Death and the Sun (15 page)

Yet it would be a gross distortion of reality to suggest that Spain is a land of bulls and bullfighters. Most Spaniards go about their lives in blissful ignorance of bullfighting, spending their leisure time and money on television, movies, music, the Internet, and professional sports, especially soccer. The so-called national festival of bullfighting isn't really. Polls taken on the Spanish public's attitudes toward bullfighting show that around half the country disapproves of the spectacle, with around thirty percent enthusiastically for it and the rest indifferent. But the people who say they are against bullfighting can't be very against it or they would do something about it, and the fact is that there is little organized opposition to bullfighting in Spain. It exists, but it fails to generate much of a response.

Bullfighting is not part of the local culture in every corner of Spain. The four great areas of bullfighting are the south (Andalucía), the center (Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla-León), the northeast (Aragón, Navarra, and the Basque Country), and Valencia. There's hardly any bull culture in the northwest (Galicia and Asturias), and there is outright hostility to bullfighting in Spain's second city, Barcelona, which prides itself on being a pan-European capital, and where the bullfight is associated with
Españolismo
(always said with a sneer), which means anything having to do with traditional—read: backward—Spain.

Even in places where the people love bullfighting, the number actually willing or able to buy a ticket and see a corrida is relatively small. Sevilla, which has a population of around eight hundred thousand, may be the most bull-crazy city in Spain, but the Maestranza bullring seats fewer than thirteen thousand, and most of those seats are filled by fans with season subscriptions who occupy their seats day after day. Thus, in total, a small number of Sevillanos actually attend a corrida during the
feria
—certainly less than ten percent of the population. Nor is there a large television audience for bullfighting. The number of corridas broadcast on the national networks is tiny in comparison to soccer matches.

But for that haunted minority of fans, the bullfight is an overwhelming obsession. It is the only spectacle left in the world that offers such a mixture of beauty and violence, art and blood, national pride and primordial urge, the fascination of wild animals and of death. Both the bullfighters and their fans are addicted to the emotional buildup of the corrida day: the waiting and worrying; then the bullring with all its theatricality, ceremony, and music; the big crowd, the tension of the bullfight itself, and the moment when the tension breaks; when man and bull find their rhythm, and what was violence and ugliness resolves itself for a brief moment, perhaps, into something more.

11

Madrid, May 15
. Silence . . .

The sun was high in the sky, but inside the two-room hotel suite the curtains were drawn and the double-paned windows blocked out the noise of the city. Everything was quiet and dark. There was a click at the door and Nacho padded into the luxurious sitting room, which was all done up in Christmas colors, reds and greens. Nacho held a teacup filled with olive oil, a candlewick floating on the surface. He put the teacup down on the table, went to the door that led to the bedroom, and eased the door open. A television glowed inside. Fran was curled up on the bed, a rumpled shape beneath the covers. Laid out on a chair beside him was a light blue bullfighter's costume.

Nacho puttered around a bit, and soon Fran stirred. He said something and Nacho replied and the two men took up the thread of what seemed to be a continuing conversation. After a few lazy moments Fran climbed out of bed, got down on the floor, and began his stretching routine. He wore blue pajama bottoms and one of those T-shirts sold in the tourist shops of Sevilla. The shirt read,
Joé, que caló!
(Fuck, it's hot!) Except the proper Spanish—
Joder, que color!—
was spelled phonetically to render the sound of a thick Andalucían accent, in which certain consonants and all word endings are swallowed.

Fran sat on the floor, straightened his legs, and touched his toes. Nacho sat on the edge of the bed, watching his boss at work. Nacho was a heavyset man in his late thirties. He was dressed like an executive, in a dark blue suit, dress shirt, pink necktie, and brown tasseled loafers. The first of Fran's two afternoons of responsibility in the Madrid ring was about to begin, and Nacho knew better than to show up in anything less than his best clothes. The matador didn't tolerate personal sloppiness from his staff on a day like this one.

“I'd do some stretching myself,” Nacho said, “but I'd split my pants.”

Fran smiled and headed for the shower, and soon there was steam coming out from under the bathroom door. After a few minutes Fran emerged in his signature white towel, his wet black hair neatly combed. Fran dropped the towel. He took a pair of flesh-colored pantyhose and rolled them over his legs, thighs, and buttocks and up to his midriff. Then he slipped on a white tank-top undershirt. Fran sat on the bed and pulled on his socks. These were the traditional bullfighter's socks: salmon-colored with an arrow design over each calf. The socks went over the knees, where they were held in place with tight plastic garters. Then it was time to put on the bullfighter's costume itself, known as the
traje de luces
(suit of lights), because of the way the sun shines off the elaborate gold decorations, filigree, baubles, tassels, and beads.

Fran stood up, cupped his genitals in both hands, and shifted them to his left thigh. Nacho stood holding the knee-length breeches of the costume open and Fran stepped into one leg and then the other. Nacho hiked the pants up, holding them by the back of the waist, pulling hard until he had lifted Fran into the air, wedging the fabric into the crack of Fran's bottom, pressing Fran's penis and testicles against his left thigh like shrink-wrapped meat in a grocery freezer. Crammed into his pants, the fly still unbuttoned, Fran went to the writing table beside the bed and laid out the framed and unframed images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Family, an assortment of saints, and crosses, medals, and amulets. There were more than forty objects in total and they covered the table.

Fran took a clipper and cut and filed his fingernails—this to prevent a stray nail from getting caught on the fabric of the capes while he worked. Nacho set out Fran's shoes, the traditional black-leather pumps with a neat bow over the toes, and Fran stepped into them and then buttoned his fly. Slowly, so as not to muss his hair, Fran put on his bullfighter's hat. This was a deep skullcap of black woven fabric with a ball of the same material over each ear, which at some angles looked not unlike a Mickey Mouse hat. Nacho attached a fake pigtail to the hair at the back of Fran's head with a bobby pin, just beneath the cap. Then Fran slipped into a ruffled tuxedo shirt, tied a thin black necktie around his neck, and shrugged himself into the braces attached to his pants. Nacho wound a sash around Fran's waist and helped Fran into the vest of the suit and the heavy waist-length jacket with wide epaulets and holes in the armpits for greater mobility.

Silence . . .

Fran took a deep breath, blowing the air out through his nose. Then he did it again. Nacho closed the curtains in the bedroom, turned off the lights, brought out a bottle of cologne, and sprayed a few shots into the air. Nacho retrieved the teacup of olive oil from the sitting room and placed it in front of Fran's saints. Then Nacho retired from the bedroom, now bathed in cathedral gloom. The air was purified by the perfume. Fran stood before his saints. His back to the world, like a priest saying Mass in the old Roman rite, Fran crossed himself, took each saint off the table, kissed it, and laid it down again. Fran struck a match and lit the wick in the teacup. He bowed his head and prayed, slowly and with care.

The ritual was over. Fran turned and walked away, shutting the door behind him. No one would be allowed to enter the room or to disturb Fran's saints or the candle until Fran had returned safely from the bullfight. It was time to go. Nacho and Fran walked out of the suite and into the empty hallway of the hotel. The elevator arrived, and it too was empty. Nacho and Fran rode down in the elevator saying nothing.

Silence . . .

The elevator doors swung open and they were in the world again. Heat. Brightness. Mirrors. Lights. People shouted. Doors slammed. Cameras flashed. A group of Japanese tourists stared. Paparazzi and tabloid TV cameramen shoved each other, trying to get a good shot of Fran. Telephones rang at the reception desk. “
Hola, buenas tardes, Hotel Wellington
.” Someone called to Fran in Spanish: “Fran, Fran, may I have your autograph?” Nacho and Fran made their way through the crowd and out the front door of the hotel. Air. Sun. Traffic. Shoes clicked on the sidewalk. More shouting. The lights of video cameras were in their faces. The minibus was at the curb and Fran's cuadrilla of assistant bullfighters was inside. Fran and Nacho hopped in and the doors closed with a thud.

Silence . . .

The minibus took off, heading north on the Calle Velazquez, and no one in the bus had much to say. The atmosphere was uptight, even a bit somber. The buss engine hummed. Three paparazzi on motorbikes zigged and zagged around the bus, trying to get some footage of Fran through the windows. The sad story of Fran's marital troubles was still raging in the pink press. Eugenia was giving interviews, saying things like, “If Fran says he is the guilty one, then he must be.” There was also news about Fran's mother. It seemed Carmen Ordóñez had checked herself into a Madrid clinic to be treated for addiction to sleeping pills, this following a television appearance in which she had seemed intoxicated to many viewers.

Fran sat in the center row of seats, strategically placed as far from the windows as possible, staring forward. His team of three banderilleros, Nacho, the assistant manservant Antonio, and the
apoderado
sat around Fran. The two picadors had gone ahead in a taxi. They needed to be at the bullring early, to choose their horses and get accustomed to them. This was the worst time of the corrida day for the bullfighters. The preparation—the liturgical progression of lunch, nap, the dressing, and saying one's prayers—had ended. The relaxation—the shower, the beers in the hotel lobby, and the dinner—was still far away. In between this alpha and omega was the bullfight, two hours of stage fright, risk, and violence. Some toreros thrived on it. Others dreaded it. Either way, they could lose themselves in it once it had started. But in the bus there was nothing to do except worry. There was no distraction except to stare out the window at the people in the streets. Regular people. People who were never bitten by what the Spanish call “the little venom of the bulls.” People who strolled and shopped and sat in cafés, serene in the enjoyment of peace and safety.

The bus turned east through quiet streets of seven- and eight-story art nouveau buildings. Presently the road emptied into a wide avenue, the Calle Alcalá, which was jammed with rush-hour traffic. The driver, Pepe, did his best to inch forward in a herky-jerky progress until he broke through the jam and the buildings gave way and the bus was in a massive open space surrounded by highways on one side and housing projects on the others. In the center of this void squatted the hulking old ring. There were people all around it, swarming like insects, dwarfed by the scale of their surroundings.

The bus circled the ring until it came to the back entrance, the
patio de cuadrillas
(patio of the matadors' teams). A small crowd waited there. The minibus waded into the crowd and stopped. The people closed in around its doors.

Silence . . .

The doors opened and the bullfighters piled into the tumult. The wind blew. The picadors' horses smelled of animal and fear. They shied and fussed. Their hooves clopped on the stone floor. A siren wailed in the distance. Fans were everywhere. They shouted at the toreros, laughing and pushing, happy to be inside the bullring on the day of an important corrida, happy that the wait was about to end. Someone begged Fran for an autograph. People clapped him on the back. “Good luck, matador,” they said. The bullfighters walked through the crowd and into the gate. The wait was over.

 

The band began to play, but you could hardly hear it in the vastness of the ring. The atmosphere of Las Ventas was distinct from that of the Maestranza. Everything in the Sevilla ring suggested warmth and intimacy, whereas in Madrid the palette was cool: gray sand, gray stone, and a wintry audience. The parade of bullfighters seemed tiny in the packed monumentality of the ring. The parade ended and the toreros strung themselves out along the
barrera
fence, making practice passes. It was a scene out of an impressionist picture. Degas would have done it justice. The circus costumes, the capes spinning like purple and yellow pinwheels, the sun and shadow, and the great throng rising in the bowl of the ring. This might have been an afternoon in Degas's time, or a century before that, or a century later. Apart from the clothes the audience wore, there was little in the panorama to give historical context, and Princess Elena and her husband were seated in the royal box.

The bulls were from the brand of the Heirs of Don Baltasar Ibán, raised just outside Madrid. Fran's first was black, a five-year-old that weighed some twelve hundred pounds. The bull marched out of the gate and looked around. One of Fran's assistants—hiding behind a
burladero
, across the ring from the bull—flicked his cape in the air, and the bull saw the blaze of purple cloth and made for it. Loose-muscled and sure, its small hooves beating muffled clops, the bull crossed the sand and skidded to a halt just before the
burladero
where the assistant bullfighter had ducked out of sight. Lacking a target, the animal turned away and made for the center of the ring. Then the assistant jumped up again, attracting the bull's attention and holding it near the
burladero
.