In Search of the Spanish Bullfight
Screen capture of interview (videos embedded below)
I have embedded below, in two parts, Canal Sur’s Jesús Quintero interviewing the matador Juan José Padilla – and his wife Lidia at the end of the second part - about his forthcoming return to the ring in Olivenza on March 4th, following his horrific injuries I posted about here. Not for nothing did [Read more...]
My friend, the legendary matador Juan José Padilla who is the first four chapters of my book Into The Arena, whose terrible goring last year cost him an eye as detailed here, is confirmed to return to the professional arena in Olivenza, Spain, on the final day of the feria there on Sunday, March 4th.
The matadors who are to accompany him are two of greatest working today. Morante de la Puebla, the Divine Cape, is an artistic genius and a childhood friend of Padillas. The second is José María Manzanares, son of the great matador of the same name, who put in a performace last year which stunned Spain and elevated him to “man of the moment”. Only Julián López – El Juli - and José Tomás also fight at this level.
They will be facing the best bulls in Spain, Núñez del Cuvillo, whose cattle are known for their ferocity and courage (as I have experienced myself). It was one of their bulls, fought by Manzanares, who was pardoned for bravery in Seville last year – the first pardon in that discerning ring in half a century.
I will be at Padilla’s side in training on the ranch – my own return to the ring with cattle - and in the callejón - the bullfighter’s alley – at the plaza de toros itself.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
Juan José Padilla with a Miura bull, Pamplona 2011 (Photo: Antalya Nall-Cain)
Juan José Padilla with a Miura bull, Feria de Abril, Seville 2010 (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)
For those that missed the news story (here) Spain’s bravest matador, Juan José Padilla – a friend of mine and major character in my recent book Into The Arena - was terribly gored a fortnight ago. In this interview he speaks of his recovery. A translation of some of his words is below…
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
They know that this is my life and they know that this is my profession, and they know that I am going to fight, I will give my utmost to be able to face bulls again, because that is what makes me happy.
And because the bull has given me everything. The bull has given me magnificent triumphs, I have been the victor of the greatest fairs in Spain, and the fact that a bull is going to give me injuries does not meant that I am going to feel any bitterness towards him. I will return to face the bulls.
In the words of Adolfo Suárez Illana this morning, who is with him, “He is getting better little by little. But he is getting there…”
Juan José Padilla and I in the ring together in March '09 (Photo: Paloma de Gaytan Ayala)
I hear, courtesy of our mutual brother-in-arms Adolfo Suárez Illana (son of the founder of democratic Spain and its first president, Adolfo Suárez), that the matador Juan José Padilla is recovering following a long operation to try to repair the terrible damage wreaked on his face by a bull in Zaragoza on Friday evening. As the photo shows, the bull Marqués no. 8, from the breeder Ana Romero, pounced on Padilla as he tripped and fell during the act of the banderillas – Padilla being one of the few matadors in the modern era who places his own banderillas, rather than delegating it to his banderilleros. The bull, which weighed 508kg and was 5 years and 8 months old (only four months short of the upper age limit) entered its horn under the left hand side of his jaw and drove it up and out through his left eye socket. As the bull was drawn off him by the other toreros’ capes Padilla got to his feet saying “I can’t see, I can’t see” before collapsing into the arms of his assistants and being carried from the ring to the infirmary and from there to hospital. The bull’s horn severed the main facial nerve of the left side of Padilla’s face, which is now paralysed, and the optic nerve of the eye which seems unlikely to recover its sight. The bull was then killed by Miguel Abellán, who wept as he did so, having only recently recovered from a similarly bad goring himself.
Whilst researching my book, I came to know Padilla very well and he features in a half dozen chapters in my book, Into The Arena. He is a force of nature who dwarfs everything around him, as I am sure he will this terrible injury. The best description of him I have heard is that of my mother who met him with me at a bullfight in Cazalla de la Sierra in ’09. She said he was like Scaramouche, who in the novel’s opening line is described as “born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad, and that was his entire patrimony.” The photo below is from the tail end of one of our wild nights out, taken by my friend Nicolás Haro (as is the one above), with Padilla’s childhood friend, the great flamenco dancer Antonio ‘El Pipa’ in the foreground at his house. You can read the extract of that chapter of the book at The Pamplona Post here.
Suerte Maestro.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
P.S. All of this has quite rightly taken precedence in my mind over my dispute with the philosopher Mark Rowlands in The Times Literary Supplement, which can be found here, and which I will follow up further soon. Needless to say, any man who can write, “Padilla is more likely to die trying to get to the arena than in it,” clearly hasn’t got the faintest idea what he is talking about, nor has the dignity to keep his ignorance to himself.
When perhaps the greatest matador in history, José Tomás, returned to the ring from his inexplicable five-year retirement in 2007, the Spanish press ran with the headline, “And The Myth Was Made Flesh.” At that time, I had never seen him bullfight, and thought it pure journalistic hyperbole. Since then I have and have chosen this headline myself as a result. The Agence-France Presse released this report on his astonishing re-emergence from near-death and appalling injury:
VALENCIA, Spain — Acclaimed Spanish bullfighter Jose Tomas made a triumphant comeback to the bullring Saturday, receiving a standing ovation more than a year after a bloody goring in Mexico that almost killed him. The 35-year-old, wearing a purple and gold outfit, offered his first bull of the night, a 502-kilogramme beast, to the doctors who had helped him recover. He was less successful with his second bull, a 556-kilo four-and-a-half-year-old, but delighted the sell-out crowd of 11,000, many of whom had traveled from overseas to see the spectacle in the eastern city of Valencia. Tomas was seriously gored and almost died in a bullfight April 24 last year in Aguasclientes, Mexico. A 470-kilo (1,000-pound) bull named Navegante, his second bull of the evening, thrust its horn into the muscle of Tomas’s left thigh, puncturing the artery and causing the bullfighter to lose about half of his blood. In September he will be able to fight at Barcelona’s Monumental ring in what may be the last La Merced festival before a bullfighting ban in the Catalonia region comes into force next year. Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved
In celebration of this return, I have put below my description of what I believe to Tomás’s greatest corrida de toros, in Jerez de la Frontera in 2009, where he fought alongside the matadors El Cid, who featured in my Prospect magazine article that led to my becoming a bullfighter (available here), and my great friend Juan José Padilla (whom you can read more about in my The Pamplona Post article here).
[Read more...]
It may seem churlish as The Last Arena receives its 50.000th visitor to send them to The Pamplona Post, but since the extract from my book Into The Arena - with a host of photographs I couldn’t fit in the book by Nicolás Haro – is all about Pamplona’s favourite matador, Juan José Padilla, I am afraid there was no way around. Please click on the masthead below:
Cayetano Rivera Ordoñez (Photo: Nicolás Haro)
Published in the magazine of yesterday’s edition of the Sunday Times is my interview with the extremely simpatico and gifted matador, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez. On the day of his corrida in Sanlucar de Barrameda, my photographer Nicolás Haro and I went to meet him in his hotel where we spoke for a couple of hours from which these words are extracted.
I usually arrive in a town the night before the fight. The day I fight, I don’t put on the alarm clock. It is important not to be tired. Depending on the time, I either get breakfast or I have an early lunch. I cannot eat for four or five hours before the fight, in case I have to have surgery. Matadors have to deal with those little matters. Usually I don’t go out from the hotel room. I’m in my own world, concentrating for the afternoon. I lie back, relax, talk to friends, watch some TV, listen to some music: flamenco, rock’n'roll, depending on how I feel.
When I am training at my family’s house in Ronda, near Malaga, I usually wake up around 9. I go to the gym for a couple of hours, then I practise my moves without the bull at home, what we call toreo de salon, for two hours. We also spend a long time thinking about the bull, because you have to read it: its movements, its speed, the height of its horns when it charges. The bull tells you what you are able to do and what you shouldn’t try, and you have to improvise on this in real time. [Read more...]
