Death and the Sun (20 page)

Certain periods of history have been more lethal for toreros than others, but bullfighting has become less dangerous thanks to improvements in emergency medicine. For example, between 1900 and 1920 46 banderilleros were killed in the ring, compared to 9 killed between 1960 and 1980, a time when there were many more bullfights. Penicillin is credited with saving the lives and especially the limbs of many twentieth-and twenty-first-century bullfighters who might otherwise have suffered horrible infections from dirty horns. For this reason, many Spanish cities have streets named for the man who first isolated penicillin, Dr. Alexander Fleming. There's even a statue of him outside the bullring in Madrid.

The majority of toreros who've died from injuries suffered in the ring have been anonymous types, but it is striking how many famous ones have been killed. Two of the three greatest matadors of the twentieth century died on the horns: José Gómez, called Joselito, was killed by a bull of the Widow Ortega, in Talavera de la Reina, on May 16, 1920; Manuel Rodríguez, Manolete, was killed by a Miura bull, in Linares, August 28, 1947. One of the greatest of the eighteenth-century matadors, José Delgado, called Pepe-Hillo, was gored to death in Madrid in 1801, as was one of the heroes of the nineteenth century, Manuel García, El Espartero, in 1894.

Pepe-Hillo, Espartero, and Manolete would be considered all-time greats even if they'd died in bed. Yet it has to be admitted that being killed in the ring does wonders for a matador's reputation. Fran's father was a fine matador and a star of his generation, but he became a legend in death. Or take Manuel Granero. He performed for less than two seasons as a matador, but he's famous to this day because in 1922 a Veragua bull named Pocapena (Little Pain) spiked him in the right eye in the Madrid ring, sending him into the history books. Being involved in a fatal incident is also good for the bull's reputation. No one remembers the names of most bullfighting bulls, but any good aficionado can tell you that Bailador killed Joselito, Islero killed Manolete, and Avispado killed Paquirri.

The deaths of important matadors have always been powerful national events in Spain and moments that the Spanish rather enjoy on some level. Of course they grieve. They wail, they moan, they write maudlin poetry, and participate in lavish funerals and ceremonies. But Spanish culture is deeply tradition-bound, and bullfighting is the most tradition-bound aspect of the culture, and it is a tradition in bullfighting that it is right and proper for a matador to die in the ring; that it is the matador's destiny and his calling. So when this happens, it is as though all the fairy tales were coming true.

“It is hard for Americans to understand why all this fuss about one bullfighter,” wrote the American author Barnaby Conrad of Manolete's death. “Yet when he was killed, he died such a beautiful dramatic Spanish death that I swear, in spite of the great funeral, the week of national mourning, the odes, the dirges and posthumous decorations by the government, that in his heart of hearts, every Spaniard was glad that he had died.”

At the same time there is also a strong tradition that a matador should never, under any circumstances, court death actively, or take risks in the ring deemed unreasonable by bullfighting standards. The essence of bullfighting is control. The matador must control his own emotions and the behavior of a wild animal, and as long as he stays in control of both, he'll be applauded for taking big risks. But when the audience senses that the man has lost his grip on himself or the animal and is simply throwing himself at danger, it will turn on him and beg him to stop. This is what happened in Pamplona. The people in the crowd wanted Antonio Barrera out of the ring after the first tossing because they could see he was in no shape to handle the situation. Sadly, they were right.

Barrera's goring was one of the 166 injuries sustained during that bullfighting season, according to
6 Toros 6
, making that year notably violent. There was no logical explanation for this. The bulls were no fiercer. The bullfighters were no braver. Perhaps it was just a run of bad luck. “The bull respected no one,” wrote the editors of
6 Toros 6
. “He sunk his horn in where he could, with cunning or ferocity, with blind fury or self-assurance. This season has been one of the bloodiest in the last ten years, and without doubt it created more absences of important matadors than any year in recent memory.”

The first top-level matador to go was Eugenio de Mora, gored in the buttocks in Sevilla on April 14, the same day Fran performed. That injury put Eugenio in dry dock for six weeks. Two days after that, in the same
feria
of Sevilla, the veteran matador José Ortega Cano was hooked into the air and came down on his left elbow, breaking it. He was out for two months. Later in the same corrida, Enrique Ponce, one of the top two or three matadors in Spain for more than a decade, suffered a footlong wound in his left thigh and was knocked out for a month. He returned in mid-May and performed in another thirteen corridas, until June 23 in Leon, when a Zalduendo bull tossed him. The doctors thought he had sustained a broken rib and nothing more. Then Enrique stopped breathing, and they realized the rib had punctured a lung. Out another month.

The matador José Miguel Arroyo, called Joselito, broke his right leg in three places when a bull knocked him down during a spring corrida in the ancient Roman arena in the French city of Nîmes. The injury might have ended his career, but Joselito came back. He was still limping and his leg was a bit misshapen when, in the
feria
of Zaragoza, he took on a full corrida of six bulls by himself and the leg held. Then there were the trials of José Tomás. He was tossed in Granada, on May 13, breaking a rib and badly bruising a leg, which put him out until June 9. Then he was gored twice in Badajoz, on June 26, but stayed until the bullfight was over, a stunt that put him in dry dock for a month. He made his comeback, and in Huesca on August 10 a bull broke a bone in his left hand. In great pain, he continued his season. Five days later, he took a shallow horn wound in the chest. That autumn he retired from the ring, citing the constant pressure of danger as one of the reasons for his decision. He was twenty-six years old.

Fran's father was killed by a bull in 1984, and one of his companions in the Pozoblanco ring that day, José Cubero, El Yiyo, was killed by a bull in 1985. Six peaceful seasons followed. Then on May 1, 1992, in the Maestranza, a sometime-matador-turned-banderillero named José Manuel Calvo Bonichón, nicknamed Manolo Montoliu, was killed by Cabatisto, a 1,320-pound bull from the ranch of the Heirs of Don Atanasio Fernandez. The bull lifted its head at the wrong moment during the placing of a pair of banderillas and punched its horn into Montoliu's chest, splitting his heart in two. Less than five months later, on September 13, in the same Maestranza, a bull named Avioncito (Little Airplane), from the ranch of the Conde de la Maza, killed a banderillero named Ramon Soto Vargas. From that day until the writing of this book, no torero has been killed in the ring in Spain—twelve years, the longest span in the history of bullfighting on the Iberian Peninsula without a death.

16

Tolosa, June 16
. They had finished dinner, the cuadrilla bus was packed, and the last minutes of Sunday night were ticking into the first minutes of Monday morning when the bus pulled out of town. They headed west to Burgos, due south through Madrid and Córdoba, and west again to Sevilla, a six-hundred-mile trip that took less than nine hours, and by Monday afternoon José Jesús Sánchez, Hipólito, was out of bed and puttering around his house. Poli was Fran's
banderillero de confianza
, which meant he was Fran's senior adviser in the ring and the first among his assistant bullfighters. Poli was forty-two years old. He was tall and thin as a teenager, had blue eyes, a protuberant nose, a small mouth, and a fine head of graying hair. He was sharp and funny, formal in his dealings with the world, profane in speech, cynical about bullfighting, grumpy even when happy, and fierce about protecting his relationship with Fran, who he'd been with since Fran's first corrida.

“This is where I rest from the shit of this life,” Poli said to me. “My house is yours and I am at your service.”

Poli lived twenty minutes west of Sevilla, in Espartinas, which had once been a town but had become a dot in a sea of sprawl. Poli's white stucco home, built in what Americans might call Mediterranean style, was in a recently built community in a row of similar houses on a street that ended all at once in farmland. It was a landscape straight out of Southern California, antiseptic and rootless, thrown up at the last minute to meet the suburban aspirations of a growing populace. The house had two airy floors with bedrooms enough for Poli and his wife, their children, and an older relative, along with a kitchen, living room and dining room, an office space with a computer, and a den area centered around a flat-screen TV and DVD player. The family car was parked outside, and a luxurious swimming pool jiggled blue in the scorching back yard.

Espartinas is a poor place and bull-crazy, so by local standards Poli was both a financial success and a minor celebrity. He might not have been a star matador, but he was a torero, a bullfighter: a man who had escaped the workaday world to travel, consort with rich and famous people, and make a good living at the bulls. Banderilleros and picadors are hired and paid by matadors. They earn money on a bullfight-by-bullfight basis according to a scale established by their union, which is located in a small office on the Calle Fuencarral in Madrid. Because Fran had performed more than forty-two times the season before, he was classified by the union as a group-A matador and was thus required to retain a full team of two picadors and three banderilleros and pay them the top rate. This was about a thousand dollars a corrida for the picadors and the two senior banderilleros and about eight hundred dollars for the third banderillero. Everyone's pay doubled when a corrida was televised. Since Fran expected to perform in about seventy corridas that season, some of them on TV, Poli could earn close to eighty thousand dollars—which would go a long way in Espartinas. But Poli's story, like the stories of most banderilleros, was a story of failure.

Poli was born into a family that could boast toreros dating back to the beginnings of bullfighting in the eighteenth century. His childhood dream was to become a famous matador, and so he started out on that well-worn and treacherous path and became a
novillero
, an apprentice matador who takes part in junior bullfights called
novilladas
, which feature immature bulls. He began at the lowest level of
novillada
, the kind that has very young bulls and no picadors. After two seasons of performing in at least twenty-five of these, Poli was able to jump to
novilladas
with slightly older bulls and with picadors.

After this apprenticeship, a
novillero
is eligible to become a full matador and appear in a proper corrida with mature bulls. But a promoter won't offer a contract for such a corrida until the
novillero
has attracted substantial positive attention from fans and the industry. The afternoon of his first proper corrida, the
novillero
participates in a simple ceremony. At the start of the corrida the senior matador on the card cedes the killing of the first bull—which would be the senior man's responsibility—to the
novillero
, who would normally kill the third bull of the corrida. After the first bull has been caped and pic'd, the senior matador and the
novillero
stand in the ring and the
novillero
exchanges his
capote
for the
muleta
and sword of the matador, while the other matador on the card that day looks on. Then the
novillero
goes over and kills the bull. After this he is officially a matador—with one catch. If his
alternativa
takes place in a ring other than Madrid's, the new matador must confirm his status by repeating the ceremony in Madrid.

In most bullfighting programs matadors are listed with the facts of their
alternativas:
the date, the bullring, the name of the matador who performed the ceremony (the “godfather”), the name of the other matador on the card that day, the official witness, and the name of the bull, its weight, and its breeder. Fran's
alternativa
was on April 23, 1995, in the Maestranza. His godfather was Juan Antonio Ruiz, Espartaco, and his witness was Jesús Janeiro, Jesulín de Ubrique. The bull was Bocalimpia of the Torrestrella ranch, which weighed 1,155 pounds. Fran confirmed his
alternativa
in Madrid the following year during the Feria de San Isidro.

Most programs will also list the bullfighting genealogy of the matadors. This is like a family tree that traces the line of matadors who have given each other
alternativas
up to the matador appearing in that day's bullfight. Like most matadors, Fran traced his lineage from Pedro Romero, of the famous Romeros of Ronda, who helped perfect the modern bullfight (
alternativa
date, April 20, 1776); through four matadors to Francisco Arjona Herrera, called Cúchares, a nineteenth-century master (
alternativa
date, April 27, 1840); through five more matadors to Ernest Hemingway's early idol Nicanor Villalta (August 6, 1922); and through four more to Espartaco (August 1, 1979), who gave Fran the ceremony.

But most
novilleros
never take the
alternativa
, or if they do, their careers as matadors fizzle in short order. Bullfighting is as hard to break into as any part of the entertainment business, perhaps even harder, because the bullfighting industry is so small and there are so few opportunities. Bullfighting is a closed-off world dominated by a small and conservative group of powerful promoters and breeders, who are naturally prejudiced against
novilleros
and matadors they've never heard of. You cannot become a matador or even a successful
novillero
without attracting the attention of these people, but there is no way to attract these people's attention without performing in bullfights, so it is a bit of a problem.