The Blind Man of Seville

breezes. The conditions were near perfect. Now it was up to the bulls.

Their group was split up. Paco and Javier took their privileged debenture seats in the Sombra while the family took their complimentary seats in the Sol y sombra. Paco and Javier sat two rows up from the ring in the barreras. Paco handed his brother a cushion with the finca’s crest embroidered on it. They breathed in the atmosphere of la Espana profunda. The murmuring crowd, the Ducados and puros, the men with their hair combed back in brilliantined rails helping their silken wives up the steps to their seats. A line of young women in traditional mantillas of white lace sat beneath the president’s box. Boys with buckets of ice full of beer and coke patrolled the terraces. Cans were expertly hurled and caught by customers, who handed down change through the obliging crowd.

The toreros led their teams out, all in their trajes de luces, following three perfectly groomed, high-stepping, dappled-grey stallions who necked at their bridles. Pepe Leal had rebuilt himself and was resplendent in his royal blue and gold suit. He wore the serious expression of a man who’d come to do his work.

The stallions retreated, followed by the mules, who would drag the dead bull out of the plaza, nodding under their red pompoms. The three toreros practised slow, beautiful passes with their pink capes. The crowd’s anticipation tightened. The toreros moved behind the barriers leaving Pepe Leal, who was to face the first bull, out alone in the plaza with his cape.

The door into the dark swung open. Silence. A single voice shouted encouragement and the half-ton bull burst into the sunlit plaza and the roar of the crowd. The bull looked about, charged, gave up and eased to a trot. Pepe called the bull, which thundered past him with no interest in the cape and savaged one of the barriers with his horns. Pepe brought him back and executed two media veronicas with the cape and the crowd broke their silence for him.

A trumpet announced the picadors, who trundled out with their lances on their blindfolded, mattressed horses. Pepe drew the bull into one of the picador’s horses. As the bull hit, the picador leaned down on his lance and drove the point into the hump of muscle. The horse’s front legs came off the ground. The crowd cheered the bull’s willingness to charge and its strength.

The picadors left the ring. Pepe’s team lined up with their banderillas, which they placed efficiently into the bull’s neck. Pepe came out for his faena and Javier and Paco leaned forward to study the final act.

The nervousness and disinterest in the cape the bull had shown at the beginning became more apparent in the faena. It took Pepe nearly half his faena to persuade the bull to take to the muleta. When the bull finally responded the band played a slow paso doble. Pepe went on to kill the bull well. Javier and Paco thought it had been a creditable performance with a distracted bull. The crowd applauded, but no white handkerchiefs dabbed the air asking for an ear.

Pepin Liria’s first bull did not take to the ring. It burst out into the bright roar, took ten strides and turned tail. It trotted around, butting the barriers. Its only moment came when, running through the cape, a horn caught in the ground and the bull performed a perfect half-ton somersault.

Vicente Bejarano’s bull was strong and fast and interested in the muleta. The crowd took to the animal, but it was not Bejarano’s day. He could not forge any connection with the beast and, although he produced some fine sculpted moments, never controlled the bull.

At 18.40 the sun was still shining on the expectant crowd sitting in Sol when the door opened into the plaza and Biensolo trotted out and took stock. There was no rushing madness, there was no charging at barriers or senseless butting. He looked around the plaza and decided it was his.

The crowd murmured, unsure of this bull, worried that it might know more than it should. Pepe walked out towards him and laid his cape at his feet. The bull took exception to the intrusion and charged him, fast, direct, head down. From that moment the crowd knew that this was the bull of the day and that if Pepe could control him then they would see something unique.

‘This should have been Pepin’s bull,’ said the man sitting next to Paco.

‘You watch,’ said Javier. ‘You’ll be crying with the rest of us by the end of this.’

Pepe performed two full veronicas and a chicuelina with the cape. The crowd went wild with anticipation. Words were spoken between the torero and the picador and when Biensolo drove into the mattressed side of the horse with such stupendous violence that both man and horse were carried aloft right to the barrier, the crowd erupted. They loved this bull.

Paco grabbed Javier around the neck and kissed his brother on the forehead.

‘Eso es un toro, no?

One of Pepe’s banderilleros excelled in placing the banderillas. The horn tips were practically in the man’s armpits as he leaned over on his slanting sprint and there was a breathless, frozen moment when man and beast became one, before miraculously separating.

Pepe came out for his faena and the crowd stilled to the purest silence in Spain. The silence of respect for the bull.

The bull, mouth closed, shoulders heaving, a red sash of blood running down his right flank to the top of the foreleg, looked at Pepe. Pepe screwed the baton, which brought the muleta out to its full extension, into his palm. He walked towards the bull, pointing the toe of each shoe at him, holding the muleta behind him. The bull was patient. At four metres Pepe turned a shoulder to the beast and opened out his chest and slowly produced the muleta, as if to say: ‘May I offer you this?’ The bull took to it, ran hard and fast and dropped his horns. Pepe seemed to hold him there, forcing him to slow down, so that only when the nose met the muleta did Pepe allow him to go forward, drawing him on, telling him that this was the royal pace. And it was a beautiful thing to see, the gradual tensile twisting of Pepe’s body, smooth and strong as red-hot wrought iron.

He brought Biensolo back and forth, and with each pass the dance improved, the relationship grew stronger, the mutual respect deepened. It was done so slowly that the audience didn’t notice that the connection had been made, the pact understood, that man and beast would play this out to its only possible conclusion.

At no point in the faena did Pepe try to dominate too much and it was this that he’d understood about the bull from the moment Biensolo had entered the ring. This was the bull’s space and he’d allowed Pepe into it.

He performed his naturales. Biensolo thundered past him as if he was moving the whole of Spain forward on his horns. Then Pepe stood before the bull and just showed him one corner of the muleta, no bigger than a terracotta floor-tile, from behind his back. Some women in the audience couldn’t stand it and gasps and squeaks of fear broke out. The bull crashed past the lonely figure, the reed in the wind bending slightly in the draught. Without turning, Pepe showed him another corner of the muleta and again Biensolo tore past