Death and the Sun (3 page)

“A moment please, Doctor, I would like to talk with you,” Paquirri says. “The goring is a deep one. It has two trajectories. One through here and one through there.” Paquirri gestures up and down, showing the paths of the horn inside his body. “Open me where you need to open me,” he continues. “I place my life in your hands.” The din in the room increases. “Quiet, please,” the matador says. “Please wet my mouth with water.” He drinks and then spits. The tape ends.

 

Out in the arena, El Yiyo killed Avispado. Then bullring servants attached chains to the bull's horns and a mule team dragged Avispado's carcass from the ring and into the bullring butchery, across an alley from the infirmary where Paquirri was being treated. A short time after the butchers had turned Avispado into cuts of meat for local markets, about eight o'clock, Paquirri was carried to a waiting ambulance, and the big white Citroën pulled out of town, siren yowling, and flew down the highway, careening along the twisting mountain roads. Around fifteen miles from the gates of Córdoba, Paquirri cried out, “Help me, I can't breathe.” The ambulance screeched to a stop and a doctor worked on him by the side of the road. When Paquirri looked a little calmer, he was put back in the ambulance, which reached the hospital shortly after nine o'clock. It had taken less than an hour to get to Córdoba, but Paquirri was all but dead on arrival. He was thirty-six years old.

In the weeks that followed, Paquirri's death would remind many writers and commentators of some lines in “The Song of the Rider,” a short poem written in the 1920s by Spain's best-known poet, Federico García Lorca, who was himself a bullfighting aficionado.

 

Through the plain, through the wind,

Black pony, red moon.

Death is watching me,

from the towers of Córdoba.

 

Oh what a long road!

Oh my brave pony!

Oh that death awaits me,

before I arrive in Córdoba!

 

Spain plunged into frenzied mourning for Paquirri. Newspapers picked over the grisly details of the goring and the race to Córdoba until the entire story took on the quality of legend. Many people second-guessed the doctors, wondering whether they had handled the wound in the right way. Strangely, amid all the fuss, it was never made clear just what had killed Paquirri, shock, loss of blood, or something else. The funeral took place in Sevilla. The prime minister was unable to attend, but sent his wife. The crowd that assembled in front of the apartment building where the body was laid out stretched for five miles. When the coffin was brought out, the massive throng wouldn't let it be placed in the hearse. Instead Paquirri was carried to Sevilla's bullring, where it was marched around and around to chants of a single word, “Torero.” In certain parts of Spain there is no greater compliment.

Paquirri was buried in the cemetery of San Fernando, where his tomb faces the mausoleum of José Gómez Ortega, Joselito, perhaps the best bullfighter of all time, who was killed by a bull on May 16, 1920. Buried with Joselito is his brother-in-law, the matador Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who killed the bull that killed Joselito. Fourteen years later, another bull killed Sánchez Mejías. Killing a murderous bull had brought bad luck to Sánchez Mejías (or so it was said), and this same misfortune pursued those who performed with Paquirri in Pozoblanco. In 1985, a bull gored El Yiyo in the heart, killing him instantly. He was twenty-one. In 1988, a gunman marched into the office of Avispado's breeder, Juan Luis Bandrés, and shot him to death. That case was never solved. In 1994, the third matador on the card that day, Vicente Ruiz, El Soro, injured his right knee. It ended his career, leaving him with a deformed leg.

Though it might have been bad for his fellow performers, Paquirri's death was a good thing for bullfighting. By the mid-1980s the bullfight had been losing ground as a popular spectacle for years, to soccer, television, and movies, in part because people believed bullfighting was fixed, that the matadors weren't really risking their lives. Paquirri's death changed that. Not only did it legitimize bullfighting as a serious thing, but it brought newfound admiration for matadors. Paquirri wasn't the first prominent matador killed by a bull. But he was the first one killed during the television age, and what was seared into the Spanish consciousness was not so much his death as the composure and humble bravery he showed in the infirmary video.

In the 1990s bullfighting would undergo a strong revival, driven in part by a new generation of young matadors who remembered Paquirri's death as a formative event. One of these was his own son, a ten-year-old named Fran, who went to bed that night thinking he had a father and was fast asleep when his mother came in to tell him he no longer did. Fran says he can't recall how he responded to this news. His mother remembered, however, and so did another person who was in the house that night. Apparently, when Fran heard what had happened, he looked up at his mother and said, “I am going to be a bullfighter.”

2

Las Majadillas, March 12
. It was all over the news. Eugenia Martínez de Irujo, the duchess of Montoro, and her matador husband, Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, were separating. You could read the gossip magazine headlines at every newsstand across Spain. “Eugenia Breaks Her Marriage,” blared the cover of
Semana
magazine. “End Point: Fran and Eugenia Break Their Marriage after Various Attempts at Reconciliation,” screamed
Lecturas
. “Fran and Eugenia: How It All Went Wrong,” said
Diez Minutos
. The pink press worked the story from every angle. There were timelines of the couple's courtship, reports and photographs of the alleged love affairs that had broken up the marriage, hackneyed laments about a fairy-tale romance gone wrong, and unattributed quotes from so-called friends and family.

Eugenia was hiding from the press behind the walls of La Pizana, the seventeenth-century monastery-turned-villa she had shared with Fran just outside Sevilla. Fran's mother-in-law, the duchess of Alba, had fled to Paris. Fran's mother, Carmen Ordóñez, was giving interviews left and right. But no one knew where to find Fran. He had disappeared with an army of tabloid reporters on his trail. In fact, he was on an estate named Las Majadillas (Little Barns), in an empty countryside of squat oak trees thirty miles west of Sevilla. The estate, laid out on a hillside overlooking a winding valley, comprised a whitewashed mansion, a courtyard with a fountain, a stable full of sleek horses, and a parking lot filled with snazzy SUVs. The rest of the estate was devoted to the raising of bullfighting bulls. The owner was a rich man's son, a friend of Fran's who, like many Spanish aristocrats and millionaires, dabbled in bull breeding.

The afternoon was sunny and fresh and the air smelled of wood smoke. The bullfighting season had just begun, and up north the city of Valencia was holding the first important bullfighting festival of the year. At Las Majadillas young calves were being put to the test, a process that can also serve as practice for toreros. The private bullring was made of whitewashed cement. There was no seating, but there were two raised platforms, one opposite the other, at twelve and six o'clock. The breeder, his wife, and a few friends visiting from Mexico stood on these. Around the ring stood tough, sunburned men wearing tweed caps and oilskin coats. They were ranch hands and bullfighting professionals, hard country folk who smelled of earth and sweat and were not invited to sit with the rich people. They had come to see Francisco Rivera Ordóñez perform with live animals, something a big crowd would be paying to see a few days hence in Valencia.

A female calf stood in the center of the ring. It was two years old and about half the age and size of a full-grown bullfighting bull, meaning it weighed some six hundred pounds and had the same dimensions as a motorcycle. The little cow was in a state of shock. It had been released into the ring just moments before and had been confronted by a mounted horse covered in padded armor. Following its instinct, the cow had charged the horse, and just as the cow had dug its horns into the horse's protective padding, the man riding the horse had shot a metal-pointed spear, which Hemingway referred to as a pic because there is no single Spanish word that describes it, into the cow's withers. This was part of the test. If the cow had broken away from the horse at the pain of the pic, there would have been a mark against it, and it might have been sent to the slaughterhouse for meat. But this cow had ignored the pain and charged the horse again. As long as it performed well with Fran, it would be released into the fields, where it would mate with seed bulls to produce cattle for the ranch.

“Hey! Hey!” Fran stalked toward the cow, speaking to it as he came. He wore the bullfighter's standard practice uniform: leather boots, skintight trousers that rose to his breastbone and were fastened with braces, a white button-down shirt, and a dusty sweater. His head was bare. He held a bullfighting cape in his right hand. This type of cape is called a
muleta
, which means “crutch.” The
muleta
consists of a half-circle of heavy red cotton twill lined with yellow fabric. The cloth is folded over and tacked onto a short wooden stick, from which it hangs like a curtain from a rod, except the stick is so short that half the cape falls limp at one end. A
muleta
may be any size, but most matadors prefer the fabric of the cape to be long enough so that the end of the cloth will brush the ground when the matador holds the
muleta
belt-high.

Fran gripped his
muleta
by the stick with his right hand, keeping the limp end of the cloth away from his body. He also held a lightweight practice sword in his right hand, positioned behind the cape so that its blade spread the limp end of the cloth to its full size. Cherry-red blood pooled in the gnarled black hair of the cow's back at the place where the horseman's spear had injured it. The cow waited, watching Fran approach. When he came within a few feet of the cow, he stopped. He was just to the left of the cow's left horn, outside the line the animal would take if it charged straight. Fran shuffled across the cow's face, keeping both feet on the ground, making sure his movements didn't provoke the cow, until he'd worked himself between the cow's horns. At this point, Fran stepped toward the cow with his left leg, so that the leg was in the direction of the cow and between the horns, while his right leg was farther from the cow and just outside its left horn.

Fran offered the cape and shouted, “Hey!”

The cow lowered its head, raised its tail, and sprang forward. Fran put the
muleta
in the cow's face, and at this moment a kind of magical transformation happened. The flimsy cloth hanging from the stick seemed to stop the cow in its tracks. It was as though the cape had a magnetic energy that held the cow in place. Then Fran swept the cape back and the cow was tugged along, its mad charge ratcheted down to a slow-motion trot by the cape. Fran kept the red fabric just ahead of the wet muzzle and pulled the cow through a slow, slower, ever slowing and deepening arc, taking the cow past his left leg, across his belly, brushing the cow past his outthrust right leg, twisting his wrist at the end to angle the cape and bring the cow behind his back, leaving the cow as far behind him as he could make it go. This was the first pass.

“
Bien, torero!
” growled the crusty types around the bullring in their tobacco-ravaged voices. Well done, bullfighter!

Fran kept the cape in the cow's face, holding the cow in place. He pivoted on his left foot, spinning around so that he faced the animal once again and was in the same position as before: left leg toward the cow and between the horns, right leg farther back and outside the left horn, the
muleta
in the right hand extended to the cow. Fran jerked the cape again, shouted, and put the cow through another slow, smooth journey around his body. He stood motionless as the animal brushed past him. His feet were fixed to the ground. His shoulders, arms, and torso moved the cape in a calm, easy fashion, and he leaned into the cow so that the cow had to step around his outthrust right leg, and the cow's blood painted a smudge on Fran's belly. Then Fran curved his wrist, sending the animal behind his back. That was the second pass.

“
Bien!
” came the audience's approval. “
Bee-yen!
”

At the end of the third pass, Fran did not spin around again. Instead he stayed in place, shook his cape, and brought the cow back the way it had come. As Fran finished this reverse pass, he lifted the cape upward, and as the cloth rose so did the cow, jumping out of the slowness of the pass like a plane taking off, shuddering, fighting gravity, and then shooting into a heart-compressing lift. The cow landed away from Fran, spun, and stared at him with hot betrayed eyes. The cow would not be in the mood to charge just then. It had been fixed in place by fatigue, disillusionment, and the brusqueness of the upward lift of the pass, which had jarred its neck muscles.

 

Fran was born on January 3, 1974, in Madrid. But soon his family moved to Sevilla so that Fran's father could be near La Cantora, the ranch he'd purchased some years before, an hour south of the city, in the province of Cádiz. The Rivera-Ordóñez household was not an easy one to grow up in. Fran's mother, Carmen Ordóñez, was just eighteen when Fran was born; she was a famous beauty distracted by nightlife and her ever-increasing role as a star of the gossip magazines. Fran's father, Paquirri, was a celebrated torero and a man who expected a lot from his sons. Once when Fran was still a little boy he begged his father to let him cape a calf. So Paquirri took Fran's hand and led him to La Cantora's ring, where a calf was waiting. But when Fran saw the little animal, he burst into tears and refused to go near it, an act of toddler cowardice that enraged his father. “Go back up to the house with the women, you faggot!” shouted Paquirri, and Fran ran up the hill to the house.