Death and the Sun (31 page)

“Olé!”

The band played. Fran kept the
muleta
in his left hand, the cloth hanging down, offering only a minimum of protection. He stalked the bull, stopped about ten feet from it, and offered the cape from there, gambling that Voluntario was enough of a bull to accept a challenge from a great distance. The gamble paid off. The bull attacked, making a dramatic run across the sanded circle of the ring. The pass connected. The bull was sucked into the draw of the cape. But the pass was incomplete. Somehow Fran couldn't keep the bull under control, and instead of following the cloth, it ran right through the cloth, spoiling the line Fran was sketching, spoiling the tempo Fran was creating, and cutting off the tension, the energy, and the beauty.

Fran cited with his left hand again, but the pass ended much the same way the first one had, with the bull running through the cape. On the third pass the bull blew past him, making its way to a
querencia
near the bullpen gate, forcing Fran to pursue it. Most of the audience applauded after each pass. Even in a place like San Sebastián, most of the fans were the kind who would applaud anytime the bull ran past the man. There were, however, more and more jeers and whistles after each pass. The hard-core experts in the audience, or those who thought they were, seemed to agree that this was a good bull, and they were annoyed that Fran couldn't quite contain the animal's prodigious energy and channel it into satisfactory left-handed
muleta
passes.

The third series of
naturales
went much the same way as the first two had, and the whistles picked up. Seemingly defeated by his left hand, Fran returned the cape to his right and did another solid set of
derechazos
. But this did nothing to mollify the part of the audience that had been waiting for grade-A work with the left hand, and they jeered with feeling.

Fran ignored them and went over to trade the lightweight sword for the steel. He hit bone on the first attempt, got a little of the blade in on the second attempt, did a take-in/take-out on the third try, and sank half the blade on the fourth. The bull died. When the time came, the crowd reacted to Fran's performance in silence, which was better than whistles but not good. Obviously, there was no question of awarding an ear, and Fran did no better with his second bull.

In the next day's newspapers Fran was admonished for what the critics called his bad
muleta
form. In
ABC
, the critic Zabala de la Serna wrote that Fran's bulls had been good ones, “but there is nothing a matador can do with a bull when that matador never crosses in front of the horns, and sends the bull out and away from himself at the end of each pass, and fails to kill with sincerity or conviction.”

Noël Chandler had been staying in his Pamplona flat and driving up the A-15 highway each afternoon to attend the day's corrida in San Sebastián. “As I've been saying all year,” Noël said, sipping a post-bullfight beer in a bar underneath the arena, “instead of reaching out and bringing the bull into his body, he's holding the
muleta
near his body and sending the bull away from his body. Very depressing.”

Back at the hotel that evening, the cuadrilla assembled for their meal in a terrible mood. The corrida had been a bad one, they had a long ride ahead of them, and they feared they were going to be cheated out of their one remaining pleasure, a big meal. They ordered, and again the food was a long time in coming, and again when it came the portions were small, and finally the frustrations of the entire season boiled over into insurrection. The old picador López began cursing and yelling in indecipherable Andalucían. Then Poli took over. “This is a
vergüenza!
” he said. “A disgrace! This is why we need to go to
taurino
hotels, places that know what we like.” The men decided the time had come for a formal protest, and Poli pulled out his cell phone.

He dialed Pepe Luis Segura's number and waited. When Pepe Luis answered, Poli went into his litany of complaints about the service and food in the hotel restaurant. When he had finished there was a pause on the line. Then Pepe Luis began to speak, and everyone at the table could hear that he was shouting. There was a pause, and the voice changed. Fran had come on the line (Pepe Luis and Fran had been sharing dinner in their hotel), and then he shouted for a while too. Poli's face lost its color. When Fran gave Poli a moment to think, he backed down somewhat from his aggressive posture and Fran hung up. After that, no one was in any mood to complain about the food.

27

Gijón, August 14
. Something had to give in Fran's season, and it finally did on a gentle evening in Gijón, a summer resort town about 185 miles west of San Sebastián along the Atlantic coast. This was a different kind of bullfight than the one in San Sebastián had been, before a different kind of crowd. Gijón has a proud taurine tradition. The annual Feria de Nuestra Señora de Begoña (Our Lady of the Begonia) has been an important August stop for toreros for a long time—the impressive and unusual sixteen-sided bullring first opened in 1888. But Gijón is a second-category ring, a provincial ring, and the audience there has a second-category attitude. The fans are not interested in being tough on matadors, or in proving their superior knowledge of the subtleties of the art of bullfighting, or in watching sober demonstrations of bullfighting essentials. This was a crowd that wanted to be entertained with all the bells and whistles.

Fran was angry after San Sebastián and he put that energy to use, coming out and giving the good people of Gijón exactly what they wanted. He won their hearts at the outset by dropping to his knees and passing the bull with a one-handed flip of the
capote
over his shoulder in a series of three
larga cambiadas
—red meat for the provincial crowd. When it was time for the
faena
, Fran skipped to midring, took off his hat, stretched out his arm, and slowly turned around the ring, dedicating the bull to the fans of the city. This was not the sort of theatrical gesture he usually indulged in, but it went over big-time with the crowd.

Fran was just fine with the
muleta
. The aficionados in a first-class
plaza
might have quibbled about his technique, but he passed the bull every which way, spinning with the animal as it moved by, passing it while staring up at the audience, standing in front of it with his cape folded and taunting it with the sword, and then he killed it on the first try.

The stands were aflutter with white handkerchiefs. The president awarded an ear, and the cheering and waving continued, and eventually he gave Fran another ear. At the president's signal, one of the two
alguaciles
knelt over the bull's carcass and cut off both the ears, yanking each one up and hacking at the skin and cartilage to separate it from the skull. Then the
alguacil
went over to where Fran stood and placed the ears, still warm, with the flaps of hairy skin hanging off, in his palm, giving him a big hug. Fran held an ear in each hand and began to walk the circumference of the ring, holding up his new trophies for inspection, smiling and bowing before each section of seats. As he approached a section, the fans sitting there rose to their feet and threw flowers and cigars and wine skins and hats down to him, and the cuadrilla ran behind to collect the stuff. When Fran had completed his circuit, he headed for the center of the sand and grinned as the audience cheered him one last time. He hadn't seemed as happy in a bullring since his
faena
in Tolosa, back in June.

Fran did another good job on his second bull, killed effectively, and cut another ear. When the corrida ended Fran was not allowed to walk out. Instead he was gathered up on the shoulders of a few men who'd come down onto the sand and carried through the main gate of the arena and over to the cuadrilla bus. Fran was the only matador of the day to cut a single ear, much less three, but still, the following morning the critics were dismissive of his achievement. “Francisco could have been better, given the quality of his rival [the bull],” wrote
ABC
's local critic, José Luis Suárez-Guanes, “but one cannot dispute his desire, his persistence, his bullfighting with the
muleta
—a performance out of his early career.” It was this sort of review—of which Fran was so often a victim—that led him to stop reading the papers.

 

Alfaro, August 17
. Fran's August 15 corrida in Málaga, his second in Málaga that week, had gone badly. The bulls were awful and the seats half full. And if Málaga was bad, then Ciudad Real, the next day, was worse. Ciudad Real is a boring, dusty town in the middle of the La Mancha plain, and the ring was smaller and also half full, and who cared about the bulls anyway? After Ciudad Real came Alfaro, which was nothing more than a village on the upper edge of the winemaking region of La Rioja, where La Rioja meets Navarra. (Pamplona is less than an hour's drive to the north.) It was late at night when the bus came to a stop in Cintruénigo, a village just up the road from Alfaro in Navarra proper. For some reason someone had built a boutique hotel there, which would not have seemed out of place in Madrid or New York. It was called the Maher and was not the kind of hotel where you'd expect Fran to put his people up. There was a cheap and cheerful hotel in Alfaro, across the street from the ring, and most matadors would not have spent the money.

Next morning there was nothing to do, so I hung out in the hotel lobby with Jesús, the
apoderada
's driver. Jesús was middle-aged, tall and shy, and had a good head of black hair. He was a real
taurino
type and boasted of many decades of work in the bull world. Jesús and I had been friendly on the rare occasions when we bumped into each other, which was almost always in hotel lobbies. That morning I detected something in Jesús's voice that was not familiar to me. There was an edge. It seemed that he wanted to tell me something, but was having a hard time getting up the nerve to do so. Finally his theme emerged.

“You're very lucky,” Jesús said. “You know, in all my years of doing this, I have never heard of a journalist being allowed to ride along with toreros the way you are with Francisco. It just doesn't happen.”

I agreed. It was indeed unusual and I was indeed lucky.

“Well, you may be lucky to have this experience,” Jesús said, “but I must tell you, Eduardo, there are some people who think you are bringing bad luck to Fran.”

I laughed this off. I told Jesús that I wasn't trying to bring Fran bad luck and I didn't think I was bringing him bad luck. Jesús smiled along, but his eyes were serious. The whole thing seemed preposterous to me and I promptly put it out of my mind.

I should have known better. Bullfighters are a superstitious bunch, as superstitious as any group of people who risk their lives regularly and come from a religious country like Spain. Most bullfighters try to preserve their good luck by praying to their saints before each corrida and by wearing medals of their saints. They try to avoid bad luck by starting the opening parade of each corrida on the right foot, by not wearing yellow costumes, and by making sure to keep all hats off beds.

The speech of bullfighters is riddled with references to
suerte
(luck), both
mala
and
buena. Suerte
is often used as a face-saving device. Matadors will say, “I had
mala suerte
in my career and didn't advance.” Or “I had
mala suerte
in the bulls I drew.” Or “I had
mala suerte
with the sword and hit bone on a good try.”

Fran came down from his room just before lunch; he was still angry about the food revolt in San Sebastián and promised he would exact some punishment from the cuadrilla in the coming days. Fran was carrying his reading glasses and the book he'd been reading. It was the Spanish translation of
Black Hawk Down
, a nonfiction account of the disastrous 1993 American military operation in Mogadishu, Somalia. He had bought the book after seeing the movie version, which he'd enjoyed. Fran asked if someone was going to make a movie of the book I was writing about him. I said I hoped so, and by way of a joke suggested that Fran could star as himself in the picture. In fact, I said, with his looks he could go to Hollywood and start a new career in the movies. Fran agreed that this would be a great idea.

“But,” I added, “you could never go back to bullfighting. No one would take you seriously. They would laugh you out of the ring.”

“Oh, and that would be a shame,” Fran said in his characteristically dark fashion. “Then I'd miss all the fun in places like Ciudad Real.”

The bullfight in Alfaro did not go well. It was a rustic little arena, and the two other matadors and their cuadrillas walked to the back door of the
plaza
from the motel across the street. The audience was drunk, rowdy, and disrespectful, and the bulls were like oxen. That night we all sat down to dinner in the hotel—the cuadrilla, Pepe Luis, Fran, the manservants, the three drivers, and the American. It was the first time everyone had sat at the same table all season. While we ate our appetizers Pepe Luis looked around, did a head count, and announced that, all together, we made thirteen, which was
muy mala suerte
indeed.

Fran was a religious man. He was a believing Catholic, went to church when he could, and belonged to a religious club in Sevilla that participated in that city's Holy Week processions. He was, however, not superstitious the way many matadors were. He kept his pre-corrida rituals fairly short and simple: he prayed to his saints and that was that. Half the time he didn't cross himself before the opening parade. In many ways Fran's entire career was based on proving that fate didn't exist, that the legacy of Paquirri did not spell doom for his son. But Fran was angry with his cuadrilla for their behavior in San Sebastián, and he was even angrier with himself for the way he'd been performing. What he did not need at that moment was to have the idea of bad luck introduced into his mind.