Iberia

by James A. Michener

  The finest single component of any fight that I have so far seen was the work with the muleta that El Viti performed one day in Madrid. Luck had given him an evil bull, a little worse than those the other matadors had walked away from in disgust, slaughtering them shamelessly. El Viti took his fractious bull and with masterful low chops began to give it both direction and confidence. Never did the animal have to charge more than a few feet and always its horn was so placed that with a bad toss left or right it could impale El Viti. Slowly, with infinite precision, the fight continued, and bit by bit the matador made of this bull a noble animal that charged with fury and followed the cloth as it should. The process continued long, until El Viti was making all the passes that a matador should make with the cloth, and the ungovernable bull was kept as close to him as I was to the man sitting next to me. It was a culminating performance, so wonderful that people were screaming with admiration of the sheer mastery.

  Finally El Viti took his stance before this once most dangerous of bulls and raised his sword for the kill. He waited. The bull would not charge. He waited. He waited some more, what seemed to be an infinity of time. At last the bull charged, the most dangerous moment of the fight, for the man must move forward, go in over the horn and somehow make his escape as the sword plunges home. But this time El Viti did not move. He kept his rigid posture and allowed the bull to bear down upon him; as the animal threw his great weight forward, the man stood fast, lured the bull off to the right with the muleta and directed the tip of the sword toward the lethal spot, where it was driven home by the weight of the charging animal. El Viti had killed recibiendo, that is, receiving the bull while keeping his feet motionless, and you can attend a hundred fights without seeing this done properly, or done at all, or even attempted. But to have done it successfully on such a bull was miraculous.

  During this epoch there was a very brave young man who was to give his name to the period, El Cordobés, an illiterate street gamin from a town near Cordoba who electrified the bullfighting world by the animal vitality he exhibited in the plazas. Part vaudevillian, part satyr, part inspired improvisator, he sold enormous numbers of tickets and charmed huge numbers of people but not me. In the remotest towns of Mexico, where impresarios had experienced trouble half filling their bullrings once a season, they could now hold three corridas in three days and cram the ring each day by merely announcing the name of El Cordobés. With a shock of unruly hair, a rock-and-roll manner and a mouthful of unusually handsome teeth, he revitalized bullfighting, but I am not sure that it was any longer an art. It was something else.

  In each bullfight come moments of nightmare intensity when forms melt together and strange combinations appear.

  I would have to confess, however, that three times I saw him perform a feat that even now seems impossible. Eager to make a good impression in classical Sevilla, he came out to cite his bull from a distance four times as great as the ordinary matador would normally choose, and as the bull charged at him, eleven hundred pounds of furious power, El Cordobés whirled in a tight circle, his small protecting muleta furled tightly about him and he in direct line with the bull’s charge. At the last moment he stopped his whirling, dug his feet in and unfurled his muleta, allowing the bull to thunder past a few inches from his chest. It was exciting, but it wasn’t bullfighting; it was vaudeville, and after a few performances I lost my taste for it. But not even the young man’s severest critic could deny him extraordinary courage and the ability to spread his charisma over an entire nation.

  In any discussion of matadors the question arises: ‘How good are the Mexicans?’ This needs careful analysis. First, Mexican bulls are decidedly inferior to Spanish. They are smaller, more difficult and less likely to give good fight. Therefore, the Mexican faces obvious limitations. Second, whereas in Spain there are scores of bull ranches where a would be matador can work with heifers, in Mexico there are few, so that the training of Mexicans is apt to be less thorough. Third, in raw bravery nothing can surprass a Mexican matador, and in this department they have no cause to defer to anyone. You will see exhibitions of pundonor in Mexico that you will see nowhere else. Fourth, the Mexican crowd is rowdy, largely uncritical and a joy to be with. Therefore, the Mexican matador can get away with nonsense that would not be permitted in either Madrid or Sevilla. Finally, a good Spanish matador may fight sixty or seventy fights a year; the finest Mexican is lucky if he performs forty times, so that the Spaniard obviously has more chance to perfect his art.

  One curious distinction needs to be made. The art of placing banderillas, which can be a graceful and lyric performance if the man doing the job has skill, has declined so badly in Spain that not often does one see a pair placed properly; since 1960 I have seen only four or five pairs done with any style by a Spaniard, whereas in Mexico almost every matador is master of this art and one can see almost any afternoon pairs of banderillas sent home with a delicacy that elicits shouts of admiration from everyone. Spanish bullfighters could do as well, I’m sure, but the public no longer demands that they do so.

  In this century there have been three Mexican matadors the equal of anything that Spain has produced. In the Age of Belmonte there was Rodolfo Gaona, a large man with a complete repertory and the personality to support it. At the transition period between Belmonte and Manolete there appeared a string-bean-thin Indian with a style so exquisite that he seemed to float across the sands. Fermín Espinosa is known in history as Armillita, but in accuracy he should be called Armillita Chico, since his older brother Juan, using the name Armillita, became a full matador in 1924 but surrendered the rank in 1933 in order to serve as peon for his more gifted brother. Armillita Chico was, if I understand correctly, the only major matador who fought a lifetime of complete seasons without once having been seriously gored, and he is reputed to have understood the psychology of bulls better than anyone else who ever got into the ring with them. And in the Age of Manolete there was Carlos Arruza, the golden boy of bullfighting who could do everything with diffident grace. He was the equal of Manolete, and the great confrontations between these two constituted one of the highlights of the century; even in their deaths there was a kind of competition: in 1947 Manolete was killed by the Miura bull Islero; in 1966 Arruza was killed in a violent automobile accident.

  Many Spaniards refuse to acknowledge these three Mexicans as top caliber. Gaona they denigrate, and the lovely floating pass which he perfected whereby the cape, held behind the body of the fighter, sways first to this side, then that, and which throughout the rest of the world is called a gaonera, is in Spain called de frente por detrás (facing the bull but with the cape behind the body). Armillita they dismiss in silence, for his cold Indian style repelled them and they could not believe he was as good as he was. And Arruza, whom they cannot deny as one of the great, they embrace by insisting that he was a Spaniard, which his parents indubitably were before they emigrated to Mexico. Arruza considered himself a Mexican.

  However, when one drops below the category of Gaona-Armillita-Arruza one finds few Mexicans who equal the middle echelon of Spaniards, and the record books are replete with names of Mexicans who stood at the top of the profession at home but were disasters when they faced the bigger bulls of Spain. Of course, there have also been a few matadors of good reputation in Spain who were found inadequate in Mexico, but not many. Furthermore, in the past twenty years there have been no Mexicans of major reputation, and in this period it would be impossible to claim that Mexican matadors were as good as those in Spain.

  Four Americans have become full-fledged matadors. The first, Harper Lee, was born in Isletta, Texas, in 1884, and after drifting about the plazas along the Mexican border, finally took his alternativa in Monterrey in 1910. Lee never fought in Spain but he gave commendable performances throughout Mexico and seems to have been a thoroughly engaging human being. His life has been favorably summarized in Knight in the Sun, by Marshall Hail, published in 1962.

  Sidney Franklin, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn na
med Sidney Frumpkin, took his alternativa in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in 1932, from the hands of Marcial Lalanda, and confirmed it much later in Madrid in 1945 at the hands of El Estudiante. He fought well both in Mexico and Spain and won commendation from Hemingway. His autobiography, Bullfighter from Brooklyn, is a hilarious affair, no single statement of which should be taken too seriously. I once had the pleasure of knowing Franklin and dining with him over an extended period, and never have I met a man whose conversation was more engaging. A group of us used to frequent his company simply to hear what he was going to come up with next, and one of the pleasures of my home in eastern Pennsylvania is that every Saturday night at eleven Sidney Franklin is available on television, broadcasting the fights from Mexico City. His chatter on the air is almost as diverting as it was in person.

  In 1966 Robert Ryan, of Los Angeles, took his alternativa in Mexico and performed well in the Tijuana plazas.

  John Fulton, the boy from Philadelphia, is the only American ever to have earned his alternativa in Spain. He took it in Sevilla in 1964. His doing so is an epic of determination and I hope that one day he will write his account of how it was done. Since he is also a gifted artist, his black-and-white drawings of what he was talking about would enhance the narrative.

  His is a tale of a young man with an idée fixe plus the grim resolve needed to carry it out in one of the cruelest ambientes on earth. For three years Fulton in Sevilla rarely sat down to a meal, eating at most twice a day from a stand-up bar where the bill was a few pesetas less if one did not take up space at a table. Once when money from home enabled him to sit and eat a regular meal, the waiter rushed up and asked, ‘Fulton, are you sick?’

  Like his idol, Rafael Gomez, called El Gallo, Fulton has a running sequence of sardonic observations on the difficulty of becoming a matador. ‘It’s as easy for an American to be a bullfighter in Spain as it would be for Cassius Clay to be mayor of Birmingham!’ When asked by a lady if he feared the bulls: ‘Not half as much as I do the men who manage the bullrings.’ On being complimented for speaking idiomatic Spanish: ‘I had to learn Spanish. The bulls won’t speak English.’ Of a famous Sevillian who sponges off matadors: ‘That man is well known … at lunch.’ Of the determination of a young aspirant: ‘If he gets one foot in the door, he’ll keep it there till gangrene sets in.’

  I know of no ambiente more totally corrupt than that of bullfighting. It is said, and properly so, that in this miserable racket the only honorable figure is the bull, and him they mutilate by shaving down the tips of his horns so that he has difficulty in locating his target. They try to drop sedatives in his drinking water to make him drowsy and sacks of cement on his back to make him weary. On one occasion when the draw for the bulls required a matador to face a particularly tough beast, his brother tried to shoot it in the corral with a rifle.

  I suppose one could argue that the management of American boxing is as corrupt as bullfighting, but I doubt it. There must be one or two people in the boxing hierarchy who are comparatively honest; but in the management of bullfighting I have not met any. Symptomatic of the general corruption is the case of the typical newspaperman who reports on bullfighting in the daily press or in the many colorful magazines devoted to the art. With several honorable exceptions he receives no salary from his employer; indeed, he is often required to pay the employer for the privilege of writing in the journal. He must therefore steal his income from the matador, whose future bookings depend on what is said about him in the big-city papers. Suppose a matador has a disastrous afternoon in Sevilla. Everyone in that city who was at the ring will know about it, but there’s nothing to be gained by having people in Barcelona and Madrid know about it too, so for six thousand pesetas to each of the five strategically placed newspapermen (or one hundred dollars in all), the matador can see to it that in all other cities in Spain the bullfight fan will read on Monday morning that ‘Juan Diego had a sensational triumph in Sevilla, with the fans clamoring wildly and carrying him from the ring on their shoulders.’ The really bizarre thing about it is that even in Sevilla, the same stories will appear if the matador pays enough so that a bewildered American or French fan who went to the fight and who can read Spanish begins to wonder if he can trust his own eyes. His eyes are all right. It’s the newspaperman that he can’t trust.

  The horns, which might be seen in any pueblo in Spain, are those of an old bull. The face is that of an old man.

  I once had dramatic proof of this venality. I happened to be in Jerez de la Frontera on Monday, May 10, 1965, for a novice fight in which the youthful sensation of that year was appearing, Sebastián Palomo, called Linares. He came into the ring—an extraordinarily handsome boy of fifteen, very small, very slim and very brave. The afternoon was a complete disaster; the ring was showered with the cushions of disgust, and if the fans could have got hold of Linares they might have lynched him, but the police saw that this did not happen.

  I drove the next day to Badajoz, where the newspaper in its edition of May 12 carried a report that I clipped: ‘In the brilliant fight held yesterday at Jerez, Sebastián Palomo Linares, fighting large bulls, heard loud applause on the first and an ovation on his second.’ This was so blatant that I asked one of the men connected with bullfighting in Badajoz about it, and he said, ‘Look, we have a contract with Linares to fight in Mérida. The boy is sensational news. We have to pay him a lot and therefore we have to sell a lot of seats. What does it matter what actually happened in Jerez? Everybody in Badajoz wants to believe that when Linares appears in Mérida they’re going to see the new Belmonte.’ And he showed me a poster which proclaimed the forthcoming appearance of Linares: ‘Destiny Sent Him as Special Envoy to Save the Fiesta Brava. Fresh from his sensational triumph in Jerez.’ Looking at the poster, with its gallant young man facing a bull of tremendous size, I began to wonder what I had seen in Jerez, and I realized that the man was right. It didn’t really matter.

  I was to see Linares twice as a beginner and twice as a full matador, to which he was promoted long before he was ready, and each time he was miserable. In fact, cushions were thrown at him, but I could see that the boy had the figure to be a matador, the courage to face bulls and a charisma that simply radiated. The last was enhanced by the release of a well-calculated motion picture called First Time in This Plaza, in which he was both a winsome little boy whom women could love and a brave man whom men could envy. Wherever he was due to fight, his manager scheduled this film in the movie houses, and when I last saw Linares he was besieged by screaming girls wherever he went. Vavra thought he might become the new El Cordobés.

  This business of making a motion picture to enhance one’s reputation, or even to create it, is amusing, because the plots are so invariable. A poor boy who wants to become a bullfighter has a serenely faithful manager who believes in him and two girls who are competing for him, one blond and good, the other brunette and bad. There is always the testing of heifers at the country ranch, where we see the good girl, and the flamenco party at which the bad girl makes advances. There has got to be one bullfight in which he is, as they phrase it, ‘a clamorous success,’ and one in which he is not, the latter being used to show his courage under adversity. In recent films a new ingredient has been added after its successful introduction in one of the El Cordobés films: the hero, frightened by his bad afternoon, sleeps fitfully, during which it is obligatory for him to dream in color of his own wounding in the plaza of destiny. Next we see the fatal ring, with him in civilian clothes kicking at the sand and stopping in long-drawn horror when he sees, always unexpectedly although he’s been in this ring ten times before, the door marked Enfermería. We now switch to the good girl, who is kneeling before an altar graced by one long, tapering candle. As she prays the candle gutters and goes out, and from the wall behind her a picture of the matador falls mysteriously to the floor. When she picks it up the glass is cracked, at which moment we cut back to the ring, where one hell of a big bull is bearing down on our boy and giving him the
works. An operation is required, with dozens of doctors in white and the anguished manager biting his lip, after which the wheels of a Mercedes-Benz squeal and the good girl rushes to the bedside of the dying matador. While she is weeping there an ordinary taxi pulls up and the bad girl dismounts, but she is prevented from entering the infirmary by a kindly priest who explains that now the matador is with the girl who truly loves him. But as the priest leaves, we see the face of the bad girl, and it is bathed in tears and she bites the corner of a handkerchief and slowly climbs back into the taxi, which takes her off into the shadows, leaving the impression that she too, at heart, is a good girl.

  Many of the matadors have made films, always to critical acclaim and to the satisfaction of their fans. One of the best was Luis Procuna’s Mexican film Bullfighter. The most successful was El Cordobés’ Learning to Die; the most artistic was an Italian film starring the matador Miguelín, The Moment of Truth; but the one with the right blend of ambiente and pathos was the one I mentioned earlier, Afternoon of Bulls, featuring Domingo Ortega and Antonio Bienvenida. This one I would like to see again. The worst I ever saw was an epic turkey made by handsome Jaime Ostos, and it, too, is worth seeing if only because it is so bad that it evokes memories of the grubby world which it portrayed.

  I suppose many readers have been either irritated or perplexed by my insistence that bullfighting is an art and not a sport, but in this I am correct. It is so reported in the Spanish press and is so considered by anyone really concerned in the matter. I was reminded of this one day on an airplane, when I had been absent from the bullring for some years and had forgot the wonderful sleazy world that envelops it. I picked up one of Spain’s best newspapers and found it engaged in a public brawl which had been started by an article that spoke disrespectfully of El Cordobés. Within a few weeks the paper received 17,000 letters, of which 15,107 supported the matador, 1624 the journal, while the remainder ‘were so confused that we couldn’t decide where to place them.’