Death and the Sun (33 page)

Thanks to Hemingway, Tynan, and others, Antonio's story is well told in English. He was the third of El Niño de la Palma's five sons, but the only one born in Ronda, where his mother “gave him to the light,” as the Spanish say, on February 16,1932. He dressed in lights for the first time in June 1948 in Haro, in La Rioja. Three seasons as a
novillero
followed, and then Antonio took his
alternativa
in Madrid on June 28,1951. That afternoon he signed a contract to be managed by Domingo González Mateos, known as Dominguín, one of the most powerful
apoderados
of that time. Under Dominguín, and with the help of Dominguín's three torero sons—Pepe, Domingo, and Luis Miguel—Antonio became one of Spain's most popular matadors. In 1953 he married Dominguín's daughter, Carmen, thus uniting two great bullfighting dynasties. Then he retired.

Like El Niño and Fran, Antonio had a short apprenticeship, took his
alternativa
in one of Spain's top bullrings, spent three seasons as star, married a powerful woman in his third season, and suffered a professional crisis. Like El Niño and Fran, the young Antonio was talented, successful, brave, and beautiful, and essentially unfinished as a matador. He did not always know how to dominate difficult bulls and, like Fran, had problems killing. But this is where the similarity ends, because when Antonio returned to the ring in 1954 he focused on his shortcomings, learned how to deal with his faults, and blossomed as a star of historic proportions.

The Antonio Ordóñez of legend appeared for the first time in 1958, after he had already been a professional matador for ten seasons. During the late 1950s and early 1960s he was invariably relaxed in the ring, slow, full of elegance, and imbued with the bullfighter's total commitment of body and life that allowed him to take his time with problem bulls, finish off bulls after horrific gorings, and return to the ring with open wounds. This was the classic Antonio, the man Hemingway wrote about and whom Fran knew and revered. Fran always spoke of his grandfather as though he were a genius who had sprung fully formed into the bullring. The evidence suggests otherwise. Like all talented people, Antonio had had to work hard to achieve his promise. Fran possessed all the raw makings of another Antonio; what he needed was the same commitment to grow.

By 1958 most people agreed that Antonio was the best matador, but there was an important dissenter, Antonio's brother-in-law Luis Miguel, Dominguín. Kenneth Tynan described him as a tall, “contemptuously handsome Castilian” who knew more about the handling of bulls than any of his contemporaries. Six years older than Antonio, Luis Miguel had been a professional torero since boyhood. He was an arrogant technician of a matador, a performer who never enjoyed warm relations with audiences, preferring to overwhelm his many detractors with his copious repertoire of passes, his great skill at placing banderillas, and his deadly sword. But he also had a warm side. He attracted women in droves, including the actress Ava Gardner, and he had a wide range of powerful, talented, and intelligent friends, from Francisco Franco to Pablo Picasso.

Luis Miguel took his
alternativa
in 1945 from none other than Manolete himself, and for the next two seasons he pursued Manolete in a serious competition for bullfighting's top slot, driving Manolete to work closer to the bulls and take more chances in an effort to retain his public. Their rivalry ended in 1947 when Manolete, prematurely worn out and drinking hard at thirty, lost his life in Linares. Luis Miguel was on the card that day, and many in Spain blamed him for Manolete's death. For the next six seasons Luis Miguel reigned as the
numero uno
of the bullring. Then, in January of 1954, he was badly gored in Caracas, Venezuela, and he retired, which opened the door for Antonio Ordóñez to become the leading star of the ring—although Luis Miguel and his fans continued to insist that Dominguín was the best, with Ordóñez a close second.

Luis Miguel returned to active performing in 1957, and for the next two seasons he and his brother-in-law Antonio avoided each other like heavyweight champs unwilling to fix a date for the big fight. The confrontation finally took place in 1959. They had to do it. Each man was insisting he was the greatest matador, and each was demanding to be paid more than any other matador. There had been bad feeling between Ordóñez and Dominguín since the mid-1950s when Antonio broke his management contract with Luis Miguel's father, accusing the elder Dominguín of dishonesty. But most of all, the public wanted to see Dominguín and Ordóñez together, and the bullfighters knew this would produce big paydays. That spring Antonio quit his
apoderado
and signed up with Luis Miguel's managers, who happened to be his brothers, Pepe and Domingo, making it easier for everyone to coordinate and to profit.

The Dominguín brothers arranged it so the second half of the 1959 season would be organized around a series of bullfights featuring Antonio and Luis Miguel, first in back-to-back corridas during the same
ferias
, then together in the same corridas with a third matador, and finally in a series of one-on-one, or
mano a mano
, confrontations. In many ways it was a staged event, a cynical moneymaking ploy. But it was also the first serious, protracted head-to-head competition between the two top matadors in Spain since the days of Joselito and Belmonte, and the bull world thrummed in anticipation. To add to the stew, Ernest Hemingway, already afflicted with the physical and mental ills that would drive him to suicide two years later, decided to return to Spain to cover the Ordóñez-Dominguín rivalry for
Life
magazine.

Hemingway's account of what happened was published in 1960 in the three long articles collected in a 1985 book,
The Dangerous Summer
. His reportage was overheated, unbalanced, sharply biased toward Ordóñez. In Hemingway's prose Antonio Ordóñez is a young god who can do no wrong, while Luis Miguel is a conceited, aging talent who chooses to slide by on tricks, and their bullfights together represent “the gradual destruction” of Dominguín at the hands of the superior Ordóñez. Little film footage of these corridas exists, and contemporary newspaper accounts are unreliable, given the old-time practice of critics living off tips from matadors. But the evidence of Hemingway's own words suggests that the rivalry was much closer than he wanted to admit.

From June 27 to August 21, 1959, the brothers-in-law performed together ten times, four of them
mano a mano
. The first five corridas had other matadors on the card, and if you count the ears and tails and gauge Hemingway's descriptions of the crowd reaction, it would seem that overall Luis Miguel got the better of Antonio in them. Then came the one-on-one bullfights. During the first one, July 30 in Valencia, Dominguín took a horn in the crotch, ceding the afternoon to Antonio. But the next day in Mallorca, in a corrida without Luis Miguel on the card, Antonio was gored, and when the brothers-in-law met two weeks later in Málaga, both had open horn wounds. It is often referred to as one of the greatest corridas ever: six bulls killed on six sword thrusts; eleven ears, four tails, and three hooves cut. (Hooves were cut for exceptional work in those years.)

But Luis Miguel was tossed again in Málaga, and at the end of the day Antonio had come out ahead in trophies cut. After Málaga, it became apparent that Luis Miguel was much worse off physically than Antonio, and the
manos a manos
in Bayonne, France, on August 15 and in Ciudad Real two days later went Antonio's way, especially Ciudad Real. On the twenty-first, in Bilbao, with the matador Jaime Ostos as the third man, Luis Miguel was gored again, ending the competition in Spain and effectively ending it for good. The brothers-in-law did continue their rivalry the next year, in eleven corridas held in France and South America, but these were lackluster affairs off the main Spanish stage.

In retrospect, the so-called dangerous summer of 1959 did not really decide whether Ordóñez or Dominguín was the better matador. Dominguín fought Ordóñez to a standstill in the first five encounters, while Antonio bested an ailing Dominguín in the second five. But Hemingway's title is an apt one, because a lot of human blood was shed that summer, and in many ways the bullfights were a disaster for all concerned. In the short time left to him, Hemingway regretted the way he had written his articles, and his reputation among bullfighting aficionados has never quite recovered from how he handled Dominguín and for some abusive things he wrote about Manolete, who was and is deified in Spain. Dominguín's reputation suffered from Hemingway's condemnation of him, and he was bitter about it for the rest of his life. Antonio was the big winner in print, but it was a pyrrhic victory, because he was tarred as Hemingway's pet, which lost him credit with many in Spain.

Over time, the reputation of Antonio Ordóñez has come to eclipse that of Dominguín, owing to the sheer weight of Antonio's career. From the mid-1950s to his effective retirement in 1971, despite numerous poor performances and lapses of attention and will, Antonio was considered by most serious aficionados to be the best active matador in Spain, and even in his day people acknowledged that he was capable of a kind of bullfighting perfection few others have ever attained. After 1971 he continued to perform, but just one day a year, in his beloved
goyesca
in Ronda. His last
goyesca
as a matador was in 1980. It was a friendly
mano a mano
with his son-in-law Francisco Rivera, Paquirri. In a photograph of that day, Antonio and Paquirri walk around the ring to furious applause with little Fran and his brother Cayetano: grandfather, father, and two sons together in public, perhaps for the last time.

29

Ronda, September
7. By midafternoon the streets were packed. Groups of women in flamenco dresses clapped and sang Gypsy songs in front of the bullring gate, and men gathered around the official resale ticket booths looking for a way into the arena. The crowds must have driven over that morning from Sevilla and Málaga—it was a Saturday—because Ronda had been quiet the night before. The day dawned brightly, but darkened as it aged, and a ceiling of dense clouds hovered over the people as they made their way through the clogged Calle Virgen de la Paz and into the
plaza de toros
. Ronda's Maestranza is an unusual bullring. At a full seventy-two yards in diameter, the arena floor is one of the largest in the world. But the Maestranza seats a mere six thousand spectators, accommodated in two covered and colonnaded grandstands, one atop the other, forming a wide wall around the ring with no uncovered seats.

The afternoon began with a parade of antique carriages, drawn by teams of three, four, or five horses, with footmen in eighteenth-century livery. They made their way around the ring to music. Then the toreros swaggered out in their
goyesca
costumes, which were made of the same material as modern bullfighting suits but cut loosely, with longer jackets, decorations in plain black stitching, and bicorn hats of the kind worn by Napoleon's officer corps. Fran was the host and promoter of the corrida, and as such he was determined to be its star performer as well. He'd chosen Domingo Hernández bulls for the occasion—Domecq stock raised in central Spain—and had signed El Juli and Curro Vázquez to perform with him. Fifty years old and set to retire that autumn, Curro Vázquez wasn't going to give Fran much competition. But if Fran wanted to be the story of the corrida, he was going to have to get the better of Juli, a young matador who would do whatever it took to cut the most ears on any given day.

As it turned out, there were no ears cut on the first four bulls of the afternoon, and the mood was almost casual in the ring. Curro Vázquez—who was Fran's uncle by marriage to a niece of Luis Miguel Dominguín's—had little to say for his two bulls, the first and fourth of the corrida. Fran gave his first animal, the second of the bullfight, a standard performance in many ways, but there was also something special about his work, something that peeked out at intervals, like sunlight between clouds. Now and then, Fran was making passes that were slower, smoother, and more forceful than any he had achieved that season. It was just one pass here and one pass there, too few perhaps for the crowd to catch on, but you could see that members of Fran's cuadrilla had noticed and they were excited—and then became frustrated when Fran botched the kill and lost an ear. After his bull was dragged out, El Juli met his first bull, which went on the defensive, and he killed with brutal efficiency.

 

The trumpet sounded, the ring cleared, and Fran's second bull loped in: a thick black animal with sharp horns, speed, and attitude. Fran stepped out and the bull made for him without encouragement. Fran dropped to his knees, flashed the
capote
over his head, and pulled off a
larga cambiada
that sent the bull out past his left shoulder. “
Olé!
” said the crowd. The bull wheeled. Fran dropped again for another
larga
, this one over the right shoulder. “
Olé!
” Fran stood. Feet together, he made three
verónicas
, bringing the bull back and forth across his body. The bull returned for more and Fran cited for another
verónica
. But this time, as the bull reached Fran, he swirled the outside corner of his magenta and yellow cape back around his hip, folding the fluttering end of the cloth away from the bull's line of sight, jarring its head around, ending the series with a half-verónica.

Beauty is in the details. The difference between a lovely face and a plain one can be found in tiny increments, a nose placed just so, a slight plumpness to the lips, a certain clarity to the skin. Fran had made scores of half-
verónicas
that season, and this last one had all the elegance and balance that were typical of his style. But on this little pass he'd slowed the motion of his hand a few beats and had concentrated his effort in a new way, making the pass that much more delicate, more studied, more precise. It was a rounder, fuller, more aesthetically pleasing motion, and it exerted greater control over the bull. All sense of hurry and struggle had been banished from it, and what remained was the emotional effect of it, delivered without any sense of the effort it took to gain that effect. This was inspiration, and if Fran could somehow keep in touch with it for the rest of the performance, he was going to do something that no one who saw it was going to forget for a long time.