Iberia

by James A. Michener

  There was no confusion on the part of the people who defended El Cordobés. In various letters he was compared favorably with Velázquez, Goya, Zuloaga, Picasso and Dali, which should give some indication of whether Spaniards think of their matadors as artists or sportsmen. Many writers referred to ‘the crazy month, in which El Cordobés fought thirty-one times, a feat never equaled before.’ To accomplish this he had to fight one day in the morning in one town and in the afternoon in another a hundred miles away. One enthusiast let himself go: ‘To compare the average bureaucratic bullfighter with the great El Cordobés is to compare one of those elegant white-glove comedies we see on the stage with a great drama like Oedipus Rex, Medea, Othello, or Death of a Salesman.’

  My favorite letter, however, summed it up concisely: ‘I have for a long time considered El Cordobés the Johann Sebastian Bach of bullfighters, but after his recent performances I suspect we shall soon have to refer to Johann Sebastian Bach as the El Cordobés of musicians.’ I have not quoted the letters which indulged in hyperbole or in which the writer allowed his emotions to get the better of, him.

  I once had a full day in which to contemplate the sordidness of the bullring, for at eight one morning I reported at the box office in Sevilla to purchase a set of tickets for the feria. I was fourth in line. When the window opened I was fourteenth, men connected with the racket having edged in ahead of me with the connivance of the police. At one o’clock, when the window had been open for five hours, I was twelfth in line, because all morning drifters had sidled up to the window with bribes to the ticket sellers. At one the police announced that the windows would now be closed, but at four we could resume our positions, which would be noted and honored. At four the best I could do was sixteenth

  I was determined to stick it out; in fact, I was enjoying this first-hand experience of what the devotee of the art goes through, and my long vigil was lightened by the fact that a most engaging American wound up behind me in the line, Charles Moore, an ice-cream salesman from El Paso, Texas. ‘We’ll see if they have the nerve to keep us standing here all day without selling us a ticket,’ I suggested.

  ‘Okay by me,’ Moore said, and we watched the comedy.

  The closest we ever got to the window was eighth. Where the connivers and drifters and the slinky individuals in long coats came from I’ll never know, but sometimes an hour would pass without our moving up one slot.

  Rehearsal for what? Applause, money, the wounds of honor, death? The pain of disillusionment?

  A policeman finally came up and said, ‘They prefer it if foreigners buy their tickets on the black market. You’re expected to.’

  ‘We’ll wait.’ He shrugged his shoulders and escorted two more characters to the head of the line.

  At eight o’clock that night, when they closed the windows, I was fourth in line and Moore was fifth. The men inside, who had seen us all day long, were quite prepared to have the day end this way, but the policeman told them, ‘You’d better do something about the norteamericanos. I saw the one with glasses taking notes and he may be a writer.’ So at five after eight Moore and I were allowed to buy our tickets. The man at the window couldn’t have been more gracious.

  John Fulton has a more harrowing story to tell. For an American without friends to arrive in Sevilla determined to become a matador, and for him to buck the prejudices of Spain, where honest men are convinced that no one but a born Spaniard, or at the very least one of Spanish ancestry, can ever truly understand the ambiente, required a courage that few young men could muster. It is interesting to observe that the Spaniards are nearly as reluctant to accept Portuguese as they are Americans, even though I have seen Portuguese like José Julio give fine performances against the big Miuras in Sevilla. Spaniards are convinced that Portuguese and Mexicans and Venezuelans and North Americans never quite catch the hang of this peculiar art.

  They were much relieved, therefore, when John Fulton ran into trouble in his presentation in Madrid. In all ways possible they stacked the cards against him, then sat back amused when he failed. ‘A fine boy, an intelligent one, too, but not a bullfighter,’ they said. ‘How could he be? He’s a norteamericano.’ But when he had a splendid afternoon in Sevilla and was carried from the ring on the shoulders of Spaniards, they said, ‘Interesting, but not true bullfighting. How could it be? He’s a norteamericano.’

  I’ve seen motion pictures of some of Fulton’s good afternoons in Mexico, and they were indeed good. His tall and very graceful body moves well against the dark mass of the bull and he has a repertoire of passes that is wholly professional. If he is no Belmonte or Manolete, few are; he is certainly as competent as the average Spanish matador and better than many, but he is a foreigner, and no Spaniard is eager to sponsor him.

  Critics of this insular Spanish attitude point out: ‘In American baseball we accept players from any part of the world, especially Spanish parts. Luis Aparicio gets off the plane from Venezuela at the Baltimore airport and ten minutes later he’s a full-fledged member of the Orioles. Or Tony Oliva flies in from Cuba to Minneapolis, and next thing you know he’s leading the American League in batting. When the Alou brothers arrive from the Dominican Republic it is an invasion. Felipe plays for Atlanta, Matty for Pittsburgh and Jesús for San Francisco. But let someone try to break into Spanish bullfighting and even if he arrived in Madrid on the wings of the Archangel Gabriel accompanied by the ghost of Juan Belmonte, he couldn’t make it.’ The analogy is not fair to Spaniards. What has been said of their insularity is true insofar as bullfighting is concerned, but it is not true in professional soccer, which is the true parallel to our baseball. When Real Madrid reigned as the best team in the world it employed international stars like Ferenc Puskas of Hungary, Alfredo Di Stefano of Argentina and Raymond Kopa of France. In fact, when I first looked at the roster of Real Madrid in 1961, I found it difficult to believe that it was a Spanish team.

  Say the Spanish: ‘In the international sport of football we want the best, and to get the best we have to buy in the world market. In the Spanish art of bullfighting we also want the best, and that can be found only in Spain. No one else can master the nuances of this art.’

  One of the side attractions of bullfighting is the bizarre gang of fans addicted to the art. Everyone who has followed the bulls has known the epicene from Peru or Chile who drives his Hispano-Suiza back and forth across Spain, enamored of some young man whom he attends slavishly and without regard to the pathetic figure he is cutting before his friends. He doesn’t care. He has bull fever interlaced with sex, and few diseases are more virulent.

  One also gets to know the American widow of forty-six whose husband left her several hundred thousand dollars and a passport, and with these she travels from feria to feria, passionately in love with some matador who has not yet spoken to her, for he does not know that she exists. If I were to describe faithfully even one of these women, and I have known several dozen, American readers would be incensed and would claim that I was burlesquing the species, ‘Such women couldn’t exist!’ my friends have protested on the few occasions when I have tried to describe them orally, but they do dear friends whom I regard with affection. They happen to be nutty about bullfighting, and some of my other good friends are nutty about other things.

  Last known portrait of Juan Belmonte (not Somerset Maugham), the man who revolutionized bullfighting, taken shortly before he shot himself.

  One hears much of integrity these days, and I have indicated that I prefer El Viti among the current crop of matadors because of his integrity. Once when the crowd had petitioned for, and the judge had awarded, an ear, El Viti turned it back, saying, ‘Today I did not deserve an ear.’ But no one connected with the art ever exhibited such integrity as an American woman I know who pined for one of the leading matadors. She followed him about Spain as if she were a puppy and he a wise old bulldog. At the arena she showered him with roses; at his hotel she would stand for hours waiting for him to make an appearance; she suffered humilia
tions by the score; and then one day when she had already paid for a ticket to a good fight in Madrid she heard belatedly that her idol was to fight that afternoon in Aranjuez, some thirty miles to the south.

  She thereupon gave away her ticket to the fight in Madrid, paid a scalper’s price for a ticket to the new fight, bought an armful of roses for her matador and hired a taxicab to take her to Aranjuez, where she found as she was about to enter the plaza that her beloved, to whom she had so far not spoken a word, had been injured the day before in another town and would not fight this day. His place was being taken by a matador of higher category, so that the fight was probably going to be better than the one scheduled, but to her this was inconsequential; if the object of her passion was not going to perform, the fight was not worth her attendance. She handed her ticket to a young man hanging about the entrance in hopes of just such a miracle, gave her roses to an old woman selling flowers and climbed into her taxi, announcing with a certain grandeur, ‘Take me back to Madrid.’

  The aficionado from whom I have learned most is Angus Macnab, who has been described as ‘the Scotsman’s Scotsman.’ To hear him explain, in Scottish accents, the merits of a particular fight is to enjoy language and emotion at its best: ‘Mind you, I’m not one to question the judgment of Ernest Hemingway, nor of matador John Fulton, but when I heard people assure me that in the great hand-to-hand at the Málaga feria in 1959 Antonio Ordóñez and Dominguín presented between them the fight of the century … some even claim the fight of the ages with six bulls killed by six single sword strokes, et cetera. Well, when sensible men tell me this with their smiles on straight and I’m expected to believe them, I keep my mouth shut and ask myself one question: “Has no one bothered to read what Alberto Vera, who wrote under the name of ‘Areva,’ said about this so-called magisterial fight?” Have you bothered to read it, Michener? No? Then I’ll quote: “This afternoon we saw two famous matadors fight six bulls, and each animal had two distinctions. It was barely three years old and was therefore more truly a calf. And what horns it did have were mercilessly shaved.” Michener, if you want to select one afternoon as an example of what bullfighting can be at least choose one in which bulls were fought and not calves with their horns removed.’ Even the most trivial of Macnab’s opinions on matadors and bulls are expressed with similar force. ‘Biggest bull I ever saw was at Pamplona one year. A Miura of nearly fifteen hundred pounds. Can you imagine how big that was? Killed two horses just by running into them. But the best man-and-bull together I’ve ever seen was Domingo Ortega and a runty bull of admirable courage to whom he had given a great fight. At the end he dropped on his knees before the fine animal, then turned his back to the horns and remained so with the bull’s right horn in the middle of his spine. Still on his knees he crawled away to pick up a hat that an admirer had thrown in the ring and this he placed on the bull’s shoulder. Then, standing back, he sighted with his sword, moved forward and pushed the sword right through the hat and into the proper spot. The bull took one step and dropped dead.’

  Pundonor in a rented suit.

  The addict with whom it is most fun to attend a fight is Kenneth Vanderford, who has a sardonic wit and a dry skepticism concerning everything. At his apartment in Madrid, where all writers interested in the fiesta brava sooner or later converge to check facts, he has a modest library of taurine material, including complete files of most of the bullfight journals for the past eight years. Apart from the nonsense of looking like Hemingway, from which he derives much amusement, Vanderford is unusually erudite, with a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Chicago. When I last saw him he was engaged in a newspaper duel with a learned Spaniard who had written an essay lamenting the fact that the Spanish language does not permit words to begin with the letter s followed by a consonant, so the English words like scarp, spume and stupid became in Spanish escarpa, espuma and estúpido. This meant, the essayist had pointed out, that the two radically different English words, eschatology which means the philosophical analysis of ultimate goals, especially those religious, and scatalogy, which means preoccupation with or study of excrement, had each to be translated by the Spanish escatalogía. Vanderford, a remarkably irreligous man (he calls himself a humanist), humorously proposed that since no intelligent man really believed in the future life any more and since there was not much to be gained by continuing to talk about it, maybe it would be better to drop the first meaning and cling to the second, which is concerned with an inescapable fact of life that is always with us. He continued with the suggestion that on second thought neither meaning need be dropped, since further study of the conflict had revealed an intimate relationship between the two meanings of the word, psychologically if not etymologically. He pointed out that the famous ascetics of history, who have always been interested in eschatology, have also notoriously been interested in scatology, since the French Catholic writer Viscomte Maxime de Montmorand, in his Psychologie des Mystiques Catholiques Orthodoxes, holds that nearly all Christian ascetics have been scatophagous. Vanderford holds equally recondite and stubborn views on bullfight matters.

  ‘You say it. Hemingway says it. Tynan says it and Macnab says it, so I suppose I can’t fight you all. But to say that at the kill a matador “goes over the horn” is pure nonsense. Let him go in that way and he’ll get a horn in the gut every time. What he does is to trick the bull into charging one way while he slides in on a curving trajectory the other way, thus avoiding the horn. Over the horn? Never.’

  It is Vanderford’s opinion that ‘the best-informed and most dedicated foreign bullfight expert of either sex is Alice Hall.’ This tall, slim gray-haired spinster was, until her recent retirement, a teacher of Spanish in a fancy private school in Atlanta, Georgia. She came originally to Spain for the laudable purpose of improving her pronunciation, little aware of what was in store. Like any dutiful tourist she went routinely to a bullfight, had the good fortune of seeing César Girón on one of his great days, and promptly surrendered. Year after year she returned during her vacations and applied to bullfighting the tenacious scholarship which had made her a fine teacher. A friend says, ‘Alice feels intuitively what the bull and the man are going to do next … what they must do … and she is in the ring with them when they do it.’ ‘Each autumn when I go back to Atlanta and face my first class of girls,’ she says quietly, ‘I feel as if I have been sentenced to exile, that I am in a strange land surrounded by strangers. My heart was left behind in Andalucía.’

  The old, who used to dream of becoming bullfighters, now hang about the young, who still have hopes.

  My favorite aficionado was a Frenchman. On the afternoon of the first fight at Pamplona, which is quite near to France and therefore attracts many Frenchmen, this doughty little bourgeois, with mustache, close-buttoned black suit and lunch in a briefcase, became so enraptured with the performance of Paco Camino that as the matador took a turn of the plaza he threw his bota of wine into the ring, and Camino drank from it. The crowd applauded. Later my Frenchman did the same for Diego Puerta, and again the crowd cheered.

  It was not until the fourth day that I was close enough to see why the crowd kept cheering this modest Frenchman, but on this day, when he tossed his bota at the feet of Miguelín, his section of the plaza rose en masse and accorded him a round of applause usually reserved for generals or generalísimos. Why? Because when this prudent fellow tossed his bota into the ring he kept it attached to a long length of French fishing cord, so that when the matador finished taking his drink, the valuable leather bottle, worth about forty cents, would be reeled back to its owner.

  The aficionado who best exemplifies the emotional hold that bullfighting can exert is a man I have not met. George Smith, a retired high school Spanish teacher from Los Angeles, saw his first fight in Mexico and subsequently came to Spain on vacation, developing an intense interest in the bulls. He began to acquire a bullfight library, and with the help of a former matador who in retirement became an expert on old books, has built up wh
at many call the finest library of its kind in the United States. He intends leaving it to the Los Angeles public library. Sudden and protracted illness has prevented him from returning to Spain but he is so infatuated with the ambiente that each spring, during San Isidro, he sends his matador-bibliophile a substantial check in order to assemble in Salvador’s taurine restaurant a group of aficionados to partake of the feast that he would like to give in person. In 1967 Nicanor Villalta, one of the finest and bravest of the old-time matadors, attended. Also present was the critic who wears the gold watch that once belonged to Manolete: ‘The mother of Manolete to Antonio Bellón, loyal and unselfish friend of her son.’ Vanderford was there and several others who appreciate the bulls, and as the meal drew to an end, Vicente Molina, the book dealer, proposed the toast, ‘To a man who truly loves our crazy world.’

  Some travelers in Spain, seeing the crowds of such tourists at bullfights, conclude that it is only the thrill-seeking foreigner who keeps the art alive, and it is true that along the Mediterranean coast the rings are populated mainly by travelers from northern countries who understand little of what they are seeing. I remember the last fight of the season in Barcelona, when more than two-thirds of the meager audience consisted of white-hatted sailors from the visiting American fleet. In Mallorca foreigners constitute a majority of the audience, and standards have degenerated so badly that a local impresario has rigged up his private plaza and keeps a tame bull therein for tourists to ‘fight’ at five dollars a throw. For two dollars they rent gaudy matador suits, and for an additional two dollars they can have their photographs taken facing the bull. When they get back into street clothes for another dollar they can purchase from the Plaza Mallorca a colorful poster showing their name printed between that of Manolete and El Cordobés.