Iberia by James A. Michener
In watching a single fight I have said that it should be considered as a ritual drama, and philosophically this is correct. Occasionally one can receive from this tragic play a catharsis precisely like that described by Aristotle, and that is why so many foreign writers have been attracted to the bullfight. I have found it more practical to see the single fight as a spectacle built up of several identifiable skills, for in this way I can better judge what I am seeing. A really complete single fight would consist of six components, each performed with art, as follows: one, after the bull enters the ring and has been tested by the peons, the matador must initiate his part of the fight with a series of delicate and artistic passes with his large cape; two, the bull must then three times attack with resolute bravery the picador and horse, and the picador must handle his lance properly; three, after each pic the three matadors in proper turn must lead the bull away from the horse and execute artistic and sometimes intricate passes with their large capes; four, three separate pairs of banderillas must be placed correctly and with art; five, the matador with his muleta must build an artistic faena consisting of a series of linked passes that make sense; six, the matador must kill proudly and honorably, going in over the horn and finishing the bull with one thrust.
Like members of the Guardia Civil, their weapons poised, the bulls maintain a vigil.
Well, that makes six components for each bull or a total of thirty-six for an afternoon, and if on a given day you see out of thirty-six as many as four items properly performed, you’ve not been cheated. On some afternoons you see none. To see all six performed well on a single bull is so rare as to be historic, and to see the six performed well on each bull of the afternoon would be positively impossible. It has never happened and never will. At the beginning of the Pamplona feria in 1966, I had seen some fifteen hundred bulls fought and had never seen one on which the six components were properly performed, and I did not expect ever to do so.
These doleful facts are summarized in a saying which reports as a permanent truth: ‘Si hay toros, no hay toreros; si hay toreros, no hay toros.’ (If there are bulls, there are no bullfighters; if there are bullfighters, there are no bulls.) This applies equally to golf, to love-making, to buying stock in the Xerox Corporation and to most other human endeavors: ‘When everything looks right, some one thing is bound to go wrong.’
For the uninitiated foreigner, especially one who loves animals, a corrida is usually an unrewarding experience; he sees a confusing spectacle in which the bull appears only as a necessary and fractious evil who, after disrupting everyone’s plans, ends ignominiously as a kind of animated pincushion. The animal is without individualized personality; and it is not illogical for the foreigner seeing his first fight to hope that the bull will catch or even kill the matador, for that would introduce into the mysterious rites at least a focal point of comprehension. But when one has attended many corridas and has begun to catch a glimmer of the intricate and subtle construction of a bullfight, he begins to center his attention on the animal, and occasionally he will sense the overtones of the tremendous drama being enacted before him: the confrontation of man and primordial animal. The devotee therefore finds something of interest in every corrida, for this confrontation can take any of various forms and all are challenging.
What have I found in the Spanish bullfight? A flash of beauty, a swift development of the unexpected, a somber recollection of primitive days when men faced bulls as an act of religious faith. In the bulls I have found a symbol of power and grandeur; in the men I have seen a professionalism which is usually honorable if not always triumphant. I have never seen a corrida which did not teach me something or which did not at some point develop unexpectedly, and I am willing to settle for this limited experience. No matter how disastrous the fight, and some of them can be dreadful, there is the ancient drama of hopeful man and savage beast and the mysterious bond that exists between them.
I have stressed the professionalism of the matador because when one enters a plaza, having paid up to twenty-five dollars for the privilege, he can be reasonably assured that if a good bull thunders into the arena, the man facing it has served an apprenticeship which taught him to give a decent fight. Since top matadors earn enormous sums of money, say seven thousand dollars a fight for eighty or ninety fights a year, the competition is grueling, for the bullring is the traditional route by which boys from impoverished families attain bull ranches of their own, and fame, and wealthy wives. It is a matter of endless training, the fighting of imaginary bulls day after day in the public parks of Madrid or Sevilla. One boy grasps a pair of horns, bends over, snorts like a bull and charges into the cape or the muleta held by another boy. Hour after hour they practice, first one boy playing the bull, then another. At home they practice passes before mirrors to attain grace, and always they bum about the countryside seeking invitations to those testing exhibitions in which the young heifers of the bull ranch are thrown against picadors and matadors to see whether they are brave or not. If the heifer charges the horse bravely, and we have seen at Trujillo and Pamplona how these scrawny, awkward beasts attack, driving at any moving object time and again, she is set aside for breeding purposes. If the heifer proves faulty or unwilling to attack when hurt, she is ticketed for beef. (If you think for a moment, you will understand why it is the heifers who are tested and not the young bulls; these animals learn so quickly that if the males were tested with capes when young they would remember, and when they entered the arena against the matador they would kill him. Since the bravery of a bull is determined primarily by his mother, she must therefore be tested to see if she is brave; the father contributes only the young bull’s physical conformation, and a visual inspection tells whether it is satisfactory or not.) At any rate, the would-be matador must seek out these testings to familiarize himself with the bull family and to exhibit the skill he has learned in the parks and before the mirror. Especially he must keep his ear tuned for word of any village festivals in which improvised arenas are set up in the main plaza, with upended carts forming the barriers and boards protecting store windows, for at these rowdy festivals wise old bulls are turned loose on which aspirant matadors can try their skills without killing the animal. The bulls have attended so many festivals they know better than the young fighters how to position themselves and when to react to the passes. ‘That bull speaks Latin,’ is a customary description. I once heard a young fighter say, ‘After I gave him two good passes he tried to borrow money from me.’ The Mexicans have a wonderful word for such goings-on. Pachangas, they call them, and the syllables evoke the madness; capeas they’re called in Spain, and they do not always end humorously. Each year some aspirant is badly gored by the canny old beasts and sometimes death results. But the competition to become a full matador is so keen that young men must take these chances.
Of a thousand boys who begin at age twelve to learn the bullfighting passes, perhaps a hundred will succeed in fighting one of the old bulls at a capea; far fewer will ever face a heifer at a ranch. Of a hundred who progress to the point where they have actually fought bulls as beginners, only four or five will become big stars. The adverse odds in this profession are overwhelming.
But since the rewards can be overwhelming, each year the horde of boys at practice remains about the same, and some very moving literature his grown out of his drudgery. Anyone interested in the purely seamy side should read Luis Spota’s The Wounds of Hunger, which has been translated into English by Barnaby Conrad. It is based on the saying that for a bullfighter the wounds of hunger are more terrifying than the wounds of the horn.
There are several fine recent books on bullfighting, and as in the case of Spain generally, the best are by Englishmen; Kenneth Tynan’s perceptive Bull Fever, which analyzes the mystique of the art; Angus Macnab’s The Bulls of Iberia, which has some excellent summaries of individual fights; and John Marks’ To the Bullfight, of which Hemingway said, ‘the best book on the subject—after mine.’ Of recent American books the three b
Of course, the best thing so far written on bullfighting is Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. As his friend Quintana says, ‘It’s amazing that a man who spoke no Spanish to begin with could have so quickly caught the spirit of a foreign art.’ It remains a masterpiece of insight and persuasion and is as popular today as when it was first published in 1932. Recently an American, John McCormick, aided by a Mexican, Mario Sevilla Mascareñas, has produced an opinionated but highly literate and well-informed philosophical analysis, The Complete Aficionado.
The period during which I have seen bullfights may be divided into three epochs, each named after a matador: the Epoch of Belmonte, 1914–1936, the Epoch of Manolete, 1939–1955, even though Manolete himself died in 1947, and the Epoch of El Cordobés, 1955 till today. Of the three, the most varied and rewarding was the first, for then one had normative figures like Belmonte, the peerless Joselito, Chicuelo, the preposterous El Gallo and Marcial Lalanda. The middle period was the most dramatic, with the confrontation of the tragic Manolete and the Mexican Carlos Arruza, ornamented by half a dozen additional figures of first category. The third period, running into the present, has been for me more difficult to categorize. I have found it dull, marked by certain honorable matadors but none of supreme excellence, and while it has given us El Cordobés, the most popular matador of all times and the one who has earned the most money, it has provided neither a classic figure nor a tragic poet. To such judgment authorities like José María Cossio and Vanderford say, ‘Nonsense. Antonio Ordóñez has been at least as great as Joselito.’
My favorite in this long procession has been none of the men named but the austere classicist Domingo Ortega. He was so pure a bullfighter that men wrote long books about his art, claiming that he had saved the bullfight from becoming a mere ornamentation. Philosophers invoked him as a reincarnation of Seneca; motion-picture theaters throbbed to the classical emotion which he was able to cram into a few controlled passes; and at the plaza men were alternately perplexed by the rigidity of his style and enchanted by its purity. If I had been a bullfighter I should have wanted to fight like Domingo Ortega, and my memory of him in the ring has had a profound influence on the way I think and especially in the way I evaluate work in the arts. I would say that he has had an impact on me as great as that of Johannes Brahms.
The quiescent third epoch, in which I have seen most of my fights, did produce the much publicized Dominguín-Ordóñez confrontation, in which the latter excelled, and some, including Hemingway and the experts just cited, have believed that Ordóñez has been the greatest fighter of this century; but as I described in the chapter on Pamplona, I have never seen him good but have seen him when his arrogant contempt for the audience was unbearable. In this period most of my knowledgeable friends have tried to convince me that the great figure is Curro Romero, and I well remember the afternoon I sat in the stands at Pamplona and happened to mention another matador as my favorite. A voluble Spanish gentleman next to me, who had remained unmoved by all my other judgments over a period of six days, exploded with rage, and Vavra caught a series of eight snapshots showing his disgust. ‘There is only one matador in Spain worthy of a man’s respect,’ he shouted. ‘All the others are what? Nothing! Poof! To see Romero on one of his fine afternoons is like seeing God Himself descending to supervise a performance. Then the cape stands out like sculptured gold, the muleta is like a thread of silk binding the man and the bull together. It is exquisite, the stuff of dreams, and one feels tears in his eyes, a profound exaltation in his heart. I have seen Curro when he molded fifteen thousand people in the plaza as if he were an angelic child playing with sand. You hear the phrase “he and the bull were one.” With Curro it’s different. There is no man. There is no bull. There is merely a golden moment, and when it’s past you turn to your neighbor as I’m turning to you now and ask, “What was that I saw?” And he explains very humbly. “My friend, you saw a miracle.” Therefore, please don’t speak to me about so-and-so. At least not in the same plaza where I have mentioned the name Curro Romero.’ John Fulton, Orson Welles, Kenneth Vanderford, Robert Vavra and scores of others all felt the same way, although they tended to express themselves more forcefully than did my Spanish friend at Pamplona. To have seen Curro Romero was to have seen the ultimate.
Well, finally I saw him. At Sevilla he came into the arena, a rather pudgy young man of undistinguished height, carriage, feature and bearing. He was a disaster. I saw him four more times in Sevilla, always miserably bad. He seemed to take one look at whatever bull fate had allotted him and to decide, ‘This animal is not for me.’
‘You mustn’t judge him until you’ve seen him good,’ Fulton insisted, paying him the cherished accolade that comes when one matador praises another. ‘It’s not a question of the bull’s being good or bad—he must be right for Curro.’ Now, one of the attributes of Domingo Ortega that I remember best was that he could take whatever came out of the chute and give it a majestic fight. If luck gave him a bad bull, he made it good; if his lot was a good bull, he made it great; and on those rare occasions when he received a naturally great bull, he handled it with such noble precision that its head was subsequently mounted. Ortega gave new meaning to the word pundonor.
Curro Romero must have had his own analysis of this word. At Jerez he was abominable because he would not try to accomplish anything with average bulls, although his competitors did passably well with theirs. ‘You’ve got to catch him on the right day,’ Vavra explained, while Vanderford growled in his beard, ‘With Curro you must not use the words pundonor or sinvergüenza. They do not apply. He is honestly terrified of a dangerous bull … or of a good one. Lack of courage? Yes. Lack of honor? Never.’
Don Quixote … a wash drawing by Picasso … an echo from the Caves of Altamira … a bull and picador separated from their forms … all these can be seen at certain moments of the corrida.
I remember the agonies Orson Welles went through at one San Isidro, for since Curro’s first appearance in the ring, Welles has always held that he is the one bright light in the taurine world and he had been warning us not to miss his boy’s performance. First day, horrible. Second day, nothing. Third day, deplorable. ‘Wait till he gets a good day,’ Welles advised.
In Barcelona the bull came out the chute wrong, and Curro quit. At Valencia there was wind, and he attempted nothing. Back in Madrid he screwed up his courage and like Ortega tried to make a good bull great, but in the end he ran in palpitating fright past the bull, jabbed his sword out sideways and punctured a lung. The audience wanted to annihilate him on the spot, and would have done so had pillows been concrete blocks, for they showered him with the former while officers of the Guardia Civil kept them away from the latter. ‘This wasn’t his day,’ Welles said sadly. ‘But just wait.’
I had now waited through more than twenty fights. I’d seen Curro face forty-odd bulls and never had the magic moment come. Never had the magic moment even been in the same province. I had seen him bad, and I had seen him worse, and I had seen him disastrous. And I no longer hoped. Each of my bullfighting friends had seen him in apotheosis, and apparently he could be something wonderful, running the bull slowly and majestically in passes of impossible beauty. My testifiers were not liars, nor were they combined in a conspiracy to create a White Legend. The agitated poet to my left at Pamplona had not compared notes with Orson Welles or Kenneth Tynan. That was his judgment, founded on fact, but it was a fact I was apparently destined not to see. To me
Matador Fulton with cape.
There was, however, in these same years a tall, ungainly, angular and thin young man from the village of Vitigudino near Salamanca who entered the arenas with little fanfare. I was in Madrid on May 13, 1961, when he underwent the ceremonies which confirmed him as a full matador; he took his sword from the hands of Gregorio Sanchez while standing a few feet from me, then strode with austere dignity toward the bull to give battle in the time-honored way. He was El Viti, and in Madrid he was a sensation. In Sevilla he was extraordinary. In Málaga and Jerez and Barcelona he was cold and precise and clothed in honor. Wherever I went I saw this reserved young man with the grave sculptured face and the long thin body fight in a manner I had thought forgotten. He engaged in no heroics and there was nothing of lyric poetry in what he did, but there was a distant echo of the epic. He never allowed himself to be hurried and I doubt if he could perform an arabesque with a cape if he wanted to, and I’m sure he never wanted to. Because he never once smiled in the ring, his detractors called him cold and frigid and rooted. Vavra and Fulton spent hours explaining to me why he failed to excite the crowd. In Pamplona it was my mention of his name that had started the argument with my poetical neighbor. ‘Viti’s nothing!’ he exploded. ‘An iceberg!’
Yet day after day this quiet young man with ice-cold manner, this youth who never smiled, who never displayed even the slightest emotion, not even when gored a few feet from where I sat, turned in a beautiful performance and won awards that others missed. He became for me the epitome of what I looked for in the ring, and almost never did he disappoint. I’ll correct that judgment: never did he disappoint, for even when the bulls were bad he tried. Like Domingo Ortega before him, he brought new distinction to the word pundonor, for he was composed of this manly virtue.