Death and the Sun (28 page)

In retrospect, the first half of August, the weeks after Fran's return, were the absolute low point of the season. The joyous anticipation of the winter, the grim determination of spring, and the resigned concentration of the injury layoff had all dissipated, and in their place a kind of disengagement with the task at hand had set in. There was nothing acute about it, but Fran didn't seem motivated. He was distracted and lifeless in the ring, giving up on bulls that might have yielded ears with a little effort from the matador. He no longer mixed with his cuadrilla during off hours, but spent his free time locked away in hotel rooms, going to the movies with Nacho, or flying off to fit in short visits with his daughter, who was staying with her mother at the duchess of Alba's summer retreat in Marbella.

The cuadrilla members were also in a dark mood. They'd lost a lot of money during their enforced summer holiday, and when they started performing again the matador wasn't cutting ears the way a top-ranked matador should. This upset them on many levels. As businessmen they were worried that if Fran kept going on this way he would fall from the top rank and there wouldn't be as much work for them in the future. As toreros, they wanted the pride of being able to say they traveled with one of the elite matadors in Spain and the pleasure of working in the first-class rings and big
ferias
. And simply as people, it hurt them to see Fran not doing as well as he could. “Please, God, let him cut a few ears!” said the assistant manservant, Antonio, one evening. “Let him cut a few ears!”

Fran returned to the ring on August 8 in the shockingly large
plaza de toros
of Palma, the capital of Mallorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean off Valencia. For the only time that season, Fran and his assistant bullfighters took a plane to a bullfight, leaving Pepe to drive the cuadrilla minibus overland and hop a ferry from Barcelona. The corrida took place on a soft summer evening. The arena was full of people on holiday, and King Juan Carlos was seated in the first row. As is customary on such occasions, Fran dedicated his first bull to the monarch, but killed badly and lost an ear. He was better on his second bull and did cut an ear. It wasn't much of a result given the indulgent crowd that night, which had granted two and three ears to the other matadors on the card.

Palma de Mallorca was everyone's first look at how the injured left elbow was going to hold up under bullfight pressure, and it was not a promising sight. Even at a distance it was easy to see that Fran was still in a lot of pain and favoring the arm. It was unable to bend the way a healthy arm should. It hung at Fran's side at a funny angle, and he held it against his hip when he wasn't using it, and tried not to use it too much. To reduce the load the arm had to carry, Fran had taken to hugging his
capote
to his chest during downtimes in the ring and carried the
muleta
as much as possible in his right hand. These were things Fran would continue to do until the end of the season.

On August 9, the day after Palma, Fran was down in the southern tip of Andalucía for a bullfight in the grand old
plaza
at El Puerto de Santa Maria, perhaps the largest and most impressive small-town ring in Spain. Fran drew bad bulls that evening and couldn't be bothered to put in the effort to make something out of them. That brought him to August 10 and the first of two corridas he was scheduled to take part in that month at La Malagueta, the venerable ring of Málaga. On that evening, with a small, ugly, but willing bull from the ranch of Daniel Ruiz Yagüe, Fran snapped out of his prevailing funk, only to have a fine effort spoiled by a stubborn bullring president who, for some unaccountable reason and in defiance of bullfighting rules, ignored an arena full of handkerchiefs and denied Fran the ear he deserved.

(As the crowd spilled out of the ring that night, one local aficionado explained that this president—the aficionado actually referred to the president as a “son of a bitch”—was trying to raise the reputation of the Málaga ring by making it harder to cut ears there.)

Fran's cuadrilla had already had three corridas in as many days, and the week ahead was going to be just as grueling. They were in the thick of the typical inhuman schedule of a working team of toreros in the late summer of a Spanish bullfighting season. During the eight days from the tenth to the seventeenth of August, they would perform in seven corridas, driving overnight on six nights and passing two in hotels. Their shortest overnight journey would be about 240 miles, from the Mediterranean coast at Málaga to Ciudad Real, in the central plain of La Mancha. Their longest overnight trip spanned 620 miles across the very length of Spain, from Gijón, hard by the Atlantic Ocean, to Málaga, on the Mediterranean. In all they would travel some 2,200 miles that week. This was approximately the distance from New York to Los Angeles, or from Madrid to Moscow by airplane. But they were not flying; they were driving in cramped vans through the second-most-mountainous country in Europe.

“How long is the trip to Huesca?” asked José María. They had a corrida the next day in Huesca, in the region of Aragón.

“It's about nine hundred kilometers,” Pepe said—about 560 miles.

“I couldn't drive that overnight,” José María said. “I've never driven that far before, least of all when everyone else is asleep.”

“You could, you could,” Pepe said. “You learn how to do it.”

“No,” said José Maria. “You have a special skill.”

“When I started out in this, no one in the business paid much attention to who they hired as a matador's manservant,” the big picador Francisco López said. “The drivers were the ones who got all the respect.”

 

Fran's team of three banderilleros, two picadors, two manservants, and a driver traveled in a Mercedes minibus that was a bit taller and wider than the average American van. Most matadors plastered their name, face, and Web address on the sides of their cuadrilla bus, but Fran's was painted a plain forest green. It had three rows of seats and storage space in the rear. Each night after a corrida, Antonio and Pepe loaded up the back of the bus with nine suitcases of everyday clothes, five or six of Fran's bullfighting costumes, another six or eight costumes belonging to the banderilleros and picadors, the heavy armor the picadors used to protect their legs from the horns, three bags of heavy
capotes
, five
muletas
, the leather case for Fran's swords (the case had belonged to Paquirri), and many boxes of banderillas, in white and in the red and gold of the Spanish flag. The picadors' lances were provided by the arena.

Fran's costumes were made to order for him by Santos, one of the handful of bullfighting tailors, all of which were located in Madrid. The handmade suits cost around three thousand dollars apiece, and Fran ordered at least three or four new ones each season. The colors of the suits are mentioned each morning in newspaper accounts of any corrida, and the colors have evocative names such as
verde manzana
(apple green),
celeste
(heaven, a shade of blue), and
sangre de toro
(bull's blood). A top matador like Fran would wear a suit no more than ten or fifteen times before giving it away to a less fortunate torero. Fran always wore a new suit when he appeared in Sevilla and Madrid, saving the used ones for lesser arenas.

Fran also ordered his bullfighting shirts, his ties, his socks, his slippers, and his fake pigtails from Santos, as well as his
capotes
and
muletas
. Each cape came from the tailor's with Fran's name stenciled into it in black ink. As Fran did with his suits, he used newer capes in the better rings, saving the worn ones for smaller
plazas
. To keep the capes straight, Antonio wrote pet names on them, such as Princesa de La Pizana (La Pizana was the home Fran had shared with Eugenia) and San Juan Evangelista. It could cost as much as fifty thousand dollars a year to keep Fran fully stocked with costumes and gear. The care and maintenance of all this was one of Antonio's main jobs on the road. After a corrida Antonio, and sometimes Nacho, would fill a hotel bathtub with cold water and soak the jacket, vest, and pants, working on any bloodstains with soap. Once the suit was clean, Antonio would hang it next to the front seat of the minibus to dry. It rode there next to Pepe like a ghostly reminder of the owner of the bus.

Most members of the cuadrilla brought pillows with them to make the ride more comfortable. But more important to one's comfort on the bus was being seated in a spot with something close at hand to prop the pillow on. Seating was assigned by seniority. Pepe, of course, drove. As the employee closest to Fran, Nacho rode next to Pepe in the shotgun seat, which provided ample space for him to put up his feet and sleep against the window. The craggy old picador López sat just behind Pepe in the coveted second-row left-side window seat. Next to him was Antonio, who endured life in a middle seat, which meant he was forced to sleep upright. Then came the junior pic, Diego. He had a window seat, but the seat was an uncomfortable few inches from the window, to allow access to the back row. Poli had the left-side window, third row. More often than not he'd stretch out on the floor, leaving the other two banderilleros to share the back seat.

Pepe had estimated that the 560-mile drive to Huesca would take at least seven hours that evening. But this haul did not seem to factor into what the toreros ordered for dinner. They sat down around midnight and ate their typical massive meal, washed down with plenty of wine and beer. Whether it was due to practice, professional pride, or something in the water, they were all able to get through long overnight trips without a rest stop, even after big boozy feeds.

They left the damp Mediterranean soup of Málaga at one o'clock in the morning, heading from palm trees and sand toward the interior. There was little talking. Pepe chewed on sunflower seeds as he drove, spitting out the shells like a baseball player. The old picador snuggled his massive craggy face into his puffy pillow and began snoring. Antonio smoked. Diego looked out the window. Joselito arranged his gangly frame in the back seat and listened to headphones. Poli was down on the floor and José María leaned against the wall in back. Within an hour everyone except for Pepe was asleep.

It was the height of summer by then, and the days were as hot as you would imagine Spanish summer days to be. But the nights were fresh with the windows open and the mountain air rushing into the minibus. This was fortunate, because the bus's air conditioning had broken down the season before, and everyone had voted not to fix it.

The miles began to pile up. After a few hours the van climbed through a dark wood of piny trees, coming over the top of it and down the other side. This was the famous pass of Despeñaperros, the only practical route through the mountains of the Sierra Morena, which divide Spain into north and south, separating sunny Andalucía from the arid plains of La Mancha and Castilla. (Partisans of the Andalucían bullfighting tradition love to say that no great bull or matador was ever born north of Despeñaperros.) Then came the flatness of La Mancha with its massive farms and warehouses, and then the suburbs of Madrid.

“That's Las Ventas,” Pepe said, pointing to the vast empty bullring perched over the network of highways.

The way bullfighters travel raises many questions at first, but these are all answered when you ride with them. Why don't they fly? Planes are expensive and impractical: vans would still be needed to take the men and equipment from the airport to the bullring, and bullrings are usually not near airports. Why do they travel at night? Summer nights are as pleasant in Spain as summer days are boiling, the roads are empty at night, and it saves the matador money on hotel rooms if everyone sleeps in the van. How can matadors nap before corridas? After many nights in a car, the human body will take any opportunity to stretch out on a long, clean bed. Why do all toreros stay in one or two particular hotels in a given city? Bullfighters don't use hotels the way other travelers do. They check in at four in the morning, check out at eleven that night, and expect to pay for only one night's lodging. They want their laundry done on the spot and need cold beer, large portions of traditional food, and a staff that will keep unwanted fans away.

Northeast of Madrid the land rose again, but this time it was rocky and bare, like the highlands of Scotland, and the night was crisp and dry. The van had passed out of the province of Madrid and into Aragón. After a couple of hours of mountain roads, past great fields of windmills harvesting the power of the air, the bus entered a city and came to a gentle stop.

They were in a small square that had been built on the side of a hill, and the blustery wind of Aragón announced that this was Huesca. Fran's red Chevy van was already parked in front of the hotel. The half-asleep bullfighters poured out of the minibus. Poli went in to get the room keys while Antonio unloaded the bus and everyone else watched and helped out a bit. It was a lot of work after a night of driving. The sky was turning from navy to royal blue, and the clock above the check-in counter read eight
A.M.
Everyone took his suitcase upstairs and collapsed. They had only a few hours. The sorting of the bulls was set for eleven-thirty that morning.

25

Huesca, Augusta
. Huesca is a typical Spanish town, a tightly packed collection of stone buildings huddled in the middle of an empty wilderness. Spaniards are a relentlessly urban people. They do not share Americans' romantic view of an awe-inspiring nature. The Spanish see nature as a malevolent force, and prefer to live cheek by jowl with their neighbors, even when there is more than enough space to get away from them. This aversion to the natural world is one of the metaphors underpinning the bullfight. The corrida is a passion play in which civilization is redeemed by its champion, the matador, in his oh-so-stylized and urbane suit, who tames and then destroys nature's champion, in the form of the bull.