Death and the Sun (35 page)

Pozoblanco was a nice small town and the people were friendly. Paquirri's death was the biggest thing that had happened there, and most of the citizens seemed eager to talk about it with the scores of reporters who were pouring in to cover Fran's bullfight, on the eighteenth anniversary of his father's death, with bulls from Sayalero y Bandrés, Avispado's ranch. As it turned out, the corrida itself was a bit of a letdown. The emotional high point was the moment of silence in Paquirri's honor. For the record, Fran cut an ear off his first bull and lost an ear to a poor sword on the second. But ears and triumphs weren't really the point of that corrida. Ronda had proven that Fran could match the brilliance of his grandfather, at least for one day. Pozoblanco proved that Fran wasn't doomed to his father's fate.

Bullfighters no longer stay at the Hotel Los Godos when they're in Pozoblanco. Instead Fran and at least one of his colleagues that afternoon put up at the Hotel San Francisco, a modern establishment on the highway outside of town. An hour after the bullfight ended, the lobby of the San Francisco was filled with aficionados, members of various cuadrillas, and journalists hunting for a final quote to round out their stories. Vicente Ruiz, El Soro, the only living matador on the card with Paquirri on the day he died, was also in the hotel lobby. Looking tired, ill, bloated, and prematurely old at forty, he leaned on a cane in front of the elevators and gave his reminiscences to a procession of cameras. Then Manuel Díaz, El Cordobés—who'd performed with Fran that afternoon and who had been the teenager in Pozoblanco, back in 1984, to whom Paquirri had dedicated his penultimate bull—came down from his hotel room and took a few questions.

While all of this was going on, Fran was up in his room with the usual white towel around his waist. A few friends had made the trip to Pozoblanco to be there for him. He chatted with them for a while, and before long he showed most of them to the door. Eventually the only one left was an older gentleman named José. Fran excused himself and went into the bathroom to take a shower. José sat on Fran's bed and watched television. The national news was on, with a story about Fran's corrida in Pozoblanco and a rehash of the sad history that had led up to it. The hotel room was set up in such a way that the TV faced both the bed and the door to the bathroom, and when Fran had finished his shower he came out and was greeted with a slow-motion video sequence of his father being gored by Avispado.

José jumped up to turn off the TV, but Fran had seen enough. He stood there naked, dripping, staring at the blank set. “Oh, my poor father,” Fran sobbed. “Why don't they leave him alone. He did so much more in his life than die.”

 

After Pozoblanco Fran's season spilled away to a quiet conclusion. He finished September by cutting four ears in the town of Lorca on the twenty-eighth, but came up empty the following afternoon in the prestigious Feria de San Miguel in Sevilla. Then, on October 5, in the autumn
feria
in Madrid, Fran clicked with Flautista (Flautist), a thirteen-hundred-pound chestnut bull from the ranch of Alcurrucén, giving an exhibition of the kind of pure bullfighting he had shown himself capable of in Ronda. Fran's
muleta
work was notable for one series of passes with the right hand and two with the left hand which had the most severe audience in the bull universe shouting
olés
. Then Fran killed
a toda ley
(completely by the book), and cut an ear that was worth two in most other bullrings.

“If this torero were capable of giving regular performances with passes as fine as those he gave us yesterday,” wrote Vicente Ruiz, the critic for the newspaper
El Mundo
, “then we would be talking about a
maxima figura del toreo
. But that is not the situation, at least for now.”

 

In the days following Fran's big splash in Madrid, I traveled down to Córdoba one last time in pursuit of an answer to a question that had nagged at me for months. I wanted to know how Paquirri had died. How could a healthy man of thirty-six die of a horn wound in an industrialized country at the end of the twentieth century? If there was an answer, I hoped to get it from Dr. Elíseo Morán, the man who'd treated Paquirri in the Pozoblanco ring. Fran had made it clear to me that he placed some of the blame for what had happened to his father on the medical care he'd received in Pozoblanco. And he assumed that the doctor in charge had retired. In fact, Dr. Morán still had his practice in Córdoba and in the Pozoblanco ring. Had Fran been hurt in Pozoblanco, he would have been placed in Dr. Morán's care.

Given the nature of my call, I wasn't sure how Dr. Morán would receive me. But when we spoke in his elegant office—he was a courtly man of sixty-eight with a wreath of pure white hair about his head—Dr. Morán answered my every question. He began by outlining the nature of Paquirri's wounds. Avispado's horn had carved three trajectories in Paquirri's thigh, Dr. Morán said: up fifteen centimeters, down ten centimeters, and in eight centimeters. The resulting damage had snapped the tangle of major vessels, including the femoral and saphenous veins and femoral artery, that carry blood to and from the leg.

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 ring. 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.