Death and the Sun

by Edward Lewine

  Most programs will also list the bullfighting genealogy of the matadors. This is like a family tree that traces the line of matadors who have given each other alternativas up to the matador appearing in that day’s bullfight. Like most matadors, Fran traced his lineage from Pedro Romero, of the famous Romeros of Ronda, who helped perfect the modern bullfight (alternativa date, April 20, 1776); through four matadors to Francisco Arjona Herrera, called Cúchares, a nineteenth-century master (alternativa date, April 27, 1840); through five more matadors to Ernest Hemingway’s early idol Nicanor Villalta (August 6, 1922); and through four more to Espartaco (August 1, 1979), who gave Fran the ceremony.

  But most novilleros never take the alternativa, or if they do, their careers as matadors fizzle in short order. Bullfighting is as hard to break into as any part of the entertainment business, perhaps even harder, because the bullfighting industry is so small and there are so few opportunities. Bullfighting is a closed-off world dominated by a small and conservative group of powerful promoters and breeders, who are naturally prejudiced against novilleros and matadors they’ve never heard of. You cannot become a matador or even a successful novillero without attracting the attention of these people, but there is no way to attract these people’s attention without performing in bullfights, so it is a bit of a problem.

  Even if a novillero has establishment support and the large sums of money needed to launch a career, and even if he has the guts, the talent, and the luck in bulls to shine in the right rings at the right time, and even if he is given the chance to become a matador, he will then be faced with a much harder task, because as hard as it is to become a matador, it is even harder to make a living as a matador, much less become a star. Within the ranks of matadors, the competition for work is much stiffer, the bulls are more dangerous, and the public is more demanding than in the ranks of novilleros. That is why so few novilleros become matadors, why even fewer last as matadors, and why fewer still make it into that elite group of forty or fifty matadors who work—and why almost no matadors are admitted to the select club of two or three who are the true stars, the figuras of the ring.

  “To become a matador is almost impossible,” Poli said. “To become a figura is a miracle.” Or as Fran’s manager, Pepe Luis, put it: “It’s easier to be elected pope than to become a figura.”

  Sometime when he was a novillero, Poli stalled and never took his alternativa. It was the same story told by Joselito, José María, and countless others before and after them. None of them would go into much detail about what went wrong in their early careers. Instead each one slipped into the traditional, formalized lingo of bullfighters, giving the standard explanations that have probably been the refuge of banderilleros for centuries. “I had my good moments,” Poli said, “but I lacked the circumstances to advance.” “I didn’t have the right help at the right time,” said Joselito. “Hombre, to live your dream of being a matador is hard, very hard,” José María said. “In my case, I didn’t devote enough time and energy to it.”

  When a novillero or young matador fails he can opt for the banderillero’s life, trading in his childhood fantasies and gold-encrusted matador’s suit for the hard reality of a suit trimmed in silver or black and the role of the subalterno or peón. Even then, however, he is not guaranteed success. There are thousands of unemployed toreros in Spain competing for around one hundred banderillero jobs with the thirty matadors who work enough each year to pay their people well. So banderilleros know they are replaceable. They serve at the whim of their matador, and each season is a precarious dance to keep the boss happy, stay out of harm’s way, hope the boss stays healthy, and try to make it another year closer to the age of fifty-five, when mandatory retirement and the union pension kick in.

  Fran’s team of matadors had consisted of Poli and two other men, both of whom departed at the end of the previous season. The first was a short, fat old-timer who knew his way around the bull world but disappointed Fran with his performance in the ring. He was asked to leave. The second was a proud young man, a kid who probably had the talent to be a matador, who placed banderillas with such skill and grace that he often received ovations for his work, and who quit Fran and joined forces with another matador. It was said that this young man clashed with Poli, but his likely motivation for leaving was money, since his new employer tended to perform twenty more times a season than Fran did, and thus was able to pay his banderilleros about twenty thousand dollars more a year than Fran was.

  So Fran had two holes in his cuadrilla, and during the winter break he filled them. Joselito was available because his former matador, the great figura of the 1980s Espartaco, had retired following a devastating leg injury (suffered not in the ring but in a pickup soccer game). By contrast, José Maria had bounced from matador to matador, never sticking anywhere for long. Both José Maria and Joselito said they were thrilled to have been hired by Fran, and both said they were keen to impress their new boss. After years of moving around, José Maria was looking for some stability, while Joselito said he was glad to have landed with another star. He was also pleased because his job with Fran was a promotion. Until then Joselito had been the lower-paid third man on the team. In Fran’s cuadrilla he was in the number-two spot.

  “The matador took a gamble on me,” Joselito said. “I have to respond. If I’m not up to the level, when the season ends he’ll go out and find someone else.”

  Sevilla, June 18. Fran’s manager, Pepe Luis Segura, worked out of a suite of rooms on the ground floor of a housing development in an undistinguished newer part of town. Pepe Luis was a short, florid man of fifty-six who wore his hair long and gelled into a thick blob at the nape of his neck. His face was expressive, his mouth was wide, and his tongue flicked to his lips as he spoke. He was clearly an intelligent man, and his way of speaking was wonderfully theatrical. He spoke high up in his nose, with great volume and at a rapid pace, repeating words for effect and making use of all the varied and complex rhetorical flourishes available in Spanish, which can have a grave, almost Shakespearean quality, even in everyday speech.

  “Francisco called me one day in January and asked if I wanted to work with him,” Pepe Luis said in his high whine of a voice. “And I thought, This is a figura del toreo, and I can make him into a maxima figura del toreo. I can give him hope and confidence. Not everyone can be the apoderado of a Francisco Rivera Ordóñez. Not everyone is afforded that privilege.”

  Pepe Luis had made it as a matador and had hung on for a number of years before quitting. He said he didn’t understand why he hadn’t been more successful, but had to admit that he lacked the charisma that excites fans. After he retired from the ring he went into business training and selling guard dogs. But the “little poison” of bullfighting was in his veins, and soon he quit the dogs to become an apoderado. Over the course of two decades Pepe Luis had managed the fortunes of a number of star matadors. In a profession not known for sensitive types, he was something of a psychologist, a motivator, who, as one newspaper writer put it, was adept at reviving sagging careers.

  The telephone on Pepe Luis’s desk rang. It was the promoter of a bullring that had a feria in August. “Well, why don’t you have Francisco Rivera Ordóñez on your card?” Pepe Luis asked. The other man spoke. “Well, I know,” Pepe Luis said. “But we want to be on with other figuras, with Ponce or El Juli.”

  One odd aspect of the bullfighting business is its last-minute quality. Although promoters may come to terms with big stars well in advance, most ferias are finalized only about six weeks before they’re scheduled to begin. It is said this custom took hold following the passage of a law that mandates that anyone with a season subscription for a feria may ask for a refund if any of the matadors formally announced for that feria fail to show up. Since matadors are always getting injured, the promoters protect themselves by holding off announcing their lineups for as long as they can. But in truth, this style of planning couldn’t be more Spanish. In Spain it is hard to get anyone to agree in ad
vance to an appointment of either a social or business nature. Call a Spaniard a few weeks ahead to plan a meeting and he’ll ask to be contacted a few days in advance. Call a few days in advance and he’ll say, “Call me on the day.” If he happens to be around on the day you wish to meet, everything will be fine. But if he’s decided to go somewhere else, well, better luck next time.

  Pepe Luis and the promoter hung up without coming to an agreement, but Pepe Luis seemed unconcerned. He explained that it was his goal as manager to get Fran into the best ferias, making sure the bulls and the other matadors on the card with Fran were to his, Pepe Luis’s, liking. Star matadors want to be on cards with other stars, and the bigger the stars, the better. Most matadors also like to be the matador of middle seniority in a bullfight, because the middle man performs with the second and fifth bulls of the day and never has to work in the first or sixth slots, when the audience is, in bullfight-speak, cold. As for bulls, all matadors have their preferences in this area, and it is always a source of negotiation, so much so that Pepe Luis employed a scout to go to bull ranches and look over any bulls that might appear with Fran.

  At this point the sensitive subject of money came up. Matadors do not like to talk about their fees, because the money they earn per bullfight is perhaps the most concrete expression of their standing in the bullfighting community. Pepe Luis would not say what Fran earned. What he would say was that the top matador that year—Pepe Luis didn’t name him, but it was El Juli—earned as much as two hundred thousand dollars a corrida in a first-category plaza, sixty thousand in a second-category plaza, and thirty thousand in a third-category plaza. The rates for the next ten or fifteen matadors were much lower, and then lower again for the twenty or thirty matadors after that. The matadors below the top fifty would take what they could get.

  At the end of the season one of Spain’s top promoters, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Fran was commanding about thirty thousand dollars in a first-category ring, maybe half that in a second-category ring, and half again in a third-category ring. Those numbers were probably about right, according to a number of other taurine professionals who confirmed the promoter’s estimate. That meant that in a typical season Fran could earn between one and two million dollars, from which was subtracted the ten to fifteen percent for his manager, the salaries of his cuadrilla, two drivers, and two manservants, and all of their traveling expenses. There was also the expense of his bullfighting costumes, capes, swords, and banderillas, which could amount to as much as fifty thousand dollars a year.

  Despite Fran’s poor showing in Madrid and Sevilla, Pepe Luis expressed confidence that Fran’s season would be a good one. “As long as Fran kills well,” he said, “he’ll cut ears.” It was his view that Fran was a great bullfighter and had the potential to be even greater, not just because of his prodigious talent, but because his art was informed and inspired by the essential tragic nature of bullfighting, which Fran inherited upon the death of his father. “Francisco represents bullfighting,” Pepe Luis said. “He feels it in his bones. Bullfighting is the only theatrical production where there is true death. In the theater a man dies and gets up after the curtain falls. Here you die and you don’t get up. Fran knows this in his heart because of the experience he had with his father. He thinks about the tragedy of his father. It passes through his head. And this is why he is a great torero.”

  17

  Craftsmen

  Alicante, June 20. The morning was hot and the sun was high over the old Arab fortress at the top of the hill, but a moist breeze blew in from the water and it made everything all right. Alicante is a seaside city, built on the side of a hilly range that divides the interior land from the shore. Along the shore are high-rise buildings that would not look out of place in Miami Beach, but the city becomes a nineteenth-century town as it moves up the hill. The local feria is dedicated to San Juan (Saint John); it begins each year in mid-June and is similar to the Feria de las Fallas, in nearby Valencia. There are fireworks, women promenading in peasant costume, and large statues that are burned down at the end of the festivities. That year ten bullfights of one sort or another were scheduled for the local bullring, a modern structure in the town’s main square, and Fran was to perform in the fifth bullfight of the series.

  Around eleven in the morning, Fran’s assistant manservant, Antonio Marquez, strode out of the hotel, lighted a cigarette, and began walking up the avenue toward the bullring, checking out the goods in the shops and leering at every woman he passed who was between the ages of about sixteen and sixty. Antonio was forty-one. He was built narrowly, with dark skin, a head of wavy dark hair, melancholy hound-dog eyes, and the big-lipped mouth of a sensualist. He had a tough, street look about him, but he was a sweetheart. Unlike many people in Fran’s entourage, who had little interest in the bulls and hung on with Fran because they were friends of his, Antonio had come up in the taurine world. His father had been a novillero. His grandfather also had been a torero, who had retired and made money renting used “suits of lights” to bullfighters in the Sevilla area. In the 1940s the grandfather had done business with Antonio Ordóñez, when the maestro was just starting out and too poor to buy his own costumes.

  Antonio Marquez was as loyal to Fran and as hardworking on Fran’s behalf as anyone on the staff. He was the one who solved all the little problems of the road and kept the Rivera Ordóñez traveling circus in good running order. Nacho, the chief manservant, was responsible for Fran and Fran alone. He would not lift a finger to help anyone but Fran and Fran’s closest friends, and no one resented this because it was Nacho’s job. Antonio, by contrast, was paid to look out for the other five bullfighters of the cuadrilla, and he was willing to help any friend or acquaintance of Fran’s who wanted tickets to the bullfight or a hotel reservation in a town that was booked up for its feria. He did this sort of thing all the time and would never accept a tip for his troubles.

  Antonio arrived at the backstage area of the ring, which was surrounded by a small crowd of rough-looking men. Some of them were scalpers and some were bullring officials and some were there because they had nothing better to do. Antonio marched up to the gate and then had to talk his way in, because the bull world had not adopted any of the kinds of security measures—ID cards or backstage passes—used in the United States and elsewhere. Once inside the ring, he made his way to the promoter’s office, which was windowless and filled with noxious cigarette and cigar smoke, and asked for his money. The promoter reached under the desk and handed Antonio a small brick of euro notes, about seven thousand dollars. This was done without the slightest formality. The promoter did not ask for a receipt, but Antonio insisted, tearing off a shred of paper and signing it and handing it to the promoter.

  This was a typical transaction in the bullfighting business, where written contracts are viewed with distrust and a man is supposed to be as good as his handshake and payments are made in hard cash. In this case the money was an advance against Fran’s fee for the corrida. It would be used to pay the salaries of the cuadrilla and for some immediate travel expenses. On long road trips, a matador’s manservant will go around collecting payment after payment in this fashion, and sometimes Nacho’s briefcase was so full of cash that he looked as though he were on his way to a drug deal. Noël Chandler used to imagine that a successful career awaited some brazen criminal who waylaid matadors’ manservants on the road, heisting the mounds of cash they always had with them.

  Around midday the bullfighters gathered for lunch, and the subject of the September 11 terrorist attacks came up. Everyone agreed that it was a disgrace that a powerful nation like the United States had been unprepared to defend itself. “Such a thing could never happen in Spain,” said the slope-shouldered banderillero José María. “Spain is invincible.” The terrorist bombings of Madrid commuter trains were about two years away.

  The bullfight in Alicante was twenty minutes old and the plaza was packed under an impossibly blue sky. The first bull entered the ring, a
nd Fran gave it a solid series of verónicas. Then he let the bull go and it trotted back to the bullpen entrance, where it felt secure. When a bull picks a favorite spot in the ring and returns to it obsessively, that spot is called the bull’s querencia. Bulls may choose querencias where they have gored a horse or a man, where the sand is cool, near the bullpen entrance, or anywhere else that suits their fancy. One natural querencia is the center of the ring, where bulls have the most available escape routes. A bull is hard to handle within its querencia because it will go on the defensive there. But a bull is less dangerous than usual when it is running toward its querencia, and a matador may attempt an impressive pass on such a bull, reasoning that it will ignore him in its haste to get where it wants to be. On the other hand, matadors are sometimes gored under such circumstances, since the bull is not paying attention to the cape.

  A bugle sounded and the picadors sauntered in on their heavy mounts and stopped at their appointed positions in the outer band of sand near the wooden fence that surrounds the ring. One picador stood in the shaded half of the ring, the other across from him on the sunny side. Behind the picadors were the teams of ring servants, the monosabios. Dressed in matching smocks and berets, the monosabios are charged with assisting the picadors by keeping their horses in line and if necessary helping to save the picadors when they fell. In most rings the monosabios are regular people so addled by bull fever that they are willing to give up their time at very little pay and risk injury and death to be close to the action.