he announced that he intended to fi ght bulls, one
shot back: ‘‘You? You want to be a torero? With a
thin and miserable face like that?’’
in 1944, he was appearing in three bullfi ghts
a week. One newspaper declared that he was
‘‘almost unanimously regarded as the greatest
matador of all time.’’ He was mobbed in the
streets and would soon be the subject of sever-
al books and a popular song, and would have
a liquor, Anís Manolete, named for him. After
a bullfi ghting season in Spain, he would spend
the winter touring Latin America. His Mexican
fans, known as Manoletistas, wore lapel pins of
his face — his ‘‘elongated, dolorous profi le,’’ as
one reporter described it.
Soon, Manolete was said to be worth the
equivalent of $37 million in today’s dollars and
36 5.8.22
to command fees equivalent to $160,000 for a
single afternoon. Already, he had dispatched
more than 1,000 bulls. He always killed them
swiftly and coldly, with a technique that had been
largely abandoned because it left the matador
momentarily exposed. He would lance the animal
head-on, straight over its right horn — without
smiling, without waving, seemingly without any
recognition of his audience at all.
Every facet of his performances was similar-
ly somber and machinelike. Early in his career,
Conrad writes, ‘‘the stiff ness of the lanky boy’s
body and the sadness of his face... just caused
audiences to laugh.’’ But Manolete’s manager had
told him to stop mimicking the garish, balletic
style of bullfi ghting that was popular at the time
and taught him, instead, to leverage his rail-thin
build and natural demeanor into something state-
lier. Even Manolete’s signature fl ourish, known
as the Manoletina, was really an anti-fl ourish:
He would wave the bull forward with the edge
of his cape held behind his back, which allowed
him to execute several passes in a row without
ever moving his feet. It gave the impression that
Manolete was hardly bothering, committed to a
minimum of strain.
He brought the same asceticism to his life
outside the ring. ‘‘Unlike most matadors,’’ one
newspaper wrote, ‘‘his name is associated with
neither liquor nor women.’’ He had few friends,
and his fame made him wary of meeting newpeople. He spoke very little at cocktail parties; it
seemed he had nothing to say. If a woman fl irted
with him, he responded in halting monosyllables.
Asked by a reporter why he didn’t smile more,
Manolete replied, ‘‘This business of the bulls is a
very serious thing.’’
In fact, his commitment to his trade was so
stoic that it felt fatalistic at times, more powerful
than any free will of his own. Once, during a fi ght
in Mexico City, Manolete was gored in the leg,
and as the medics carried him away, someone
asked him why he stood his ground when even
the crowd recognized how erratically the bull was
behaving and yelled for him to fall back.
‘‘It’s why I’m Manolete,’’ Manolete answered.
‘‘For that, I charge what I charge.’’at the entrance to a federal building when a secu-
rity guard sprang off his stool, shaking his head,
and waved at me to stop. He had a look on his
face like, Give me a break. ‘‘Guy,’’ he said. ‘‘You got
to lose the chew.’’
I did a quick inventory of my mouth. Was
I chewing something? Then I realized that he
meant chewing tobacco: My jaw skews so severe-
ly to one side that he thought I had some wadded
in my cheek.
‘‘No,’’ I heard myself explaining to this security
guard, this stranger: ‘‘This is my face. This is just
what my face looks like.’’
My face is a conversation piece. People can’t
help noticing that it’s there and often want to talk
about it, want to ask about it or even, once in a
while (especially in high school), feel entitled to
off er an unsolicited critical take. By now, I can tell
when someone I’m talking to has gotten momen-
tarily distracted by my face — scrutinizing its
angles, considering it as an object. Mostly, they
want to know why it’s so conspicuously crooked,
to hear the story of the presumably outlandish
accident that fractured my large, bumpy nose in
one direction and wrenched my long jaw in the
other, so that, no matter how I incline my head,
you never feel I’m looking straight at you.
But I never broke any bones; my face just grew
that way. At some point when I was a kid, things
started drifting, just slightly. And, like a space-
craft that’s been infi nitesimally poked off course,
that lopsidedness kept escalating as I hurtledRecently,^ Iwaspassingthrough^ ametal^ detectorBy(^) th
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27
,
Manolete performing in 1946.
Associated Press