The Crazy One

In Mexico, the hour before the bullfight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but in fact you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour next day. Outside the Plaza Mexico, cheap cafes open only on Sunday, and huge as beer gardens, filled with the public (us tourists, hoodlums, pimps, pickpurses and molls, Mexican variety--which is to say the whores had head dresses and hindquarters not to be seen elsewhere on earth, for their hair rose vertically 12 inches from the head, and their posteriors projected horizontally 12 inches back into that space the rest of the whore had just marched through). The mariachis were out with their romantic haunting caterwauling of guitar, violin, song of carnival and trumpet, their song told of hearts which were true and hearts which were broken, and the wail of the broken heart went right into the trumpet until there were times, when drunk the right way on tequila or Mexican rum, it was perhaps the best sound heard this side of Miles Davis.

You see, my friends, the wild hour was approaching. The horrors of the week in Mexico were coming to term. Indeed, no week in Mexico is without its horrors for every last Mexican alive--it is a city and a country where the bones of the dead seem to give the smell of their char to every desert wind and auto exhaust and frying tortilla. The mournfulness of unrequited injustice hangs a shroud across the centuries. Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry. The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way. It puts the cracks in the plaster of new buildings, it forgets to cement the tiles, it leaves rags in the new pipes of new office buildings and forgets to put the gas cap back on the tank. So the intellectuals and the technicians hate the bullfight as well. You cannot meet a socialist in Mexico who approves of the running of the bulls. They are trying to turn Mexico into a modern country, and thus the same war goes on there that goes on in three quarters of the world--the battlefront is the new highways to the suburbs, and the corporation's office buildings, the walls of hospital white and the myopic sheets of glass. In Mexico, like everywhere else, it is getting harder and harder to breathe in a mood through the pores of the city because more and more of the city is being covered with corporation architecture, with surgical dressing. To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land. And four o'clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week. If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal's flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter.

I could never have understood it if someone tried to explain ahead of time, and in fact, I came to love the bullfight long before I comprehended the first thing about why I did. That was very much to the good. There are not too many experiences a radical American intellectual could encounter in those days (when the youngest generation was called the silent generation) which invaded his sure sense of his own intellectual categories. I did not like the first bullfights I saw, the formality of the ritual bored me, the fights appeared poor (indeed they were) and the human content of the spectacle came out atrocious. Narcissistic matadors, vain when they made a move, pouting like a girl stood up on Saturday night when the crowd turned on them, clumsy at killing, and the crowd, brutal to a man. In the Plaza Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the w.c. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss. If you are an American escorting an American girl who has blonde hair, and you have tickets in sol, you buy your girl a cheap sombrero at the gate, for otherwise she will be a prime target of attention. Indeed, you do well not to sit near an American escorting a blonde whose head is uncovered, for the aim of a drunken Indian is no better than you when your aim is drunk. So no surprise if one's early detestation of the bullfight was fortified in kidney brew, Azteca.

Members of a minority group are always ready to take punishment, however, and I was damned if I was going to be excluded from still another cult. So I persisted in going to bullfights, and they were a series of lousy bullfights, and they were a series of lousy bullfights, and then the third or fourth time I got religion. It was a windy afternoon, with threats of rain, and now and then again ten minutes of rain, poisonous black clouds overhead, the chill gloom of a black sky on Sundays in Mexico, and the particular torero (whose name I could not recall for anything) was a clod. He had a nasty build. Little spindly legs, too big a chest, a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass, and a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth. He was engaged with an ugly bull who kept chopping at the muleta with his horns, and occasionally the bull would catch the muleta and fling it in the air and trample it and wonder why the object was either dead or not dead, the bull smelling a hint of his own blood (or the blood of some cousin) on the blood of the muleta, and the crowd would hoot, and the torero would go over to his sword handler at the barrera, and shake his head and come out with a new muleta, and the bull would chop, and the wind would zig the muleta out of control, and then the matador would drop it and scamper back to the barrera, and the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs through the rain all the way down from the cheap seats, and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes, and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly-gasoline through the crowd.

I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp's face and a dull thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair. There was something going on for him more humiliating than humiliation--as if his life was going to take a turn into something more dreadful than anything it had encountered until now. He was in trouble. The dead dull fight he was giving was going to be death for certain hopes in his psyche. Somehow it was going to be more final than the average dead dull fight to which he was obviously all too accustomed. I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man.

Well, he finally gave up any attempt to pass the bull, and he worked the animal forward with jerks of his muleta to left and right, a competent rather than a beautiful technique at best, and even to my untutored eye he was a mechanic at this, and more whistles, and then desperation all over that vain incompetent pimp's face, he profiled with his sword, and got it halfway in, and the animal took a few steps to one side and the other and fell over quickly.

The art of killing is the last skill you learn to judge in bullfighting, and the kill on this rainy afternoon left me less impressed than the crowd. Their jeers were replaced by applause (later I learned the crowd would always applaud a kill in the lung--all audiences are Broadway audiences) and the approbation continued sufficiently for the torero to take a tour of the ring. He got no ears, he certainly didn't deserve them, but he had his tour and he was happy, and in his happiness I found there was something likable about him. So this bad bullfight in the rain had given a drop (continued on page 112) The Crazy One (continued from page 92) of humanity to a very dry area of my heart, and now I knew a little more and had something to think about which was no longer altogether in category.

We have presented the origin of an addiction. For a drug's first appeal is always existential--our sense of life (once it is made alert by the sensation of its absence) is thereupon so full of need as the desire for a breath of air. The sense of life comes alive in the happy days when the addict first encounters his drug. But all histories of addiction are the same--particularly in the beginning. They fall into the larger category of the history of a passion. So I will spare each and every one of us the titles of the books I read on the running of the bulls, and I will not reminisce about the great bullfighters I saw, of the majesties of Arruza and the machismo of Procuna, the liquidities of Silverio and the solemnity of César Girón; no, we will not micturate the last of such memory. The fact is that I do not dwell on Arruza and Procuna and Silverio and Girón, because I did not see them that often and in fact most of them I saw but once. I was always in Mexico in the summer, you see, and the summer is the temporada de novillos, which is to say it is the time when the novilladas are held, which is to say it is the time of the novices.

Now the fellow who is pushing up this article for you is a great lover of the bullfight--make on it no mistake. For a great bullfight he would give up just about any other athletic or religious spectacle--the World Series in a minute, a pro football championship, a Mass at the Vatican, perhaps even a great heavy-weight championship--which, kids, is really saying it. No love like the love for four in the afternoon at the Plaza Mexico. Yet all the great matadors he saw were seen only at special festivals when they fought very small bulls for charity. The novillada is, after all, the time of the novilleros, and a novillero is a bullfighter approximately equal in rank to a Golden Gloves fighter. A very good novillero is like a very good Golden Gloves finalist. The Sugar Ray Robinsons and the Rocky Marcianos of the bullfighting world were glimpsed by me only when they came out of retirement long enough to give the equivalent of a snappy two-round exhibition. My love of bullfighting and my experience of it as a spectator was founded then by watching novilleros week after week over two separate summers in Mexico City.

After a while I got good at seeing the flaws and virtues in novilleros, and in fact I began to see so much of their character in their style, and began to learn so much about style by comprehending their character (for nearly everything good or bad about a novice bullfighter is revealed at a great rate) that I began to take the same furious interest and partisanship in the triumph of one style over another that is usually reserved for literary matters (is Philip Roth better than John Updike?--you know) or that indeed average Americans and some not so average might take over political figures. To watch a bullfighter have an undeserved triumph on Sunday afternoon when you detest his style is not the worst preparation for listening to Everett Dirksen nominate Barry Goldwater or hearing Lyndon Johnson give a lecture on TV about Amurrican commitments to the free universe. Everything bad and god-awful about the style of life got into the style of bullfighters, as well as everything light, delightful, honorable and good.

About the time I knew a lot about bullfighting, or as much as you could know watching nothing but novilleros week after week, I fell in love with a bullfighter. I never even met this bullfighter, I rush to tell you. I would not have wanted to meet him. Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection. And his name--not one in a thousand of you out there, dear general readers, can have heard of him--his name was El Loco. El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy. To amplify the power of nomenclature, El Loco came from the provinces, he was God's own hick, and his real name was Amado Ramirez, which is like being a boy from Hicksville, Georgia, with a name like Beloved Remington. Yet there was a time when I thought Beloved Remington, which is to say Amado Ramirez, would become the greatest bullfighter in the whole world, and there were critics in Mexico City hoary with afición who held the same opinion (if not always in print). He came up one summer like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall.

But we must tell more of what it is like to watch novilleros. You see, novice bullfighters fight bulls who are called novillos, and these bulls are a year younger and 200 to 400 pounds lighter than the big fighting bulls up around 1000 pounds which matadors must face. So they are less dangerous. They can still kill a man, but not often does that happen--they are more likely to pound and stomp and wound and bruise a novillero than to catch him and play him in the air and stab him up high on the horns the way a terrible fullgrown fighting bull can do. In consequence, the analogy to the Golden Gloves is imperfect, for a talented novillero can at his best look as exciting, or more exciting, than a talented matador--the novice's beast is smaller and less dangerous, so his lack of experience is compensated for by his relative comfort--he is in less danger of getting killed. (Indeed, to watch a consummate matador like Carlos Arruza work with a new young bull is like watching Norman Mailer box with his three-year-old son--absolute mastery is in the air.)

Novilleros possess another virtue. Nobody can contest their afición. For every novillero who has a manager, and a rich man to house and feed him, and influential critics to bring him along on the sweet of a bribe or two, there are a hundred devoted all but unknown novilleros who hitch from poblado to poblado on back dirt roads for the hint of a chance to fight at some fiesta so small the results are not even phoned to Mexico City. Some of these kids spend years in the provinces living on nothing, half-starved in the desire to spend a life fighting bulls and they will fight anything--bulls who are overweight, calves who are under the legal limit, beasts who have fought before and, so, are sophisticated and dangerous. These provincial novilleros get hurt badly by wounds which show no blood, deep bruises in the liver and kidney from the flat of a horn, deep internal bleedings in the gut, something lively taken off the groin. A number of them die years later from malnutrition and chronic malfunctions of some number of those organs; their deaths get into no statistics on the fatalities of the bullfight.

A few of these provincial novilleros get enough fights and enough experience and develop enough talent, however, to pick up a reputation of sorts. If they are very lucky and likable, or have connections, or hump themselves--as some will--to rich homosexuals in the capital, then they get their shot. Listen to this. At the beginning of the novillada, six new bullfighters are brought in every Sunday to fight one bull each in the Plaza Mexico. For six or eight weeks this goes on. Perhaps 50 fighters never seen before in Mexico have their chance. Maybe ten will be seen again. The tension is enormous for each novillero. If he fails to have a triumph or attract outstanding attention, then his years in the provinces went for nothing. Back again he will go to the provinces as a punishment for failing to be superb. Perhaps he will never fight again in the Plaza Mexico. His entire life depends on this one fight. And even this fight depends on luck. For any novillero can catch a poor bull, a dull mediocre cowardly bull. When the animal does not charge, the bullfighter, unless possessed of genius, cannot look good.

Once a novillero came into the Plaza on such an occasion, was hit by the bull while making his first pass, a verónica, (continued on page 211) The Crazy One (continued from page 112) and the boy and the cape sailed into the air and came down together in such a way that when the boy rolled over, the cape wrapped around him like a tortilla, and one wit sitting in sol, full of the harsh wine of Mexico's harsh grapes, yelled out, "Suerte des enchiladas." The young bullfighter was named The Pass of the Enchiladas. His career could never be the same. He went on to fight that bull, did a decent honorable job--the crowd never stopped laughing. El Suerte des Enchiladas. He was branded. He walked off in disgrace. The one thing you cannot be in any land where Spanish is spoken is a clown. I laughed with the rest. The bullfight is nine tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one's cruelty out of one's pores--it makes an elixir of cruelty. But it does something else. It reflects the proportions of life in Latin lands. For in Mexico it does not seem unreasonable that a man spend years learning a dangerous trade, be rapped once by a bull and end up ruined, a Suerte des Enchiladas. It is unfair, but then life is monstrously unfair, one knows that, one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods. In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one's dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods. In fact, dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods' cruel vision.

On to Beloved Remington. He arrived in Mexico City at the end of the beginning of the novillada several years back. He was there, I think, on the next to last of the early Sundays when six bulls were there for six novilleros. (In the full season of the novillada, when the best new young men have been chosen, there are six bulls for only three toreros--each kid then has two bulls, two chances.) I was not yet in Mexico for Amado Ramírez' first Sunday, but I heard nothing else from my bullfighting friends from the day I got in. He had appeared as the last of six novilleros. It had been a terrible day. All of the novilleros had been bad. He apparently had been the last and the worst, and had looked so clumsy that the crowd in derision had begun to applaud him. There is no sign of displeasure greater among the Mexican bullfighting public than to turn their ovations upside down. But Ramírez had taken bows. Serious solemn bows. He had bowed so much he hardly fought the bull. The Plaza Mexico rang with merriment. It took him forever to kill the beast--he received a tumultuous ovation. He gave a turn of the ring. A wit shouted "Olé, El Loco." He was named. When they cheer incompetence, they are ready to set fire to the stadium.

El Loco was the sensation of the week. A clown had fought a bull in the Plaza Mexico and gotten out alive. The promoters put him on the following week as a seventh bullfighter, an extra added attraction. He was not considered worth the dignity of appearing on the regular card. For the first time that season, the Plaza was sold out.

Six young novilleros fought six mediocre bulls that day, and gave six mediocre fights. The crowd grew more and more sullen. When there is no good bullfight, there is no catharsis. One's money has been spent, the drinks are wearing down, and there has been no illumination, no moment to burn away all that spiritual sewer gas from the horrors of the week. Dull violence breeds, and with it, contempt for all bullfighters.

Out came the clown, El Loco. The special seventh bullfighter. He was an apparition. He had a skinny body and a funny ugly face with little eyes set close together, a big nose and a little mouth. He had very black Indian hair and a tuft in the rear of his head stood up like the spike of an antenna. He had very skinny legs and they were bent at the knee so that he gave the impression of trudging along with a lunch box in his hand. He had a ludicrous butt. It went straight back like a duck's tail feathers. His suit fit poorly. He was some sort of grafting between Ray Bolger and Charlie Chaplin. And he had the sense of self-importance to come out before the bull, he was indeed given a turn of the ring before he even saw the bull. An honor granted him for his appearance the week before. He was altogether solemn. It did not seem comic to him. He had the kind of somber extravagant ceremoniousness of a village mayor in a mountain town come out to greet the highest officials of the government. His knees stuck out in front and his buttocks in back. The Plaza rocked and rocked. Much applause followed by circulating zephyrs of laughter. And under it all, like a croaking of frogs, the beginnings of the biggest thickest Bronx raspberry anybody ever heard.

Amado Ramírez went out to receive the bull. His first pass was a yard away from the animal, his second was six feet. He looked like a 55-year-old peon ready to retire. The third pass caught his cape, and as it flew away on the horns, El Loco loped over to the barrera with a gait like a kangaroo. A thunderstorm of boos was on its way! He held out his arm horizontally, an injunction to the crowd, fingers spread, palm down, a mild deprecatory pleasant gesture, as if to say, "Wait, you have seen nothing yet." The lip-farters began to smack. Amado went back out. He botched one pass, looked poor on a basic verónica. Boos, laughter, even the cops in every aisle were laughing. ¡Que Payaso!

Then, it happened. His next pass had a name, but few even of the afición knew it, for it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady's hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring by his unprotected ass). If I remember, it was called a Gallecina, and no one had seen it in five years. It consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counterclockwise into the bull so that the cape was wrapped around your body just like the suertedes Enchiladas, except you were vertical, but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns. Then the whirling continued, and the cape flared out again. Amado was clumsy in his approach and stepped on his cape when he was done, but there was one moment of lightning in the middle when you saw clear sky after days of log and smelled the ozone, there was an instant of heaven--finest thing I had yet seen in the bullfight--and in a sob of torture and release, "!Olé!" came in a panic of disbelief from one parched Mexican throat near to me. El Loco did the same pass one more time and then again. On the second pass, a thousand cried !Olé! And on the third, the Plaza exploded and 50,000 men and women gave up the word at the same time. Something merry and corny as a gypsy violin flowed out of his cape.

After that, nothing but comedy again. He tried a dozen fancy passes, none worked well. They were all wild, solemn, courtly, and he was there with his peasant bump of an ass and his knobby knees. The crowd laughed with tears in their eyes. With the muleta he looked absurd, a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase. It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog, but he could do no wrong now for this crowd--they laughed, they applauded, they gave him a tour of the ring. For something had happened in those three passes which no one could comprehend. It was as if someone like me had gotten in the ring with Cassius Clay and for 20 seconds had clearly outboxed him. The only explanation was divine intervention. So El Loco was back to fight two bulls next week.

He did little with either bull, and killed the second one just before the third aviso. In a good season, his career would have been over. But it was a dreadful season. A couple of weeks of uneventful bullfights and El Loco was invited back. He looked awful in his first fight, green of face, timid, unbelievably awkward with the cape, morose and abominably prudent with the muleta. He killed badly. So badly in fact that he was still killing the bull when the third aviso sounded. The bull was let out alive. A dull sullen silence riddled with Mexican whistles. The crowd had had a bellyful of laughs with him. They were now getting very bored with the joke.

But the second bull he liked. Those crazy formal courtly passes, the Gallecinas, whirled out again, and the horns went by his back six inches away. iOlé! He went to put the banderillas in himself and botched the job, had to run very fast on the last pair to escape the bull and looked like a chicken as he ran. The catcalls tuned up again. The crowd was like a bored lion uncertain whether to eat entrails or lick a face. Then he came out with the muleta and did a fine series of derechazos, the best seen in several weeks, and to everyone's amazement, he killed on the first estocada. They gave him an ear. He was the triunfador of the day.

This was the afternoon which confirmed the beginning of a career. After that, most of the fights are mixed in memory because he had so many, and they were never without incident. All through that summer, he fought just about every week, and every week something happened which shattered the comprehension of the most veteran bullfighting critic. They decided after this first triumph that he was a mediocre novillero with nothing particular to recommend him except a mysterious flair for the Gallecina, and a competence with the derechazo. Otherwise, he was uninspired with the cape and week with the muleta. So the following week he gave an exhibition with the muleta. He did four pasesde pecho so close and luminous (a pass is luminous when your body seems to lift with breath as it goes by) that the horns flirted with his heart. He did derechazos better than the week before, and finished with manoletinas. Again he killed well. They gave him two ears. Then his second bull went out alive. A fracaso.

Now the critics said he was promising with the muleta but weak with the cape. He could not do a verónica of any value. So in one of the following weeks he gave five of the slowest, most luminous, most soaring verónicas anyone had ever seen.

Yet, for three weeks in a row, if he had cut ears on one bull, he let the other go out alive. A bullfighter is not supposed to let his animal outlive three avisos. Indeed, if the animal is not killed before the first aviso, the torero is in disgrace already. Two avisos is like the sound of the knell of the bell in the poorhouse, and a bullfighter who hears the third aviso and has to let his bull go out alive is properly ready to commit a Mexican variety of hara-kiri. No sight, you see, is worse. It takes something like three to five minutes from the first aviso to the last, and in that time, the kill becomes a pigsticking. Because the torero has tried two, three, four, five times, even more, to go in over the horns, and he has hit bone, and he has left the sword half in but in some abominable place like the middle of the back or the flank, or he has had a perfect thrust and the bull does not die and minutes go by waiting for it to die and the peons run up with their capes and try to flick the sword out by swirling cloth around the pommel guard and giving a crude Latin yank--nothing is cruder than a peon in a sweat for his boss. Sometimes they kick the bull in the nuts in the hope it will go down, and the crowd hoots. Sometimes the bull sinks to its knees and the puntillero comes in to sever its neck with a thrust of his dagger, but the stab is off-center, the spinal cord is not severed. Instead, it is stimulated by the shock, and the dying bull gets up and wanders all over the ring looking for its querencia while blood drains and drips from its wounds and the bullfighter, looking ready to cry, trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road. And the next aviso blows. Such scenes are a nightmare for the torero. The average torero can afford less than one occasion a year when three avisos are heard. El Loco was allowing an average of one bull a week to go out unkilled.

For a period, criticism of El Loco solidified. He had brilliant details, he was able on occasion to kill with inspiration, he had huge talent, but he lacked the indispensable ingredient of the bullfighter, he did not know how to get a good performance out of a bad bull. He lacked tenacity. So Ramírez created the most bizarre faena in anyone's memory, a fight which came near to shattering the rules of bullfighting. For on a given Sunday, he fought a very bad bull and worked with him in all the dull, technical, unaesthetic ways a bullfighter has to work with an unpromising beast, and chopped him to left and to right, and kept going into the bull's querencia and coaxing him out, and this went on for minutes, while the public demonstrated its displeasure. And El Loco paid no attention and kept working with the bull, and then finally got the bull to charge and he made a few fine passes. But then the first aviso sounded and everyone groaned. Because finally the bull was going good, and yet Amado would have to kill him now. But Amado had his bull in shape and he was not going to give him up yet, and so with everyone on the scent of the loss of each second, he made derechazos and the pass with the muleta which looks like the gaonera with the cape, and he did a deliberate adorno or two and the second aviso sounded and he made an effort to kill and failed, but stayed very cool and built up the crowd again by taking the bull through a series of naturales, and with 20 seconds left before the third aviso and the Plaza in pandemonium he went in to kill and had a perfect estocada and the bull moved around softly and with dignity and died about ten seconds after the third aviso, but no one could hear the trumpet for the crowd was in a delirium of thunder, and every white handkerchief in the place was out. And Amado was smiling, which is why you could love him, because his pinched ugly little peasant face was full of a kid's decent happiness when he smiled. And a minute later there was almost a riot against the judges, for they were not going to give him the tail or two ears or even an ear--how could they if the bull had died after the third aviso? And yet the tension of fighting the bull on the very edge of his time had given a quality to this fight which had more than a hint of the historic, for new emotions had been felt.

Amado was simply unlike any bullfighter who had ever come along. When he had a great fight, or even a great pass, it was unlike the passes of other fine novilleros--the passes of El Loco were better than anything you had ever seen. It was as if you were looking at the sky and suddenly a bird materialized in the air. And a moment later disappeared again. His work was frightening. It was simple, lyrical, light, illumined, but it came from nowhere and then was gone. When El Loco was bad, he was not mediocre or dull, he was simply the worst, most inept and most comical bullfighter anyone had ever seen. He seemed to have no technique to fall back on. He would hold his cape like a shroud, his legs would bend at the knees, his sad ass seemed to have an eye for the exit, his expression was morose as Fernandel and his feet kept tripping. And when he was afraid, he had a nerveless incapacity to kill which was so hopeless that the moment he stepped out to face his animal you knew he could not go near this particular bull. Yet when he was good, the comic body suddenly straightened, the back took on the camber of the best back any Spanish aristocrat ever chose to display, the buttocks retired into themselves like a masterpiece of poise, and the cape and the muleta moved slowly as full sails, or whirled like the wing of that mysterious bird. It was as if El Loco came to be every comic Mexican who ever breathed the finest Spanish grace into his pores. For five odd minutes he was as completely transformed as Charlie Chaplin's tramp doing a consummate impersonation of the one and only Valentino, the long-lost Rudolph.

Let me tell then of Amado's best fight. It came past the middle of that fine summer when he had an adventure everyweek in the Plaza and we had adventures watching him, for he had fights so mysterious that the gods of the bulls and the ghosts of dead matadors must have come with the mothers and the witches of the centuries, homage to Lorca!, to see the miracles he performed. Listen! One day he, had a sweet little bull with nice horns, regular, pleasantly curved, and the bull ran with gaiety, even abandon. Now we have to stop off here for an imperative explanation: It is essential to discuss the attitude of afición to the natural. To them the natural is the equivalent of the full parallel turn in skiing or a scrambling T-formation quarterback or a hook off a jab--it cannot be done well by all athletes, no matter how good they are in other ways, and the natural is a dangerous pass, perhaps the most dangerous there is. The cloth of the muleta has no sword to extend its width. Now the cloth is held in the left hand, the sword in the right, and so the target of the muleta which is presented for the bull's attraction is half as large as it was before and the bullfighter's body is thus so much bigger and so much more worthy of curiosity to the beast--besides the bull is wiser now, he may be ready to suspect it is the man who torments him and not the swirling sinister chaos of the cloth in which he would bury his head. Moreover--and here is the mystique of the natural--the bullfighter has a psychic communion with the bull. People who are not psychic do not conceive of fighting bulls. So the torero fights the bull from his psyche first. And with the muleta he fights him usually with his right hand from a position of authority. Switching the cloth to the left hand exposes his psyche as well as his body. He feels less authority--in compensation his instinct plays closer to the bull. But he is so vulnerable! So a natural inspires a bullfighting public to hold their breath, for danger and beauty come closest to meeting right here.

It was naturales Amado chose to perform with this bull. He had not done many this season. The last refuge of his detractors was that he could not do naturales well. So here on this day he gave his demonstration. Watch if you can.

He began his faena by making no exploratory pass, no pase de la muerte, no derechazos, he never chopped, no, he went up to this sweet bull and started his faena with a series of naturales, with a series of five naturales which were all linked and all beautiful and had the Plaza in pandemonium because where could he go from there--how does Jack E. Leonard top himself?--and Amado came up sweetly to the bull, and did five more naturales as good as the first five, and then did five more without moving from his spot--they were superb--and then furled his muleta until it was the size of this page, and he passed the bull five more times in the same way, the horns going around his left wrist. The man and the bull looked in love with each other. And then after these 20 naturales, Amado did five more with almost no muleta at all, five series of five naturales had he performed. It is not much easier than making love 25 times in a row, and then he knelt and kissed the bull on the forehead he was so happy, and got up delicately, and went to the barrera for his sword, came back, profiled to get ready for the kill. Everyone was waiting on a fuse. If he managed to kill on the first estocada this could well be the best faena anyone had ever seen a novillero perform, who knew, it was all near to unbelievable, and then just as he profiled, the bull charged prematurely, and Amado, determined to get the kill, did not skip away but held ground, received the charge, stood there with the sword, turned the bull's head with the muleta, and the bull impaled himself on the point of the torero's blade which went right into the proper space between the shoulders, and the bull ran right up on it into his death, took several steps to the side, gave a toss of his head at heaven, and fell. Amado had killed recibiendo. He had killed standing still, receiving the bull while the bull charged. No one had seen that in years. So they gave him everything that day, ears, tail, vueltas without limit--they were ready to give him the bull.

He concluded the summer in a burst of honors. He had great fights. Afterward they gave him a day where he fought six bulls all by himself, and he went on to take his alternativa and become a full-fledged matador. But he was a Mexican down to the bones. The honors all turned damp for him. I was not there the day he fought six bulls, I had had to go back to America and never saw him fight again. I heard about him only in letters and in bullfighting newspapers. But the day he took on the six bulls, I was told, he did not have a single good fight, and the day he took his alternativa to become a matador, both his bulls went out alive, a disgrace too great even for Amado. He fought a seventh bull. Gypsy magic might save him again. But the bull was big and dull and ElLoco had no luck and no magic and just succeeded in killing him in a bad difficult dull fight. It was obvious he was afraid of the big bulls. So he relinquished his alternativa and went back to the provinces to try to regain his reputation and his nerve. And no one ever heard much of him again. Or at least I never did, but then I have not been back to Mexico. Now I suspect I'm one of the very few who remember the happiness of seeing him fight. He was so bad when he was bad that he gave the impression you could fight a bull yourself and do no worse. So when he was good, too, and that was something no other torero ever gave me, for when they were good they looked impenetrable, they were like gods, but when Beloved Remington was good, the whole human race was good--he spoke of the great distance a man can go from the worst in himself to the best, and that finally is what the bullfight could be all about, for in dark bloody tropical lands possessed of poverty and desert and swamp, filth and treachery, slovenliness, and the fat lizards of all the worst lust, the excretory lust to shove one's own poison into others, the one thing which can keep the sweet nerve of life alive, is the knowledge that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be. It is a romantic self-pitying impractical approach to the 20th Century's demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function and categorization of impulse, but it is the Latin approach. Their allegiance is to the genius of the blood. So they judge a man by what he is at his best. By that logic, I will always have love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, which is to say he taught me something about the mystery of form. And where is a writer or a lover without a knowledge of what goes on behind that cloth where shapes are born? Olé, Amado!