through the vacuum of adolescence. Like Man-
olete’s face, something about this arrangement
seems to project gloominess, loneliness or woe.
Not long after my friends emailed me that photo
of the matador, I went on television to talk about
a magazine article I’d written and, looking online
afterward, found one commenter asserting that I
had the face of a depressed pervert. Other feed-
back I’ve received about my face from strangers
on the internet includes: ‘‘Deeply weird’’ and
‘‘Whoah! What the Hell is up with his rubbery
jaw?!’’ Another commenter compared my face
to something Salvador Dalí would paint: ‘‘Like a
smirking Camembert melting in the sun.’’
No one appreciates my face with more uncon-
trollable gusto than dentists. More than once, I’ve
endured one calling in a colleague from the other
room to come have a look. They peer at my X-rays
with giddy concentration. Sometimes, they ask
me to get out of the chair and stand against the
wall, so they can get a few shots with a regular
camera too. (I was in my mid-30s before I realized
that these demoralizing portrait sessions weren’t
a standard part of a dental exam.) Every time I go
to see a new one, it’s the same: The dentist gets
like an archaeologist before a dig, eager to know
what sort of ruined structure is hidden under
there, imagining all the physical dysfunction and
pain I must be living with and the many diagnos-
tic tools and specialists that could be gathered
behind the project of setting it right.
They aren’t wrong. My jaw is so misshapen
that I can feel it wriggle out of joint whenever
I open wide enough for a sandwich or a yawn,
until it bonks back into place. The gums on the
left side of my mouth are wearing away at a
distressing rate because those teeth apparently
clamp together long before the ones on the other
side can connect, and therefore do most of the
chewing. I suff er through a lot of sinus infections
and sinus pressure, as those passageways have
been narrowed and clog all the time. And I get
frequent headaches: There’s a particular kind of
dull headache that sprouts under and above my
eyes like mold. There’s one that presses and holds
its weight against my face from inside, like a tan-
truming toddler squatting against her bedroom
door to keep the world out. There’s the throb-
bing one that hangs around diff usely for hours
and produces pain only when I focus on it, like
a pang of guilt. Other headaches molder at the
periphery of language, in a cloud of synesthesia
and memories: purple pain, newsprint-colored
pain; pain that has the turgid heft of Greek yogurt
or smells like the inside of an umbrella; pain that
funnels me back to one gloomy Sunday afternoon
from my childhood in New Jersey when I was
splayed on the carpet, watching Steve Martin in
‘‘The Jerk’’ on Channel 11.
There have been moments in my life when
I’ve been motivated to better diagnose and even
fi x these problems, shuttling around for explor-
atory scans and consultations. Doctors have
proposed plastic surgery to straighten out my
nose, or surgically breaking my jaw and reset-
ting it. After walking me through the complete
cartography of the human face in an anatomy
textbook, one talked about boring my sinuses
open wider with lasers.
But I’ve never pursued any of it. I felt as if I
should, but somehow, every possible interven-
tion felt so garishly ambitious — so dramatic. For
better or worse, all these problems seem normal
to me now. And the truth is, I started to iden-
tify so deeply with the peculiarities of my face
that the idea of correcting those imperfections
eventually became unthinkable. Looking in the
mirror, I’d try to imagine every part of me point-
ing fl awlessly forward and wonder: Who would
I be then?
When I was younger, I worried I was ugly.
But by the time I discovered Manolete in my
early 30s, there was even a measure of perverse
vanity involved: I had come to appreciate my
face so much that I was willing to live with the
pain of having it attached to my head. And that’s
why, reading that biography of the matador on
my kitchen fl oor the night it arrived, it didn’t
upset me to learn how supposedly grotesque my
doppelgänger was, how relentlessly this face we
shared was ridiculed. I was able to brush it off ,
even fi nd it amusing. And that felt good — good
to feel unthreatened, good to recognize that a
measure of genuine self-acceptance had appar-
ently been growing inside me, from an odd angle,
all those years.
Reading about how ugly Manolete was that
night, I could feel myself freely loving who I am,
and therefore vindicated in my refusal to let all
those doctors tear apart my face and change me.
Everything suddenly felt simple.
But then I read the rest of the biography.an upstart matador known as Dominguín was
sidelined for several weeks with an injury. Recu-
perating in bed and fi nding himself both bored
and consumed by professional frustrations,
Dominguín called a Madrid radio station to ask
for time on the air. He had a lot of incendiary
opinions about the sport, and about Manolete in
particular, that he felt compelled to share.
Luis Miguel Dominguín was 21 and comes
off , in written accounts, as an almost cartoonishdistillation of every matador cliché the American
imagination can conjure. Dominguín was suave,
cocky, ambitious, defi ant, theatrical — a man of
‘‘indomitable self-esteem’’ and physical vigor
who was always surrounded by ‘‘company that
was completely joyous and happy’’ and whose life
seemed to pour over him in a warm, never-end-
ing bath of eager women and delicious wine. (‘‘If
only you knew how diffi cult I fi nd it to refuse,’’ he
said of his womanizing. ‘‘I just let myself drift.’’)
Also — this is worth saying directly — he was
stupefyingly handsome. His face was appealing
in a perfectly symmetrical, proportional way.
Manolete had always been known for his
understatement in the ring. Dominguín dealt
in cheap fl ash. He would run the bull into the
ground and toy with the animal until it was dazed
and panting, then cuddle up to it, kiss the bull on
the forehead and pose with one of its horns stuck
close to his own ear — a move he called el teléfono.
He was motivated almost exclusively by pride
and claimed to fear humiliation more than death.
Dominguín began ascending professionally in
1943, just as Manolete’s fame was exploding. But
then his career plateaued. He was having trou-
ble breaking into the biggest corridas, colliding
with some unbudgeable barrier that he couldn’t
comprehend. Everyone who met Dominguín
absolutely loved him; he didn’t understand why
bullfi ghting fans weren’t going similarly wild.
When a correspondent from the radio station
arrived at Dominguín’s bedside with a micro-
phone, the young matador didn’t hold back. He
railed about how unfairly the bullfi ghting world
was treating him, how the elites who ran the
sport wouldn’t allow him to compete against
their golden prince, Manolete. ‘‘I am anxious to
furnish proof that I am a better torero than he,
and that I can unseat him from the pedestal on
which public opinion has placed him,’’ Domin-
guín insisted. ‘‘It is my intention to prove my
superiority in the only way open to me’’ — in
the ring.
At fi rst, Manolete tried to ignore Dominguín’s
trash-talking. He considered this loud young
man a nuisance, this whole manufactured rival-
ry repellent and unclassy. Manolete had already
announced his plans to retire at the end of the
season. He was only 30 but wanted to leave the
sport while he was still healthy — still alive —
and spend his days riding horses and hunting
on a ranch outside his hometown. He was done
— done with bulls but also done with the fi ckle,
petulant fans for whom he fought. ‘‘They are
asking more than I can give,’’ Manolete told the
press. ‘‘Always more and more.’’
But Dominguín kept hounding Manolete, and
the public started piling on. The atmosphere
around bullfi ghting was already losing some of
its wickedness and danger; the longer Manolete
reigned over the sport, the more the crowd expect-
ed of him and the harsher its impatience and
disappointment becameThe New York Times Magazine 37(Continued on Page )Early^ in^ the^1947 b
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