The Best American Sports Writing 2013 Read online

  A glancing blow from Marques unsteadies Padilla; his feet get tangled. At the apex of his fall, he still has time to right himself, escape the bull. His chin tilts up: there is the wheeling sky, all blue. His last-ever binocular view. This milestone whistles past him, the whole sky flooding through the bracket of the bull’s horns, and now he’s lost it. The sun flickers on and off. My balance—

  Padilla has the bad luck, the terrible luck, of landing on his side. And now his luck gets worse.

  Marques scoops his head toward Padilla’s face on the sandy floor, a move that resembles canine tenderness, as if he’s leaning down to lick him, but instead the bull drives his sharp left horn through the bullfighter’s jaw. When Marques tusks up, the horn crunches through Padilla’s skin and bone, exiting through his left eye socket. Cameras clock the instant that a glistening orb pops loose onto the matador’s cheek. A frightening silence descends on the crowd. Nobody knows the depth of the wound.

  Marques gallops on, and Padilla gets towed for a few feet, pulled by his cheek. He loses a shoe. Skin stretches away from his jawbone with the fragile elasticity of taffy.

  Then Padilla’s prone body is left in the bull’s dust. He springs up like a jack-in-the-box and hops around. His face is completely red. As the blood gushes down his cheek, he holds his dislodged eye in place with his pinkie. He thinks he must be dying. I can’t breathe. I can’t see.

  Marques, meanwhile, has trotted a little ways down the sand. He stands there panting softly. His four legs are perfectly still. What unfolds is a scene that Beckett and Hemingway and Stephen King might have collaborated to produce, because this is real horror, the blackest gallows humor: the contrast between the bullfighter crying out “Oh, my eye! I can’t see! I can’t see!” and the cud-chewing obliviousness of the animal.

  In the bullring, other bullfighters spill onto the sand and rush to Padilla’s aid. They lift him, hustle him toward the infirmary. Meanwhile, the bullfight must go on. Miguel Abellan, another matador on the bill, steps in for Padilla. He kills Marques in a trancelike state that he later swears he can’t remember. Tears run down his cheeks. He’s survived 27 gorings himself, but what he sees in Zaragoza makes him consider quitting the profession.

  Cornadas—gorings—are so common that every plaza is legally required to have a surgeon on site. Bullfighters now routinely survive injuries that would have killed their fathers and grandfathers. Good luck, now, excellent luck: Carlos Val-Carreres is the Zaragoza surgeon, one of the best in Spain.

  “I’m asphyxiating,” Padilla gasps as they bring him in. Many hands guide him into the shadowy infirmary. Someone scissors off his clothing. Someone inserts a breathing tube into his windpipe. Val-Carreres understands instantly that this is a potentially fatal cornada, one of the worst he’s seen in 30 years, and one they are ill equipped to handle in the infirmary. Padilla, now tracheally intubated, is loaded into an ambulance.

  Pronóstico muy grave, Val-Carreres tells reporters.

  At 7:52 P.M., half an hour after the goring, Padilla arrives at the emergency room. He presents with multiple fractures to the left side of his face, a detached ear, a protruding eyeball, and hemorrhage at the base of his skull. A five-hour operation saves his life. The surgeons rebuild his cheekbone and eyelid and nose, with mesh and titanium plates. But they are unable to repair his split facial nerve, which has been divided by the bull’s horn, because they cannot locate the base of the nerve. Padilla wakes up from the anesthesia to discover that he can no longer move the left side of his face. It is paralyzed.

  When he comes to, his first words to his manager, Diego Robles, are: “Don’t cancel any of my contracts in South America.” Padilla has November bullfights in Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador.

  His first words to his youngest brother, Jaime, who is also a bullfighter, a banderillero, and scheduled to perform in two days’ time: “Don’t cancel your fight. You have to do it for us. You can’t let this get the best of you.”

  His first words to his wife, Lidia: “Where is my eye?”

  The eye is back in its proper place, but sightless—the optic nerve has been elongated and lesioned by the horn. He’s also deaf in his left ear, and the entire left side of his face is purple and bloated, like something viewed underwater. His eyelid is sealed shut. His mouth curls inward like a wilted leaf.

  “I was there when he saw himself for the first time after the accident,” recalls Diego. “He saw the reality in front of him. He said, ‘Es que no soy yo—’”

  No. That’s not me. Here is a vertigo a thousand times more destabilizing than his slip in the plaza: he does not recognize himself.

  There is the physical pain, which the doctors reduce with morphine, and then there is the terror. They’re telling him he might never again wear his “suit of lights.” Never stand before another bull. If he can’t return to a plaza, he’ll be exiled from his life. Evicted from his own skin.

  In his hospital room, as soon as he can move again, he begins to rehearse bullfighting moves with the sheets. And on October 19, less than two weeks after the accident, he gives a press conference in a wheelchair with his face uncovered.

  “I have no rancor toward this bull or toward my profession,” he slurs into the mike. He makes the following pledge: “I will return to dress as a torero.”

  II. The Wild Feast and the Matador’s Famine

  A millennium and a half after Moorish cavaliers rode into Spain and began to cultivate the bullfighting tradition, a few hundred years after trendy nobles staged bullfights to celebrate weddings and Catholic festivals, nearly a century since the golden age of the matador, when Juan Belmonte and Joselito “the Little Rooster” pioneered the mad modern style of “artistic” caping (working within inches of the enraged animal), bullfighting remains the national fiesta or the fiesta brava—“the wild feast.”

  In a standard corrida de toros, the common term for the spectacle, there are three matadors on the bill and six matches total. The fame and fees of 21st-century matadors range wildly, depending on official ranking and also “cachet”—a torero’s reputation. Group A matadors such as Padilla must perform in at least 43 corridas per season. These guys are the seguras, and the industry can support only a dozen or so of them. To maintain their status, Group As need to be frequent fliers and serial killers, traveling fiendishly from February to October, sometimes performing in plazas on opposite coasts in the same week. For Group B matadors, the minimum is 13 corridas. Group C? No minimums. It’s the ladder rung where rookies get classed with semiretired stars. Padilla spent years in Group C before finally breaking through.

  Today it’s harder than it’s ever been to earn a living in the bullring. Unemployment in Spain is nearing 25 percent, and the country’s flailing economy is taking its toll on the mundo taurino. (“We will torear la crisis,” said Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in a press conference, invoking the figure of the bullfighter to salve Eurozone panic.) Nearly a hundred corridas have been cut from the season, and still plazas are often only half full.

  Is bullfighting an art, a sport, torture? Dying out, or more popular than ever? You can find evidence in every direction. Spanish newspapers cover bullfighting in the culture pages, alongside theater reviews. In 2010, Catalonia outlawed corridas de toros; in Madrid they are legally protected as a “cultural good” and publicly subsidized, like the National Ballet. Telemadrid’s latest reality show is Quiero Ser Torero—“I Want to Be a Bullfighter.”

  “We Spaniards don’t understand ourselves, the majority of Spaniards, we don’t understand our country without our fiesta,” says Juan Jose Padilla. “The fiesta unites the nation.”

  Bullshit, say Spain’s anti-taurinos. “The majority of Spaniards are against the bullfight,” says Silvia Barquero, spokeswoman for Spain’s animal-rights party, PACMA, who believes the Catalonian ban augurs a new and enlightened era in Spain. “We should not cause suffering to an animal that has the same right to life as our species.” (You certainly don’t have to be a member of PACMA or
PETA to find a corrida alienating, cruel, and atavistic.)

  Then there is the controversy over televised corridas. In 2006, when the socialist party was in charge, Spain’s national TV network, TVE, stopped showing them. Now, with Rajoy and his conservative Popular Party back in power, the bulls have returned to the public airwaves. On August 24, TVE said that it would again air live bullfights after the six-year hiatus. Previously the network had pulled them from its schedule to protect minors from violence, but superfans could still get the afternoon corridas on premium cable channels. This is how Pepe and Ana Padilla were able to watch their son’s goring in the instant it occurred.

  Not only could they watch it—thanks to a freakish coincidence, you can now watch them watching it: on October 7, a Canal Sur production crew happened to be taping in the home of Ana and Pepe, filming them seated in front of their son’s televised image for a newsmagazine segment titled “The Courage of a Bullfighter.” When Marques gored Juan Jose, the glass eye of the camera was trained on Ana Padilla’s face.

  Should I stop taping? asked the cameraman.

  “Siga! Siga!” said Pepe. Keep rolling. If these were Juan’s pasos ultimos, his final moments, he wanted a record of them.

  The cameraman obliged, and the result is an uncanny hall of mirrors. The nested footage of Ana and Pepe reacting in real time to the goring makes the scene exponentially more horrifying. Suddenly the tiny bullfighter is no remote cartoon of pain but a fully dimensioned human: their son. After Marques spears Padilla, his mother’s face erupts in sobs. Pepe doesn’t think he will ever recover from his son’s accident.

  “I thought that I had killed him,” he says in a raw voice. “I thought that I had murdered my son. I was the one who encouraged him in this profession . . .”

  Pepe Padilla has raised three toreros. (Oscar, the middle son, retired as a banderillero the day after Juan Jose’s goring and now runs a chain of pet-supply stores.) Pepe coached his sons after school, caping cows with them in the green hills around Jerez. He once dreamed of being a matador himself. As a teenager, he was a novillero, a matador in training. “But I was a coward,” he says, smiling. “Not like my Juan.”

  Today, Pepe is a charmer in his sixties with uncorrected teeth, gold jewelry wreathed by silver chest hair, and one droopy eyelid. For decades he worked as a baker in Jerez, sleeping three or four hours, heading back out before dawn to support his seven children. (Seven children! Franco years, he grins, shaking his head. Everything scarce and hard-won, including condoms.) Juan Jose appeared on May 23, 1973; Pepe says he was born to torear. When he was eight, he was written up in a bullfighting journal for having “the courage of a 30-year-old matador.” When he was 12, he killed his first bull. At 21, he became the first and only man in his family to achieve the rank of professional matador.

  “All of my sons were good,” Pepe says. “But Juan had something special.” He stares into space for a long time, as if seeking the precise descriptor for this ineffable quality.

  “Huevos!” He grins. “Cojones!”

  Later, as Juan Jose made his bones as a young matador, he earned a reputation for fighting the world’s most difficult and aggressive bulls: Victorinos, Pablo Romeros, and especially Miuras, a strain of fighting bull notorious for maiming and killing many toreros. Padilla’s style was defined by his incredible—and lunatic—valor. He did moves nobody else would dare. He was one of the few matadors to put in his own banderillas, to cape bulls on his knees. One consequence of this bravura is that Padilla might well be the record holder when it comes to bullring injuries: before the Zaragoza goring, he had already been seriously wounded by the toros 38 times. He nearly died in Pamplona in 2001, when a Miura bull gored him in the neck.

  Overnight, Padilla’s story flies around the globe: he’s a hero in Spain, elsewhere a grotesque footnote to the “real” daily news. A Twitter sensation: #Fuerzapadilla. His shattered face becomes the public face of bullfighting.

  Once the media storm dies down and his condition is stabilized, Juan travels home to the seaside pueblo of Sanlucar, where he lives with Lidia and their two children, Paloma, eight, and Martin, six. At home, he is left to relearn kindergarten skills in private, miles from any bullring. How to chew and swallow. How to ride his bicycle and grocery shop, cycloptically. The ringing in his left ear never stops. It hurts to talk. Unable to train for a corrida, some days he can’t stop crying. Prior to the accident, he was a joyful, open, easygoing guy. Which is not to say that he was necessarily an even-keeler. He has always had a strong character, just like the noble bulls he fights, Pepe explains, “because of his raza,” his fiery lineage. Juan Jose can be tempestuous, irritable, “and then there’s nothing to be done, you have to leave him alone!”

  But the mood that sucks him under in October is something new. Like the eye he can’t open, it’s black and unchanging.

  “I fell into a great depression,” says Padilla.

  “Estaba fatal,” says Diego, his manager. “Estaba hundido hundido hundido.”

  He was sunk, sunk, sunk.

  Lidia is not used to seeing her husband ashamed, in pain. “We were so afraid for him—the children too, it affected them . . .”

  Lidia Padilla is a sedately beautiful woman, dark-haired, with a doll’s porcelain face, and she’s been Juan Jose’s girl since antes antes, cradle-robbed when she was 14 and he was a high school senior, the handsome bread-delivery boy. Their first date was during Semana Santa, Easter week. Juan Jose believed it was his destiny to have a wife like Lidia, a woman both “passionate” and devoutly Catholic. “I found the balance I needed in her,” he says.

  Lidia has been with Juan his whole career, but she has never once watched her husband perform. Not in a plaza and not on TV, and during the 11-hour drive to Zaragoza, after the accident, she imagined begging him to retire. But when she saw him in the hospital, the speech she’d prepared dissolved. “I couldn’t take that dream from him,” she says. “To ask him not to be a torero. It would be like killing him while he was still alive.”

  Padilla realizes he needs to get back into the bullring as soon as humanly possible. So many people had suffered as a result of his accident, he says, that he wanted to give them “tranquillity, normalcy.” He has a habit of describing his “return to normalcy” as something he has to do for other people, as if the Zaragoza fall upset some cosmic equilibrium, knocked the whole world (and not just his world) off its axis.

  But what’s the rush to resume a career that nearly killed him? Why the sprint back to such a chronically risky kind of normal?

  “I couldn’t conceive of my life without el toreo,” he says. “If I couldn’t have returned to my profession, it’s clear that I would have been really affected. I could have dedicated myself to other things, business. I had some good offers, but none of that was going to fill me . . . Oh, it was affecting my head, I felt such a heaviness, at the beginning I was anguished, it was a tremendous anguish.”

  In the bullfighting world, there is this saying, Torear la suerte: an aphorism that contains an entire philosophy. Brutishly translated: “Bullfight your fate.” Whatever bull God drums up for you, you face off against, you dance with, you dominate, and it’s up to you to put on a splendid show, to use every bull as an opportunity to demonstrate all of your arte. Your valor and skill. Torear la suerte, in other words, combines religious fatalism with Nietzschean will.

  Padilla’s years as a torero, then, have prepared him to view his recovery as a special kind of corrida—a chance to use his faith and courage outside the bullring.

  In late October, Padilla travels north to Oviedo to consult with an internationally renowned ophthalmic surgeon, who warns him that his comeback plan seems “unrealistic”—his optic nerve is still not responding to light. The next specialist to evaluate Padilla is Alberto Garcia-Perla, a maxillofacial surgeon. As Padilla recalls their first meeting, his voice grows rough with gratitude: “There was never a moment when Dr. Garcia-Perla responded negatively to my dream of retu
rning to torear. He’s always said that I would be the one to decide.”

  Garcia-Perla, the chief surgeon at Seville’s Virgen del Rocio Hospital, will direct a team of 18 doctors, including plastic surgeons, ear-nose-and-throat surgeons, and an anesthesiologist, in an attempt to repair Padilla’s facial nerve. The plan is to reconnect the two ends of the nerve using an implant from the sural nerve in Padilla’s leg. If the operation succeeds, Juan might regain the ability to blink and chew, lift both brows in surprise. Garcia-Perla is no stranger to this kind of high-stakes reconstructive surgery: his team successfully performed the second face-transplant surgery in Spain, the 11th in the world. But they’ve never had a case quite like Padilla’s.

  “We’ve seen facial trauma like Juan’s before. What’s unique here is the method: the horn of a bull. Ordinarily a goring of that depth to the face . . . it could have killed him.” Think how narrowly he avoided brain damage, says Garcia-Perla. “It was a question of millimeters. He’s lucky to be alive, and he’s conscious of that.”

  The surgery gets under way at 9:00 A.M. on November 22. It lasts 14 hours. Moonrise, and Juan Padilla has a new face. And within weeks, the repaired facial nerve begins to “awaken.” Little by little, Padilla regains limited motor control of his left eyebrow and lips. Over the next six months, Garcia-Perla believes, Padilla might recover as much as 80 percent of his facial mobility. But nerve regeneration is a slow process. One millimeter, more or less, per day.