Death and the Sun (4 page)

“That was my father,” Fran recalled with a laugh.

Paquirri divorced Carmen when Fran was about six. A few years later Paquirri married the singer Isabel Pantoja in a nationally televised ceremony. Less than two years after that came Paquirri's death and the national hysteria that followed. In its aftermath Carmen took Fran and his brother back to Madrid, which might not have been the best place for her boys. Madrid was Spain's media capital and Fran had become a celebrity, a kind of JFK Jr. stand-in for his martyred father. It was a lot to put on a child, but Carmen seems to have loved the attention, and as the years progressed she became the undisputed queen of the pink press, the most covered, adored, and reviled figure in the country, someone who was said to earn good money by selling exclusive stories about herself to tabloid news outfits.

Following his father's death, Fran continued to talk about becoming a matador, and at the same time displayed a sustained contempt for academics, getting expelled from four schools in five years. Fran wasn't a bad kid, just an inattentive student with a taste for practical jokes. He could be polite, poised, and well put together if he was called upon to accept an award for his dead father or do an interview with his mother, but he could also play a wild prank on a friend or chase a pretty girl across a nightclub dance floor. In a mild sort of way Fran had two personalities, and these followed him into adulthood. The dominant one was the prince, an elegant, mild-mannered, distant, and proper fellow with a nice word for everyone. But every now and then a delinquent, unruly, needy, naughty, sometimes playful, sometimes sad, boy peeked out from the princely exterior.

In an effort to rein him in, get him away from the pressures of Spain, and cool his desire to become a bullfighter, Carmen sent Fran and his brother to Camp Kennebec, in Belgrade, Maine, for a few summers. The camp's director, Joel Lavenson, remembered Fran as a remarkable athlete who fit in with the other kids despite his almost complete lack of English. Lavenson knew Fran's story and tried to give the boy a little extra attention. But Fran—in full prince mode—put him off, and Lavenson realized there would be no getting through to the soft-voiced, painfully proper twelve-year-old who had suffered a heavy loss and was an ocean away from home, but who never complained, nor cried, nor fussed, but took a red cape to the baseball field at dusk and practiced bullfighting moves after dinner.

“He was like a deer in the headlights,” Lavenson said. “He was going on autopilot. He wasn't homesick. He wasn't sad if he lost a game. He was in survival mode. He was in a state of shock. He just couldn't allow himself to let me comfort him.”

After Fran's final school expulsion in Spain, Carmen sent him to the Culver Military Academy, in Culver, Indiana, hoping this would knock the bulls out of his mind for good. At Culver Fran marched around in uniform, learned to speak English, and developed a taste for basketball, American football, rap music, and Kim Basinger, and was expelled in the middle of his second year for leading a late-night foray into the dormitory of a local girls' boarding school. When Fran got back to Spain he was fifteen years old and had shown no inclination to do anything other than bullfight. So his mother took him to see his grandfather.

As Fran tells it, he walked into the room and there was Antonio Ordóñez, the most revered living matador in Spain, and for a moment Fran was mute with anxiety. Then he told his grandfather he wanted to be a matador. “My grandfather told me it would be hard for me,” Fran said. “He said, ‘It will not be easy to fight with your names, and it is not going to be easy for you, because if you fight, you must be the best. I can't have you be mediocre.' I said, 'I understand.' And he told me, ‘If you are worth it, I will help you. If not, I will tell you. And if you insist, I will break your legs.'”

Fran spent the next two years living on ranches, learning to become a torero under his grandfather's tutelage. As Fran remembers it, his grandfather was not much of a teacher. Like many a gifted artist or athlete, Antonio Ordóñez had a hard time explaining how he did what he did, and Fran was left to figure things out for himself, something that probably came to hurt him down the line. Fran premiered as a bullfighter in 1991 and spent the following three seasons appearing in
novilladas
, which are bullfights that feature apprentice matadors and young bulls. During this time Fran's performances did not cause much of a stir with the fans or the critics, but Antonio decided that his grandson should take the
alternativa
and become a full matador in the April
feria
of Sevilla.

It was a huge gamble. Fran was an untested kid and the Sevilla
feria
is one of the most important bullfighting fairs in the world. Whatever he did there would be magnified many times over. If Fran succeeded he was on his way, but if he failed he might never dig himself out of the hole. As if the pressure weren't enough, Fran was mugged a few days before his debut, suffering a hard blow to his genitals. By the afternoon of the bullfight he was almost too swollen to walk, but he took a numbing needle in the groin, went out, and against all expectations had a total, absolute, utter, and dramatic success. “What Emotion!” raved a headline in the following day's edition of
Diario 16
. “No one expected the appearance of so much bullfighter so soon. It was so hard to believe, you had to rub your eyes.”

The rest of that year was like one long victory lap, with Fran racking up triumph after triumph while the nation's bullfighting critics and fans went nuts. “Rivera was like an earthquake,” said
Diario 16
in its season-end wrap-up. “Just four days after taking the
alternativa
in Sevilla, he was already a star, and the season was immediately turned upside down.” For the next two seasons Fran was one of the two or three top matadors in Spain, paid tens of thousands of dollars a bullfight and featured in all the major
ferias
. He was brave, talented, and had what political consultants would call name recognition. Spanish men use the last names of both their parents, and Fran's surnames—Rivera and Ordóñez—conjured all the heartbreak of his father and the majestic performances of both his great-grandfather and grandfather. It was as though a new opera prodigy had come along and he was named Luciano Pavarotti Caruso.

But, looking back on it all, it seems almost preordained that Fran should suffer the decline that overtook him in his fourth season as a matador. He had gone further on less experience and training than just about any matador in history, and it is a truism of bullfighting that all successful young matadors suffer some kind of crisis after their first explosion onto the scene. The crisis can be internal, as the satisfactions of fame and money begin to cool the ambition that propelled the young phenom forward. Just as often the crisis comes from without, as the fickle bullfighting public turns its attention to the next young hero. Whatever the crisis, the young phenom—now a former phenom—must either find a way to overcome what ails him and go on to long years of achievement or watch his career ebb away.

The crisis hit Fran in the late 1990s, a time when he'd become distracted from bullfighting by the planning for his wedding—an event so large it merited four hours of live coverage on national television—and by the death of his beloved grandfather Antonio from cancer. Fran's performance in the ring deteriorated, and fans and critics were as vocal in their condemnation as they had been in their praise. When Fran was on top, his family background had made his victories seem bigger. When he started to sink, however, his famous names magnified his failures. Where once Fran had triumphed, he now had disasters. Where once he heard cheers, he now heard whistles and jeers. By the start of his eighth full season as a matador, the same bullfighting experts that had once called him the man who would save bullfighting were denying he'd ever been good. Fran was a pretty boy, they said, who worked as a matador because a certain ignorant segment of the public would always pay to see a bullfighter who appeared in the gossip magazines.

“Rivera Ordóñez is sustained by his family history,” said Juan Posada, the respected critic for the newspaper
La Razón
, “and by his agreeable face and by the favors that are done for him by the pink press. He had much promise but he hasn't advanced. He hasn't moved on from what he was eight years ago, and that has hurt him.”

 

Fran finished his practice session with the cow and trotted over to the grandstand to see whether any of the breeder's guests would like to cape the animal. This is a tradition at calf testings. When the professional toreros have had their workout, guests may come down and try a few passes. This can be dangerous, and many people have been badly hurt or even killed during these amateur hours. But Spain is a country that has never succumbed to the wear-your-seatbelt mentality prevalent in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Anglo-Saxon cultures fear death and avoid the very thought of it, to the extent that it is seen as unnatural, an insult to the living. By contrast, Spaniards view death as a natural consequence of life, and knowing they are going to die anyway, they see no reason not to stay out all night drinking, indulging in rich food, smoking cigarettes, and driving like fiends.

After some discussion, a tall, heavyset man dressed in blue jeans and a button-down shirt ambled into the ring. He was a lawyer and had no bullfighting experience. Fran smiled at the lawyer, offered him the cape, and pointed him toward the cow. The man advanced on the cow with unsure steps, dragging the cape on the ground in front of him. He was not gentle or careful in his movements the way Fran had been, and the cow became agitated, raising its head as this clumsy creature moved into view. When the lawyer had shuffled to within a few yards of the cow, the animal lost its composure and charged.

The lawyer then did two things that were natural under the circumstances but were two of the worst things he could have done. First, he stepped backward. Big mistake. Bullfighting bulls and cows charge at motion. Fran had controlled the cow by standing still and catching its attention with the movement of the cape, but the lawyer did just the reverse. His body moved all over the place while the cape hung lifeless in his hands. Second, as the cow bore down on the lawyer, he brought the cape in front of his legs in a reflexive, defensive gesture, which had the unfortunate effect of drawing the cow's attention directly to the lawyer's legs.

The cow barreled into him, flipping him in the air. He landed with a grunt on the sandy floor of the bullring. In an instant Fran was there. Fran had no cape, but he waved his hands in the cow's face and ran away from the lawyer, drawing the cow after him. At the same time, two ranch hands dashed in, lifted the lawyer up, and carried him to safety. The lawyer was going to have a deep bruise for a souvenir, nothing worse, and everyone had a good laugh. After that, no one else wanted to give the cow a try, until a child shouted down from the grandstand.

“
Papá, Papá
,” the child said, “I want to bullfight.” Fran smiled. He'd moved out of his house and the demands of the bullfighting season lay ahead, so he savored this spare time with his daughter.

“Come down, my love,” Fran said. Cayetana Rivera was less than three years old. She was chubby, with her father's face in miniature framed in a pageboy of sleek brown hair. Fran picked her up and gave her a big kiss. Then he cradled her against his right side and carried her out into the ring—just the way Paquirri used to carry Fran. With the child in his right arm, Fran executed a casual series of passes with his left, and the cow grazed little Cayetana's legs as it charged back and forth, and Cayetana shrieked with delight as the sun made its way westward over the hills toward Portugal.

3

Most non-Spaniards think of the bullfight as a sport, but it is not a sport. A sporting event is a competition between two or more parties in which the outcome is in doubt. The pleasure in watching a sporting event is to see who will win, to root for one side and perhaps place a wager. The Spanish love to gamble. They even gamble on poetry readings in the Basque Country. But there is no gambling on bullfighting, because everyone knows the outcome. The bull will die. If the bull should disable the matador, another matador will come out and kill the bull. If all the matadors are disabled, then the bull is taken out back and dispatched by an assistant bullfighter or a bullring butcher. The bull has no chance.

Bullfighting fans know this. So the crowds that come to the bullfights are not paying their money to see a fight or contest, nor are most of them coming for the pornographic pleasure of watching a public execution—though this may be the motivation for some viewers. Instead the majority of the crowd comes to see two things. First, they want to examine, analyze, and revel in the beauty and power of the bulls. This may not make much sense, since corridas are organized bull killings, but bullfighting fans admire bulls with the same fervor that horseracing fans admire thoroughbreds. Second, they want to see a man stand still and use his cape to make a bull run where the man wants it to, and do so in a graceful manner. In Spanish, these three qualities are named
parar, mandar
, and
templar
.

Parar
(to stop) is usually defined, in bullfighting terms, as standing still while the bull charges. That may sound easy, but it's almost impossible to do. Humans are hard-wired to flinch at danger, and most people cannot control this impulse, but to be a professional bullfighter you must be able to stand without moving while a bull hurls itself at you. The capacity to keep your feet quiet, under the constant pressure of bodily harm and under the other stresses of a long season, is what separates even mediocre professional bullfighters from normal people.

Mandar
(to command) means to use the cape to force the bull to charge in the direction of the bullfighter's choosing, and send it where the matador wants it to go. Any fool with raw courage can wave a cape in a bull's face and hope to survive the experience. A professional bullfighter has the skill to use the cape to dominate and control the animal.