Death and the Sun (9 page)

Bulls learn to use their horns by fighting with their cousins in the field, and they become more dangerous as they age. By Spanish law, bulls used in formal corridas must be between four and six years old, but in modern times most bulls are sent to the ring before they turn five. When Jandilla bulls mature they are divided into lots of six animals that will be sent to the same corrida, the breeder selecting each lot to make it consistent in size, beauty, and bravery. The best lots are sold to the most prestigious rings; lesser groups go to lesser rings. A top corrida of Jandillas, of the type appropriate for a bullfight in Madrid or Sevilla, would have cost about ten thousand dollars an animal during the year in question. This is a reflection of the time and energy it takes to raise such a bull, and the fact that the breeder may reject as many as half the male animals born during a season because of physical defects or lack of ferocity.

 

Juan Reyes drove his white Land Rover over a wooded ridge and down into a forested valley that had been divided by barbed-wire fencing. He came to a gate and asked if I would open it for him. I got out of the car. The air was quiet, but there was a musky animal smell on the wind and the hairs on the back of my neck tingled. I opened the gate. After Reyes drove through I shut it and scrambled back into the car. We rumbled up a hill. The day was bright and the sun made it hard to look through the windshield. Then Reyes pointed into the middle distance and I saw them for the first time.

Their coats were sleek and shining. Four of them were black and two were a dark chestnut color. Their faces were short, with short noses and wet muzzles. The horns were as thick as a man's fist at the base, and spread out a few inches, then turned forward and rose to sharp black tips. Their necks were long, and at the top of each neck was the bulge of tossing muscle that crests and shivers when the bull feels danger. Their backs would have reached above the waist of a tall man. Their bodies were thick and covered in sturdy knots of muscle. By comparison, their legs and hooves were delicate and thin. Their tails were long with a tassel of silky hair at the end. Each weighed more than a thousand pounds.

“These are the bulls for Sevilla,” Reyes said. The bulls we were looking at had been earmarked for a corrida on April 14, with Fran on the card. Reyes stared at the bulls for a minute in silence. “The bull in the country is a magnificent sight, isn't he?” he said.

Reyes was right. When a bull entered the stone enclosure of the bullring, surrounded by the atmosphere of the city, it was an exotic and theatrical presence, a menacing emissary from nature, a circus performer sent into the modern world to excite a jaded public. But in the fields of a great ranch like Jandilla, the bulls displayed a different side of their character. They were frightening, yes, but not horrifying, because they were suited to their setting.

As I watched them, I became aware that my window was down and there was nothing between those horns and me, and I panicked. Without thinking, I grabbed at the knob and tried to roll up my window as fast as I could. I was pumping away when Reyes grabbed my arm, stopping me short. I had made a sudden motion, and a chestnut bull with a splotch of white hair on its forehead swung its head in my direction. I froze. My face reddened and sweat beaded. The bull looked at me for a few seconds. Then it dropped its head and shook off some flies. The moment had passed, but the fear of it stayed with me. Later I realized it wasn't the horns or the bull's size or its power that had struck me. It was the eyes. They were cold, shark eyes.

Before we said goodbye I asked Reyes if his years of raising bulls had given him any insight into whether the chestnut animal I had met was going to perform well in Sevilla on April 14.

Reyes smiled. “A bull is like a melon,” he said. “You can't tell if he is going to be sweet or bitter until you open him up.”

Like all bullfighting bulls, the bulls of Jandilla were wild animals, in the sense that they lived in the open, took care of themselves more or less, and were too ferocious to coexist with humans in close quarters. Certainly they were as wild as any other animal in this world, where wilderness has dwindled and even the most feral creatures live constrained lives in national parks. Yet wild as they were, Spanish bullfighting bulls were also the highly refined products of human tinkering, the result of three hundred years of selective breeding designed to produce specific characteristics—although those characteristics have changed over time as bullfighting has changed.

 

The people of Iberia have always killed the wild bulls that are indigenous to their land. Early humans hunted bulls for meat. But from the beginning of recorded history, the societies founded by each of the successive conquerors of Spain have also killed bulls for entertainment. The ancient Romans staged bull killings by gladiators in their arenas, and some of these spectacles may have included the use of red capes. During the Middle Ages, Arab and Christian nobles hunted bulls on horseback with the assistance of peasants on foot, and there were also occasions—most often the birth, wedding, or coronation of an important lord—when bulls were rounded up alive and killed by the nobles themselves before an audience of their peers in what we might recognize today as an early version of the corrida, though an aristocratic version that was always on horseback.

The modern bullfight on foot arose during the eighteenth century, a time when Spain was in decline as a military and economic power and its once proud aristocracy was falling into decay. The king at the beginning of the century, the French-born Felipe V, discouraged aristocratic equestrian bullfights at his court, which caused the nobility to lose interest in performing in them. This void was filled by a new breed of bullfighters, men of humble birth who acted as paid entertainers, killing bulls on foot, with cape and sword, before large audiences drawn from all strata of society. This switch from the aristocratic to the plebeian was a symptom of a fundamental trend in Spain. At a time when western Europe looked to its aristocracies for cultural leadership, at a time of the advances in rational science and philosophy known as the Enlightenment, Spain became obsessed with bullfights, flamenco, and popular theater.

These three newly constituted art forms had roots in antiquity. Far from being rational, scientific, or aristocratic, they were coarse, energetic, irrational, intoxicating, pagan, style-obsessed, and low class. The bullring, flamenco party, and dance hall performance gave rise to a modern Spain that developed on its own, separated from the rest of Europe by its growing tendency to look inward, by its irrelevance in world affairs, and by the physical barrier of the Pyrenees. Bullfighting was so central to this idiosyncratic development that in 1948 the noted Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset made this oft-quoted observation: “One cannot write the history of Spain from 1650 to our own time without keeping the bullfight clearly in mind.”

Like many before and after him, Ortega y Gasset viewed bullfighting as emblematic of Spain's singular and backward nature. There is, however, another way to look at it. As one of the first forms of mass entertainment, as an early commercial spectacle, as a triumph of popular culture, and as an art form that created national celebrities, bullfighting was one of the most advanced aspects of eighteenth-century European society, a signpost to the culture of today. The first star matador emerged in the mid-1700s. A former carpenter, Francisco Romero, along with his matador sons and grandsons, came from a hilltop town in eastern Andalucía by the name of Ronda, a town that would produce a twentieth-century torero dynasty, the Ordóñez clan.

Traditionally, the bulls meant for bull spectacles were provided in haphazard fashion, but by the time the Romeros were getting the modern bullfight going, Spaniards were breeding wild bulls. These early breeders were among the first people in the world to practice selective breeding, keeping records of the characteristics of their animals and attempting to mate certain individuals to produce desired traits in the offspring. By the middle of the eighteenth century things had become advanced enough that one can speak of original strains or castes of bullfighting bulls. There is some controversy about how many original castes there were, five or six. But it is generally agreed that most of the bullfighting stock in Spain comes from the Vázquez, Vistahermosa, and Cabrera lines, which were founded in the eighteenth century by three gentleman breeders in the town of Utrera, just south of Sevilla.

Don Borja's Jandilla brand can trace its lineage back to one of those herds, the one formed by Vicente José Vázquez in the 1770s. After Don Vicente's death, his herd passed to his children, who sold it to the bull-crazy king Fernando VII in 1830. Some twenty years later, Cristóbal Colón de la Cerda, the duke of Veragua, bought most of the late king's herd. The duke's name is the Spanish form of Christopher Columbus, and Colón was indeed a direct descendant of the famous explorer. The duke was equally famous for his bulls, which acquired great renown in the nineteenth century. History records a number of notable specimens, including the bull Aborrecido, who took five pics and killed two horses in San Sebastián on August 30, 1886; Regalón, who withstood six pics, killed two horses, and died fighting in Madrid on May 12, 1890; and Confitero, who took an astounding twenty-four pics in the Valencia ring on July 24,1877.

These old accounts stress two statistics—pics received and horses killed—that are of no importance today, because of the profound ways in which bullfighting has changed as a spectacle. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the points of the picadors' lances were rather small and their horses unprotected. This meant the first act of the bullfight was a prolonged affair, and it took many pics and often the deaths of a few horses to wear down a single bull. During this era, the matador's
muleta
was seen as a functional tool used to give a few choppy passes to get the bull into position for killing. But in the 1920s the horses were given padding, and over the ensuing decades the standard pic was made bigger and more destructive, thus shortening the first act of the corrida to a small number of pics. At the same time, matadors improved and embellished their
muleta
technique, to the point that the cape work with the
muleta
replaced the act of the horses as the focal point of the spectacle.

As the bullfight changed, so did the kind of bull desired by audiences and bullfighters. Old bullfighting required a big, tough animal that was hard to dominate and could endure the pain of repeated pics, whereas modern bullfighting called for a bull with speed, good eyesight (to see the cape), a taste for charging repeatedly, the stamina to keep charging, and the type of personality that would bend to the dominating will of the matador.

In 1910, the heir of the old duke of Veragua sold his cattle, which ended up in the hands of Juan Pedro Domecq y Núñez de Villavicencio, the founder of the Domecq bull-breeding dynasty. Juan Pedro Domecq moved his new cattle to his ranch, Jandilla, and died in 1937, leaving his land and bulls to his son, Juan Pedro Domecq y Díez. It was this Juan Pedro who developed the Domecq strain of bull, which has taken over contemporary bullfighting. After Juan Pedro Domecq y Díez died, his herd was distributed among many heirs, and today there are Domecqs sending bulls to top bullrings under various brands: El Torero, Torrestrella, Marques de Domecq, Santiago Domecq, Juan Pedro Domecq, Zalduendo, Martelilla, and Jandilla. The owners of Domecq bulls have also been more than willing to sell their animals to other breeders, so that today just about forty percent of all bulls sent to the ring are related somehow to Juan Pedro's original herd.

Domecq bulls are popular for a simple reason: they make it easy on matadors. Since the early days there have been two basic philosophies of bull breeding. Some breeders create bulls to help bullfighters, while other breeders produce bulls to make life harder for them. The so-called hard bulls are bred large and tall with wide horns, to make it difficult for toreros to work near them. These animals are less likely to follow the cape, less likely to charge straight, more likely to go on the defensive, and more likely to learn that the cape is a trick and to go gunning for the man. The so-called easy bulls are bred lower to the ground, smaller, with smaller horns. They are more likely to concentrate on the cape, charging it straight and true and never catching on that there is a man manipulating that cape.

There are different types of Domecq bulls, and the Jandilla ranch is known for producing the fiercest animals among the various Domecq herds. Still, according to Julio Fernandez, the bull geneticist for the Unión de Criadores de Toros de Lidia, which is the top association of breeders, the Domecq bull on the whole is the ideal matador-friendly bull. Domecq animals are short of stature and long-necked, which means that when they drop their heads following the punishment of the pics, they carry their horns low to the ground and away from the matador's vital organs. More important, Domecq bulls are said to “grow” as the bullfight progresses, attacking the cape with vigor and stamina, charging and charging again, allowing matadors to shine. “These bulls have been adapted well to the modern bullfight,” Fernandez said. “They give the toreros the type of bullfight that toreros want.”

Like most modern matadors, Fran dreamed of facing the ideal modern bull, a creature that charged repeatedly, straight and true, with enough personality to evoke a sense of fear in the audience. Sadly, however, such bulls rarely appeared. Despite the efforts of Spain's best breeders, the average bullfighting bull fell short of ideal. Some bulls were ugly, skinny, small, or had twisted and malformed horns. Some were too myopic to see the cape. Some bulls fell down from having weak legs. Some bulls charged but hooked at the matador, while others stopped in the middle of each pass. Some refused to charge, backing up against the fence and defending themselves. Others sat down in the sand and mooed. There was also a measure of cheating when it came to bulls. Undersized bulls were stuffed with grain at the last minute to bring them up to the legal weight minimum for appearing in proper corridas, and this produced sluggish animals that tended to fall. A picador could ruin a good bull by punishing it too severely, leaning too hard on the pic or shooting it back on the bull's spine.