Corrida

The crowd began a spine-tingling chant--"to-re-ro, to-re-ro, to-re-ro," the greatest tribute they can pay a matador, and the presidente signaled for one ear, and as the chant kept up, another ear, and finally the tail of the dead animal. Then the crowd spilled down into the arena and hoisted the exhausted man onto their shoulders. As they swept out of the main gate the look in the man's glazed eyes was one of fulfillment and ecstasy ...

This was the scene, but what lay behind it? What is it that distinguishes bullfighting so completely from all other sporting events? A partial answer is that it is not a sport. It is a tragedy, if you will, or a spectacle -- but not a sport, please. A further answer requires recognition of the fact that it is a complex activity evoking complex reactions. Many writers have tried -- and failed -- to synthesize it; many people will never be responsive to it. It can no more be "explained" than can a sunset or a work of art. But certainly it partakes of these:

First and most simply, it is a formalized, emotionally-charged group experience of which the matador is the shining star. It is a man against a beast, not the beast of burden or the milch-herd bull we know, but a very distant relative, bred (not trained) for centuries for one purpose: to be fierce and powerful and filled with a rage to kill men. The fighting bull has never encountered a dismounted man until it enters the bull ring. It is this beast pitted against a man who must fight according to an ancient and stipulated pattern, a lethal dance as rigidly conventionalized as classic ballet. Next, it is the arena itself, with its history of blood and death and beauty in the hot afternoon sun. Finally, it is the crowd, a passionate fiesta crowd, wise in the intricacies and niceties of the art, a dedicated crowd whose mass voice is ever ready to be raised in roaring praise of skill and courage -- and just as ready to howl derision and abuse at the matador who flinches, as they would, when sabre-sharp horns cleave past him, mere fractions of an inch from his unprotected body. It is the music, the color, the parade of the participants, the communion of deep excitement and fascinated expectation -- for one of the two actors in the drama will surely die. (Or, as in the case of Manolete, in 1947, both.) La fiesta brava is all these and yet it is something much more, something which -- perhaps -- is the perfect fusion of formal art and primal passion. It is a traditional pageant which is profoundly affecting because it is, in addition to all its other aspects, a symbolic re-enactment of man's awareness that nerve, intellect and control may win dominance over the unreasoning beast -- the beast within, who would flee in terror, as well as the beast without.

And why do men fight bulls? Why have they been doing it, in one form or another, for thousands of years. (And it has been thousands of years. The historian Breasted tells how the ancient pharaohs boasted of their prowess in killing wild bulls even before the Cretans. (continued on page 62)Gorridacontinued from page 58) who held athletic exhibitions in arenas around 2000 B.C. The height of the programs came when the performers would vault spectacularly over the charging bulls.)

Are bullfighters hopeless neurotics? Sadists? Masochists? Are they, as one free-wheeling psychiatrist put it, "latent homosexuals who cannot level a woman with their penis and so must level a bull with their sword?" Are they brave men or really terrible cowards who must daily prove to themselves and the world that they are not? And just what is courage? Isn't the clerk who day after day makes the drab haul to his accounting stool to support his family exhibiting courage? It would take more guts for some people to live out his life of quiet desperation than to pursue the career of an arctic explorer.

We are all cowards -- it's just that we are each afraid of different things. I vividly remember taking the fearless Sidney Franklin--fearless in a bull ring, that is -- for a fast ride on a midget motorcycle through the winding streets of Sevilla's barrio de Santa Cruz and he was babbling with fright before it was over.

"Many would be Cowards, if they had Courage enough," wrote Thomas Fuller back in 1732.

Probably many toreros fight bulls simply because they lack the courage not to fight bulls. As I wrote in the introduction to Carlos Arruza's autobiography, My Life as a Matador, much mystic claptrap has been ascribed to the reasons men fight bulls, from religion to homosexuality to thwarted patricide, and perhaps in rare instances it has some validity. But in Arruza's case, and I believe in the cases of the majority of men who get a supreme thrill from making a" bull pass by their legs, the basic underlying reasons are contained in this excerpt from the excellent paper entitled The Counter-Phobic Attitude by the late psychiatrist Otto Fenichel:

"When the organism discovers that it is now able to overcome without fear a situation which would formerly have overwhelmed it with anxiety, it experiences a certain kind of pleasure. This pleasure has the character of 'I need not feel anxiety any more.'

... "It will generally hold true that the essential joy in sport is that one actively brings about in play certain tensions which were formerly feared, so that one may enjoy the fact that now one can overcome them without fearing them."

I am convinced that the reasons for one's taking up bullfighting are usually neither more nor less neurotic or mystical than those which propel a man to take up high-diving, mountaineering, giant slalom or sports car racing.

The one thing that all bullfighters have in common is that they are true adventurers. Of course the economic factor figures in there very heavily also. "Toreros and royalty are the only ones who live well," they say in Spain. In Mexico, it's toreros and politicians. Bullfighting is just about the only way for a poor boy to make it. All he has to do is lay his life on the line; not just once, though, in one jaw-clenched, door-die act of bravado, but coldly and methodically, day after day, month after month and season after season.

Take the rather typical case of Fernando de los Reyes, "El Callao" (pronounced cah-yow), a shy modest man who looks as much like a matador as a man can. I recently came back from seeing him take the alternative in Mexico City -- that is, graduate to the status of a full matador -- and I have never seen such beautiful, slow, languid, insouciant right hand passes in my life -- no, not even from the great Manolete.

At the comparatively advanced age of 26, he had finally done it, finally received his Doctorate of Tauromachy, and he was on top of the world. Ever since he was 16 he'd been working toward this goal, and he finally came through with flying colors, to let none of his rabid supporters down. But if it hadn't been for a certain afternoon, Fernando de los Reyes, El Callao, would probably still be just a novillero.

El Callao -- the Silent One -- was brought up hungry poor, the son of a day laborer, in Mexico City. Nothing is poorer than the poverty of Mexico City, or maybe it just looks poorer than any place else, set, as it is, against the gaudy newness of the buildings and the big cars of the politicians. Fernando started working in a grocery store when he was 14 and graduated to the body shop of a garage when he was 16. Some of his fellow workers were aficionados practicantes -- that is, they used to spend their days off looking for opportunities to fight bulls. Fernando got in with them and found himself going out to the small village pachangas where half-bred young animals are caped in makeshift arenas for fun and for the enjoyment of the drunken villagers on feast days.

At first Fernando just went along for the ride and couldn't see too much in these wild unorganized affairs. But then one day he was persuaded to go out there with a cape in his hands. The big morucho bull was in the middle of the arena pawing the sand and waiting for someone to come into range when Fernando slid through the burladero opening in the fence. Thin but perfectly built, he already had a natural torero's walk and grace. He held the big cape out in front like a boxer, the right lower and closer to his body.

"Toro!" he shouted at the bull and shook the cape. Then he watched with his heart pounding louder than the bull's hoofs as it charged down on him. But he held his ground and just before the horns hit the cape he swung his arms, the left hand snapping down even with the right and then the two of them swinging together, moving the magenta cloth just a few inches in front of the animal's snout and guiding the terrible head by his thighs.

It worked! It was a veronica, a jerky, ungraceful one, but still a veronica. And the bull had gone by -- this great lethal hunk of black muscle had been made to miss him and he hadn't moved his legs back an inch! With just his wrists and this cloth he had sucked death close into him and then controlled and dominated death and sent it away from him.

He experienced the greatest emotion he'd ever felt in his life, and he knew that he could never be anything else but a torero. He knew also that these bulls held his one chance to get out of a garage or maybe to own a garage, or maybe a string of garages. "Bullfighting is a pile of riches guarded by a pair of sharp horns," people told him. Here was a way, an exciting, quick, easy way to get a decent house for his parents and five brothers and sisters. Here was a way to become somebody overnight!

It wasn't quite that easy, he found out. In fact that first day, after his lucky initial pass, the bull began to point out to him just how difficult it was going to be. Because he didn't know anything about the complicated science of terrains and querencias and bull psychology, the first time he tried to make the bull pass between him and the fence it tossed him sky high. If the bull had had a little more breeding and sharper horns it would have made a sieve out of him. Right then he learned a basic tenet: don't try to take a bull between you and the fence because it will instinctively swerve away from the hard boards and head into your body without even aiming for you. And just to complicate matters he was told that, every once in a while, one draws a bull that hugs the fence for protection and you can make him pass well only between you and the fence!

He was tossed several times that day and many times afterward in the years to come. He began to see why so many boys who want to become bullfighters never make it, boys who like the pageantry and the big money and the easy women and the fast cars, but who can't stand the gaff. Every young boy in Spain and Mexico dreams of being a torero, that is, a professional bullfighter of (continued on page 66)Gorrida(continued from page 62) some rank or other, but there are only about 30 first-class matadors (killers of selected, big bulls) in the world. Men who want to become matadors often think that somehow bullfighting will solve their problems, the way some people believe Tahiti would solve theirs.

They want to be matadors but they don't want to do what a matador has to do. They like the romance of it all, the color, the position, the being the center of attention, the getting away from whatever is bothering them, the impressing of a parent or a brother or a girl. But they don't like the hunger, the riding the rails from one village fair to another, sleeping in corrals, scrounging a cape pass here, acting as banderillero there, and always tangling with bulls that have been fought so many times that "they know Latin," ignore the cape and batter the man's underfed body. Many would-be toreros like everything about bullfighting except fighting bulls.

Fernando liked to fight bulls, any bulls. He kept at his job at the garage but he fought and practiced every chance he got. Finally when he was 19 a big break came his way. It was at the tiny ring of the Rancho del Charro and it was for free. But it was in Mexico City, and he was to kill his first animal. He'd done plenty of work with the capote and the muleta cape but he'd never had a chance to kill a bull. He did well, well enough to earn him a fight in El Torero, the second largest ring in Mexico City, also for free. In this fight he caped well, killed well, and was awarded his first ear as a trophy of a fine performance. He was immediately contracted for La Plaza Mexico, the largest bull ring in the world, which seats 50,000 people. He was paid $80, quite a different sum from the $26,000 which Manolete received in that same plaza in 1946, but it was Fernando's first bull money and he was delighted to get it. Of course it was more than used up immediately in expenses -- rented costume, swords, banderilleros and picadors, bribes to the critics, and so forth, but he was on his way. It would be no time at all, he thought before he would be a full matador, not just a minor novillero, and get in on that big money and those good bulls.

But then he was badly gored in the groin. It was his baptism of blood, his first real cornada, and the toreros claim a man sheds his brave blood first. It certainly looked that way because Fernando -- or El Callao, as they were billing him now because of his shyness -- went way down and stayed down for the rest of the year. When he came back it was almost like starting from scratch. He went to Spain, did fairly well, but then in France he received a terrible goring in the stomach. He missed the entire season again. Back in Mexico he found that because of his long absence and bull ring politics he wasn't offered a single decent fight.

By 1956 he was ready to go back to the garage; la fiesta brava had beaten him to his knees.But a spark in him wasn't quite dead, and he wangled a fight with Chano Ramos, one of the new young novilleros. It was to be a mano-a-mano -- a hand to hand contest between the two of them with no third matador on the bill. For El Callao this was it -- he had to make good now or he was through.

I suppose the memory of that fight will be around as long as the people who witnessed it are. On his first bull, he strode out there like Manolete -- whom he resembles -- and had the crowd going wild with those fantastic right hand passes of his, passes that controlled the bull and geared down its charges so that the whole performance seemed like a slow motion film or a dream sequence. When he killed well he was awarded both ears of the dead bull and received a great ovation.

On his second bull Fernando was out to cinch his triumph, even though this animal had a dangerous left chop. On his first quite he flipped the cape over his head, started a gaonera series, and the bull slammed its head to the left halfway through the charge. The torero was flung high into the air and crashed down to the sand unconscious. His men lured the bull away and rushed El Callao to the infirmary. The doctors brought him to quickly and he saw that he hadn't been gored. He lurched to his feet but fell back groggily. He got up again and the nurses tried to make him stay down. "Watch it from here on la televisión," said one, pointing to a set on the floor.

This wasn't the best move, because El Callao took one look at Chano Ramos out there receiving tremendous applause with his -- El Callao's -- second bull, and he struggled to his feet again. "Got to go back in there!" he gasped, starting for the door shakily. But two nurses blocked his way. "I'm all right," he said. "Look, l know whether I'm all right or not!"

One of the nurses, Maria Herejón, answered him with a Spanish saying: "Tantos años de marquesa sin saber mover el abanico?" -- "A Marquise for so many years and I don't know how to flutter a fan?" Meaning she'd been a bullfight nurse for 33 seasons and when she said a man was too groggy to go back into the ring she knew what she was talking about. With her arm around his shoulder affectionately she walked him around, helped adjust his uniform, and gave him a little more time to collect himself. Finally she said "Now!" He gave her a kiss on the cheek and ran out of the infirmary back into the arena. From the little opening in the gateway to the ring Nurse Herrejón watched him take on his third, and last, bull.

What followed then was the greatest performance that the Mexico City fans had seen in years. El Callao did every pass he'd ever learned in his 10 years of apprenticeship, and he did them closer to the horns than people believed could be possible. Later, in the cafes all over Mexico, those passes would be compared to passes by Silverio and Garza and Arruza. Especially those incredible, right handed, "in the round" passes -- "ay, chihuahua, aquellos pases en re-dondo! Better than Manolete's, even slower and smoother!"

Like a king he was out there alone in the center of the world with that mass of black death charging and recharging, the two of them drunk with what they were doing. He was tossed again, frighteningly, but he climbed off the sand blazing mad and let the bull's horns pass closer to his body than before and the audience was a howling pack of maniacs. Then he lined the animal up, getting its feet together so that the shoulder blades would be open to take the sword down into the aorta. He profiled himself to the animal, sighted down the blade, shouted "toro!" once as he shook the muleta in his left hand, and then, as the bull charged, he ran-- lunged forward to meet it. The two became one for a long instant before they separated. Then the bull spun twice and crashed over backwards dead.

You already know what happened: The crowd began that spine-tingling chant -- "to-re-ro, to-re-ro, to-re-ro," the greatest tribute they can pay a matador, and the presidente signaled for one ear, and as the chant kept up, another ear, and finally the tail of the dead animal. Then the crowd spilled down into the arena and hoisted the exhausted man onto their shoulders. Fernando de los Reyes had earned his right to become a full matador, and life was good -- maybe better than it would ever be again.

This story of the making of El Callao is really the eternal story of most matadors. People tell me that bullfighting will die out, that there is no place for it in this modern world. But I believe there will always be Callaos in Spain and Latin America, and that there will always be people who will thrill to the sight of courage in the afternoon.

Cossio lists the biographies of over 10,000 toreros since 1700 in his monumental work, Los Toros. Whether the next 250 years will produce another 10,000 one cannot tell. But bullfighting, (concluded on page 74)Corrida(continued from page 66) anachronistic as it is in this jet and atomic world of today, appears to be here to stay; for example, there were 288 corridas in Spain in 1945, as opposed to only 241 in 1915, and this year there should be close to 300. The extraordinary interest manifested by Americans in the last 10 years should insure steady customers by itself. Bullfighting books and records are best-sellers, there is a rash of bullfighting movies, and the torero's costume has influenced Milady's wardrobe quite considerably.

Periodically there are attempts to hold corridas in the United States, but they are generally abortive attempts in Texas or bloodless parodies in California. Far from encouraging this activity, I deplore it and will do anything to discourage bringing bullfights to the United States. This country is culturally, historically and ethically incapable of producing an E1 Callao, just as it is incapable of furnishing an arena with 50,000 people who would deliriously chant "to-re-ro" to a man who'd risked his neck to do a couple of arabesques around a bull.

No -- let us leave la fiesta to the Latins, to the El Callaos, for only they truly have the proper talent and history and breeding and decadence to savour the pagan spectacle, to know how to enjoy the death ritual. Let us continue to go to the source. Let the gates of fear continue to swing on their original hinges in their original sites, for when the bolt is thrown they creak open onto yellow sand that is steeped in centuries of blood and lore with layer upon layer of cowardice and bravery on top.

Fernando de los Reyes, El Callao -- the Silent One -- waits for the gates of fear to open.

The crowd cheers those incredible right hand passes ... ... as he works close, terribly close, to the lethal horns.

The crowd cheers those incredible right hand passes ... ... as he works close, terribly close, to the lethal horns.

The crowd cheers those incredible right hand passes ... ... as he works close, terribly close, to the lethal horns.

His second bull crashes him to the ground, unconscious.

In the infirmary, El Callao is revived but told he cannot return to arena.

Below, he talks nurse into releasing him.

Above, man and bull are merged in the moment of truth as the matador's sword finds its target.

Below, tribute to the bloodied but triumphant hero, ears and tail awarded by the presidente.

With his third bull, El Callao outdoes himself, working closer to the horns than was belived possible. It is too good to last: suddenly he is tossed by the horns, frighteningly, but (below) climbs from the sand blazing mad.

With his third bull, El Callao outdoes himself, working closer to the horns than was belived possible. It is too good to last: suddenly he is tossed by the horns, frighteningly, but (below) climbs from the sand blazing mad.