Death and the Sun Read Free Page B

wind,
Black pony, red moon.
Death is watching me,
from the towers of Córdoba.
    Â 
Oh what a long road!
Oh my brave pony!
Oh that death awaits me,
before I arrive in Córdoba!
    Â 
    Spain plunged into frenzied mourning for Paquirri. Newspapers picked over the grisly details of the goring and the race to Córdoba until the entire story took on the quality of legend. Many people second-guessed the doctors, wondering whether they had handled the wound in the right way. Strangely, amid all the fuss, it was never made clear just what had killed Paquirri, shock, loss of blood, or something else. The funeral took place in Sevilla. The prime minister was unable to attend, but sent his wife. The crowd that assembled in front of the apartment building where the body was laid out stretched for five miles. When the coffin was brought out, the massive throng wouldn’t let it be placed in the hearse. Instead Paquirri was carried to Sevilla’s bullring, where it was marched around and around to chants of a single word, “Torero.” In certain parts of Spain there is no greater compliment.
    Paquirri was buried in the cemetery of San Fernando, where his tomb faces the mausoleum of José Gómez Ortega, Joselito, perhaps the best bullfighter of all time, who was killed by a bull on May 16, 1920. Buried with Joselito is his brother-in-law, the matador Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who killed the bull that killed Joselito. Fourteen years later, another bull killed Sánchez Mejías. Killing a murderous bull had brought bad luck to Sánchez Mejías (or so it was said), and this same misfortune pursued those who performed with Paquirri in Pozoblanco. In 1985, a bull gored El Yiyo in the heart, killing him instantly. He was twenty-one. In 1988, a gunman marched into the office of Avispado’s breeder, Juan Luis Bandrés, and shot him to death. That case was never solved. In 1994, the third matador on the card that day, Vicente Ruiz, El Soro, injured his right knee. It ended his career, leaving him with a deformed leg.
    Though it might have been bad for his fellow performers, Paquirri’s death was a good thing for bullfighting. By the mid-1980s the bullfight had been losing ground as a popular spectacle for years, to soccer, television, and movies, in part because people believed bullfighting was fixed, that the matadors weren’t really risking their lives. Paquirri’s death changed that. Not only did it legitimize bullfighting as a serious thing, but it brought newfound admiration for matadors. Paquirri wasn’t the first prominent matador killed by a bull. But he was the first one killed during the television age, and what was seared into the Spanish consciousness was not so much his death as the composure and humble bravery he showed in the infirmary video.
    In the 1990s bullfighting would undergo a strong revival, driven in part by a new generation of young matadors who remembered Paquirri’s death as a formative event. One of these was his own son, a ten-year-old named Fran, who went to bed that night thinking he had a father and was fast asleep when his mother came in to tell him he no longer did. Fran says he can’t recall how he responded to this news. His mother remembered, however, and so did another person who was in the house that night. Apparently, when Fran heard what had happened, he looked up at his mother and said, “I am going to be a bullfighter.”

2
The Former Phenom
    Las Majadillas, March 12
. It was all over the news. Eugenia Martínez de Irujo, the duchess of Montoro, and her matador husband, Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, were separating. You could read the gossip magazine headlines at every newsstand across Spain. “Eugenia Breaks Her Marriage,” blared the cover of
Semana
magazine. “End Point: Fran and Eugenia Break Their Marriage after Various Attempts at Reconciliation,” screamed
Lecturas
. “Fran and Eugenia: How It All Went