Death and the Sun (32 page)

“Fine!” he shouted. “If that's the way it is, I'll go eat by myself and then you'll be twelve.” Poli and Joselito went over to sit with Fran at the small table he moved to, but he was still seething, and everyone ate in silence with heads down—especially me, since I was obviously the thirteenth person and therefore the cause of all the trouble.

Sometime during the meal my cell phone rang. It was my mother-in-law calling me from New York. My wife, Megan, had fallen and broken her big toe and needed me at home. We had a large and floppy baby boy, and we had stairs in our house, and Megan wasn't sure she could carry my son up and down. I couldn't speak to her just then because she was in the emergency room, but the message was: book a flight and call her later with the details. I hung up and told everyone what had happened, and they began giving me a hard time. Mostly this was a joke. Everyone was laughing. But it was serious too, the way it had been with Jesús. They wanted to know why I wasn't more upset. My poor wife had hurt herself—where was my sympathy? I pointed out that a broken toe wasn't exactly cancer. With some sarcasm I said my wife had broken her elbow in about fifteen places a few years before, a much worse injury, and we had somehow weathered the storm. She would probably survive a broken toe.

Pepe Luis was sobbing with laughter. He called me over to him. “You aren't a very lucky fellow, are you?” he said as everyone else laughed along. Then he pulled out his wallet and handed me a small card with a photograph of a statue of the Virgin Mary, a talisman to raise my
buena suerte
quotient. I turned to Fran and asked him in English if I should mention that I was Jewish. He was not laughing. He was sitting quietly at his table. He smiled at me and said no. I thanked Pepe Luis and went upstairs to pack. I had a flight out of Pamplona that morning at five.

 

 

 

 

THIRD THIRD

SEPTEMBER—OCTOBER

 

Being a
matador de toros
is much more difficult than I had imagined it would be, but also much more beautiful.

 

—
FRANCISCO RIVERA ORDÓÑEZ

28

Ronda, September 6
. The moment I left Spain, Fran began cutting ears like a demon. There was no single explanation for this. It was a confluence of several factors. He was beginning to achieve some emotional detachment from his marital situation; he'd nudged his elbow back into usable shape; he was back in practice with real bulls and live audiences; and he was having
buena suerte
in the bulls he was drawing. Fran cut three ears in Játiva on August 20, two ears in Antequerra on the twenty-third, and a single ear in Alcalá de Henares on the twenty-fourth. In Linares, on August 28—the fifty-fifth anniversary of Manolete's fatal goring in that ring—Fran clicked with his second bull and cut two ears. Noël was there and said it was Fran's best performance of the season. After Linares he got two ears in Requena on the thirtieth and an ear on the first of September in Ejea de los Caballeros.

I returned to Spain as fast as I could, switching planes in London for a direct flight to Málaga. The local
feria
was over by the time I arrived, and it was odd to see the streets quiet and the old bullring empty. Noël picked me up the next morning and we headed for Ronda, where Fran was scheduled to preside over the Corrida Goyesca the following day. My plan was to see the bullfight in Ronda and hop on the cuadrilla bus for the last few weeks of the season. Things seemed to be going Fran's way again, and the end of the season was shaping up to be a happy time. In the month since Fran's return from injury, he had climbed two steps up the
escalafón
to tenth place, with forty-six corridas and thirty-three ears. Best of all, he was triumphing again and September was a month packed with important
ferias
. If Fran could cut some ears in Valladolid, Barcelona, Murcia, Sevilla, and Logroño he might be able to turn the season around.

Whatever happened, September was going to be interesting, because Fran would be forced to confront his complicated history in two emotionally charged corridas. The first was the
goyesca
in Ronda on the seventh; the second was a bullfight in Pozoblanco on the twenty-sixth. The
goyesca
was important to Fran because of the great bullfighting history of Ronda, his family connection to Ronda and the
goyesca
, and because this bullfight took place each year in the ring where his grandfather's ashes lay buried, under the sand where the bulls emerge from the bullpen gate. The Pozoblanco corrida meant a lot too, because it would take place where Fran's father had been fatally wounded, on the eighteenth anniversary of his death, and because the bulls Fran would face that afternoon came from the same ranch that had bred the killer bull Avispado.

Noël eased his black Audi sedan out of the snarl of Málaga's morning rush hour, traversed the hills that divide the coast from the interior, crossed the plain behind the hills, and came to Serranía de Ronda, the rough mountain range with the old city perched atop two peaks, like a fortress. When the road began to twist up into the mountains toward the gates of the city, I tried calling the cuadrilla to see about hooking up with the bus. Antonio was not answering his mobile number. Nacho picked up right away, but when I announced myself he told me to call the
apoderado
.

That was odd.

“I don't want to bother Pepe Luis with my travel plans,” I said.

“Just call the
apoderado
,” Nacho said. Then he hung up.

Something about calling Pepe Luis felt wrong to me, maybe even impolite. It seemed to upend the natural hierarchy of the cuadrilla. Surely, my presence on the bus was something for Nacho or Antonio to arrange. This was all far below Pepe Luis's pay grade. I phoned Nacho again.

“Call the
apoderado
,” he repeated, his voice rising. Then he hung up again.

I put the telephone in my lap and stared out at the mountain scenery for a moment, gathering my thoughts. The phone rang. It was Pepe Luis, and before I could get a word in, he began to speak. “You are a good person,” he said in that high, nasal, air-raid siren of a voice of his, clipping off the ends of words in his deep Andalucían accent, “but you know that bullfighters have their superstitions.”

Pepe Luis said certain people in the cuadrilla—he wouldn't name names—were worried that I was bringing Fran bad luck. When I was around, Fran did nothing, nothing, and more nothing. And the minute I went away, Fran started cutting ears. So, Pepe Luis said, it would be better for everyone if I got around on my own. “You may continue with your work,” he said. “But traveling with us? No way.”

He apologized. He said he was sorry it had to be like this and assured me it wasn't personal. I told him it was no problem. Then I asked how severe my quarantine was going to be. Was I banned from speaking to the cuadrilla? From saying hello? Pepe Luis told me not to worry. He said he and the boys were happy to sit down with me and have a few beers anytime we crossed paths. But I was bad luck and they were throwing me off the bus for good. End of story.

We pulled into Ronda and Noël and I stored our gear in our respective hotels and went for a walk. Ronda is small, and within minutes we had bumped into various members of the Rivera Ordóñez entourage. When we asked them about my banishment, Nacho, Juani, Antonio, and Poli swore up and down that they didn't think I was bad luck, didn't want me off the bus, and furthermore denied that anyone in the cuadrilla wanted me off. Then we went to see Fran at his hotel, and he too pleaded ignorance of the situation—although he seemed not at all surprised by it and quite amused as well. In full prince mode he took pains to assure me that as far as he was concerned I'd done nothing wrong, and he would be glad to call Pepe Luis and have me reinstated on the bus. I was tempted, but said no. My presence was causing more of a stir than it should have. The time had come to travel on my own.

We left Fran and meandered around the hard and lovely town. Ronda's two halves were set on plateaus atop facing mountain peaks, separated by a brooding ravine with only a narrow stone bridge to join them. The view from the bridge was dramatic. Tumbledown houses rimmed the sides of one peak, then came the deep cleft of the ravine, then the other side of the ravine with an open square and the bullring, with its white walls and red-tiled roof and its statues of El Niño de la Palma and Antonio Ordóñez in front. Wreaths lay on the statues with ribbons that read,
In memoriam, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren
. Gardens ran down to the edge of the plateau. The view was of the glum mountains all around, the pleasant farmland in the valley, the fields spreading in patches of burnt yellow and green, and all of it growing smoky as day blurred into evening and glimmering lights came on in the farmhouses below.

It was exquisite and sad. Ronda was changing. Germans were buying up the fields and farms, and the historic
goyesca
was not what it had been. The Ordóñez family had founded the
goyesca
to celebrate Pedro Romero, but the corrida quickly became a celebration of the greatness of Antonio Ordóñez. He had performed in the
goyesca
most seasons from 1954 to 1980, and during that time it was one of the signature events in Spain, a lure for celebrities, jet-set types, and hard-core bull nuts like Noël Chandler. But the
goyesca
had lost some glamour after Antonio stopped appearing in it, and even more so after his death in 1998. By the start of the new millennium many of the chic people had forgotten about Ronda, and the aficionados that Noël had known were too old, too tired, or too dead to show up anymore. It seemed that evening that Ronda was full of ghosts. Most imposing of all was the ghost of Antonio Ordóñez.

 

The wall along the main passageway under the seats in the monumental bullring in Madrid is lined with plaques commemorating famous matadors. Some of these toreros were minor stars who, for whatever reason, had been favorites of the Madrid public. Others were big stars in their day whose accomplishments have faded from the minds of all but a few history buffs. Still others—a bare handful—were true
figuras de epoca
, so great that they have come to define their eras and are remembered by aficionados everywhere. Each of these plaques features a portrait of a matador and a small statement about him. Most of these statements say generic things such as, “He was the pride of [insert hometown here].” The text of the plaque for Antonio Ordóñez is a bit different. It reads, “Antonio Ordóñez y Araujo, master of masters, the pride of bullfighting.”

As Kenneth Tynan wrote in his 1959
Sports Illustrated
profile of Antonio, the title
figura de epoca
is not bestowed on the man who earns the most money during his career, or is the bravest, or has the best technique. A
figura de epoca
must have all of these, and endure at the top of his game for years, and have his own inimitable style. In the twentieth century there were no more than a half dozen matadors who might be considered
figuras de epoca
, and only four would make everyone's list. In the teens there was Joselito, the greatest practitioner of the old technique of the first two centuries of bullfighting, and Juan Belmonte, who discarded that technique and changed the game. In the thirties and forties, Manuel Rodríguez—Manolete—overwhelmed Spain with the brutal, tragic force of his personality. Then, in the fifties and sixties, there was Ordóñez, a matador who seemed to be in touch with the essence of classic bullfighting.

He was tall, handsome, and knock-kneed, with a commanding personality and a style that was at once forceful and refined. Antonio did all the passes without an ounce of posturing, fakery, or guile. He did everything by the book and made it look new again. After seeing Antonio for the first time, in Pamplona in 1953, Hemingway made this oft-quoted assessment: “I could tell he was great from the first long slow pass he made with the cape. It was like seeing all the great cape handlers, and there were many, alive and fighting again except that he was better.”

Like his father, El Niño, and his grandson, Fran, Antonio was a complex person. He dropped out of school at fourteen, saying that a great matador needed to write just well enough to “sign checks,” but he loved opera and spoke French. He was as Spanish as Spanish could be, but he was one of the only international Spanish stars of the Franco era. He killed bulls for a living, but more than any other matador in history, his performances expressed a sense of collaboration between man and animal. “For me the bull is a friend,” Antonio once said, “a great friend, who I am mortally afraid of in the ring.” Or, as Antonio's good friend Orson Welles once said, “With Antonio, each pass asserts not ‘How great I am!' but ‘How great we are!'”

Like El Niño and like Fran, Antonio was shy by nature but had an absolute belief in his own brilliance, and would lapse into a cold fury when he thought this was being questioned. He could be kind one minute and cruel the next. Pepe Luis Segura remembers an evening in the 1970s when he found himself on a drinking binge with Antonio. They weren't friends, just taurine acquaintances, but as the night wore on, Pepe Luis was moved to unburden himself to the older man. Pepe Luis was still working as a matador then, but was failing to convince the promoters, critics, or fans that he was a great matador. Unable to earn a decent wage in the ring, he'd been forced to develop his side business of breeding and selling guard dogs. “Why has this happened to me, Maestro?” Pepe Luis complained.

Antonio, who was already retired and a legend, patted him on the shoulder and told him things were not as bad as they seemed. “Whatever you do in life, it is important to be the best at it. So don't worry, Pepe Luis. I am the best bullfighter and you can be the best dog trainer.”