To Run Across the Sea (10 page)

The deals done, a man could seat himself in one of a row of golden thrones for his shoes to be polished, while dictating a letter to a scribe, nibbling at a calf’s foot from a charcoal brazier, or perhaps having his blood-pressure taken by a doctor who operated from a 1938 Studebaker, with a blow-up of an electro-cardiograph plastered by way of advertisement over his back window. Camels were debarred from the town’s centre, but while I was there, one had managed to sneak through and pass down the main street, and was cropping geraniums.

In the background the Nile moved in its last sluggish curve to the sea. Its great rival, the Amazon, is 150 miles across at its mouth, containing the Island of Marajó, roughly the size of Belgium. One could sit in a golden, plush-bottomed throne in the muddy square of El Rashid and look across the waters to the Nile’s further bank, which might have been 200 yards away. There were five months to go to the end of the dry season, by which time not a drop of the waters gathered in Ethiopia or the mountains of Equatorial Africa would reach the sea. A little would have been wasted, but the rest would have been taken up by a million gardens, their boundaries touching each other for nearly 4,000 miles. A river of life indeed.

‘W
HEN THE HORN WENT
in I felt absolutely no pain,’ Tomás Campuzano said. ‘I suspected this animal of defective vision from the first, but failed to take proper precautions. It was like being hit by an express train. I was airborne, somersaulted and landed face down, shocked and acutely surprised. I rolled over, saw one of the boys take the bull away with the cape, and the blood fountaining out. Still no pain. They shot me up with morphine in the sick-bay and then took me to Zaragoza hospital, where I spent a month.’ Tomás showed me the tremendous scar left by this close encounter with death, scrawled like an undecipherable signature up the inside of the thigh from knee to stomach. He joked continually. ‘If you are going to suffer a
cornada
, then Zaragoza is a good place. They have the best horn-wound surgeons in the country.’

Among the toreros of Spain, Tomás Campuzano is accepted as the most ready to tackle ‘difficult’ bulls, the euphemism for those with exceptionally large horns or suspected by the experts who look them over before the fight of potential unpredictability in action. For this reason there are few who have received more horn-thrusts (five to date) from the terrible Andalusian bulls with which, as a fully fledged matador, he is so often called upon to match himself. He takes part in up to fifty fights in a season. Last year was outstandingly successful. A torero who has given an impressive display with a bull may be awarded as trophies one ear, both ears—or, in exceptional cases, even the tail of the vanquished animal. In the 1986 season, despite a wound that nearly dislocated his sword arm, Campuzano collected a grand total of eighty-six ears and eight tails for a series of uniformly brilliant performances.

He started informal training at the age of seven at whatever bull-farm could be persuaded to allow him to practise his cape-passes with a calf, and appeared as a professional in the ring at the legal minimum age of 17. Now aged 30, and earning about £7,500 per fight, he has reached the height of his career, a modest, friendly man who smiles a great deal, and has remained unspoiled by success.

Tomás was born in Gerena, about 10 miles from Seville. It is the archetypal Andalusian hilltop village, put together from stark, white, geometrical shapes, raised above a prairie of pale wheatfields, patched here and there with great brassy spreads of sunflowers. In Gerena the narrow streets are calm and immaculate. Dignity of appearance and personal style is much cultivated. Men walk slowly, held erect, and few women are to be seen. It is a spare, silent place, a last refuge of the Spain of the past. Almost the whole of the hill’s summit is occupied by the low-lying, blind-walled palace of José Luis García de Samanieco, the Marqués of Albacerrado, who owns all that is visible from his rooftop of the almost Siberian landscape of this region of Andalusia, as well as one of the great
ganaderías
of fighting bulls.

Tomás, whose father was once a shepherd on the estate, has moved down with his family to take over one of the large new houses at the bottom of the village. It is a place to which he returns continually between fights, and where he is a living legend, a poor boy who has shot to the top of what in rural Andalusia still remains the most glamorous, and the most honourable of professions.

The new Campuzano house is an extended and softened version of the seventeenth-century peasant dwellings that present austere profiles to the village from the top of the hill. A big sitting-room holds modern furniture of the best quality, gathered under a vast chandelier, but with the retreat from simplicity there has been a loss of strength. Otherwise custom prevails. When I visited, the voices of women and children could be heard faintly beyond the ornate doors, but only men with a certain solidity were present: Tomás’s father, still moving as if in control of sheep; an exceedingly genial brother who manages Tomás’s affairs; a couple of old sun-cured uncles leaning upon their sticks. The mother flustered in with coffee on a tray, flashed a nervous half-smile and withdrew. Tomás’s wife—clearly, from her photograph, a beauty of the highest order—did not appear.

This, in some way almost oriental, gathering was dominated by the huge mounted heads of two of Tomás’s most difficult and memorable bulls, whose challenging eyes it seemed hard to avoid. Tomás said that they were masterpieces of the taxidermist’s art, and that the facial expression—different in every bull as in every man—had been most successfully preserved. He invited me to join him on the landing half-way up the staircase, at a point where the most fearsome-looking of these animals, Abanico by name, could be viewed from precisely the angle at which Tomás had been exposed to its stare six years before in the ring at Málaga. ‘I’m off to Madrid on Monday,’ Tomás said, ‘and whenever I go on a trip I stand here and look into this brute’s eyes, and tell myself, at least they can’t throw anything at me worse than this one.’

At this point the subject of fear came up. It seemed a doubtful one to raise with a man generally accepted as among the most courageous of all toreros, but he cut across my attempts at tact. ‘Was fear something you could come to terms with?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘never.’ The fact was that it got worse and worse, strengthening with each increase of a man’s responsibilities. From the day he got married the fear increased, and now that his wife was expecting a child, it was closer again and more insistent. In summer, he said, when he could be fighting twice a week, a bullfighter’s family was constantly overshadowed by fear. While the fight was on no telephone calls to the house could be made by friends—to keep the line clear for any emergency—and only close relatives were invited into the home, to maintain what amounted to a silent vigil. They were exceedingly devout, and crucifixes and rosaries hung everywhere about the home. Another minor bullfighter who had drifted in said, ‘We take our troubles to the Virgin of Macarena. She’s a Sevillian—almost a member of the family you might say. Imagine two fights in two days. Naturally you’re praying half the time.’

The estate house of the Albacerrada bull-breeding farm is two miles up a country road from Gerena; a clean-cut example of purest Andalusian architecture. Decoration is outlawed, the atmospheric quality of these surroundings depending upon white, crystalline façades and the blue mossy shade of cactus and eucalyptus. Adjacent is a small, high-walled ring in which the cows from which the bulls are bred are subjected to a series of tests, known collectively as the
tentadero
.
Tentaderos
take place at frequent intervals during the summer months and have come to be treated as a social event, inevitably watched at Albacerrada by the Marqués and a few of his intimates. It is explained that the number of those present on such occasions is kept to a minimum to avoid distracting the animals under test.

When I arrived the testing was already under way. I looked down from the rim of the small arena at a rider on a padded horse, steel-tipped pole in hand, waiting on the far side of the ring for the entrance of a cow under test. The Marqués had just expounded the bull-breeder’s theory that taurine courage is transmitted through the female of the species, and that the male only adds strength. For this reason, only two-year-old cows are subjected to serious testing, and they are certainly no less fierce than the bulls.

The wall of the ring was painted a most profound and refulgent yellow, with the overhead sunshine rippling and showering down its uneven surface. The wall colour was intensified by that of the sand, and there was a yellow reflection in the faces of the onlookers. After a while the unearthly quality of the light seemed even to effect the mood, endowing this scene with a feeling of separateness from the surrounding world. A religious hush had fallen; the spectators were motionless and silent. An element of ritual was discernible here, a flashback perhaps to Celto-Iberian days and sacrificial bulls.

A small black cow came tearing out into the ring, slid to a standstill and swung its head from side to side in search of an adversary. It was big-horned, narrow of rump, all bone and muscle; faster in the take-off than a bull, quicker on the turn and with sharper horns. ‘Ugly customer,’ a herdsman whispered approvingly in my ear. The horseman thwacking the padding of his horse with the pole, called to the cow and it charged, crossing the ring at extreme speed, head down, horns thrust forward in the last few yards, thumped into the quilting over the horse’s flanks and threw it against the wall.

Time and again, it skewered up ineffectively with its horns while the horseman, prodding and shoving down with the shallow, testing
pic
, scored the hide over its shoulders. Failing to get through the padding it trotted off, then turned back for a second charge. The watching herdsman noted points in their books under four headings: courage, speed, reflexes, staying power; and communicated what might have been approval or disdain with inscrutable signs.

It was this performance with the horse and the cow’s indifference or otherwise to the prickings of the
pic
that sealed its fate; but when the serious business was at an end, fun for all followed with the cape. Tomás Campuzano had arrived to help the local boys add polish to their technique, conducting a series of passes with a mathematical exactitude that seemed sometimes to border on indifference. The onlookers smiled dreamily. Those that followed the master seemed agitated by comparison and a young Venezuelan bullfighter who had come along appeared a little out of his depth with a beast of this kind, or perhaps the cow was learning quickly from its mistakes.

Surely, I asked myself, the keen-eyed selectors could ask for nothing better than this animal with its limitless vigour and thirst for aggression? But, the experts detected weaknesses overlooked by the outsider, for rejection followed the completion of its trial. And so in the course of the morning six aspirant cows came and went. It was a spectacle providing its own special brand of addiction, preferred by many enthusiasts to the commercial bullfight itself. Spain’s leading painter of bullfighter posters, present on this occasion, later admitted that he never missed a
tentadero
if he could help it. Both he and Don José Luis, although a little stiffened by middle age, gave brief but confident displays with the cape and came off intact, although the Marqués’s boxer dog (always addressed in English) broke into the ritual calm with yelps of hysterical anguish at the sight of its master exposing himself to such danger. Of six cows, four rejects were subjected to the ignominy of having a few inches lopped from the end of their tails after the test. In this way they were marked for the slaughterhouse. The two accepted, to be kept for breeding, had the dangerous ends of their horns removed. Both operations—the second performed bloodily with a saw—were carried out forthwith and in view of the onlookers.

From the ring we moved back to the estate house for a snack served in the yard. This took traditional form: thick, solid potato omelettes cut into cubes to be eaten with the fingers, slivers of hard farm cheese, white wine of the last year’s vintage (still a little murky) from the estate vineyard, which, spurred on by Don José Luis’s assurance that it contained only five degrees of alcohol, guests downed like water. The informality of such occasions is much appreciated in Andalusia—and referred to approvingly as
simple
. To this slightly feudal environment Tomás Campuzano had been admitted as an admired friend. Part of the reward of a famous bullfighter is an escape into the Nirvana of classlessness.

The bulls inhabit an untidy savannah of old olives, thorn and coarse grass entered a few hundred yards from the estate house. There are upwards of 600 of them kept in two separate herds, the four-year-old
novillos
and the five-year-old bulls in the full vigour of life. Throughout the summer months their numbers dwindle steadily as the bulls are sent off, six at a time, to fight in the big city rings where the management can afford to pay for the best. For a
corrida
of six four-year-olds, the Marqués expects to be paid three million pesetas; for the five-year-olds the price is four million. He loses money on the bulls, he complains, but keeps afloat on the slight profit the estate makes from sunflower oil, wheat and olives.

All guests are taken as a matter of course to inspect the herds. They ride in a trailer drawn by a tractor from which fodder is distributed in times of dearth, and which is therefore acceptable to the bulls. The trailer has high steel sides and is heavy enough not to be turned over by a charge. The tractor’s engine is always kept running because the bulls have learned to associate its sound with food. Still, the excursion is not quite in the same bracket as a trip through a safari park because a fighting bull is more aggressive than anything encountered in the wild, and if annoyed is liable instantly and unforeseeably to charge the offending object, whether animate or otherwise. A Spanish treatise on the subject of bulls speaks of the bull’s docility on the ranch. ‘It is more than likely,’ it says, ‘that the vast majority of fighting bulls would allow themselves to be stroked. To attempt this one must put away the almost insuperable fear that their presence and proximity inspires.’ None of those present on this occasion seemed inclined to put the author’s theory to the test.