Beatle in the Bull Ring

I went to spain last summer intending to write a serious piece about the bullfight scene: a sort of pocket form book was what. I had in mind, which would list the top ten matadors, run through their respective qualities and offer a little advice about where and when you might expect to see them at their best.

And indeed I could still write such a piece. It would begin with the news that Antonio Ordóñez, the serene young maestro from Ronda whom Hemingway worshiped, is emerging from two years' retirement to fight a full Spanish season in 1965,---Ordóñez of the magic cape, the supreme slow-motion artist, all control and courtesy, who killed his last bull in Lima in 1962, lifting his hat skyward to dedicate its death to the soul of his recently buried father, a former matador of some glory who was Hemingway's model for the bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises. Mastery imposed with grace and without melodrama: Such is Antonio.

Having welcomed him back (with a hopeful prayer that time has not dulled his 32-year-old reflexes). I would go on to salute another revenant, this time of a different stamp: Litri, who as a puny, big-nosed boy---expressionless save for his eyes, which blazed volumes of censored resentment and a mute, imperative need to stun the world with valor---stormed across Spain in the early 1950s, earning fortunes by sheer force of personality, making up in courage what he lacked in art. The bulls in his heyday were weakened for star matadors by having their horns shaved down, which caused them to miss their marks by a vital couple of inches: but the safeguards against this abuse have since been strengthened, and in 1964, when Litri returned to the ring after six years' absence, he triumphed with untouched bulls. The glowering face was as magnetic as ever, and art had strengthened the fighting: all the same, I would have to add that he still ends his faenas with sensational tricks, like staring at the crowd instead of the bull as the horns brush past his legs.

Nor could I omit Jaime Ostos, the exuberantly handsome young Andalusian who received, in 1963, a wound that brought him nearer death than any matador of the front rank since Manolete's fatal goring 16 years earlier. After a winter of agonized convalescence, he reappeared in April with guts undiminished, still a dominating wielder of cape and muleta, and still, on his day the best killer in Spain, often seen in pictures with both feel off the ground as he plunges over the horns. "Jaime's our number three," Hemingway used to say, numbers one and two being Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguin, of whom the latter took his bland, omniscient. Castilian technique into permanent retirement some four years ago.

And speaking of technique, I would have to find room for El Viti, a solemn fellow from Salamanca who fights almost daily. We are dealing with serious toreros, and EI Viti is serious to the point of glumness---in the words of Orson Welles, an aficionado of more than 30 years' standing who now lives in Madrid: "He's gray and dreary and dismal, but technically---until Antonio comes back---he's the best there is. You remember what Anatole France said when someone asked him who was the greatest French poet? He said: Unfortunately, Victor Hugo.' I feel the same way about EI Viti." And then I would spare a sentence or two for Paco Camino, a slightly built depressive from Seville who overcomes his prevailing apathy about once a month and completes half a dozen superlative left-handed passes ("Like the rays of a lighthouse sweeping the sea," said a dazzled critie); and the elegant gypsy, Curro Romero, whose triumphs are even rarer, annual conquests of panic that only occur when this peerless but terrified artist encounters an utterly trustworthy, straight-charging bull; and the hard-working brothers Giron---Cesar and Curro from Venezuela---who strut into the ring like a pair of flamboyant gymnasts prepared to do handsprings over the bull's back before killing it. And I could not leave out the great veteran, verging on portliness now but still a walking manual of bullfight tradition and a living guarantee, whenever he enters the plaza, that the bulls on hand will be honestly fought, according to the rules, without tricks or histrionics: I mean Antonio Bienvenida, at 12 the oldest active matador in Spain. Every year or so. Bienvenida undertakes the hardest taurine feat of all---the killing of six bulls single handed in Madrid---and does it, moreover, with an unruffled headwaiter's smile on his face. With the sword he sometimes vacillates: and the same applies to Jose Fuentes, a slim teenage apprentice currently regarded in taurine circles as the boy most likely to mature into a classic bullfighter---a torero de epoca. Fuentes was born in Linares, the town in which Manolete died:

"Linares took him from us." says the youngster's publicity, "and Linares gives him back."

Having named my choice of the best, I would have to tell you where to see them. The first rule is: Stay away from Madrid. The economics of tourism have ruined this noble plaza; still the biggest in Spain, it is no longer the cathedral of serious bullfighting. Its money-minded impresario knows that he can fill the house with foreigners, no matter how feeble the bulls and toreros he provides: Only in May, when a dozen fights are held on consecutive days for the feria of San Isidro, Madrid's patron saint, can you count on reasonable matadors and decent animals. Wherever you go, incidentally, study the breeder's name on the posters. Bulls of any breed can be bad, and one in twenty is apt, because of horned incest, to be downright crazy; but you have a better-than-average chance of seeing good, hard-charging wild animals if they come from the following ranches:

Atanasio Fernandez, Graciliano Perez Tabernero, Conde de la Corte, Escudero Calvo, Samuel Flores, Ricardo Arellano, Fermin Bohorquez, Juan Pedro Domecq. Eduardo Miura, Pablo Romero, Salvador Guardiola, Antonio Urquijo, Tulio Vazquez, Joaquin Buendia.

There are nearly 200 accredited bull ranches in Spain, and many of those I have omitted can produce the raw material for a good corrida. What must always be stressed is that the bull is the basis, the essential datum of the fight, the problem that the matador must solve.

Outside Madrid, the Easter fair in Seville is a gaudy social spree, but its bullfights are dubious. Rain often saddens the plaza, and wind---by blowing the capes toward the matadors---can render it perilous. Moreover, spring has an incalculably provocative effect on the bulls, all of whom are virgins when they die; and the matadors are naturally reluctant to take risks when a goring might immobilize them for Madrid and the lucrative summer ferias that lie ahead. Of these, Pamplona (first week in July) is still an indispensable occasion, despite its noise, falling-down drunkenness and inflated prices; The tourist aficionados in this Basque township often show better critical judgment than Spaniards in the deep south of Andalusia. Valencia, an ugly and clangorous port that looks across the Mediterranean to Majorca, has my favorite feria---about ten fights at the end of July, majestic fireworks every night, 17,000 seats in the bull ring, and roughly 21 tourists, Malaga (first week in August) is more picturesque and a good place to see Ordóñez, who was born nearby in Ronda; but the crowd is absurdly euphoric and generous with trophies---anyone who gives a bull six passes and kills it without using firearms can usually cut an ear. Mid-August ushers in the semana grande at San Sebastián (a snobbish northern resort, with gray sand in the ring and bad weather often threatening), followed by the feria of Bilbao (same weather but less snobbism, coupled with a traditional insistence on gigantic bulls, most of which turn out to be fat and breathless rather than muscular). The major September festivity takes place in Salamanca, where the program tends to feature good local toreros matched with locally bred bulls, which are nearly always inferior to animals raised in Andalusia. Saragossa rounds off the season with a respectable feria halfway through October. And Barcelona holds two or three lights a week from early spring to late fall: There, for the most part, big names face small bulls before big crowds. As in Madrid, tourism keeps the standards low and the profits high.

Thus I would end my survey of the modern Spanish bullfight: but the picture it gave would be false and partial, since it would be confined to the serious aspects of the scene. Bullfighting is the difficult craft of facing a charging bull with stillness, grace and rhythmic control; of slowing its pace to fit your tempo; of forcing it to follow the course you prescribe, not the one it chooses; of enlisting it as your partner in a dance of your dictation; and of preparing it, with the aid of cape passes, flesh wounds delivered by picadors on horseback and banderilleros on foot, and further passes with a piece of red serge on a stick, so that its head is sufficiently lowered for you to dive over its right horn and plant a sword between its shoulder blades. That is serious bullfighting. But the bullfight today is not ruled by serious matadors. It is ruled by something the Spanish call tremendismo and we would call sensationalism. The matador who extends the red serge to the bull with his left hand, holding the sword right-handed behind his back, and takes the charge slowly around his motionless body in a gentle are is behaving seriously. The matador who kneels with his back to the bull and lets it charge uncontrolled under his outstretched arm is a tremendista. He has courage, but no grace and no mastery, which are the prerequisites of art; he looks permanently unsafe, whereas art always looks secure. The embodiment of tremendismo---and arguably the highest-paid individual performer in European history---is a 28-year-old matador, christened Manuel Benitez but known wherever Spanish is spoken as "El Cordobes"---the Cordobán.

I first saw him in 1961, the season in which he began his subjugation of Spain: a wild, unteachable youth, his body already crisscrossed with horn scars and his hair an unmanageable mop, so much so that he had to brush it out of his eyes after each series of passes. (Spain regarded the gesture as effeminate, and snickered whenever he used it.) Instead of approaching the bull with grave, majestic tread and muleta correctly proffered, he shambled toward it with a cheery grin, trailing the muleta behind him in the sand. At that time he put in his own banderillas (because of a shoulder injury, he no longer does so); but rather than run at the charging bull in the classic quarter circle, he preferred to break the sticks in half and await the charge on his knees, leaping up at the last moment to jab them in as the animal lumbered past. He killed atrociously, never going in straight and slowly, but veering away from the horns and shoving the sword ignobly into the lung: his eyes would be tightly shut, so that he looked like a blindfold child in the old English game of pinning the tail on a painted donkey. Yet he showed abnormal valor in all the other skills of bullfighting, and it was valor that his publicity stressed. The words of a famous 19th Century matador were prominently quoted: "Without valor the art of bullfighting is like the sky without the sun: It is still the sky, but without radiance and beauty. The beginner must demonstrate three things: valor, valor and valor. Art can be learned, but valor is innate, like seductiveness in the eyes of beautiful women." The publicists failed to mention that in killing, the supreme test of valor, when the man should expose his body to the bull, EI Cordobés was nowhere. But a safe kill in the lung often drops a bull more quickly than a brave one between the shoulder blades; and modern crowds love quick kills

In 1961 El Cordobés was still a novillero, an apprentice matador; even so, he was earning more than the best of the fully fledged stars. 400,000 pesetas an afternoon (just under $7000) was his accustomed figure. He was beginning to price his betters out of the ring. It was no accident that Ordóñez, who had sworn never to appear with a torero earning more than himself, decided to retire in 1962.

To the Spanish El Cordobes was a startling novelty; but I recognized him as soon as I saw him. This cool uncaring boy, with his disdain for tradition and dignity and balletic "line," was a Spanish embodiment of something I had already met under several other names. In France, the blouson noir; in Britain, the Mod; and in America, the hipster. Nonchalance, love of danger for kicks, casual contempt for conformity: These were (continued on page 170)Bull Ring(continued from page 166) the attributes that made El Cordobés the first hip bullfighter. He would attempt tricks so outlandish and graceless that his fans would laugh even as they applauded: and he would grin back at them, conscious that, although he had injected an element of comedy into an art formerly held to be tragic, they would pay even higher prices to laugh at him tomorrow. He had mastered several clever and seriously employable technical devices: he knew, for example, how to magnetize the bull by focusing the attention of its offside eye on the outstretched tip of the muleta, so that when it had passed him he could make it swing and recharge without having to run after it; but there was no artistic emotion in the use to which he put his knowledge. There was simply fun and hazard.

After one of the Cordobán's faenas, anyone who attempted a series of pure, commanding, unflamboyant left-handed passes---the keystones of classic bullfighting---would be lucky if he did not bore the crowd to distraction. The Spanish have always revered any performer who possesses the untranslatable quality they call duende, which means the power to convey profound emotion without fuss or frills. It is what separates great matadors and flamenco singers from merely good ones. In American terms, Billie Holiday had it, but not Ella Fitzgerald; Ernest Hemingway, but not John O'Hara. El Cordobés ostentatiously lacked it, but went on to prove that, alone among the top matadors ol history, he did not need it. It was as if a great musician were to demonstrate that he could get along perfectly well without a sense of pitch.

I saw El Cordobés again in 1962. The bulls he faced were underweight insects, and when he made his debut in Málaga, the horned midget that scampered into the ring provoked even that notoriously tolerant audience to cover the sand with a protesting hail of cushions and smashed bottles of beer. He fought it imperviously, earning more than ever. In 1963, when our paths next crossed, he had taken the alternativa, the ceremony whereby an apprentice graduates to the rank of matador. (The decision to graduate involves no examination: It simply means that you are bound thereafter to fight not just anything with horns, but bulls of a fixed minimum age---four years ---and a fixed minimum weight---1000 pounds---in a first-category plaza.) By now El Cordobés was the idol of Spain, a national treasure whose daily fee had risen to more than $10,000. In Pamplona he was cool to the point of inertia, and a jeering mob chased him to his hotel. The two bulls he had fought were cowardly weaklings, lacking the frank, unhesitating charge he needs to bring off his effects: but what nettled the customers was that he had not even tried. Yet I discerned, in the noise of their outrage, something I had never heard in Spain before, something new and alien---a note of cynical admiration, almost of envy. Even as they booed him, they were envying his ability to get away with such enormities: they could barely resist congratulating him on having pulled off such a tremendous confidence trick.

After all, had not Juan Belmonte said that the best bullfighter was the one they paid the most? 1963 was the year when every novice grew his hair, went down on his knees and tried to look swingingly indifferent, like the Cordobán. It was also the year in which I realized that the era of Dominguin and Ordóñez, whose rivalry reached its climax in the feverish summer of 1959, had been a golden age. Any gutsy beginner could ape El Cordobés; but nobody could look like Ordóñez.

In the winter of 1963-1964 the Cordobán rode in triumph across Mexico, fighting almost every day and picking up $25,000 per corrida. Like the Spanish, the Mexicans were mesmerized into tearing up the rules of bullfighting: Tow-haired tremendismo ousted classical standards. I returned to Spain in 1964 hoping that the vogue would have evaporated: but no. El Cordobés was now pocketing a million pesetas (just under $17,000---an unparalleled sum for Spain) every time he appeared, and he appeared live or six afternoons a week. Before going to see him, I consulted Orson Welles, one of the few Anglo-Saxon aficionados whose opinions the Spanish take seriously. He filled in a little historical background.

"When Louis XIV's grandson became king of Spain. Louis said that the Pyrenees had ceased to exist. He was wrong." (Thus Orson, genially booming.) "It was El Cordobés who abolished the Pyrenees. Europe used to end at the French border: now it covers Spain. He's a symbol of the way the whole peninsula has been Europeanized. The tourists adore him. He's a beatnik from anywhere: he's taken the Spanishness out of bullfighting and made it a by-product of the beat revolution. And he's the first great figure in bullfighting who could have succeeded in other performing arts---singing, for instance, or acting. He's already made two movies, and he plays himself in both of them. The first was called Learning to Die, although some people say they ought to have called it Learning to Die Rich. He never forgets the future, and he cares about self-improvement. He has a cultural instructor who travels around with him and tells him about Spanish history---who the reyes calólicos were, and so on. If you measure his income against the time he takes to earn it---say forty minutes a day---I'd say he was the highest-paid performer of all time, with the possible exception of Elizabeth Taylor. As a bullfighter, he's a comedian. But make no mistake about it: He's a star. He's the greatest tremendista since Manolete. He can't walk like a matador, because he has flat feet---I know because I have them, too. But he's a genuine star." I asked Orson if he had ever met El Cordobés. "Sure, and he told me he had no afición. He said he disliked the bulls and was only interested in success." I thought of Sid Caesar's dying matador bit in one of his early TV shows: "I do not hate the bulls, and the bulls do not hate me. They're just making a living like anybody else."

Welles told me that he had seen El Cordobés in Seville, the taurine capital of Andalusia: even there, in the heartland of classicism, the crowd went so wild that the bull-ring president, instead of waving one handkerchief to authorize the cutting of the first ear, followed by another for the second, and a third for the tail, shattered the rules by waving all three the instant the fight was over, (Tails are seldom cut in Seville, and in Madrid two ears is the maximum trophy). In May 1964, Orson took Antonio Ordóñez and his wife to see the Cordobán's debut in Madrid. The day was wet and windy, but the demand for tickets was such that one American tourist traded a station wagon for two seats in the third row. Orson challenged his guests to bet on the afternoon's awards. Ordóñez, said the Cordobán would cut three ears; his wife voted for two. Orson plumped for a horn wound. Before that audience, he felt, in an atmosphere of such expectation, El Cordobés had no alternative but to be gored.

He won the bet. After caping his first bull and kissing it three times on the flank---a repulsive piece of showmanship ---El Cordobés mistimed a pass and took six inches of horn in his left thigh, together with a nasty jab in the scrotum. He was whisked off to the bull-ring infirmary, leaving the animal to he killed by one of his colleagues. In clear defiance of the taurine regulations--- which insist that trophies must be awarded only to those who have actually killed their bulls---the president granted him an ear. It was duly delivered to his hospital bed. "All over Spain," said Orson, summing up, "you can buy little printed cards to give to your friends. You hand them to your host when you go out to dinner. They bear a simple message---'Kindly Do Not Talk About El Cordobés."

From Madrid I flew southeast to Valencia, where the idol was due to appear in the great July feria, There I talked to his manager, a tall, attractive, long-faced man in his 30s named Chopera, who owns---with his father---some 20 important bull rings in Spain, 10 in South America, several in Mexico, and a select stable of Spanish matadors, of whom El Cordobés is king. (So potent is the Cordobán charisma that a bullfighter who bills himself as "The Double of El Cordobés" has based a profitable career on mere physical resemblance to the original.) With Chopera's help I pieced together the facts of the Cordobán's life.

He was born in Palma del Rio, a village 30-odd miles from Córdoba, on May 4, 1936. His father was a waiter in a local bar, and the household was desperately poor: "I've stolen more chickens than a gypsy," he nowadays recalls. That summer the Spanish Civil War broke out, and hardship increased for the Benitez children---three girls and two boys, of whom Manuel was the youngest. When the war ended three years later, the family could not feed him, and he was sent to an orphanage. In 1941 real orphanhood befell him: His parents died within a few months of each other, and his eldest sister took over his upbringing. (Like many bullfighters, he grew up in a suffocatingly feminine ambiente.) Necessity and opportunity drew him toward the bulls. Southern Spain breeds the best bulls and the most poverty: Then as now, the quickest way to conquer the latter is to fight the former. So Manuel stole by night into the pastures of neighboring bull ranches and caped the moonlit animals. At any rate, that is the official story, and it may very well be true---although the same legend has been told of almost every top matador since Juan Belmonte, who actually did indulge in such nocturnal rehearsals.

In his teens Manuel took part in small-town bullfights, amateur scrambles held in village squares behind improvised barricades. He hitchhiked to famous ranches and gate-crashed tientas, the trials that breeders hold in private arenas to test the courage and staying power of yearling animals. In both Madrid and Barcelona (how he got there God knows) he was an espontáneo, which means a young fanatic who leaps into the ring from a cheap seat with a smuggled muleta and gets in as many passes as he can before being gored or dragged off to jail. Between exploits like this he worked on a building site in Madrid and taught himself to read. In a recent interview he said: "I'm not afraid of the bulls. Of life, yes ..." Given his background, the statement rings true.

In August 1959, with scant success, he made his first appearance in the suit of lights. A month later he and Manuel Gomez, a fellow novillero, faced seven-year-old bulls in a village called Loeches. Both were wounded and sent to hospital in Madrid, where they occupied adjoining beds. During the night Gomez died. It was not until the next season that the new star began to rise; he met and acquired as manager a paunchy publicist named El Pipo, who persuaded him to call himself "El Cordobés" and fixed a fight for him in Córdoba. The local critics adored his crazy, carefree valor, and by the end of the year he had killed 72 bulls, cutting 90 ears, 31 tails and 13 hoofs. In 1961 he began to conquer the big ferias; Valencia, where he was twice badly gored, especially warmed to him; and his tally for the summer was 67 novilladas, from which---tackling the usual quota of two bulls per engagement---he garnered 111 ears, 27 tails and 13 hoofs. (To average more than one ear per fight is a feat that only the best achieve.) The unique, unprecedented year was 1962, in which the Cordobán broke all records by fighting 111 times---more than anyone else had ever fought in a single season--- and bagging a total of 167 ears and 28 tails. (It was also the year in which the cutting of hoofs was officially prohibited.) In May 1963, to hysterical acclamation, he took his alternativa in Córdoba, and that winter he paid his first visit to Mexico, where the big money is. He swept it into his souvenir collection, along with 60 ears and 7 tails. It was hereabouts that he changed managers, switching from El Pipo, who owned only bullfighters, to Chopera, who owned bull rings as well.

He had still not appeared in Madrid, where a single disaster can tarnish a hundred golden afternoons elsewhere. He took the crucial plunge on May 20, 1964, getting himself gored (as Orson Welles predicted) and cutting an undeserved ear. But he returned to face the Madrid public a month later at an annual charity fight that is always attended by Franco (who hates the bulls) and the serious aficionados. The day before the event he was interviewed by a bullfight weekly. The reporter spoke with awe of his almond-colored eyes, his schoolboy laugh, his armies of friends and the single red rose that is delivered to his apartment every day by an unknown admirer. How did he feel when facing the bulls? "For me," the Cordobán said, "the bull is pure joy, like a wine that fills my heart and makes me drunk. You don't know what it's like to have a triumph in the bull ring. It is delirium. You can't learn bullfighting. When you are before the bull, it's as if already in another world someone had taught you to fight it." Next day he drove to the big ring: the handkerchiefs waved like a snowstorm and won him two ears. As always, he stood with his feet together and wound the bull's charge around his body like a tourniquet; these circular passes look highly impressive until you study them and realize that as soon as the horns have passed the thighs the danger ceases. "His muleta was like a magnet!" exulted the mayor of his home town, who had come to Madrid for the occasion. Antonio Diaz-Cañabate, the leading bullfight critic, was less enthusiastic: "With the feet together, you cannot fight bulls, you can merely simulate passes. Only the body as a whole, not the wrist alone, can control a bull. And without control there cannot be a good pass." He added that the applause for the Cordobán "verged on the supernatural--- something never before seen or heard." (concluded on page 176)Bull Ring(continued from page 171)

That was a month before Valencia. Since Madrid (Chopera told me) El Cordobés had flown to Mexico, where a special summer season of corridas had been staged for his benefit. After Valencia, he had 31 contracts already signed for August---a fight a day, involving 8000 miles of travel by car and plane. During the winter of 1964-1965 he would appear in Peru. Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia and again Mexico; in all of these countries he would be ritually mobbed. I asked Chopera whether the Cordobán phenomenon could be compared in any way with the Beatles. "I suppose there's a connection," he said. "Manolo's hair is quite long and he causes sensations wherever he goes. And I expect he's heard their records, although he's never seen them in person. But there's one big difference. When Manolo performs, there's always the possibility of death."

I went upstairs to meet the maestro. It was 90 minutes before he was due to walk into the Valencian ring. The hotel lobby was jammed and the street outside impassable. "Madre de Dios!" said the elevator man, "the end of the world will be like this." Chopera showed me into a still-darkened bedroom: El Cordobés had fought in France the day before, and it had taken a plane trip and an overnight journey by car to get him to Valencia that morning. He sat grinning on the unmade bed, naked except for a jockstrap and a gold medallion around his neck. I learned afterward that it was reversible, with a Spanish Virgin on one side and a Mexican Virgin on the other, thus usefully combining supernatural propitiation with good Hispano-American relations. He was chattering noisily to two other journalists, and laughing a lot---a derisive urchin's laugh, full of mischief and complicity. In the background his dresser was laying out his costume.

There was talk about habits and hobbies. He said he drank wine with meals, smoked a little, sang a lot at his guitar, and went shooting when he wanted to be alone. He owned two Mercedes, a private plane, an estate near Córdoba, apartments in Madrid and Jaén, and he was about to buy a bull ranch. (Already Chopera hand-picks the bulls he fights, owns many of the plazas in which he fights them, and virtually dictates terms to the matadors who fight with him: When El Cordobés starts fighting his own bulls, the circle will be complete. M.C.A., I reflected, never had it so good.) Somebody asked whether he planned to marry. A wide smile and a vigorous headshake: He had met Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie's dancing daughter, and been photographed with her, but there was no romance. "But you're pestered by thousands of girls," said one of the journalists. "Haven't you a favorite?" "Yes," said El Cordobés, winking, "the bull." Then who was his favorite movie actor? "El Cordobés!" shouted El Cordobés, laughing like a monkey.

I now came nervously weaving in with somber traditional questions about the bulls. How had he formed his style? "It's personal," he said, jabbing at the two-faced medallion, "it comes from myself." What matadors had influenced him? "Pues"---a huge shrug---"Manolete." (Ask a traditional question and you get a traditional answer.) Had he ever seen Manolete fight? "No." Then how-------? "He saw movies," said Chopera quickly. What were his best and worst days in the ring? "The best was my alternativa in Córdoba. The worst---that's still to come." I asked him what books he read, a question to which most matadors have two set answers: either "Comics and thrillers" or "The great works of Spanish literature and philosophy." El Cordobés came up with a third: "Nothing." Chopera added, probably with truth, that he sometimes consulted Los Toros, the four-volume standard work on tauromachy by Jocé Maria de Cossio.

It was almost time for him to dress. He was still attentive, but infectiously restless, like a jazz drummer late for a set. Before leaving I put a final question, embarrassing myself by its portentousness. "Outside the bull ring," I said, "are you afraid of death?" He looked bewildered for a moment. "I never think of it," he said. Then, in a sudden outburst of glee: "I shall live forever!"

That afternoon---Friday, July 24, 1964 ---six bulls from the ranch of Samuel Flores were killed in the Valencian ring. The corrida was televised throughout Spain, and thousands of people started work at five in the morning in order to be free to switch on their sets at 6:30 p.m. They got their labor's worth. With the sixth bull---having failed with the third---El Cordobés had the greatest triumph not only of his life, but conceivably (I am choosing my words with care) of bullfight history. I speak in terms of audience reaction, not of art. "Collective madness," said one critic next day: another wrote that under the Cordobán spell, "eccentric unorthodoxy was miraculously converted into a fundamental source of artistic creation." A typical review summed up the occasion:

During his faena with the last bull of Don Samuel Flores, the general paroxysm exceeded all limits. Cushions by the hundred, articles of clothing, and screams mingled with rapturous ovations filled the ring and the air. All Spain saw him kneeling before the bull, as if he were buried in the sand: saw him linking passes with the left hand, and passes with the right: rotating from the waist upward, but never moving his feet as the bull went by in thunderous proximity. Circular passes, with effortless flexure of arms and legs; long, rhythmical naturales---all of these he performed in his own casual manner, the new orthodoxy from Córdoba. Repose, presence, perfect timing with the arm, complete dominion with the wrist: These are qualities inherent in the style of Manuel Benitez. And if he lacks artistic grace, he has the inexplicable gift of authority over the masses---the gift called empathy. When he killed with a single stroke, closing his eyes to administer it, hundreds of spectators poured into the ring to carry him shoulder-high. They flung themselves upon him, so that a squad of policemen had to be summoned to protect him from the explosion of enthusiasm. Only with their aid was he able to receive the ears and tail of his dead enemy, to make a triumphal circuit of the ring, and to get back to his hotel, which he quitted an hour later to fight next day on the other side of the country he had conquered ...

And what was the fight really like? Intensely exciting, but totally unmoving: plenty of risk, but little artistry: an apotheosis of the comic bullfights you can see at night in provincial plazas, with clown matadors dressed like Chaplin's tramp. It was no more, in essence, than a superlative circus turn. But it marked a revolution, even a coup d'élat After Valencia, it was clear beyond denying that the art of bullfighting had surrendered to the cult of personality, and that El Cordobés was its absolute emperor. The revolution also extended to audience behavior. Before Valencia, spectators threw cushions only to indicate violent disgust, and police protection was reserved for matadors in serious danger of being lynched. El Cordobés changed all that in a single afternoon.

When at last he escaped to the Hotel Astoria, thousands of fans gathered in the square outside, many of them chanting his name. Eventually he appeared on a balcony, beaming beneath a vast sombrero, and flung into the crowd handful after handful of big, coarse 1000-peseta bank notes, each of them worth more than $17. It was a stupefying sight: the monarch of commercial bullfighting repaying his investors.

The following day, those who attended the bullfight in Valencia were handed a printed slip as they entered the plaza. It bore an admonition in several languages. The English version read: "To throw the seat cushions into the bull ring is not correck. Please to abandon oneself in the seat." The authorities needn't have worried. Not a cushion was flung, and nobody abandoned himself. The Cordobán was fighting 300 miles away.