something extraordinary hanging on the wall of
a restaurant in Spain, and they knew, right away,
that they’d need to send me a picture of it.
It was an old photograph, a hazy black-and-
white portrait of a young matador sitting on a
bench. The bullfi ghter was slender and long-
limbed. He wore a heavily ornamented jacket
with oversize epaulets, matching pants and white
knee socks, and sat with one hand formally fi xed
to his hip while the other fl accidly clasped the
nub of a cigarette between his knees. His pos-
ture suggested that he’d done his best, on short
notice, to snap his body into a dignifi ed pose for
the camera but got only halfway there.
The man’s head was tilted, and his dark eyes
rose just slightly to meet the lens. His long nose
was misaligned. His expression was loaded but
elusive. He looked tired, crestfallen or maybe just
bored. My friends didn’t bother writing anything
when they emailed me a picture of this photo-
graph, but its signifi cance hit me right away: The
bullfi ghter looked exactly like me.
I remember physically jerking back in my seat
when I clicked open the image. The likeness was
chilling, but also exhilarating — just as it had
apparently been for my friends. On their way
out of the restaurant, they each stopped short
in front of the photo and, after a dopey beat of
silence — they were deliriously full from dinner
and maybe a little tipsy too — one fi nally said,
‘‘Why is there a picture of Jon on the wall?’’
I understand how subjective these things can
be, how a resemblance that feels uncanny and
self-evident to one person can elude everyone
else. Sometimes all you get is a lot of skepticism
and squinting, people searching for a sliver of
correspondence between the two supposed dop-
pelgängers just to be polite: Maybe around the
mouth, I guess. But this photo of the matador was
diff erent. For years, I would show that picture to
people at parties without a word, and every time
there was a profound shock of recognition. It
smacked people with an eerie jolt, joggled them
into befuddled laughter or downright creeped
them out. Even my mother recognized instant-
ly that I and this anonymous Spaniard looked
34 5.8.22
is article is adapted from ‘‘Serious Face,’’ a collection
of essays published by Random House this month.
identical, which seemed to rattle her core belief
that, in all the universe, her boychik was unique
and special.
Eventually, I learned who the man in the pho-
tograph was. He was known as Manolete and
is almost invariably described as the best bull-
fi ghter of the 1940s and among the greatest of all
time. When Manolete died, a British newspaper
reported that his funeral went on for four hours,
and a military plane fl ew low overhead, shower-
ing the 100,000 mourners in attendance with red
carnations. An American reporter wrote: ‘‘Man-
olete’s death carries for his followers the impact
that the death of the entire Brooklyn Dodger
team would produce in Flatbush.’’
I ordered an obscure biography of the matador,
written by an American named Barnaby Conrad,
who lived in Spain in the 1940s and fought bulls
himself. The book was slim but fi lled with photo-
graphs. Ripping the package open and fl ipping
through it the night it arrived, I was astonished to
see my own face everywhere, from every angle.
There I was: doting on my Spanish mother, eating
paella, lancing bulls. There I was: suiting up in
my bedazzled jacket at the height of my fame
or caught candidly at close range, looking goofy
and agog. And there I was at the end of the book,
hewed from marble — eyes shut, unmistakable in
profi le — resting on top of my tomb.
Before long, I had absent-mindedly lowered
myself onto my kitchen fl oor and pressed the
spine of the paperback open to a random page,
to start reading the book in earnest. And this — I
swear — was the very fi rst sentence I read:
‘‘He has a face that’s as dreary as a third-class
funeral on a rainy day.’’He was remarkably ugly — by which I mean,
people couldn’t stop remarking on how ugly he
was. They just kept taking swipe after swipe at
the glum-looking, contorted hideousness of his
face. It took reading only a handful of pages of
the biography to understand that Manolete’s con-
spicuous ugliness seemed to be a defi ning feature
of his persona. He was ugly the way Einstein was
a genius, the way Gandhi was nonviolent, the way
Jeff Bezos is rich.
The peculiarity of his appearance preoccu-
pied everyone. Even people who adored Mano-
lete always managed to tack on some gratuitouscheap shot about the unpleasantness of his face.
Writers called him ‘‘tired-looking,’’ or a ‘‘popeyed,
chinless, badly bodied, painfully and barely dig-
nifi ed man,’’ or ‘‘the mournful-faced, hawk-nosed
Manolete,’’ or simply ‘‘Old Big Nose.’’
The more I read about Manolete, the more it
started to feel as if this man’s face triggered some
kind of slur-refl ex in other human beings. One
morning, I left the biography on my coff ee table,
and my daughter — she was 6 then and knew
nothing about the book or why I was reading it
— caught sight of the portrait on the cover as she
trundled by and announced, ‘‘I can’t believe they
made a book about someone so ugly!’’
Weirder still, Manolete’s ugliness appeared
to be a very specifi c strain of ugliness, one that
communicated sadness and dejection. His long,
bowed face was described as ‘‘tragic-looking.’’
The New York Times wrote that he possessed
‘‘such a solemn, gaunt, deadpan face that he
sometimes seems twice his age,’’ and another
observer noted that ‘‘his wide, sad, heavy-lidded
eyes hinted at knowledge of terrors the rest of us
could only imagine.’’ This aura of despondency
was actually part of Manolete’s appeal. He had
arrived at an unconventional style of bullfi ghting
that was minimal and almost apathetic-seem-
ing. He would shuff le into the arena without any
fl air, then repeatedly wave the bull by him with
his cape while standing straight as a toothpick,
his facial expression never shifting from the
brooding and indiff erent one he always wore.
But as Norman Mailer put it, the crowds were ‘‘so
stirred by the deeps of sorrow in the man that the
smallest move produced the largest emotion.’’
Somehow, the dissonance between Manolete’s
aff ect and the crazy feats he was executing creat-
ed an alchemic kind of beauty. His style hinged
on this contrast — this ‘‘beautiful ugliness,’’ as
Conrad put it. ‘‘He was by nature a melancholy
man, and this sadness was plainly refl ected in
his art,’’ another writer explained. ‘‘But it was
the sadness of an artist, a sadness tinged with
languor and a sadness against which his artistry
stood out in high relief in a manner that was
quite extraordinary.’’
I knew almost nothing about bullfi ghting when
I got that fi rst Manolete book, and to be honest,
I’ve resisted learning any more than necessary
about the sport because it seems so cruel. Still,
here was a man going about his job without any of
the clichéd, invincible bravado that I had associ-
ated with matadors, but instead with a look of res-
ignation and unease, even victimhood: a second
animal sent into that ring for the trivial enjoyment
of a paying audience, trapped all alone behind the
unknowable buff er of his face. Apparently, at the
beginning of every bullfi ghting season, Manolete
felt pricks of pain behind his eyes, as though he
had walked into a dusty room. But there was no
dust. ‘‘It must be fear,’’ he confessed.
I thought about this as I made eye contact
with myself in all those old pictures. I couldn’tO
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