Fran was going to bed early and alone that season and did little but talk about his estranged wife. The banderilleros and picadors sometimes chatted up women in public places, but it never seemed to go further than that. They might have been hiding their bad behavior because I was writing a book about them. That would have been hard to do, though, given the intimacy of our travel arrangements. In Huesca that night, no one did anything more than have an expensive beer. They had no interest in black women, they explained. Most of them went back to their hotel. A few of them hit the bars.

  San Sebastián, August 12. Rain fell and clouds hung low over the skyline when Pepe guided the minibus into this beautiful and modern city. San Sebastián (“Donostia” in Euskara, the Basque language) spreads out from a crescent-shaped bay dotted with impressive green hills. The scenery recalls Rio de Janeiro, but San Sebastián is on the northern coast of Spain, up near the French border. It is the capital of the Basque Country and is famous for its cuisine, both traditional and experimental. Fran and Pepe Luis checked into the luxurious Hotel Maria Cristina in the center of town, while the cuadrilla settled into a straightforward businessmen’s hotel on a quiet street near the bullring. This hotel had just opened, and the owners, a husband and wife, were in the lobby to greet the toreros when they arrived. The couple, both aficionados, were excited to have bullfighters staying with them.

  It may seem unjust that Fran got to stay in a five-star hotel and put his men—men charged with defending his life—in a more modest establishment. But this was in keeping with bullfighting tradition. In the days before the toreros’ union, matadors treated their subordinates shabbily, paying them meager wages and housing them in the cheapest fleabags—or, whenever possible, saving the price of lodging altogether by letting them sleep on the road. Things were much fairer in Fran’s day, but no one objected to his staying in a fancy hotel. As the matador Fran paid the bills, and as the matador he ran most of the risks in the ring. If any of Fran’s men had possessed the luck, talent, and guts to be matadors themselves, they would have treated their employees exactly as Fran did, or worse. In fact, Fran was known among the top matadors for treating his team well. They ate better and slept in greater luxury than many of their colleagues.

  There was no bullfight that night, so the cuadrilla looked forward to an unhurried dinner at the hotel restaurant. As always, their behavior was quite formal. Each newcomer greeted the table with “Buen provecho” (“Good appetite”) as he sat down, and bullfighting was not discussed, because it was considered to be impolite to mix business with food. A waiter came by and delivered menus. The men studied them and placed their orders. Time passed. The drinks were late in coming, which produced some consternation. The first round was consumed, then another, and still the food had not arrived. The waiter was summoned, and the craggy-faced picador Lopez gave him an earful of complaint.

  The waiter apologized and eventually plates of food were set on the table. The toreros were pleased at first, until they looked down at what had been set before them. Then their faces darkened. The style of presentation at this restaurant was pure nouvelle cuisine, and that meant one thing: small portions. The steak was around four ounces. It came with three bites of potato, each one carved to resemble a mushroom. The rice with squid in a sauce of its own ink was formed into a hockey-puck-sized disk that sat forlorn in a sea of empty porcelain. All of it was pretty, but it was not enough food for the bullfighters. Most of them looked unhappy but resigned. Poli seemed as if he were ready to explode.

  San Sebastián, August 13. On the outskirts of town, atop a hill, stood the Illumbe entertainment complex, home to a nine-theater multiplex cinema, a food court, video-game rooms, and a first-category bullring that seated around ten thousand spectators. The seats in the bullring were honest-to-goodness seats with backrests. There were aisles between sections that led to refreshment stands and clean, modern bathrooms. Best of all, given San Sebastián’s rainy climate, there was a retractable roof that could open or close in twel
ve minutes. The Illumbe ring opened in 1998 with a corrida of Torrealta bulls that were dispatched by three matadors, including Francisco Rivera Ordóñez. It was the most comfortable bullring in Spain and had all the atmosphere of a midwestern hockey arena.

  The San Sebastián corrida would be Fran’s crucial summer date. Given the lost bullfight in Pamplona, this was his only opportunity to triumph in one of the big rings up north. It was also his only scheduled appearance in a first-class ring between May and September. On this afternoon Fran would have to perform in a different way than he had in the small towns he’d been visiting during the prior months. In small towns the crowds just want a good show. They don’t come to judge bullfighters but to cheer them. They aren’t great connoisseurs of the ring and don’t want to be. They applaud any pass that looks flashy and risky. They enjoy all the flourishes: the matador staring at the audience while the bull runs by, or passing the bull on his knees, or kneeling in front of an exhausted bull and tossing away his cape, or leaning his forehead against the bull’s horn.

  By contrast, fans in big cities like San Sebastián come to the arena, in large measure, to display their bullfighting knowledge. They may not know anything more than the people in the small towns do, but they think they do, and what they think they want is their vision of what classic bullfighting should be. This means each bull should be pic’d just enough to tire it, but not enough to exhaust it; the banderillas should be placed in proper style; and the matador should lower his hands and give deep, measured verónicas with the capote. In addition, the matador should favor his left hand in his muleta work—with no sword behind the cape to spread the fabric—and lure the bull just past his body, prolonging the moment when the horns are close by, slowing the bull down, then curving the bull behind his back to link the next pass. Finally, the matador must kill on the first try, going straight over the horns and leaving the sword in the right place.

  Aside from his well-publicized traumas with the sword, the thing that hurt Fran the most with the fans in the first-class plazas—and the newspaper critics whose columns they studied—was his muleta technique. Fran was often criticized for failing to “cross” at the beginning of each pass. That is, he didn’t start each pass between the horns, right in front of the bull, but instead from a position parallel to the bull. The concept of crossing had come into bullfighting during the 1970s and was championed by certain critics. Like many matadors, Fran rejected crossing as an unworkable fantasy technique, because the matador had to forgo linking his passes in favor of shuffling in front of the bull between each pass. Fran was also criticized for failing to complete his passes by bringing the bull around his back; he had a tendency to allow the bull to run out and away from him at the end of each pass, something the press-box pundits called “vulgar.”

  The bulls in San Sebastián were from the ranch of the brothers García Jiménez of Salamanca, in central Spain, and Fran drew two of the better ones. The first was a red-coated creature of twelve hundred pounds named Voluntario (Volunteer), an apt name for a bull that was more than willing to get into the fray. Voluntario charged and charged, asking for as much action as Fran had to offer. As always, Fran began well, with a handsome set of first-class verónicas that were met with applause and olés! When the horsemen and banderilleros had run their course, Fran came out with his muleta and worked a fine opening stanza of passes with his right hand, lunging forward on his left leg to pass the bull low, forcing the bull’s head down, bearing down on its charge, and bringing it under control.

  Three sets of right-handed passes followed, each one an improvement on the one that preceded it. The passes of the second series were elongated, with Fran “running the hand,” as the Spanish say, pulling the bull through drawn-out circles of movement. The audience called out olés and clapped in rhythm, demanding music. The president resisted at first, but then relented, and the next series was all anyone could have asked for in derechazo passes: Fran drawing the bull across his body in stretched-out straight lines, then bending those lines into tense angles at the end, dragging the bull behind his back. He ended this series by switching the cape to his left hand in midpass, bringing the bull whence it had come, pushing the cape up at the end, wrenching the bull’s head up with it and out past Fran’s shoulder.

  “Olé!”

  The band played. Fran kept the muleta in his left hand, the cloth hanging down, offering only a minimum of protection. He stalked the bull, stopped about ten feet from it, and offered the cape from there, gambling that Voluntario was enough of a bull to accept a challenge from a great distance. The gamble paid off. The bull attacked, making a dramatic run across the sanded circle of the ring. The pass connected. The bull was sucked into the draw of the cape. But the pass was incomplete. Somehow Fran couldn’t keep the bull under control, and instead of following the cloth, it ran right through the cloth, spoiling the line Fran was sketching, spoiling the tempo Fran was creating, and cutting off the tension, the energy, and the beauty.

  Fran cited with his left hand again, but the pass ended much the same way the first one had, with the bull running through the cape. On the third pass the bull blew past him, making its way to a querencia near the bullpen gate, forcing Fran to pursue it. Most of the audience applauded after each pass. Even in a place like San Sebastián, most of the fans were the kind who would applaud anytime the bull ran past the man. There were, however, more and more jeers and whistles after each pass. The hard-core experts in the audience, or those who thought they were, seemed to agree that this was a good bull, and they were annoyed that Fran couldn’t quite contain the animal’s prodigious energy and channel it into satisfactory left-handed muleta passes.

  The third series of naturales went much the same way as the first two had, and the whistles picked up. Seemingly defeated by his left hand, Fran returned the cape to his right and did another solid set of derechazos. But this did nothing to mollify the part of the audience that had been waiting for grade-A work with the left hand, and they jeered with feeling.

  Fran ignored them and went over to trade the lightweight sword for the steel. He hit bone on the first attempt, got a little of the blade in on the second attempt, did a take-in/take-out on the third try, and sank half the blade on the fourth. The bull died. When the time came, the crowd reacted to Fran’s performance in silence, which was better than whistles but not good. Obviously, there was no question of awarding an ear, and Fran did no better with his second bull.

  In the next day’s newspapers Fran was admonished for what the critics called his bad muleta form. In ABC, the critic Zabala de la Serna wrote that Fran’s bulls had been good ones, “but there is nothing a matador can do with a bull when that matador never crosses in front of the horns, and sends the bull out and away from himself at the end of each pass, and fails to kill with sincerity or conviction.”

  Noël Chandler had been staying in his Pamplona flat and driving up the A-15 highway each afternoon to attend the day’s corrida in San Sebastián. “As I’ve been saying all year,” Noël said, sipping a post-bullfight beer in a bar underneath the arena, “instead of reaching out and bringing the bull into his body, he’s holding the muleta near his body and sending the bull away from his body. Very depressing.”

  Back at the hotel that evening, the cuadrilla assembled for their meal in a terrible mood. The corrida had been a bad one, they had a long ride ahead of them, and they feared they were going to be cheated out of their one remaining pleasure, a big meal. They ordered, and again the food was a long time in coming, and again when it came the portions were small, and finally the frustrations of the entire season boiled over into insurrection. The old picador López began cursing and yelling in indecipherable Andalucían. Then Poli took over. “This is a vergüenza!” he said. “A disgrace! This is why we need to go to taurino hotels, places that know what we like.” The men decided the time had come for a formal protest, and Poli pulled out his cell phone.

  He dialed Pepe Luis Segura’s number and waited. When Pepe Lu
is answered, Poli went into his litany of complaints about the service and food in the hotel restaurant. When he had finished there was a pause on the line. Then Pepe Luis began to speak, and everyone at the table could hear that he was shouting. There was a pause, and the voice changed. Fran had come on the line (Pepe Luis and Fran had been sharing dinner in their hotel), and then he shouted for a while too. Poli’s face lost its color. When Fran gave Poli a moment to think, he backed down somewhat from his aggressive posture and Fran hung up. After that, no one was in any mood to complain about the food.

  27

  Good Luck Bad Luck

  Gijón, August 14. Something had to give in Fran’s season, and it finally did on a gentle evening in Gijón, a summer resort town about 185 miles west of San Sebastián along the Atlantic coast. This was a different kind of bullfight than the one in San Sebastián had been, before a different kind of crowd. Gijón has a proud taurine tradition. The annual Feria de Nuestra Señora de Begoña (Our Lady of the Begonia) has been an important August stop for toreros for a long time—the impressive and unusual sixteen-sided bullring first opened in 1888. But Gijón is a second-category ring, a provincial ring, and the audience there has a second-category attitude. The fans are not interested in being tough on matadors, or in proving their superior knowledge of the subtleties of the art of bullfighting, or in watching sober demonstrations of bullfighting essentials. This was a crowd that wanted to be entertained with all the bells and whistles.