Iberia (109 page)

 

Many of the matadors have made films, always to critical
acclaim and to the satisfaction of their fans. One of the best was
Luis Procuna’s Mexican film
Bullfighter
. The most successful was
El Cordobés’
Learning to Die
; the most artistic was an Italian film
starring the matador Miguelín,
The Moment of Truth
; but the one
with the right blend of ambiente and pathos was the one I
mentioned earlier,
Afternoon of Bulls
, featuring Domingo Ortega
and Antonio Bienvenida. This one I would like to see again. The
worst I ever saw was an epic turkey made by handsome Jaime
Ostos, and it, too, is worth seeing if only because it is so bad that
it evokes memories of the grubby world which it portrayed.

 

I suppose many readers have been either irritated or perplexed
by my insistence that bullfighting is an art and not a sport, but
in this I am correct. It is so reported in the Spanish press and is
so considered by anyone really concerned in the matter. I was
reminded of this one day on an airplane, when I had been absent
from the bullring for some years and had forgot the wonderful
sleazy world that envelops it. I picked up one of Spain’s best
newspapers and found it engaged in a public brawl which had
been started by an article that spoke disrespectfully of El Cordobés.
Within a few weeks the paper received 17,000 letters, of which
15,107 supported the matador, 1624 the journal, while the
remainder ‘were so confused that we couldn’t decide where to
place them.’

 

There was no confusion on the part of the people who defended
El Cordobés. In various letters he was compared favorably with
Velázquez, Goya, Zuloaga, Picasso and Dali, which should give
some indication of whether Spaniards think of their matadors as
artists or sportsmen. Many writers referred to ‘the crazy month,
in which El Cordobés fought thirty-one times, a feat never equaled
before.’ To accomplish this he had to fight one day in the morning
in one town and in the afternoon in another a hundred miles
away. One enthusiast let himself go: ‘To compare the average
bureaucratic bullfighter with the great El Cordobés is to compare
one of those elegant white-glove comedies we see on the stage
with a great drama like
Oedipus Rex, Medea, Othello
, or
Death of
a Salesman
.’

 

My favorite letter, however, summed it up concisely: ‘I have
for a long time considered El Cordobés the Johann Sebastian Bach
of bullfighters, but after his recent performances I suspect we
shall soon have to refer to Johann Sebastian Bach as the El
Cordobés of musicians.’ I have not quoted the letters which
indulged in hyperbole or in which the writer allowed his emotions
to get the better of him.

 

I once had a full day in which to contemplate the sordidness
of the bullring, for at eight one morning I reported at the box
office in Sevilla to purchase a set of tickets for the feria. I was
fourth in line. When the window opened I was fourteenth, men
connected with the racket having edged in ahead of me with the
connivance of the police. At one o’clock, when the window had
been open for five hours, I was twelfth in line, because all morning
drifters had sidled up to the window with bribes to the ticket
sellers. At one the police announced that the windows would now
be closed, but at four we could resume our positions, which would
be noted and honored. At four the best I could do was sixteenth

 

I was determined to stick it out; in fact, I was enjoying this
first-hand experience of what the devotee of the art goes through,
and my long vigil was lightened by the fact that a most engaging
American wound up behind me in the line, Charles Moore, an
ice-cream salesman from El Paso, Texas. ‘We’ll see if they have
the nerve to keep us standing here all day without selling us a
ticket,’ I suggested.

 

‘Okay by me,’ Moore said, and we watched the comedy.

 

The closest we ever got to the window was eighth. Where the
connivers and drifters and the slinky individuals in long coats
came from I’ll never know, but sometimes an hour would pass
without our moving up one slot. A policeman finally came up
and said, ‘They prefer it if foreigners buy their tickets on the black
market. You’re expected to.’

 

‘We’ll wait.’ He shrugged his shoulders and escorted two more
characters to the head of the line.

 

At eight o’clock that night, when they closed the windows, I
was fourth in line and Moore was fifth. The men inside, who had
seen us all day long, were quite prepared to have the day end this
way, but the policeman told them, ‘You’d better do something
about the norteamericanos. I saw the one with glasses taking notes
and he may be a writer.’ So at five after eight Moore and I were
allowed to buy our tickets. The man at the window couldn’t have
been more gracious.

 

John Fulton has a more harrowing story to tell. For an
American without friends to arrive in Sevilla determined to
become a matador, and for him to buck the prejudices of Spain,
where honest men are convinced that no one but a born Spaniard,
or at the very least one of Spanish ancestry, can ever truly
understand the ambiente, required a courage that few young men
could muster. It is interesting to observe that the Spaniards are
nearly as reluctant to accept Portuguese as they are Americans,
even though I have seen Portuguese like José Julio give fine
performances against the big Miuras in Sevilla. Spaniards are
convinced that Portuguese and Mexicans and Venezuelans and
North Americans never quite catch the hang of this peculiar art.

 

They were much relieved, therefore, when John Fulton ran into
trouble in his presentation in Madrid. In all ways possible they
stacked the cards against him, then sat back amused when he
failed. ‘A fine boy, an intelligent one, too, but not a bullfighter,’
they said. ‘How could he be? He’s a norteamericano.’ But when
he had a splendid afternoon in Sevilla and was carried from the
ring on the shoulders of Spaniards, they said, ‘Interesting, but
not true bullfighting. How could it be? He’s a norteamericano.’

 

I’ve seen motion pictures of some of Fulton’s good afternoons
in Mexico, and they were indeed good. His tall and very graceful
body moves well against the dark mass of the bull and he has a
repertoire of passes that is wholly professional. If he is no
Belmonte or Manolete, few are; he is certainly as competent as
the average Spanish matador and better than many, but he is a
foreigner, and no Spaniard is eager to sponsor him.

 

Critics of this insular Spanish attitude point out: ‘In American
baseball we accept players from any part of the world, especially
Spanish parts. Luis Aparicio gets off the plane from Venezuela at
the Baltimore airport and ten minutes later he’s a full-fledged
member of the Orioles. Or Tony Oliva flies in from Cuba to
Minneapolis, and next thing you know he’s leading the American
League in batting. When the Alou brothers arrive from the
Dominican Republic it is an invasion. Felipe plays for Atlanta,
Matty for Pittsburgh and Jesús for San Francisco. But let someone
try to break into Spanish bullfighting and even if he arrived in
Madrid on the wings of the Archangel Gabriel accompanied by
the ghost of Juan Belmonte, he couldn’t make it.’ The analogy is
not fair to Spaniards. What has been said of their insularity is true
insofar as bullfighting is concerned, but it is not true in
professional soccer, which is the true parallel to our baseball.
When Real Madrid reigned as the best team in the world it
employed international stars like Ferenc Puskas of Hungary,
Alfredo Di Stefano of Argentina and Raymond Kopa of France.
In fact, when I first looked at the roster of Real Madrid in 1961,
I found it difficult to believe that it was a Spanish team.

 

Say the Spanish: ‘In the international sport of football we want
the best, and to get the best we have to buy in the world market.
In the Spanish art of bullfighting we also want the best, and that
can be found only in Spain. No one else can master the nuances
of this art.’

 

One of the side attractions of bullfighting is the bizarre gang
of fans addicted to the art. Everyone who has followed the bulls
has known the epicene from Peru or Chile who drives his
Hispano-Suiza back and forth across Spain, enamored of some
young man whom he attends slavishly and without regard to the
pathetic figure he is cutting before his friends. He doesn’t care.
He has bull fever interlaced with sex, and few diseases are more
virulent.

 

One also gets to know the American widow of forty-six whose
husband left her several hundred thousand dollars and a passport,
and with these she travels from feria to feria, passionately in love
with some matador who has not yet spoken to her, for he does
not know that she exists. If I were to describe faithfully even one
of these women, and I have known several dozen, American
readers would be incensed and would claim that I was burlesquing
the species. ‘Such women couldn’t exist!’ my friends have
protested on the few occasions when I have tried to describe them
orally, but they do exist and some of them are dear friends whom
I regard with affection. They happen to be nutty about
bullfighting, and some of my other good friends are nutty about
other things.

 

One hears much of integrity these days, and I have indicated
that I prefer El Viti among the current crop of matadors because
of his integrity. Once when the crowd had petitioned for, and the
judge had awarded, an ear, El Viti turned it back, saying, ‘Today
I did not deserve an ear.’ But no one connected with the art ever
exhibited such integrity as an American woman I know who pined
for one of the leading matadors. She followed him about Spain
as if she were a puppy and he a wise old bulldog. At the arena she
showered him with roses; at his hotel she would stand for hours
waiting for him to make an appearance; she suffered humiliations
by the score; and then one day when she had already paid for a
ticket to a good fight in Madrid she heard belatedly that her idol
was to fight that afternoon in Aranjuez, some thirty miles to the
south.

 

She thereupon gave away her ticket to the fight in Madrid, paid
a scalper’s price for a ticket to the new fight, bought an armful of
roses for her matador and hired a taxicab to take her to Aranjuez,
where she found as she was about to enter the plaza that her
beloved, to whom she had so far not spoken a word, had been
injured the day before in another town and would not fight this
day. His place was being taken by a matador of higher category,
so that the fight was probably going to be better than the one
scheduled, but to her this was inconsequential; if the object of
her passion was not going to perform, the fight was not worth
her attendance. She handed her ticket to a young man hanging
about the entrance in hopes of just such a miracle, gave her roses
to an old woman selling flowers and climbed into her taxi,
announcing with a certain grandeur, ‘Take me back to Madrid.’

 

The aficionado from whom I have learned most is Angus
Macnab, who has been described as ‘the Scotsman’s Scotsman.’
To hear him explain, in Scottish accents, the merits of a particular
fight is to enjoy language and emotion at its best: ‘Mind you, I’m
not one to question the judgment of Ernest Hemingway, nor of
matador John Fulton, but when I heard people assure me that in
the great hand-to-hand at the Málaga feria in 1959 Antonio
Ordóñez and Dominguín presented between them the fight of
the century…some even claim the fight of the ages with six bulls
killed by six single sword strokes, et cetera. Well, when sensible
men tell me this with their smiles on straight and I’m expected
to believe them, I keep my mouth shut and ask myself one
question: “Has no one bothered to read what Alberto Vera, who
wrote under the name of ‘Areva,’ said about this so-called
magisterial fight?” Have you bothered to read it, Michener? No?
Then I’ll quote: “This afternoon we saw two famous matadors
fight six bulls, and each animal had two distinctions. It was barely
three years old and was therefore more truly a calf. And what
horns it did have were mercilessly shaved.” Michener, if you want
to select one afternoon as an example of what bullfighting can be
at least choose one in which bulls were fought and not calves with
their horns removed.’ Even the most trivial of Macnab’s opinions
on matadors and bulls are expressed with similar force. ‘Biggest
bull I ever saw was at Pamplona one year. A Miura of nearly fifteen
hundred pounds. Can you imagine how big that was? Killed two
horses just by running into them. But the best man-and-bull
together I’ve ever seen was Domingo Ortega and a runty bull of
admirable courage to whom he had given a great fight. At the end
he dropped on his knees before the fine animal, then turned his
back to the horns and remained so with the bull’s right horn in
the middle of his spine. Still on his knees he crawled away to pick
up a hat that an admirer had thrown in the ring and this he placed
on the bull’s shoulder. Then, standing back, he sighted with his
sword, moved forward and pushed the sword right through the
hat and into the proper spot. The bull took one step and dropped
dead.’

 

The addict with whom it is most fun to attend a fight is Kenneth
Vanderford, who has a sardonic wit and a dry skepticism
concerning everything. At his apartment in Madrid, where all
writers interested in the fiesta brava sooner or later converge to
check facts, he has a modest library of taurine material, including
complete files of most of the bullfight journals for the past eight
years. Apart from the nonsense of looking like Hemingway, from
which he derives much amusement, Vanderford is unusually
erudite, with a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Chicago.
When I last saw him he was engaged in a newspaper duel with a
learned Spaniard who had written an essay lamenting the fact
that the Spanish language does not permit words to begin with
the letter