There Is No Such Thing As A Bullfight
By Larry Freeman
© 2004 L. Freeman

From the outside, this bullring resembles nothing so much as a red erector-set construction, but inside it is a concrete-stepped cone funneling down to the sand, on which are painted two white rings, one inside the other. Entering the arena, they search your bags making sure there were no bottles to throw at the picadores, or so I think. The crowd winds through the darkened and arched galerías, past the dolls-house cathedral with its miniature stained-glass windows that is the chapel for the toreros, to climb the skeleton stairs flight after flight until it is my section and I am shuffled through the tunnel to emerge, born into the light, my eyes momentarily protesting at the brilliance.

An old man sits beside me, alone and rigidly upright on the hot, still brightly-sunlit concrete sombra (shade) tier. How he can sit there on the sun-heated concrete with his bony butt, is beyond me. At least I have rented one of the little plastic pillows that the kids have near the entrance. We are maybe one-third of the way up from the premier seats.

The velvet shadow is scything its way across the arena, but hasn't quite reached us yet. A loudly-drunken Kansas orthodontic surgeon and his brittle-blonde trophy wife sit one tier below us, declaiming his ubermensch status to all and sundry.

For me, the show starts well before the 4 pm start of the corrida. The man beside me is an older man, maybe 70s or even 80s. A two- or three-day beard speckles his canyoned, shiny cheekboned look. His nose is a scimitar blade, his eyes blue, white-clouded marbles with snow-capped ridges above.

His forehead is ridged and scarred on one side, but all in all, he exhibits a noble, dignified mien. He wears a spotless white shirt, the old-fashioned, collarless kind, open at the neck and showing a white-ribbed undershirt. His shiny black suit is old, but sponged clean and still showing traces of the knife-edged creases it had once born, as well as the faint rust-colored signs of much wear.

He wears a matching neat, buttoned up vest, and his much-worn and creased shoes have been polished to almost-mirror brightness in spite of the old and cracked leather. A carefully brushed pearl-gray fedora with an old-fashioned wide silk-ribbon hat band sits squarely on his head, the brim raised all around.

The old man speaks English in a slow, precise, scholarly, almost pedantic, but halting fashion. When my attention is first attracted, he has already been somehow drawn to explain the proceedings to the dentist.

"Where's the fuckin' scoreboard?' roars the slovenly dentist.

"¿Señor?" Queries the elder.

"The scoreboard! The scoreboard! How ya gonna know who's winning, Pancho?" The mouth mechanic's wife cringes at his boorishness.

"Señor," patiently explains the old man, "the bull never wins. The bull always dies. This is not about winning because the corrida is a ceremony of the death."

"'S'funny, thought this was a bullfight.'" slurs the dentist.

"Not to aficionados, Señor. There is no such thing as a bullfight. We have come to think of it as a living work of art, and the torero is the artist. Yes, there is much blood, and horror too, if you must look at it that way, but we see the beauty, the approach to perfection. Music written in blood."

It is easy it is to tell the turistas from the indígenas. The American tourists are loud, self-conscious and often drunk, and dress like panhandling street people except for their New Balances and their Vuarnets, while the Mexicans dress up to go to the corrida, or maybe they have just come from church.

While we are sitting there, all conversation in the section stops cold because this little teenaged chica struts lubriciously past. Dressed in a skintight black torero outfit with a flat-topped sombrero cordobés perched prettily on her long hair at a jaunty angle. Her raccoon-shadowed flashing eyes echo the silver boot tips, belts, buckles and hatband which attracts the eye to the silky fluidity and jingle besides, just in case you are blind.

There is nothing to identify her as Mexican, and she clearly thinks she is dressed in the latest American fashion… but she is not. It is a subtle but jarring difference. Too much makeup, too red lips, too dark eyeshadow, encarnadined dagger-like nails, an exaggerated sway to her walk… too much, too much. But fetching nevertheless….

The spectacle starts at sunset. so the sun will not be in the matador's eyes as he faces the bull. The bullring is designed to give the matador the advantage.

Two horsemen in full regalia burst from the gate racing at top speed in opposite directions around the circumference of the ring until the crowd gasps at the coming collision, as they come together to stop in front of the box of the Presidente, to be given the key to begin. They return quickly to open the gate of the torilles for the grand procession.

They are the alguacilillos, the bailiffs who are the keepers of the gate.

The dentist cackles as the trumpet sounds the opening notes of the paso doble which mark the beginning of the event. "Lookit the fairies!" he points. The elderly man gives him a disdainful sniff.

They enter through the double red wooden gate, elegant and dignified as they stride across the ring toward the box of the Presidente in the pasillo, their passage, the procession of the cuadrillas. First comes two matadores (surprise! There is no such thing as a toreador (or at least there wasn't until the Opera Carmen appeared). Abreast, resplendent in their suits of light, the traje de luces, sparkling and winking in different colors. The colors are not important to the colorblind bulls, but the enhanced costumes are alive with the movement that will infuriate. Skintight, so there will be no folds of cloth for the horn to snag, the body of the torero is heavily oiled beneath, so that if the end of a horn does tear the suit, it might slide on the oil. A small protection, to be sure, but the matador wants every edge he can get, no matter how small.

Because this is to be a corrida mixta, a mixed card, they are followed by the single somberly-clad rejoneador, in grey whipcord, rigidly erect and astride a splendidly-prancing white horse. After him come the peones, dressed like toreros but actually mere hangers-on. These are followed by the despised, hulking, picadores on horseback, then the brightly-clad banderilleros, and finally the mulillas, the men whose teams of mules will drag off the dead bulls.

They come to salute below the box of El Presidente.

Then they retreat, some of them remaining behind the barreras, the wooden, shoulder high barriers that are dotted about the circle.

A hush falls over the audience, even the dentist seems to hold his breath, waiting, just waiting.

His name is Embajador and weighing in at over 1100 pounds (500 kilos), he is glossy black, huge and bulky in the front while his hindquarters are quick and agile. The horns are a flattened classic 'u' and the right one has a recently broken tip that leaves a sharp jagged weapon. The broken horn distresses the beast. The horns are related to a cat's whiskers; they are needed to guide the bull, and suddenly one of them is missing, and the bull is angry and disoriented, not a good state for a bull to be in.

He is one of the six bulls that had been picked by the toreros' representatives at the sorteo, the drawing of the bulls at noon the day of the event. Two bulls are sorted for each of the matadores, and two for the rejoneador. It is sometimes called the apartado, the separation of the bulls, because after the sorting each bull is placed separately, together with several steers, in his own pen.

Embajador restlessly paces the small corral behind the ring, intimidating the steers that have been placed there to pacify him, leaving them to huddle against the rough wooden fence as the setting sun casts ever-longer shadows across the sand.

He is seven years old. Seven years of a sybaritic life, free to ramble and charge at anything that moves within his territory, bred to kill, from a long line of killer forebears, tested for courage, agility and speed to be a proper representative of the ganaderia, the ranch where he has been bred. If he had been bred for meat, he would have experienced three years of a crowded and restricted life, restrained from running lest he lose some of his valuable fat before the terrified animal is pulled up by his hind feet and his throat slashed so that he can bleed out.

A little known fact is that there is always the possibility that the bull can leave the confrontation alive! A brave bull may be granted an indulto, a pardon by the President after petition by the crowd. The kill is then simulated by the matador with an empty hand and the bull becomes a stud, semental.

And even after death the bull may be granted the honor of being dragged around the ring by the mulillas in a triumphant circuit, a vuelta lap.

Embajador is cosseted into the chute by the steers, and a rosette divisa stuck onto his back, showing the colors of the ranch.

The sun is fading from powder-blue cloudlessness as the shadows creep across the circle. Liquid, brassy notes drift over the arena to sound the first tercio, the first fifteen minute third of the matador's duel. A blackness bursts across the sand, a blacker shadow within a shadow, hooves booming a drumbeat in the sudden silence. 25,000 voices struck dumb by a power, by a living threat. The shrill giggle of a woman momentarily pierces the mood.

A wicked horn thunks into the red-painted barrera with a sound that reverberates throughout the arena.

A jagged wooden shard suddenly shows bone white, prised free with a toss of the nightmare head as Embajador wheels to continue his rampaging circuit of the sanded circle, seeking the territory he will choose to defend.

The watchers of the torero's cuadrilla critically judge the moves and feints of the half-ton monster as it careers around the ring.

Every so often, one of the peones comes out from behind the barrera to taunt the bull, dodging agilely, all to see the character of the animal, and to draw him to different areas of the ring.

The crowd suddenly bristles as if it were some single, huge, prehistoric animal. Whistles and catcalls greet the lumbering entry of the two hated picadores, their horses caparisoned with heavily padded blankets, blindfolded so as not to bolt at the sight of the bull. The picadores are dully clad in brown, their legs protected by steel armor, their stolid, fleshy heads crowned by the steel, Saturn-like helms, and they carry the cruel picas, the lance with the puya, the steel head.

Their goal is to prod the muscle at the hump at the base of the neck so that the bull's head is lowered to make the kill possible. It is not supposed to weaken the bull, and the crowd becomes quite vocal if the picador becomes too enthusiastic. Even so, the runnels of blood drip from the flanks to plop wetly onto the sand as a scarlet precursor to death.

While the picador is relatively safe, not so the horse, because the bull sometimes hooks a horn up under the blanket to endanger the unprotected underbelly. Horses are killed, horses are sometimes even upset and gored to death while the crowd is properly horrified.

But it is a fleeting event, and then the mulillas come in to drag off the dead horse, on its back, its legs comically extended, while the peones distract the bull.

They all retreat to leave the black monster standing alone, watching warily for what is to come next.

THE MAN ON FOOT

What comes next is the matador and he approaches with his tight-assed, pouter-pigeon walk, flaunting his coleto, the pigtail that is the professional mark of a torero who has taken his alternativa and is no longer a novillero. He calls to the bull, stopping to stamp his slippered foot to attract the attention of, the bull? The crowd? What draws my attention are his pink socks.

And the bull responds, turning to face the oncoming threat to his territory, snorting, pawing, throwing up sprays of sand as he prepares to charge.

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