Authors: Norman Mailer
Mind of an Outlaw (36 page)
This account of triumphs is in danger of becoming as predictable as any account of triumphs since Caesar. Let us keep it alive with an account of the fiascos. Amado was simply unlike any bullfighter
who had ever come along. When he had a great fight, or even a great pass, it was unlike the passes of other fine
novilleros—
the passes of El Loco were better than anything you had ever seen. It was as if you were looking at the sky and suddenly a bird materialized in the air. And a moment later disappeared again. His work was frightening. It was simple, lyrical, light, illuminated, but it came from nowhere and then was gone. When El Loco was bad, he was not mediocre or dull, he was simply the worst, most inept, and most comical bullfighter anyone had ever seen. He seemed to have no technique to fall back on. He would hold his cape like a shroud, his legs would bend at the knees, his sad ass seemed to have an eye for the exit, his expression was morose as Fernandel, and his feet kept tripping. He looked like a praying mantis on its hind legs. And when he was afraid he had a nerveless incapacity to kill which was so hopeless that the moment he stepped out to face his animal you knew he could not go near this particular bull. Yet when he was good, the comic body suddenly straightened, the back took on the camber of the best back any Spanish aristocrat chose to display, the buttocks retired into themselves like a masterpiece of poise, and the cape and the muleta moved slowly as full sails, or whirled like the wing of that mysterious bird. It was as if El Loco came to be every comic Mexican who ever breathed the finest Spanish grace into his pores. For five odd minutes he was as completely transformed as Charlie Chaplin’s tramp doing a consummate impersonation of the one and only Valentino, long-lost Rudolph.
He concluded the summer in a burst of honors. He had great fights. One was the greatest fight I have ever seen. Afterward they gave him a day where he fought six bulls all by himself, and he went on to take his
alternativa
and became a full-fledged matador. But he was a Mexican down to the bones. The honors all turned damp for him. I was not there the day he fought six bulls, I had had to go back to America and never saw him fight again. I heard about him only in letters and in bullfighting newspapers. But the day he took on the six bulls I was told he did not have a single good fight, and the day he took his
alternativa
to become a matador, both his bulls went out alive, a disgrace too great even
for Amado. He fought a seventh bull. Gypsy magic might save him again. But the bull was big and dull and El Loco had no luck and no magic and just succeeded in killing him in a bad difficult dull fight. It was obvious he was afraid of the big bulls. So he relinquished his
alternativa
and went back to the provinces to try to regain his reputation and his nerve. And no one ever heard much of him again. Or at least I never did, but then I have not been back to Mexico. Now I suspect I’m one of the very few who remembers the happiness of seeing him fight. He was so bad when he was bad that he gave the impression you could fight a bull yourself and do no worse. So when he was good, you felt as if you were good too, and that was something no other torero ever gave me, for when they were good they looked impenetrable, they were like gods, but when Beloved Remington was good, the whole human race was good—he spoke of the great distance a man can go from the worst in himself to the best, and that finally is what the bullfight might be all about, for in dark bloody tropical lands possessed of poverty and desert and swamp, filth and treachery, slovenliness, and the fat lizards of all the worst lust, the excretory lust to shove one’s own poison into others, the one thing which can keep the sweet nerve of life alive is the knowledge that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be. It is a romantic self-pitying impractical approach to the twentieth century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse, but it is the Latin approach. Their allegiance is to the genius of the blood. So they judge a man by what he is at his best.
Let me tell then of Amado’s best fight. It came past the middle of that fine summer when he had an adventure every week in the plaza and we had adventures watching him, for he had fights so mysterious that the gods of the bulls and the ghosts of dead matadors must have come with the mothers and the witches of the centuries, homage to Lorca!, to see the miracles he performed. Listen! One day he had a sweet little bull with nice horns, regular, pleasantly curved, and the bull ran with gaiety, even abandon.
Now we have to stop off here for an imperative explanation. I beg your attention, but it is essential to discuss the attitudes of
afición
to the
natural
. To them the
natural
is the equivalent of the full parallel turn in skiing or a scrambling T-formation quarterback or a hook off a jab—it cannot be done well by all athletes no matter how good they are in other ways, and the
natural
is a dangerous pass, perhaps the most dangerous there is. The cloth of the muleta has no sword to extend its width. Now the cloth is held in the left hand, the sword in the right, and so the target of the muleta which is presented for the bull’s attraction is half as large as it was before and the bullfighter’s body is thus so much bigger and so much more worthy of curiosity to the beast—besides the bull is wiser now, he may be ready to suspect it is the man who torments him and not the swirling sinister chaos of the cloth in which he would bury his head. Moreover—and here is the mystique of the
natural
—the bullfighter has a psychic communion with the bull. Obviously. People who are not psychic do not conceive of fighting bulls. So the torero fights the bull from his psyche first. And with the muleta he fights him usually with his right hand from a position of authority. Switching the cloth to the left hand exposes his psyche as well as his body. He feels less authority—in compensation his instinct plays closer to the bull. But he is so vulnerable! So a
natural
inspires a bullfighting public to hold their breath, for danger and beauty come closest to meeting right here.
It was
naturales
Amado chose to perform with this bull. He had not done many this season. The last refuge of his detractors was that he could not do
naturales
well. So here on this day he gave his demonstration. Watch if you can.
He began his
faena
by making no exploratory pass, no
pase de muerte
, no
derechazos
, he never chopped, no, he went up to this sweet bull and started his
faena
with a series of
naturales
, with a series of five
naturales
which were all linked and all beautiful and had the Plaza in pandemonium because where could he go from there? And Amado came up sweetly to the bull, and did five more
naturales
as good as the first five, and then did five more without moving from his spot—they were superb—and then
furled his muleta until it was the size of the page in an art book like this, and he passed the bull five more times in the same way, the horns going around his left wrist. The man and the bull looked in love with each other. And then after these twenty
naturales
, Amado did five more with almost no muleta at all, five series of five
naturales
had he performed, twenty-five
naturales
—it is not much easier than making love twenty-five times in a row—and then he knelt and kissed the bull on the forehead he was so happy, and got up delicately, and went to the
barrera
for his sword, came back, profiled to get ready for the kill. Everyone was sitting on a collective fuse. If he managed to kill on the first
estocada
this could well be the best
faena
anyone had ever seen a
novillero
perform, who knew, it was all near to unbelievable, and then just as he profiled, the bull charged prematurely, and Amado, determined to get the kill, did not skip away but held ground, received the charge, stood there with the sword, turned the bull’s head with the muleta, and the bull impaled himself on the point of the torero’s blade which went right into the proper space between the shoulders, and the bull ran right up on it into his death, took several steps to the side, gave a toss of his head at heaven, and fell. Amado had killed
recibiendo
. He had killed standing still, receiving the bull while the bull charged. No one had seen that in years. So they gave him everything that day, ears, tail,
vueltas
without limit—they were ready to give him the bull—a month later they even forgave him the six bad bulls he fought all by himself. But they could not forgive the two big bulls who went out alive on the day he took his
alternativa
. That was the end of Amado Ramirez in Mexico City.
But I will always have love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets. And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war. When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever. Because he never had the ability most bullfighters, like most artists, possess to be false with their
art, tasty yet phony, he taught something about life with every move he made, including the paradox that courage can be found in men whose conflict is caught between their ambition and their cowardice. He even taught me how to look for form in other places. Do you see the curve of a beautiful breast? It is not necessarily a gift of God—it may be the record life left on a lady of the balance of forces between her desire, her modesty, her ambition, her timidity, her maternity, and her sense of an impulse which cannot be denied. So go through the pictures which follow. If we were wise enough, bold enough, and scholars from head to motorcyclist’s boot, we could extract the real history of Europe from the forms elucidated between man and beast in the sequences soon to be glimpsed beneath your hand,
torero de salon!
ALLOW A SYMPOSIAST
to quote from himself. The following is out of a new book called
The Armies of the Night
.
Not for little humor had Negroes developed that odd humorless crack in their personality which cracked each other into laughter, playing on one side an odd mad practical black man who could be anything, wise chauffeur, drunken butler, young money-mad Pullman porter, Negro college graduate selling insurance—the other half was sheer psychopath, rocks in the ice cube, pocket oiled for the switchblade, I’ll kill you Whitey, burn baby, all tuned to a cool. These Blacks moved through the New Left with a physical indifference to the bodies about them, as if ten Blacks could handle any hundred of these flaccid Whites, and they signaled to each other across the aisles, and talked in quick idioms and out, an English not comprehensible to any ear which knew nothing of the separate meanings of the same word at separate pitch (Maoists not for nothing these Blacks!) their hair carefully brushed out in every
direction like African guerrillas or huge radar stations on some lonely isle, they seemed to communicate with one another in ten dozen modes, with fingers like deaf and dumb, with feet, with their stance, by the flick of their long wrist, with the radar of their hair, the smoke of their will, the glide of their passage, by a laugh, a nod, a disembodied gesture, through mediums, seeming to speak through silent mediums among them who never gave hint to a sign. In the apathy which had begun to lie over the crowd as the speeches went on and on (and the huge army gathered by music, now was ground down by words, and the hollow absurd imprecatory thunder of the loudspeakers with their reductive echo—you must FIGHT …
fight
… fight … fite … ite …, in the soul-killing repetition of political jargon which reminded people that the day was well past one o’clock and they still had not started), the Blacks in the roped-in area about the speaker’s stand were the only sign of active conspiracy, they were up to some collective expression of disdain, something to symbolize their detestation of the White Left—yes, the observer was to brood on it much of the next day when he learned without great surprise that almost all of the Negroes had left to make their own demonstration in another part of Washington, their announcement to the press underlining their reluctance to use their bodies in a White War. That was comprehensible enough. If the Negroes were at the Pentagon and did not preempt the front rank, they would lose face as fighters; if they were too numerous on the line, they would be beaten half to death. That was the ostensible reason they did not go, but the observer wondered if he saw a better.
There is an old tendency among writers of the Left when apologists for one indigestible new convulsion or another—they go in for a species of calculated reduction which attempts to introduce comfortable proportions into historic phenomena which are
barbaric, heroic, monstrous, epic, and/or apocalyptic. (
New Republic
and
Nation
writers please stand!) So we may remember there was never much of a famine in the Ukraine, just various local dislocations of distribution; never real Moscow trials, rather the sort of predictable changing of the guard which accompanies virile epochs of history. The American labor unions were never really in danger of leaving the Left, just being led down the garden path by unscrupulous but limited leadership. Et cetera. So forth.