Death and the Sun (19 page)

Marco and bull were holding each other off in the center of the ring while the horsemen settled in. Then it was time for Marco to move the bull in front of the picador on the shaded side of the sand for the first pic. Marco raised his cape and swept it back and the bull followed, but it stumbled on its left foreleg and came up limping and in pain. In a first-class
plaza
the president might have sent such a bull back to the corrals in favor of a replacement animal. Tolosa, however, couldn't afford to replace bulls except in extreme situations, so there would be no such reprieve. Marco was going to have to make do with what he had, a defensive animal that was now injured.

He moved to within five feet of the bull, held out his
capote
, shook it, and gave a shout. The bull stood its ground. Its head lolled; its sad eyes stared at Marco in reproach. Marco shuffled toward it a few steps and offered the cape again, and again the bull stood its ground. Finally, Marco got right up in the bull's face and tried one more time. The bull thought for a second and attacked, thrusting its head down, then flicking it up, lancing its horn into Marco's thigh, sending him fifteen feet in the air.

This last bit is not poetic license. One second Francisco Marco was a matador citing for a pass, and the next he was an indistinct mishmash of limbs flung into the sky. He fell hard and lay like a dropped knapsack on the sand. The bull wheeled and raced at Marco's prone body, its battering-ram head lowered to send Marco skyward a second time. By then other bullfighters had entered the ring. Someone flashed a cape in the bull's face, and the bull, delirious from the thrill of having hit something solid, turned with the cape and charged away from Marco. Fran and a banderillero were the first to get to Marco, and they picked him up and ran him into the
callejón
and under the stands to the infirmary, with Fran's hand pressed on Marco's wound to stem the bleeding. The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

The bullfighters in a corrida are responsible for defending each other while there's a bull in the ring, regardless of which matador and team the bull corresponds to. During the act of the picadors the two matadors who are not in action stand to the left of the horse, ready to save either the picador or their fellow matador. During the banderillas there are numerous people in the ring, and during the matador's
faena
his banderilleros crouch in
burladeros
, waiting to spring to his aid should anything bad happen. At least that is how it should be. The reality is that over the course of a long and tiring season, many toreros let their concentration wander when they should be watching out for their colleagues, and so are often out of position when something goes wrong. One exception to this rule was Fran, who was famous in the bull world for his punctiliousness and concentration in the ring. For that reason, Fran made more saves than most of his colleagues.

A few minutes after Marco's goring, Fran returned from the infirmary, and Nacho washed Marco's blood off Fran's hands with water poured from a plastic bottle. During Fran's absence Finito de Córdoba had killed Marco's bull, quickly and without attempting to make a show of it. Since Marco was gone for the day and Finito had handled Marco's first bull, Marco's second animal, the final bull of the corrida, now belonged to Fran. The bull was named Heredado, which was appropriate to the situation, since it means “inherited.” The bull looked like a winner out of the chute, red brindle in color, heavier in muscle than its fellows, and charging easily. Fran must have liked what he saw, because he ordered a gentle pic'ing and a fast act of banderillas. He didn't want to wear out the bull before he'd had a chance to perform with it.

The preliminaries finished, Fran came into the ring alone with his
muleta
. He cited the bull in the middle of the sand and gave it two series of passes with the right hand, working the right horn, working with conviction. The bull was willing to charge, but it didn't follow the cape well at first and the series were a bit disjointed. Fran stuck with the animal, passing it smoothly, holding the cape on a steady plane, trying not to jerk the bull's head up or down, keeping the cape in the bull's face, making the cloth seem just within reach so the bull didn't lose confidence and learned to enjoy the game of the cape. On the third series the performance jelled. Then the passes came in long rhythmic figures, Fran lengthening the passes out, pass by pass, slowing the bull down, and attenuating the moments of danger when the bull was passing close to his body.

The music started. Fran switched the cape to his left hand and took his partner through a classic set of
naturales
, bringing the animal across his legs with the red cloth dangling from the stick. It was one of those ecstatic moments that come rarely in bullfighting. It wasn't scary or tragic or moving. It was pure joy. Fran was in total control, and Tolosa loved it. Then he began passing the bull with his eyes on the audience and not on the animal. It was a parlor trick that his father, Paquirri, had liked to use, a trick that wouldn't pass muster in a first-class ring but was just the sort of thing to get a small-town crowd excited.

At the end of the last series, Fran walked up to the bull, dropped his cape to the ground, and thrust his chest at the horns. He was in front of the bull with nothing to protect him, no cape, no sword. There was nothing but an inch of air between Fran and the horn. The bull shook its head. Fran leaned into the horn, pressing its gray tip against his chest. All the bull had to do was chop and it would have popped a hole in Fran's heart, but the bull was fully dominated. Fran turned his back and walked away. While the ovation died down, he walked to the
barrera
and took the steel sword from Nacho. Fran lined up, ran in, and managed to sink the sword about halfway into the bull, the blade entering the body in a good place. The bull died and the crowd waved its handkerchiefs and Fran collected an ear and made a lap around the ring.

 

There was a sizable crush in the hotel lobby after the corrida, and a big crowd gawked in from the street. This was an event for the locals, since toreros were the only famous people who ever came to Tolosa. After a short beer at the bar and some autographs Fran and his team gathered again in the same hotel restaurant, at the round table they'd used at lunch. The group was alone in the room this time: Francisco Marco was in the hospital, and his cuadrilla waited there with the family until they had heard the outcome of his operation. When Fran sat down at the table he noticed that Poli and Joselito hadn't come downstairs yet. They were still in the hotel lobby, chatting up some girls. Fran waited for a while, growing increasingly irritated. He was in full prince mode this evening, expecting proper etiquette from everyone around him. Finally, Poli and Joselito appeared.

“We're always waiting for you two,” Fran said, his voice harsh and loud in the empty restaurant. “It's rude.”

Poli mumbled an excuse. Joselito stood behind him, looking terrified. Then Poli came over to sit down.

“You go and eat at another table,” Fran said. “You are banned from this one!”

“Fine,” Poli said. “I'll eat all by myself, alone.”

“Poor baby,” Fran said. Then he made a show of speaking to the person seated next to him.

The corrida had been a satisfying one, but Fran would never condescend to be happy about it. He was a star, a
figura
of the bullring, and an ear in Tolosa was not something he was going to celebrate.

After dinner the men headed to their vans and took off for Sevilla, a nine-hour drive. There was never any thought of spending the night in Tolosa. There were three full days until the next corrida, and the cuadrilla wanted to spend that time at home with family and friends. Meanwhile, Francisco Marco was nursing a sutured wound in his right thigh, a plastic tube sticking out from the stitches, draining the suppurating fluids. The terse report in the morning paper would describe his condition as “reserved,” a good prognosis, and Marco's manager guessed his boy would be ready for his next scheduled corrida, which was in Pamplona on July 8, or the following one, also in Pamplona, on July 10, with Rivera Ordóñez on the card. Until then, Marco was in what bullfighters call
dique seco
(dry dock). It is a place most toreros are all too familiar with.

15

On July 9 in the bullring of Pamplona a young matador from Sevilla got it bad. Antonio Barrera was in the middle of his
muleta
performance when a big bull from the Santiago Domecq ranch jabbed its horn into Barrera's thigh and sent him skyward. Bullfighters spilled into the ring as Barrera fell to earth, landing hard on the sand. While some of the banderilleros lured the bull away from Barrera's prostrate body, a matador named Miguel Abellán picked him up and tried to help him to the infirmary. But Barrera wrenched himself free of Abellán and waved him away with a dismissive sweep of the arm. This was Barrera's first appearance in Pamplona, a big chance for him to earn his stripes with the fans up north, and he was going to kill that bull if it killed him to do it.

Serious gorings often take place after a matador has already been tossed, and the Pamplona crowd was worried about Barrera, with good reason. He was wobbly on his feet as he made a few final passes with the bull and went over to the fence to get his killing sword. Then he set himself and made a firm run at the bull, going over the horns and landing the blade between the shoulder blades, and everything looked fine—until, at the last second, the bull raised its head. Barrera went shooting off the horns. Later media reports would say that he had taken a direct hit to the scrotum and that one testicle was all but destroyed. This time Miguel Abellán had no problem getting Barrera to the infirmary, but when Abellán returned to the ring some of the fans heckled him for letting Barrera perform after the first tossing.

“What could I do?” Abellán said with a Latin shrug. “He's a torero.”

Bullfighting's critics are fond of pointing out that the corrida isn't a fair fight at all, that the bulls are murdered in cold blood by matadors who work in relative safety. This is accurate, but beside the point. Bullfighting fans know the bullfight is not a fair fight, and they come to the arena assuming that the day's events will end with the bulls dead and the toreros unharmed. Far from being an embarrassment, it is this very imbalance in danger between man and animal that redeems bullfighting and makes it possible for it to exist in the contemporary world. Imagine if the bullfight were a fair fight—that is to say, a pitched battle that resulted in the deaths of half the bulls and half the men on any given day. Would such a throwback to the bloody death matches of the ancient Roman arenas be more acceptable to bullfighting's critics?

The modern bullfight is an artistic exhibition that results in the deaths of six bulls. While the death of the bull is the climax of the spectacle, it is not its dramatic focus. There is no suspense in the bull's death. Instead the drama comes from the possible death or injury of the bullfighter. In a sense, the bullfighter's medium is danger. The bullfighter takes danger, in the form of the bull, and plays with it, bringing the horns close to his body and sending them away again, creating patterns of danger and safety, standing near the horns, teasing them, avoiding them, until both the bullfighter and his audience are emotionally spent. In bullfighting any action the man takes, from placing banderillas to passing the bull with the cape to killing, is considered better and more interesting in direct proportion to how dangerous it is.

People attend bullfights for many reasons, but the biggest emotional reason is to be frightened. This is the same motivation that causes people to go to scary movies or ride roller coasters or walk through haunted houses, the only difference being that the danger in bullfighting is real and the audience has a role in creating it. Bullfighters like to say the most dangerous beast in the ring is the crowd. It is the crowd that urges the bullfighters to take greater and greater risks, and it is the crowd that voices its disapproval when the bullfighters play it safe. The crowd comes to the bullring hoping on some level for the ultimate thrill that a bullfight can provide: the death of the matador. And it is the crowd's ambivalence about this murderous urge that makes the bullfight so exciting and elevates the object of the crowd's aggression, the matador, to an object of worship.

According to Ramón Vila, the chief surgeon of the Maestranza bullring in Sevilla, there are around 120 major injuries suffered by toreros in the ring during the course of a typical Spanish season of 850 formal corridas. That's a big injury every seven bullfights, and it doesn't count pulled muscles, minor broken bones, cuts, bruises, and other small mishaps. Picadors suffer the fewest injuries, because the modern picador's horse rarely falls, since it is a big, healthy animal wearing padded armor. Banderilleros suffer the majority of injuries, because there are three times more of them than of matadors. But on a percentage basis a matador is more likely to be injured than a banderillero, and matadors' injuries tend to be more severe.

According to Dr. Vila, about seventy percent of all wounds suffered by matadors occur in the area between the belly and the knees, because that is where the bull holds its horns during most cape passes. But gorings in the eyes, head, neck, trunk of the body, and lower legs are also common, as are tossings that result in broken ribs, necks, backs, and limbs. One way or the other, most matadors spend a few weeks in the hospital each season, and many are punished cruelly by the horns year after year, coming close to death on multiple occasions. Interestingly, Fran hadn't been gored once in his eight seasons as an active matador, in spite of the fact that he had been tossed repeatedly, particularly at the beginning of his career.

Bullfighting histories tend to be both sketchy and inaccurate, but the history books suggest that there have been at least five hundred recorded incidents of toreros killed by bulls worldwide since bullfighting on foot came into vogue in the eighteenth century. The real toll is probably higher, given the number of bullfights that surely have been forgotten by history, especially in South America. Nevertheless, if we accept the figure of five hundred deaths and look back over three hundred years, that averages out to a little more than one and a half deaths in the ring each year. Of the bullfighters known to have been killed, a good 60 were full matadors, some 180 were apprentice matadors, 160 were banderilleros, 75 were picadors, and around 20 were Portuguese-style equestrian bullfighters.