José Delgado Guerra was born in Sevilla, in the Baratillo district, on March 14, 1754. He was baptized three days later in the Colegiata de San Salvador; his godfather was José de Misas, first cousin to a renowned picador. His father, Juan Antonio Delgado, was a dealer in wine and oil from Aljarafe, or the Morisco Strip, as the county of Niebla was still called then, according to Cossío. He was established in Sevilla not long before the birth of Pepe-Hillo to look after the shipping of those spirits, but was soon ruined. When he had barely learned his first letters, the only ones that Pepe-Hillo ever knew, his father placed him as a cobbler’s apprentice. The only thing known about his mother is her name, Agustina Guerra. By a strange coincidence of fate, she gave birth to the future bullfighter in the same year that his most outstanding rival, Pedro Romero, was born in Ronda.
His father was infuriated when he heard about Pepe-Hillo’s escapades at the slaughterhouse in Sevilla, fighting with yearlings, young bulls, and even full-grown bulls in the pens, almost never spending time at the cobbler’s workshop. The slaughterhouse was the leading school of bullfighting in the kingdom, according to the historian José Daza, and it undoubtedly was for Pepe-Hillo. He was discovered there by Joaquín Rodríguez, Costillares, when the boy used his own shirt for lack of a cape. At that time Costillares was competing for primacy among bullfighters with Juan Romero, as he would later be the rival of his son, Pedro. Costillares had also trained with yearlings at the slaughterhouse and moved on to be the inventor of the volapié and the verónica in their modern versions. He was a rational bullfighter, consistent and original, who, booed once at an advanced age by the actor Isidro Máiquez, would shout at him with cold logic from the barrier: “Señor Máiquez, Señor Máiquez, this isn’t the theater because here you die for real.”
Costillares was pleased by Pepe-Hillo’s disposition: his tenacious, joyful courage, his ambitious audacity, his imaginative and haughty postures. Perhaps he was somewhat frightened by his stunning pride—blind to danger, bending at the waist, filled with grace—precisely because in the bullring you die only once and always for real. In any case, and in spite of the protests of the wine dealer, he took on Pepe-Hillo as a matador’s assistant. In the bullfights in Córdoba, in 1770, he was already second sword. Pepe-Hillo had just turned sixteen at the time. Four years later he was married in the Colegiata de San Salvador to María Salado. Soon his fame had spread throughout Andalucía, where they already preferred him to Pedro Romero. In Madrid, on the other hand, everyone still swore by the Romero name. When the Junta de Hospitales de la Villa y Corte could not arrange for the Romeros to fight in that bullring, they turned unwillingly to Costillares and Pepe-Hillo.
In 1778, Pepe-Hillo and Pedro Romero were both at the bullring in Cádiz. Pedro Romero, a Herculean man, serene and immune to envy, told him during an interval: “Friend, what God took from you in strength He made up for with grace.” Pepe-Hillo was challenging a bull with his beaver hat before killing him with a volapié like those of Costillares. Pedro Romero fought his with the comb he kept in his hair net. That same year they competed again at the Real Maestranza in Sevilla, where Pepe-Hillo suffered one of his twenty-five serious gorings. Pedro Romero, who had never been wounded by a bull, risked his life in a parry to save him. That was the beginning of the deep friendship between the rivals, attested to by Romero himself.
In 1784, Pepe-Hillo appeared as sole matador in Burgos, in one of the bullfights celebrated in honor of the Count de Artois. According to a manuscript in the collection of Ortiz Cañavate and cited by José María Cossío, Pepe-Hillo was so outstanding in courage and skill that “several times he even killed a bull while holding a watch in his left hand instead of the killing cape.” In Madrid in 1789, in the celebrations of the coronation of Carlos IV, Pedro Romero and Pepe-Hillo again appeared in the same bullfight. Armona, the director of the Villa y Corte bullring, drew lots to determine first place in the ceremony that acknowledges a bullfighter as a full-fledged matador; it fell to Pedro Romero. Then, hesitating, he asked: “Well, Señor Romero, since it has been determined that you will fight first, do you pledge to fight bulls from Castilla?” That imperturbable creature replied: “If they’re bulls that graze in a field, I pledge to; but Your Grace must tell me why you have asked me this question.” The director shrugged, while Pepe-Hillo listened to them, silent and livid, and then read a letter from José Delgado Guerra, in which he had first stipulated in his contract to fight only bulls from Andalucía and Extremadura, because the ones from Castilla were thought to be difficult and dull-witted killers.
The bullfighters presented a complete contest in the morning and in the afternoon. Pedro Romero dispatched the bulls from Castilla and Pepe-Hillo the ones from Andalucía, as had been agreed. The last one of the afternoon, which was José Delgado’s, was from a Castilian herd, the result of a joke or a mistake on the part of El Tío Gallón, who separated them in the bullpens and despised Pepe-Hillo. According to Pedro Romero, José Delgado became furious when he saw its colors and then made a series of lackluster, shaky passes that astonished and irritated the audience. The kill was sounded and the surly beast, which until then had demonstrated a fondness for the haven under the royal balcony, pressed its haunches against those boards and Pepe-Hillo could not shift or square him for the kill. “Friend, leave it, we’ll get him out of there,” Pedro Romero said. Pepe-Hillo stared at him without replying, and went straight to the bull. His rival moved away but observed his attempts to attract the bull because he had a presentiment about the goring. That happened immediately, when the bull seized and turned over the uneasy Pepe-Hillo. In the gesture of a cynical great lord, or in anticipation of a character out of Valle-Inclán, Pedro Romero picked up Pepe-Hillo, bleeding and stunned, carried him to the box of the duchess of Osuna, and left him at her feet. Then he squared the bull and dispatched him with a single sword thrust.
Néstor Luján has understood better than anyone else the sociological significance of Pepe-Hillo’s bullfighting. For the first time, and as a result of his rivalry with Pedro Romero, enthusiasts were divided significantly in their preferences. The indiscretions of Pepe-Hillo and the somewhat superficial showiness of his bullfighting would turn him into an idol of the masses, a term that included the aristocracy. A man obsessed with renown became the first bullfighter of great multitudes. His bullfights on working days interrupted projects. If he fought on Sunday, the fiesta lasted until Tuesday in order to comment adequately on his passes. In the bullring, commoners and nobility rubbed elbows in order to kneel and remove their hats when the king entered and then to cheer enthusiastically for Pepe-Hillo. “The Spaniards are good, peaceful, and enthusiastic,” the Prussian minister concluded in the language of an explorer when he informed his court about those customs. If the people seemed remiss in becoming civilized, the most cultured part of the nobility became debased with dedicated passion. To the greater glory of Pepe-Hillo, they copied the speech of the slums and disseminated it in their salons. In the meantime, Pedro Romero, indifferent to prestige and applause, would persist in the purity of his art, followed always by a minority of true connoisseurs. When he finally retired from the bullring, weary of the crowds and his conflict with Pepe-Hillo, he had given to bullfighting a precise mental esthetic, which was the meaning and reason-for-being of the most elaborated of spectacles.
The absence of Costillares and Pedro Romero meant that Pepe-Hillo was sole master of the arena. Year after year, as he approached half a century, his faculties diminished and the gorings increased. He created the Aragonese pass or behind-the-back cape work, and perfected dodges, parries, and evasions with the cape folded several times and draped over the forearm. Thirteen times he was thought dead when he was removed, wounded, from the bullring. Yet when asked whether he planned to retire, he replied, smiling: “I’ll only leave here with my guts in my hand.” In 1796, five years before he fulfilled that promise, he published in Cádiz Tauromaquia, or the Art of Bullfighting. The book was written for him by a friend, José de la Tixera, since Pepe-Hillo had difficulty signing his name. But many pages of the book seemed dictated by him and written down word for word. His essential advice for young bullfighters is the triple repetition of an imperative: courage, courage, courage.
Because of so many indescribable reckless acts, the people had a presentiment of an obscure panic, which perhaps Pepe-Hillo himself was not aware of. When he fought in Sevilla, he always went down on his knees and asked for the blessing of his father, the former wine dealer from the Morisca Strip. Then, covered in scapulars, he prayed for a long time at the altar of his favorite superstitions. A sad seguidilla seemed to anticipate his tragic destiny. “What pity I feel / when I see El Hillo / praying in the chapel of Baratillo!” Pepe-Hillo did not believe too much in that commiseration. He knew how savage spectators could become; their applause was the primary purpose of his life. He had seen them go after old bullfighters with prods and sticks when they sought refuge in the safety enclosure, or took cover, so they would return to the center of the ring. In the blink of an eye, at a time and in an arena he refused to imagine, that could be his humiliating end. Yet he refused to desert his destiny, as Pedro Romero had done. He had already said it many times. He would abandon his profession only with his guts in his hand.
In the meantime he squandered wealth and women, which always returned to him renewed. Cockfights, Gypsy dances, too much drinking, too much eating, brothels. Uncouth and ugly, he had the masculinity of an arrogant suicide, and it charmed lower-class women as well as ladies with the bluest blood. From the time of the celebrations of the coronation, when Pedro Romero carried him, wounded, to the duchess of Osuna, people wagered on which of the nobility’s boxes he would be taken to after each goring. He dedicated part of his wealth to buying rustic and urban properties in Sevilla. He attended two regular get-togethers there, one on Calle Gallegos and the other at the Tomares water kiosk, across from the king’s warehouses. For some time he was thought to be almost tempted to abandon the bullring and retire to his properties, where everyone treated him like a monarch. Yet his legend preceded him and obliged him to live cheered on by the public, if only by chance. When he was watching a bullfight in Calatayud, a bull jumped into a row of seats filled with people. The authorities, as terrified as the crowd, hesitated. Pepe-Hillo took a sword, mounted a picador’s horse, and galloped to where the incident had occurred. He faced the bull, waited for his charge, and killed him with a single lance thrust.
On Monday, May 11, 1801, a complete bullfight was announced for the Puerta de Alcalá bullring. In the morning eight animals from Gijón and Briceño, and in the afternoon another eight from the herd of José Gabriel Rodríguez, in Peñaranda de Bracamonte, for Pepe-Hillo, José Romero, and Antonio de Santos. Some time earlier Pepe-Hillo had renounced his prejudices against Castilian bulls. Now, like Pedro Romero before him, he was obliged to measure himself against every animal that grazed in a meadow. The night before the bullfight, Pepe-Hillo rode out to Arroyo Abroñigal to see the bulls that had been purchased. He liked the look of a black bull with wide horns from Peñaranda de Bracamonte, one they called Barbudo. He demanded it for himself and no one dared argue with him.
The king and queen attended, as did Goya, who in his deafness sketched passes in the new, grotesque silence that now surrounded bullfights. In the morning, Pepe-Hillo was knocked down and suffered scrapes and contusions. In the afternoon, still in pain from the fall, he faced the beast that he himself had chosen for his own glory. Barbudo was the seventh to leave the bullpen and Pepe-Hillo must have realized when he saw him that he had been totally mistaken when he thought he had detected his spirit. The bull took three lances, always running from his fate, and three pairs of banderillas; he was cowardly wounded, and dangerous in the way he came out. The time came to kill the animal and Pepe-Hillo delivered two naturals and a chest pass, while Barbudo swung around and threatened to trap him against the barrier. Pepe-Hillo stabbed him while the bull stood still and thrust half the sword into his left side. Barbudo in turn caught him by a fold in his trousers and threw him flat on his back in the ring. The blow dazed the bullfighter, and the bull plunged his left horn into the pit of his stomach. That is the tragic instant that Goya captured in Etching 33 of his Tauromaquia: the tragic moment when the pain returned Pepe-Hillo to consciousness so that he would die aware of his suffering and clutching the shaft of the other horn. Then Barbudo held him in midair, swinging him back and forth for a whole minute, according to José de la Tixera. The autopsy report spoke of a terrible wound that cut in two the colon, stomach, liver, and right lung. The entire large lobe of the liver passed into the thoracic cavity, and several vertebrae and ribs were broken. The autopsy pronounced his instant death, although other less realistic and more pious versions conceded him a terrified quarter of an hour to receive the sacraments. The picador Juan López came late to the efforts to distract the bull, but he speared the bull from his rearing horse. José Romero finished off Barbudo with a couple of sword thrusts. Don Manuel Godoy was in Portugal at the time, winning the inglorious War of the Oranges. His mistress, the queen, wrote to him from Aranjuez, recounting the goring of Pepe-Hillo. “He was killed by a single thrust of the horns, on the spot, without the Unction arriving in time. At the moment of aiming the sword, the bull caught him, picked him up by the sternum, which is in the chest, cut open his stomach, went as high as his liver, cut the intestine in half, broke four ribs on one side and six on the other; he left all his blood in the ring and was on the horns for a time. Many people left the bullring, Manuel, my friend, and I, who don’t like the bullfights, what will happen now?”
November 7–8, 1975
—At 15:30 hours, faced with the considerable increase in gastric hemorrhage alluded to in the previous report, and his lack of response to medical treatment, a new surgical intervention was decided upon. To this end, His Excellency the Head of State was moved to “La Paz” Hospital Complex, where he was immediately placed in the care of Professor Hidalgo Huerta, with the collaboration of Doctors Serrano Martínez Cabrero and Artero Gurao and the surgeons Paula Seminario and Sagrario Parrilla. The team for anesthesia and recovery comprised Doctors Llauradó, María Paz Sánchez, and Francisco Fernández. Supervision of the cardiorespiratory constants during that tragedy was the responsibility of Doctors Vital Aza, Señor, Mínguez, and Palma. The operation revealed the existence of multiple new ulcerations of the stomach, which were bleeding profusely. For this reason they proceeded with a partial gastric surgery. The intervention, which lasted four hours, required the administration of five liters and six hundred milliliters of blood. All of this was well tolerated. At the time of the writing of this report, at 21:00 hours, vital signs are within normal range. The prognosis is very grave. Tomorrow, at 9:00, a new medical report will be issued.
“If the road to Berlin were open, it would not be a division of Spanish volunteers on their way there but a million Spaniards offering their services,” Sandro quoted Franco in the winter of 1942. Two years earlier it was two million fighters that the Generalissimo had offered to fulfill the “mandate of Gibraltar and the African vision.” Then Sandro referred to a character of Huxley’s, unknown to Marina, who asserted that death was the only absolute value not yet corrupted by men in spite of their efforts to degrade it. He wondered aloud whether those million bayonets stationed at the entrance to “La Paz” would impede his passage to a secret death, after asking him for identification. After all, you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Périgod, master of the art of political survival, pointed this out very well. Immediately afterward he began to speak of other bayonets, the ones in The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid: The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill. He compared and identified them with the horns of the bull of death painted by Goya (“the one you didn’t want to see in the original for fear you’d be left blind”), and with the horns of another of Goya’s bulls goring a picador’s white horse. He ended by describing the slaughter in the Prado as a bullfight in which a minotaur with multiple heads sacrificed herds of men. Marina half-listened to him, not understanding his words very well and almost not crediting his existence. For more than ten days Sandro had not tasted alcohol and had drunk ice water with his meals. Yet he expressed himself now with the reckless urgency of intoxication, hastily summarizing à bout de souffle some incomprehensible hypotheses for her that he had been working on obsessively. From the huge bullfight that The Shootings had been, he went on to refer to time halted by art in the midst of history’s atrocities.
“What does this have to do with Franco’s dying?”
“Everything,” Sandro replied immediately. “In spite of the eroticization of our consumer society, death made into a spectacle is still at the center of the Iberian arena. We know that Franco is slowly wasting away in a totally aseptic room. We also know that they keep him dozing with sedatives and artificially assist his respiratory and urinary insufficiencies. One of his doctors told a reporter that he had palpated his open intestines and swore that the dying man was not suffering from cancer and showed no symptoms of metastasis. That last sentence is one I certainly don’t follow since metastasis is the reproduction of a very real disease in a place different from where it appeared initially. They’ve sutured a ruptured artery and several stomach ulcers. His heart stopped, but they stimulated it and regulated its rhythm electrically. There’s not a single drop of his own blood in his body, since it all bled out intermittently and had to be replaced by transfusion.”
“I still don’t understand,” Marina repeated, shrugging. Profiled against the opening of the window and leaning against the side of the bay, her gaze seemed to be lost in the dark night where another snowstorm threatened.
“Let’s witness again the death of Felipe II. We know almost as much about that as we do about his life and, of course, about his person, for history does not know who that man really was. Consumption, gout, tertian fevers, and a cancer of the knee finished him off in El Escorial in a death agony that lasted two and a half months. Hydropic tumors swelled his belly and legs horribly. He burned with thirst, and only his fortitude or his pride allowed him to die slowly, without a single complaint. His tortured body could not tolerate the touch of hands or cloth. It was impossible to change or clean the bed, and the bedchamber reeked like a sewer. Lying in his own filth, a bedsore opened along the length of his back, from the nape of his neck to his buttocks, and the ulcers became worm-ridden. In these conditions they operated on his leg, and pus poured out of the swelling. They brought his father’s coffin and opened it next to his bed. Felipe II ordered them to wrap him in a shroud just like Carlos V’s, and he died, lucid, in the forty-second year of his reign, with the crucifix of the emperor in his hands. His death was an obvious parable of the corruption of absolute power.”
“Absolute power is the most transitory,” murmured Marina. “In two years, no one will remember Franco. It will simply be as if he had never existed.”
“But the country will be the same: the land of the tragic sense of death and the picaresque or murderous sense of life. In fact the picaresque is our Renaissance, and if we freed ourselves here from the wars of religion, it wasn’t because we had burned the heretics but because we believed in death on the one hand and in the ragged beggar boy on the other. Our future was reduced to waiting for the one man’s end. Our past was the chronicle of other death agonies. Even the history of bullfighting, before it became a spectacle for foreign tourists, became a backwater and was reduced to a few fatal gorings, beginning with Pepe-Hillo’s.
Sandro was quiet for a few moments, recalling his notes on the tragedy, taken the night before from Cossío, Luján, and de la Tixera. As he wrote them he believed he was describing a bloody event he had witnessed personally in a mirror or in a world similar to the one in the paintings. Almost like the flash of a hallucination, he was struck suddenly by the memory of the fighting bull painted by Goya right after he had survived his grave crisis of 1792 and 1793. He felt certain that another very similar bull, or perhaps the same bull in a kind of brutal reincarnation of the painting in the bullring, killed Pepe-Hillo in Madrid eight or nine years later. Goya had attended the bullfight and witnessed the death of the bullfighter between the horns of Barbudo. But then Sandro imagined Goya in the vertigo of an absolute certainty as true as it was inexplicable, asking himself who he was, who Don Francisco Goya y Lucientes really was.
After Pepe-Hillo, Sandro spoke of Joselito, Granero, and Varelito. Three more bullfighters killed in the bullrings of another century, where symmetrical and concentric destinies all converged in a kind of determinism that anticipated the goring itself. On May 15, 1920, almost on the anniversary of the death of Pepe-Hillo, Joselito was fighting in Madrid. The next day he was supposed to fight in Talavera on an equal footing with his brother-in-law, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. As they had done earlier with El Hillo, the audience demanded greater and greater risks and marvels of him, perhaps in anticipation of the sacrifice about which Lorca’s “terrible mothers” had a presentiment with a certainty unknown to the bullfighters themselves in their ambiguous solitude. In Madrid the crowd booed him, threw seat pads into the ring, and howled: “Get him out! Get him out!” In a moment of silence, a girl shouted at him from the seats: “I hope to God a bull kills you tomorrow in Talavera!” In Talavera the fifth bull of the afternoon was named Bailador and was as black as Barbudo. He seemed surly and confused, and in the end turned out to be half-blind, seeing well enough from a distance but not up close. Joselito observed the defect and challenged him more with his voice than by working the cape, which was almost invisible to the bull. Having concluded a series of passes to attract the animal, the bullfighter moved away from Bailador, thinking he had dominated him and forgetting for a moment about his far-sightedness. As he walked away from the bull, the sword entered the animal’s field of vision and Bailador quickly charged. Joselito attempted to guide his route with the muleta, but the bull, too close now to the cloth to see it, continued to attack the man. He gored Joselito in the left leg, as Barbudo had gored El Hillo, tossed him in the air, and as he fell the bull received him with another goring, sinking an entire horn into his belly, as the bull had done to Pepe-Hillo. He died on the horns. Later, looking at his opened body in the infirmary, one of Joselito’s banderilleros would say: “If a bull killed this man, I tell you that here no one escapes dying in the ring.”
Manuel Granero quickly attracted attention after the death of Joselito, and fans believed him the indisputable heir to that incomparable genius. Dead soon after his twentieth birthday, the boy was Valencian, tall, chubby-cheeked, his appearance somewhere between dim-witted and effeminate, who in some old photographs looks like an altar boy and in others a gelding. He was also a man of exceptional valor and very thoughtful intelligence. He spent no more than three years in the ring, and at first he doubted his gifts for bullfighting. People said he was ready to leave it with no misgivings after his first fights with young bulls, because he did not want to be mediocre, much less make a fool of himself. He had studied music and played the violin wonderfully. If he left bullfighting, he would become a professional violinist. Yet in his first year as a matador, he engaged in ninety-one bullfights, a number not matched even by Joselito soon after the ceremony making him a matador. On May 7, 1922, four days from the anniversary of the death of Pepe-Hillo and almost two years from Joselito’s last goring, he fought in Madrid with Juan Luis de la Rosa and Marcial Lalanda. The fifth bull of the afternoon, Pocapena, was Granero’s, farsighted like Bailador and skittish like Barbudo. He leaned a great deal to the right and tended to charge near the barrier. When it was time for the kill he withdrew to the bullpen and backed onto the base of the barrier, just like Barbudo. A man in the cuadrilla who had formerly been with Joselito attempted to bring the bull to the center of the ring. Granero immediately stopped him: “Leave it, I can take care of him.” Pocapena began to charge, closing in on Granero, who waited for him, not moving a muscle. The bull gored Granero in his right thigh, suspended him in midair as Bailador and Barbudo had suspended Joselito and Pepe-Hillo, and tossed him to the base of the barrier. There he horned him over and over again, destroying his sash and breeches. In one of those thrusts, he sank a horn into his right eye, tearing it out by the roots and splitting his brain and frontal bone. He was alive when they carried him into the infirmary but died a few moments later.
Six days after the death of Granero, Manuel Varé, Varelito, perished in Sevilla after three weeks of agony, the result of another goring. He was Sevillan, like Pepe-Hillo, and carried to unmatched perfection the running sword thrust up to the hilt, which Pepe-Hillo had learned from Costillares. Although correct, he was less brilliant with the cape and small killing cape, but at the moment of truth, he entered in close and very slowly, his left leg slightly bent, thrust the sword with a skill identical to the courage that makes it possible. He lacked the physical gifts of Joselito and suffered many mishaps in handling the cape, yet the wounds did not diminish his stubborn courage. On April 21, 1922, he was in Sevilla, appearing in the fourth bullfight of the fair. Joselito was dead, and Belmonte, a Sevillan like Manuel Varé, had retired, and with increasing imperiousness the public demanded everything from bullfighters. As they had done to Joselito in Madrid in his next-to-last kill (“I hope to God a bull kills you tomorrow in Talavera!”), the crowd in the stands booed Varelito, exasperating him with their hissing and insults. The fifth bull of the afternoon, Bombito, fell to the bullfighter from Sevilla, just as Bailador and Pocapena, also in fifth place, had fallen to Joselito and Granero. The animal was black, like Barbudo and Bailador, but with shorter horns. Always hounded by the shouting of the crowd, Varelito thrust the sword into the bull’s neck, not killing him at the first jab. Then Bombito gored him as he turned away, destroying his sphincter and rectum. As he was carried to the infirmary, in the shocked silence in the bullring, he shouted at the crowd before he disappeared: “Now he’s got me! Now you have what you wanted!” In the ring he left a stream of blood and a bull that was dead after he had wounded him.
“Let’s leave this country,” Marina said slowly. “Let’s leave together, tomorrow, if you like. After all, neither one of us belongs here. At heart you’re Italian, and I never knew who I was.”
“Nobody does. R. told us that on the day we met. But it isn’t true. Goya knew that perfectly well, even though he spent almost his whole life finding it out. Perhaps the rest of us move through the world without distinguishing ourselves from shadows, or understanding with any certainty why we pretend we were born. In any case, I can’t leave the bullring without finishing my book, and I can’t finish the book without understanding the meaning of the bull in this arena.”
“The bull? Which one are you referring to, to Goya’s, to Barbudo, to Bailador, to the one that hollowed out Granero’s head?”
“Possibly they’re all the same. The bull is the symbol of death, with his thrusts and charges. It’s well known too that Pepe-Hillo himself chose Barbudo the day before he was gored. On the other hand, the beast is transformed into the victim of a bloody sacrifice to an unknown or forgotten god, with the public as witness. Only reason is able to propitiate the animal when it is time for the sacrifice, and bring into play human dignity and existence. Do you know Espartero’s response to his assistant?”
“How would I know it if I never went to a bullfight?”
“A nervous banderillero was having difficulties placing the darts. In two impatient sentences, Espartero indicated how to drive them in. ‘If I do what you tell me to, this bull will gore me.’ Espartero looked at him in stupefaction and shrugged. ‘And what does that matter?’ His logic seems appropriate to a ritual, about whose mysteries we know absolutely nothing. The bull can be both the victim and the one that offers up the sacrifice. Besides, the bull is one of the animals with which men tend to identify magically. From the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, a bull was at Mass and in the procession on Saint Mark’s day. When Fernando the Catholic married Germaine de Foix, he had bull’s testicles served at the wedding banquet to increase his virility. On the other hand, our only contribution to the natural sciences was proving the bull’s dominion over all the wild animals.”
Then Sandro spoke of the public encounters between fighting bulls and other animals, to the greater glory of the crowds of the Bourbon Restoration. In 1894 in Madrid, the bull Caminero faced the lion Recadé in a cage fifty meters in diameter. The king of the jungle became frightened at the first attack and Caminero pursued him, tossing and goring him as he chose. The lion died of his wounds the next day. Three or four years later, and again in the Madrid bullring, a black spotted bull was locked in with a Bengal tiger. When the tiger saw his enemy with his back turned, he leaped onto his shoulders and took the back of his neck into his jaws. Regatero, which is what they called that bull, shook off his adversary and gored him repeatedly. The tiger turned around and bit his dewlap, but Regatero cornered him against the bars and gored the tiger to death. The public protested, believing that so unusual and attractive a spectacle had ended. The bullring attendants poked the tiger with sticks through the bars to rouse him. He moved again and Regatero attacked him one more time. The tiger, whose name has, unjustly, not passed into the chronicles, sank his fangs into the bull’s snout, and the bull finished off the tiger by attacking frenetically with his head. The crowd roared then and patriotically cheered the Spanish bull to the sound of the chords of the Marcha de Cádiz. They took away the tiger, emptied of blood.
The following year, and again in the capital, another duel was presented between the bull Sombrerito and the elephant Nerón. They chained the pachyderm to a post driven into the center of the arena, but he broke the chains and panic invaded the stands. They chained him again and Sombrerito charged him several times, but the giant paid him no attention. The bull ceased his efforts and the crowd booed the two animals, throwing oranges at them, which the elephant calmly devoured. They took away Sombrerito and sent out another deadly bull from the same herd. This one immediately attacked Nerón, put him to shameful flight, knocked him down and gored him in the belly and the head. The public became impassioned and applauded the bull and the Fatherland. The brass band again played the opening measures of the Marcha de Cádiz.
Other public festivities no less notable and always employing wild animals took place during the years of the Restoration. Times that still open in the waters of antepenultimate history, like Japanese flowers in the bidet, while a king died telling the queen: “Cristinita, hide your cunt and protect Cánovas from Sagasta and Sagasta from Cánovas”; while Cánovas himself outlined the first article of the Constitution: “Those who cannot be anything else are Spaniards”; while the French were Spaniards with money and kissing a man without a mustache was like drinking down an egg without salt; while “The bourgeoisie, egotists all, / who despise the rest of humankind, / will be swept away by the socialists / to the sacred cry of liberty . . .”; while Guerra declared he would fight no more bulls in Madrid, not even for the benefit of Most Holy Mary; while Espartero affirmed that “hunger gives more gorings than bulls,” until a final goring by the bull Perdigón, the “traitorous little bull” that Fernando Villalón wanted to conjure up twenty-five years later after a spiritualist session, killed him off in Madrid. Then, also in Madrid and in the bullring where the blood of that esteemed matador had been spilled, a supposed son of Perdigón himself, with wide-spread horns and a dull yellowish color, fought with the lionesses Sabina and Nemea. He chased and constrained them so much that not even flaming arrows could force them to risk resisting him. The competitions between animals become baroque and churrigueresque, like Jesuit architecture in its dazzling decline. They enclosed the bull Carasucia with a she-bear, a she-panther, and a she-lion. Only the bear fought with any honor, while the lion and the panther, gored multiple times, fled in terror. The excited crowd, emotional and enthusiastic, gave the conqueror a standing ovation.
The final competition was held in San Sebastián, shortly after the turn of the century. The bull Hurón was measured against a tiger whose ferocity the posters guaranteed and predicted. Yet the feline became as timid as a mouse at the first charges and fled the thrusting horns, offering no resistance. Hurón knocked down the tiger, gored him, and tossed him against the grillwork with so much power that the crash bent several bars. Improvised blacksmiths straightened them immediately with hammers, but the president ordered the fight suspended, sick of the spectacle or having a presentiment of imminent disaster. The honorable public became enraged, stamping their feet and roaring their demand that the battle continue until the death of the tiger. The president gave in and ordered the animal harassed with goads, clubs, and flaming banderillas, but the singed and beaten animal did not cease its panting or its trembling as it cringed on one side of the cage. The fireworks maddened Hurón, a circumstance unforeseen by those strategists, and the bull threw himself against his terrified adversary, breaking the bars, and both animals walked out into the ring. Overcome by panic, the screaming public crowded together and became violent in waves, looking for the exits from the bullring. While people trampled on people, the Civil Guard shot the two animals in the ring. Whoever it was who gave the order to fire, which no one ever found out, spectators armed with pistols followed his example from the stands. The bullets rebounded on the cement stairs, increasing the terror of the noble masses. The day yielded one dead and almost a hundred injured by bullets, falls, or trampling. The memory of the bull and the tiger was lost after the incident.
“Let’s leave here right away,” Marina repeated, her arms folded over her chest as if she were making an effort to contain a shudder. “Let’s go and never come back to this country.”
Sandro shook his head and then repeated promises to get away as soon as he turned in his book, which was almost finished. Then they would go to Colorado and spend the summer with his children. Marina would be delighted to live a few months with them. In reality he spoke without hearing himself, vaguely aware that she wasn’t listening to him either. Looking at her in the dark night of the window, where small snowflakes were beginning to fall, he thought of a Piero della Francesca. One of those cold, serene female profiles in the frescoes of the Church of San Francesco, in Arezzo, or the Diptych of Federigo da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, in the Uffizi in Florence. The same decided will appeared to have traced their common features, beneath which the passions veiled a hidden fire or a resplendent light whose moderated brilliance barely showed through. Five hundred years earlier, Piero had loved a woman almost identical to Marina, although his art was then characterized by a supposed emotional coldness. Loving her, he immortalized her obsessively in almost all his works, perhaps because he also knew she was very similar to him. Then Sandro thought of another Piero: The Birth of Our Lord, in the National Gallery. Beneath its reproduction and on the sofa in his house, he had made love to Marina, before the autumn of our discontent, when they began to meet in those dissolute bars behind the old Municipal Slaughterhouse. He had never noticed then Marina’s resemblance to the Virgin, the one kneeling in prayer next to the choir of shepherdesses. If he identified her now with Piero’s beloved, he did not feel certain that he, and only he, was the one who remembered the frescoes in Arezzo and in the Uffizi. Perhaps another man saw them in a century closer to the Florentine painter and silently was helping him to evoke them. Sandro refused to say his name.
That night they went to bed naked, not touching beneath R.’s sheets and blankets. Sandro dreamed about the recently painted Wild Bull. On an easel of wood smoothed with a plane, the wet oil painting gleamed. A woman who was still young, whom Sandro recognized in his dream without recalling her name, talked to him beside the canvas. She was dressed all in black, her clothing and lace trimming from another time, as if she were going to a masquerade ball. Sandro asked her whether she thought he was mad, convinced all the while that he had lost his mind since he could not hear his own voice. And he could not understand what she replied, her words vanquished by the same silence. Facedown on the table at the foot of a transom, the mask looked for paper, pen, and an inkwell and nervously scratched some sentences in a small, very clear hand: “Of course you are. Raving mad. How did you dare to incite him so that he would leave the painting and really gore you, you fool. This bull makes me feel naked down to my bones. He looks at me as if I were a rag doll.” Sandro burst into laughter, and laughing, he awoke.
The sun shone on the whitewashed walls in the house. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, Marina was sitting beside the window in the studio. She was motionless, as if she had spent part of the night waiting for the snow to cover the earth and the heavens to shine. The television was on and from the auditorium of La Paz hospital complex, the minister of information and tourism read the latest medical bulletin about Franco: At 8:30 a.m. on November 8, the clinical evolution of His Excellency the Head of State is the following: he has spent the night sleeping. He awoke from anesthesia at 3:00 a.m. and has been sedated to avoid pain. His vital signs remain normal. The cardiocirculatory situation has shown no change. From the beginning of yesterday’s surgical intervention and up to the moment of this current report he has received seven liters and two hundred milliliters of blood by transfusion. At the end of the surgical intervention an arteriovenous circuit breaker was implanted in his right forearm for hemodialysis. The thrombophlebitic process in his left thigh continues unchanged. The prognosis continues to be the same.
Immediately afterward there was a report on the true nature of the “arteriovenous circuit breaker.” It consisted of placing a tube in an artery and another in a vein, so that the artery brought enough blood to the hemodialysis, or artificial kidney, and then returned to the organism through the other tube. The dialysis purified the patient’s blood, placed in contact with the artificial plasma through a semipermeable membrane. In peritoneal dialysis, used then on the dying man, the peritoneal membrane functioned as a semipermeable membrane, cleaning the toxins accumulated in the organism.
Then Sandro thought of Morocco: Diary of a Flag, the chronicle and memoir of the campaign written by Franco at the age of thirty. The official cornetist had a Moor’s ear to show to the other legionnaires. “I killed him!” he boasted. He had found the Moor at the bottom of a gully, hiding among some rocks. Aiming his carbine at him, he had him walk up to the road together with the other troops. “Fren, fren, no kill!” the prisoner pleaded. “No kill! Now you’ll see. March over to that rock and sit down.” The prisoner obeyed, trembling, and the cornetist fired at him. Then he cut off his ear, as a kind of trophy, as if the Moor were a recently killed fighting bull. That was not, Franco stressed, the first exploit of the young legionnaire. In a new edition that appeared after the Civil War, the paragraph had been censored.
Outside, the snow sparkled in the silent woods. Looking at it, he recalled the naked whiteness of the woman he had dreamed about. Laughing, Sandro had pulled off her mourning clothes with the black lace trim, like a mask ready for a costume ball. They made love at the foot of the easel where the fresh paint still gleamed on that head of a vicious bull, on a floor badly made of creaking wooden boards. Sandro didn’t hear her laughter or her shouts because a silence of eternal ice had filled his head. Then he told the woman that in his deafness her shrieks of pleasure felt like those of a woman crucified. “I always lived crucified,” he thought he read on her lips. “I didn’t want to be born.”
Du Sang, de la Mort et de la Volupté. He passed his eyes over the thickness of trees in order not to think about the dream whose final and perhaps only meaning he did not want to admit to himself. Up the slopes and beneath the blazing blue sky, the snow seemed to turn pink in the late-morning light. Behind the first hilltops, in a hollow covered with ferns, lay a pond as round as a medal. Sandro and Marina had discovered it that autumn, when they had come across the spot, almost by accident. On the final slopes the trees disappeared, and the foliage was reduced to hawthorn, lost yews, and fields of carline thistle. The images of a man and a woman lengthened in the water, turned golden by midday, but far from the shore the pond grew dark and deep, like a trap. For Sandro, the clearest memory was of silence. Perfect quiet in a world still without cicadas or serpents, without wind and birds. He thought that deafness would illuminate his memories and evoked what he had written one dawn, totally drunk, in his notebook: “Saturn is my self-portrait and only tonight did I finally realize it.” Then he had weighed a coin in the palm of one hand (“Francisco Franco Caudillo of Spain by the Grace of God”). On an impulse he threw it into the water. It must have fallen in the exact center of the pond, because the waves that began to ripple across the surface were perfectly concentric with the contour of the banks. It was Marina who noticed that they traced the outline of a bullring, with high rows of seats. An arena and its stands ironically disappeared as it grew.
Only then, as he recalled that morning before the snows a few weeks later, and told himself that the pond would freeze in the gully, he thought he could detect the meaning of everything he had been writing recently about Goya, in the chapter he would call tauromaquia. Marina refused to see the original of Wild Bull for fear she would go blind. According to Néstor Luján, after centuries we know almost nothing about bulls. We don’t know why all the bullfighters named Pepete died in the ring, or why it was always May, not April, that was the cruelest month, the one that left the most blood and the most dead in the arena. Rudolf Arnheim observed that the bombing of Guernica, on April 26, 1937, and the sketches for Picasso’s mural came under the sign of Taurus, the celestial bull. Now Sandro amplified the coincidences of the constellation, through time and to limits that were incomprehensible for calculating probabilities. Between April 20 and May 21, two events took place: the massacre of May 3, 1808, and Goya’s display of his painting, The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill, on a triumphal arch celebrating the return of the Desired One, May 11, 1814. The most savage of bullfights, the one in which the minotaur multiplied in order to charge men with bayonets, denounced history forever as the masses shouted: “Long live our chains!”
If the wide-horned black bull painted by Goya during his convalescence seemed to transform into the firing squad in The Third of May in Madrid, another wide-horned black bull killed Pepe-Hillo, in Goya’s presence, on May 11, 1801. Still under the sign of Taurus, though in another century, a bull as dark as night fatally gored Joselito on May 15, 1920, in a horning identical to El Hillo’s. If the 1801 bull was named Barbudo, the one in 1920 was called Bailador and was the fifth bull of the afternoon. Another bull that also appeared in fifth place killed Granero on May 7, two years later. He was a skittish beast like Barbudo and short-sighted like Bailador. He caught Granero next to the barrier, as Barbudo had caught Pepe-Hillo, also by the leg, and finished him off on the ground with horn thrusts to the head. Again in fifth place, the bull Bombito appeared in the ring and gored Varelito on April 21, 1922. As a consequence of the wound, the matador died on May 13. The four bullfighters were gored when it was time for them to kill the bull.
The snow was beginning to freeze and turn golden among the trees. On May 2, 1808, always under the same constellation and in the Puerta del Sol, kilometer zero in all Spanish territories, the contemporary history of a reckless people began, which since that time has charged savagely in search of itself without success. He thought of a Christmas Eve, in a year he did not care to remember, when the car in which Sandro was driving his wife (his second wife) and two children skidded on an icy highway from Boulder to Denver and turned over an embankment of snow frosted like all the snow in those woods. At Boulder Hospital his wife (his second wife) was declared technically dead. Even so, the doctors struggled bravely to revive her, perhaps by means of a desperate logic that reduces realism to achieving the impossible. An hour later they succeeded, and two weeks later they discharged her and she returned home, where Sandro was a tangle of guilt-ridden contradictions for having escaped the accident unharmed.
His wife (his second wife) was a rationalist and an agnostic. Even so, she never concealed what she had experienced when she was dead. She said she suddenly felt deprived of substance and transformed into serene consciousness, undertaking a journey through not time and space but brilliant peace and light. Her pilgrimage was suddenly interrupted when she became conscious of physical pain in the hospital bed. She was in distress and was perfectly lucid, because suffering isolates and defines. She remembered everything: her name, her address, and even her final scream before the car overturned. Sandro said to himself then that perhaps there was a special, nontransferable hell for Spaniards, a people responsible for their slow suicide over the centuries, where each citizen would awake in an empty bullring that would be eternity for him. There, and although his name was Sandro Vasari, a descendant of Giorgio Vasari and three generations of Italian xarnegos, he too would find himself one day perpetually imprisoned in the center of the arena and the infinity of concentric circles of bleachers, facing the bullpen and with an ironic, useless watch in his hand (a watch attached to a long silver chain, like Pepe-Hillo’s), under the same pitiless sun of May 2, 1808.
“Early this morning, while you were sleeping, R. telephoned from the United States,” Marina whispered suddenly, returning him to the other reality. “He insisted that I not wake you. He wanted to talk to me alone and ask me how the book on Goya was going. I said you were constantly working on it and said it was almost finished.”
“That’s the truth, more or less.”
“He seemed to believe me.” She hesitated for a moment, and then added: “R. was in Boulder, Colorado, and was calling from your wife’s house, your second wife, according to what he said.”
“He’s very free to do that,” Sandro interrupted drily. “He can telephone from another life of mine, if he wants to.”
She wasn’t listening to him. Reverberating on the frozen snow, the sun lit her profile again as if she were one of Piero della Francesca’s figures. Looking at her hands crossed on a knee, and without raising her head, Marina asked:
“Sandro, do you think I’m going crazy? Tell me the truth.”
“You must be if you really came to me after all these years and if in reality you’re here now with me. In other words, if we truly are who we think we are.”
He rested his palm on Marina’s shoulder and observed his own hand as if it belonged to someone else, while the sun turned the veins stretching from his wrist to his knuckles blue, and reflected on his wristwatch. It was exactly 10:00 in the morning.
“I know very well who you are, but every day I know myself less and less,” Marina repeated. “If we left here, then perhaps I could find myself.”
“We’ll go, Marina, very soon, and maybe earlier than you suppose. The book will be finished before you know it.”
“I hope it’s not too late. I hope I don’t really go crazy then, if I haven’t already lost my mind.” She paused, and Sandro felt her shoulder beneath his palm harden, as if it had turned into stone. “Before dawn and R.’s call, I got up and dressed because I couldn’t sleep. It was still snowing, but soon the wind would rise and sweep away all the clouds. I turned on the porch light and sat in this same chair, next to the window. That was when I saw it, as soon as the light went on . . .”
“What did you see, for God’s sake?”
“It was Goya’s bull and he still had that cape caught on the banderillas still piercing his back. He stood motionless in a clearing in the wood, under the oak trees. He must have seen me at the same time, because he approached the window slowly, shaking the snow off his forehead, tossing his head. He came up to the edge of the windowsill and began to stare at me so fixedly I thought I would sink while still alive into his eyes. They were bloodshot and wide open, like they are in the painting; but his gaze wasn’t an animal’s, it was a man’s, a man chained in hell. I don’t know how long we looked at each other; perhaps eternities. Suddenly, very slowly, he made a half turn and was lost among the trees. I sat contemplating his hoof prints on the snowy ground. More flakes, the last ones, finally erased them at daybreak.”