Jazz pianist Fats Waller is said to have told a lady who asked him what swing was: “Lady, if you has to ask, you ain’t got it.” I didn’t have to ask, I knew that I didn’t have what it takes to be a torero: I lacked the arrogance, the hauteur, the macho posturing that comes naturally to even the most reticent of Latin performers. I was too English. Yet the young man attempting to teach me how to swing a cape with grace and slow subtlety was one of the least artistic toreros there’ve ever been. He was also one of the bravest.
By Bill Cranfield
Raul Sanchez, the Lion of Talavera, made no fewer than 50 appearances in the world’s premier bullring, La Monumental de Las Ventas in Madrid. Usually with difficult animals and sparse mid-summer attendances. The crowd loved his do-or-die attitude, his suicidal courage. A lack of imagination? Perhaps. A friend reckons that the bravest torero of all was Curro Romero — he had so much fear to overcome.
Raul was the best friend of the son of the couple who ran the boarding house I stayed in when I first arrived in Madrid. In the now gentrified and hyper-expensive Plaza de la Marina Española, then a rather run-down backwater in the very centre of the city. Almost every summer Sunday, the three of us would go searching for “capeas” in nearby villages.
Arriving too early one afternoon, I found a vacant spot on the fence circling the town square and proceeded to squat there, clutching Raul’s cape, muleta and wooden sword, ready to hand them to him when the bull appeared. What I hadn’t reckoned with was that my feet were dangling within easy reach of the animal’s horns, so I spent an uncomfortable couple of hours trying to avoid them.
In the evenings, we would trawl the taverns and pick-up joints in the then notorious Calle Echegaray, drinking rough red wine at a couple of pesetas a glass, including complimentary tapas. I remember the tiny baked sparrows that one munched beak and claws and all.
Some years ago I rang Raul’s peña with a view to visiting him after so many years only to be told that he was suffering from dementia and would not recognise me. He may have lacked imagination as a torero but now he was left with nothing but.
