My column for Taki’s Magazine: ‘Among the Gold and the Gore’

Last night I filed my copy – and I fear as a result missed the birthday party of Don Tristán Ybarra n the feria – about bullfighting and reality television, the corrida and Made In Chelsea for my column in Taki’s magazine. It has been edited, as is always the case. However, this time I prefer the long version, not least as is is not quite so savage to dear Ollie Locke – a former flat mate of my girlfriend – and his amusing little book, Laid in Chelsea. After all, it was she who introduced him to reality television in the first place, while turning it down herself.

P.S. The photo in the blog post below is of us at the very corrida discussed from the Spanish newspapers.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Last night, while seated in the La Maestranza bullring of Seville to watch the great matador José Marí Manzanares dance with and dispatch six bulls, I was reminded once again why I became so fascinated by the spectacle we ‘Anglo-Saxons’ incorrectly call bullfighting. (It is not a fight, but a highly structured drama centring on a ritual sacrifice. Nor is it a sport, but is conceived of as an art-form, unique in having a risk of death for the practitioner, but reviewed between the ballet and theatre in the newspapers and spoken of in terms of its aesthetics rather than its athletics.)

My girlfriend, a recent convert but still possessed of strong and valid doubts about the activity, asked what it was amongst the gold and the gore that draws me back to the plaza de toros time and time again. The answer I gave was the absolute reality of the corrida. As an art-form, it represents man’s struggle with death, and how it should be best faced, which is with a striking and elegant defiance. However, it is the only art-form that also is what it represents, which is a man standing alone on the sand with an animal intent on killing him. And kill they do: 533 noted professional toreros have died in the past three centuries, and a far greater number number of less famous ones and amateurs. My first instructor in how to torear, the matador Juan José Padilla, almost joined their ranks two years ago when a bull removed his eye and a chunk of his skull. Needless to say he was back in the ring five months later, sans depth perception, a triumphant return which I covered for GQ magazine here.

I come to Seville whenever I can to see these exceptionally brave men stand in front of these beautiful bulls, the best time of year being now as the town prepares for its annual celebration of the death of winter, the feria de abril, ‘April Fair’. This year I am not here on holiday, but have come to meet with another matador, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, about whom I am co-producing and writing a documentary. Cayetano has risen to fame and riches through risking his life in this way, a risk he knows all too well. His father, the matador Paquirri, was killed by a bull when Cayetano was just seven years old.

Whatever one thinks of the ethics of injuring and killing an animal as part of a public spectacle – personally I find it no less reprehensible than killing one at a third the age and after a far worse life for meat I do not medically need to eat – there is an undeniable honour and glamour in earning your status and fortune by dancing with death.

Which is why it stands in such stark contrast to what passes for honour and glamour in my home country of Great Britain. I say this having just attended the book launch of an acquaintance who had brought out his memoirs at the ripe old age of 26. I say memoirs, it is more accurately described as a travelogue of his sexual adventures, something made clear by its title Laid In Chelsea. It is currently at number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list. The reason for this literary success is because the author, Ollie Locke, is famous for being in a reality television show called Made In Chelsea.

Now, I must admit up front my envy at his book sales. My own travelogue Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight didn’t make it onto the bestseller lists, even after it was erroneously but flatteringly shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Award. (See earlier comments about the corrida not being a sport.)

The fact that having your life filmed and broadcast, and then writing about your carnal exploits, can bring wealth and glory neatly sums up so much that is wrong with modern Britain, a generalisation that extends to our Saxon cousins in the US. Spain may be financially bankrupt, but at least it isn’t morally so.

I should add here that the book is actually quite readable, although that is helped by the fact that I know some of the people in it. Indeed, I’m even related to one of them. The author himself, Ollie Locke, is a witty and charming young man, with the bizarrely marketable talent of being good at being himself. However, he is also the sort of person – I’m sure he won’t mind me remarking on this – that had to have explained to him for an hour why the girl to whom he lost his virginity might not like that event written up and published.

Having the sexual ethics of an alley cat to one side, the reason I cannot watch Made In Chelsea, despite having grown up there and knowing some of the cast, is that no one on it ever does, or has ever done, anything worthy of note. It is a parade of moderately good looking people having rather stilted conversations about one another’s utterly irrelevant and pedestrian personal lives. I know these people and find it unspeakably dull; God knows what anyone else sees in it. Fiction was invented to get away from exactly this sort of tedium.

However, when people use that oxymoronic and false phrase ‘Reality Television’, it is not Made In Chelsea, or Big Brother, or any of those other monstrosities that spring to mind. It is the television footage of Cayetano’s father, being tossed by that bull in 1984, and then the footage afterwards of him in the hospital, fully conscious, reassuring and calming the panicking surgeons as they struggle in vain to stop his life from haemorrhaging out onto the bed sheets where he lay. That was how Paquirri justified his salary and his celebrity, by paying the ultimate price, and facing it with a courage and grace at the end that beggers belief.

That his son – both sons in fact – should follow in his shoes, makes him truly deserving of having his life told as a story, on film and in print. Something Ernest Hemingway felt similarly about when he wrote the articles about Cayetano’s grandfather Antonio Ordóñez that were posthumously published as the book The Dangerous Summer. And when he fictionalised his 1924 encounter with Cayetano’s great grandfather, also called Cayetano, in Pamplona as The Sun Also Rises. Some people are deserving of recognition and others not. The British and American inability to distinguish between them is at the heart of our ethical, and aesthetic decline.

A Dedication to Seville

Ten years ago, I arrived in Seville with a broken engagement behind me and a career as investment banker in front of me. I had come to Andalusia to recover from the horrors of the one and prepare myself for the horrors of the other. I had been to the city a few times – I discovered it on the way back from an early attempt to ‘be an author’ in the Sahara desert – and seen a few corridas de toros, that we English wrongly call bullfights, as though it were a sporting contest rather than what it is, a scripted drama culminating in a ritual sacrifice. The Spanish word for the activity, toreo is as well translated by the word ‘bullfighting’ as flamenco would be by ‘heel-dancing’.

(We had the word bullfight and its cognates sitting idle in our vocabulary since we banned our own grim ‘sport’ of bull-baiting with dogs, which gave us our national symbol, the bull-dog, as Spain was given its, the toro bravo by the corrida, hence it is also called the fiesta nacional. For discussion of its current popularity and the oft-quoted ‘Gallup’ polls, see this post. On the ethics of the corrida, see this one.)

The corridas confused and fascinated me – when done well, they were beautiful, when badly a sin: they appeared to exist on a moral precipice – while the atmosphere of Seville – the buildings and people so clearly European when seen on my way back from Africa, yet somehow alien when arrived at from London – had a similar effect. And underneath both was the soul-twisting lament of the flamenco voice with its dark rhythms that pulse like the inevitable approach of death.

Author, Algerian border, 1998

So I came back to Seville in 2003, staying at the Hotel Alfonso XII according to my copy of that poet of flamenco, toreo and Andalusia, Federico García Lorca. My copy of the aficionado’s bible, Ernest Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon, charts my progress through the town to what was the bullfighter’s hotel in those days, the Colón, and on east to Cordoba.

Now, ten years later, I am coming back to a different Seville as a different person. Spain’s economy, like a bull stumbling after a bad wound from the picador’s lance, is being watched by the world to see if it will get up to charge again – something even the bull does not know – or will have to be replaced with something different. I, however, have moved from my seat in the audience to the callejón, the alleyway around the ring where the toreros stand.

After that first visit in 2003, I came back a few times, most notably for the feria de abril, the ‘April Fair’, of ’07, when I saw the matador El Cid torear a bull of Victorino Martín so well that I based an entire essay for Prospect magazine on it. As a result of that, I was sent back to Seville to write a book on toreo, and it was then that first met a series of people who would both populate my book and change my life.

This history of a taurine tribe

The Dedication of a Friend

Among the most important of these are the family that bred the only bull I have ever killed with a sword.

I first met Enrique Moreno de la Cova in the Spring of 2009, as I described in chapter five of my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, and he invited me to come and face his cattle along with the now one-eyed – and world famous – matador Juan José Padilla. Enrique and his elder brother Félix had inherited the ‘mark’ (literally a ‘brand’) of cattle called Saltillo, now more famous as an encaste, a ‘strain’ of the breed that is the toro bravo. The original Saltillos still exist, though. (They are named after their first owner, the Marquess of Saltillo, from whom Enrique’s grandfather, Félix Moreno Ardanuy purchased them in 1918.) However, their decline was noted as long ago as 1937, when the matador and father of modern toreo, Juan Belmonte remarked in his memoirs, “What has happened to the breeds of Parladé, Saltillo and so many others?”

When I faced the Saltillos, I had only been in the ring once before – with the far simpler and smoother cattle of Fuente Ymbro with Padilla and our friend Adolfo Suárez Illana, son of the founding Prime Minister of Spanish Democracy – and the account of my injuries on their horns is fully recorded in chapter six of the book.

Matadors Finito de Córdoba & Juan José Padilla give a lesson(Photo: Nicolas Haro)

For me the Saltillos are Seville, and so I was sad to hear from Enrique that he and his brother no longer had them. However, they remain within the family, having moved to a cousin, José Joaquín Moreno Silva. One of my greatest memories of my two years living in Spain is an afternoon spent with the Saltillos at their ranch Miravalles under the tutelage of my friend, the former matador Eduardo Dávila Miura (whose grandfather bred the most famous bulls of all, including the one that killed Manolete). We then returned to the former ranch of the Saltillos, La Vega, with all three grandsons of Don Félix, who, along with Maestro Dávila Miura, inscribed a copy of their forebear’s philosophical musings on the bulls.

Now, I must pack for my return to Seville, where I shall be watching corridas with Enrique, drinking at La Fresquita with him, his wife the artist Cristina Ybarra (who has an excellent blog here) her brother Tristán and his aficionada pura wife Maria O’Neill, joking with Adolfo and Padilla as he dresses before going to torear in the Maestranza, and returning to the ring myself with Eduardo.

 

Spring is here, and Seville, she has not abandoned me .

(The heraldic motto ‘NO8DO’ is to be found all over Seville, from the drain covers to the police cars. The skein of wool in its centre represented by an ’8′ is called a madeja in Spanish, so it reads, “no madeja do”, a play on the words no me ha dejado, ‘she has not abandoned me.” These were reputedly said by King Alfonso X when the city remained loyal to him against his son, Sancho IV of Castile.)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

P.S. Obviously, I never became an investment banker, although in a strange twist of fate and friendship Enrique and Cristina’s eldest son did come and work for a summer with my father in the City doing exactly that, exchanging Saltillo for Fiske & Co PLC.

Enrique Moreno de la Cova and the author en route to the bullring of his Saltillos (Photo: Nicolás Haro)

The Barcelona Ban on Bullfighting: Two Years on…

Two years after the regional parliament in Barcelona voted to ban the corrida de toros, known in English as bullfighting – although not other forms of ‘playing with bulls’ – throughout Catalonia, it looks increasingly like this will piece of legislation will be overthrown by the federal government in Madrid when they, following France, make the corrida a matter of protected cultural interest.

It is interesting to review the arguments on both sides in this matter, and, despite asking me - who am avowedly anti-ban not least because I am politically a liberal - to write the foreword, the most balanced book produced on the subject remains the series of interviews with animal rights groups, bullfighters, politicians and journalists by Cat Tosko. Just take a look at the contents list below. I also enclose my foreword in full.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

 

The book is available as a paperback or eBook for £5 at Amazon UK here, or Amazon US for $8 here.

 

 

The Bull and The Ban

Interviews from both sides of the debate on the controversy surrounding bullfighting, its recent ban in the autonomous community of Catalonia and its future in Spain, the rest of Europe and the Americas…

Contents:

Foreword by Alexander Fiske-Harrison – author of Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight.

Introduction by the interviewer, Catherine Tosko – documentary filmmaker and former Animal Rights activist.

The Interviews

Alfred Bosch: Catalan MP & Coalition Leader, Catalan Parliament

Antoni Strubell i Trueta: Catalan MP & Author

Rampova: Catalan artist

Marilén Barceló: Catalan Psychologist, Bullfighting aficionada

Bob Rule: British aficionado, member: Club Taurino of London

Miguel Perea: Spanish bullfighter (picador)

Emilio Bolaños Arrabal: Spanish bullfighter (banderillero)

Fernando Cámara Castro: Spanish bullfighting teacher (ex-matador)

Francisco Rivera Ordóñez: Spanish bullfighter (matador)

Frank Evans: British bullfighter (matador)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison: British author & bullfighter (aficionado practicó)

Gaspar Jiménez Fortes: Spanish bullring manager

Equanimal: Spanish Animal Rights lobby group

Graham Bell: British Animal Rights activist

Jason Webster: British writer: author of Duende: In Search of Flamenco and the novel Or The Bull Kills You…

Foreword

In this book you will find the entire range of views on bullfighting represented in a series of interviews – from those who are completely against it to those who are completely for it – backed by the strongest arguments they can give. And although in my own interview I give the views I have come to hold after two years in Spain researching my own book on the subject – namely against any form of ban, but with grave misgivings about the cruelty of the activity – I have actually inhabited each position given at different times along the way.

My book ‘Into The Arena’ shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Prize

It has just been announced that my book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight has been promoted from the longlist for the world’s richest sports writing prize, the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Award 2011, onto the six-strong short list.

I should like to say that without the friendship and courage of the matadors of Spain, most particularly my Maestro Eduardo Dávila Miura and my friend Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, this book would never have existed. However, the greatest thanks of all are owed to the first matador I met, the Cyclone from Jerez, Juan José Padilla, who is even now recuperating from a hideous near-fatal goring and preparing himself for further surgical intervention in Seville next week in the hope they can restore the sight to his left eye after the bull’s horn took it away (see earlier blogposts.)

My interview with Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez in ‘The Times’.

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.

A Life in the Day: The lord of the bullring

The matador Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, 32, on his love-hate relationship with the bull

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Published: 26 July 200

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.