Part 1 (1/2)

Miracle in Seville.

A Novel.

James A. Michener.

Excerpt from Centennial.

*or two good reasons I did not cable New York a true account of what transpired during that spring feria in Seville twenty years ago. First of all, I could not decide if I had seen what I thought I saw. Did it really happen, or was it the product of a mind made overactive by the feverish festivities of Holy Week? Since I kept my writing headquarters in the gracious Alfonso Trece Hotel, I was not far from that famous cigarette factory where Carmen with the rose between her teeth bewitched the Spanish captain sent to guard her. I could distinctly hear her singing at dusk when I pa.s.sed her factory, so I might also have witnessed other miracles. Even today I cannot be sure of what happened during that vital, spiritual and social three-week fair the people of Seville call their feria.

The second reason for my duplicity was more simple, but devastatingly effective in keeping me silent. If I had reported all of what I had seen to my magazine, my boss would have cabled back: 'Lay off that Spanish wine,' and the conscientious woman who handled my ma.n.u.scripts, removing the gaucheries in my prose, would have wired: 'Stop your medieval dreaming. Miracles don't happen in the twentieth century.' I could not afford such ridicule.

Now, reflecting calmly two decades later, I suspect that what I experienced was some shadowy glimpse of a truth we men do not like to acknowledge: that women possess an arcane power to influence men, making them see visions and influencing them to perform acts they would not normally commit. I'd struggled through a messy divorce and was already contemplating remarrying, so my thoughts were concentrated on the relations.h.i.+ps between women and men. Was I translating my own confusion about women into universal truth regarding their potency? Certainly in Seville I witnessed a battle between two powerful women, and to me they remain as forceful as they were when they involved me in their combat.

I worked in those days for a lively magazine called World Sport, which owed its success to a belief that sports-hungry American men would buy a journal that kept them informed about what was happening in the sporting life of countries they'd never seen. One of my more successful stories had been a riveting account of the brave aborigines on Pentecost Island in the New Hebrides who climbed to the top of very tall trees, then leaped headfirst down to earth supported only by vines lashed about their waist and ankles. Make the vines too long, you dashed your brains out. Make them too short and you dangled in midair, an inept fool who would be ridiculed. Make them just right, and you walked away a champion among men.

Since I specialized in bizarre stories, it was my good luck to have seen much of the world's playful nonsense, such as the performance of Argentine gauchos working wonders on the pampas with their bolo ropes, which they could twist perfectly around the rear legs of a galloping horse, or the daring fellows who canoed down the Yukon River during the turbulent spring floods.

My editor had given me the Seville a.s.signment one morning in March: 'Shenstone, we've decided to send you to Spain for a six-pager on a little-known aspect of bullfighting.' When I objected that our magazine had carried numerous takes on that sport as it operated in Peru, Mexico, Portugal and, of course, Spain, the boss reb.u.t.ted me: 'Sure, Hemingway did that series for Life on the summer-long duel between Ordonez and his brother-in-law Domingun, and Barnaby Conrad has been effective on the story of Manolete. But what we've never had in America is an honest case study of some typical rancher who raises the bulls that fight the matadors, and we think that the roly-poly in this picture from a Spanish magazine might be just the man we want.'

In the Madrid bullfight magazine he tossed to me I saw the full-moon face of Don Cayetano Mota, owner of the historic Mota Ranch for fighting bulls. He was, the story explained, sixty-eight years old, five feet five, and looked as round as an English toby mug in its three-cornered hat. His thick gray hair was rumpled, just like his suit, and I had the feeling that a man with a build and a face like that ought to be smiling, but he was frowning as if to say: With me, things are not going well.

I liked Don Cayetano from the moment I saw him scowling at me from the page, an impression that was reinforced when I read additional details about his career: Inherited from his grandfather the distinguished line of Mota fighting bulls whose fame-had been well established by the middle of the last century. Exemplars of the breed constantly appeared in the history of bullfighting. One Mota was immortalized by the great Mazzantini, and vice versa. Mota bulls were prominent in those historic fights early in this century in which Juan Belmonte and Joselito contested for supremacy.

The article described how the quality of the line had declined so pitifully during the Civil War in Spain that major matadors had begun to spurn the bulls from this once-famous ranch. The decline continued during World War II to the extent that leading matadors of the postwar period, such as the immortal Manolete and the Mexican Arruza, tried to avoid fighting events in which the Motas were scheduled to appear; even superior artists could accomplish nothing with bulls that were inferior.

When Don Cayetano inherited the ranch in 1953 he had dedicated himself to restoring the Mota name to the glory it had known when Veragua, Concha y Sierra and Mota were the honorable triumvirate of breeders for the plazas of Spain. Unfortunately, Mota seemed to have been waging a campaign that was honorable but doomed-the author of the article wrote that Mota bulls are still more often a disgrace than a triumph. Don Cayetano could take what solace he could from a matchless wall in his ranch north of Seville adorned by the heads of four Mota bulls famous in history. The article was accompanied by a photograph showing the heads handsomely preserved by taxidermists who had polished the deadly horns with wax, and from the photo, which I would want to use in my story, I caught a sense of how majestic and lethal a Mota bull could be. But why were these four special? The text had antic.i.p.ated my question: When a bull has performed in some major ring with unparalleled bravery and the time comes for him to be killed, spectators will fill the plaza with a blizzard of waving white handkerchiefs, pleading with the judge to spare the life of this n.o.ble animal, which is then taken out of the ring to spend the remainder of his life in pasture. No other surviving ranch can boast of four indultados. May the time come again, and soon, Don Cayetano, when you will witness another indultado for one of your bulls!

Within a moment of seeing the photo of the four bulls, I knew how my story should be organized: I'll use that word indultados, pardoned ones, for the motif. As the Mota bull is sometimes pardoned, so Don Cayetano can be pardoned for the low estate into which his famous ranch has fallen. And Spaniards will rejoice that he's made a comeback, or tried to do so. I like this sentence in the caption: 'When a n.o.ble bull is spared, and it happens maybe once in two decades, all Spaniards seem to rejoice, as if Spain itself has somehow been enn.o.bled.'

I saw the fat little owner, scowling and with shoulders hunched forward as if preparing for battle, as an Everyman who, as the years close in on him, wants to leave behind him some worthy achievement. I would not sentimentalize him, but I would use a portrait of him standing below his four indultados to present a warrior fighting to restore his own life. Folding the magazine pages and stowing them in my gear, I asked the secretary in the New York office who handled our travel to get me a flight to Madrid.

I was fortunate that I arrived in Spain at a time when bullfighting, notorious for its violent swings from epochs of greatness to periods of shame, was in a relatively stable condition. If it could boast of no transcendent pairs like Belmonte and Joselito of the 191520 period or Manolete and Arruza of the 1940s, it did offer three young men worth seeing whenever they appeared in the ring, for you could be sure they would give an honest account of themselves. They were as honorable in their fields as Joe DiMaggio, Red Grange, Paavo Nurmi and Don Bradman had been in theirs, and in one significant aspect the matadors surpa.s.sed these other greats because when they performed with the bulls they laid their lives on the line. In this century two of the very greatest matadors, Joselito and Manolete, masters of their art in every respect, were gored to death in the ring as thousands watched.

The three noteworthy matadors I encountered were smallish, not much over five feet six, an advantage in bullfighting, where quickness and deftness of movement can mean the difference between life and death. These men were highly skilled artists, built more like ballet dancers than athletes.

Paco Camino was the beau ideal of a matador. Possessed of an elfinlike physique, he was also handsome of face and charismatic in his deportment, exhibiting his skill in the ring with a mesmerizing mix of grace and confidence. On special afternoons he could perform with such perfection that both men and women first gasped at his mastery, then cheered as the graceful Paco circled the ring while the bull he had just killed was dragged away. Nodding to the crowd and flas.h.i.+ng a dazzling smile, he would make one tour to the wild applause of the crowd, then another and, at the insistence of the spectators, perhaps a third. On certain memorable occasions, men would leap into the ring at the end of a fight and insist upon carrying him on their shoulders out through the great gates reserved for heroes, saliendo en hombros.

El Viti-like many matadors of previous ages, he fought under a nom de guerre-was the cla.s.sicist, a thin fellow slightly taller than his two rivals and whose comportment was marked by a solemnity that never varied. A high priest of the bullring, he was a man of the most uncompromising honor, a figure from ages past who had come into the ring to fight in a mode of cla.s.sical purity regardless of the quality of the bull he had acquired in the lottery. He presented a remarkable stance when he fought: erect, immobile, face cleansed of any emotion other than dedication to duty, feet fixed in the sand, regardless of whatever ominous moves the bull might make. He seemed at times to be a statue linked with the wild bull in some mysterious way. Men who loved bullfighting revered El Viti for his cla.s.sic purity and, even more, because he alone still practiced the most difficult feat in the ring, killing recibiendo (receiving), which required unbelievable courage and willpower. In the normal final act of killing the bull, other matadors waited till the precise moment the tired bull was about to make a lunge forward, then they also moved forward and leaned in with the sword to gracefully slide safely past the outstretched horns. This in itself is a difficult and dangerous feat. Those who do it poorly land in either the hospital or the morgue, but in killing recibiendo-while ”receiving” the bull-El Viti did not move his feet at the final moment. Erect and immobile, he allowed the enraged animal to charge directly at him and impale himself on the sword's point. This act is so difficult and so dependent upon the lucky coincidence of timing-the bull moving forward directly onto the sword-that nine times out of ten, no matter how perfectly El Viti has performed his part in the tragic ballet, the attempt fails. The sword either hits bone or misses the mark or is deflected by the bull, and the deadly dance must be repeated. No one jeers at the matador, for he has done his part, standing there impa.s.sively as the bull charges at him, and I was to see one fight when El Viti, through no fault of his own, failed six times to kill the bull, with the crowd encouraging him to try yet again. But I was also to see him kill on the first try, with the bull falling dead at his feet and the arena exploding with triumphant shouts as if each spectator had somehow partic.i.p.ated in this recreation of bullfighting's historic days.

The third member of this notable trio was a wild man, as far removed from El Viti as a matador could be. He was El Cordobes, named for his native city in southern Spain, who had discovered early in his life as a street urchin that the bullfight spectators could be brought to their feet by wild exhibitions of daring. Challenging the animal in a dozen tricky ways, his flamboyant histrionics had never before been seen in serious bullfighting. Half circus performer, half matador with superior athletic skills, El Cordobes perfected an exhibitionistic routine that outraged cla.s.sicists, who wanted to bar him from the plazas, but delighted the crowds, who eagerly crammed into the arenas to see what outrageous thing he would do next. When I first saw him I said: 'This is preposterous! It's not bullfighting as I know it! And Spaniards who pay good money to see him ought to be ashamed of themselves.' But when I chanced to see him fight in a little town north of Madrid, I saw him give a performance that went far beyond the limitations of cla.s.sical bullfighting but which retained the ancient thrilling glory of this unique form of entertainment: one solitary man poised against a maddened bull to be slowly and artfully bent to man's will. After a series of awesome maneuvers by both man and bull, El Cordobes had killed with a single thrust, and I had joined the crowd's ecstatic explosion.

So when I reached Spain to write my article on the rancher Don Cayetano Mota and his stumbling bulls, there were these three matadors worthy of attention: Paco Camino, the charismatic; El Viti, the marble statue of rect.i.tude; and El Cordobes, the daring showman.

And there was Lopez.

A lean, long-legged scarecrow of a Gypsy with a scraggly mop of unwashed black hair, Lzaro Lopez was an unlikely bearer of the hallowed name of matador. As a boy of eight in Triana, the Gypsy quarter of Seville, he had roamed the fields about the city with a gang of boys like himself, making forays at night into the carefully guarded bull ranches. By moonlight he and the others practiced the dangerous art of tormenting young bulls to make them charge. Lzaro never mastered the art of keeping his feet bravely planted while the bulls charged at him, but he had devised a score of rather shameless tricks that tantalized the bulls into charging while enabling Lzaro to give the impression that he was honestly fighting them.

One night when he and his team of young scoundrels had sneaked onto the grounds of the Mota ranch, Lzaro encountered an especially splendid young Mota bull. With the red-and-white checkered tablecloth he had stolen to serve as his cape, the aspiring matador launched a chain of linked pa.s.ses, one leading beautifully to the next, encouraging the bull to charge the cape again and again. His cheering compatriots spread the news throughout Triana that 'Lzaro Lopez, the scrawny one, he knows how.' As a consequence, some older Gypsies who remembered how their Cagancho, also a tall, s.h.i.+fty man, had become a major fighter in the 1920s and won the grudging admiration of the American writer Hemingway, decided to take young Lzaro under their protection. Since these Gypsies were some of the most venal in Triana, they quickly taught their boy a hundred evil devices.

BECAUSE of my childhood in New Mexico and my subsequent work in the bullrings of Spain, I speak Spanish easily and also know the lingo of the plazas, tempting me to throw around esoteric words relating to the fight and making me sound more knowledgeable than I am. My editors always restrain me with a sensible rule of their magazine: 'If the Spanish word has found its way into Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, use it without italics as an ordinary English word. If it's not there, don't use it. Don't clutter up your ma.n.u.script with show-off italics.'

I generally adhere to that rule, for it gives me most of what I need. Everyone knows toreador, matador and picador, but many may be surprised to learn that 'corrida,' for a full afternoon of six bulls, is also English, as well as the difficult words 'banderilla' (barbed dart) and 'banderillero' (the man who uses it). I was happy to find that the word for the small red cloth used at the end of the fight, 'muleta,' has now been anglicized; I often needed it. I refused to lose faena, which designates the matador's entire work in the important last act of the fight, but I could do without alguacil, the man on horseback who opens the fight by riding in to ask for the key to the bulls' corrals. There was one forbidden word that is so Spanish and covers such a distasteful part of bullfighting that I would have to use it, rule or no: bronca. A marvel of onomatopoeia, it sounds exactly like what it designates: the uproarious riot that can occur at a fight when the audience feels that it has been defrauded and wants to kill the matador. In a bronca, with cus.h.i.+ons and bottles tossed in the ring, and almost anything else, even human bodies, Spanish bullfighting can be almost as violent as English soccer. Indultado is necessary if one is to deal with the emotion of the fight, and I'm also glad that 'aficionado' has become English, for without it I'd miss the spirit of bullfighting. As a bullfight fanatic who goes ape over the spectacle, much like a baseball crazy so intoxicated by his sport that he can even cheer for one of the Chicago teams, I confess that I'm an aficionado.

But I was astonished to find that the one word I needed most had not been anglicized-toro for the bull; I used it anyway and without italic. The dictionary did give me a word I used frequently, 'torero,' to indicate all categories of bullfighters. Torero but not toro? Baffling.

THE CLa.s.sIC BULLFIGHT consists of four distinct parts. First, when the bull enters the ring-rus.h.i.+ng in if he is brave, sneaking in if not-the matador holds back, allowing his peons to run the animal with their capes held by one corner and dragging on the ground. This allows the matador to study the animal and a.s.sess its strengths and weaknesses. But after a few minutes he strides into the arena holding only a large, heavy cape with no appurtenances of any kind. Artfully he plays the bull, attempting arabesques of great beauty. In this first part Lopez could be exciting, unfurling his cape with majesty and drawing the bull into its folds until bull, man and cape formed one solid ma.s.s, then suddenly releasing the cape so that the bull thundered past. As an ingenious fellow proud of his mastery of the cape, he devised pa.s.ses of his own, some of great intricacy, but he became known for the manner in which he performed two traditional pa.s.ses invented by the great matadors of the 1920s. In the b.u.t.terfly pa.s.s of Marcial Lalanda, Lopez held the ends of the cape behind him with two hands and, body fully exposed to the bull's horns, attracting the bull by fluttering first one wing of the cape then the other. The bull would finally charge at one of the b.u.t.terfly's exposed wings, then stop in confusion and thrust toward the other. With the matador always edging backward and the bull lunging forward, the two performed a deadly pas de deux. To watch Lzaro Lopez perform the b.u.t.terfly was to see perfection, and patrons paid large entrance fees to the rings when he fought, hoping to see him perform this dazzling feat. When the bull finally roared past, his horn millimeters from the man, Lopez would lead him past with breathtaking skill, and any true aficionado treasured such an experience.

The second pa.s.s, for which Lopez was even more admired, was the Chicuelo, named in honor of the matador who invented it. It had become one of the basic pa.s.ses that the would-be matador had to master if he aspired to the t.i.tle. To execute it, the matador held the cape out in front of him, hands far apart to provide maximum target for the bull, then moved forward slowly and artistically, always flicking the end of the cape to attract the bull. When the animal finally charged, the man deftly rotated, s.n.a.t.c.hing the cape away and wrapping it about himself as if it were a flag and he a flagpole.

The trick of this pa.s.s was to free oneself from the cape so as to be in position to launch another pa.s.s of the same kind before the bull turned to charge again. Lopez was the acknowledged champion of the Chicuelo, and it was his mastery of such cla.s.sic pa.s.ses that made the public willing to indulge his sometimes shameful behavior in other portions of the fight. One Spanish critic said of him: 'He's like paregoric, bitter to the taste when he abuses the bull, but good for you because when he does things right you feel wonderful.'

The second part of the fight is dominated by the picadors, ma.s.sive men dressed in heavy chamois pants, perched on big, ponderous horses and armed with long oaken staves or spears with sharpened steel points. Their job is to position their horses so that the bull will attack and prove his courage while the picador leans forward heavily and drives his lance deep in the bull's shoulder muscles, which are so powerful that unless they are fatigued the matador will have great difficulty at the kill. After the bull staggers away from the horse, the matador has another chance to perform miracles with the cape, and quite often Lopez launched his finest pa.s.ses at this point.

The third segment of the fight consists of the banderilleros, whose lovely skill usually astounds foreigners seeing their first fight in Spain. These men, usually slim and graceful, have perfected the art of holding two long barbed sticks high over their heads, attracting the bull's attention so that it will charge, and then flinging themselves on a trajectory to intercept the bull. Twisting high on their toes like inspired dancers, and with exquisite timing, they thrust the barbed sticks into the bull's neck to weaken the powerful muscles even more.

Many matadors turned this difficult task over to their a.s.sistants, but Lopez, because he was such a skilled trickster and also because his long arms gave him an advantage, took pleasure in doing the job himself, and some of the finest pairs of banderillas placed in Spain in these years were done by him, but he also sometimes had a compulsion to coa.r.s.en his act. As a writer from Sports Ill.u.s.trated said: 'Having just planted a pair as elegantly as anyone could hope, the Gypsy apparently felt he had to top even this, so he wrapped the ends of another pair of banderillas in cloth, gripped the bundle firmly in his teeth and, with his long arms fixed closely to his sides, ran at the bull, quartered him, and leaned his long neck over the bull to jab the sticks into the bull. It was the d.a.m.nedest thing I ever saw, and the most vulgar.'

The fight's fourth segment is somber. The bull, wounded and perplexed, is aware that death looms. The horses are gone. The dancing men with their long sticks torment him no more. The arena is hushed, the matador's subalterns withdraw to safety behind the red protective barrier, and the matador steps alone into the ring with only his muleta, the red cloth so infinitely smaller than the cape used earlier, and a symbolic wooden sword. Now it is truly man against bull, and the bull seems to have the advantage, for the muleta is indeed extremely small and the sword completely harmless.

At this solemn moment the matador is supposed to present a n.o.ble figure of tragedy, the hidden sword helping to flare out the cloth to tempt the bull into a final series of pa.s.ses. Done correctly, these pa.s.ses can be the high point of the fight, the unbelievably dangerous moment when the matador holds only the small cape in his left hand, the sword pointed downward and behind his back in his right hand to indicate it will play no part in what is about to happen. Watchers hold their breath. The band is quiet. An awesome hush dominates the plaza as the unprotected man edges slowly forward, aware that to reach the tempting muleta the bull's horns must pa.s.s only inches from the man's chest. One errant twitch of the cloth and the matador is dead; a masterly twitch and the bull dives for the far end of the cloth in a spectacular pa.s.s under the left arm of the matador. It is a moment of death-defying daring unmatched in any other sport or exhibition.

And finally the end of the faena, what Hemingway termed 'the moment of truth,' when the matador exchanges the wooden sword for one of steel and faces the bull to deliver the thrust of death. He must stand firm and not allow his fear to show. Again, with the cloth in his left hand, he must lure the bull forward while he grips the sword in his right hand, calculates the exact point of entry and drives the lethal weapon home. The bull staggers, finally collapses, and a subaltern rushes out to give it the coup de gce with a small dagger thrust into the top of the spinal column.

Paco Camino, the handsome magician with the dark face and dancing eyes, tried to give his faena a touch of grace, determined to give the customers their money's worth. He killed honorably. I liked Paco.

El Viti, feet planted in a chosen spot, awaited the terrible final rush when the bull must impale himself upon the waiting sword. He was the only matador alive willing to risk this ancient style. I honored El Viti.

To El Cordobes the faena was apt to be a display of inspired vaudeville, with no sense of impending tragedy. He liked to drop to his knees, his back only inches from the bull's deadly horns, then nod to the wildly cheering crowd. He also liked to do the telephone call, dropping on one knee before the dazed bull to place an elbow on the bull's forehead and his hand against his own ear as if listening to a phone call from the bull. But what sent the crowds into an uproar of disbelief was his trick of kneeling and, as he faced the perplexed bull, taking one of the animal's horns between his teeth. Obviously, if the still-powerful bull made a sudden chop with his head, El Cordobes would be skewered right through the top of his skull. I had seen him perform each of these displays and invariably felt cheated, for at the moment of death he diminished his adversary, a terrible thing for any combatant to do. I did not relish El Cordobes's style, but I was constantly amazed by his courage and his knowledge of bulls. That I had to respect.

And Lopez? No matter how brilliant this angular Gypsy had been in the early parts of his fight, no matter how frenzied and prolonged the cheers he elicited, at the end when his performance should have reached an electrifying climax, he invariably ruined it, humiliating himself, his bull and his public. His behavior with the muleta and sword was dismal, a display of such cowardice as to shame even a callow teenager. If, when he stepped alone into the ring for his faena, he saw anything about the bull that displeased him, he flashed signals of dismay to the judge and to the spectators: Can't you see that this bull is plainly in no condition to be fought? or Isn't it clear that this bull is blind in his left eye and will not charge honestly? or Isn't it plain that this bull has been fought before and had a chance to learn tricks? Regardless of the response he received from the judge or from the audience, he then and there declared the bull unfightable, hoping the authorities would return it to the corrals. When they refused, he shrugged his shoulders half a dozen times, turning in a circle so as to address each part of the arena, as if to inform the spectators that he now considered himself free to kill this impossible bull in whatever way he found possible.

Boos greeted this admission that the fight was going to end in a disaster, and when he threw back at the crowd indecent gestures indicating he didn't give a d.a.m.n what they thought, one of those wonderful bronca riots resulted. Any riot in a bullring can be awesome, but a Lopez bronca usually had a special force, for even after the customary flinging of cus.h.i.+ons and chairs into the ring, the protesters remained unsatisfied. Bottles were thrown at him, and enraged men leaped the barrier and stormed across the sand in an attempt to thrash the Gypsy. Such broncas always ended with a dozen policemen rus.h.i.+ng into the arena, not to punish the rioters, with whom they agreed, but to form a cordon around Lopez to keep him from getting killed. Some of the most illuminating photographs of Spanish bullfighting are those depicting Lopez being beaten up in the ring by angry spectators or being escorted out by several policemen.

But when Lopez next appeared for an exhibition in any of those towns where he had caused a riot, the same patrons would crowd back into the arena in hopes of seeing him give one of his astonis.h.i.+ng flawless performances with the large cape and the banderillas. One critic wrote: 'The chances of seeing this awkward praying mantis performing well are not better than one in eleven, but the chances of getting into heaven are about the same, and on a good afternoon, this man is heavenly.'

It was with this background knowledge that I flew from Madrid to Seville to find that a dumpy little man with black hair reaching down almost to his eyebrows was awaiting me. It was Don Cayetano Mota, as gloomy of countenance as I had expected but eager to show me his ranch, which lay some eighteen miles north of Seville. His first words were 'I'm taking you to see the Mota bulls. I want you to live with them, to learn why they're such wonderful animals.'

As soon as we pa.s.sed through the ranch gates, a pair of pillars dating from past times, I saw that it was one of those Spanish ranches that delight the eye: low, rambling farm buildings erected in the eighteenth century surrounding a fine house built in the late 1880s. The private bullring, a small affair built of beautiful stone quarried nearby, dated back to the 1840s, but the American-style silos for storing feed for the animals were more modern.

Despite the impressive structures, the glory of the establishment lay not in the cl.u.s.ter of buildings but in the broad and rolling fields in which the bulls were bred and grown almost to maturity. The Spaniards had learned when they acquired these bulls from Roman sources in the time of Christ that if they allowed them to grow to full maturity they would be so powerful that no one man could handle them throughout all four segments of the fight. A full-grown bull of ma.s.sive size and power could topple any horse that opposed it, and when it came time to place the sticks, no man could reach over the enormous, fully matured black hump of fat and muscle protecting the neck. In their sixth year the ma.s.sive bulls could annihilate a man, so they were fought by the aspiring matadors during their third year. Full matadors fought bulls in their fourth year and, if the breeder felt he might get away with it, occasionally in their fifth.

'These are the Mota ranges,' Don Cayetano told me as we stood on a slight rise surveying them, 'and out there are my two-year-olds.'

'No fences?'

He laughed: 'No one would have enough money to fence a bull ranch.'

I spent four rewarding days at his ranch, talking with him about the history of his bulls. He spoke no English. As a proud Spanish landowner he believed that the world began and ended in Spain and that to learn any foreign language would be a waste of time, for why would he wish to converse with Frenchmen, Germans or Americans? His world was Spain, and even within that big country his focus was exclusively centered on his ranch and the bullrings in which his animals performed. Since I was fluent in Spanish, we conversed easily as he showed me mementos from past centuries: the colorful posters hailing his bulls, the stuffed heads of bulls who had given n.o.ble performances, their ears always missing to indicate they had been granted to the matadors who had killed them in high style, and the wall to which my eyes returned repeatedly, the one displaying the four Mota bulls of legendary bravery who had been given the indultado. I was gaining a strong sense of the glory that had once accrued to the name Mota.