(by Michael Kimmelman nytimes.com 6-1-08)
It was the time of Las Fallas, the annual spring festival in Valencia. Giant papier-mâché cartoon floats of Sinbad and Snow White and troupes of amateur dancers with lacquered hair and sequined outfits jammed the old city squares. Spanish matrons and women in evening dresses joined the teenagers and the men in business suits thronging the plaza de toros. The matador José Tomás had come to fight.
By 5 o’clock a mob toting slim, white plastic seat cushions had jammed onto the cement benches of the arena. I was there, like everyone else, to see José Tomás, and found myself sandwiched between an elderly, rheumy-eyed Valencian in a porkpie hat and a bullfighting announcer for Spanish television on a busman’s holiday from Madrid who was working a thick stogie. The smells of wet clay, manure and sand gave way to after-shave and cigar smoke.
growing segment of Spain, though his artistry and grace, along with his fearlessness (it shocks other matadors), make him a figure of widespread fascination. The contradiction seems to encapsulate something deep in the Spanish psyche.
The announcement of his appearance in Valencia caused a scramble across the country for tickets, and old Spain, the Spain that still loves bullfighting, turned out in full. When Mariano Rajoy, the head of Spain’s conservative Popular Party, who had just lost the election to the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, entered the arena, he received a thunderous ovation, something that didn’t much happen to him out on the campaign trail. “He will yet be the ruin of Zapatero!” murmured a red-faced man, to no one in particular. I spotted Tomás’s father a few seats over — short, gray-haired, bespectacled, in crew-neck sweater and slacks, staring anxiously into space. Everyone now stood, expectant. Then a brass band struck up; the matadors, after first crossing themselves, paraded into the ring behind white horses; and the crowd finally settled down to wait for José Tomás.
AS SPAIN GOES, so goes toreo, or bullfighting. That’s the old adage. During the 1940s, Manolete was a matador of stoic gravity, reflecting the rueful mood of a country coming out of bloody civil war under a dictatorship. During the 1960s, the mop-topped El Cordobés, a hot-dog and a rule breaker in the ring, personified the opening up of the nation after years of isolation. In the ’90s, Espartaco was called a technocrat for a technocratic era. This sort of metaphor is glib, but there is nonetheless something to the notion that you can read Spain through bullfighting.
Today, along with José Tomás, a variety of other gifted matadors have emerged — among them Enrique Ponce, El Juli, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, Morante de la Puebla, Juan Bautista, Miguel Ángel Perera — at precisely a moment when the country apparently cares less than ever about what they do. It’s also revealing of Spain’s curious divide between indifference and fascination that several of the more flamboyant and handsome toreros (bullfighters) occupy the gossip pages the way Spanish soccer stars do.
But first things first. Aficionados will rightly tell you that toreo is not a sport; in Spanish newspapers, it is never featured on the sports pages. Sport implies a fair fight between willing opponents. Except in the unusual case that a bull is spared for having shown exceptional bravery in the ring, all the bulls die. Even in Portugal, where bulls aren’t killed in the ring, they are killed afterward, a hypocrisy that spares the spectator but not the animal. Every lidia — an individual bullfight between a bull and a matador — is a ritual orchestrated to injure and then exhaust the animal so that it can be more easily killed. Whatever that is (and opponents call it torture), it’s not sporting.
The tradition is to call toreo an art, and I got nods of agreement from bullfighters and fans whenever I suggested an analogy to jazz, since every combination of bull and bullfighter elicits a different, irreproducible, unpredictable, improvised performance. For aficionados, the true goal is bringing out the innate bravery and nobility and distinct character of each bull, and they’ll say there is nothing more disgraceful than a fight in which the tips of the bull’s horns have been blunted (it’s illegal, though it happens all the time), or one in which a bull has been too badly weakened by the lance of the horse-bound picador in the early stage of action, or one in which a bull is messily dispatched by the matador. Hard-core fans bemoan what they believe is the shameful trend of bulls bred to be less fierce for the convenience of toreros. At a fiesta in Seville this spring, where animal rights protesters chanted outside the arena, devotees inside screamed about kittenish bulls that stumbled around and tipped over from exhaustion. It was the usual Rorschach, as bullfighting always is.
If you’re not Spanish, or not from someplace else where bullfighting is part of the culture, like Mexico or the south of France, you will either approach it with curiosity or you will have decided it is beyond consideration — like dog- or cockfighting, although the crucial difference in bullfighting’s case is that at least humans put themselves, and not just the animals, at mortal risk. A newcomer with an open mind who goes to a bullfight can come away feeling that it is both artful and repulsive, a paradox that again seems to sum up Spain’s attitude.
“The only way I can explain it is to say it is like watching a tiger, going toward it and being able to touch it,” the matador Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez told me not long ago. “Sometimes with a bull you have to tell it what you want, other times ask it, and the magic is that each bull is different.” Then, anticipating the criticism of outsiders, he added: “Often I feel sad for the bulls, and I wish I didn’t have to do this” — now he was talking about killing the animal — “when the bull gives you so much, and all you feel is grateful.”
That’s the matador’s view. To the public, toreo, once a people’s pastime, has become something like fine wine. It’s the “domain of the consumer elite,” says Lorenzo Navarrete Moreno, a sociologist and the secretary of the Madrid-based National Sociology and Political Science Association. “Half a century ago, this was a homogeneous society,” he said. “Spanish children shared precisely the values and tastes of the parents — but now most Spaniards no longer go to church. They say they’re against killing a bull but against banning corridas too. People continue to cling to a notion of national identity even if it entails something they don’t like. In the case of bullfighting, they embrace it because it is not something manipulated or foisted on them by the powers that be, by the church or state or by European legislators, and, even if it’s a luxury item, it still has a popular aspect. But this clash can’t be sustained indefinitely.”
Perhaps not. Zapatero won re-election this year having pushed into law an agenda mixing gay marriage and quickie divorces with other social legislation designed to do away with vestiges of the old Spain. Three years ago, the European Parliament voted to slash subsidies to bull ranchers — subsidies that especially galled bullfighting opponents — while last year a vote in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that would have declared toreo torture narrowly fell short. Spanish state television at the same time announced, to the horror of toreo fans, that after 50 years it would no longer broadcast live bullfights, relegating them to cable. Most Spaniards might not even notice, it turns out. In 1971, 55 percent of them still claimed to be interested in bullfighting. In 2006, only 27 percent did; most important, a whopping 72 percent said they had no interest in it at all. Younger Spaniards now find diversion in soccer and video games. A good seat to a corrida — meaning an afternoon’s regular card of six bullfights — is roughly equivalent in cost to an opera or pro football game in America. Regional politics also conspire against toreo’s popularity; the recent campaign to ban bullfights across Catalonia is a separatist declaration of independence by other means.
And yet. There are more bullfights than ever today: nearly 1,000 corridas a year, as opposed to 300 or so during the so-called golden age before the Civil War, when the rivalry between Juan Belmonte and Joselito revolutionized toreo, establishing the style of the modern bullfight, with matadors planting their feet and getting the bull to make close, choreographed passes. Giorgio Armani has lately hired Rivera to model. His advertisements are everywhere. Clearly, Armani is banking that bullfighting still sells. And every Spanish town seems to want a corrida with a star matador for its main attraction. The Spanish writer Ramón Pérez de Ayala early in the last century said, “If I were prime minister, I would ban the bullfights, but until that time I continue to attend,” and this seems to sum up attitudes still.
Spaniards tell their children to be nice to the dog, but they talk bullfighting with their friends. And if they can manage it, they buy tickets to see José Tomás.
WHEN HE SUDDENLY emerged a little more than a decade ago, José Tomás stunned the bullfighting world. His style prompted comparisons with great matadors of the past, like Juan Belmonte and Manolete, and his courage became legendary. “His detractors complained he was just scaring people to death” is how Bill Lyon, an American journalist who has lived in Spain for nearly half a century and watched all the great bullfighters during that time, summed it up.
Some people called Tomás “the extraterrestrial,” because he almost seemed to invite catastrophe, getting repeatedly tossed and gored but then remaining weirdly impassive, implacable, his mind fixed on the fight, his feet immobile in the sand as an immense animal intent on killing him passed again and again within millimeters.
Then in 2002, at 27 and at the height of his fame, José Tomás quit and disappeared for five years. He later said that it was because of the stress and danger, the constant hassles with promoters, the pressure of expectations. Naturally, his absence enhanced his mystique. When he returned last year, his comeback was the first sellout at the 19,000-seat arena in Barcelona in more than 20 years. Scalpers hawked tickets for $4,000. “And the Myth Was Made Flesh” was the next day’s headline in the conservative newspaper ABC.
Tomás rationalized his return simply by saying “to live without fighting bulls is not to live at all.” For traditionalists, that explained everything.
But for Theo Oberhuber and others like her, that was nonsense. She is the national coordinator for Ecologists in Action, an environmental and animal rights organization based in Madrid that lobbies to end toreo. “The fact that bullfighting is a tradition means nothing,” she told me recently. “Traditions are things people have been doing a long time,” she said, “and there are bad traditions, which we have eliminated, like bound feet, and traditions we should preserve because they contribute something positive to our lives. If a man wants to risk his life, he’s welcome to do so, but without killing something else.”
That’s as good an argument as any I’d heard against toreo, and no doubt José Tomás would have his response. As it happened, his manager, Salvador Boix, had sent word that the matador should be at an early lunch in his hotel restaurant before the fight in Valencia, and that he might talk. There, at a long table, several members of his entourage devoured ham and beer. They roused themselves just long enough to mutter that they had no clue where Tomás might be, at which point a lanky, catlike man in white leather sneakers and sunglasses, with a baseball cap pulled low over his short, wavy brown hair, loped down the dingy hotel steps and out the front door.
When Boix turned up I told him that José Tomás had left, and he laughed like Sidney Greenstreet in “The Maltese Falcon.” He had in tow Luis Corrales, who runs the Plataforma para la Defensa de la Fiesta, an organization that has emerged to support bullfighting against the Catalan abolitionists and groups like Oberhuber’s. Tomás, like other star matadors, pays a retinue of a dozen or so people to travel with him: banderilleros, picadors, assistants, drivers, a man who helps select the bulls he will fight and Boix, an anomaly in that he is from outside the bullfighting world. He is a slight, swarthy, gregarious, curly-haired man, a pop musician (he plays the flute) who seems always very much on the make and wears open-collar shirts that are buttoned a bit low.
At a dark, smoky bar around the corner from the hotel, he and Corrales delivered the usual mumbo jumbo. Tomás is “the people’s bullfighter,” Boix began. The matador forms a special “communion with audiences” and has returned bullfighting, corrupted for years by “cheap spectacle,” to its pure state, “to the essence of the fiesta, which is a fight of life and death, a liturgical ritual.”
Bullfighting promoters go on like this for hours and hours. “Toreo is a struggle between nature and man which dates back to the Paleolithic Age, but somehow our message is not getting across,” Corrales added. Then he acknowledged what was fast becoming clear: “It’s a closed circuit in which the Spanish journalists, the ring owners and impresarios and managers talk to each other, and many of them are mediocre and old-fashioned, and if you are a young Spanish man who is not a right-winger and have grown up hearing that animals have rights like humans, then you’re probably turned off by bullfighting without really knowing anything about it. Our best chance to convince someone like that is to have him see José Tomás.”
Back at the hotel, I found a van idling on the street. Tomás’s banderilleros had gotten dressed and were waiting inside the lobby, fidgeting in their shiny outfits, slippers and small clip-on pigtails — the traditional caste mark of the toreros — with embroidered dress capes draped over their arms, hats in hand. A squat, elderly Spanish man, annoyed at having to negotiate the scrum of autograph seekers blocking the sidewalk, asked what the fuss was about.
“We’re waiting for José Tomás,” I volunteered. The man wheeled his wife around to face the hotel entrance. “José Tomás!” he exclaimed, in case she hadn’t heard. He straightened his comb-over. Surrounded like a rock star by his retinue, Tomás, head down, then strode past in his skintight pink-and-gold outfit and the van whisked him off. For the second time I had come close to Tomás but missed him. I imagined the banderilleros in the van laughing through the rear window. ¡Olé!
THE CORRIDA BEGAN poorly. There were three matadors, as usual. Vicente Barrera, a veteran from Valencia, led off. His first bull, overpunished by the lance of the picador or maybe just congenitally weak, had to be herded out after it kept falling on its front legs. Its substitute stormed into the ring. A lawyer-turned-torero, Barrera is a sturdy but unremarkable matador. Hips forward, making those odd inching steps matadors make toward the animal, slightly flicking his muleta — the smaller of the capes used to provoke a charge — he strutted with his back to the bull after completing each sequence of passes. It was the standard theatrics, not badly done, but the crowd, restless and waiting, seemed only half-engaged.
Then José Tomás came out, and the arena awoke. Like other superstars, he enjoys the benefit of people hoping to witness a miracle. Tomás is cheered even when his performance is ordinary. At his tumultuous comeback in Barcelona last year, not his greatest fight, the crowd gave him three standing ovations even before the first bull had left the corral. This time, barely a moment into the lidia, his cape caught on the animal’s horn and was ripped away. Tomás stationed himself near the center of the ring, jaw forward, calmly waiting for a banderillero to retrieve it while the animal rampaged nearby. The matador’s valor (never mind that it was occasioned by a mistake) got the fans cheering wildly.
Everything in bullfighting is bizarrely mannered, but José Tomás moves with a peculiar grace, a patience and slowness, almost a quality of relaxation, that paradoxically ratchets up the tension. Even when he again lost his muleta and had to sprint backward (with skittering steps, like a dancer’s) to escape the bull’s horns, his sang-froid provoked appreciative roars.
Tomás finally thrust his sword between the bull’s shoulders, stopping his banderillos from trying to exhaust the dying animal further. The matador waited, watching, as the bull first kneeled, then, like a demolished building, crumbled. People threw flowers, their seat cushions and stuffed animals while horses dragged the carcass away and Tomás, looking pleased with himself, took a triumphant lap around the ring.
His second fight was entirely different. The bull charged into the ring, pure energy, but quickly became winded, hurt by the stabs of the picador’s spear, collapsing to the ground before Tomas could get started. The banderilleros dashed out and pulled the animal’s tail to rouse him. The bull, its flanks covered in blood, panted heavily. The fans, uneasy, fell silent. Tomás at his best has an ability to inject drama into even seemingly hopeless situations. This time he tried everything to stir the bull into action, but the bull kept falling until somehow, almost like a hypnotist, Tomás got the crippled, staggering animal to rise to his bait, and matador and bull managed a series of hair-raising, heartbreaking passes. Now the crowd came to life. Depending on one’s perspective, Tomás had prolonged the torture of this poor creature or inspired it, miraculously, to do what no one, including perhaps the bull, thought was possible.
The kill was appalling. After Tomás got the sword in, having bungled his first try, an assistant stabbed the fallen, struggling animal 11 times in the base of the head with his dagger before finally polishing him off by severing the spinal column. It was sickening. The crowd, displeased, counted each thrust, tauntingly. José Tomás walked off, shamed and distraught.
SOME DAYS LATER, Cayetano Rivera met me for coffee at the Hotel Wellington in Madrid, a traditional bullfighters’ hangout. He is supremely pedigreed in the world of bullfighting. His grandfather, Antonio Ordóñez, a legendary torero, was lionized by Hemingway. His father, Francisco Rivera, known as Paquirri, was a matador who died in the ring in 1984, when Rivera was 7. His cousin is a matador; so is his brother. “All the women in my family married bullfighters,” he said, rolling his eyes.
If José Tomás is today’s biggest star inside the ring, Rivera, handsome, articulate, charming and a rising talent as a matador, is probably toreo’s best hope for a spokesman — someone on the inside who can represent bullfighting humanely and clearly to skeptical outsiders in the modern world.
“For years I stayed away from it: I went to school in Switzerland, focused on television and cinema, lived in Los Angeles,” he said. “But increasingly I wondered what my father and grandfather felt so passionately about that they would risk their lives. So I became a torero several years ago, late compared to others. And I discovered what a powerful feeling it is when you are so close to death. It is something so real and strong and addictive.
“It is indescribable,” he continued. “You’re in the clouds with the bull, and you have to improvise but also think of the whole so that it has meaning, a flow, and you’re trying to create this performance in real time with a bull that is trying to kill you.”
Not long ago, Rivera got so lost in the clouds that when a bull gored him in the leg he ignored common medical sense and, in the middle of the ring, tied his own tourniquet so he could keep on fighting. “There are times you risk more to gain more,” he explained, a little sheepishly but also pleased by his bravery. “But it’s one thing to risk your life, another to invite tragedy.”
He was talking about Tomás at this point, taking a subtle swipe at his colleague’s gutsy style, before swiftly retreating and praising Tomás, saying every matador needs to establish his own level of danger to feel inspired. “I take a risk if I see a chance to perform better, and like all bullfighters I accept that I will be hurt,” he said.
I pressed him about killing the bulls.
He paused. “I’m not a hunter, and the first time I killed a bull it didn’t feel good,” he said. “It was shocking. Nobody loves the bull more than the bullfighter, that’s for sure. But it’s a responsibility, and it wouldn’t be fair to have someone else kill the bull. It’s only fair that I risk my life doing it.
“Today, people have so many other ways to entertain themselves — movies, Internet, sports, television — and maybe the interest in bullfighting is because there’s nothing else that offers so much reality,” he said. “It’s like what my grandfather told my brother, ‘Some bullfights are so important that your life doesn’t matter.’ And it sometimes happens when you are completely given over to the moment in the ring that you really don’t care, you just forget about your body. And it’s incredible.”
It occurred to me then that he sounded like an artist. Bullfighting survives its own social anachronism not just because of its machismo mythology, but also because of an irrational, purely visceral response that fans and bullfighters like Rivera share. Being irrational, it defies normalization, remaining something exotic even in Spain. And in the end this describes the way art tends to operate. That’s not a moral judgment. It merely helps explain the eloquence that some people find in what others see as utterly worthless and contemptible.
BILL LYON, the American aficionado, agreed to meet one Sunday afternoon to watch a bullfight. He is a gentle, endearing obsessive, a journalist who moved to Spain during the early 1960s because he fell in love with the country back then and who tries not to miss a corrida or a novillada (corridas with apprentice matadors and younger bulls) in Madrid, where he lives. We hopped the subway for the plaza de toros.
A novillada was scheduled that afternoon, but it was raining, so we drank anise at the bar under the stands, waiting to hear whether the fights would be canceled. Japanese tourists in matching blue-and-red slickers mixed awkwardly with the hard-core Spanish crowd. A former torero, down on his luck, hawked lottery tickets.
“Bullfighting will persist as the last heroic act,” Lyon said, “the last myth after astronauts, aviators and mountain climbers are no longer mythic.” He mentioned a veterinary study, which some proponents of bullfighting have lately latched onto, suggesting that bulls don’t suffer the way we imagine they might in the ring, that their anxiety level drops when they’re no longer penned in but fighting. I nodded, but wondered whether the line of argument will make any difference to opponents. People who oppose toreo still eat meat and accept the industrialized slaughter of billions of animals under the most inhumane conditions. Logic, in the form of a veterinary study or otherwise, won’t bridge the gulf between fans and detractors, which Spaniards, forever on the verge of change, have simply come to live with. Then Lyon said: “Beware of drawing too many conclusions about Spain from its bullfights, because most Spaniards aren’t interested in toreo and many are against it — that is, until somebody from the outside tries to prohibit it.”
At that moment, over the loudspeaker, the announcement came. It was a rainout. We downed our anise, passed the disappointed young toreros as they ducked under umbrellas and packed into vans in their still-spotless uniforms and made our way to a tiny, dank bullfight bar up the street, then to another bullfighting hangout, equally unprepossessing but warm, and to a third, where the tapas were good.
The tourists were now far away. Lyon looked at home. Fellow aficionados arrived, shook off the drizzle and laughed in clusters beneath the old photographs of matadors and the stuffed heads of slaughtered bulls.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/sports/playmagazine/601bullfight.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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