Death and the Sun (27 page)

23

Cayetano Ordóñez y Aguilera, Fran's great-grandfather, was born in Ronda on January 4, 1904, a single day shy of seventy years before Fran's birth. He had no bullfighting pedigree. His father was a cobbler in Ronda with a shoe store named La Palma, at 8 Calle Santa Cecilia. The store failed when Cayetano was thirteen, and the family moved to La Línea de la Concepción, near Gibraltar, where work was easier to come by. Cayetano got a job as a busboy in a local restaurant. He learned English there from the tourists, and about the bulls from the many breeders and toreros who frequented the restaurant and bar.

This was a real perk, because like most Andalucían boys of his time, Cayetano was besotted with the idea of becoming a great matador. Bullfighting was one of the few forms of mass entertainment in turn-of-the-century Spain, and it was going through what is now thought of as its Golden Age, thanks to the competition between two toreros from Sevilla. José Gómez y Ortega, known as Joselito, became a matador in 1912 at the age of seventeen, skipping the long apprenticeships that were common then. He was tall, elegant, and handsome, and he made bullfighting look easy, placing banderillas with style, commanding the bull with his
capote
, and killing like a cannon. It was said that there was not a calf born that José couldn't handle.

Joselito was the best of his day, but it is important to remember that his day was a primitive one. Picadors' horses wore no protection. Many died each corrida, and spectators in the front rows were often splattered with the horses' blood and viscera—something that was portrayed as comic relief in contemporary newspaper accounts. The act of the horses and the killing with the sword were the key elements of this earlier, more brutal form of bullfight. The art of passing bulls with the
muleta
and the
capote
was still quite crude. The prevailing practice was, you waved your cape at the bull and then got out of the way or the bull would get you. There was a concept that matadors could stand still and use the cape to direct the horns past their bodies, but few were able to practice it.

The development of modern bullfighting was a complex process. Many toreros contributed to it, and aficionados love to argue over who contributed what. For sure, one major figure, perhaps
the
major figure, was a matador named Juan Belmonte. He was born three years before Joselito but became a full matador in 1913, a year later than Joselito. Belmonte was as unlikely a matador as Joselito was a classic one. He was short, ugly, and sickly, with twisted legs that could barely run. Still he drove himself to be a matador. Legend has it that as a child Juan would sneak out of Sevilla into the countryside where he would strip nude and cape bullfighting bulls in their pastures by moonlight. In his ignorance of how to use a cape and in facing the limitation of his bad legs, Belmonte adopted a revolutionary style of
toreo
. He proved that if he stood still and swung his cape, the bull would follow the cloth and leave him alone.

It took Belmonte years of blood and struggle to perfect his style, but when he hit the arena, he hit it like an earthquake. People thronged to see him, and one prominent matador of the old school said that people had better see him as soon as they could, because he wasn't going to be around long. In fact, Belmonte improved each year, and over time his success with his style helped to change bullfighting forever. After Belmonte, the work with the
muleta
, which had been perfunctory, became the longest, most dangerous, evocative, and dramatic part of the bullfight, until it became the point of the bullfight.

Many of the other matadors of Belmonte's day had a hard time keeping up with Belmonte, but not Joselito. He'd been a genius of the old school, and he brought all of his grace and ring science to mastering Belmonte's technique. From 1913 to 1920 he and Belmonte performed together more than 250 times, driving each other to excellence, creating their golden age.

Sometime during those years, or so the story goes, Belmonte was in a restaurant in La Linea de la Concepcion, where he was presiding over a table of
taurino
types, when a thin busboy in an apron, bloody from cutting sides of beef, walked up to him. “Can I help you, son?” Belmonte asked. “Yes, Maestro,” said Cayetano Ordóñez. “I want you to give me the
alternativa
and make me a matador in the bullring of Sevilla.” “Excellent,” Belmonte replied with a laugh. “When you can kill a bull more cleanly than you can cut him up for steaks, I'll make you a matador.”

Meanwhile, aficionados were sharply divided between those who admired Joselito's elegance (the Joselistas) and those who loved Belmonte's tragic intensity (the Belmontistas), and often when the two performed together the feelings aroused in the stands were so strong that fans would riot. But by 1919 the public began to turn on both men. Like many matadors before and after them, Joselito and Belmonte were the victims of their own success. Every time they appeared they were expected to perform miracles. They'd excelled for so long that they had begun to compete with the public's memory of their greatness, and the memories were always better.

By the spring of 1920 many crowds treated them with open hostility. Their last performance together took place in Madrid on May 15. According to Belmonte's semifictional memoir, the crowd screamed at them both, and Joselito was taking it badly. “Listen, Juan,” Joselito is supposed to have said to Belmonte. “We might as well face it now. The public is furious with us, and the day is coming when we won't be able to go into the ring at all.”

The next day, in the village of Talavera de la Reina, on the road from Madrid to Badajoz, Bailador, a bull of the ranch of the Widow Ortega, gored Joselito. The matador's midriff was sliced open and his innards spilled from his body. As he was carried to the infirmary, he cried out, “Mother, I'm smothering!” Then he died. Although audiences had harassed him to an early grave, forcing him to take greater and greater chances to please them, all of Spain went into mourning over Joselito, including Belmonte, who was devastated by the loss of his rival. Belmonte went on for another season, but his heart wasn't in it, and in 1921 he fled to South America. Bullfighting's Golden Age had ended, and for the next few years the world of the bulls languished as the search began for a new savior who could reinvigorate the spectacle.

 

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

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.