Death and the Sun by Edward Lewine Read Free Book Online Page A

great
faena
. Spanish bullfighting bulls are bred to charge at the slightest provocation, and most bulls need little encouragement to act on that programming. Bulls are territorial creatures by nature and live in herds. When a bull is faced with danger it will first try to escape. If it cannot escape, it will do what it can to defend its turf and the cows it is mating with. So when a bull is separated from its herd and put into an enclosed space where it cannot escape, it will lash out, charging at whoever walks into what it perceives to be its space until that space is cleared. In that sense, the charge of the bull is really a running away in reverse.
    The matador uses the opening passes with the
capote
to teach the bull to follow the cape. The horse provides a solid, confidence-building target for the bull to hit, and the picador’s lance tires the bull and lowers the carriage of its head, lowering its horns and making it less dangerous to work with. The banderillas slow the bull further and focus its attention on the man. The
faena
with the
muleta
is the point of the show, the matador’s chance to shine. But it, too, serves a purpose, preparing the bull for the sword by wearing it down to the point where it is slow and sluggish and can be killed in the prescribed fashion. The sword ends the spectacle and can be a spectacle in itself. Each stage of the bullfight prepares the bull for the next stage, and the art of bullfighting consists of this preparation.
    If bullfighting is an art, then what does it do for the viewer? No writer can sum up the effect of an artwork on an average person, but this much can be stated: the movements that a talented matador makes with his cape are beautiful to watch even when he is standing alone in his bedroom, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Without a bull, the cape passes of bullfighting are like the steps of a lovely folk dance, but when the charged atmosphere of the ring and the menacing beauty of the bull are added to the dance of the cape, and when the dancer is made to perform under the threat of bodily harm and with the dual aims of controlling a wild animal and then working with it to create something pleasing to the eye, then that is a performance that can inspire a depth of emotion.
    Aficionados say there is a special feeling that comes when a great matador passes a bull low and slow around his body and the bull responds, charging hard at the cape and lending solemnity and danger to the matador’s movements. Hemingway described it as a lump in the throat. García Lorca called it “man’s finest anger, his finest melancholy and his finest grief.” It is an electric mixture of fear, pleasure in beauty, sadness, anger, horror, joy, tension, the feeling of victory over death, and the viewer’s relief that he or she is safe and not facing the bull. According to García Lorca, this dark yet sweet emotion can be inspired by any art form, but especially by the two Spanish arts of bullfighting and flamenco music. When a torero or a flamenco artist loses himself and begins creating on the very edge of reason and capacity he may, García Lorca said, summon up a demon called the
duende
, who can make the powerful emotion run. This
duende
is not brought into being by talent or skill but rather by the artist’s ability to give himself over to the moment and by his ties of blood and history to the essential culture of Spain, which for García Lorca is found always in the bullfight.
    â€œSpain is the only country where death is a national spectacle,” he wrote, “the only one where death sounds long trumpet blasts at the coming of spring, and Spanish art is always ruled by a shrewd
duende
who makes it different and inventive.”
    The only trouble is, this special emotion is rarely evoked in the ring, because the art of bullfighting is made from an adversarial collaboration between a human and an unwilling animal. It is this emotion that Fran