Death and the Sun (23 page)

A few matadors place the banderillas themselves, and some of them are great artists of this phase of bullfighting. When a matador places his own sticks, he does so alone in the ring, without help from his colleagues, and the performance is always accompanied by music. In many ways, the season when I followed Fran was the season of the matador-banderillero. The undisputed king of the rings that year was Julián López, El Juli, who placed his own sticks, and the new star was a former ski jumper from Granada named David Fandila, El Fandi, who was thought to be one of the best banderilleros to come along. Having said that, most matadors in Spain leave the task of placing banderillas to their assistants, and most assistant bullfighters are indifferent or even frankly cowardly in their performance with the sticks, which suits their matadors just fine, because it doesn't take the spotlight away from them.

When the banderilleros place the sticks, there is a strict division of labor. In Fran's cuadrilla it went as follows. For the first bull, Poli was behind the cape and Joselito placed the first and third pairs, with José María placing the middle pair. For the second bull, Joselito had the cape, while Poli took pairs one and three and José María the middle pair again. It is important that banderillas be placed on both the left and right sides of the bull, and most banderilleros specialize in working to a particular side. Poli and Joselito were left-side banderilleros; José María was a right-sider. Poli was a master with the cape, but the best thing one could say about his banderillas was that they were effective. José María was short and muscled with the slope-shouldered grace of a boxer, which he was in his spare time. He was a good athlete, but rarely thrilled with his work. Joselito lacked Poli's skill with the cape, but after a few rough spots early in the season he had begun to show that he was a classy performer in banderillas.

In public Fran was careful not to praise his cuadrilla, preferring to keep them a little off balance so they would work hard to stay in his good graces. In private, however, he admitted he was pleased with his new team. He always had Poli, the man who knew him best and could be counted on to lift his spirits with a well-timed joke or remark. José Maria was solid in the ring and a good man. Above all, Fran felt a special kinship with Joselito, who he thought exemplified the right way to be a torero.

The bullfighting business could be awful. It was filled with petty jealousies, fraud, and a kind of tacky, second-rate showbiz atmosphere. Still, many toreros carried with them a vision of what their profession should be. Fran believed that when you became a torero, you committed yourself as an artist in mind, body, and spirit. To be a torero was to conduct yourself with grace and dignity at all times. To be a torero was to carry with you the tragic spirit of your art, to study it, to live for it, and, if called upon, to die for it. This was a way of life that Fran found beautiful, and it was even more beautiful when encountered in a humble banderillero, who had given himself to bullfighting even though he knew the rewards would be small.

“I like the way Joselito thinks about bullfighting,” Fran said. “It's the way I think about it. You see, bullfighting is very special. The bullfighter is a different kind of man.”

18

Alicante, June 20
. The red van and the green minibus pulled out of Alicante around two in the morning, and the wheels rolled through the misty night, up the Spanish coast, past Valencia and Barcelona and across the Pyrenees into France. From there the road took them farther north, skirting Perpignan and Beziers, and then east with the bending of the continent, past the ancient Roman provincial cities of Nimes and Arles, and finally south to the shore and the small town of Istres, in the suburbs of Marseille, where there was a bullfight the next day. The toreros were not happy about having to spend time in the south of France, a part of the world that many people find rather congenial but Spanish bullfighters disdain because it isn't Spain and because they don't like the food.

“There's nothing good to eat there,” Juani explained as he paid the toll on the first French highway after the Spanish border. “The only thing they have is duck, duck, duck, duck.”

Fran had just woken up, and I asked him if he felt the same way. “Of course not,” he said in English. “Look who you are talking to.”

The Spanish are as intensely focused on their food as they are on their culture, language, and traditions, which means they are quite happy to eat Spanish cuisine all day, every day. Chinese restaurants, for example, have never done big business in Spain. But while they can be dogmatic about food, and they care about the freshness and quality of their agricultural products, especially those of their home region, the Spanish do not have it in them to be food snobs the way the French and some Italians are. They don't stand on ceremony when it comes to eating. They eat at all hours. Breakfast can be had anytime from dawn until noon, lunch from noon to five, and dinner from about eight until the early morning hours. Their cooking is rough and simple: good grilled meat and fish, fresh eggs, rice cooked with meat and seafood, soups, stews, and the famous cured Serrano ham. Contrary to what you read in books by Americans, the Spanish do not like spicy food. The wines and olive oil are underrated, but Spain does not have the kind of cheese culture one finds in France, and the bread is atrocious.

The big meal accompanied by big conversation is the central act of Spanishness, even more so than the Mass, the evening stroll, or the midday nap, three traditional activities that are fading. Spaniards love to chat, to argue, to opine and orate, especially over a table of good food. Both the Spanish language and the Spanish way of life contribute to this. The language is expressive, formal, yet poetic in a way that English is not. The Spanish lifestyle is structured to allow extended, unhurried time for meals and sitting in cafés and talking. Spain is a country where food and wine are cheap and plentiful, and a place to have a nibble, a smoke, and a sip can be found on every street corner. Much of life is taken up with sitting around such places, and a Spaniard would rather have one more drink or bite to eat than an extra hour of sleep.

 

Istres turned out to be a small municipality of medieval origin, situated on the shore of a large brackish lake with an outlet to the Mediterranean. Today it is best known for its proximity to a military airfield. Despite the efforts of the locals, Istres was not brimming over with charm, even during its so-called
feria
, an ersatz event inaugurated that year as a ploy to attract tourists. Fran and his entourage arrived in midmorning and settled into a brand-new motel off a highway on the outskirts of town. Built on the American model, the motel lacked a restaurant, which would be unthinkable at a European-style inn. But the dilemma of where to eat was resolved when a deputation from Istres's club of bullfight fans invited the cuadrilla to a celebratory lunch.

The meal was not a success. The day was swampy in a Florida Everglades sort of way. The restaurant was beset by flies and packed with red-faced Frenchmen drinking pastis, anise-flavored liquor that turns cloudy when water is added, as it invariably is. The proprietress didn't speak a word of Spanish, which turned out to be a blessing. The first thing to arrive at the table was a green salad. Plain and unadorned, it differed from the classic Spanish salad, which is always dolled up with bits of corn, onion, tomato, canned tuna, and egg. The bullfighters didn't touch it. Then came a generous plate of cold cuts with a pot of French mustard nestled in its center. This was also a no-go for the toreros, because the tray didn't include Spanish ham and Spanish sausage.

One of the Spaniards asked for cheese. The restaurant was probably saving it for dessert, but the waitress brought out a plate of soft, creamy French cheese. This was also rejected, since it didn't resemble the hard cheese from La Mancha that the toreros were used to. By the time the main course arrived, both the Spaniards and their French hosts were getting frustrated. In theory, the entrée should have been acceptable. It was steak and fries. Unfortunately for all concerned, Poli sniffed at his plate, looked around, and said in Spanish, “Maybe this is horse.” The meal was done for. After a respectable amount of time the bullfighters retreated to their motel.

That evening everyone gathered to set out and find some dinner, and while he was waiting for the cuadrilla to assemble Fran talked about his upcoming corrida in Pamplona on July 10. Every morning of the Pamplona
feria
the bulls that are to be killed in the arena that afternoon are run through the streets of town, and anyone who wants to can run with them. Many people are injured each day, and once in a while someone is killed. The last time this happened, the victim was an American. Few professional toreros run in these
encierros
, as the bull runs are called. Bullfighters risk their lives with bulls for money, and don't need the added danger of being surrounded by amateurs, many of them drunk, many of them non-Spaniards. But like his father and grandfather before him, Fran often ran the
encierros
, partly to honor his forebears and partly because, like them, he enjoyed it.

“You must run with me this year,” Fran told me. “It will be great.”

I shuffled my feet a bit and said something about having a wife and child.

Fran smiled. “Don't worry,” he said, the picture of reason and judgment. “I run far from the horns.”

I asked him what he meant by “far.”

“Oh, a few meters.”

That sounded too close to me, so I mumbled more excuses.

Fran shot me a look, clearly exasperated with my un-Spanish show of fear. “I know!” he said with a wicked smile. “You will run with the bulls, you will get caught, and you will die. Then I will write a book about a dead writer.”

We left it there. But I knew I was expected to run, and if I didn't, I'd be branded as the coward I was.

That evening, Fran decided to go to McDonald's for dinner. So there they were, a hardened group of matadors, picadors, and banderilleros, eating Happy Meals in a plastic picnic area in the south of France, where one can dine about as well as anywhere on earth. The night was cool and the meal pleasant, until the end, when Poli discovered that the big craggy-faced picador López had removed the desserts from some of the Happy Meals and eaten them himself. The two got into a shouting match, which had to be broken up by the
apoderado
. “It's just like summer camp,” Fran observed.

 

Istres, June 22
. The southern French border is closer to the great bullfighting land of Andalucía than New York is to Chicago. So it should come as no surprise that there have been Spanish-style bullfights in the south of France for at least two centuries. Today the bullfight is on the rise in France, and more corridas are given each year and more bullrings are being built. There are now about thirty
plazas de toros
on French soil, all of them in the south. Bullfights are held in the two-thousand-year-old Roman arenas at Nîmes and Arles. Béziers and Mont-de-Marsan have distinguished nineteenth-century rings, and there are a number of contemporary
plazas
in smaller towns, among them Magesq (opened in 1989), La Brede (1999), and Istres, which would officially open on the day of Fran's corrida.

Northern France has had its bullfights too. In 1889 a group of investors, led by the duke of Veragua, built a ring on Rue Pergolese in central Paris. It accommodated twenty-two thousand spectators and had electric lighting and a retractable roof, and the corridas held there led to a flowering of interest in bullfights in the north. There were strong protests as well. Animal rights groups brought many lawsuits demanding the abolition of the bullfight in France, and in the mid-1890s the national legislature passed a law banning the bulls. But bullfighting supporters worked to repeal the law, taking their case all the way to France's highest court, which ruled that the bullfight was indeed to be outlawed everywhere in France, with the exception of the south. The justices thought the bullfight was such a part of the indigenous culture there that it should be allowed to go on. This is the legal situation today.

The bullring in Istres was spanking new and rather pretty, with a graceful white awning that kept the expensive seats in shade. The program did not open with a traditional Spanish bullfighting march; instead the band played the “Toreador Song” from the French opera
Carmen
. Otherwise it was a regular corrida. The crowd was small. The bulls were bad. A young French matador cut the only ear. The six bulls died their deaths and the cuadrilla hurried back to the motel to shower, change, and get the hell out of France as soon as possible and back to the only real country in the world. For dinner they sent Juani to a supermarket, where he found ham and cheese and bread and beer that approximated the Spanish versions of those foods.

“Next year when we come,” Pepe Luis said, “we can bring a barbecue and grill our own food.”

As the cuadrilla minibus was being loaded, Joselito sat with his gangly frame draped over a chair in the motel lobby. He was studying a sheet of paper that had Fran's upcoming corridas listed on it. There were six dates left in June, then another ten in July.

“You have a lot of work coming up,” someone said.

Joselito folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “
Hombre
, there's no point in worrying about the future,” he said. “In this business you never know what is going to happen.”

19

Algeciras, June 29
. In the days following the corrida in France, Fran and company drove back to Spain and made a tour of Castilla-León, the region just north of Madrid. They had no luck with a pair of Montalvo bulls before a half-empty
plaza
in Burgos on June 23, or with Luis Algarra bulls in the packed ring of León the next day. On June 25 they were down in the westernmost edge of Extremadura, in Badajoz, where Fran cut an ear off an excellent Jandilla bull, and it was back up to Castilla-León on the twenty-sixth, where Fran's poor showing with the sword in the bullring in Soria cost him any chance of trophies from the Arauz de Robles bulls he'd drawn. Next stop was Sevilla, for two days' rest, then on the road once again for a corrida of Núñez del Cuvillo bulls in Algeciras on the twenty-ninth.