The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  “What does this have to do with Franco’s dying?”

  “Everything,” Sandro replied immediately. “In spite of the eroticization of our consumer society, death made into a spectacle is still at the center of the Iberian arena. We know that Franco is slowly wasting away in a totally aseptic room. We also know that they keep him dozing with sedatives and artificially assist his respiratory and urinary insufficiencies. One of his doctors told a reporter that he had palpated his open intestines and swore that the dying man was not suffering from cancer and showed no symptoms of metastasis. That last sentence is one I certainly don’t follow since metastasis is the reproduction of a very real disease in a place different from where it appeared initially. They’ve sutured a ruptured artery and several stomach ulcers. His heart stopped, but they stimulated it and regulated its rhythm electrically. There’s not a single drop of his own blood in his body, since it all bled out intermittently and had to be replaced by transfusion.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Marina repeated, shrugging. Profiled against the opening of the window and leaning against the side of the bay, her gaze seemed to be lost in the dark night where another snowstorm threatened.

  “Let’s witness again the death of Felipe II. We know almost as much about that as we do about his life and, of course, about his person, for history does not know who that man really was. Consumption, gout, tertian fevers, and a cancer of the knee finished him off in El Escorial in a death agony that lasted two and a half months. Hydropic tumors swelled his belly and legs horribly. He burned with thirst, and only his fortitude or his pride allowed him to die slowly, without a single complaint. His tortured body could not tolerate the touch of hands or cloth. It was impossible to change or clean the bed, and the bedchamber reeked like a sewer. Lying in his own filth, a bedsore opened along the length of his back, from the nape of his neck to his buttocks, and the ulcers became worm-ridden. In these conditions they operated on his leg, and pus poured out of the swelling. They brought his father’s coffin and opened it next to his bed. Felipe II ordered them to wrap him in a shroud just like Carlos V’s, and he died, lucid, in the forty-second year of his reign, with the crucifix of the emperor in his hands. His death was an obvious parable of the corruption of absolute power.”

  “Absolute power is the most transitory,” murmured Marina. “In two years, no one will remember Franco. It will simply be as if he had never existed.”

  “But the country will be the same: the land of the tragic sense of death and the picaresque or murderous sense of life. In fact the picaresque is our Renaissance, and if we freed ourselves here from the wars of religion, it wasn’t because we had burned the heretics but because we believed in death on the one hand and in the ragged beggar boy on the other. Our future was reduced to waiting for the one man’s end. Our past was the chronicle of other death agonies. Even the history of bullfighting, before it became a spectacle for foreign tourists, became a backwater and was reduced to a few fatal gorings, beginning with Pepe-Hillo’s.

  Sandro was quiet for a few moments, recalling his notes on the tragedy, taken the night before from Cossío, Luján, and de la Tixera. As he wrote them he believed he was describing a bloody event he had witnessed personally in a mirror or in a world similar to the one in the paintings. Almost like the flash of a hallucination, he was struck suddenly by the memory of the fighting bull painted by Goya right after he had survived his grave crisis of 1792 and 1793. He felt certain that another very similar bull, or perhaps the same bull in a kind of brutal reincarnation of the painting in the bullring, killed Pepe-Hillo in Madrid eight or nine years later. Goya had attended the bullfight and witnessed the death of the bullfighter between the horns of Barbudo. But then Sandro imagined Goya in the vertigo of an absolute certainty as true as it was inexplicable, asking himself who he was, who Don Francisco Goya y Lucientes really was.

  After Pepe-Hillo, Sandro spoke of Joselito, Granero, and Varelito. Three more bullfighters killed in the bullrings of another century, where symmetrical and concentric destinies all converged in a kind of determinism that anticipated the goring itself. On May 15, 1920, almost on the anniversary of the death of Pepe-Hillo, Joselito was fighting in Madrid. The next day he was supposed to fight in Talavera on an equal footing with his brother-in-law, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. As they had done earlier with El Hillo, the audience demanded greater and greater risks and marvels of him, perhaps in anticipation of the sacrifice about which Lorca’s “terrible mothers” had a presentiment with a certainty unknown to the bullfighters themselves in their ambiguous solitude. In Madrid the crowd booed him, threw seat pads into the ring, and howled: “Get him out! Get him out!” In a moment of silence, a girl shouted at him from the seats: “I hope to God a bull kills you tomorrow in Talavera!” In Talavera the fifth bull of the afternoon was named Bailador and was as black as Barbudo. He seemed surly and confused, and in the end turned out to be half-blind, seeing well enough from a distance but not up close. Joselito observed the defect and challenged him more with his voice than by working the cape, which was almost invisible to the bull. Having concluded a series of passes to attract the animal, the bullfighter moved away from Bailador, thinking he had dominated him and forgetting for a moment about his far-sightedness. As he walked away from the bull, the sword entered the animal’s field of vision and Bailador quickly charged. Joselito attempted to guide his route with the muleta, but the bull, too close now to the cloth to see it, continued to attack the man. He gored Joselito in the left leg, as Barbudo had gored El Hillo, tossed him in the air, and as he fell the bull received him with another goring, sinking an entire horn into his belly, as the bull had done to Pepe-Hillo. He died on the horns. Later, looking at his opened body in the infirmary, one of Joselito’s banderilleros would say: “If a bull killed this man, I tell you that here no one escapes dying in the ring.”

  Manuel Granero quickly attracted attention after the death of Joselito, and fans believed him the indisputable heir to that incomparable genius. Dead soon after his twentieth birthday, the boy was Valencian, tall, chubby-cheeked, his appearance somewhere between dim-witted and effeminate, who in some old photographs looks like an altar boy and in others a gelding. He was also a man of exceptional valor and very thoughtful intelligence. He spent no more than three years in the ring, and at first he doubted his gifts for bullfighting. People said he was ready to leave it with no misgivings after his first fights with young bulls, because he did not want to be mediocre, much less make a fool of himself. He had studied music and played the violin wonderfully. If he left bullfighting, he would become a professional violinist. Yet in his first year as a matador, he engaged in ninety-one bullfights, a number not matched even by Joselito soon after the ceremony making him a matador. On May 7, 1922, four days from the anniversary of the death of Pepe-Hillo and almost two years from Joselito’s last goring, he fought in Madrid with Juan Luis de la Rosa and Marcial Lalanda. The fifth bull of the afternoon, Pocapena, was Granero’s, farsighted like Bailador and skittish like Barbudo. He leaned a great deal to the right and tended to charge near the barrier. When it was time for the kill he withdrew to the bullpen and backed onto the base of the barrier, just like Barbudo. A man in the cuadrilla who had formerly been with Joselito attempted to bring the bull to the center of the ring. Granero immediately stopped him: “Leave it, I can take care of him.” Pocapena began to charge, closing in on Granero, who waited for him, not moving a muscle. The bull gored Granero in his right thigh, suspended him in midair as Bailador and Barbudo had suspended Joselito and Pepe-Hillo, and tossed him to the base of the barrier. There he horned him over and over again, destroying his sash and breeches. In one of those thrusts, he sank a horn into his right eye, tearing it out by the roots and splitting his brain and frontal bone. He was alive when they carried him into the infirmary but died a few moments later.

  Six days after the death of Granero, Manuel Varé, Varelito, perished in Sevilla after three weeks of agony, the result of another goring. H
e was Sevillan, like Pepe-Hillo, and carried to unmatched perfection the running sword thrust up to the hilt, which Pepe-Hillo had learned from Costillares. Although correct, he was less brilliant with the cape and small killing cape, but at the moment of truth, he entered in close and very slowly, his left leg slightly bent, thrust the sword with a skill identical to the courage that makes it possible. He lacked the physical gifts of Joselito and suffered many mishaps in handling the cape, yet the wounds did not diminish his stubborn courage. On April 21, 1922, he was in Sevilla, appearing in the fourth bullfight of the fair. Joselito was dead, and Belmonte, a Sevillan like Manuel Varé, had retired, and with increasing imperiousness the public demanded everything from bullfighters. As they had done to Joselito in Madrid in his next-to-last kill (“I hope to God a bull kills you tomorrow in Talavera!”), the crowd in the stands booed Varelito, exasperating him with their hissing and insults. The fifth bull of the afternoon, Bombito, fell to the bullfighter from Sevilla, just as Bailador and Pocapena, also in fifth place, had fallen to Joselito and Granero. The animal was black, like Barbudo and Bailador, but with shorter horns. Always hounded by the shouting of the crowd, Varelito thrust the sword into the bull’s neck, not killing him at the first jab. Then Bombito gored him as he turned away, destroying his sphincter and rectum. As he was carried to the infirmary, in the shocked silence in the bullring, he shouted at the crowd before he disappeared: “Now he’s got me! Now you have what you wanted!” In the ring he left a stream of blood and a bull that was dead after he had wounded him.

  “Let’s leave this country,” Marina said slowly. “Let’s leave together, tomorrow, if you like. After all, neither one of us belongs here. At heart you’re Italian, and I never knew who I was.”

  “Nobody does. R. told us that on the day we met. But it isn’t true. Goya knew that perfectly well, even though he spent almost his whole life finding it out. Perhaps the rest of us move through the world without distinguishing ourselves from shadows, or understanding with any certainty why we pretend we were born. In any case, I can’t leave the bullring without finishing my book, and I can’t finish the book without understanding the meaning of the bull in this arena.”

  “The bull? Which one are you referring to, to Goya’s, to Barbudo, to Bailador, to the one that hollowed out Granero’s head?”

  “Possibly they’re all the same. The bull is the symbol of death, with his thrusts and charges. It’s well known too that Pepe-Hillo himself chose Barbudo the day before he was gored. On the other hand, the beast is transformed into the victim of a bloody sacrifice to an unknown or forgotten god, with the public as witness. Only reason is able to propitiate the animal when it is time for the sacrifice, and bring into play human dignity and existence. Do you know Espartero’s response to his assistant?”

  “How would I know it if I never went to a bullfight?”

  “A nervous banderillero was having difficulties placing the darts. In two impatient sentences, Espartero indicated how to drive them in. ‘If I do what you tell me to, this bull will gore me.’ Espartero looked at him in stupefaction and shrugged. ‘And what does that matter?’ His logic seems appropriate to a ritual, about whose mysteries we know absolutely nothing. The bull can be both the victim and the one that offers up the sacrifice. Besides, the bull is one of the animals with which men tend to identify magically. From the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, a bull was at Mass and in the procession on Saint Mark’s day. When Fernando the Catholic married Germaine de Foix, he had bull’s testicles served at the wedding banquet to increase his virility. On the other hand, our only contribution to the natural sciences was proving the bull’s dominion over all the wild animals.”

  Then Sandro spoke of the public encounters between fighting bulls and other animals, to the greater glory of the crowds of the Bourbon Restoration. In 1894 in Madrid, the bull Caminero faced the lion Recadé in a cage fifty meters in diameter. The king of the jungle became frightened at the first attack and Caminero pursued him, tossing and goring him as he chose. The lion died of his wounds the next day. Three or four years later, and again in the Madrid bullring, a black spotted bull was locked in with a Bengal tiger. When the tiger saw his enemy with his back turned, he leaped onto his shoulders and took the back of his neck into his jaws. Regatero, which is what they called that bull, shook off his adversary and gored him repeatedly. The tiger turned around and bit his dewlap, but Regatero cornered him against the bars and gored the tiger to death. The public protested, believing that so unusual and attractive a spectacle had ended. The bullring attendants poked the tiger with sticks through the bars to rouse him. He moved again and Regatero attacked him one more time. The tiger, whose name has, unjustly, not passed into the chronicles, sank his fangs into the bull’s snout, and the bull finished off the tiger by attacking frenetically with his head. The crowd roared then and patriotically cheered the Spanish bull to the sound of the chords of the Marcha de Cádiz. They took away the tiger, emptied of blood.

  The following year, and again in the capital, another duel was presented between the bull Sombrerito and the elephant Nerón. They chained the pachyderm to a post driven into the center of the arena, but he broke the chains and panic invaded the stands. They chained him again and Sombrerito charged him several times, but the giant paid him no attention. The bull ceased his efforts and the crowd booed the two animals, throwing oranges at them, which the elephant calmly devoured. They took away Sombrerito and sent out another deadly bull from the same herd. This one immediately attacked Nerón, put him to shameful flight, knocked him down and gored him in the belly and the head. The public became impassioned and applauded the bull and the Fatherland. The brass band again played the opening measures of the Marcha de Cádiz.

  Other public festivities no less notable and always employing wild animals took place during the years of the Restoration. Times that still open in the waters of antepenultimate history, like Japanese flowers in the bidet, while a king died telling the queen: “Cristinita, hide your cunt and protect Cánovas from Sagasta and Sagasta from Cánovas”; while Cánovas himself outlined the first article of the Constitution: “Those who cannot be anything else are Spaniards”; while the French were Spaniards with money and kissing a man without a mustache was like drinking down an egg without salt; while “The bourgeoisie, egotists all, / who despise the rest of humankind, / will be swept away by the socialists / to the sacred cry of liberty . . .”; while Guerra declared he would fight no more bulls in Madrid, not even for the benefit of Most Holy Mary; while Espartero affirmed that “hunger gives more gorings than bulls,” until a final goring by the bull Perdigón, the “traitorous little bull” that Fernando Villalón wanted to conjure up twenty-five years later after a spiritualist session, killed him off in Madrid. Then, also in Madrid and in the bullring where the blood of that esteemed matador had been spilled, a supposed son of Perdigón himself, with wide-spread horns and a dull yellowish color, fought with the lionesses Sabina and Nemea. He chased and constrained them so much that not even flaming arrows could force them to risk resisting him. The competitions between animals become baroque and churrigueresque, like Jesuit architecture in its dazzling decline. They enclosed the bull Carasucia with a she-bear, a she-panther, and a she-lion. Only the bear fought with any honor, while the lion and the panther, gored multiple times, fled in terror. The excited crowd, emotional and enthusiastic, gave the conqueror a standing ovation.

  The final competition was held in San Sebastián, shortly after the turn of the century. The bull Hurón was measured against a tiger whose ferocity the posters guaranteed and predicted. Yet the feline became as timid as a mouse at the first charges and fled the thrusting horns, offering no resistance. Hurón knocked down the tiger, gored him, and tossed him against the grillwork with so much power that the crash bent several bars. Improvised blacksmiths straightened them immediately with hammers, but the president ordered the fight suspended, sick of the spectacle or having a presentiment of imminent disaster. The honorable
public became enraged, stamping their feet and roaring their demand that the battle continue until the death of the tiger. The president gave in and ordered the animal harassed with goads, clubs, and flaming banderillas, but the singed and beaten animal did not cease its panting or its trembling as it cringed on one side of the cage. The fireworks maddened Hurón, a circumstance unforeseen by those strategists, and the bull threw himself against his terrified adversary, breaking the bars, and both animals walked out into the ring. Overcome by panic, the screaming public crowded together and became violent in waves, looking for the exits from the bullring. While people trampled on people, the Civil Guard shot the two animals in the ring. Whoever it was who gave the order to fire, which no one ever found out, spectators armed with pistols followed his example from the stands. The bullets rebounded on the cement stairs, increasing the terror of the noble masses. The day yielded one dead and almost a hundred injured by bullets, falls, or trampling. The memory of the bull and the tiger was lost after the incident.