Death and the Sun (14 page)

Madrid's
feria
is most strongly felt at the bullring, the Plaza de Toros Monumental de las Ventas de Espiritu Santo. Las Ventas, as it is known, opened for business in 1931. It seats twenty-three thousand people and is the largest bullring in Spain. (The largest in the world is Plaza Mexico, the forty-five-thousand-seat monstrosity in Mexico City.) Las Ventas is also the most prestigious ring in the world. A bullfighter who has taken the
alternativa
in another ring must repeat the ceremony the next time he performs in Madrid, to “confirm” his status as a matador. Despite its renown, most toreros dread appearing in Las Ventas, and would avoid it if they could, because it is an uncomfortable place to work. The wind gusts constantly on the arena floor, threatening to blow the bullfighters' capes in the air, exposing their bodies; the bulls purchased for corridas there are always the largest and meanest available.

But the worst thing about Las Ventas, from the torero's perspective, is the crowd. It is a big-city crowd, the kind that revels in its reputation for being knowledgeable and demanding. On an average day, a Madrid audience ranges in emotion from total indifference to raging hostility. Fran once said the people in Madrid don't come to the bullring for enjoyment, they come to give matadors a final exam. It is emblematic of the Las Ventas attitude that it is one of the only rings in Spain where the band doesn't play when a matador is doing well. In Madrid, music is seen as a frivolity. The bullfight may be an art form in the rest of Spain, but in the capital it is a bloody struggle, and the fans make it that way. Said Fran: “In Madrid you fight with the wind, you fight with the bulls, you fight with the people.” Apart from its scale and the roughness of its fans, however, Las Ventas is a typical bullring. It consists of a circular stadium surrounded by outbuildings, which include corrals for the bulls, stables for the drag mules and the picadors' horses, an infirmary, and a chapel for the toreros to pray in. (By law, all bullrings must have chapels.) Like most Spanish rings, Las Ventas is equipped with an aging sound system that is almost never used—the music is provided by an unamplified band, there is no electronic scoreboard, and the interior of the ring is devoid of advertising. There is no law prohibiting advertising in bullrings, but by tradition the important rings refrain from spoiling the atmosphere with billboards. Bullrings in Latin America are much less fastidious on this front.

As in all bullrings, the sanded floor of Las Ventas is painted with two concentric circles, the first circle about seven and a half yards in from the fence that surrounds the ring, the second some ten yards farther in. These circles divide the sand into a three-ringed bull's-eye pattern, which provides some visual order to the geography of what would otherwise be featureless, and helps the picadors to correctly position their horses when receiving the bull's charge. The outer band of sand, between the fence and the first painted circle, is called
las tablas
. The narrow middle band is
los tercios
. The area generally corresponding to the inner circle is
los medios
.

The wooden fence around the sand is called the
barrera
. It is about five feet high and made of thick red-painted wooden planks set into grooved stone posts. A low, white-painted step runs along the base of the fence, inside and out. This gives the bullfighters a toehold when they need to vault in or out of the ring under duress. For more relaxed entries and exits, the
barrera
is broken by a series of narrow openings, each with a section of fencing set about a foot in front of it, leaving enough space for a man and not enough for a bull. These protected openings are known as
burladeros
, from the Spanish word that means “to trick” or “to joke.” Between the
barrera
and the first row of seats is the passageway called the
callejón
.

Until the eighteenth century, bullfights mostly took place in city squares and palace courtyards, which may be why the Spanish name for bullring is
plaza de toros
, simply an open space in which bullfights are held. In Madrid corridas were mounted in the Plaza Mayor, which could accommodate fifty thousand spectators. From the beginning of the seventeenth century until 1855, around 250 so-called royal bullfights were staged in the Plaza Mayor to celebrate an event in the life of the royal family. These weren't like the bullfights we know, with a matador on foot, but the archaic and aristocratic type in which horsemen, usually nobles, used spears to kill bulls, with the assistance of commoners on foot.

As bullfighting on foot grew in popularity during the eighteenth century, Spaniards began constructing stadiums for their bull events. This does not seem unusual from a modern perspective, but it was viewed as a radical step at the time. The new
plazas de toros
of the eighteenth century were the first stadiums erected in Europe since the last great arenas of the ancient Romans fifteen hundred years before. One of the oldest active
plazas
is in Béjar. It was first used in the 1500s. Other early rings include the
plazas
at Campofrio (1718), Zaragoza (1764), Sevilla (1761), and Ronda (1785). These rings were built by charities, which held the exclusive right to mount bullfights, to raise money. In the nineteenth century rings were built purely for profit. Important nineteenth-century
plazas
still in use include those of Valencia (1851), El Puerto de Santa Maria (1880), and Valladolid (1890).

Despite the violent political upheavals of the twentieth century, the Spanish continued to construct bullrings at a merry pace. An 1880 government census found there were around 105
plazas
in Spain; by 2001 that number had risen to about 350, with more being built. Most of Spain's bullrings are small, with an average seating capacity of 5,000, and a mere handful seat more than 15,000. The government classifies the
plazas
of Barcelona, Bilbao, Córdoba, Madrid, San Sebastián, Sevilla, Valencia, and Zaragoza as first-category rings, meaning they are large and each one mounts more than fifteen bull events a year, at least ten of those being proper corridas. (Though it isn't by law, Pamplona is also considered to be first-category.) The rings of provincial capitals, as well as a handful of other rings of some importance, are classified as second-category, with all remaining fixed rings as third-category. Portable rings are fourth-category. The regulations controlling bullfights are less stringent in the lower-category rings, and toreros and breeders are paid less to perform in them. Seats in bullrings are priced according to their proximity to the sand and whether they will fall in shade or sunlight during the corrida. Seats in the shade cost twice as much on average as seats in the sun. There are two reasons for this. First, when the bullfighters aren't in action they stand in the shaded half of the
callejón
, and this is where the bulls are pic'd. Second, most fans will pay top price to avoid the savage power of the Spanish sun. In the early evening, when most corridas are held, the sun sinks quickly, casting the ring in ever-increasing shadow, and the visual drama of the
plaza
bisected into sun and shade is a vital part of the aesthetics of the event. “The theory, practice and spectacle of bullfighting have all been built on the assumption of the presence of the sun,” wrote Hemingway, “and when it does not shine over a third of the bullfight is missing. The Spanish say
‘El sol es el mejor torero.'
The sun is the best bullfighter, and without the sun the best bullfighter is not there. He is like a man without a shadow.”

The seating in a bullring is divided into pie-wedge sections called
tendidos
. The Madrid ring has ten of them.
Tendidos
one, two, nine, and ten are sold as
sombra
, meaning they are in shadow throughout the bullfight. During the season in question, the best
sombra
seats in Madrid cost $105 each.
Tendidos
three and eight are
sol y sombra
(sun and shade), meaning they begin the bullfight in sunlight and end it in shadow. These seats are priced less than
sombra.
The rest of the ring is
sol
(sun), the cheapest seats. They cost as little as $3.50 each, for the back rows. In Madrid, the
sol
sections are
tendidos
four, five, and six, as well as the notorious and reviled
tendido siete
, section seven, where the toughest hecklers in bullfighting sit.

Most bullrings do not have seats, in the commonly understood sense of the word. The standard bullring seating consists of rows of stone steps with numbers stenciled on them to mark a place for each spectator. The steps are cold, dirty, and unyielding to human flesh, and every
plaza
in Spain has a cushion-renting concession, usually run for the benefit of a local charity. For less than $2 you are given a small padded square to put between your backside and hard reality. The seating is hellishly cramped. Fans sit thigh to sweaty thigh, with knees pressing into the back of the person in the row ahead. In a different country this might provoke fisticuffs on a regular basis, but the Spanish are endlessly good-natured about this sort of thing and brawls during corridas are rare.

 

Given how expensive, difficult, uncomfortable, and unrewarding it is to follow bullfighting, it is amazing that anyone becomes an aficionado. Few forms of entertainment yield their pleasures as slowly or sparingly. To properly understand a bullfight, the spectator needs technical knowledge of the execution of scores of passes, of pic'ing, of banderillas, and of killing, as well as a grounding in the history of bullfighting and its multitudinous local traditions—not to mention a knowledge of bulls, which is a subject complex enough for a lifetime of study. Without a good bit of this information, the spectator will never view bullfighting as anything more than an intermittently thrilling, but mostly boring, spectacle that can also be a revolting bloodbath.

It is axiomatic among aficionados that bullfighting is almost impossible to comprehend fully, even for Spaniards, even for toreros. “This is a very difficult subject to know about,” said Fran's great-uncle, the famous matador Dominguín. “I would say that only ten percent of matadors have any real understanding of bullfighting.”

The technical side is just the start for the aspiring aficionado, however, because the only way to become a true connoisseur is to attend a large number of corridas—and that's a thing not many people can do. The fact is, there are few bullfights to see. In Europe, they are held regularly in Spain, France, and Portugal; in the Americas, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia mount corridas. But Mexico and Spain are the only countries with enough bull events to provide a steady diet, and even a Spaniard or a Mexican would have to do a fair amount of traveling within his or her country to see a large number of bullfights, since a mere handful of cities mount more than five corridas a year, and this travel would be too expensive and time-consuming for any save the idle rich.

Bullfights do appear on television, especially in Spain and Mexico, but a televised corrida is to a live corrida what pornography is to sex. You can learn a lot from video, but not what you really need to know, which is the emotion of the thing. Bullfighting is an art of feelings, and it depends for its effects on the charged atmosphere of the ring and the visceral impact of being in the presence of a large wild animal—things that are not well conveyed onscreen, and that's assuming the bullfight is a good one. In fact, most bullfights are awful. For a great bullfight you need ferocious bulls matched with matadors willing to risk themselves, a combination that rarely occurs. As a Spanish proverb goes, “When the bulls are great the matadors fail to show, and when the matadors are willing the bulls are lousy.”

Despite its ornery nature, and in defiance of the millions of people worldwide who would like to see it banned, bullfighting thrives, even flourishes, around the globe. The most concrete evidence for this assertion is that the number of corridas mounted each year has been rising sharply throughout the past hundred years. According to the Spanish government, there were 864 corridas in Spain alone during the season chronicled in this book. That's up from the 513 corridas in 1990, the 323 in 1960, and the 209 in 1904. A similar sort of growth is chartable in France and Latin America, though bullfighting as a spectacle seems to be dying out in Portugal, where it is illegal to kill the bull in public.

In Spain, the surprising growth of the bullfight is usually attributed to three things. First, the Spanish economy boomed in the post-Franco years, and greater wealth has led to greater demand for leisure activities. Second, Spain joined the European Union during this time, and that internationalist move spawned a predictable backlash of interest in all things seen as singularly Spanish. Third, tourism has risen dramatically, making Spain the second-most-visited country on earth, and many tourists like to catch a bullfight.

Anti-bullfighting advocates are fond of claiming that the bullfight would die in Spain if not for the support of tourists, but the facts don't bear this out. Government statistics show that the majority of corridas are held off the tourist track—for example, in places like Murcia, Gijón, and Albacete, provincial cities that do not overflow with foreigners. And even in the big tourist centers it is still Spaniards who support the bullfights. Take Madrid and Sevilla. Both rings are packed during their spring
ferias
, the bullfights that the Madrileños and Sevillanos want to see. Yet both rings are virtually empty during their non
-feria
bullfights, even though these take place in midsummer, at the peak of the tourist season.

Bullfighting is everywhere in Spain. The newspapers cover it. Television broadcasts it. Posters for corridas fill the streets, as they have done since bullfighting was invented, announcing corridas in grandiose language that is familiar to aficionados everywhere. “With permission of the authority,” the posters typically read, “and if the weather does not impede the spectacle, six wild and beautiful bulls will be pic'd, banderilla'd, and put to death by the sword.” Restaurants and bars display bullfighting photos. Bullrings dominate city architecture. The countryside is riddled with bull-breeding ranches. Bullfighting is often called
la fiesta nacional
, and it has a semiofficial status. Most bullfights are presented with some financial assistance from the government, especially in small towns, and most bullrings are municipally owned. Political leaders are often seen at big corridas, as are members of the royal family. It is no accident that bullfights are held during
ferias
, which are civic celebrations. There's a sense that attending a bullfight is a way to support town and country, king and culture.