Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  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.

  “Olé!”

  Whatever else Fran’s critics said about him, no one could deny that he was an artist with the capote. It was always the cornerstone of his performances, and his skill with the big cape didn’t leave him all season. This was a verónica pass, named for Saint Veronica, who used a cloth to wipe Jesus’s bloody brow on his way to Calvary. The verónica is the basic pass made with the capote, the man positioning his feet much as he would for a muleta pass—lead foot away from the bull’s line of attack, back foot into the line of the charge—gripping the big circle of the capote with his hands on both sides of the wedge that’s cut out of it and swinging it in a semicircle around his body. The pass was done about as well as you can do one.

  Fran passed the bull a few more times, each time stepping toward the center of the ring—as the Spanish say, “gaining ground on the bull”—teaching it who was boss, teaching it to follow the cloth. The passes were slow and clean. The horns were always close but never touched the cape, and Fran followed through on each pass, leaning out over the bull, forcing it to move past his body. The emotion of bullfighting was there and the Valencianos shouted “Olé!” and “Olé!” and “Olé!” as the series unfolded. Then Fran shut off the flow with a half-verónica—like a regular verónica, but the matador gathers the cloth at his back hip at the very last moment, suddenly removing the bull’s target, whipping the bull’s head around and taking away its desire to charge again.

  A trumpet blast, and Fran’s picadors trotted into view. The bull charged the horses twice, taking two stabs of the lance. Another trumpet, and Fran’s banderilleros put in three sets of sticks. Fran took off his hat and laid it on the sand. It was time for the faena with the muleta. Fran and the bull were alone in the ring. The audience was all around them, and the ugly office buildings loomed over the roof of the red brick bullring. The sky was dry for the moment, and the air was filled with the guerrilla-warfare sounds of firecrackers exploding and the brassy, percussive music of the bands marching and the people out on the streets. Fran started with the muleta in his right hand, reeling off several uneven series of derechazos that were marred by the bull’s growing tendency to become distracted and slide away at the end of each pass. So Fran got down on one knee and executed a set of low, pretty, punishing passes, using the semaphore of the cape to command the bull to lower its neck, bringing the head down and giving Fran greater control. Then he stood tall again and twisted the bull around his body in three rhythmic progressions of passes with the right hand that squeezed taut olés from the crowd.

  The bull stood its ground, waiting for Fran to act, its flanks heaving, a saddle of blood spreading down its back from where the picador had injured it. Fran gave the animal a few seconds to catch its breath. Then he offered the cape and shouted. The bull struck. But this time it didn’t charge in a straight line. Instead it took its eye off the cape for a moment and made straight for Fran. Without hesitation Fran spun, twirling in a circle, wrapping the muleta around his leg, bringing the bull’s head around with a snap, forcing the bull to wrench itself after the cloth, stopping it cold. Fran had solved the problem presented by the bull with courage and artistry, and Valencia loved it.

  “O—LÉ!”

  Someone in the crowd yelled “Maestro, musica!” and the band began to play. The audience quickened, focusing its will on the sand. Fran moved the muleta to his left hand and began to work naturales, luring the bull with the small square of cloth hanging lifelessly from the stick. The series worked, as did the next, and the next, building up and up in emotion, and then Fran made his way to the fence and traded the light sword for the steel death sword. Fran lined up in front of the bull, in profile, and ran forward, leaning over the horns and sinking the sword into the bull’s back. The hilt was a little below where it should have been, according to the textbooks, but it was good enough. The bull staggered around for a few seconds, mouth gaping, tongue hanging out. Then it walked over to the wooden fence and folded its legs underneath its body. Dead.

  The audience waved white handkerchiefs and the president of the corrida awarded Fran an ear, the only ear awarded that day. Yet the reviews in the papers were unenthusiastic. Fran had done a passable job, the critics agreed, but it had been a bull that was willing to cooperate. “Rivera Ordóñez was good with his first bull,” wrote Javier Villan, of the newspaper El Mundo, in a review that was typical of the rest, “although he could have been, and should have been, better.”

  It was night by the time Fran stabbed the final bull of the corrida and killed it. Then he and the other two matadors and their assistants walked out of the ring to their vans. Fran got back to the hotel in less than ten minutes, went up to his room, stripped, and took a quick hot shower. Then
he wrapped a white hotel towel around his slender waist and settled into the couch in the sitting room of his suite to entertain the stream of guests that always come to visit a matador after a bullfight.

  Fran seemed to be pleased. He hadn’t taken Valencia by storm, but he had done well, especially considering what had been going on in his life. The season had begun and the first result had been positive. Maybe this was what he needed to get his head in shape for the all-important weeks to come. The next two months would bring with them the two most prestigious ferias of the year: Sevilla in April and Madrid in May. If he was going to get back on top, he’d like to start with triumphs in those places.

  The first person to show up at Fran’s door was a bull breeder from the province of Salamanca. Then came the president of the Rivera Ordóñez fan club, up from Granada with her boyfriend. Next came a bullfighting photographer who had shot Fran many times over the years. After the group had chatted for a few minutes, there was a knock at the door and the most popular matador in Spain walked in. Julian Lopez, El Juli, was a small, slender twenty-year-old boy with a half-moon horn scar running out from the side of his mouth. El Juli had just arrived from his ranch outside Madrid. He was performing in Valencia the following afternoon. The air in the room shifted a bit, as it always does in the presence of white-hot fame.

  The breeder from Salamanca turned to face him.

  “Ah, Maestro,” said the breeder. “Good evening.”

  Then the breeder looked around. He had just called one matador a maestro while in the hotel room of another matador. That was like calling a young woman beautiful when in the presence of one’s wife. The breeder turned to Fran, who sat impassively on the couch.

  “Of course you are a maestro as well,” the breeder told Fran.

  “Don’t worry,” said Fran, in prince mode. “Julian is also my maestro.”

  Everyone was still smiling at this bit of diplomacy when there came another knock on the door. Fran’s manservant, Nacho, answered it. When Nacho saw who it was, he gave the visitor a quick hug and let him into the room.

  “Fran,” said the visitor in a public school British accent.

  “Noël,” Fran said, and then in English, “How are you doing?”

  The two men shared a warm embrace. Noël Chandler, a Welshman, was a retired computer executive who lived in Spain and was Fran’s biggest fan. This was Noël’s traditional beginning-of-season visit. The two men chatted about the upcoming year—where Fran would be performing, how he was feeling about the season. As the conversation wound down and Noël got ready to leave, he asked the sort of serious bullfighting question any aficionado might ask of a matador at the start of a new campaign. He wanted to know if Fran would be favoring bulls from any particular breeders during the coming season.

  “What kinds of bulls are you interested in fighting this year, Fran?” Noël asked.

  “Dead ones,” Fran said. “Dead ones.”

  SECOND THIRD

  THE STRUGGLE

  APRIL—AUGUST

  Journalist: Maestro, what does it take to be a great matador?

  Antonio Ordóñez: The ability to sleep in cars.

  —a legendary remark of Fran’s grandfather

  6

  Melons, Bitter and Sweet

  Ruta del Toro, late March. One morning during the lull between the ferias of Valencia and Sevilla, I drove about sixty miles south of Sevilla to the town of Jerez de la Frontera, where sherry wine is made. Jerez sits at the head of a web of roads and highways known as the Ruta del Toro (Route of the Bull), which runs through country rich in the ranches where bullfighting bulls are bred and raised. The day grew hot and sunny and the highway swung in and out of fields of green grass that were spotted with twisted olive trees and rocky hills. Herds of cattle wandered in the distance, but none resembled the fierce bulls I had seen in the ring.

  I turned off the highway and passed beside a hillside town named Vejer de la Frontera (the word frontera [border] in a town’s name indicates that it stood on land contested by the Moors and Christians in the Middle Ages). At Vejer I turned onto a country road and drove past a rising tract of land with a whitewashed house atop it. This was La Cantora, the ranch that had belonged to Paquirri and still belonged to his widow, Isabel Pantoja. Soon the road narrowed and I saw stands of cactus, imported from the New World, and ahead a small, arrow-shaped sign that read Jandilla. I followed that arrow and began seeing other signs that said, in Spanish, Danger, Bullfighting Cattle.

  Eventually I passed the ranch’s gate and drove along a bumpy dirt track that trailed through fields alive with pheasants, rabbits, and other small game animals, and grazing black cows. The big villa where the ranch’s owner lived rose out of a hill on the horizon, and soon I came to a concrete building with antennas on the roof and chickens in the yard. This was the home of the chief herdsman of Jandilla, Juan Reyes, a broad-shouldered thirty-five-year-old man with a sun-reddened face dominated by a bulbous nose. Reyes had agreed to show me some bulls, and he led me to his ancient white Land Rover, which would take us into their pastures. The door to the passenger seat was dented in two places, and in the center of each dent was a hole that looked as if it had been made by a small cannon.

  “Horns,” Reyes explained.

  There are approximately three hundred breeders who raise the bulls used in top-shelf professional bullfights in Spain, and each breeder is known by its brand—which is both the name the bulls appear under and the symbol (Jandilla’s is a star) that is seared into their hide with a branding iron. The proprietor of the Jandilla brand was Francisco de Borja Domecq y Solís, a member of an old and powerful Jerezano family that had become a major force in the breeding of bullfighting bulls. Don Borja, as he was called in bullfighting circles—the “Don” indicating the respect accorded to bull breeders—raised his bulls on two ranches: Jandilla in Andalucía and Los Quintos in Extremadura. The Jandilla ranch comprised four square miles, much of it devoted to corn and rice, its two cash crops. Bull breeders claim that raising bulls is so consuming of time and resources that they don’t make money at it, a claim many aficionados dismiss.

  The breeding stock of the Jandilla brand was spread out over both of Don Borja’s ranches and consisted of around 500 cows and 30 seed bulls, which were mated each year to produce about 350 offspring that would eventually yield up to 90 mature bulls—enough to supply fifteen full corridas. Like all bullfighting bulls, Don Borja’s animals lived a mostly wild existence, interacting with humans rarely apart from a few special days. These included the days when they were vaccinated, separated from their mothers, and branded with the year of their birth, a serial number, and the Jandilla star. (On the day of branding, each animal was also given a name, which was written into the ranch’s ledger. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to these names, but at Jandilla, as on some other ranches, the names related to the bulls’ parents.)

  At two years of age the calves were tested for bravery, but the males and females were tested in different ways. The female calves were tested in a manner similar to the testing Fran had participated in before his corrida in Valencia. The cows were made to charge a picador in a bullring, and those animals that charged the picador repeatedly after being hurt by the lance, and charged the muleta, were set aside for breeding. Male calves, on the other hand, were tested in open fields by horsemen who knocked them down with wooden poles, and those male calves that got up and challenged the horsemen after being thrown down were reserved for the ring. Males and females that failed their trials were slaughtered for meat.

  The cows and bulls were tested differently because the bulls were destined for corridas, and the Spanish corrida is grounded on the fact that the bull has never faced bullfight conditions before. Bulls are intelligent creatures with long memories. A bull that’s been caped or pic’d will learn from that experience, and if that bull is confronted by those same circumstances later in life, it will be more likely to ignore the cape or the horse and try to kill the man, and no matador c
ould create artistic passes with such a bull. But even so-called virgin bulls that have never been caped or pic’d learn quickly during the twenty minutes they spend in the ring, becoming more likely, as the bullfight progresses, to ignore the cape and strike the man. This ability to learn is part of the reason bulls are killed in bullfights. You cannot perform with the same bull twice.

  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.