Fran went out and caped the bull to a spot in front of the picador who was standing in the shade, drawing it inside the two concentric circles painted in the sand. By the rules of bullfighting the bull must always charge the horse with the space of the painted lines between them. Seated in his saddle, Fran’s picador Diego Ortiz shifted his horse so it was perpendicular to the bull, rattled his armored boot inside its armored stirrup, raised his spear into the air with one of his massive hands, and called out. The bull responded to this stimulus and charged, driving itself into the horse’s padded flank, the horse twisting away its head, its pink tongue flicking around its lips in mute horror, as the monosabios whipped the horse’s bottom with leather switches, forcing it to lean into the bull’s horns.
The bull rocked forward and the half-ton horse slammed against the barrera fence, almost crushing a monosabio to death in the process. Meanwhile, Diego the picador leaned over and shot his spear into the bull, at the tail end of the tossing muscle that mounded out at the spot where the bull’s neck met the trunk of its body. Feeling the pain of the spear, the bull tried to slide to its right and away from the horse. But Diego reined the horse toward the center of the ring, blocking the bull’s escape route while he pressed the metal point of the spear into the bull’s flesh with all of his weight behind it. After a few seconds of this Diego let the bull get away, and the spear popped out of the newly made wound, and dark molasses blood slicked down the bull’s side. The audience whistled and jeered, wanting the bull punished as little as possible so that it would still have enough gas to charge the muleta.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the act of the horses was one of the highlights of the corrida, and the picadors were the big stars. They got top billing, above the matadors, on posters (which to this day are the primary means of advertising corridas), they were paid more, and they were allowed to wear gold trim on their costumes, a privilege they still retain. In bullfighting’s first centuries the picadors’ horses were unprotected, and the job of picador was a skilled profession in which the performer tried to spear the bull as soon as it came into range, hold the bull off with the spear, and slide the horse out of the bull’s line of attack, thus saving the horse and providing a show of equestrian and martial skill.
Nowadays the horses are so large and protected that there is only a small chance of a horse’s being badly hurt and falling down, and because of this the art of pic’ing has degenerated to the point where most picadors simply let the bull hit the horse and shoot in the lance, a technique that requires much less skill than the work of the old-time picadors did. Some fans still regard pic’ing as a fascinating test of the bravery of the bull. But most want it over with quickly, acknowledging that the pic is necessary to wear the bull down, but hoping the picador doesn’t do too much damage, rendering the bull inadequate for the cape work to follow.
As a top matador, Fran had two picadors in his traveling cuadrilla. The senior man, Francisco López, categorically refused to be interviewed for any purpose. Fie was around six foot six inches tall, had a craggy wooden-Indian face, was annoyed most of the time, and must have been at least sixty years old, because he worked as a stunt double for Charlton Heston in the movie Ben-Hur, which was filmed around 1958. López tended to pic with a heavy hand, bending into bulls and doing a lot of damage. The junior picador, Diego Ortiz, was an amiable man of about thirty-five with massive hands, a great help in his profession. He was happy to be interviewed, but his Andalucían accent was so thick it was difficult for his cuadrilla mates to understand much of what he said—and they were from Andalucía.
The picadors withdrew from the stage and the bull went back to the center of the ring, bloody and too tired from charging the horses to move unless provoked. At this point the banderilleros jogged in and arranged themselves in the prescribed fashion. As the matador in charge of this bull, Fran had little to do. He moved to the side of the sand, took off his hat, and gave it to Nacho in exchange for a shiny metal cup of water, taking a sip and handing it back to Nacho. Then he stood with hands on hips and watched. The matador in line to kill the next bull was José Pacheco, El Califa. He went over to the sunny side of the ring, across from where the bull was, bunched up his capote in his arms, and waited. Meanwhile, a banderillero from Califa’s team and the third matador of the afternoon, El Cordobés, moved into place across the ring from Califa in the shaded sand. They were all in the ring to protect the men placing the sticks.
Poli entered, holding his capote against his body as if he were waltzing with it. Gray-haired Poli wore a pink costume trimmed in black. He moved in front of the bull, offered the cape, and the bull engaged. But instead of standing still and making the bull pass across his body as a matador would, Poli bowed and then, like an ambassador taking his leave of a king, shuffled away from the bull, tiptoeing backward in a three-quarters circle. The bull, nose in the fabric of the cape, followed, turning in a smooth arc, moving with Poli so that at the end of the turn the bull was in line with the center of the ring, in the right place and position to receive the first pair of banderillas.
This was the self-effacing cape work of the good assistant bullfighter in the role of lidiador, or man with the cape during the act of the banderillas. It was a sweet little piece of technical bullfighting, but the crowd neither noticed nor cared. Few Spanish fans understand bullfighting well enough to pick up on such details, and anyway the audience in a city like Alicante comes to enjoy itself, not to analyze. Fran, whose head is a computer of bullfighting minutiae, was pleased with Poli, but the act of the banderillas was of no interest whatsoever to him. His only concern was for the bull and what condition it would be in when it came to the act of the muleta. Like most matadors, Fran believed that a bull has a limited number of good charges in its body, and Fran did not want these wasted on unnecessary movement. Poli had brought the bull into position with a single delicate motion that did not tire or damage the animal unduly.
Gangly Joselito came out from behind the barrera and went to the sunny side of the ring, across the sand from the bull. Joselito was thirty years old, long and lean, leaner even than Poli, with a round face and surprised eyes. He was dressed in a suit of green with black trim. In his left hand Joselito held a matched pair of banderillas, wooden sticks about two feet long, each with a metal harpoon-like point at one end. They were festooned with shreds of colored paper, the top half yellow and the bottom half red, the colors of the Spanish flag. Joselito touched his right hand to his tongue and used the fingers to wet the harpoon points. The saliva is thought to help the metal slip through the bull’s hide. Joselito took a banderilla in each hand, holding it by the blunt wooden end, balancing it against his palm, his fingers forming a tube around the shaft. Then he raised his hands high above his head.
The banderillas pointed outward in front of Joselito like horns. He called to the bull and it turned to face him, turning into the center of the ring. From the bull’s perspective, Joselito represented a new threat, something it had never seen before: a man without a cape in his hands. Joselito screwed his face up in concentration, and maybe fear, and his breath came out in bursts through his straining lips. He stalked toward the bull with exaggerated steps that started on the heel and rolled to the toes, pelvis outthrust, back arched. A watchful moment passed. Then, as if by mutual accord, the man and the animal made their moves, running at each other. Except Joselito didn’t come straight on, as the bull did. He ran in a circular pattern, making his way to the left of the bull’s line of attack and then around into the line at a ninety-degree angle, running across the horns.
Joselito and the bull came together in midring, and the bull lowered its head to pluck Joselito into the air. Just then Joselito jumped—his back straight, his arms held high—and slammed his hands together above his head and drove them down over the bull’s horns. The metal barbs at the ends of the banderillas lodged in the bull’s thick hide, on the shoulder just behind the left horn. Joselito pushed off from the banderillas, pivoting away from the anima
l. He landed on both feet, like a gymnast dismounting the parallel bars, and threw his hands into the air, and the bull’s momentum carried it past. The banderillas hung down off the bull, one right next to the other, clattering as the bull ran, and the crowd applauded.
Ernest Hemingway observed that no phase of the corrida is more pleasing to someone unfamiliar with the spectacle than the banderillas. For a newcomer to the art of bullfighting, Hemingway said, the first passes with the capote are hard to follow, the act of the horses comes as a shock, the matador’s performance with the muleta is too complex, and the death by the sword is too fast-moving. But the placing of banderillas is just right for the new fan. It is easy to follow the action and enjoy it.
At first the fan wonders how the torero gets away with it. But, said Hemingway, the act of the banderillas is based on the simple premise that a four-legged bull cannot turn in a circle tighter than the length of its body, whereas a two-legged man can turn on a dime, twirling out of harm’s way while the bull struggles to get around and take a stab with its horns. There are many ways of running up to the bull to place banderillas, but the most typical is the one described above. That is al cuarteo, or making a quarter-circle across the line of the bull’s charge. The man can also choose to run straight at the bull: poder a poder. Or he can await the bull’s charge, feint in one direction, then shift back as the bull reaches him: al quiebro. Or he can try any number of other strategies.
The placement of a pair of banderillas is judged on four criteria: the angle of attack (the more directly the torero comes at the bull, the better the pair); the manner in which the banderillas are placed (the man should jump high, keep his back straight, put the banderillas in over the horns, and make a clean landing); the terrain in which the banderillas are placed (in general, it is more dangerous, and therefore of greater merit, to place the sticks in a way that affords the man the tightest and least promising route of escape—for instance, an area of the ring where the torero is between the bull and the barrera); and finally, the position of the shafts, which should be sunk on the shoulders, behind the neck, and the shafts should be together, not spaced apart.
There is no single satisfying explanation for why banderillas are used at all. Some people theorize that the barbed sticks straighten the bull’s charge by causing pain in the shoulders when pivoting; others say the act of the banderillas is purely ornamental. Whatever else they do, the banderillas are dramatic and fun to watch, and they aid in the process of wearing the bull down and focusing its anger for the final act of the matador and the red cape. Most bulls will be given three pairs of banderillas, though with a weak bull in a second- or third-class plaza, two or even one pair may be used.
A few matadors place the banderillas themselves, and some of them are great artists of this phase of bullfighting. When a matador places his own sticks, he does so alone in the ring, without help from his colleagues, and the performance is always accompanied by music. In many ways, the season when I followed Fran was the season of the matador-banderillero. The undisputed king of the rings that year was Julián López, El Juli, who placed his own sticks, and the new star was a former ski jumper from Granada named David Fandila, El Fandi, who was thought to be one of the best banderilleros to come along. Having said that, most matadors in Spain leave the task of placing banderillas to their assistants, and most assistant bullfighters are indifferent or even frankly cowardly in their performance with the sticks, which suits their matadors just fine, because it doesn’t take the spotlight away from them.
When the banderilleros place the sticks, there is a strict division of labor. In Fran’s cuadrilla it went as follows. For the first bull, Poli was behind the cape and Joselito placed the first and third pairs, with José María placing the middle pair. For the second bull, Joselito had the cape, while Poli took pairs one and three and José María the middle pair again. It is important that banderillas be placed on both the left and right sides of the bull, and most banderilleros specialize in working to a particular side. Poli and Joselito were left-side banderilleros; José María was a right-sider. Poli was a master with the cape, but the best thing one could say about his banderillas was that they were effective. José María was short and muscled with the slope-shouldered grace of a boxer, which he was in his spare time. He was a good athlete, but rarely thrilled with his work. Joselito lacked Poli’s skill with the cape, but after a few rough spots early in the season he had begun to show that he was a classy performer in banderillas.
In public Fran was careful not to praise his cuadrilla, preferring to keep them a little off balance so they would work hard to stay in his good graces. In private, however, he admitted he was pleased with his new team. He always had Poli, the man who knew him best and could be counted on to lift his spirits with a well-timed joke or remark. José Maria was solid in the ring and a good man. Above all, Fran felt a special kinship with Joselito, who he thought exemplified the right way to be a torero.
The bullfighting business could be awful. It was filled with petty jealousies, fraud, and a kind of tacky, second-rate showbiz atmosphere. Still, many toreros carried with them a vision of what their profession should be. Fran believed that when you became a torero, you committed yourself as an artist in mind, body, and spirit. To be a torero was to conduct yourself with grace and dignity at all times. To be a torero was to carry with you the tragic spirit of your art, to study it, to live for it, and, if called upon, to die for it. This was a way of life that Fran found beautiful, and it was even more beautiful when encountered in a humble banderillero, who had given himself to bullfighting even though he knew the rewards would be small.
“I like the way Joselito thinks about bullfighting,” Fran said. “It’s the way I think about it. You see, bullfighting is very special. The bullfighter is a different kind of man.”
18
They Eat Horses, Don’t They?
Alicante, June 20. The red van and the green minibus pulled out of Alicante around two in the morning, and the wheels rolled through the misty night, up the Spanish coast, past Valencia and Barcelona and across the Pyrenees into France. From there the road took them farther north, skirting Perpignan and Beziers, and then east with the bending of the continent, past the ancient Roman provincial cities of Nimes and Arles, and finally south to the shore and the small town of Istres, in the suburbs of Marseille, where there was a bullfight the next day. The toreros were not happy about having to spend time in the south of France, a part of the world that many people find rather congenial but Spanish bullfighters disdain because it isn’t Spain and because they don’t like the food.
“There’s nothing good to eat there,” Juani explained as he paid the toll on the first French highway after the Spanish border. “The only thing they have is duck, duck, duck, duck.”
Fran had just woken up, and I asked him if he felt the same way. “Of course not,” he said in English. “Look who you are talking to.”
The Spanish are as intensely focused on their food as they are on their culture, language, and traditions, which means they are quite happy to eat Spanish cuisine all day, every day. Chinese restaurants, for example, have never done big business in Spain. But while they can be dogmatic about food, and they care about the freshness and quality of their agricultural products, especially those of their home region, the Spanish do not have it in them to be food snobs the way the French and some Italians are. They don’t stand on ceremony when it comes to eating. They eat at all hours. Breakfast can be had anytime from dawn until noon, lunch from noon to five, and dinner from about eight until the early morning hours. Their cooking is rough and simple: good grilled meat and fish, fresh eggs, rice cooked with meat and seafood, soups, stews, and the famous cured Serrano ham. Contrary to what you read in books by Americans, the Spanish do not like spicy food. The wines and olive oil are underrated, but Spain does not have the kind of cheese culture one finds in France, and the bread is atrocious.
The big meal accompanied by big conversation is the centr
al act of Spanishness, even more so than the Mass, the evening stroll, or the midday nap, three traditional activities that are fading. Spaniards love to chat, to argue, to opine and orate, especially over a table of good food. Both the Spanish language and the Spanish way of life contribute to this. The language is expressive, formal, yet poetic in a way that English is not. The Spanish lifestyle is structured to allow extended, unhurried time for meals and sitting in cafés and talking. Spain is a country where food and wine are cheap and plentiful, and a place to have a nibble, a smoke, and a sip can be found on every street corner. Much of life is taken up with sitting around such places, and a Spaniard would rather have one more drink or bite to eat than an extra hour of sleep.
Istres turned out to be a small municipality of medieval origin, situated on the shore of a large brackish lake with an outlet to the Mediterranean. Today it is best known for its proximity to a military airfield. Despite the efforts of the locals, Istres was not brimming over with charm, even during its so-called feria, an ersatz event inaugurated that year as a ploy to attract tourists. Fran and his entourage arrived in midmorning and settled into a brand-new motel off a highway on the outskirts of town. Built on the American model, the motel lacked a restaurant, which would be unthinkable at a European-style inn. But the dilemma of where to eat was resolved when a deputation from Istres’s club of bullfight fans invited the cuadrilla to a celebratory lunch.
The meal was not a success. The day was swampy in a Florida Everglades sort of way. The restaurant was beset by flies and packed with red-faced Frenchmen drinking pastis, anise-flavored liquor that turns cloudy when water is added, as it invariably is. The proprietress didn’t speak a word of Spanish, which turned out to be a blessing. The first thing to arrive at the table was a green salad. Plain and unadorned, it differed from the classic Spanish salad, which is always dolled up with bits of corn, onion, tomato, canned tuna, and egg. The bullfighters didn’t touch it. Then came a generous plate of cold cuts with a pot of French mustard nestled in its center. This was also a no-go for the toreros, because the tray didn’t include Spanish ham and Spanish sausage.
Death and the Sun Page 17
