Death and the Sun (12 page)

 

Sevilla, April 18
. Fran's second bullfight took place on a bright, hot Thursday afternoon with little breeze. It was a perfect day for a bullfight, and the Maestranza was full, in part because El Juli was on the card. All of the omens were good except one: the bulls. They were from the ranch of Don José Luis Marca, a breeder from Badajoz, in Extremadura, a herd founded on Domecq blood. Don José Luis had brought thirteen animals to Sevilla, only to see the bullring veterinarians reject seven of them for lacking
trapío
, an almost untranslatable word that means something like “the look of a proper fighting bull.” The six bulls that were eventually killed in the ring did not exhibit much
trapío
, or anything else for that matter. They were the worst kind of bull from a matador's perspective. They gave the appearance of weakness—falling down a lot on shaky legs—but were deadly to work with because of their marked tendency to cut in on the matador.

Fran was the first performer of the day, and right from the start he made it clear to the audience that he was ready to cut a few ears. While the bullring servants were still smoothing the sand in preparation for the first bull, Fran entered the ring and walked across the sanded circle alone. He stopped about ten feet from the gate to the corrals, and seeing this, the audience began to murmur, and then to applaud. The trumpet sounded and the band stopped playing. There was dead silence in the ring, apart from the cries of swallows as they hunted bugs in the Mediterranean sky. An attendant appeared and swung open the heavy, squeaky wooden gate. Fran dropped to his knees.

Fran was almost in the doorway from which the bull would burst out. He was positioned to perform a
larga cambiada de rodillas a porta gayola
, one of the more dangerous passes a matador can attempt. The moment the bull showed itself, Fran was going to flip his cape over his right shoulder and pray the animal would follow the motion of the cape safely over that shoulder. This was Fran's only hope. On his knees he would be unable to move out of the way, and there was nowhere for the bull to go but over or through him. The wound, if it came, would be a bad one, in the face or the chest. The bull, rushing from its dark stall, would not have time to adjust its eyes to the sunny ring and might not be able to see the cape.

Fran gave a quick nod. The attendant signaled back, then opened an inner door. A heartbeat passed. Then another. Then another. From deep inside the tunnel that led to the corrals came banging and clashing sounds and a human voice calling out—and out trotted the bull, looking a bit disoriented. It loomed in front of Fran. Its head was up and it seemed unaware that Fran was kneeling just underneath its great dewlaps. Fran shouted, “
Hey, toro, hey!
” The bull looked down and surged forward. The bull was in Fran's face. Fran swung the cape. The cape spread out into the air, a purple-yellow flash. The bull lurched right with the motion of the cloth. The bull's horn swooshed past Fran's cheek. The bull was past Fran. “
OLÉ!
”

Fran rose to his feet, cited the bull, and gave one (“
Olé!
”), two “(
Olé!
”), three (“
Olé!
”), four (“
Olé!
”)
verónicas
—each pass slow and measured, Fran's body the picture of relaxation, the bull coming within centimeters of Fran's legs. He finished the series with two half-
verónicas
and a pretty
revolera
pass in which he flicked the cape around his waist in a full circle, the cloth swelling out around his torso like a flower opening in the sun. And Fran walked away with the bull staring in total incomprehension while the crowd got to its feet and poured out its ovation. But that was the best Fran could do with the bull, which lost its will to charge in the act of the
muleta
and had to be killed.

Fran's second bull was a living deathtrap, a hysterical creature that charged without rhythm or reason. It would charge one time, stop the next time, start up again, cut in, cut out, run away, then wheel around asking for more. If Fran had been in a small town, he might have killed the bull and forgotten about it. But this was Sevilla, an afternoon of responsibility, so Fran felt honor bound to do the best he could under the circumstances. The result was an ugly, stuttering exhibition. The only way to squeeze a decent pass out of this bull was to walk right up to it, get in its face, begin the pass, and brace for whatever the bull could do in response. Most times, Fran got through a pass by dodging or blocking the horn, getting spanked by the dangerous flat side of the horn, which can produce a nasty wound that in some cases causes terrible internal bleeding.

Fran got in there and rode out six series of bumpy, choppy, ugly passes, skipping around the bull, getting hit by the horns, bouncing here and there around the ring, chasing after the animal at the beginning of each pass and evading it at the end. While Fran did this, the crowd was silent. Those who didn't understand what they were seeing were bored. Those who did understand were choked with fear. By the time Fran killed, he'd been beaten half silly by the horns and his costume was raked with bull's blood.

“The bull was difficult,” Fran said after the corrida. “One pass he was good. One pass he stopped. One pass he came at me. Every pass, the bull would go by me, then turn around on me, then look at the cape, then look at me. The danger of this bull was that if I didn't do what I did, if I didn't stay with him, if I didn't stay with this bull, he would eat me.” I asked Fran why he had attempted so many passes with such an animal. “I am hungry,” he replied. “I am still hungry. What I said with that bull was: I am going to do something and you will have to deal with me, because I am back.”

The following day, the newspapers treated Fran's work with uncharacteristic respect. “It's been quite a while since we've seen a performance as classic and brave as the one turned in by Rivera Ordóñez with the dangerous fourth bull,” wrote Juan Posada of
La Razón
, a critic who was no friend of Fran's. “He showed that beautiful passes, which are so often discussed by bullfighting fans, take a back seat when danger rules in the ring. Rivera, bullfighting his guts out, lived up to his family heritage and applied it in the best bit of bullfighting that has been achieved in this
feria
.”

What did Fran get in return for risking his life? Well, he got a nice round of applause and the satisfaction of having lived up to his responsibility. It had been a worthy performance, but worthy doesn't cut ears in Sevilla. You cut ears for something special, something that moves people. Man had proposed. God had disposed. The bulls had discomposed. Another year had passed and Fran had failed to cut an ear in his beloved Sevilla. The toreros had come to town praying for good bulls. The breeders had arrived with what they hoped were their best animals. The aficionados were ready to wave their white handkerchiefs and award ears. But as so often happened in the bull world, the melons, once opened, were more bitter than sweet.

“I had four bulls in Sevilla, and nothing,” Fran said. “Madrid is now the second chance for me to say something big. Now I have to put all my hopes into Madrid. I really want it to be good.”

 

El Rocío, April 21
. Without a home since the separation from his wife, Fran was living on a tiny horse farm on the edge of El Rocío, a village about an hour south of Sevilla. It was a rustic place, a small thatch-roofed cottage surrounded by uncultivated fields, and it belonged to Juan, the thirty-eight-year-old heir to a modest fortune from his father's shoe factory. Fran loved it there. The paparazzi hadn't discovered it yet—they would in short order—and Fran had everything he needed to stay in shape. Mornings he rode horses, then did some practice cape work, then had a light lunch, a nap, and another exercise session in the afternoon. But the best thing about the place for Fran was the presence of the owner's family. Juan's father and mother made daily visits and treated Fran like a son. It was the kind of steady, low-key parenting Fran never got from his own family.

That afternoon, after the midday nap, Fran showered and put on an immaculate blue suit and a crisp red and blue Hermes tie. He was going to drive into Sevilla and attend the corrida, the final one of the
feria
, which always featured the dreaded Miura bulls. Fran's daughter, Cayetana, and her nanny were staying with him that day, and he had arranged to drop them off with her mother in town before the corrida. Fran, Cayetana, and the nanny got into a green Toyota SUV and took off for Sevilla. Once inside the city, they made their way over the Triana Bridge to a spot across the river from the bullring where Eugenia was waiting, a slender, pretty blonde dressed in a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and tan cowboy boots.

Just then Fran spotted a press photographer standing about fifty feet away from them, snapping pictures. Fran took off after him, but the man hopped on a moped and sped away. Then Fran handed his daughter off to his wife and leaned over to kiss her on the lips, and Eugenia turned her face, leaving him nothing but her cheek, and they parted company, tense and sad.

Outside the bullring was the usual crush. It was time for Fran to be a star. Everywhere there were hands to shake and autographs to sign and women to kiss. During the corrida Fran used the season tickets he'd inherited from his grandfather and sat with the man who managed his business office. It turned out to be a boring corrida, and when it was over Fran disappeared into the crowd.

9

Madrid, May 15
. Noël Chandler sat in the kitchen of his elegant two-bedroom flat, sipping strong tea, catching up on the rugby news in the London
Daily Telegraph
, getting ready to begin his day. The odd thing about this very British domestic scene was that it was taking place in Spain's capital city, and Noël was off to meet a ticket scalper in a tapas bar and then attend a bullfight. Although a Welshman by birth, Noël was one of the most maniacal bullfighting aficionados on the planet, a man who had attended more than 940 bullfights over the preceding seven years, an average of around 135 corridas a year, sometimes camping out at
feria
after
feria
, other times driving through the night to follow the exploits of a single matador who'd caught his eye.

Like most bull-obsessed people born in nonbullfighting countries, Noël attended his first corrida on a whim during a vacation and underwent a life-changing, semireligious conversion on the spot. “Looking back, I almost immediately became entranced,” said Noël of that corrida, which he saw in 1959 when he was twenty-five. “At first I was captivated by the bulls. But then my interest in the whole thing deepened and I came to regard bullfighting as a world I wanted to inhabit.” Noël would go on to organize his entire adult life around bullfighting. He chose a career in computers to earn enough money to feed his habit, took postings in remote foreign offices where his protracted disappearances to Spain wouldn't be noticed, divorced his wife when the relationship got in the way of his obsession, and retired to Madrid at the earliest possible moment to follow the bulls and matadors around Spain.

Noël referred to bullfighting as his “work,” and he treated it seriously, reading all he could on the subject and spending his time, money, and energy traveling to see the best corridas. After decades of such devotion he had transformed himself into a consummate expert, not unlike a world-class connoisseur of art, music, or wine. Although he wore his knowledge lightly and almost never bragged about it or showed it off, Noël was an excellent judge of bulls and had wide-ranging taste in matadors. Unlike most English-speaking aficionados, Noël lived in Spain, was fluent in Spanish, had many Spanish friends, and owned flats in Madrid and Pamplona, where he'd been a great bull runner in his day and had lately become something of an elder statesman among the non-Spanish regulars of that city's
feria
.

Ray Mouton summed up Noël this way in
Pamplona
, his book about the running-of-the-bulls festival. “Though he does not talk a lot about
toreo
,” Mouton wrote, “there is no question among critics and aficionados that Chandler knows as much about bullfighting and running the bulls as anyone . . . He is the exception, the foreigner who does know and understand these things the way the Spanish do.”

Mouton was right. Noël saw the bullfight as a Spaniard would, not as a picturesque escape from everyday life, but as a part of everyday life. In fact, bullfighting had become more a part of Noël's life than it was for all but a handful of Spanish fans. Yet while Noël could sometimes seem like a Spaniard with a British accent, he remained something of an outsider wherever he went. He was an Englishman in Wales, a Welshman in England, a Spaniard in the British Isles, a Brit in Spain, and a non-torero inside the bull world. As much as he understood the Spanish way of being an aficionado, Noël was an aficionado in his own way. Few Spanish fans traveled beyond their native city to see a bullfight, the way Noël did. In Spanish culture the bullfight is something meant to be enjoyed as part of the hometown
feria
. A fiercely parochial people, the Spanish give their allegiance to family and friends first, then to city and province, and only then to Spain. For that reason, the average Bilbaíno bullfighting fan has as little urge to see a bullfight in Málaga as the average Malagueño does to see a bullfight in Bilbao.

Noël also betrayed his non-Spanish roots in the way he'd become friendly with bullfighters, something most Spaniards would never dream of doing. Toreros are celebrities in Spain, but in a much quieter way than movie stars or pop singers or soccer heroes are. The torero plays a special role in Spanish culture, one that requires the maintenance of a certain level of dignity. For the most part, bullfighters do not appear in ads or commercials, nor are they regular guests on chat shows. Aficionados idolize bullfighters, but they do not usually stalk them or dream of being their friend. It is okay for women and children to loiter in hotel lobbies hoping for a kiss or a free publicity photo from their favorite matador, but that is about as far as the adulation goes.