Death and the Sun (7 page)

In the beginning of his career Fran adopted a rough, straightforward style that made sense given his lack of training. He wasn't elegant in what he did in the ring, but he took chances and passed the bull in a blunt, old-fashioned way, facing it head-on, reaching out and bringing the bull to his body with the cape. In time he moved from his early roughness and found his way toward a more classic and aesthetic style, which on good days reached for something the Spanish call
toreo puro
(pure bullfighting). This is a kind of austere yet aesthetic approach based on the exquisite performance of a few fundamental passes, made without trickery or theatrics.

The trouble was that Fran never quite grew out of his original style and never quite became comfortable with his new one. On days when he was having problems, it seemed as though he couldn't decide what he wanted to do with the bull, trying this and that without being able to put it together in a satisfying whole. He was stuck in a limbo between styles, of two minds as to what he should do. His work deteriorated, and so did his confidence. He was always strong with the
capote
, but his performances with the
muleta
were increasingly spotty, especially the dangerous left-handed
natural
passes, the very basis of the matador's art. He also began to have problems with the kill, which is—pardon the choice of words—a fatal flaw in a matador, because in most bullrings if the matador cannot sink the sword on the first try, he will lose any chance at an ear.

Sitting in the minivan that night on the road to Valencia, Fran analyzed why he'd struggled in his bullfighting. He said he had done too well too quickly, had become conceited, hadn't worked hard enough to improve. Then the hard times had come, and he'd lost his confidence and that sense of composure and focus that he'd possessed in the early years, and the whole thing had fallen apart. “You need to go to the ring with a clear mind,” he said. “And one moment I thought I was God, maybe the top, the second coming of Christ, then came the problems with my grandfather, and I lost the feeling. I lost concentration and one day I lost the touch in front of the bull.”

We talked a little about what he meant by losing touch.

“When you go into the ring,” Fran said, “you can't think, ‘Now I will do this pass, then this pass, then this other pass.' No. You must do the performance the bull needs and deserves, and this is different every time.”

“If you are thinking about yourself, you can't be thinking about the bull?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

Then Fran's focus shifted to the future.

“I am very nervous for tomorrow,” he said. “This season is very important for me. I think it is time. I can take my place in
la historia
. We bullfighters, when we talk among ourselves about other bullfighters, we say, ‘For that guy, the train has already left the station.' The train left, and he didn't get on it. He lost his chance. I think I can get on the train and take my position. I think I still have many things to say.”

Fran said this with such casual conviction that it seemed quite natural, but in retrospect it was startling. That night Fran had spoken, with rare humility for a matador, about how things had not been going well for him and why, and then he had made a complete turnabout, showing a titanic sense of pride and ambition. That night on the road to Valencia, Fran had challenged himself. He might have hedged. He might have said that, given his marital troubles, this was a year to mark time, solve his personal problems, and live to fight again. Instead he had declared his intention to make it back to the top that very season and do it on his own terms, being true to his idea of what a great bullfighter should be.

To achieve his goal, Fran was going to have to find a way to forge a style of bullfighting that would make his public and himself happy. He was going to have to triumph in big cities and small villages all over Spain. He'd have to please the critics and the elite core of knowledgeable fans, most of whom were against him, as well as the masses who just wanted a good show. He would have to succeed with the solid burghers of Spain's northern regions and charm the fun-loving denizens of the Spanish southland. Most of all, he was going to have to come to terms with the crushing legacy of his forefathers—El Niño de la Palma, Antonio Ordóñez, and Paquirri—shake off the mental, physical, and moral fatigue of his own eventful life, and try to regain the touch he had possessed in those early years, when bullfighting was like singing a tune and he knew just how to give each bull what it needed to make a great performance.

“I want to feel happy in front of the bull again,” Fran said. “That is the most important thing to me.”

 

Fran fell silent and after a while he slept. When he woke up, Juani was parked beside the curb of a wide and empty boulevard. A young couple was leaning into the window and Juani was asking them for directions to the hotel. Fran's minivan was in the middle of a city, which turned out to be Valencia. It was two o'clock in the morning and the wet air glowed pink under the streetlights. As soon as Juani got his directions and was driving again, Fran lashed into him in rapid-fire Spanish. The following is an approximation of what was said.

“Juani, I've told you time and time again,” Fran said, his voice loud after the long silence of the ride. “Find the hotel on a map before we arrive somewhere.”

“But Matador, Matador,” Juani said, “this is a new hotel. I've never been there.”

“All the more reason to figure out where it is
before
you start driving,” said Fran. “Anyway, what's the hotel called?”

“It's something like the Vin . . . the Vinki . . . like the Vinki Lass.”

At this Fran turned to me, switched to English, and said, “He never knows the way to the hotel. I find this so . . . how you say? Depressing.”

Juani circled around downtown Valencia for a while and presently found his way to a new hotel on a pedestrian alley a few blocks from the bullring. The hotel was named the Vincci Lys, which, in Juani's defense, was an odd name in Spanish or English. The lobby was empty apart from the night manager and a tired-looking girl behind a desk. The girl stared at Fran the way people stare when they see a celebrity; the manager asked Fran to autograph a menu that was hanging on the wall. The hotel was trying to attract bullfighters and aficionados, and offered a “bullfighting menu,” which consisted of the same Spanish food on offer in every hotel restaurant from Barcelona to Badajoz. Fran checked in, grabbed his suitcase, and headed for the elevator. He wouldn't be seen again until just before the bullfight.

When I got up to my room and turned on the television, whom should I see on the screen but Fran's mother. Carmen was appearing on a program called
Tómbola
, which was like a demented version of an American Sunday-morning chat show. But instead of a governor or senator facing political journalists, there was Carmen in a sequined blouse, squaring off against a group of tabloid reporters. They peppered her with personal questions and impertinent comments before a studio audience that shrieked, groaned, and howled, enjoying the spectacle of a rich and famous person being humiliated.

“Where is your son?” asked one of the reporters. “Is he living at your house?”

“No,” Carmen answered. “He is bullfighting tomorrow. He is risking his life tomorrow.”

“Do you feel terrible about your son's situation?”

“Absolutely.”

Then a reporter turned to Carmen and said, “When you sell your life stories to the press, you hurt your children, don't you?”

I couldn't hear Carmen's response. The cries of the audience drowned her out.

I don't know whether or not Fran saw his mother on television that night.

5

Valencia, March 14
. Valencia turned out to be a pleasant, muggy, and prosperous town with some attractive nineteenth-century neighborhoods surrounding a seedy central district whose jumbled street plan is a11 that remains of its medieval origins. Valencia is not on Spain's main tourist route. It has no must-see sights, museums, or other attractions. But in mid-March Valencia puts on the Feria de las Fallas, which is one of the nicest
ferias
in Spain, especially for the tourist, because most of the excitement takes place in the streets and is open to all. The Fallas of Valencia is the first crucial
feria
of the bullfighting calendar, and thus the effective start of the season, because during the early part of the twentieth century it became established that most bullfights and almost all the important bullfights would take place during
ferias
, and the season follows the
ferias
around Spain.

Valencia's
feria
is dedicated to San José—Saint Joseph—the father of Jesus and a patron saint of the city. It lasts for about a week, and there are daily fireworks displays, processions of marching bands, and women dressed in traditional Valencian costumes. The
fallas
themselves are statues, two stories tall, made of wood and wax and painted papiermache. They are built throughout the year by local artisans who represent each of Valencia's neighborhoods, and are displayed in the streets. On March 19, the saint's day and the climax of the festival, the
fallas
are burned to the ground. During the
feria
that year, the city planned to present eleven bull-related events in its 150-year-old ring, which is in the center of town near the train station. On the card were eight corridas (bullfights of full-grown animals and matadors), two
novilladas
(bullfights of aspiring matadors and young bulls), and one
corrida de rejones
(Portuguese-style bullfighting in which a torero confronts the bull on horseback).

Fran was to appear in the fifth spectacle of the cycle. By the day of his bullfight the
feria
was in full swing, and the brass bands marched along the wide avenue beside the bullring in a thunder of music, accompanying the swaying processions of women in their peasant skirts, their hair rolled up like cinnamon buns on both sides of their head. The sound of small firecrackers was constant, and at noon each day the city sponsored a thunderous fusillade of fireworks designed purely to generate as much noise as possible. The streets were filled day and night. There were many tourists in evidence, but most of the crowd was composed of well-dressed Valenciano families out for a drink, a bite to eat, or just to show themselves off. Here and there, in back streets and alleys, people built wood fires and cooked massive flat black pans of saffron-colored paella, the rice dish that was perfected in Valencia.

The scene outside Fran's hotel was a mess at bullfight time. The paparazzi and television crews were out, hoping to glean a few new tidbits from the ongoing Fran-and-Eugenia saga and get his reaction to his mother's latest comments. There was also a mob of little old ladies and adolescent girls angling for a pre-corrida kiss from the best-looking matador in the country. Fran walked out of the hotel with less than twenty minutes to go before the corrida was set to begin. He was dressed in a light blue and gold matador's costume and had his game face on as his associates led him through the crowd and piled him into the minibus and rolled down the street to the bullring.

 

The ring was damp and the sky gray when the toreros crossed the sand to start the corrida. Fran was the matador with the least seniority that afternoon, and so was appearing with the third and sixth bulls of the lineup. The other two matadors were stars, but not superstars. Without a major draw on the card, like the number-one matador of the moment, Julián López, El Juli, the bullring was half empty, the gaps especially evident in the cheap seats. The bulls were from the Jandilla ranch, bred in southernmost Andalucía, and the program said each bull weighed around twelve hundred pounds. The newspapers the following day would agree that the bulls had been good—charging with passion and offering opportunities for the matadors to create emotional passes with them. But the first two matadors couldn't seem to do anything special with their animals. Perhaps it was the lack of a crowd, or the cloudbursts that poured over the ring at intervals throughout the afternoon.

A ring attendant opened the heavy door to the bullpens and Fran's first animal came out, shiny black, rippled with muscle, built along the lines of a small pickup truck. The bull was terrifying and freakish. It belonged in the forests of an earlier age or in someone's bad dream, not in the middle of a city at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The bull stopped for a moment, raised its head, looked around and sniffed the air, and the great pot roast of muscle on its neck rose and twitched with fear. Without warning, the bull galloped stiff-legged across the sand, a rope of drool spilling from its black mouth. As it approached the wooden barrier, it lowered its head and chopped hard with its right horn, flicking the horn up and taking out a hefty chunk of wood, leaving a white scar in the red paint. Then the bull sauntered back to the center of the ring and waited to be challenged.

Fran slipped through a small opening in the wooden fence. He spread his purple and yellow
capote
out with both hands, letting it fall in front of him like the skirts of an elegant ball gown. Then he raised the cape, shook it, and shouted. The bull wheeled and headed straight for Fran. His hat pushed down over his eyes, Fran flared his nostrils and scrunched his lips into his face, grimacing with the effort of staying still. The bull came. Fran didn't move. The bull lowered its head, arching its neck forward. The left horn—a white curve with a black tip—sliced at Fran's left leg. But just before the horn reached flesh, Fran dropped his right hand, spreading out the cape—and the bull followed the motion of the cloth a few inches to the right, just enough for the horn to whiff by Fran's leg as he moved the cape, turning it first with his shoulder, then his waist, then his arms, capturing the bull in the gentle slipstream of the cloth, slowing the bull and moving it across his body and on out the other side.