help wondering why this random matador had
hurtled out of history, through that portal on a
restaurant wall, to reach me here in the present
— what inscrutable information he might be car-
rying, whether his life and his face had anything
to do with mine.was born in Córdoba on July 4, 1917, and nearly
died of pneumonia at age 2. When he was 5, he lost
his father. From then on, he would spend his child-
hood clinging to his mother, who spoiled him.
Little Manolete was aloof and morose, and he
wandered through Córdoba lost in thought. He
liked to read. He liked to paint. He seldom played
with other kids and was too shy to buy a ticket
to go to the movies. And he did not care about
bullfi ghting at all.
The one corrida Manolete went to as a child
didn’t excite him in the least, and when kids
at school pretended to be bulls and matadors,
play-fi ghting with one another, Manolete kept to
himself. This confused his classmates: They knew
Manolete came from a family of bullfi ghters and
assumed he would follow in his relatives’ footsteps.The New York Times Magazine 35They couldn’t understand why he was wasting his
time at school. He would be a bullfi ghter soon.
It was true: Manolete’s grandfather and two of
his uncles had been bullfi ghters, and so had his
father, who also fought under the name Mano-
lete. But the elder Manolete developed a degen-
erative eye condition as a young man, and though
he kept trying to perform, even when he saw two
blurry animals running at him instead of one, he
eventually gave up the sport. (‘‘The sight of a mat-
ador with spectacles was too ridiculous for the
crowd to take,’’ Conrad writes in his biography.)
He died broke and virtually blind.
The most successful matador in the family
was Manolete’s great-uncle: a titanic, immacu-
lately confi dent man known as Pepete. ‘‘Rather
than ever having to conquer any fear,’’ Conrad
explained, Pepete ‘‘simply did not recognize
what the emotion was.’’ He had become a some-
what legendary fi gure after rushing to help an
injured friend during a bullfi ght in Madrid in
1862, only to be gored by the animal himself.
Pepete stood up immediately, dusted the sand off
his pants and walked to the edge of the ring. Only
then did blood start surging out of him. Regard-
ing his wound with some curiosity, he asked,
‘‘Is it anything?’’ Then he died. The bull had har-
pooned Pepete straight through the heart.
This family history explained why Mano-
lete’s mother, Angustias , sheltered her son.
Even before marrying Manolete’s father, she
was widowed by a diff erent matador husband.
And recognizing this tragic compulsion of the
men in her orbit to throw themselves at bulls,
she ‘‘sedulously kept from [Manolete] everything
that even most remotely might turn his mind
toward a passion which in her own eyes was themost fatal of all obsessions,’’ an acquaintance of
Manolete’s wrote. This included giving away or
selling her two husbands’ bullfi ghting costumes
and other artifacts from their careers, to get them
out of the house.
The events of Manolete’s early life are fl uid in
diff erent tellings, and the details are often irrec-
oncilable. Almost everything I read relayed his
story in a kind of oldfangled, fl orid prose. To
some unknowable degree, the truth was being
turned into folklore. It read like a parable — the
story of a man being swept passively toward his
destiny. No matter what his mother did, there
was only one future for her son.
The tale turns on a kind of mythic conversion
story. One afternoon, when Manolete is around
11, he’s wandering past the bullfi ghting arena in
Córdoba at the exact moment when matadors
from all over Spain are fi ling in for an event. A
crowd has gathered to cheer the bullfi ghters, but
when a particularly famous one passes by, a man
heckles him, barking that he’s nothing compared
with the matadors that the city of Córdoba has
produced. And when the heckler lists off a couple
of these local heroes, Manolete is astonished to
hear his own father’s name.
Manolete looks around, stiff ens with pride; all
at once, he sees the magnifi cent respect these
matadors command, the crowd that has con-
verged outside the arena just to slap them on the
back or reach out to feel the fabric of their jack-
ets. And, more than the prestige, he recognizes
the money involved: the security that this sport
might provide him and his mother. ‘‘Now it had
happened,’’ Conrad writes, ‘‘happened suddenly
and irrevocably’’: Manolete wanted to fi ght bulls.
He sprinted home and managed to fi nd an old
matador’s tunic in a cupboard in the attic — the
one bullfi ghting accessory his mother apparently
overlooked in her purge. The Spanish journalist
Antonio Díaz-Cañabate, who knew Manolete,
describes him furtively lifting it, surprised by the
garment’s weight, and slipping it clumsily over his
shoulders. Suddenly, ‘‘some innate instinct’’ com-
pels his arms forward; he begins swinging them
around to execute a fi t of imaginary cape work,
as though, there in his attic, he is commanding an
invisible bull. It’s at this moment that Manolete’s
mother walks into the room, crying. ‘‘Alas!’’ she
tells him. ‘‘The poison is already in your veins!’’
From then on, Manolete would spend his ado-
lescence hanging around bullfi ghters, silently
absorbing their craft. He hadn’t ever wanted to
fi ght, but as Conrad puts it, ‘‘He was starting to
become a man and had just begun to realize that
fi ghting bulls was simply what men in his family
were supposed to do.’’ He was surrendering to
the sport more than pursuing it, letting it drag
him out like a tide. He was like the human inverse
of Ferdinand the Bull.
The same kids at school who were confused
when Manolete didn’t want to play bullfi ghter
This page: Revista Aplausos. Opening page: Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. with them now excluded and mocked him. When
e photograph of Manolete (right) that Jon Mooallem’s friends saw in a restaurant in Spain.Manuel^ Laureano^ Rodríguez^ Sánchez