In any discussion of matadors the question arises: ‘How good
are the Mexicans?’ This needs careful analysis. First, Mexican bulls
are decidedly inferior to Spanish. They are smaller, more difficult
and less likely to give good fight. Therefore, the Mexican faces
obvious limitations. Second, whereas in Spain there are scores of
bull ranches where a would-be matador can work with heifers,
in Mexico there are few, so that the training of Mexicans is apt
to be less thorough. Third, in raw bravery nothing can surprass
a Mexican matador, and in this department they have no cause
to defer to anyone. You will see exhibitions of pundonor in
Mexico that you will see nowhere else. Fourth, the Mexican crowd
is rowdy, largely uncritical and a joy to be with. Therefore, the
Mexican matador can get away with nonsense that would not be
permitted in either Madrid or Sevilla. Finally, a good Spanish
matador may fight sixty or seventy fights a year; the finest Mexican
is lucky if he performs forty times, so that the Spaniard obviously
has more chance to perfect his art.
One curious distinction needs to be made. The art of placing
banderillas, which can be a graceful and lyric performance if the
man doing the job has skill, has declined so badly in Spain that
not often does one see a pair placed properly; since 1960 I have
seen only four or five pairs done with any style by a Spaniard,
whereas in Mexico almost every matador is master of this art and
one can see almost any afternoon pairs of banderillas sent home
with a delicacy that elicits shouts of admiration from everyone.
Spanish bullfighters could do as well, I’m sure, but the public no
longer demands that they do so.
In this century there have been three Mexican matadors the
equal of anything that Spain has produced. In the Age of Belmonte
there was Rodolfo Gaona, a large man with a complete repertory
and the personality to support it. At the transition period between
Belmonte and Manolete there appeared a string-bean-thin Indian
with a style so exquisite that he seemed to float across the sands.
Fermín Espinosa is known in history as Armillita, but in accuracy
he should be called Armillita Chico, since his older brother Juan,
using the name Armillita, became a full matador in 1924 but
surrendered the rank in 1933 in order to serve as peon for his
more gifted brother. Armillita Chico was, if I understand correctly,
the only major matador who fought a lifetime of complete seasons
without once having been seriously gored, and he is reputed to
have understood the psychology of bulls better than anyone else
who ever got into the ring with them. And in the Age of Manolete
there was Carlos Arruza, the golden boy of bullfighting who could
do everything with diffident grace. He was the equal of Manolete,
and the great confrontations between these two constituted one
of the highlights of the century; even in their deaths there was a
kind of competition: in 1947 Manolete was killed by the Miura
bull Islero; in 1966 Arruza was killed in a violent automobile
accident.
Many Spaniards refuse to acknowledge these three Mexicans
as top caliber. Gaona they denigrate, and the lovely floating pass
which he perfected whereby the cape, held behind the body of
the fighter, sways first to this side, then that, and which
throughout the rest of the world is called a gaonera, is in Spain
called de frente por detrás (facing the bull but with the cape
behind the body). Armillita they dismiss in silence, for his cold
Indian style repelled them and they could not believe he was as
good as he was. And Arruza, whom they cannot deny as one of
the great, they embrace by insisting that he was a Spaniard, which
his parents indubitably were before they emigrated to Mexico.
Arruza considered himself a Mexican.
However, when one drops below the category of
Gaona-Armillita-Arruza one finds few Mexicans who equal the
middle echelon of Spaniards, and the record books are replete
with names of Mexicans who stood at the top of the profession
at home but were disasters when they faced the bigger bulls of
Spain. Of course, there have also been a few matadors of good
reputation in Spain who were found inadequate in Mexico, but
not many. Furthermore, in the past twenty years there have been
no Mexicans of major reputation, and in this period it would be
impossible to claim that Mexican matadors were as good as those
in Spain.
Four Americans have become full-fledged matadors. The first,
Harper Lee, was born in Isletta, Texas, in 1884, and after drifting
about the plazas along the Mexican border, finally took his
alternativa in Monterrey in 1910. Lee never fought in Spain but
he gave commendable performances throughout Mexico and
seems to have been a thoroughly engaging human being. His life
has been favorably summarized in
Knight in the Sun
, by Marshall
Hail, published in 1962.
Sidney Franklin, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn named Sidney
Frumpkin, took his alternativa in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in 1932,
from the hands of Marcial Lalanda, and confirmed it much later
in Madrid in 1945 at the hands of El Estudiante. He fought well
both in Mexico and Spain and won commendation from
Hemingway. His autobiography,
Bullfighter from Brooklyn
, is a
hilarious affair, no single statement of which should be taken too
seriously. I once had the pleasure of knowing Franklin and dining
with him over an extended period, and never have I met a man
whose conversation was more engaging. A group of us used to
frequent his company simply to hear what he was going to come
up with next, and one of the pleasures of my home in eastern
Pennsylvania is that every Saturday night at eleven Sidney Franklin
is available on television, broadcasting the fights from Mexico
City. His chatter on the air is almost as diverting as it was in
person.
In 1966 Robert Ryan, of Los Angeles, took his alternativa in
Mexico and performed well in the Tijuana plazas.
John Fulton, the boy from Philadelphia, is the only American
ever to have earned his alternativa in Spain. He took it in Sevilla
in 1964. His doing so is an epic of determination and I hope that
one day he will write his account of how it was done. Since he is
also a gifted artist, his black-and-white drawings of what he was
talking about would enhance the narrative.
His is a tale of a young man with an idée fixe plus the grim
resolve needed to carry it out in one of the cruelest ambientes on
earth. For three years Fulton in Sevilla rarely sat down to a meal,
eating at most twice a day from a stand-up bar where the bill was
a few pesetas less if one did not take up space at a table. Once
when money from home enabled him to sit and eat a regular
meal, the waiter rushed up and asked, ‘Fulton, are you sick?’
Like his idol, Rafael Gómez, called El Gallo, Fulton has a
running sequence of sardonic observations on the difficulty of
becoming a matador. ‘It’s as easy for an American to be a
bullfighter in Spain as it would be for Cassius Clay to be mayor
of Birmingham!’ When asked by a lady if he feared the bulls: ‘Not
half as much as I do the men who manage the bullrings.’ On being
complimented for speaking idiomatic Spanish: ‘I had to learn
Spanish. The bulls won’t speak English.’ Of a famous Sevillian
who sponges off matadors: ‘That man is well known…at lunch.’
Of the determination of a young aspirant: ‘If he gets one foot in
the door, he’ll keep it there till gangrene sets in.’
I know of no ambiente more totally corrupt than that of
bullfighting. It is said, and properly so, that in this miserable
racket the only honorable figure is the bull, and him they mutilate
by shaving down the tips of his horns so that he has difficulty in
locating his target. They try to drop sedatives in his drinking water
to make him drowsy and sacks of cement on his back to make
him weary. On one occasion when the draw for the bulls required
a matador to face a particularly tough beast, his brother tried to
shoot it in the corral with a rifle.
I suppose one could argue that the management of American
boxing is as corrupt as bullfighting, but I doubt it. There must be
one or two people in the boxing hierarchy who are comparatively
honest; but in the management of bullfighting I have not met
any. Symptomatic of the general corruption is the case of the
typical newspaperman who reports on bullfighting in the daily
press or in the many colorful magazines devoted to the art. With
several honorable exceptions he receives no salary from his
employer; indeed, he is often required to pay the employer for
the privilege of writing in the journal. He must therefore steal his
income from the matador, whose future bookings depend on
what is said about him in the big-city papers. Suppose a matador
has a disastrous afternoon in Sevilla. Everyone in that city who
was at the ring will know about it, but there’s nothing to be gained
by having people in Barcelona and Madrid know about it too, so
for six thousand pesetas to each of the five strategically placed
newspapermen (or one hundred dollars in all), the matador can
see to it that in all other cities in Spain the bullfight fan will read
on Monday morning that ‘Juan Diego had a sensational triumph
in Sevilla, with the fans clamoring wildly and carrying him from
the ring on their shoulders.’ The really bizarre thing about it is
that even in Sevilla, the same stories will appear if the matador
pays enough so that a bewildered American or French fan who
went to the fight and who can read Spanish begins to wonder if
he can trust his own eyes. His eyes are all right. It’s the
newspaperman that he can’t trust.
I once had dramatic proof of this venality. I happened to be in
Jerez de la Frontera on Monday, May 10, 1965, for a novice fight
in which the youthful sensation of that year was appearing,
Sebastián Palomo, called Linares. He came into the ring—an
extraordinarily handsome boy of fifteen, very small, very slim and
very brave. The afternoon was a complete disaster; the ring was
showered with the cushions of disgust, and if the fans could have
got hold of Linares they might have lynched him, but the police
saw that this did not happen.
I drove the next day to Badajoz, where the newspaper in its
edition of May 12 carried a report that I clipped: ‘In the brilliant
fight held yesterday at Jerez, Sebastián Palomo Linares, fighting
large bulls, heard loud applause on the first and an ovation on
his second.’ This was so blatant that I asked one of the men
connected with bullfighting in Badajoz about it, and he said,
‘Look, we have a contract with Linares to fight in Mérida. The
boy is sensational news. We have to pay him a lot and therefore
we have to sell a lot of seats. What does it matter what actually
happened in Jerez? Everybody in Badajoz wants to believe that
when Linares appears in Mérida they’re going to see the new
Belmonte.’ And he showed me a poster which proclaimed the
forthcoming appearance of Linares: ‘Destiny Sent Him as Special
Envoy to Save the Fiesta Brava. Fresh from his sensational triumph
in Jerez.’ Looking at the poster, with its gallant young man facing
a bull of tremendous size, I began to wonder what I had seen in
Jerez, and I realized that the man was right. It didn’t really matter.
I was to see Linares twice as a beginner and twice as a full
matador, to which he was promoted long before he was ready,
and each time he was miserable. In fact, cushions were thrown at
him, but I could see that the boy had the figure to be a matador,
the courage to face bulls and a charisma that simply radiated. The
last was enhanced by the release of a well-calculated motion
picture called
First Time in This Plaza
, in which he was both a
winsome little boy whom women could love and a brave man
whom men could envy. Wherever he was due to fight, his manager
scheduled this film in the movie houses, and when I last saw
Linares he was besieged by screaming girls wherever he went.
Vavra thought he might become the new El Cordobés.
This business of making a motion picture to enhance one’s
reputation, or even to create it, is amusing, because the plots are
so invariable. A poor boy who wants to become a bullfighter has
a serenely faithful manager who believes in him and two girls who
are competing for him, one blond and good, the other brunette
and bad. There is always the testing of heifers at the country ranch,
where we see the good girl, and the flamenco party at which the
bad girl makes advances. There has got to be one bullfight in
which he is, as they phrase it, ‘a clamorous success,’ and one in
which he is not, the latter being used to show his courage under
adversity. In recent films a new ingredient has been added after
its successful introduction in one of the El Cordobés films: the
hero, frightened by his bad afternoon, sleeps fitfully, during which
it is obligatory for him to dream in color of his own wounding
in the plaza of destiny. Next we see the fatal ring, with him in
civilian clothes kicking at the sand and stopping in long-drawn
horror when he sees, always unexpectedly although he’s been in
this ring ten times before, the door marked Enfermería. We now
switch to the good girl, who is kneeling before an altar graced by
one long, tapering candle. As she prays the candle gutters and
goes out, and from the wall behind her a picture of the matador
falls mysteriously to the floor. When she picks it up the glass is
cracked, at which moment we cut back to the ring, where one
hell of a big bull is bearing down on our boy and giving him the
works. An operation is required, with dozens of doctors in white
and the anguished manager biting his lip, after which the wheels
of a Mercedes-Benz squeal and the good girl rushes to the bedside
of the dying matador. While she is weeping there an ordinary taxi
pulls up and the bad girl dismounts, but she is prevented from
entering the infirmary by a kindly priest who explains that now
the matador is with the girl who truly loves him. But as the priest
leaves, we see the face of the bad girl, and it is bathed in tears and
she bites the corner of a handkerchief and slowly climbs back into
the taxi, which takes her off into the shadows, leaving the
impression that she too, at heart, is a good girl.