Death and the Sun (6 page)

Since bullfighting is not a sport, there is no objective way to judge a matador's performance. Audiences rate what they see in the ring on a kind of sliding scale that takes into account the relative difficulty presented by the bull (some bulls are harder to work with than others); the amount of danger the bullfighter exposed himself to (some bullfighting techniques are more dangerous than others); whether the performance was aesthetically pleasing; and whether it was in keeping with bullfighting tradition and fitting for the bullring in question (some rings are more prestigious than others, and their audiences expect a more classical, refined style).

Newcomers to bullfighting often assume that the violence they are seeing is meant to taunt, humiliate, and therefore enrage the bull. In fact, the reverse is true. The passes, pics, and banderillas are used to slow the bull down, calm it, and focus its anger on the cape, so the matador can do a great
faena
. Spanish bullfighting bulls are bred to charge at the slightest provocation, and most bulls need little encouragement to act on that programming. Bulls are territorial creatures by nature and live in herds. When a bull is faced with danger it will first try to escape. If it cannot escape, it will do what it can to defend its turf and the cows it is mating with. So when a bull is separated from its herd and put into an enclosed space where it cannot escape, it will lash out, charging at whoever walks into what it perceives to be its space until that space is cleared. In that sense, the charge of the bull is really a running away in reverse.

The matador uses the opening passes with the
capote
to teach the bull to follow the cape. The horse provides a solid, confidence-building target for the bull to hit, and the picador's lance tires the bull and lowers the carriage of its head, lowering its horns and making it less dangerous to work with. The banderillas slow the bull further and focus its attention on the man. The
faena
with the
muleta
is the point of the show, the matador's chance to shine. But it, too, serves a purpose, preparing the bull for the sword by wearing it down to the point where it is slow and sluggish and can be killed in the prescribed fashion. The sword ends the spectacle and can be a spectacle in itself. Each stage of the bullfight prepares the bull for the next stage, and the art of bullfighting consists of this preparation.

If bullfighting is an art, then what does it do for the viewer? No writer can sum up the effect of an artwork on an average person, but this much can be stated: the movements that a talented matador makes with his cape are beautiful to watch even when he is standing alone in his bedroom, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Without a bull, the cape passes of bullfighting are like the steps of a lovely folk dance, but when the charged atmosphere of the ring and the menacing beauty of the bull are added to the dance of the cape, and when the dancer is made to perform under the threat of bodily harm and with the dual aims of controlling a wild animal and then working with it to create something pleasing to the eye, then that is a performance that can inspire a depth of emotion.

Aficionados say there is a special feeling that comes when a great matador passes a bull low and slow around his body and the bull responds, charging hard at the cape and lending solemnity and danger to the matador's movements. Hemingway described it as a lump in the throat. García Lorca called it “man's finest anger, his finest melancholy and his finest grief.” It is an electric mixture of fear, pleasure in beauty, sadness, anger, horror, joy, tension, the feeling of victory over death, and the viewer's relief that he or she is safe and not facing the bull. According to García Lorca, this dark yet sweet emotion can be inspired by any art form, but especially by the two Spanish arts of bullfighting and flamenco music. When a torero or a flamenco artist loses himself and begins creating on the very edge of reason and capacity he may, García Lorca said, summon up a demon called the
duende
, who can make the powerful emotion run. This
duende
is not brought into being by talent or skill but rather by the artist's ability to give himself over to the moment and by his ties of blood and history to the essential culture of Spain, which for García Lorca is found always in the bullfight.

“Spain is the only country where death is a national spectacle,” he wrote, “the only one where death sounds long trumpet blasts at the coming of spring, and Spanish art is always ruled by a shrewd
duende
who makes it different and inventive.”

The only trouble is, this special emotion is rarely evoked in the ring, because the art of bullfighting is made from an adversarial collaboration between a human and an unwilling animal. It is this emotion that Fran would be seeking to create in his corrida in Valencia.

4

On the road, March 13
. Along with its small neighbor Portugal, Spain occupies the Iberian Peninsula, which juts out from southern France at the western edge of Europe. This vaguely square piece of land, described by the ancient geographer Strabo as looking like a bull's hide stretched on a wooden frame, is girded by the Bay of Biscay to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south and to some extent the east. Most of Spain is mountainous. The average height of the land there is greater than in any European nation save Switzerland. At Spain's center, taking up as much as half of its five hundred thousand square miles, is the arid and sparsely populated tableland called the
meseta
. A range of snowcapped mountains splits the
meseta
, and thus Spain, into north and south. There are also formidable mountain ranges along the northern and southern coasts, in the northeast, and along the border with France, which is protected by the Pyrenees Mountains.

Few European nations contain such a variety of people and landscape within their borders. The north coast, comprising the regions of Galicia, Cantabria, Asturias, and the País Vasco (Basque Country), with landlocked La Rioja and Navarra just below it, is damp and green, and its people are serious and industrious and are closer to northern Europeans in culture and attitudes than any other Spaniards. The center, comprising the regions of Castilla-León, Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Aragón, and Extremadura, is a place of empty plains, castles, poor farmland, and windmills. It is the land of Don Quixote and of the capital city, Madrid, and the classic resident is dour and hardworking and has an outlook on life not far removed from his peasant forebears. The eastern coast of Spain—the regions of Cataluña, Valencia, and Murcia—is like the rest of the Mediterranean, and the people there are of the same agrarian-cosmopolitan-mercantile type found along the Italian and French coasts. Meanwhile, southern Spain, the vast region of Andalucía, is the Spain of Romantic tradition, the Spain of Gypsies and flamenco music, of Arab palaces and whitewashed houses, of gazpacho and sherry, and of bulls and bullfighters.

Fran was driving from Sevilla, the capital of Andalucía, to the city of Valencia, on the middle Mediterranean coast. It was eight
P.M.
, and his driver, Juani, planned to kill the four-hundred-mile journey in less than six hours, with a break for dinner at a roadside restaurant. Juani started out from Sevilla under a clear night sky and made good time up to Córdoba. From there he planned to head farther north, past the town of Linares—where a bull from the ranch of Miura killed the legendary matador Manolete—and into the wine-producing region of Valdepeñas, in La Mancha, then east to the shore and straight into Valencia, where Fran had bulls the following day.

Bullfighters in Spain travel by automobile, as they have done since the early decades of the twentieth century, when they gave up on the train. During the season to come, Fran would crisscross Spain in a late-model burgundy-red Chevrolet van. The two rows of passenger seats in back flipped down to create a level surface, and Fran made himself a comfortable bed there with the freshly laundered bolsters, pillows, and blankets kept for him. Like most successful matadors, Fran traveled alone with a private driver, sending his cuadrilla of assistant bullfighters on ahead in a minibus, which could accommodate nine men and all of the bullfighting gear.

The atmosphere in Fran's car that night was relaxed; there was no sense of personal or professional crisis, nor any urgency over what Fran would be up to the following day. Fran sat in the back seat and made a few calls on his mobile phone and listened to flamenco on the Chevy's CD changer. Seated next to Juani was a friend of Fran's who had been putting Fran up in his house during the weeks following his separation from Eugenia. After an hour of driving the night grew cloudy. The highway narrowed to one lane in either direction and Juani began a nerve-racking game of tag with the broken line of eighteen-wheelers that were clogging the road. Fran's face fell into shadow.

“It has been hard, very, very hard,” Fran said in English, the language he used for almost all of the interviews in this book. “I was thinking about ending the bullfighting season. After what happened to me, I thought, ‘I can't take it. I can't take any more.' But this is something . . . well . . . it is my job, it is my life, it is something that I have to do.”

It was only later that a rough picture emerged of what Fran had gone through during the first months of the year. It seems that when he and Eugenia split in February, Fran fell into a deep depression and talked about quitting the ring. During this time he continued to appear in a few warm-up corridas in smaller bullrings, and each afternoon when he put on his matador's costume he broke into tears. On March 3, the day Eugenia announced the separation to the press, Fran was performing in a town named Calahorra. Minutes before the opening parade of toreros, in the tunnel that led out to the sand, Fran made a request of his assistant bullfighters. “Watch out for me,” he said. “I really don't know where my head is at right now.”

The person who seems to have turned Fran around was his
apoderado
, José Luis Segura. In bullfighting, the
apoderado
is like a manager, coach, and agent rolled into one. He travels with the matador, makes bookings, handles the cash, helps with training, and offers encouragement and artistic advice, all for ten to fifteen percent of the matador's earnings. One day shortly after Fran and Eugenia's separation, Pepe Luis—Pepe is a nickname for José—took Fran aside for an all-out pep talk. The
apoderado
reminded Fran that he was still a star in the bull world, and that if he quit the ring in the face of marital troubles, he would lose something as a man and as a bullfighter, something he might never get back again.

Fran responded that his wife and child were his world. He went on to say that unlike most bullfighters' wives, his wife had traveled with him on the road and advised him on his bullfighting. Pepe Luis countered that even though Fran was going through a rough patch personally, he had a career that he'd worked hard to create, and this career was important enough to fight for. In the end, Fran agreed and decided to continue with the season. Pepe Luis assured him that he was doing the right thing. Following this, Pepe Luis placed a call to his cardiologist and begged for some anti-anxiety pills. The
apoderado
, who had a heart condition, had just convinced a sad and distracted young man to go back to the bullring, a place where there is no room for distraction.

It was a frustrating state of affairs for all concerned, particularly since Fran had seemed to be on the verge of a comeback. The season before had been his best in years, and he had finished up with a corrida in Madrid, where he'd cut an ear in the greatest bullring in the world. During the off-season, Fran had made a number of changes he'd hoped would get him back on track. He'd replaced three of the five men in his cuadrilla of assistant bullfighters, parted ways with his old
apoderado
, and signed with Pepe Luis. Then, over the Christmas holiday, the hopeful matador and his new
apoderado
had begun intensive strategy sessions and agreed that this was going to be the year Francisco Rivera Ordóñez would climb back on top.

They talked about a number of ways Fran could achieve this goal, but the essence of their conversations was that Fran had to be true to himself as an artist. What that meant exactly is hard to explain, but it was a question of style. In many ways matadors are like opera singers. Opera singers the world over perform the same limited repertory, everyone working the same material. But even though the operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini don't change, each singer brings his or her own voice and style to the words, movements, and music. Different singers specialize in different facets of opera performance: some singers are suited for romantic leads, others play villains; some devote themselves to a certain type of opera, such as the works of Wagner; some are known as great actors with average voices, others are pure singers devoid of acting talent.

Similarly, each successful matador has his own style and his own niche in the profession. One corrida is almost identical to another, and what any one matador does is pretty much the same as what every other matador does. All matadors perform the same basic passes, but each matador does these passes his own way, putting his own physical stamp on the material. Also, matadors have different personalities: some are artistic types concerned with the aesthetics of their craft, others are daredevils who specialize in taking on the biggest, meanest bulls that can be found; some are known for their
capote
work, some for placing the banderillas, some as great killers.

Fran possessed talent in abundance and was a naturally gifted athlete who could perform in a number of different styles. This had been a blessing in the early years, when he needed physical prowess and innate skill to make up for his inexperience and, worse, his lack of training. But as his career progressed, his talent had hurt him somewhat, because he had never really been forced to answer the fundamental question of who he was as a matador. Fran was like a singer who could play basso villain roles and heroic tenor roles but had never found a voice of his own. This was part of the reason why bullfighting fans could not decide what they thought about Fran, and why his most recognizable traits continued to be his good looks and his lineage.