The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  Anyway, Cristina wasn’t even home when I got there. I had driven to Parla with my translator, Muriel, and her bullfighter husband, Pedro, who both know Cristina and Cristina’s father, Antonio, who himself used to be a bullfighter—if it sounds like just about everyone I encountered in Spain was or is a bullfighter, it’s true. No one answered the doorbell at the apartment. Cristina’s car wasn’t around, so it looked like she really was gone. A car seems to be the first thing matadors buy themselves when they start making big money—that is, when they start getting sometimes as much as tens of thousands of dollars for a major fight. The bullfighter car of choice is a Mercedes, but Cristina bought herself a bright red Ford Probe, which is much sportier. She also bought her mother a small business, a gift store. We decided to wait a bit longer. Pedro killed time by making some bullfight business calls on his cellular phone. Just as we were debating whether to go looking for Cristina at her mother’s store, Mrs. Sánchez came around the corner, carrying a load of groceries; she said Cristina was at the bank and that in the meantime we could come upstairs. We climbed a few flights. The apartment was tidy and fresh-looking and furnished with modern things in pastel tones, and in the living room there were a life-size oil painting of Cristina looking beautiful in her suit of lights, two huge photographs of Cristina in bullfights, one of her as a civilian, a large photograph of the older Sánchez daughter getting married, and a big-screen TV. On almost every horizontal surface there was a bronze or brass or pewter statuette of a bull, usually bucking, its withers bristling with three or four barbed harpoons called banderillas, which are stuck in to aggravate him before he is killed. These were all trophies from different corridas and from Cristina’s stint as a star pupil at the Madrid bullfighting school. Lots of Cristina’s stuff was lying around the room. On the dining table were stacks of fresh laundry, mostly white dress shirts and white T-shirts and pink socks. On the floor were a four-foot-long leather sword case, three hatboxes, and a piece of luggage that looked like a giant bowling-ball bag, which is a specially designed case for a matador’s twenty-thousand-dollar suit jacket. Also, there was a small black Kipling backpack of Cristina’s, which cracked me up because it was the exact same backpack that I was carrying.

  Mrs. Sánchez was clattering around in the kitchen, making Cristina’s lunch. A few minutes later, I heard the front door scrape open, and then Cristina stepped into the room, out of breath and flustered about being late. She is twenty-five years old and has chemically assisted blond hair, long eyelashes, high cheekbones, and a tiny nose. She looks really pretty when she smiles and almost regal when she doesn’t, but she’s not so beautiful that she’s scary. This day, she was wearing blue jeans, a denim shirt with some flower embroidery, and white slip-on shoes with chunky heels, and her hair was held in a ponytail by a sunflower barrette. She is not unusually big or small. Her shoulders are square and her legs are sturdy, and she’s solid and athletic-looking, like a forward on a field hockey team. Her strength is a matter of public debate in Spain. The weakest part of her performance is the very end of the fight, when she’s supposed to kill the bull with one perfect jam of her sword, but she often doesn’t go deep enough or in the right place. It is said in certain quarters that she simply isn’t strong enough, but the fact is that many matadors mess up with the sword. When I brought it up, she shook her head and said, “People who don’t understand the bullfighting world think you have to be extremely strong, but that’s not the case. What is important is technique and experience. You have to be in good shape, but you don’t have to match a man’s strength. Besides, your real opponent is the bull, and you can never match it in strength.”

  Her mother came in and out of the room a few times. When she was out, Cristina said in a low voice, “I’m very happy with my family, but the time comes when you have to be independent.” The tabloids have reported that she has just bought a castle on millions of enchanted acres. “I bought a small piece of property right near here,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m having a house built. I think when I come back from my winter tour in South America I’ll be able to move in.”

  What I really wanted to know was why in the world she decided to become a bullfighter. I knew she’d grown up watching her father fight, so it had always been a profession that seemed normal to her, even though at the ring she didn’t see many girls. Plus she doesn’t like to sit still. Before she started training to be a matador, she had worked in a beauty parlor and then as a typist at a fire extinguisher factory, and both jobs drove her crazy. She is a very girly girl—she wears makeup, she wants children, she has boyfriends—but she says she was only interested in jobs that would keep her on her feet, and coincidentally those were jobs that were mostly filled by men. If she hadn’t become a matador, she thinks she would have become a trainer at a gym, or a police officer, or perhaps a firefighter, which used to be her father’s backup job when he was a bullfighter, in the years before he started advising her and became a full-time part of her six-person crew. She didn’t become a woman matador to be shocking or make a feminist point, although along the way she has been shunned by some of her male colleagues and there are still a few who refuse to appear in a corrida with her. Once, in protest, she went to Toledo and instead of having a corrida in which three matadors each killed two bulls, she took on all six bulls herself, one by one. She said she wants to be known as a great matador and not an oddity or anecdote in the history of bullfighting. She simply loves the art and craft of fighting bulls. Later that day, when I saw her in the ring, I also realized that besides loving the bullfight itself, she is that sort of person who is illuminated by the attention of a crowd. I asked her what she’ll do after she retires from the ring in three or four years. “I want to have earned a lot of money and invested it wisely,” she said. “And then I want to do something in the movies or on TV.”

  She mentioned that she was eating early today because she had a stomachache. With a fight almost every night for months, I suppose there would be nights when she felt crummy or wasn’t in the mood. Cristina laughed and said, “Yeah, sometimes you do feel like, oh God, I don’t have the slightest desire to face a bull this afternoon!” Personally, I’m not a huge coward, but the phrase “desire to face a bull” will never be part of my life, any afternoon, ever. I figured that nothing must scare her. She shook her head and said, “Failure. My greatest fear is failure. I’m a woman who is a fighter and I always think about trying to surpass myself, so what I most fear is to fail.”

  Just then, Mrs. Sánchez came into the room and said the sandwiches were ready, so Cristina started to get up. She paused for a moment and said, “You know, people think that because I kill bulls I have to be really brave, but I’m not. I’m a sensitive person, and I can get superterrified. I’m afraid of staying home by myself, and I get hysterical if I see a spider.” I asked if bulls ever haunted her dreams, and she said, “I don’t dream much at all, but a few times I’ve dreamed that a bull was pursuing me in the ring, up into the stands. And the night before my debut in Madrid, I did dream of bulls with huge, twisted horns.”

  I HAD SEEN the first bullfight of my life a few days earlier, on that night in Madrid, and it was a profound education. I learned that I should not eat for several hours beforehand and to start looking away the minute the picadors ride in on their stoic-looking blindfolded horses, because their arrival signaled that the blood and torment would begin. At first, in Madrid, I had been excited because the Plaza de Toros is so dramatic and beautiful, and also the pageantry that began the corrida was very nice, and when the first bull galloped in, I liked watching it bolt around the ring and chase the matador and his assistants until they retreated behind the small fences around the ring that are there for their protection. The small fences had targets—bull’s-eyes, actually—painted on them. The bull would ram into them with its horns and the fence would rock. The more furious bulls would ram again and again, until the matador teased them away with a flourish of his cape. The bulls were homely, with little head
s and huge briskets and tapered hips, and they cornered like school buses and sometimes skidded to their knees, but they had fantastic energy and single-mindedness and thick muscles that flickered under their skin and faces that didn’t look vicious at all and were interesting to watch. Some of the fight was wonderful: the matador’s flourishes with the shocking pink and bright yellow big cape and his elegance with the small triangular red one; the sound of thousands of people gasping when the bull got very close to the cape; the plain thrilling danger of it and the fascination of watching a bull be slowly hypnotized; the bravery of the picadors’ horses, which stood stock-still as the bull pounded them broadside, the flags along the rim of the ring flashing in the late-afternoon light; the resplendence of the matador’s suit in that angling light, especially when the matador inched one foot forward and squared his hips and arched his back so that he was a bright new moon against a sky of sand with the black cloud of a bull racing by. I loved the ancientness and majesty and excitement of it, the way bullfighting could be at once precious and refined yet absolutely primal and raw. But beyond that I was lost and nauseous and knew I didn’t understand how so many people, a whole nation of people, weren’t shaken by the gore and the idea of watching a ballet that always, absolutely, unfailingly ends with a gradual and deliberate death. I didn’t understand it then, and I doubt I ever will.

  IN THE LITTLE BRICK BULLRING in Móstoles, Cristina killed two bulls well but not exceptionally—for the first kill the judge awarded her one of the bull’s ears, but for the second she got no award at all. A once-in-a-lifetime sort of performance would have earned two ears, a tail, and a hoof. After that second fight Cristina looked a little disgusted with herself, and she hung back and talked for several minutes with her father, who was standing in the crew area, before she came out and took the traditional victory walk around the ring. She was clearly the crowd favorite. People wave white handkerchiefs at bullfights to indicate their support; in Móstoles it looked like it was snowing. As she circled the ring, men and women and little kids yelled, “Matadora! Matadora!” and “Olé, Cristina!” and tossed congratulatory sweaters and flowers and shoes and blazers and sandwiches and a Levi’s jacket and a crutch and a cane, and then a representative of a social club in Móstoles stepped into the ring and presented her with an enormous watermelon.

  After the fight, Cristina left immediately for Zaragoza, where she would have her next fight. I went back to Madrid to have dinner with Muriel and Pedro. Pedro had just finished his own fight, and he looked very relaxed and his face was pink and bright. The restaurant, Vina P, was practically wallpapered with old and new fight posters and photographs of bullfighters and some mounted bulls’ heads. Its specialty was slabs of beef—since the animals killed in bullfights are butchered and are highly sought after for dining, the specialty of the house might occasionally be straight from the bullring. Pedro said Vina P was a bullfighters’ restaurant, which means it is the rough equivalent of a sports bar frequented by real athletes in the United States. Before I got to Spain I imagined that bullfighting was an old and colorful tradition that was preserved but isolated, a fragile antique. Cristina Sánchez would be honored, but she would be in the margins—it would be as if she were the very best square dancer in America. Instead, she looms, and bullfighting looms. There are tons of restaurants in every city that are bullfighter and bullfight-aficionado hangouts, and there are pictures and posters of bullfights even in the restaurants that aren’t, and there are bullfight newspapers and regular television coverage, and every time I turned around I was in front of the headquarters of some bullfight association. At a gas station in a nowhere place called Otero de Herreros the only bit of decoration I saw was a poster for an upcoming fight; it happened to have a picture of Cristina on it. The biggest billboards in Madrid were ads for Pepe Jeans, modeled by Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, Matador de Toros. Mostly because of Cristina, bullfight attendance is up and applications to the Madrid bullfighting school are up, especially with girls. The Spanish tabloids are fat with bullfighter gossip, and they are really keen on Cristina. That night while we were eating dinner, Pedro noticed a gorgeous young man at another table and whispered that he was a Mexican pop singer and also Cristina’s old boyfriend, whom she’d recently broken up with because he’d sold the story of their relationship to the press.

  I had planned to leave Spain after the fight in Móstoles, but when I heard that Cristina was going to fight soon in a town that was easy to get to, I decided to stay a few more days. The town was called Nava de la Asunción, and to get there you head north from Madrid over the raggedy gray Sierra de Guadarrama and then onto the high golden plain where many fighting bulls are raised. The occasion for the fight was the Nava town fair. According to the local paper, “peculiar and small amateur bullfights used to be done in the fenced yards of local houses until for reasons of security it was recommended to do away with these customs.” The bulls were always chased through the fields in the morning so the townspeople could see what they were like. The paper said, “Traditionally there are accidents because there is always a bull that escapes. There is maximum effort put out to be sure that this does not occur, even though it is part of the tradition.” It also said, “To have Cristina Sánchez in Nava is special.” “The Party of the Bulls—Cristina Sánchez will be the star of the program!” “Cristina Sánchez will show her bullfighting together with the gifted Antonio Borrero ‘Chamaco’ and Antonio Cutiño—a great bill in which the star is, without a doubt, Cristina Sánchez.”

  Nava is the prettiest little town, and on the afternoon of the fight there was a marching band zigzagging around and strings of candy-colored banners hanging along the streets, popping and flapping in the wind. Just outside the bullring a few vendors had set up booths. One was selling soft drinks, one had candy and nuts, one had every manner of bullfighter souvenir: T-shirts with matador photos, pins with matador photos, photo cigarette lighters and key chains, autographed photos themselves, and white hankies for waving at the end of the fights. Of the nine photo T-shirts, seven were of Cristina. Six were different pictures of her either posing in her suit of lights or actually fighting. The other one was a casual portrait. She was dressed in a blue blouse trimmed with white daisy embroidery, and her blond hair was loose and she appeared to be sitting in a park. A nun came over to the souvenir booth and bought a Cristina photo-hankie. Big-bodied women with spindly little daughters were starting to gather around the booth and hold up first one Cristina T-shirt and then another and finally, sighing, indicate that they would take both. Skittery little boys, sometimes with a bigger boy or their fathers, darted up and poked through the stuff on the table and lingered. After a while, a couple of men pushed past the throng, lugging a trunk marked C. SÁNCHEZ toward the area under the bleachers where the matadors and picadors were getting ready. Now and then, if you looked in that direction, you could catch a glimpse of someone in a short sequined jacket, and until the band came thundering by you could hear the hollow clunking of hooves and the heavy rustling of horses and donkeys.

  The tickets were expensive whether you bought one for the sunny side or the shade, but every row was packed and every standing-room spot was taken. The men around me were smoking cigars and women were snacking on honey-roasted peanuts, and every few minutes a guy would come through hawking shots of Cutty Sark and cans of beer. Young kids were in shorts and American basketball team T-shirts, but everyone else was dressed up, as if they were going to a dinner party at a friend’s. At five-thirty, in slanting sunlight, the parade of the matadors and their assistants began. Each of them was dressed in a different color, and they were dazzling and glinting in the sun. In a box seat across the ring from the entrance gate were the sober-looking judge and three girls who were queens of the fair, wearing lacy white crowns in their hair. Antonio Borrero “Chamaco” fought first, and then came Cristina. She was wearing a fuchsia suit and had her hair in a braid and a look of dark focus on her face. When she and her assistants entered the ring, a man stoo
d up in the stands and hollered about how much he admired her and then an old woman called out that she wanted Cristina to bless a little brooch she had pinned on her shawl.