The Best American Sports Writing 2013 Page 4

  On December 30, five weeks after his epic operation, Padilla stands in front of a vaca brava, a two-year-old cow, at Fuente Ymbro, a ranch in Cadiz that breeds fighting bulls. He’s here to torear with a live animal for the first time since the accident. The day is cold and cloudless. Scallion green hills descend to an azure lake, and bulls that look camel-humped with muscle tissue percolate slowly around the low buildings. A dozen close friends and family members are standing around the miniature bullring, waiting to see what Juan Jose is capable of in his reconstructed body. It’s a “closed-doors corrida”—a test and a performance.

  With his eye patch in place, he shakes out the muleta, his red cape, and shouts: “Toro!” Everybody’s eyes are full. Only the young cow, with her velvety, bumblebee-like ruff, seems distracted, unaware of the import of this moment. She charges Juan’s blind side, and he expertly sidesteps her.

  Padilla insisted on this date because he refused to let the year end without “the sensation of dressing as a bullfighter” and standing before an animal. He describes his desire to “grab the cape” in supple, tactile terms, with the longing of a ghost recalling its body. “And above all I wanted to share it, to offer it as a gift to my family and those close to me who suffered through this, to the doctors. Afterward I realized that I hadn’t been wrong, to have this hope of returning.”

  In January the surgeon in Oviedo, the skeptic, examines Padilla and is so impressed by the adaptation of his right eye that he revises his initial prognosis: Padilla is able to measure distances and spaces with only one eye, and so it’s “perfectly fine” for him to return to the bullring. Garcia-Perla, who attended the private corrida on the 30th, agrees.

  So on March 4, in the southwestern town of Olivenza, the Cyclone reappeared, looking like a glittering apparition of his former self, haunting the afternoon, wearing a black eye patch and a laurel green suit of lights. Olivenza is not a major venue on the calendar taurino, but Juan Jose’s one-eyed return magnetized the world’s gaze. In the moments before his first bull came rampaging onto the sand, nobody knew what to expect: Were they about to watch a man’s suicide, a second goring? How much could he really see? Wasn’t it just yesterday, practically, that his face was torn apart in Zaragoza? Journalists flinched preemptively, prepared for a literal collision between the man’s blind ambition and the sprinting animal. But Padilla swept his cape over the bulls’ horns a dozen times, as if he were intent on violently, defiantly erasing every doubt.

  III. Homecoming

  At 8:30 every weekday morning, Juan Jose Padilla drives from his home in Sanlucar to meet with a physical therapist. For 30 minutes, he endures an electroshock treatment that causes his face to convulse and contort. This is exercise for his paralyzed facial muscles, a daily attempt to coax that nerve to regenerate. He also meets with his speech therapist and his ear doctor. Mornings are for doctors’ visits, afternoons for the bulls.

  At noon, Padilla drives his white Mercedes to the Sanlucar Plaza de Toros, a small, intimate bullring. “My office,” he jokes. Walking through the archway feels like entering a seashell, scrubbed clean by years of sand and salt and light. Today, a Thursday in early May, the audience is me, my translator, and Diego’s strawberry-blond dog, Geto.

  What does training look like for a bullfighter?

  Padilla strides into the ring, skeletally gaunt in a T-shirt and black bike leggings. An athlete, no question, but with a mauled look. Wild and fragile at once. He’s dropped 40 pounds since Zaragoza. He’s average height, but his extreme weight loss makes him look like a gangly giant; his large hands dangle from his wrists, and his Adam’s apple tents his long throat. If Goya were to paint a taurino trading card, it would look like Juan Jose.

  “Toro!” Padilla screams at Diego, furiously wagging his red cape.

  Diego lowers his head and runs at him.

  Diego Robles is 60-plus and leather-skinned, so super-marrón he seems to be getting tan from within, as if at any moment he might hiccup a tiny sun. He’s an ex-torero with startlingly blue eyes, and he’ll grab his jerky-lean stomach muscles to show you he has no “Michelins”—nary a spare tire.

  Diego adjusts his backward powder blue baseball cap, paws the sand with a sneaker toe, and charges again. He runs with his head down, holding a pair of real bull’s horns that look like yellowed saber teeth. He circles Padilla, huffing in an unconvincing imitation of a deranged bull. Padilla holds his body erect, drawing the cape over Diego’s head with animatronic evenness.

  Next, Diego disappears from the plaza and returns with what appears to be a Tim Burton movie prop—a wheelbarrow with a bull’s skull affixed to its front end. The skull’s a little crooked, which makes its grin look somehow bashful. A hay bale is lashed to the cart behind it, frizzing golden straw.

  “What do bullfighters call that wheelbarrow?” I ask, preparing for a whimsical yet terrifying new vocabulary word.

  “The wheelbarrow,” says Diego, looking flustered. Geto greets the skull in cosmopolitan fashion, licking first one bony cheek and then the other.

  The skull-barrow rolls my way.

  “Grip the horns,” says Diego. They’re a foot long at least, thicker around than my wrist. It’s a sickening exercise to imagine this bovine stalagmite tunneling through Padilla’s eye socket.

  Now Padilla practices the volapié—a death blow delivered to the bull by an airborne matador. He runs at the wheelbarrow, leaps over the skull’s horns, and sinks his estoque, the needlelike sword, into the center of the hay bale. “Bien!” claps Diego. The hay bale looks like a cheese cube at the end of a gigantic toothpick. The skull grins vacantly into the stands; Geto, bored, has wandered off to lick his own foot.

  To a foreigner, it’s an almost comically surreal scene. “Toro!” Padilla screams into the empty ring.

  Every May for 19 years, Padilla has returned to his hometown of Jerez de la Frontera, a 30-minute drive from Sanlucar, to torear at Jerez’s annual fair.

  My 20th Feria.

  In Spain, every locality from Madrid to the most rinky-dink pueblecito celebrates its annual fair: a big weeklong street party, usually tied to a religious holiday. Portable tents go up like luminous mushrooms; inside these temporary pavilions, everybody boozes and shimmies. Jerez de la Frontera, the fifth-largest city in Andalucía, is located in Cadiz province. Halfway between the sea and the blue burrs of the mountains, it’s the true cradle of what Americans consider to be stereotypically Español: sherry, stallions, flamenco, fighting bulls. The Jerez Feria is one of the major events on the bullfighting calendar, this year even more than usual. Padilla’s canted face is on posters everywhere in town; he’s wearing the laurel green jacket, extending his montera. On the posters his snarl looks stagy and flirtatious, deliberate; in person, you can see that this grimace is frozen onto him, a half smile he can’t straighten.

  It’s Saturday, May 12, and I’ve been invited to Padilla’s house about an hour before he’ll leave for the corrida in Jerez. The Padilla homestead turns out to be a Sanlucar monument. Kids on bikes don’t know the street address, but when I say “Padilla” their eyes go wide—“Ah! The house of the torero.” Sanlucar and Jerez are not wealthy towns—Sanlucar has one of the lowest per capita incomes in Spain—so bullfighting can be something analogous to Hoop Dreams for the poor kids of Andalucía.

  The house is a modest mansion surrounded by an eight-foot magenta wall, with a massive backyard that hosts a lemon tree and a bluish tile of Christ’s face. There’s a play area for Paloma and Martin, and a sandy junior bullring where their dad trains. The interior of the two-story house is set up like a self-curated museum: every room contains displays of bullfighting memorabilia. Swords, hats, and so many sequined jackets that you wonder if there’s not a naked army of Prince’s backup dancers wandering around Sanlucar.

  The accident, in career terms, has been a remarkable boon. Padilla has contracts everywhere—this season, he is planning to perform in 60 to 70 corridas. Diego can negotiate for fees that are double or i
n some cases triple what he was making before. He’s also getting better bulls: “The people have always associated me with Miuras,” Padilla says. “Now there’s been a complete change in my professional life. They’re giving me new opportunities.” For the first time, he’s facing off against the best-bred bulls in Spain. Stylistically, he explains, a different choreography is possible with a toro that charges rhythmically and follows the cape.

  Half a dozen close family friends, including Dr. Garcia-Perla, are gathered around the coffee table, waiting for their audience with the Cyclone. (The title of the Padillas’ lone coffee-table book: The Cyclone.) A papal hush drapes the house. Somehow, thanks to the mysterious intervention of Diego, I am admitted to Juan Jose’s dressing room. In the inner chamber, Padilla is putting on a short, rigid jacket, the matador’s exoskeleton. It’s snowflake white with gold embroidery. He’s wearing the matador’s coleta, a clip-on bun made of his own hair. He’s already got on the cropped breeches, the flamingo pink socks. After his weight loss last fall, he needed a whole new wardrobe.

  He says he has around 50 suits, but only eight in rotation for any given season. The sword boy cleans them after each corrida. Padilla’s sword “boy” is a kind, bespectacled man in his fifties named Juan Muñoz. He dresses and undresses Juan Jose and hands him his sword at the “hour of truth” and is perhaps the most feudal-manservant-seeming member of Team Padilla. Muñoz doesn’t use OxiClean or Shout—no, nothing like that. He says he gets the blood off his boss’s sequins with soap and water.

  Padilla adjusts his skinny tie in the mirror. He smiles nervously at Lidia, who smiles back. Strides out to greet his fan base.

  “How do I look?”

  Spotlit by the risk that he’s about to undertake in the plaza, Juan looks frailer than he has all week. Mummy-like in white. His legs are matchsticks. His eye patch is a blindfold he can’t lift. Suddenly I feel very scared, truly scared, for this corrida.

  “Very handsome!” everyone responds. People hug Padilla one by one and file out to their cars. We leave Lidia behind in the foyer.

  The next time Juan Jose Padilla appears, he is a completely different person.

  The plaza is crammed solid with Jerezanos. It’s 7:00 P.M., but the enormous, cheerfully brutal sol of Andalucía is still shining above the bullring. Every matador on today’s lineup is a star—Cayetano, in fact, is the scion of the Ordoñez bullfighting dynasty, and Morante de la Puebla is a legendary artist with the cape. But Padilla is the major attraction, hero and homeboy to all.

  “Jerez, it’s his tierra,” says Diego. “It’s going to be an incredibly emotional moment. You have to be strong so that so much emotion doesn’t overwhelm you. It can make you tender, weak . . .”

  Acute excitement pulses in the stands. Two nights ago, at the Thursday corrida, this same plaza was nearly empty. Everybody blamed the economy: even the cheap seats cost 28 euros. But tonight there is no evidence that money is weighing on anybody’s mind. FUERZAPADILLA! read banners unscrolling throughout the stadium.

  When Padilla, Cayetano, and Morante parade onto the sand, a roar erupts from the open mouth of the stadium into the blue sky of Jerez, loud enough to ripple a flock of low-flying birds. In the foyer of his home, Padilla looked so thin, like something prematurely sprung from its cocoon. But now he is fast, strong; the eye patch looks menacing. His hoarse cry of “Jerez!” brings down the house.

  Padilla’s first bull comes charging out and silences the rowdy crowd. In a corrida de toros, the matador will have roughly 20 minutes to dominate and kill the bull. This block of time is subdivided into three tercios: “the act of the lances,” “the act of the banderillas,” and “the act of death.” If the matador performs well, the crowd will petition the president of the bullfight to award him trophies: the dead bull’s ears or, for an exceptional corrida, the gristly gray ribbon of the bull’s tail. Death is always the outcome for the bull, except in rare cases when an unusually “valiant” animal is pardoned.

  Many have pointed out that the bullfight is not really a fight at all—a contest between equals—but “a tragedy in three acts.” The rite’s brutality can make bullfighting feel incomprehensible to a foreigner and indefensible to an animal lover; and yet every bullfighter I spoke to professed to feel what struck me as a genuine love for the toros. What kind of love is this? How is it possible to publicly kill the animal to which you have dedicated all your waking hours? “I give the toro everything, and he gives me everything,” Padilla told me. His profession, he says proudly, is “the most dignified in the world” because of “its truth, its reality”—its blood-red engagement with the fate shared by all species. Every corrida, the matador greets his future death cloaked in fur, and today is no exception.

  Act I: Juan Jose and his banderilleros swing their pink capotes around wildly, each man caping the bull in turn. Out trot the picadors, looking like dapper Lego men on horseback in their wide-brimmed hats and squarish leg armor. Their horses are swaddled in petos, mattresslike cloaks to protect them from the bulls’ horns. The picadors insert their lances into the hump of muscle tissue at the base of the neck, the morillo, to get the bull to lower its head; otherwise Padilla won’t be able to get over its horns to make the final kill. There is something scarily perfunctory about the way the picadors jab the bull with their long lances—they’re like a cavalry of gas jockeys, only instead of filling up the tank, they are draining the bull’s life.

  Act II: Padilla dismisses his assistants, signals to the crowd that he will put in his own banderillas. Goddamnit, Padilla, qué fuerte. Everyone is aware that this is exactly how he lost his eye. And now, one-eyed, Padilla is flying onto the wooden running boards behind the bull. How does he get so high? He takes a running leap as if the sand were a trampoline and sinks another wooden flag into the bull. He places the final pair of banderillas al violín, a one-handed maneuver that recalls the dramatic acrobatics that caused his fall in Zaragoza.

  Act III: Tercio de la muerte. Now Padilla is stalking the bull, with an unexpected sultriness and mock haughtiness. Via a sort of feline strut across the sand toward the animal, he slinks up to the bull and goads it into charging. It lowers its horns, tosses its head in a dozen vain attempts to catch the cape. When it comes up on Padilla’s blind left side, we recoil, but we don’t have to worry; he seems to have no trouble gauging distance or responding to the unhinged shadows in the bullring.

  Padilla’s body language changes tone continually over the next seven minutes, as his pasos transmit contempt and urgency, comedy and reverence. Sometimes the bullfight looks a lot like a game of freeze tag, and his pranks get juvenile; he does everything short of blowing a raspberry at the bull. Sometimes it’s more like an awkward cocktail party: the bull refusing to charge, Padilla doing the torero catcall that is like emphatic forced laughter: “Eh, toro! He-he-HEH!”

  Soon everyone can tell from the bull’s ragged breathing that the end is near. Padilla and the bull are staring into each other’s faces with an opaque intimacy. Something visible to everyone in the stands, but as ultimately impenetrable as any couple’s love-or-hate affair. It’s almost sunset now; the planks of blood down the bull’s back look violet. As if on the conductor’s cue, two seagulls choose this moment to swoop through the invisible membrane between bull and man. Padilla’s dark hair is sticking to his head. The matador, underweight, with his twisted face and his eye patch, appears unmistakably mortal. His face fossilizes his brush with death, the way that fire gets incarnated by cold, tender welts. His return to the ring, one could argue, gives the crowd a sense that death will come for all of us, sooner or later, that death is certainly imminent, but it ain’t here yet.

  Inside the plaza’s walls, the concrete parentheses that enclose Padilla and the bull, everybody straightens; erguirse is the Spanish verb for this, electric shivers racing up spines. Juan Jose directs the creature’s horns around his waist, as if he is carving his own hips out of black space. Drawing beautiful shapes with the cape and the bull. Drawing
breaths.

  Padilla squares his feet, positions himself for the kill. The bull is four feet away from him. Here it comes: the “hour of truth.” It’s a crazy, horrible, ugly, enraging, senseless, sublime, endless moment to witness—a moment that swallows every adjective you want to hurl at it.

  In the balcony, the orchestra has stopped playing. The conductor is craning over his shoulder, watching Padilla for his cue. His baton trembles in midair at the exact angle as Padilla’s sword.

  Padilla draws the sword back at eye level, as if the estoque is an arrow in an invisible quiver.

  He runs. He flies, just as he did during his training with the wheelbarrow. Volapié. He leaps and leans his torso over the bull’s lowered horns and plunges the sword into the vulnerable morillo.

  The crowd lets out one single, tidal exhalation.

  Did he “win”? Bullfighting is less straightforward than American spectacles like pro football; in this regard, it’s a little more like American Idol. But thanks to the thunderous petition of the crowd, tonight the president awards him two ears from his first bull and two ears from his second. Before he exits the arena, Padilla drops onto his knees and kisses the sand of Jerez. Then he is carried through the great doors of his home plaza, de hombros, twinkling like a living torch on his brother Jaime’s shoulders. Escorted by the longest ovation you have ever heard.

  Forty minutes after his triumphant exit through the Puerta Grande, Padilla is back home in Sanlucar, changing out of his work clothes. Outside, a few guys are loading up the shuttle bus; at 4:30 A.M. tomorrow, Padilla and his entourage will leave for their next fight in Talavera. Some freckly taurine roadie carries swords and a bleached skull to the trunk.