Death and the Sun (10 page)

Another deception was horn-shaving. A few days before the corrida, the bull would be immobilized, often in the crate used to truck it to the arena. Then someone would saw a few inches off the end of its horns, filing what was left to give them points again and dyeing them black so they looked like normal horns. Many aficionados believe that a bull with shaved horns is handicapped, because its sense of the distance it needs to strike a target is thrown off by a few inches, and because the shaved horn will be tender the way a human nail is when it has been trimmed too close. The bull world had suffered through a few horn-shaving scandals, notably in the 1950s, when the practice was revealed to be widespread. But even more recently horn-shaving was indifferently policed, and it was generally thought that some bulls used in provincial rings had doctored horns. Nevertheless, if bulls were being shaved, it did not seem to be making bullfighting any less dangerous. The rate of injury to bullfighters had not fallen over many years.

In the end, the biggest frustration for a matador was coming to a bullfight hoping to give a great performance, only to be confronted with animals that rendered such a performance impossible. It was a constant problem, one that was magnified many times over when the bullfight was an important one, like Fran's upcoming corrida in Sevilla, Fran's hometown and the capital of the bull world. “You have many days and nights thinking about what is going to happen in Sevilla,” Fran said, “looking forward to Sevilla, working hard, waking up early in the morning to practice. Then you go to Sevilla and the bull comes out and says, ‘No!' Among bullfighters, we say many times, ‘Man proposes, God disposes, and the bull discomposes.'”

7

By mid-April the bullfighting season was six weeks old and Fran had appeared in eight corridas, which put him fourth on the
escalafón
(leader board) of active matadors. The
escalafón
comes out weekly in the two national bullfighting magazines,
6 Toros 6
, published in Madrid, and
Aplausos
, published in Valencia. But the
escalafón
isn't a league standing or world ranking in the sports sense of those terms, because there is no National Bullfighting League or Professional Bullfighters' Tour to oversee or regulate an official ranking. Instead the
escalafón
is more like a bestseller list. It ranks matadors solely by how many bullfights they've performed in during the current season, the theory being that the best matador is the one who gets the most offers of work.

The idea that the best matador is the one who works the most comes from the fact that work has always been scarce for matadors, something the
escalafón
illustrates with eloquence. The final
escalafón
of the season in question showed that about two hundred matadors had appeared at least once during the preceding eight months. But approximately half of those matadors had performed fewer than five times, and only twenty—the group at the very top—had performed more than forty or fifty times. The reality was that no more than forty matadors in Spain worked with any regularity. The rest of them spent their days practicing and waiting, or working at other jobs. One fairly successful matador named Pepin Jiménez—he performed thirty times that season—was also a middle school math teacher.

It is generally true that the best matadors in Spain at any given time are the top forty on the
escalafón
, but not exactly true. Some matadors worked a lot because fans loved them, while the elite aficionados and critics despised them. Some matadors who weren't fan favorites worked because their
apoderados
were well connected, or they sold their services cheaply, or they weren't picky about performing in low-end bullrings. There were matadors who could work as much as they wanted but kept their number of performances small because of a nagging injury, or fear, or the simple choice to shoot for quality of performance over quantity. As in most art forms, in bullfighting there was no direct correlation between popularity and quality.

In addition to number of corridas performed, the
escalafón
also lists the number of ears and tails cut by each matador—another misleading statistic. Cutting ears and tails is a tangible way for a matador to prove he can impress audiences, but the value of those ears depends on where they were won, since ears cut in small-town bullrings are worth much less than those cut in the big arenas. In any event, Fran, who'd cut eleven ears and a tail in his eight performances that season, was happy to be among the top five matadors on the
escalafón
so early in the year—and his good showing reinforced the growing impression that he was on his way back to glory.

It was all very encouraging, but Fran knew that
escalafón
rankings, ears, and tails, were not what he needed to reestablish his reputation. Those things would all take care of themselves if only he could rack up a few triumphs in the very top
ferias
. Just as the leading professional golfers and tennis players are judged by their performances in the handful of so-called major or grand-slam tournaments, so matadors are judged by what they do in the small number of prestigious
ferias
. These blue-chip corridas are known among bullfighters as “afternoons of responsibility,” because in order to succeed in them a matador takes on the heavy burden of performing without cutting corners, facing every danger head-on. Or as Fran's grandfather put it: “A bullfighter who really wants to be great has to not worry about his life four or five days a year.” Those days are the afternoons of responsibility.

These charged afternoons came during the top
ferias
, which comprised less than a tenth of the 850 corridas that would be mounted that season, and which were spread over the eight-month bullfighting calendar. From a matador's perspective, the bullfighting season was divided into three parts. During part one—March, April, and May—there were few corridas, but the most important
ferias
took place then. During part two—June and July—the frequency of corridas increased, but aside from Pamplona and Valencia, there were few prestige
ferias
. Part three—August and September—was the high season, when there were so many
ferias
of all degrees of prestige that the bullfighters lived in their vans, driving night after night from corrida to corrida until October, when the season would end with a diminishing trickle of dates.

The crucial
ferias
were those of Valencia in March, Sevilla in April, Madrid in May, Pamplona and Valencia in July, Bilbao in August, and Zaragoza in October. But head and shoulders above the rest were Madrid, first, and then Sevilla. Why were some
ferias
more important than others? There is no logical explanation. It was more or less a matter of tradition. In many ways, though not in all, bullfighting was as tradition-bound as anything that has survived into the modern world. Why did the two top
ferias
occur at the beginning of the season rather than as a climax at season's end? Tradition. Why were toreros always clean-shaven? Tradition. Why did matadors employ two picadors when one was enough? Tradition. Why did matadors take their hats off when performing with the
muleta
at the end of the bullfight? Well, you get the picture.

 

As soon as Fran plunged his sword into the back of his second bull in Valencia, washed the bull's blood off his hands, and walked out of the arena, he began to dream about the two corridas he was contracted for in Sevilla. More than anywhere else, Sevilla was Fran's home. He had lived there much of his life, married there, raised his daughter there, and lived his greatest bullfighting triumphs in the city's ring. Sevilla was where Fran's father was buried. His grandfather had lived in a flat in a small building on a short alley—the famed Calle Iris—that ends at the wall of the bullring. The very stones of Sevilla reminded Fran of who he was.

But it wasn't just bullfighting history or family tradition that made Fran love bullfighting in Sevilla so much. It was the atmosphere of the city's magnificent and ancient bullring during the April
feria
. Sevilla is at the center of the greatest section of bull-breeding country in Spain, and so it is home to more toreros, breeders, and other bullfighting professionals than any other city in Spain, and most of the people who attend the April bullfights there have some connection by trade, blood, or friendship to the bull business. For this reason, the crowd in the Sevilla ring demands good bullfighting and knows good bullfighting and treats events in the ring with a kind of reverence that is unusual, if not singular, among bullfighting audiences.

During the Sevilla fair, people come to the corridas dressed up: men in suits, women in their best ensembles. In Sevilla they sit in rapt silence, watching events unfold with the intensity of an opera audience on opening night—until something good happens, and then the Sevillanos erupt into cascades of applause and
olés
, and the bullring band plays, and the ring is awash in
alegría
, that special kind of wild joy that is native to southern Spain. Above all, it was this mixture of refinement and
alegría
that made Fran love Sevilla so. “The way the people in Sevilla feel the bullfight is different than in any other place,” he said. “In Sevilla you have to do things better, because all the bullfighting world is here.”

Sevilla is the largest and most important city in southern Spain and the capital of Andalucía. Its skyline is dominated by an expanse of small whitewashed buildings that honeycomb out from the colossal Gothic cathedral—carved from a medieval mosque—and by the Giralda, the cathedral's bell tower, which in the Middle Ages was used by muezzins to call the Muslim faithful to prayer. On the cathedral's eastern flank is a labyrinth of whitewashed houses, ramshackle palaces, broken-down churches, and tiny squares. This was the Jewish quarter until 1492, when Columbus sailed for the Americas and the heroic “Catholic king and queen,” Ferdinand and Isabella, expelled the Jews from Spain. Today this area is called Barrio de Santa Cruz, the Neighborhood of the Holy Cross, as if the Jews had never existed.

To the west of the cathedral is the Arenal, a district of restaurants and inns. The Arenal is bound by the curving sweep of the Guadalquivir River and the avenue named Paseo Cristóbal Colón, which runs along the water. Across the river is Triana, the old Gypsy quarter, which has been the birthplace of more famous matadors than any neighborhood in the world. Bullfighting, like its sister art flamenco music, has always been associated with Gypsies and Gypsy culture. Some of the most famous matadors, including Joselito, were Gypsies; Fran himself had Gypsy blood. From the bridge that joins Triana to the Arenal, the Guadalquivir washes south and west through a fertile plain—past Utrera, where the first bullfighting bulls were raised—some seventy miles before it spills into the Atlantic Ocean at Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

Just down from the Triana Bridge, on the cathedral side of the river, is an elegant wedding cake of a building—whitewashed with ocher trim and an austere yet beautiful main gate decorated in marble. At first sight, this building looks as if it might be a Baroque church or the palace of a cardinal or prince. In fact, it is the most storied bullring in the world, the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla. The Maestranza, as it is known, is owned by the Maestranza, an order of nobility dedicated to horsemanship. These aristocrats built the ring in 1761 and have refurbished it several times over the centuries. The Maestranza may not be the most important ring in Spain—that title would surely go to the monumental ring in Madrid—but in many ways it is closest to the hearts of bullfighters, for its age, its beauty, its location, and the fact that every great matador in history has performed there.

No two bullrings are alike, but the Maestranza has a number of striking peculiarities. It is one of the oldest rings in Spain, and it isn't a true circle: it bulges out at one point, perhaps because of an eighteenth-century engineering glitch. The sand used on the arena floor comes from a special quarry and is the rich golden shade found so often in bullfight paintings and so rarely in life. The rows of seats end in a section that's covered by a roof of antique white, black, and blue tiles and supported by a colonnade of mismatched marble columns. A domed chapel belonging to the Maestranza club sits alongside the ring, and the ring's back façade is encrusted with houses that have been there for ages. The overall effect of the ring and its setting by the river, with the Giralda bell tower peeking over it in the distance, is stunning day or night.

 

Eleven months a year Sevilla is a lazy and quiet place, more like a country town than a city of eight hundred thousand people. But each spring the regular life of Sevilla stops in its tracks while its citizens pitch themselves into six weeks of celebrations, sacred and profane. First comes the observance of Semana Santa (Holy Week), the week that leads up to Easter. During this time the streets fill to bursting with tourists and locals, who come out to watch religious brotherhoods and clubs on parade, carrying on their shoulders heavy platforms topped with statues of saints and scenes from the Bible. The atmosphere is laden with religiosity and repentance, and it is difficult to get around or find a hotel room.

Then, after about a fortnight's break, the two-week Feria de Abril begins. This is the fanciest, most insular and elitist
feria
in Spain. Like many fairs in Andalucía, the action is not in town but on the outskirts, at a fairground. Here locals set up large pavilions called
casetas
, which are constructed on the same patch of ground each year, along streets named after famous bullfighters. The
casetas
range in size from singlefamily affairs, large enough to accommodate a dinner party, to gigantic structures erected by businesses, clubs, political parties, and unions. No matter what the size, the standard
caseta
consists of an eating area, a bar, a kitchen, and a stage of some sort with a speaker system. Twenty-four hours a day, the
casetas
are full of dancing, chatting, smoking, and laughter. But the parties are by invitation only, and can be rather off-putting for tourists and other outsiders.