Death of a Matador

All his art was an affair with death, and in the bullring Juan Belmonte always was desperately close to dying. Throughout his thousand corridas, death seemed to be his mistress, and away from the plaza, she always seemed to him to be the better twin of boredom. When he retired in 1935, he was king of the world's matadors, more than a millionaire, a hero in his native Spain, spoken of in the same breath with Cervantes and Goya. But life grew dull as it grew safer. When a friend told him he had no choice but to die tragically, his answer held no other hope. "I'll see what I can do," Belmonte said.

Mano o Mano. In life, Juan Belmonte's triumph was a victory of utter weakness. He stood fast in the path of the bull, directing its charge with a close sweep of his crimson muleta, winding the bull around him, said Ernest Hemingway, "like a belt—his right leg pushed toward the bull, in that bent slant which will be copied but never made truly until another genius comes in the same twisted body." Twisted, small, weak, Belmonte survived with courage that was more than a match for his inability to move with the bull. "My legs were in such a state," he once said, "that if one wanted to move, it had to request permission from the other."

Belmonte perfected his harrowing verónicas and pases naturales to give bullfighting its modern style—the hands held low, elbows close to the ribs, the body unmoving and erect. His was "a sinister delicacy of movement," explained Aficionado Hemingway, "a beautiful, unhealthy mystery," in which the crowd's emocón grew fiery at the sight of his "evident physical inferiority, not only to the bull but to those working with him and to most who were watching."

Matched mano a mano against the gypsy genius Joselito for the seven greatest years of Spanish bullfighting (1914-20), Belmonte was gored time and again, Joselito hardly ever. Belmonte was always the torero of "four olés and an ay!"—the scream coming whenever he was gored or pitched into the air on the horns of a bull. Then, in 1920, Joselito was killed in the arena, leaving Belmonte the unchallenged maestro. When he retired at last, he had killed 1,650 bulls and been gored scores of times. "How many?" stammering Belmonte once said. "Let us say f-f-fifty. I like that number of fifty."

Naked in the Moonlight. In his retirement. Belmonte presided over his 3,500-acre ranch on the grassy Andalusian tableland 40 miles south of Seville. He spent good days tilting with bulls in his fields and holding private seminars in his own bullring, coaching aspirantes, reminiscing about the old days. In Seville, he hung out at sidewalk bars, where he liked to tell and retell the pleasures of his first attempts at bullfighting. "At night," he remembered, "we would swim the Guadalquivir and fight the bulls in the pastures in the moonlight. That was the beautiful time, fighting them naked in the moonlight."