Death and the Sun Read Free Page A

weekends as the chief of the medical team in small bullrings around the province. By the day of Paquirri’s goring, Morán had treated dozens of horn injuries, and was confident he could open and clean Paquirri’s wound, stop the blood flow, and stabilize Paquirri so he could be taken to the hospital in Cordoba, where the proper facilities existed to help doctors reattach any severed blood vessels and close the wound. “Let’s go,” Dr. Morán told his fellow surgeons when he saw Paquirri in the air. “We’ve got a big one.”
    The infirmary was silent as the doctors scrubbed up, laid out needle, thread, anesthesia, and bags of blood. “Where are the toreros?” they asked themselves. “Why haven’t they arrived yet?” No one spoke, and their eyes flicked to the room’s glass doors. Then the doors flew open, shattering the glass. In came Paquirri, borne on a litter of hands and arms, and in his wake a small crowd of bullfighters, entourage members, and gawkers. They laid Paquirri out on the operating table. His thigh was sliced open like a Sunday roast and blood pooled on the table beneath it. The doctors trained their strong surgical lights on the wound and cut Paquirri’s pant leg off, exposing his leg to the hairy genitals.
    Among the people at the periphery of these events was a video cameraman from TVE, Spain’s national network. Shooting under the surgical lights, he was able to capture a few minutes of Paquirri’s agony. This footage would be shown again and again around the country in the weeks, months, and years that followed. As one writer described it, this video footage would become the Spanish equivalent of the Zapruder film, which captured the second when the bullet struck John E Kennedy. The film begins with the camera at Paquirri’s feet. Then the camera pans up his ruined thigh, his torso, to his face. Paquirri flinches now and then, but he is calm. His voice is firm, his face impassive. He takes control of the room, making sure everything is done right. This is his ninth serious goring.
    â€œA moment please, Doctor, I would like to talk with you,” Paquirri says. “The goring is a deep one. It has two trajectories. One through here and one through there.” Paquirri gestures up and down, showing the paths of the horn inside his body. “Open me where you need to open me,” he continues. “I place my life in your hands.” The din in the room increases. “Quiet, please,” the matador says. “Please wet my mouth with water.” He drinks and then spits. The tape ends.
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    Out in the arena, El Yiyo killed Avispado. Then bullring servants attached chains to the bull’s horns and a mule team dragged Avispado’s carcass from the ring and into the bullring butchery, across an alley from the infirmary where Paquirri was being treated. A short time after the butchers had turned Avispado into cuts of meat for local markets, about eight o’clock, Paquirri was carried to a waiting ambulance, and the big white Citroën pulled out of town, siren yowling, and flew down the highway, careening along the twisting mountain roads. Around fifteen miles from the gates of Córdoba, Paquirri cried out, “Help me, I can’t breathe.” The ambulance screeched to a stop and a doctor worked on him by the side of the road. When Paquirri looked a little calmer, he was put back in the ambulance, which reached the hospital shortly after nine o’clock. It had taken less than an hour to get to Córdoba, but Paquirri was all but dead on arrival. He was thirty-six years old.
    In the weeks that followed, Paquirri’s death would remind many writers and commentators of some lines in “The Song of the Rider,” a short poem written in the 1920s by Spain’s best-known poet, Federico García Lorca, who was himself a bullfighting aficionado.
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Through the plain, through the