The Last Matador

http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2012-09/13/juan-jose-padilla-matador-bullfighting-interview

(by Alexander Fiske-Harrison gq-magazine.co.uk 9-13-12)

Spain's financial crisis and animal-rights activists are sending the bullfight spiralling into decline. Enter Juan José Padilla. GQ finds out how one man become an icon for the Spanish fighting spirit...

Juan José Padilla was the first matador I met while researching my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight (£15.99, Profile Books). He was also by my side (and saved my skin more than once) when I took my first steps into the ring for the controversial closing section of the book, which ended in me killing a bull myself.

Still, I wasn't too concerned for his safety. Padilla has been seriously injured 26 times by bulls. In 2001, he was carried from the Pamplona bullring by his team after a Miura bull slid its horn clean through his neck, piercing his oesophagus. Two weeks later he was carried in triumph from the bullring in Santander on the shoulders of the crowd.

In Spain, his homeland, Padilla is famous as a killer of the bulls other matadors won't fight, especially the strain that is bred on the ranch of the Miura family, Zahariche, 40 miles outside Seville.

Known provocatively as the "Bulls of Death", Miuras have killed more bullfighters than any other variety. When Ferruccio Lamborghini, then a tractor billionaire, was searching for inspiration to outmatch Enzo Ferrari's sports cars in the early Sixties, he found it at Zahariche. Awed by the ferocity, power and agility of the bulls, he named his first mid-engine two-seater the Lamborghini Miura and took a fighting bull as his badge to rival the Ferrari's "prancing horse". When I say that Padilla's dining room in Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the coast has six Miura heads displayed triumphantly above the place settings - all of which he killed in a single afternoon in Bilbao in 2001 - you get an idea of the man.

When I received a second text that afternoon last October, however, this time from a matador, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, whose own matador father, Paquirri, was killed by a bull in 1984, my dread boiled: "I guess you know about our friend Juan... Let's hope he gets the best care possible." That message got me into the street and on my iPhone; what I downloaded was the stuff of nightmares.

Here's what I saw: Padilla - at the centre of the arena - was placing the multi-coloured sticks with their barbed points, the banderillas, in the second "third" of the bullfight. Nowadays, most matadors don't place their own banderillas, delegating the task to their assistants. However, Padilla is Padilla. This time, though, somewhere around umpteenth time he must have performed this particular move, something went badly wrong. He tripped.

Running past the bull, a foot tapped an ankle and he was down, the bull on him like a vengeful, snorting locomotive - all coiled black muscle channelled down into a point the circumference of Louboutin stiletto; like an iron skip balanced on a nail. Crunch. The horn entered under Padilla's left ear, cracking the skull, ripping the auditory nerve, and then into the jaw, smashing through both sets of molars, exploding his cheekbone as surely as a rifle bullet and coming out through the socket of his left eye. If you can stomach to even look at the images (let alone the YouTube video), just be pleased the tragedy was all over in a matter of seconds.

His team took the bull off him; distracting the animal's resurgent aggression with their bright capes. Padilla, astonishingly, got up. He was holding half his face in his right hand. Cheek, jawbone and eyeball, like the contents of a butcher's bin, rested in his upturned palm as he walked towards the edge of the ring. "I can't see, I can't see," repeated the fighter. As he walked out, the 42-year-old's legs, unsurprisingly, buckled - blood loss and nervous shock eventually getting the better of his breathtaking machismo. He was rushed to the ring's infirmary and from there out into the city of Zaragoza and to the Miguel Servet Hospital. By now the entire nation was following the sirens.

A team of expert surgeons - general, trauma, plastic and nerve-specialists who usually work on face transplants - worked desperately to try to piece together the skull with titanium, prevent the loss of the eyeball, prevent infections from a horn wound so close to the brain, and generally stop Padilla from flatlining. They succeeded. Just. Although he came away with his life, what Padilla had lost was 15kg of his usual 70, his left eye and the mobility in the left side of his face - and that was just the physical injuries.

More miracles were to come: ten days after this horrific accident, the unthinkable happened. Wheeled out by his bullfighting and medical teams, Padilla announced to the attending press that he would be returning to the ring. He couldn't walk, couldn't eat, and could only half-see, half-hear and half-speak, but what he said was that he was coming back. Back into the ring. Back to fight the bulls. It was only then that I knew I had to be there with him.

When I was younger, like you, probably, I thought I'd hate bullfights. I was a member of the WWF and read biology at university. However, the first bullfight I saw - in Seville in 2000 - was an unusually good one, drawing me to identify with the courage, skill and art of the man, rather than the injury and death of the bull. (I saw it as a dance in which the man lures the bull to run past him - hence corrida de toros, "running of bulls" - until he is ready to kill it.)

Men have been proving themselves against bulls for at least as long as they have been painting on cave walls. Those bulls were aurochs, the great horned ancestor of all domestic cattle. The most aggressive of its descendants is the Spanish fighting bull, the toro bravo.

The corrida was originally a form of jousting, with the mounted knight sending a servant on the ground to finish the animal off, the matador, or "killer". But as its popularity grew in the 18th century, the spectacle became dominated by the matador and today it is he who first greets the untouched bull, full of fight and fury, with the large magenta cape so synonymous with the sport. He then deploys a knight, or rather picador, to show the bull's ferocity and strength by letting it charge the armoured horse and its rider's lance.

In the old days, the matador would then place the banderillas (barbed spears) in the bull to show his athletic prowess - Padilla and a few others still do. Finally, the matador takes up the more famous, smaller red cape - the muleta - and the sword and enters the ring to dance with this bull - which has been "diminished" for just this reason - allowing him to bring the bull so close it seems impossible he won't be caught. Then, he crosses the horns of the bull with the sword to kill it.

Let's not get too romantic here; this is clearly not a sport, and there is no "winning". Well, certainly not for the bulls. If the matador gets killed or injured it is a mistake, another matador kills the animal. But mistakes do happen. Five-hundred-and-thirty-three notable professional toreros have been killed by bulls in the past three centuries, and that's just the famous ones. Of course, modern medicine has reduced the frequency of this to practically zero, but the injuries still occur - as Padilla's horrific case proves.

So what you have is an animal being killed in an almost ritual sacrifice as part of a scripted drama. Is that shocking? Yes. Is it wrong? We kill about three million cattle annually in the UK, more than ten times that in America, and their lives are about a third as long as a fighting bull's and the conditions in which they live much worse. A meat cow needs to be tender (young), easy to farm (weak) and cheap (badly housed and fed.) A fighting bull needs to be fearless, strong and is sold at £8,000 a head for good ones, ten times the price of the black-and-white box of beef you see on British pastures.

Animal-rights activists might argue that it's a question of context, that bullfighting is - whichever way you puff it up - nevertheless the unnecessary and bloody death of a terrified, goaded animal merely for the artistry and enjoyment of others. Supporters merely counter: is tradition no longer necessary? Is art no longer necessary?

In 2007, there were 2,622 bullfights in Spain. In 1932, the year Ernest Hemingway published the bullfight aficionado's bible, Death In The Afternoon - called so as the majority of bullfights take place after lunch - there were only 1,089. Since then, however, the sport seems to have gone into a steep decline. Certainly up until very recently, and depending on whether you live in rural Spain or not, any mention that you might be keen to witness a fight yourself seemed catastrophic for one's social and moral standing in the modern world.

In October 2008, in a statement to the Spanish Congress, Luis Fernández, the president of Spanish state broadcaster RTVE, confirmed that the station would no longer broadcast live bullfights - citing a loss of advertising and the impact of violence on minors. This broadcast tradition dates back as far as the invention of the colour television, so this was an unprecedented win for the animal rights groups.

Even more radical change was afoot. At the end of 2011, bullfights were banned in Catalonia. The regional capital, Barcelona, is Spain's second city, and the closure of its ring La Monumental was a serious blow to bullfighting aficionados. In fact, the official figures show that the number of bullfights across Spain have fallen by a third since 2007 - from 2,622 five years ago to 1,724 in 2010. Many believe this decline mirrors the start and longevity of Europe's financial  crisis - bullfighting coming under pressure in Spain because of public-subsidy cuts.

But come 2012 and something is stirring amid the ranks of matadors and the lovers of the bullfight. What's clear is that such staunch defenders of tradition are not going to give up their beloved arenas quietly - they've been scrapping for their livelihoods for centuries, after all. Over the last 12 months there's been a shift, if not in the ever-diminishing figures, then certainly in the mood.

A growing list of Spanish, French and South American cities and regions have started to formally declare their celebrations of bullfights part of their protected cultural patrimony. In France, for example, in small towns such as Béziers, found along the border with Spain that also has bullrings, the ADDA (Asociación Defensa Derechos Animal) says that the French government has categorised bullfighting as an "intangible cultural heritage" - a lead followed quickly by the cities of Madrid and Murcia in Spain.

Not only this, but those who rely on the profession financially are also looking to the UNESCO Bullfighting Project to protect their livelihoods and cultural heritage - in short a lobbying group that aims to place bullfighting under UNESCO protection using the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. If this happens - a big if - and bullfighting is shielded by UNESCO, animal-rights activists are deeply concerned that supporters of sealing, whaling and cockfighting may well try a similar approach to safeguard their industries.

Today, there are those in Spain who think the ban in places like Catalonia and the Canary Islands could well be overturned. And soon. In March this year, the Confederation of Bullfighting Professionals turned in 590,000  2012 signatures on a petition to protect bullfighting as an "asset of cultural interest"; a petition that also demanded the ban be overruled and the sport be reinstated.

What's more significant (and more worrying for the likes of PETA, who campaign tirelessly for bullfighting to be abolished in its entirety) is that the current Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, is an ardent supporter of bullfighting. He, too, signed the petition to protect and reinstate bullfighting in places such as Catalonia; a sentiment supported by the reigning conservative People's Party.

As Spain's financial woes keep unemployment up - despite a recent £80m bailout plan - politicians are looking to bullfighting's working-class heritage to instil in voters a sense of nationalistic pride, hard-fought nowadays in a country split by its economic debt. It seems to be working. Earlier this year, the people of Guijo de Galisteo, a small town in western Spain, voted to turn their back on austerity and use the £12,000 cash pot collected by the town hall to hire bulls for their summer festivities later this year, rather than to pay local people to carry out odd jobs about the municipality.

So what of Juan José Padilla? How does the ageing, one-eyed matador fit into Spain's broader picture? Well, for many, Padilla - after announcing his injury-defying return to the ring - has somehow become symbolic of bullfighting's predicament in its homeland. And perhaps its last hope.

Could Padilla - a man from humble beginnings whose feats have been so defined and so adored by the sport and who cheated death in the arena - face down all the odds and rise again triumphantly, lifting bullfighting back into favour, and back into the hearts and minds of those countrymen who once loved the spectacle?

Some believe that if anyone can, Padilla can. For some, Padilla's return to the ring has become less about one man's personal victory, and more a symbol of Spain's integral survival. No pressure, then.

Seville, 2 March 2012 (Morning)

I arrive in Spain's southern capital two days before Padilla's projected comeback and drive the 60 miles south to his home. It is good to see Padilla again in the flesh, but when we embrace, it's a shock to feel each individual rib. However, I note that his arms are still hard with wiry muscle: there is steel there as well as bone. Interviews aren't Padilla's strong point, as he quickly points out: "Too much press, before a fight it is bad. Press after a fight is good." He can certainly feel the world's gaze; his comeback has even made the front page of the New York Times this morning.

We talk at a private bar at the end of his garden, which has a sign outside that reads: "Here... there are no problems." Last time we were there, we practically rolled out. Padilla remembers: "Good memories. I have not drunk since the accident. We will drink here again soon."

I notice that when Padilla talks, his gruff voice is harder to understand than normal - half his face barely moves. I begin by asking about his family: "Lydia [his wife] and the children are good. Paloma [his daughter] is learning English. You remember Paloma, you met her at the festival at Cazalla de la Sierra." I nod, remembering a little girl drawing in the corner of a hotel room. At the time, Padilla was lying almost naked on a bed as his wife rubbed liniment into his scarred body before a bullfight. Are they happy about Padilla fighting again? "My children say I am a bullfighter.

What else would I do?" When he was young, Padilla was apprenticed to his baker father, baking loaves late at night to pay for bullfighting school. Now he supports his family. "Lydia knew I would return to the ring from the beginning. She was for it. She was the only one. My parents, though, they were very unhappy."

I notice Padilla is now talking more clearly and I see why: he is pressing a fingertip just above the side of his mouth, holding the lip clear of his teeth. I ask him what it is like to get back in the training ring since his injury - is there a difference? "Nothing. There is no difference." I'm a little sceptical, but there's no drawing him: "Everything was the same from the moment I went into the ring." It is well known that with only one eye, a man's perception of depth is seriously skewed, but Padilla is quick to cut off any doubt as to his ability: "It doesn't matter," he says, firmly. I sense I should move on. Is he happy, himself, to be back in the ring? "Yes. And I am grateful, grateful to be back." And what of his memories of the injury? "I have always known, as a Christian, that suffering is a part of glory." The south of Spain, Andalucia, is Catholic enough to make Rome look agnostic. "I have had many important afternoons with the bulls, many triumphs, and I have suffered many wounds. This is a part of bullfighting; its other face."

Padilla tells me about the injury that he suffered on 7 October last year; was he afraid when it happened? "Yes, for my children, for my wife, for my family, I was very afraid at that moment. Also, remember, I could not see out of either eye at that moment. I could hear the silence of the audience, the bull moving elsewhere in the ring, and the voice of my team calling to me. I could hear the danger in their voices. I could hear their horror."

And your thoughts in the infirmary, the hospital? "My thoughts were with God, because I knew I was in great danger, and I wanted to come back, and to come back to bullfight." Did you think you might die? "Yes, because I could tell the doctors thought I was dying." Was he afraid? "Yes, only because I do not want to leave my wife on her own, I do not want to leave my children on their own. I feel no resentment to the bull or to my profession. I have been given many successes, many moments of glory by the bulls. How could I resent that? But I did feel a great pain, and a sense of loss."

Despite Padilla's iron-fisted machismo, the recovery and the rehabilitation have clearly been tough: "Yes, especially the face, which was paralysed - to reactivate, to reanimate, to re-educate it - and to do that for four hours a day, whilst going to train on the ranches in the afternoons with the cattle, that has been very hard." His fans have helped: "Amazing. The whole of Spain rose up with this Twitter campaign, #fuerzpadilla ['Strength Padilla']."

Padilla, as you might expect, isn't on Twitter, but shows me a book containing thousands of tweets, chosen from hundreds of thousands, which someone has compiled especially for the bullfighter.

Many of these celebratory tweets speak of him as their hero. "No. This was a mistake. Scars are not medals, they are the marks of mistakes. That is all."

I ask him if he will have any limitations once back in the ring; whether he will be taking any precautions that perhaps he didn't take before the accident. "No, my profession does not permit limits, it does not permit precautions."

And with that, I end the interview. I can see he has grown tired.

Why men fight bulls in Spain is an "Everest question": because they are there. Every bar in Andalucia has a bull's head on the wall; even roadside cafés are littered with photos of matadors. In Padilla's house there are no fewer than 30 bulls' heads on the wall. In one room there is a long cabinet whose top overflows with trophies, while underneath are a dozen "suits of lights" (traje de luces) behind glass, each worn at a defining moment in his career: his alternativa when he became a full matador, his triumphs in Madrid, Pamplona, Seville. I ask him his favourite, and he takes out the plainest one there. No bright cloth, no gold embroidery.

"My wedding suit," he smiles.

As we finish up, his children arrive back from school, Paloma, now nine, and Martín, aged five. They try out their broken English on me as he plays with them, a tender and affectionate father. I leave him in peace in his last days before he has to face the blood and thunder again.

Vejer de la Fronter, 2 March 2012 (Afternoon)

From Padilla's house, I drive 50 miles further south to the farm of the Núñez del Cuvillo family who have bred the bulls for this particular fight, trying to gauge just how daunting a task this is set to be for Padilla.

Álvaro Núñez shows me the six bulls relaxing in their paddock, having been brought in from the 7,000 acres of wild pasture. In the background I can make out some of the other 2,000 cattle in herds among the oak-stubbled hills.

It is this that quietens my doubts about the brutality of killing cattle in this way. Ranches have one third the number of cattle per acre a British farm has. It is a wild landscape, tree-shaded against the Andalucian sun - a nature reserve. Of the six million acres of Spanish dehesa - wooded wilderness - around a fifth is on bull ranches. The bulls look good: well-developed and strong with long, arching horns. Two of them were for Padilla - drawn by lot on the day - the other four for the two matadors alternating with him. The bulls lounge in the shade, half-ton fighters with two blades apiece, secure after five years training on each other. Ready for transport, they are the only ones in the paddock who don't have plaster casts on their horns to prevent them from killing each other. But soon those grazing bulls will be in the arena, ready to face a matador.

Olivenze, 4 March 2012 (Evening)

Having followed the bulls 230 miles north to the Portuguese border, I am in the packed bullring and the crowd's excitement is like nothing I have witnessed before. When Padilla walks in at the head of his team, in a green suit of lights stitched with a gladiator's laurel leaves in gold, 6,000 people rise to applaud him - mainly for just turning up.

Padilla is up first as the most senior matador - he has "worn the gold" for 18 years - and watches from behind the barrier. The first bull is 480kg of jet-black danger, moving warily as it exits the "Gates of Fear". Then it sees something move and it charges, attacking the barrier with its horns, sending splinters flying.

Padilla walks towards the bull, cape in both hands, meets it with his legs locked straight, back arched like a dancer and slowly sweeps the cape, with the bull attached to it as though by glue, through three perfect veronicas, the fabric brushing the animal's face on each pass. With each pass, it comes closer, and with each pass the crowd shout olé, and he ends, fixing it on the spot with a half-veronica before walking calmly away, his back to the bull.

When we come to the banderillas, everyone wonders whether Padilla will place his own. Remember: he has no depth perception after the injury and it involves sprinting at the bull. Despite this, he places all three pairs to crescendos of applause.

The trumpets blow for the final act of this dark drama and Padilla takes up the muleta and his sword. He flicks the end of the red cloth at the bull and draws it towards him, luring it past him, so that the horns glide harmlessly by. He pivots on his feet and sends another ripple down the fabric. Again the bull charges past, again Padilla turns, and now the olés are coming with each pass as he twists and dances, the vast muscles thundering around him in pursuit of the muleta, the man standing implacable and upright, besieged by a plunging and bewildered death.

Soon the bull, tiring rapidly, refuses to charge and stands its ground. It wants this enemy to come to it.

Padilla accepts the invitation, aiming down the blade of his sword in his right hand, and pushing the muleta forward with his left. The bull rears at the lure, while the man charges the bull. This is called "the moment of truth". The curved sword point strikes between the bull's ribs to the left of the spine and bites down, its trajectory towards the aorta. Padilla swerves away from the horns at the last second. Within a minute, the bull keels over, crashing to the sand. Padilla salutes it. The crowd are on their feet, white handkerchiefs out, petitioning the president of the plaza for a trophy for their hero, and he is given it: an ear of the bull.

Padilla is victorious, and more importantly alive. After the other two matadors kill their first bulls, each dedicating their animal to Padilla, he greets his second bull on his knees and goes on to give not only a better display of his profession than earlier, but the greatest he has given in his career, earning yet another ear.

The other two matadors fight brilliantly, but it is Padilla alone who is swept up to tour the ring on the shoulders of the crowd. Then I see that it is not the crowd, but other bullfighters. An entire profession is holding him up so that an entire nation can applaud him. That night Padilla is on every news channel; come the morning he will be on the front page of every newspaper. When I meet him at the hotel afterwards, he has tears in his eyes.

So Padilla is not dead, and neither is bullfighting. Well, not amid the heat, the roars, the spilt red blood and yellow crushed rock. Not dead. Not here. Not yet.