Death and the Sun (18 page)

When the pairs had been set, the men withdrew into the office of the bullring promoter, which was in the arena's bowels just behind the ticket booth. Old bullfight posters were taped to the damp brick walls, and the promoter, the herdsman of the bullring corrals, and a representative of the local government sat around a beat-up metal desk, smoking. One of the banderilleros tore three slips of paper off a large sheet and wrote the numbers of a different pair of bulls on each slip, crumpling and tossing them into the flat-topped Spanish cowboy hat of the corral herdsman, which sat upturned on the table. With everybody watching, the herdsman shook the hat to mix up the three balls of paper.

“Good luck, gentlemen,” he said.

The banderillero of the matador with the most seniority reached into the hat, picked out a ball of paper, and read off the numbers of the bulls his matador would now have to kill in the corrida—and the bullring promoter recorded the numbers in a ledger and on some government forms. Then the banderillero of the second matador in seniority picked a piece of paper, and then the banderillero of the junior matador. When this was done the assistants left the room to tell their masters what had happened.

Two of Fran's banderilleros—gray-haired José Jesús Sánchez, whose nickname was Hipólito, and gangly José Antonio Gutiérrez, whose nickname was Joselito, walked out to the street. In 1903, when the ring was built, it was on Tolosa's outskirts. But the town had caught up with the ring since then, and was all around it, a collection of low-rise housing complexes nestled in the green hills. The toreros walked down a short avenue lined with apartment buildings, their windows shuttered against the midday sun. At the end of the avenue stood their hotel. Hipólito, who was known as Poli, and Joselito walked through the lobby to the parking lot out back, where they found Fran sunning himself against a wall. Pepe, the driver, was washing the cuadrillas minibus nearby, and the two manservants, Nacho and Antonio, were running around doing errands.

“How are the bulls?” Fran asked, his eyes lidded against the sun.

“The first one is big,” Joselito said, “with horns that go up like this.” He gestured with two fingers, pointing them up in the air. “It's a fairly controllable animal,” he concluded.

“What color is its coat?” Fran asked.

“Black,” Joselito replied.

“And the second?”

“Larger, but with comfortable horns, a little up and in.”

Again Joselito used his fingers to mimic the bull's armament. Horns that curve inward are thought to be safer—“more comfortable,” in bullfighting argot—for the matador because they hook away from the body and are less likely to catch him as he works with the cape. Just then, Fran's
apoderado
, Pepe Luis, appeared, took a quick look at Nacho, and clucked.

“Matador,” Pepe Luis said, “look at those shoes.”

Nacho wore a pink tennis shirt, blue jeans, and leather slippers with toes that pointed up in a vaguely
Arabian Nights
way.

“They are very comfortable,” Nacho said defensively.

“And very ugly,” Fran added. “How can you wear them?”

Everybody laughed.

 

Fran seemed to be in much better spirits, and the heaviness that had hung over him during the time of the important corridas in Sevilla and Madrid had passed with the spring weather. Not that his life was perfect. The April and May corridas were failures that would haunt him for another year; he'd slipped to ninth on the
escalafón
, with nineteen corridas; and his family troubles continued to receive top billing in the gossip press. Eugenia had just given an interview in
Semana
in which she said she still believed in love but was continuing the legal process of separating from Fran. A few days later the magazine
Interviú
hit the newsstands with a cover photo of Fran's mother, topless beside the pool of a North African resort. “Splendor in Tangiers” was the inside headline. Finally,
Sorpresa!
reported that Fran had lost his temper with some photographers who were stalking him on a playdate with his daughter.

“I would like to maintain, at least at the margins, my privacy,” Fran was quoted as saying. “I am not my mother. You see, I have not sold an exclusive interview or photo to anyone, ever.”

Three weeks had passed since Fran's second corrida in Madrid, and during that time Fran had performed in the cities of Granada and Toledo; in Plasencia, where he'd cut an ear; and in Elda, where he'd cut two ears. Then, in the three weeks following his corrida in Tolosa, he was scheduled to take part in nine bullfights in Spain and one in France, a series of dates that would culminate in his most important appearance of midsummer, an afternoon of responsibility on July 10 in the big ring in Pamplona at the height of the running-of-the-bulls
feria
.

The hotel in Tolosa had a cool basement restaurant, which was lined with bulging casks of hard apple cider, and Fran's cuadrilla assembled there for lunch around one o'clock. There were twelve of them, and Fran was paying every one of their salaries. Fran sat at a round table with his manservants Nacho and Antonio, the old picador Francisco López with his wooden-Indian face, Fran's driver Juani, the manager's driver Jesús, the junior picador Diego Ortiz with his big hands, and the
apoderado
himself, Pepe Luis Segura. The three banderilleros—Poli, Joselito, and slope-shouldered José María Tejero—arrived late, as always, and took a smaller table to one side with Pepe, who drove the team minibus.

Keeping track of a large group of Spaniards can be confusing. It seems that most men in Spain are called Juan, Antonio, Ignacio, Francisco, Manuel, or José, while most women are Ana, Teresa, or Maria. Last names too are limited. For this reason, the Spanish employ nicknames and diminutives and use the surnames of both mother and father. Without such measures it would be hard to distinguish people. In Fran's cuadrilla there were five Josés, but the banderilleros were called Joselito, José María, and Poli; the driver went by Pepe, a nickname for José; and the
apoderado
was a José Luis, who used Pepe Luis. Both the matador and the senior picador were Franciscos, but one was Fran and the other was often called Paco. Then there was a Juan, known as Juani, and an Ignacio, known as Nacho, and to round things out an Antonio, a Diego, and a Jesús.

Many books about bullfighting insist that toreros eat lightly before a corrida because of the fear, and because a full stomach would impede any surgical procedure that might be needed after an injury. It is a dramatic detail, and most writers repeat it. But it isn't true. At lunch after lunch, all season long, Fran's team consumed copious repasts before every bullfight, as did the cuadrillas of other matadors. In Tolosa they had a three-course meal consisting of soup, salad, and plates of asparagus and omelets to start; steaks, chops, and fish for the main course; and ice cream and cake for dessert. Many drank beer or wine. To be fair, Fran usually ate a bit less. That afternoon he confined himself to tomato juice and a plate of squid stuffed with rice in a sauce of its own ink.

The conversation at lunch was much like the conversation at any precorrida lunch. As with everything else in bullfighting, the way bullfighters relate to one another is governed by tradition. There was a well-defined hierarchy in a typical cuadrilla, and everyone understood his role. The matador was stern and aloof, a prince among his subjects. His banderilleros were his knights, his brothers in arms, and there was always a senior banderillero who acted as a trusted counselor. Picadors were a breed apart and kept to themselves. The
apoderado
might be a father figure, or akin to an older brother, or a mere employee, depending on the matador's age, his status in the profession, and the age and professional standing of the
apoderado
. Finally, the rest of the staff—the drivers and the manservants—often were the butt of jokes. They were considered lower-class buffoons, a recognizable stock character that has had an honored place in Spanish culture at least since Miguel de Cervantes created the manservant Sancho Panza in
Don Quixote
.

In Fran's cuadrilla, it was Juani who performed the main Sancho Panza role. Like Sancho, Juani came from a small town, and like Sancho, Juani's education and outlook were confined to what could be learned within the boundaries of that small town. Like Don Quixote, Fran was alternately exasperated and amused by the antics of his servant, and like Don Quixote Fran was sometimes bested in conversation and in life by the servant's street smarts. But while Don Quixote tended to treat Sancho Panza as he thought a knight should treat his squire, Fran teased Juani as an older brother does his younger sibling.

Juani was to be married that October, at the end of the bullfighting season, and he'd spent most of the spring sick with worry over the mounting cost of his wedding and trying to devise various schemes and strategies to make it a more economical event.

“One thing's for sure,” Juani said. “I'm not inviting too many people.”

Fran greeted this news with a look of deep concern. “But you have many, many guests to invite,” he said.

There were knowing smiles around the table, and Juani looked more worried. Fran started running through a list of people whom Juani must invite or else court social disaster and perhaps expulsion from Fran's inner circle. The list included Fran's family, which was enormous on both sides, and the family of Fran's father's second wife, and all of Fran's many friends from around the world. As the list grew, Juani squirmed in his seat. Then he saw the others laughing at him.

“Okay,” Juani said to Fran. “And you'll come with all your girlfriends.”

Nobody laughed.

“I'll be coming alone,” Fran said quietly.

 

There was another table of bullfighters across the restaurant from Fran and his cuadrilla, but they weren't laughing or fooling around. They were eating without talking, their heads down. At the center of their table was a clean-cut matador named Francisco Marco. He was twenty-eight years old, the same age as Fran, and was what the Spanish would call a
torero de la tierra
, a local bullfighter. This meant Marco had some fame in the region where he'd been raised, but nowhere else. Marco was from Navarra, the region next door to the Basque Country, and those were the two parts of Spain where he worked, performing, in a good year, eight or nine times. This was not enough work to support a fixed team, and so Marco used picadors and banderilleros hired by the day, men whose luck with the bulls had been as hard or harder than his own.

By contrast, Fran had always been among the top twenty matadors, those who appear in more than forty-two corridas a season in Spain and France and are thus required by Spanish union regulations to keep a full cuadrilla of five assistant bullfighters and pay those assistants the mandated top rate, about a thousand dollars a bullfight. The date in Tolosa was a minor one for Fran and his team, members of bullfighting's elite. For Francisco Marco and his struggling banderilleros and picadors, men who worked day jobs to feed themselves, this was a key afternoon of the year, one of the few days they could call themselves toreros—an afternoon of responsibility if ever there was one. The Marco and Rivera camps traveled on two different paths of the bullfight world. They did not speak to each other in the restaurant before the corrida, and there was no sense of foreboding when everyone finished eating and went upstairs for the siesta.

14

Tolosa, June 16
. The bullring smelled of earth and wood. It was a pretty little ring of wooden beams and whitewashed plaster, and it seated five thousand, which felt painfully small after a week of corridas in big, old Las Ventas. It was also striking how different the fans were. In big rings like Madrid's, the audience was composed of adults, typically couples and groups of men. In small
plazas
like Tolosa's, however, whole families attended. It was not unusual to see babies, toddlers, and school-age children happily sitting through the bloody deaths of six bulls. No one had told them they should be horrified by it all, so they weren't. The bullfight should have been an attractive one to local fans: it featured Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, the local kid Francisco Marco, and Juan Serrano, called Finito de Córdoba, the matador who had led the
escalafón
the year before with 122 corridas. But the stands were only two-thirds full when the matadors paraded across the ring, perhaps because the World Cup soccer matches were on television that afternoon.

True to Joselito's prediction, Fran's first bull was a manageable creature and Fran gave it a fine performance that drew
olés
and applause and finally, when the passes came smooth and linked, a serenade from the band. But Fran blew his chance at an ear when it took him numerous sword thrusts to kill. His second bull was less accommodating than his first had been, and Fran couldn't piece together a satisfying performance with his
muleta
, and he failed with the sword again before ending the bull's life. Fran had always had problems killing, and this was shaping up to be yet another afternoon ruined by his lack of regularity in this facet of bullfighting.

Francisco Marco was the matador with the least seniority, so he faced the third bull of the day. It was the biggest animal in the corrals, a high-backed bull with full-sized armament and a good defensive intelligence. This was a bull that seemed to understand that the easiest way for it to defeat the bullfighter was to ignore the urge to charge the cape and attack only when the man had come in close enough to expose his body to the horns. Seeing that he had no choice, Marco moved into the bull's immediate vicinity and offered the cape for a series of shaky
verónicas
that opened the performance. Then the trumpet sounded and in marched the picadors, who took up their classic positions beside the
barrera
fence, one picador in the shaded half of the ring, the other on the sunny side.