When I saw my first corrida de toros, as a teenager in Barcelona a long time ago, I remember looking up at a giant poster of Antonio Ordoñez and an intrigued local approaching me, kissing his bunched fingertips, and almost whispering in reverential tones: “Mucho torero!” I expected to be sickened — as I had been, while simultaneously fascinated, by a documentary on the life of the great Mexican matador Luis Procuna that I had watched on TV before ever visiting Spain, when the camera cut away to the death-throes of the bull against the barrera as Procuna prepared to take his triumphal lap of honour.
Bill Cranfield
Like so many neophytes, I had made the elementary mistake of anthropomorphising the thoughts of the dying animal (who doesn’t even know, of course, that it is dying). Of Disneyfying it. A bull is a bull. And the crowd in a plaza de toros is appreciative of its power, of its bravery, of its beauty — but it identifies with the man who has utilised these attributes to create a rare kind of magic (or not as the case may be). There is no blood-lust, though often a high degree of heartlessness where a hapless torero is concerned. As the Catalan-Filipino singer, painter and film director Luis Eduardo Aute put it recently in a passionate defence of “the art that suspends time”: “No aficionado attends a corrida out of sadism, or to see blood spilled; in fact, the complete opposite. What he hopes to see is a faena that results in the least possible pain for either animal or man.” As someone who views life itself as a corrida, for Aute, going to the bullring is “like going to mass, it is a metaphysical communion”.
I don’t think that is quite what I experienced that first afternoon in Barcelona. But it overturned completely all my preconceptions. What I remember most was the unreality of it all. Sitting high up in a cheap “andanada” and listening to the sounds of the city — traffic honking, ambulances sirening, a modern metropolis going about its daily business, while there in the midst of it, we sat watching something unimagineable in the even-then politically correct climate of the UK and northern Europe in general. A man legally risking his life. An animal legally being ritually slaughtered. I had hardly travelled outside England at the time and certainly not to Asia or Africa, where such things could still be encountered.
I do not place such pursuits as mountain-climbing or motor-racing in the same category as toreo since in those cases, risk is something to be assiduously avoided, whereas it forms the very basis of what a matador does, and the degree to which he courts it and elegantly evades its consequences is used as a yardstick of his success.
