Death and the Sun (34 page)

The bull took two pics. Then Fran set his feet and gave another series of
verónicas
, and that same tenderness of motion was in his hands, wedded to the same lethargic tempo. The passes seemed to roll like waves meandering over a sandbar, building up into a sluggish fullness before surging over in a gush of released energy. The passes were so relaxed, so devoid of tension, so copious, they almost failed to excite the crowd, until the black peril of the bull swelled in behind the cape, giving the passes a dignity that danger confers on the art of the corrida. “
Olé!
” If Fran had made a series of
verónicas
like that in Sevilla, the people might have stopped the proceedings and given him a lap around the ring. The Ronda crowd was less discerning, however. They didn't realize yet what they were seeing, and they did nothing more than chant “
Olé!
” and await developments.

The sound of a trumpet announced the banderillas, and the crowd was in for a surprise. Fran had decided to place a pair of sticks himself and had offered to share the other two with Curro and Juli. It was an appropriate gesture all around, given Fran's role as host and the festive nature of the
goyesca
. But it was also a maddeningly self-defeating decision. Poised on what looked like a big triumph, he had decided to risk the stamina of his final bull on an act of banderillas that was going to be longer and more wearing than usual. Fran was also giving a big advantage to El Juli, because he never placed his own sticks, whereas Julián was a well-known matador-banderillero and would surely win over the crowd with his work.

The band began to play, as it usually does when matadors place banderillas. Curro Vázquez took the first pair and was almost killed trying to get them in. Then El Juli rammed his banderillas home to applause. Fran walked out to midring and raised his pair over his head. Just then, a wide and flat beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and the gray ring overflowed with light. Fran hopped up into the sparkling air and the bull stormed forward. Fran hit the ground, feet together. The bull came on. Fran waited. The bull got closer. When the bull was within a few inches, Fran stepped wide with his left foot and the bull tilted at the motion of the wayward leg. Just as quickly, Fran popped the leg back to its original position, his feet together, and banged the harpoons into the bull's black hide as it veered, carried away from Fran by its speed and momentum. The audience cheered. The band stopped playing. It was time for the third and final act.

 

Even casual observers could now sense that something was about to happen, and the audience chattered in anticipation. As Fran emerged with the red cape and sword in his hands, the people hushed themselves quiet. Fran spread his feet apart and cited for the first pass. He extended the cape, shook it hard, and shouted, “
Hey!
” The sound echoed off the walls of the ring. The bull launched and lowered its head, slashing its right horn at the red cloth. Fran stood firm; with his left hand tucked neatly behind his back, he swept the cape away from the bull with an even-flowing bend of his right hand, wrist, arm, shoulder, torso, and leg, making it clear by the beauty of what he was doing that he was on his way to a triumph, as long as the bull cooperated and he could get the sword in on the first try. What the audience didn't know, and maybe what Fran himself didn't know, was that this bull wasn't going to cooperate in any way, and it wasn't going to matter.

Midway through that first pass, the bull came up short. It swayed at Fran and chopped its head. Most matadors would have skipped to safety and no one in the crowd would have blamed them. But Fran stayed with the pass. He knelt into the bull, pushing the cape down into its face, forcing it to lower its head and run into a series of low, controlling passes that hurt its neck muscles and made it take notice of what Fran wanted it to do. Then Fran rose to his feet again, switched the
muleta
to his left hand as he came up, and fanned out a sweet string of velvety
naturales
that resolved into a chest pass, the bull shooting into the air as Fran raised the cape. “
Ohhhhhhhhhh-LAY!
” roared the crowd.

Shouts of “
Musica!
” filled the air. The band began to play a
pasodoble
. Fran stalked forward, eyes on the bull, setting up for the next series of passes. But when he heard the music he broke stride, looked up at the musicians, and waved his sword back and forth at them, telling them to stop playing. The band shut down with a loud drumbeat. The ring was silent for a moment. The bull stared at Fran, its sides rising and falling with labored breath. Then everyone in the stands started talking at once. It took a second for the audience to decide what it thought about this new development, and then the people broke into applause, hesitant at first, then with feeling. Fran had made what Spaniards called a
gesto muy torero
, a gesture that was “very bullfighter.” It was as if Fran were saying, “I know we're in my ring and you would like to do me a favor for the sake of my family. But today I would like to show you what I can do on my own terms.”

What happened next took less than five minutes. There weren't more than twelve or thirteen passes involved. The bull continued to be recalcitrant. It stopped and started. It indulged in reluctant pauses. Once it came just short of knocking Fran over with a head butt. But on this afternoon in Ronda the mundane problems of bullfighting did not seem to apply to our bullfighter. He moved in a kind of trance, creating a dreamy performance, refining each pass, cleaning its line and tempering its motion one well-designed withdrawal of the cape at a time. Everything was effortless, yet filled to the brim with emotion. Each time the bull faltered in its charge Fran waited, an abstracted smile on his face. Then he took up the pass again and taught the bull where to go, making the bull into more than it was.

Fran was
borracho de toro
, drunk on bull. The indecision and doubt that seemed to follow him into the ring some afternoons was gone. He was playful, heedless, and almost childlike. Two superior sets of passes with the right hand and two more with the left, and somewhere in the middle of it a woman's voice could be heard from the seats: “
Lo lleva en la sangre!
” He carries it in his blood!

Fran paused, cape held out to the bull, looked over his shoulder at the sound of the woman's voice, and nodded broadly in agreement. Fran wouldn't have been who he was without El Niño, Antonio, and Paquirri. His blood had given him everything. But whatever anyone else thought about him, Fran knew that he'd paid for everything he'd been given, and more. He was born into a certain heritage, and sometime in childhood, before he understood the implications of it, he had accepted the challenge of that heritage, with all the advantages and burdens that came with it. But on this afternoon, in this bullring, in his family's hometown, in the place where the terrible business of the bulls took its modern shape, Fran found a way to grasp the whole mess of it and make it his, to take the misery and make it beautiful, which is what great bullfighting is always about.

He arranged his body in profile to the bull, lined up, rocked back, and crashed over the horns, pouring the sword into the bull's body, burying the smooth metal blade between the bull's shoulders, leaving it there, up to the red-wrapped hilt. The bull stood, amazed at being dead. It paced back and Fran followed, eyes on the bull. Then the bull rattled and shook. It swayed. Fran swayed with it, arms outstretched, pelvis thrust forward. Standing on all fours, the bull laid its skull down on the sand and allowed the weight of its dying carcass to tumble after the head and collide with the ground. Fran spun around. His arms embraced the crowd, and the people chanted “
Torero!
” as Fran knelt down before the bullpen gate, picked up a handful of sand, and kissed it, touching the memory of his grandfather whose ashes were buried there.

 

The rest of the afternoon was a matter of housekeeping. Fran was awarded his two ears and he took his victory lap. Then El Juli, not to be outdone, got right in the face of a nasty bull and cut his own pair of ears, not so much for art as for lacking a normal sense of self-preservation. After the corrida, Fran and his daughter climbed into a horse-drawn carriage and were wheeled into the streets with the crowd applauding. The cuadrilla had gone to change clothes at an inn across the street from the bullring, and the assistant manservant Antonio Marquez was down in the bar. When I walked in he gave me a big
abrazo
, the loose hug Spanish men greet each other with. Then he hugged me again.

“Did you see him, Eduardo?” Antonio asked. “Did you see how slow he was? The way he made the passes long and smooth? I can't tell you what it means to me. After all these years with him . . .” Antonio had lapsed into sobs. Just then Juani the driver barreled into us, red-faced, and hugged Antonio and then hugged me. “
Me cago en los muertos de su toreo!
” he said. This is an untranslatable Andalucían exclamation; literally, “I shit on the dead of his bullfighting.” Normally, it is considered a serious insult to tell someone you are shitting on his ancestors. But in this case Juani meant it as high praise.

The history of bullfighting is studded with examples of matadors who for one special day reached outside themselves and gave a performance that went beyond anything they'd do again in their career. Fran's work in Ronda wasn't like that; it was something much better. It was a glimpse of what Fran might be capable of on a regular basis, as a mature artist, a man who had overcome his faults and fears to be confident in what he wanted to do and capable enough to realize his vision even in the face of adversity. It was also joyous. What was it Fran had said to me on the road to Valencia back in March? “I want to feel happy in front of the bull again.” Well, for one afternoon at least, Fran had found that elusive thing he'd been searching for.

I came across Noël in the lobby bar of a big hotel, but he was having a few beers with some friends from the bull circuit and I didn't have the chance to corner him and get his views. After a while we made our way out of the hotel and walked across the bridge to the other side of town. Noël had been invited to a private party that Fran was throwing in the garden of one of the old palaces perched at the edge of Ronda. When we got to the party Noël made right for Fran, grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him, and said in a quiet voice, “You know how good you were today, don't you?” Fran smiled and said, “I am very happy.”

It wasn't just Fran and his followers who thought he had done something special. So did Spain's bullfighting critics, and for the next week they showered Fran's performance with praise. “The grandson of Antonio Ordóñez did honor to his family,” wrote the
6 Toros 6
critic Paco Aguado, “with an exhibition of bullfighting of exquisite suavity, of absolute ease and naturalness, standing upright, forcing nothing, tranquil, classic. Everything perfect, and better still the final sword thrust.”

That evening the cuadrilla bus pulled out of Ronda. They had bulls less than forty-eight hours later in Calatayud.

If Fran's season were the plot of a film or a novel, it would have ended in Ronda, with Fran triumphant and all doubt and gloom washed away. Sadly for Fran, the art of fiction was not at his disposal. He was going to have to continue making his way through the muddle of reality. Ronda had its echoes. A few weeks afterward
6 Toros 6
, the most influential bullfighting magazine in Spain, ran a flattering headshot of Fran on its cover with an interview on the inside suggesting that Francisco Rivera Ordóñez was back and ready for better things. But a triumph in Ronda does not a season make, and Fran's chances to build on his September success were running out. There were four weeks left in the season, eleven corridas, and the days were growing colder once again.

 

Córdoba, September 24
. “Paquirri was a great torero, but he had bad luck,” said Antonio Ayoso, who was driving me out of Córdoba in his taxi. “They should never have taken him in the ambulance. They should have taken him in a helicopter. But they put him in that ambulance, and by the time they got to the hospital he was dead.”

Seventeen days had passed since the
goyesca
in Ronda, and Fran had performed four more times. He cut two ears in Calatayud on September 9, had no luck in the important
plazas
of Valladolid on the fourteenth and Murcia on the fifteenth, and cut an ear in first-category Barcelona on the twenty-second. That night Fran sped off to Logroño, where he had bulls on the twenty-third, and I flew to Madrid, caught the bullet train down to Córdoba, and arranged to be driven into the mountains to Pozoblanco. In all my travels, I had never been less eager to visit a place. Pozoblanco: the name was bathed in dread and doom.

We were driving out from Córdoba into the Sierra Morena range, taking the very road Paquirri's ambulance had taken the opposite way. “The route was much worse in Paquirri's time,” Ayoso said. If so, then it must have been a really nasty road in its day, because it was still treacherous, its coiling hairpin turns so tight the taxi had to slow to a near standstill to navigate them. We ascended through slopes of green pine and burnt grass and turned right at Espiel with its small roadside cemetery; then it was up into the cool high valley of Los Pedroches, with the wind blowing, past fields of grazing sheep and goats, past cement factories and a slaughterhouse, and finally into Pozoblanco. It had taken us close to two hours to complete a trip that Paquirri's ambulance had made in less than one.

The taxi dropped me in front of the Hotel Los Godos, which looked much as it must have in Paquirri's day. One of the hotel's owners, Godofredo Jurado, gave me a glimpse of room 307, which contained the last bed Paquirri slept in. The sheets, pillows, and blanket Paquirri used that night were kept in plastic bags, Jurado said. “If we were in a tourist zone we'd turn this into a museum,” he added, opening the door to a modest room with a tile floor, two narrow beds, and a television mounted on the wall. “But we are in an out-of-the-way place, so we just rent it out. More than ninety percent of our clients ask to stay in this room.”