Iberia (107 page)

, which has some excellent
summaries of individual fights; and John Marks’
To the Bullfight
,
of which Hemingway said, ‘the best book on the subject—after
mine.’ Of recent American books the three best are, perhaps
symbolically, compendiums featuring photographs, but they are
very good: Peter Buckley’s
Bullfight
, which gives a fine account
of how matadors cruise back and forth across Spain; Barnaby
Conrad’s
La Fiesta Brava
which is well informed; and Robert
Daley’s
The Swords of Spain
, the classic photograph of which has
a heroic tourist running into the arena at Pamplona in sheer
terror, full speed and at least three hundred yards ahead of the
nearest bull. El Valiente, Daley calls him, and every time I see him
bursting into the arena I think of myself.

 

Of course, the best thing so far written on bullfighting is Ernest
Hemingway’s
Death in the Afternoon
. As his friend Quintana says,
‘It’s amazing that a man who spoke no Spanish to begin with
could have so quickly caught the spirit of a foreign art.’ It remains
a masterpiece of insight and persuasion and is as popular today
as when it was first published in 1932. Recently an American,
John McCormick, aided by a Mexican, Mario Sevilla Mascareñas,
has produced an opinionated but highly literate and well-informed
philosophical analysis,
The Complete Aficionado
.

 

The period during which I have seen bullfights may be divided
into three epochs, each named after a matador: the Epoch of
Belmonte, 1914-1936, the Epoch of Manolete, 1939-1955, even
though Manolete himself died in 1947, and the Epoch of El
Cordobés, 1955 till today. Of the three, the most varied and
rewarding was the first, for then one had normative figures like
Belmonte, the peerless Joselito, Chicuelo, the preposterous El
Gallo and Marcial Lalanda. The middle period was the most
dramatic, with the confrontation of the tragic Manolete and the
Mexican Carlos Arruza, ornamented by half a dozen additional
figures of first category. The third period, running into the
present, has been for me more difficult to categorize. I have found
it dull, marked by certain honorable matadors but none of
supreme excellence, and while it has given us El Cordobés, the
most popular matador of all times and the one who has earned
the most money, it has provided neither a classic figure nor a
tragic poet. To such judgment authorities like José María Cossío
and Vanderford say, ‘Nonsense. Antonio Ordóñez has been at
least as great as Joselito.’

 

My favorite in this long procession has been none of the men
named but the austere classicist Domingo Ortega. He was so pure
a bullfighter that men wrote long books about his art, claiming
that he had saved the bullfight from becoming a mere
ornamentation. Philosophers invoked him as a reincarnation of
Seneca; motion-picture theaters throbbed to the classical emotion
which he was able to cram into a few controlled passes; and at the
plaza men were alternately perplexed by the rigidity of his style
and enchanted by its purity. If I had been a bullfighter I should
have wanted to fight like Domingo Ortega, and my memory of
him in the ring has had a profound influence on the way I think
and especially in the way I evaluate work in the arts. I would say
that he has had an impact on me as great as that of Johannes
Brahms.

 

The quiescent third epoch, in which I have seen most of my
fights, did produce the much publicized Dominguín-Ordóñez
confrontation, in which the latter excelled, and some, including
Hemingway and the experts just cited, have believed that Ordóñez
has been the greatest fighter of this century; but as I described in
the chapter on Pamplona, I have never seen him good but have
seen him when his arrogant contempt for the audience was
unbearable. In this period most of my knowledgeable friends have
tried to convince me that the great figure is Curro Romero, and
I well remember the afternoon I sat in the stands at Pamplona
and happened to mention another matador as my favorite. A
voluble Spanish gentleman next to me, who had remained
unmoved by all my other judgments over a period of six days,
exploded with rage, and Vavra caught a series of eight snapshots
showing his disgust. ‘There is only one matador in Spain worthy
of a man’s respect,’ he shouted. ‘All the others are what? Nothing!
Poof! To see Romero on one of his fine afternoons is like seeing
God Himself descending to supervise a performance. Then the
cape stands out like sculptured gold, the muleta is like a thread
of silk binding the man and the bull together. It is exquisite, the
stuff of dreams, and one feels tears in his eyes, a profound
exaltation in his heart. I have seen Curro when he molded fifteen
thousand people in the plaza as if he were an angelic child playing
with sand. You hear the phrase “he and the bull were one.” With
Curro it’s different. There is no man. There is no bull. There is
merely a golden moment, and when it’s past you turn to your
neighbor as I’m turning to you now and ask, “What was that I
saw?” And he explains very humbly, “My friend, you saw a
miracle.” Therefore, please don’t speak to me about so-and-so.
At least not in the same plaza where I have mentioned the name
Curro Romero.’ John Fulton, Orson Welles, Kenneth Vanderford,
Robert Vavra and scores of others all felt the same way, although
they tended to express themselves more forcefully than did my
Spanish friend at Pamplona. To have seen Curro Romero was to
have seen the ultimate.

 

Well, finally I saw him. At Sevilla he came into the arena, a
rather pudgy young man of undistinguished height, carriage,
feature and bearing. He was a disaster. I saw him four more times
in Sevilla, always miserably bad. He seemed to take one look at
whatever bull fate had allotted him and to decide, ‘This animal
is not for me.’

 

‘You mustn’t judge him until you’ve seen him good,’ Fulton
insisted, paying him the cherished accolade that comes when one
matador praises another. ‘It’s not a question of the bull’s being
good or bad—he must be right for Curro.’ Now, one of the
attributes of Domingo Ortega that I remember best was that he
could take whatever came out of the chute and give it a majestic
fight. If luck gave him a bad bull, he made it good; if his lot was
a good bull, he made it great; and on those rare occasions when
he received a naturally great bull, he handled it with such noble
precision that its head was subsequently mounted. Ortega gave
new meaning to the word pundonor.

 

Curro Romero must have had his own analysis of this word.
At Jerez he was abominable because he would not try to
accomplish anything with average bulls, although his competitors
did passably well with theirs. ‘You’ve got to catch him on the right
day,’ Vavra explained, while Vanderford growled in his beard,
‘With Curro you must not use the words pundonor or
sinvergüenza. They do not apply. He is honestly terrified of a
dangerous bull…or of a good one. Lack of courage? Yes. Lack of
honor? Never.’

 

I remember the agonies Orson Welles went through at one San
Isidro, for since Curro’s first appearance in the ring, Welles has
always held that he is the one bright light in the taurine world
and he had been warning us not to miss his boy’s performance.
First day, horrible. Second day, nothing. Third day, deplorable.
‘Wait till he gets a good day,’ Welles advised.

 

In Barcelona the bull came out the chute wrong, and Curro
quit. At Valencia there was wind, and he attempted nothing. Back
in Madrid he screwed up his courage and like Ortega tried to
make a good bull great, but in the end he ran in palpitating fright
past the bull, jabbed his sword out sideways and punctured a lung.
The audience wanted to annihilate him on the spot, and would
have done so had pillows been concrete blocks, for they showered
him with the former while officers of the Guardia Civil kept them
away from the latter. ‘This wasn’t his day,’ Welles said sadly. ‘But
just wait.’

 

I had now waited through more than twenty fights. I’d seen
Curro face forty-odd bulls and never had the magic moment
come. Never had the magic moment even been in the same
province. I had seen him bad, and I had seen him worse, and I
had seen him disastrous. And I no longer hoped. Each of my
bullfighting friends had seen him in apotheosis, and apparently
he could be something wonderful, running the bull slowly and
majestically in passes of impossible beauty. My testifiers were not
liars, nor were they combined in a conspiracy to create a White
Legend. The agitated poet to my left at Pamplona had not
compared notes with Orson Welles or Kenneth Tynan. That was
his judgment, founded on fact, but it was a fact I was apparently
destined not to see. To me Curro Romero would remain a legend,
a reward which good fairies brought to good little boys. Alas, I
was bad.

 

There was, however, in these same years a tall, ungainly, angular
and thin young man from the village of Vitigudino near
Salamanca who entered the arenas with little fanfare. I was in
Madrid on May 13, 1961, when he underwent the ceremonies
which confirmed him as a full matador; he took his sword from
the hands of Gregorio Sánchez while standing a few feet from me,
then strode with austere dignity toward the bull to give battle in
the time-honored way. He was El Viti, and in Madrid he was a
sensation. In Sevilla he was extraordinary. In Málaga and Jerez
and Barcelona he was cold and precise and clothed in honor.
Wherever I went I saw this reserved young man with the grave
sculptured face and the long thin body fight in a manner I had
thought forgotten. He engaged in no heroics and there was
nothing of lyric poetry in what he did, but there was a distant
echo of the epic. He never allowed himself to be hurried and I
doubt if he could perform an arabesque with a cape if he wanted
to, and I’m sure he never wanted to. Because he never once smiled
in the ring, his detractors called him cold and frigid and rooted.
Vavra and Fulton spent hours explaining to me why he failed to
excite the crowd. In Pamplona it was my mention of his name
that had started the argument with my poetical neighbor. ‘Viti’s
nothing!’ he exploded. ‘An iceberg!’

 

Yet day after day this quiet young man with ice-cold manner,
this youth who never smiled, who never displayed even the
slightest emotion, not even when gored a few feet from where I
sat, turned in a beautiful performance and won awards that others
missed. He became for me the epitome of what I looked for in
the ring, and almost never did he disappoint. I’ll correct that
judgment: never did he disappoint, for even when the bulls were
bad he tried. Like Domingo Ortega before him, he brought new
distinction to the word pundonor, for he was composed of this
manly virtue.

 

The finest single component of any fight that I have so far seen
was the work with the muleta that El Viti performed one day in
Madrid. Luck had given him an evil bull, a little worse than those
the other matadors had walked away from in disgust, slaughtering
them shamelessly. El Viti took his fractious bull and with masterful
low chops began to give it both direction and confidence. Never
did the animal have to charge more than a few feet and always its
horn was so placed that with a bad toss left or right it could impale
El Viti. Slowly, with infinite precision, the fight continued, and
bit by bit the matador made of this bull a noble animal that
charged with fury and followed the cloth as it should. The process
continued long, until El Viti was making all the passes that a
matador should make with the cloth, and the ungovernable bull
was kept as close to him as I was to the man sitting next to me. It
was a culminating performance, so wonderful that people were
screaming with admiration of the sheer mastery.

 

Finally El Viti took his stance before this once most dangerous
of bulls and raised his sword for the kill. He waited. The bull
would not charge. He waited. He waited some more, what seemed
to be an infinity of time. At last the bull charged, the most
dangerous moment of the fight, for the man must move forward,
go in over the horn and somehow make his escape as the sword
plunges home. But this time El Viti did not move. He kept his
rigid posture and allowed the bull to bear down upon him; as the
animal threw his great weight forward, the man stood fast, lured
the bull off to the right with the muleta and directed the tip of
the sword toward the lethal spot, where it was driven home by
the weight of the charging animal. El Viti had killed recibiendo,
that is, receiving the bull while keeping his feet motionless, and
you can attend a hundred fights without seeing this done properly,
or done at all, or even attempted. But to have done it successfully
on such a bull was miraculous.

 

During this epoch there was a very brave young man who was
to give his name to the period, El Cordobés, an illiterate street
gamin from a town near Córdoba who electrified the bullfighting
world by the animal vitality he exhibited in the plazas. Part
vaudevillian, part satyr, part inspired improvisator, he sold
enormous numbers of tickets and charmed huge numbers of
people but not me. In the remotest towns of Mexico, where
impresarios had experienced trouble half filling their bullrings
once a season, they could now hold three corridas in three days
and cram the ring each day by merely announcing the name of
El Cordobés. With a shock of unruly hair, a rock-and-roll manner
and a mouthful of unusually handsome teeth, he revitalized
bullfighting, but I am not sure that it was any longer an art. It was
something else.

 

I would have to confess, however, that three times I saw him
perform a feat that even now seems impossible. Eager to make a
good impression in classical Sevilla, he came out to cite his bull
from a distance four times as great as the ordinary matador would
normally choose, and as the bull charged at him, eleven hundred
pounds of furious power, El Cordobés whirled in a tight circle,
his small protecting muleta furled tightly about him and he in
direct line with the bull’s charge. At the last moment he stopped
his whirling, dug his feet in and unfurled his muleta, allowing the
bull to thunder past a few inches from his chest. It was exciting,
but it wasn’t bullfighting; it was vaudeville, and after a few
performances I lost my taste for it. But not even the young man’s
severest critic could deny him extraordinary courage and the
ability to spread his charisma over an entire nation.