44 5.8.22
with his subtle and refi ned performances. Now
Dominguín was giving fans permission to feel
exhausted with the dour-faced, overpaid man
who had dominated bullfi ghting for years. An
old friend of Manolete’s, the bullfi ghter Carlos
Arruza, characterized the backlash as sadistic:
‘‘Out of boredom, they now wanted to destroy
their once-beloved idol.’’ They didn’t buy Man-
olete’s retirement as a transcendent end to a
prestigious career. To them, he looked like a
coward running away.
It began to take a toll. Arruza described Man-
olete ‘‘as too sincere an artist not to suff er under
this treatment.’’ As the summer wore on, he start-
ed drinking heavily, and he seemed even more
troubled and sadder than his face usually made
him look. ‘‘To tell the truth, I was shocked by his
physical state,’’ Arruza recalled. Manolete was
trapped between what the world required of him
and what he wanted for himself — unsure which
image of his life was ultimately the real one, the
more noble one to pursue.
One afternoon, Manolete went to visit his
mother. She was concerned about how rundown
he looked.
‘‘Mother,’’ Manolete said, ‘‘I am not the child
I once was. I have to fi ght bulls.’’
He decided to accept Dominguín’s challenge.
Nine thousand people came to watch Manolete
and Dominguín’s showdown in Linares on Aug.
28, 1947. The two matadors had already faced
off twice in the preceding weeks, and each time
Manolete found himself at odds with the pub-
lic, as the crowds thronged behind Dominguín
instead. Now, in Linares, Dominguín played to
the crowd right away with ostentatious stunts,
dropping to his knees in the sand and windmill-
ing his cape as the fi rst bull he faced leaped by.
Manolete killed his fi rst animal calmly. Many
people applauded. Many others booed. ‘‘They
keep demanding more and more of me, and I
have no more to give,’’ he told an onlooker as
they dragged the carcass away.
His second time out, Manolete drew a bull
named Islero, bred on a ranch outside Seville
notorious for the nastiness of its animals. A writ-
er from Life magazine would describe the bull as
‘‘an unusually ugly customer’’; it weighed more
than 1,000 pounds and was aggravated from the
get-go, shooting headlong out of the gate before
eventually steadying itself, inscrutably, at the
center of the ring.
Manolete stepped forward. He fl ared his cape,
but the bull just glared at him. His manager
didn’t like the look of the animal; he shouted
at Manolete to walk away. But Manolete kept
at it, eventually coaxing the bull into a fi erce
charge, then swiveling almost imperceptibly, so
that its horns scraped the air close to his body.
The crowd erupted and, after that, Manolete
began wringing Islero through pass after pass,
dominating the animal, until he was comfortable
enough to turn his back on the bull, step away
and make a dainty performance of preparing
his sword.
The matador seemed to be allowing for a beat
of anticipation before the kill. But right as Mano-
lete speared the bull between its shoulder blades,
Islero jerked suddenly to the right and planted
a horn in Manolete’s groin. The bull shoved the
man upward, into the air. And when Manolete
hit the ground, the bull charged him again. Then
it stomped on him.
People rushed in from all directions to help,
swarming the bull like a fl urry of fl ies. Some
grabbed at parts of the animal and some grabbed
for Manolete, to drag him out from under the
heavy pistons of its hind legs. As they hauled the
matador out the door, the bull, still with Mano-
lete’s sword in its withers, crumpled in on itself,
dead. Everyone in the arena turned silent, left
to stare at the two pools of blood in the sand.
The tear at the top of Manolete’s right leg
was six inches long. He was losing a tremendous
amount of blood and going into shock. At 8 p.m.,
shortly before he was transferred to a hospital
for surgery, he regained consciousness briefl y
and moaned about the pain. He would die just
before sunrise the following morning.
And that was it: the end of the allegory into
which writers always molded this real man’s life.
But the more I scrutinized the story, the more
ungraspable it became. Did the fact that he kept
fi ghting bulls make him a steadfast hero or a
kind of passive human sacrifi ce? Was he virtu-
ous or pathetic? And did he even know himself?
What killed Manolete: too much integrity or
not enough?
I found it baff ling, honestly. Even at the end, in
his hospital bed, one of the last things Manolete
reportedly said was: ‘‘Did the bull die?’’Do any of us truly comprehend the pressures
roiling inside our heads?
In my case, I mean this literally. Although no
doctor has been able to tell me defi nitively, the
source of my headaches most likely has some-
thing to do with my sinuses. Sinuses are empty
spaces, perfect puddles of air nestled among our
bones. But some of mine have apparently been
nearly fl attened, like a crushed plastic straw, as,
over time, the bones of my jaw and nose grew
out of alignment and plowed into them.
This, however, merely piled extra dys-
function onto a baseline of dysfunction that
all human sinuses share. It turns out that all
sinuses — not just mine — are works of lavishly
bad engineering. This is especially true of the
maxillary sinuses, under each eye. Unlike our
other sinuses, which have openings at the bot-
tom, these open at the top, near the bridge of
the nose, so that sludgy, viscous mucus mustpush all the way upward through the maxillary
sinus, against the force of gravity, before it can
drain. (Maxillary sinuses are like toilets inside
our faces that we are trying to fl ush upside-
down.) For this reason, it’s the maxillary sinus-
es that most often clog, and where most sinus
infections fi rst take hold. It’s also where my own
headaches tend to start.
After one doctor I visited explained this cock-
amamie arrangement to me, I wondered if I’d
misunderstood him, and I started reading about
the science of sinuses with a compulsion simi-
lar to the one with which I’d read about Man-
olete — even slogging through a paper on the
sinuses of bulls and other bovids, which claimed
to be ‘‘the broadest and most comprehensive
quantitative analysis of sinus morphology ever
attempted.’’ Ultimately, the study that was the
most illuminating was also the most disgusting:
It involved pumping salt water into the heads of
fi ve decapitated human cadavers and the heads
of fi ve decapitated dead goats, to measure how
much liquid accumulated inside the sinus before
the fl uid level reached the hole at the top and
the sinus started to clear.
The scientists did this with each head tilted
in four diff erent positions. They found that the
goats’ sinuses drained extremely well when their
heads were held in their natural position. Human
sinuses, by contrast, performed terribly in their
own, normal, upright orientation. They drained
most effi ciently when the heads were rotated for-
ward 90 degrees. That is, our sinuses would work
much better if we crawled around on all fours,
staring at the ground — like goats.
Writing in The Journal of Otolaryngology —
Head & Neck Surgery, the researchers conclud-
ed that the design of our sinuses was likely to
have been locked in early in our evolutionaryFace
(Continued from Page 37) The more I scrutinized
the story, the more
ungraspable it became.
Did the fact that
he kept fighting bulls
make him a steadfast
hero or a kind of passive
human sacrifice?