white, geometrical shapes, raised above a prairie of pale wheatfields, patched here and there with great brassy spreads of sunflowers. In Gerena the narrow streets are calm and immaculate. Dignity of appearance and personal style is much cultivated. Men walk slowly, held erect, and few women are to be seen. It is a spare, silent place, a last refuge of the Spain of the past. Almost the whole of the hill’s summit is occupied by the low-lying, blind-walled palace of José Luis García de Samanieco, the Marqués of Albacerrado, who owns all that is visible from his rooftop of the almost Siberian landscape of this region of Andalusia, as well as one of the great ganaderías of fighting bulls.
Tomás, whose father was once a shepherd on the estate, has moved down with his family to take over one of the large new houses at the bottom of the village. It is a place to which he returns continually between fights, and where he is a living legend, a poor boy who has shot to the top of what in rural Andalusia still remains the most glamorous, and the most honourable of professions.
The new Campuzano house is an extended and softened version of the seventeenth-century peasant dwellings that present austere profiles to the village from the top of the hill. A big sitting-room holds modern furniture of the best quality, gathered under a vast chandelier, but with the retreat from simplicity there has been a loss of strength. Otherwise custom prevails. When I visited, the voices of women and children could be heard faintly beyond the ornate doors, but only men with a certain solidity were present: Tomás’s father, still moving as if in control of sheep; an exceedingly genial brother who manages Tomás’s affairs; a couple of old sun-cured uncles leaning upon their sticks. The mother flustered in with coffee on a tray, flashed a nervous half-smile and withdrew. Tomás’s wife—clearly, from her photograph, a beauty of the highest order—did not appear.
This, in some way almost oriental, gathering was dominated by the huge mounted heads of two of Tomás’s most difficult and memorable bulls, whose challenging eyes it seemed hard to avoid. Tomás said that they were masterpieces of the taxidermist’s art, and that the facial expression—different in every bull as in every man—had been most successfully preserved. He invited me to join him on the landing half-way up the staircase, at a point where the most fearsome-looking of these animals, Abanico by name, could be viewed from precisely the angle at which Tomás had been exposed to its stare six years before in the ring at Málaga. ‘I’m off to Madrid on Monday,’ Tomás said, ‘and whenever I go on a trip I stand here and look into this brute’s eyes, and tell myself, at least they can’t throw anything at me worse than this one.’
At this point the subject of fear came up. It seemed a doubtful one to raise with a man generally accepted as among the most courageous of all toreros, but he cut across my attempts at tact. ‘Was fear something you could come to terms with?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘never.’ The fact was that it got worse and worse, strengthening with each increase of a man’s responsibilities. From the day he got married the fear increased, and now that his wife was expecting a child, it was closer again and more insistent. In summer, he said, when he could be fighting twice a week, a bullfighter’s family was constantly overshadowed by fear. While the fight was on no telephone calls to the house could be made by friends—to keep the line clear for any emergency—and only close relatives were invited into the home, to maintain what amounted to a silent vigil. They were exceedingly devout, and crucifixes and rosaries hung everywhere about the home. Another minor bullfighter who had drifted in said, ‘We take our troubles to the Virgin of Macarena. She’s a Sevillian—almost a member of the family you might say. Imagine two fights in two days.
Tomás, whose father was once a shepherd on the estate, has moved down with his family to take over one of the large new houses at the bottom of the village. It is a place to which he returns continually between fights, and where he is a living legend, a poor boy who has shot to the top of what in rural Andalusia still remains the most glamorous, and the most honourable of professions.
The new Campuzano house is an extended and softened version of the seventeenth-century peasant dwellings that present austere profiles to the village from the top of the hill. A big sitting-room holds modern furniture of the best quality, gathered under a vast chandelier, but with the retreat from simplicity there has been a loss of strength. Otherwise custom prevails. When I visited, the voices of women and children could be heard faintly beyond the ornate doors, but only men with a certain solidity were present: Tomás’s father, still moving as if in control of sheep; an exceedingly genial brother who manages Tomás’s affairs; a couple of old sun-cured uncles leaning upon their sticks. The mother flustered in with coffee on a tray, flashed a nervous half-smile and withdrew. Tomás’s wife—clearly, from her photograph, a beauty of the highest order—did not appear.
This, in some way almost oriental, gathering was dominated by the huge mounted heads of two of Tomás’s most difficult and memorable bulls, whose challenging eyes it seemed hard to avoid. Tomás said that they were masterpieces of the taxidermist’s art, and that the facial expression—different in every bull as in every man—had been most successfully preserved. He invited me to join him on the landing half-way up the staircase, at a point where the most fearsome-looking of these animals, Abanico by name, could be viewed from precisely the angle at which Tomás had been exposed to its stare six years before in the ring at Málaga. ‘I’m off to Madrid on Monday,’ Tomás said, ‘and whenever I go on a trip I stand here and look into this brute’s eyes, and tell myself, at least they can’t throw anything at me worse than this one.’
At this point the subject of fear came up. It seemed a doubtful one to raise with a man generally accepted as among the most courageous of all toreros, but he cut across my attempts at tact. ‘Was fear something you could come to terms with?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘never.’ The fact was that it got worse and worse, strengthening with each increase of a man’s responsibilities. From the day he got married the fear increased, and now that his wife was expecting a child, it was closer again and more insistent. In summer, he said, when he could be fighting twice a week, a bullfighter’s family was constantly overshadowed by fear. While the fight was on no telephone calls to the house could be made by friends—to keep the line clear for any emergency—and only close relatives were invited into the home, to maintain what amounted to a silent vigil. They were exceedingly devout, and crucifixes and rosaries hung everywhere about the home. Another minor bullfighter who had drifted in said, ‘We take our troubles to the Virgin of Macarena. She’s a Sevillian—almost a member of the family you might say. Imagine two fights in two days.
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