All of this was well known, but then Dr. Morán said something unexpected: “I never thought Paquirri was going to die. We had controlled the bleeding. He was no longer bleeding and I was calm. I never thought he was dying.” There are numerous accounts of Paquirri’s final hours. I had studied four of them in detail, and all of them are based on the assumption that Paquirri had been in a race for his life when he was sent down to Córdoba. But Dr. Morán had a different view. He told me that when he said goodbye to Paquirri that night, he thought he was saying goodbye to a patient who was more than stable enough to make it to the hospital alive.
So why, then, did Paquirri die?
Dr. Morán attended a postmortem on Paquirri’s body the night of the goring. He said it proved that the medical attention Paquirri had received in Pozoblanco had been effective. The clamped blood vessels and compresses in the wounds had held, and the torero had not bled out in the ambulance. Accepting this, and adding to it the clue that, just before he died, Paquirri had been agitated and had complained that he couldn’t breathe, Dr. Morán concluded that the cause of death was a pulmonary embolism. This was probably the result of a blood clot or a bit of fatty tissue that had been dislodged by the horn wound and had made its way through Paquirri’s bloodstream to a major vessel in his lung, where it had cut off the supply of oxygenated blood, shutting down the body in short order.
According to various American emergency room doctors I interviewed, an embolism isn’t the sort of thing the doctors in Pozoblanco could have predicted or treated, even if Paquirri had been in a hospital. In fact, Paquirri wasn’t in a hospital, he was in an ambulance, which is where he should have been, given his medical condition. Paquirri could not have stayed in Pozoblanco. He had to be taken to a big hospital for the surgery and postoperative care he would need to make a complete recovery.
This opinion was affirmed by Paquirri’s personal physician, Dr. Ramón Vila, who also happened to be the chief doctor of the Maestranza ring in Sevilla. Dr. Vila was at home on the day Paquirri died. He had, however, been in telephone contact with Dr. Morán in Pozoblanco while Morán was treating Paquirri, and Vila had read the postmortem materials. “The doctors in Pozoblanco did all they could,” said Dr. Vila, who is a friend of Dr. Morán’s. “In the final analysis, the death of Paquirri was a death from stress, probably a pulmonary embolism.”
Dr. Morán and Dr. Vila’s diagnosis is a controversial one. Over the years aficionados and journalists have speculated, although without evidence, that Paquirri bled to death from a deep wound that the Pozoblanco medical team missed. When I recounted the known facts of Paquirri’s last hours to Dr. James Giglio, a professor at Columbia University’s medical school and the director of emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, he agreed the most plausible explanation was that Paquirri bled out. Nevertheless, Dr. Giglio did not rule out embolism, especially if Paquirri had seemed fine just before he died. “If you take as fact that there was a sudden deterioration of a patient that appeared to be stable,” Dr. Giglio said, “an embolism is an appealing explanation.”
The afternoon was ending and so was my time with Dr. Morán. Long shadows fell across his office. When I asked him what Paquirri’s death had meant to him over the years, he did something strange. He leaned over and turned off the lamp that sat on the desk between us. “I never thought he was going to die,” he said again, his face hidden in the growing shadows. “When they told me he had died, I was shocked. I felt lost. There is no one in the world, no doctor, who wants his patients to suffer or die. When things don’t go well we feel terrible. We spend many nights without sleep.” It was only when Dr. Morán showed me to the door that I realized why he had turned his lamp off. He hadn’t wanted me to see his tears.
Zaragoza, October 13. The ten-day Zaragoza feria is dedicated to la Virgen del Pilar (the Virgin of the Pillar), who, along with Saint James, is the most important of Spain’s national patron saints. The feast day of this Virgin, and the centerpiece of her feria, is October 12, which was also the day Columbus first sighted land in the Americas, as well as the day Spanish-speaking people worldwide celebrate El Dia de la Raza (Day of the Hispanic Race). Zaragoza’s main square was crowded in the hours before Fran’s corrida. People placed bouquets and wreaths on a thirty-foot mountain of flowers being offered to the Virgin outside her church. There were processions of girls in peasant dresses, brass bands, and soldiers marching. Happy Zaragozano families packed the tables of inns and restaurants, munching away on large lunches. That afternoon, with the permission of the government, as bullfighting posters always say, six large bulls would be slaughtered in the town arena.
More than Italy or France, Spain is the country where the culture of the Roman Empire is best preserved in modern form. We were in Caesar Augusta, as Zaragoza was named when the Romans colonized it and made it into a city for retired veterans of their famed legions. If you visit the town during the feria, it would not be hard to imagine Caesar Augusta as it must have been during some festival two thousand years ago, when Rome still ruled the known world. Once again it was bread-and-circuses time for the local population, with the parades of citizens and soldiers, the feasts, the offerings of flowers before the temple of the town’s most important goddess, and the bloody entertainments of the coliseum as the final pleasure of the day.
Bullfighting is easy to dismiss as an artifact of humanity’s savage and uncivilized history. But in its bloody way the bullfight is the essence of civilization, if by civilization we mean humanity’s subjugation of the natural world and the development of custom and ritual to replace violence as the governing principle of human interaction. A society that can mount a corrida is an advanced society, one that has tamed nature, met the basic needs of its people (to the extent that entertainment is a priority), and channeled the bloody impulses of its populace into ordered ritual. There is nothing more civilized than a bullfight. It is the sum of humankind’s fears and wordless needs contained in a spectacle of rigid control and elaborate ceremony. Spectacles similar to bullfighting were part and parcel of the culture of the Roman Empire, which was the founding culture of Western civilization. Is it any surprise, then, that such spectacles have endured, just as Roman architecture, Roman laws, Roman language, and Rome’s adopted religion—Christianity—have?
The afternoon of Fran’s corrida was cold, damp, and gray. But the bullring—which was built in 1764 to mount bullfights to raise money for a charity hospital—had a modern tent-like contraption rigged over it to keep out the weather. Inside the arena it was muggy with tobacco smoke and the heat of ten thousand spectators, a packed house. Fran had cut two ears the day before in a small town called Calanda, but on this afternoon, in the first-category ring at Zaragoza, he couldn’t get anything going. So he killed his last bull, and with it his season died. When the bullfight was over, Fran and the other toreros shook hands, clapped each other on the back, and walked out of the plaza into the chill wet air, some of the audience whistling at Fran as he turned away from what had been a mediocre day.
In the end, Fran performed sixty-two times that season, killing around 120 bulls and cutting forty-nine ears. He’d registered notable performances in Ronda and Linares, cut an ear in each of the first-category plazas of Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid, and had some big afternoons in second- and third-class rings: Lorca, Cartagena, Játiva, and Calatayud. Fran could also take satisfaction in the thought that despite a rough emotional start and an injury that kept him out of action for a month, he’d finished strong, cutting twenty-four ears in his last twenty-one corridas. If the entire season had been that good . . . But it hadn’t. Fran finished tenth on the leader board of matadors, a spot that 6 Toros 6 categorized as being the “lukewarm zone.” It was a position from which a matador must either move up or move down.
“The season started very nervous, very tense, with many problems,” Fran said, “but at the end I really enjoyed being a bullfighter. I was excited waiting for the bull to come out. I was happy in the ri
ng. The end of the season was a personal and professional victory for me. I said, ‘I am here, and don’t say I am dead. I am still alive and I want to make my dream come true.’”
Fran and his cuadrilla held their traditional end-of-season dinner in the wine cellar of a townhouse that belonged to a prominent businessman and sometime bullfight promoter. As usual, Noël Chandler was invited along. When the dinner of tapas, steak, grilled fish, salad, bread, and wine was finished, Fran sat at one end of the table, a little-boy smile crinkling around the huge Cuban cigar in his mouth. Like everyone else he was a little drunk and very happy. No matter how good or bad a bullfighting season has been, toreros are always pleased to reach its conclusion. They’d risked their lives, done their work, and banked their money, and could look forward to a well-earned holiday. Best of all, they were in one piece. They’d beaten the odds and brought themselves one step closer to an honorable retirement and the telling of tall tales to grandchildren.
The only dissenting voice in the happy chorus was that of the apoderado. Pepe Luis Segura was still fixated on the idea that the presence of an American journalist had cursed them all. “You cost us another ear today,” he told me as we ate. “You cost us another one.”
Then, without preamble, the old picador Francisco López stood up and rapped his knuckles on the table for silence. The room settled down. López spread out his arms, lifted up his head, and began to sing. His song was a fandango, one of the basic forms of traditional flamenco music, the real flamenco that in Spain is called cante hondo (deep song). His scarred and ruined voice told the same story of savage beauty and tragic pain that is told over and over in the bullrings of Spain and wherever the deep, old flamenco is sung. He wasn’t a great singer. Some of the people around the table snickered a little. But the old picador had a touch of the duende that night, and he closed his eyes and lost himself and the dark demon came.
Paco López finished his lament, the party broke up, and the bullfighters strolled out into the autumn night to the big hotel where their cars were parked out front. The season had ended, but the same frantic pace of travel would be maintained for one more night. They were driving home that very moment, eager to get back to Andalucía and their winter vacations. The cuadrilla loaded up the minibus, waved farewell, and pulled out.
Then it was time for Fran to go. He and Noël embraced, and Fran told Noël to call him during the off-season, to plan a trip scouting bulls in the countryside. But everyone knew this was just talk, and that Noël and Fran would probably see each other again in the spring, in some hotel room somewhere after a corrida. Then Fran slipped into his red Chevy van, and Juani drove off.
While everyone said his goodbyes, I was leaning against a car, taking in the scene. When I started to walk away I realized with some embarrassment that the car was Pepe Luis’s champagne-colored Mercedes sedan. A few weeks later, in New York, I heard that when Pepe Luis saw this, he began to rage that I had cursed his car just as sure as I had cursed the season. Later that final night of the season, somewhere on the highway between Zaragoza and Sevilla, Pepe Luis and his driver were in an accident and the champagne-colored Mercedes was totaled. Fortunately, neither the apoderado nor his chauffeur was hurt.
Appendix: How to See Them
When you first start going to the bullfights, it isn’t the specific details that matter so much as your overall impression of the spectacle. For this reason, as a beginning aficionado you should try to attend the best bullfights—that is, those held in major cities during ferias. Like sushi, bullfighting loses much of its charm when it is not the best quality: off-season bullfights in big-city rings tend to be drab and poorly attended, and the level of bullfighting in small towns is unpredictable. So the best bet is to go to bullfights during big-city ferias when the rings are packed, the atmosphere is charged with excitement, and the bullfighters and bulls are good enough that they won’t spoil the day.
Many people may disagree, but for me Spain is the country in which to see a bullfight. Hands down, Spain has the greatest number of beautiful and historic rings, the most ferocious and hard-charging bulls, and the most discerning public. Spain mounts the most corridas a year—about eight hundred and fifty—and that isn’t counting novilladas, horseback corridas, and other bull-related spectacles. The Spanish bullfighting season runs from March through October and unfolds much the same way each year. A complete list of Spanish ferias and bullring schedules would go on for pages; the following are some of the prominent ones.
The essential ferias of March are the weeklong cycles in Castellón de la Plana and down the road in Valencia. Then comes the April fair of Sevilla, which runs for two weeks, into early May. There are two or three prestigious corridas in Madrid in early May, and then the thirty-day Feria de San Isidro, which spills into June. Granada, Plasencia, Sevilla, and Toledo mount corridas on June 7, the Feast of Corpus Christi. At the end of June, solid provincial ferias are held in Alicante, León, and Burgos. The bull-running feria of Pamplona goes from July 6 to 14, and later that month there are top-notch weeklong ferias in Santander and Valencia. August and September are busy taurine months. The two prestige August ferias are those of Bilbao and San Sebastián, with Gijón and Málaga in the second tier; Almería, Azpeitia, Ciudad Real, Huelva, Linares, and Vitoria are among the best that follow behind. The standout September ferias are those in Sevilla and Valladolid, followed by Logroño, Murcia, Salamanca, and Ronda; then come ferias in Albacete, Andújar, Aranjuez, Guadalajara, Mérida, and Palencia. Zaragoza boasts the key October feria, and there is also an autumn feria in Madrid and a lovely one in Jaén.
The most important ferias of the Spanish season are San Isidro in Madrid in May, the Feria de Abril of Sevilla, the Corridas Generales of Bilbao in August, Pamplona’s Feria de San Fermín in July, the Feria del Pilar of Zaragoza in October, and the two ferias of Valencia: Las Fallas in March and San Jaime in July. Taking into account the attractions of the host city, the nontaurine aspects of the feria itself, the level of bulls and matadors presented, and the ease of finding corrida tickets, food, and lodging, the top big-time ferias to attend as a tourist are those of Madrid and Valencia, and, of the second rank, Almería and Logroño. The worst big rings are in Barcelona (filled with tourists), Córdoba (always empty), and San Sebastián (hockey stadium atmosphere). It is likely to rain a great deal in the spring and be boiling hot down south in the summer months. The best weather of the bullfighting season is in September.
France has some thirty bullrings, and of these the best are the ancient Roman arenas at Arles and Nîmes. These rings play host to numerous ferias, of which the best are the mid-June cycle in Nîmes and the September ferias in both Nîmes and Arles. Worth noting are the ferias in Vic-Fézensac in June, Mont-de-Marsan in late July, and Bayonne, Beziers, and Dax in mid-August. Bullfighting is in decline in Portugal, so I can’t recommend any ferias there. The big ring in Lisbon, the Campo Pequenho, is set to reopen after a restoration, so there is reason to hope.
The bullfighting season in Latin America is the mirror image of the European season, running from October to March, although bullfights do take place during the summer in rings along the Mexican-American border. After Spain, the nation with the most developed taurine culture is Mexico. Mexico has more than seventy rings, a majority of them clumped in the center of the country, in the states due north of Mexico City. The forty-seven-thousand-seat bullring in the capital, the biggest ring in the world, mounts corridas on most winter Sundays. The grandest ring in South America is the Plaza de Acho of Lima, Peru, which was built in 1766 and has corridas on scattered Sundays from October to mid-December.
The best feria south of Mexico, from the point of view of matadors and bulls, is in Quito, Ecuador, in the first week of December. Venezuela has close to twenty rings, and the key ferias are in Maracay, Valencia, and Caracas. The top rings of Colombia are in Cali, Bogota, and Medellin.
It is difficult to purchase advance tickets to corridas in Spain, and even though a few Web sites ha
ve begun to offer this service, generally there is no need for it. Apart from a few particularly popular corridas and the entire Sevilla feria, it isn’t hard to get into most bullfights. If you are staying at a good hotel, your concierge will usually be able to scrounge a few tickets for you, but you will probably pay a hefty scalper’s price. It’s better, cheaper, and more fun to go to the bullring yourself—this is easy to do, since most rings are located in the center of town—bypass the scalpers who will pester you, and head straight to the box office, which will likely have a few tickets left, even on the day of the corrida.
Keep in mind that most box offices observe a generous midday break for lunch and a nap. If the corrida happens to be sold out, ask for the reventa, a government-sanctioned dealer that resells tickets at a twenty-percent premium. Typically, the reventa booth or booths will be right outside the arena. If the reventa is also sold out, you may have to resort to one of the scalpers. Ticket-scalping is illegal, and you may pay dearly for one of the worst seats in the house. But it is rare in Spain to hear of a scalper selling counterfeit or phony tickets, and I have never heard of anyone being robbed by someone posing as a scalper. Of course there is always a first time.
More often than not, however, the box office will have tickets to sell and might even have enough to offer you a choice of seating. In Spanish rings, each ticket, or entrada, is printed with the seat number, row number, arena section, and whether the seat will be in sun or shade during the corrida. The first row of seats is called the barrera, and the two or three rows behind the barrera are called the contra-barreras. Rising from the contra-barreras—akin to the orchestra seats in a Broadway theater—are the tendido seats. Most bullrings have no seats above the tendidos, but in larger rings the tendidos may be topped with covered palcos—like balconies in a theater—and above the palcos a covered grada section. The biggest rings may have yet another covered section, above the grada, called the andanada.
Death and the Sun Page 27