The Spanish have no word that means “bullfight.” They refer to bullfighting as the fiesta de los toros (festival of the bulls), or the fiesta nacional (national festival), or the fiesta brava (wild festival), or simply los toros (the bulls). What a bullfighter does with a bull is usually translated into English as “to fight,” but the Spanish word for this is torear, which takes the word for bull and creates a verb out of it, “to bull.” The art or craft of bullfighting is called toreo—“bulling.” A bullfighter is a torero, a “buller.” (The word toreador is never used; it’s best known from the opera Carmen, which was written by a Frenchman.) A single bullfight involving full-grown bulls is called a corrida de toros, or a running of bulls—not to be confused with the “running of the bulls” in the city of Pamplona, where people run in the streets with bulls. The act of holding a corrida is indicated by the verb celebrar, as in, “Yesterday they celebrated a corrida.”
The word matador does mean “killer” in English, and the word lidiar (to fight) is often used in bullfight journalism. But the fact that the matador kills the bull makes bullfighting no more a sport or a fight than a butcher’s killing a chicken makes butchery a sport; the word lidiar in a bullfighting context usually refers to the strategy the matador uses to control the bull and make art with it. There is little sense of conflict or sport or fight in most Spanish bullfighting terms, and for this reason it makes sense to avoid the confusing English word “fight” when writing about bullfighting. The only time “fight” will appear in this book is when someone else uses it in a direct quotation in English.
Nevertheless, bullfighting does retain an element of sport, because the bullfighter is an artist who must dominate and conquer his medium in order to use it. A paintbrush rarely seeks to kill the painter; an oboe does not resist the musician with violence. But there is a dangerous wildcard in every corrida, and that is the bull. To paraphrase Tynan again, the bull makes bullfighting such a difficult art that there are only forty or fifty people in the world at any given time who possess the guts, physical prowess, and knowledge of bulls to bullfight poorly on a regular basis, much less do it well. In truth, no one bullfights well on a regular basis for very long, not even the big stars. It can’t be done without suffering dire consequences.
The Spanish corrida itself is a strictly choreographed and formal spectacle, and the order and ceremony of it never changes. Everything the men do in the ring—where they stand, when they wear their hats, what direction they walk—is subject to rules and regulations. Some of these rules are written in the bullfighting codes of Spain’s national law, and some are nothing more than traditions, but every corrida unfolds the same way, and the structure and regulations of the corrida are enforced by a president—usually a local politician or police captain—who sits in a box in the stands and controls the action with a series of signals made with handkerchiefs of different colors. The only thing that makes one corrida different from another is the behavior of the bull and the specific things the toreros do to bring that bull under control and make it submit to the preordained logic of the bullfight.
The bullfight opens with the appearance of two alguaciles, horsemen dressed in plumed tricorn hats and black smocks, in the fashion of bailiffs in the time of the Hapsburg kings of Spain. The alguaciles lead a parade of the matadors, followed by the matadors’ teams of assistant bullfighters, then the bullring attendants who help the mounted bullfighters—the so-called monosabios (wise monkeys), named after a traveling troupe of animal performers that appeared in Madrid during the nineteenth century—then the mule teams that drag the dead bulls out of the arena, and finally the bullring servants who sweep the sand. This parade is accompanied by music played by a live band. The parade is the only consistently enjoyable part of a corrida. To see the toreros come out in all their finery and march across the sand of a great bullring with the sun high in the sky and the band playing is always dramatic and moving. Often it is the best part of the proceedings.
In the typical corrida three matadors kill six bulls, the bulls drawn from the same breeder. The matadors appear in order of seniority, dating from their first bullfight as a matador. The senior man kills the first and fourth bulls, the next in seniority kills the second and fifth bulls, and the junior man dispatches bulls three and six. When a bull is released into the ring, the matador responsible for killing it is in control of events, and is assisted by his cuadrilla, or team of five assistant bullfighters: two picadors on horseback and three banderilleros on foot. The other two matadors and certain members of their cuadrillas are also required to be present in the ring at various times, to lend a hand.
Each bull spends about twenty minutes in the ring, and what happens to it during that time never varies. The process the bull undergoes is divided into three acts, which the Spanish call los tres tercios, or the three thirds. As the writer Angus Macnab has pointed out, each third, or act, is based on giving the bull a different lure to charge at: first a horse, then a man holding two wooden sticks, then a man holding the small red muleta cape. Each of these acts has an artistic and a technical purpose. In other words, each act is an opportunity for the bullfighter to do something beautiful with the bull and also a way to prepare the bull for the act that follows. One of the great satisfactions of watching a good corrida is to see how the toreros accomplish the technical tasks of preparing the bull while performing in an artistic manner. In that sense, good bullfighting offers pleasures similar to those of good architecture: both combine art and function in a pleasing way.
The first act of the corrida is the tercio de varas, the third of the lances, and it too is divided into three parts: the opening passes, the pic’ing, and the quites. Part one, the bull enters the arena and the matador passes it using a capote, the cape used by matadors in the first third and by their assistants throughout the bullfight. The capote is a circle of silk and rayon—magenta on one side, yellow on the other—with a wedge about one fifth the circumference cut out of it and a small collar sewn into the open wedge. The matador holds the capote at the ends of the cutout and swings it using both arms, sometimes letting go with one hand to create special effects. The capote weighs between seven and nine pounds and will stand upright like a pyramid when it is placed on the ground the right way.
The matador’s opening passes allow him to ingratiate himself with the crowd and teach the bull to follow the cape. If the passes are well made—using parar, mandar, and templar—the matador will hear shouts of “Olé!” from the audience. The origin of this word is unclear, but it may derive from the Arabic “Allah,” meaning God. A sizable portion of Spanish words come from Arabic, which was introduced to Spain during the Middle Ages, when the so-called Moors—Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East—controlled vast tracts of the country.
In the second part of the first third of the corrida, two picadors—bullfighters riding horses draped in padded armor—enter the ring and the matador draws the bull over to charge one of them. When the bull hits the horse’s padded flank, the picador thrusts his pic, a long wooden spear with a three-quarter-inch metal point and a cross-guard some two inches down, into the large hump of muscle just behind the bull’s neck. The ferocity of the bull’s attack shows the audience the quality of the animal, and the horse provides the bull with an encouragingly solid target to hit. The resulting wound lowers the bull’s head and causes bleeding that weakens the animal. The bull will usually be pic’d one to three times, depending on how strong it is. The person who decides this is the president, in consultation with the matador, although by law, bulls used in the top bullrings in Spain must receive a minimum of two pics each.
After the first pic comes the third element of act one, the quite (pronounced key-tay). In the quite the matador lures the bull away from the horse and tries to impress with a few more passes. After another encounter between bull and horse, the matador who is next in line to kill a bull will do a quite and try to outshine the quite of the first matador. If the bull is pic’d a third time, the thi
rd matador will have his chance.
A trumpet sounds and it is time for the second act of the bullfight, the tercio de banderillas. A banderilla is a wooden stick, about two feet long, decorated with bits of colored paper, and with an A-shaped barb at one end. The torero takes one banderilla in each hand and runs at the bull. When bull and man meet, the bull will lower its head to sink in the horn, and as it does, the man aims the sticks over the horns and plants them in the bull’s shoulder, jumping away to let the bull trot safely past. Three pairs of banderillas are usually placed. Many matadors leave this job to their assistants on foot, which is why these assistants are called banderilleros, or banderilla placers. Most assistant banderilleros try to get the sticks in with a minimum of fuss, doing no more than whetting the audience’s appetite for the work of the matador in the third act. There are also some matadors who place their own sticks, and when a great matador does this, it can be a fantastic show and is accompanied by music in most rings.
Then another trumpet sounds to begin the final third of the corrida, the third of the muleta and death. In this third, the ring is cleared. The matador comes out alone with muleta and sword—most often a lightweight, dummy sword, to spare the matador’s wrist from wear and tear—and attempts to construct a coherent performance of linked muleta passes that is called the faena (work). During the faena, the matador will make his passes with the cape in both his left and right hands (though the sword stays always in the right hand), varying the type, speed, and position of the passes to build short series.
The basic muleta pass made with the right hand, with the sword held behind the cape to spread it out, is called the derechazo (right). The basic muleta pass with the cape in the left hand is the natural. The natural is the most dangerous and moving, and therefore most important, kind of pass a matador can perform, because the cape hangs limp, offering the least protection to the man. Besides the derechazo and natural, there are many other common muleta passes.
If the matador makes his passes slowly and gracefully, bringing the bull toward his body and out behind his back, then spinning to link the first pass with the next one in the series, he will hear shouts of “Olé!” and the band may play music to accompany his work. It is this faena with the muleta on which modern matadors are principally judged, and everything that happens to the bull beforehand is meant to prepare it to perform well during the faena.
When the matador decides that the faena is complete—usually within seven to ten minutes—he will go over to his manservant and exchange the fake sword for the real one. Then he will stand in front of the bull and run at it, using his left hand to distract the bull with the cape and his right hand to thrust the sword into the flesh between the bull’s shoulder blades. Sometimes the bull is killed with one thrust. More often the matador must run at the bull a few times to get the sword in the right spot. Even then, the bull doesn’t always die right away and the matador must deliver a final blow with a special sword called a descabello, which is jabbed into the back of the bull’s neck, severing its spinal cord and killing it in a jerky instant. The death of the bull is the simple means to end the performance, but the way the matador kills can be dramatic and aesthetically pleasing.
When the bull dies, the crowd may whistle, remain silent, applaud, or shout, to indicate its attitude toward the performance of the bull. This is done not for the bull’s benefit, but rather for the benefit of the breeder and of the ring’s management, which purchased the bull. When the bull has been taken from the arena, the crowd will do the same for the matador. If the fans judge that a matador has performed beautifully and killed quickly, they will wave white handkerchiefs to insist that the matador be awarded one of the bull’s ears, two ears, or both ears and the tail, according to how well the audience thinks he has done. These gruesome rewards may have grown out of the eighteenth-century practice of tipping a successful matador with the valuable meat of the bull he’d just killed. The awarding of such trophies is subjective, but audiences in the larger, more important bullrings are stingier with their bull appendices than audiences in little towns. So one ear cut in Madrid is a greater honor than two ears cut in the provinces.
Since bullfighting is not a sport, there is no objective way to judge a matador’s performance. Audiences rate what they see in the ring on a kind of sliding scale that takes into account the relative difficulty presented by the bull (some bulls are harder to work with than others); the amount of danger the bullfighter exposed himself to (some bullfighting techniques are more dangerous than others); whether the performance was aesthetically pleasing; and whether it was in keeping with bullfighting tradition and fitting for the bullring in question (some rings are more prestigious than others, and their audiences expect a more classical, refined style).
Newcomers to bullfighting often assume that the violence they are seeing is meant to taunt, humiliate, and therefore enrage the bull. In fact, the reverse is true. The passes, pics, and banderillas are used to slow the bull down, calm it, and focus its anger on the cape, so the matador can do a great faena. Spanish bullfighting bulls are bred to charge at the slightest provocation, and most bulls need little encouragement to act on that programming. Bulls are territorial creatures by nature and live in herds. When a bull is faced with danger it will first try to escape. If it cannot escape, it will do what it can to defend its turf and the cows it is mating with. So when a bull is separated from its herd and put into an enclosed space where it cannot escape, it will lash out, charging at whoever walks into what it perceives to be its space until that space is cleared. In that sense, the charge of the bull is really a running away in reverse.
The matador uses the opening passes with the capote to teach the bull to follow the cape. The horse provides a solid, confidence-building target for the bull to hit, and the picador’s lance tires the bull and lowers the carriage of its head, lowering its horns and making it less dangerous to work with. The banderillas slow the bull further and focus its attention on the man. The faena with the muleta is the point of the show, the matador’s chance to shine. But it, too, serves a purpose, preparing the bull for the sword by wearing it down to the point where it is slow and sluggish and can be killed in the prescribed fashion. The sword ends the spectacle and can be a spectacle in itself. Each stage of the bullfight prepares the bull for the next stage, and the art of bullfighting consists of this preparation.
If bullfighting is an art, then what does it do for the viewer? No writer can sum up the effect of an artwork on an average person, but this much can be stated: the movements that a talented matador makes with his cape are beautiful to watch even when he is standing alone in his bedroom, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Without a bull, the cape passes of bullfighting are like the steps of a lovely folk dance, but when the charged atmosphere of the ring and the menacing beauty of the bull are added to the dance of the cape, and when the dancer is made to perform under the threat of bodily harm and with the dual aims of controlling a wild animal and then working with it to create something pleasing to the eye, then that is a performance that can inspire a depth of emotion.
Aficionados say there is a special feeling that comes when a great matador passes a bull low and slow around his body and the bull responds, charging hard at the cape and lending solemnity and danger to the matador’s movements. Hemingway described it as a lump in the throat. García Lorca called it “man’s finest anger, his finest melancholy and his finest grief.” It is an electric mixture of fear, pleasure in beauty, sadness, anger, horror, joy, tension, the feeling of victory over death, and the viewer’s relief that he or she is safe and not facing the bull. According to García Lorca, this dark yet sweet emotion can be inspired by any art form, but especially by the two Spanish arts of bullfighting and flamenco music. When a torero or a flamenco artist loses himself and begins creating on the very edge of reason and capacity he may, García Lorca said, summon up a demon called the duende, who can make the powerful emotion run. This duende is not brought into being by talent or
skill but rather by the artist’s ability to give himself over to the moment and by his ties of blood and history to the essential culture of Spain, which for García Lorca is found always in the bullfight.
“Spain is the only country where death is a national spectacle,” he wrote, “the only one where death sounds long trumpet blasts at the coming of spring, and Spanish art is always ruled by a shrewd duende who makes it different and inventive.”
The only trouble is, this special emotion is rarely evoked in the ring, because the art of bullfighting is made from an adversarial collaboration between a human and an unwilling animal. It is this emotion that Fran would be seeking to create in his corrida in Valencia.
4
The Challenge Accepted
On the road, March 13. Along with its small neighbor Portugal, Spain occupies the Iberian Peninsula, which juts out from southern France at the western edge of Europe. This vaguely square piece of land, described by the ancient geographer Strabo as looking like a bull’s hide stretched on a wooden frame, is girded by the Bay of Biscay to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south and to some extent the east. Most of Spain is mountainous. The average height of the land there is greater than in any European nation save Switzerland. At Spain’s center, taking up as much as half of its five hundred thousand square miles, is the arid and sparsely populated tableland called the meseta. A range of snowcapped mountains splits the meseta, and thus Spain, into north and south. There are also formidable mountain ranges along the northern and southern coasts, in the northeast, and along the border with France, which is protected by the Pyrenees Mountains.
Few European nations contain such a variety of people and landscape within their borders. The north coast, comprising the regions of Galicia, Cantabria, Asturias, and the País Vasco (Basque Country), with landlocked La Rioja and Navarra just below it, is damp and green, and its people are serious and industrious and are closer to northern Europeans in culture and attitudes than any other Spaniards. The center, comprising the regions of Castilla-León, Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Aragón, and Extremadura, is a place of empty plains, castles, poor farmland, and windmills. It is the land of Don Quixote and of the capital city, Madrid, and the classic resident is dour and hardworking and has an outlook on life not far removed from his peasant forebears. The eastern coast of Spain—the regions of Cataluña, Valencia, and Murcia—is like the rest of the Mediterranean, and the people there are of the same agrarian-cosmopolitan-mercantile type found along the Italian and French coasts. Meanwhile, southern Spain, the vast region of Andalucía, is the Spain of Romantic tradition, the Spain of Gypsies and flamenco music, of Arab palaces and whitewashed houses, of gazpacho and sherry, and of bulls and bullfighters.
Death and the Sun Page 4
