Only the best
Daniel Hannan
If you were to watch El Juli without ever having seen a bullfight before, you might well wonder what all the fuss was about. Where was the drama that you had been led to expect — the throwing out of the chest, the dropping to one’s knees, the squeals from the crowd? Where, above all, was the sense of struggle? For El Juli never communicates the slightest feeling of aggression in the ring. On the contrary, he draws his bulls into a relationship so tender and tragic that it might almost be called love. Each man kills the thing he loves, as Oscar Wilde said. The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.
El Juli is more than a brave man. He is the best matador in Spain. In fact, I am beginning to wonder whether he might not be the best matador ever to have lived. Amazingly, many taurine writers are wondering the same thing. I say ‘amazingly’ because it is normally an article of faith among aficionados that contemporary toreros cannot hold a candle to the heroes of the past. Each generation is held to be inferior to the previous one. It is partly, I think, a function of the ageing process. When we are young, we live in bright primary colours, and the corridas we see impress us deeply. As the world around us becomes duller, those early corridas live on undimmed in our memories, and we conclude that the fiesta is in decline.
It is not a new phenomenon. Bullfighters whom we now acknowledge as titans were often scorned in their own day. When Spaniards talk of the Golden Age, they mean the years between 1913 and 1920, when Belmonte and Joselito transformed bullfighting from an athletic spectacle into a kind of liquid sculpture. But, at the time, critics complained that toreo was degenerating, that the bulls were undersized, and that the current crop of matadors were parodies of the 19th-century champions Frascuelo and Lagartijo. At his last performance in Madrid, Joselito was driven from the ring by a hail of cushions and insults. He died the next day on the horn of a halfblind bull called Bailador, and was at once proclaimed the greatest torero of all time. Belmonte, his friend and rival, retired shortly afterwards and was placed on the pedestal next to Joselito. But he complicated matters by repeatedly coming out of retirement, only to be jeered by angry crowds for failing to live up to the myth that they had built around him.
The only post-Civil War bullfighter habitually ranked with Belmonte and Joselito is Manolete, a sad-looking Cordovan who worked closer to the horntips than anyone had managed before. But it was never close enough for his contemporaries. The Mexican bullfighter Carlos Arruza recalled their last meeting at the plaza in San Sebastian. Manolete had turned in a brilliant performance with difficult bulls, repeatedly and recklessly exposing himself. But the crowd remained grimly silent. ‘Fuck it, Manolo, what else do they want from you?’ asked Arruza. ‘I know exactly what the bastards want,’ replied Manolete. ‘And I might just give it to them.’ It was a remark that came to haunt Spain’s conscience: two days later, 28 August 1947, Manolete was caught by a Miura bull at the moment of the swordthrust. He died that night, and was instantly hailed as the maestro of maestros.
El Juli, uniquely, has been canonised in his own lifetime. A child prodigy, he killed a young bull at the festival to mark his first communion. When he was 12, aficionados were whispering his name. When he was 15, and performing in Mexico to get around EU laws on child labour, he was being spoken of as the best matador of the epoch. By the time he was 17, it was clear that he was a generational phenomenon. A backlash inevitably followed: no one could fulfil El Juli’s early promise, not even El Juli. But, this winter in Latin America, still aged just 23, he evolved a new style of toreo that went beyond anything seen before.
Spanish critics describe his current form in tones that are at once awe-struck and abstract. They say that he combines the best of Belmonte with the best of Joselito, that he fuses the Ronda school with the Seville school, that he has redefined the concept of toreo. This is all very well, but does not bring us much closer to what he is actually doing. So let me try, in my literal Anglo-Saxon way, to explain his technique. If you or I took a cloth and tried to get a bull to pass us, we would probably manage. But, unless we were both skilled and brave, we would skip back as it passed. We would not be concentrating on how to combine the lines of our body with the animal’s to present a classical tableau. We would not be able to temper the bull’s charge. And we would certainly not be able to give the cloth a hypnotic twitch to make the bull turn and charge again while we held our ground.
El Juli does these things more slowly and more gracefully than anyone else. He winds the bull around himself, calculatedly drawing the horns within inches of his legs. Then, at the end of a circular series of passes, he switches from forehand to backhand not, as other toreros do, to send the bull away with a chest pass, but to begin a new series in the opposite direction. Every time he pirouettes, the bull obediently follows, mesmerised by the red serge, its head lowered for an upward thrust that somehow never comes.
To watch such a performance is not so much thrilling as draining. It is like the final act of Tristan and Isolde, crescendo after crescendo until you feel you can take no more; and then, when the blade plunges, a sense of almost unbearable poignancy. Taurine writers describe such afternoons as ‘apoteósis’. Watching El Juli on Good Friday, and seeing his pascal audience being moved, not just aesthetically but spiritually, I understood for the first time what they mean.
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