El Cordobés’ career as seen from inside Spain

‘Or I’ll Dress You in Mourning’, which I have just re-read, was a brilliantly-written atmospheric biography of Manuel Benítez El Cordobés by the journalists Larry Collins and Dominque Lapierre (who has recently died). It is based around the matador’s confirmación de alternativa in Madrid on May 20, 1964. His performance that day, which ended in a cornada grave, is described in detail, while around this is woven the story of El Cordobés’s beginnings and the Civil War and post-Civil War experiences of his home town, Palma del Río, constructed from a series of interviews with key characters. It’s an absorbing portrait both of the torero and of Spain on the cusp of modernity.

Now, over a half century since that classic biography’s publication, along comes another biography of the Cordoban, ‘El Cordobés y el Milagro Pop’ by Fernando González Viñas, published by the new taurine imprint El Paseíllo.

The blurb on the book’s back cover speaks of the content inside as equivalent to cultural studies and that is indeed the approach that González takes. Here, too, is a look at the Benítez story by a fellow Spaniard, as opposed to a somewhat romanticised account by an American and a Frenchman. Whilst covering Benítez’s life and career (which continued professionally in the bullrings up until 2004) in broadly chronological order, González effectively riffs on one aspect in each of the book’s 53 chapters, much in the style of Craig Brown’s biography of the Beatles, ‘One Two Three Four’.

Indeed, Benítez’s linkage to the Beatles forms the start of the book as González imagines the pop group’s manager, Brian Epstein, fatally overdosing at home beneath a bullfight poster featuring the name El Cordobés. Later in the book, González reports that Epstein once approached Benítez on putting a film together involving the matador and the group, only for the torero to nix the idea by demanding the income involved be split six ways, for John, Paul, George, Ringo, Manuel and a final portion for his ‘cuadrilla’ too. (Epstein enjoyed watching bullfighting and assisted the matador Henry Higgins with his career, although that last point is not mentioned here.)

The riffing is enjoyable and somewhat satirical when it comes to looking back at the final years of the Franco regime and reporting on El Cordobés’s apparently innate astuteness (typified by his dumping of his manager El Pipo, going it alone once the older man had set the matador on his path to stardom, and then running rings around bullfighting’s empresarios). There is one chapter, however, based on Benítez’s salto de la rana, where it is particularly stretched, González using its literal English translation - ‘leapfrog’ - to bring in comparisons with the mathematical use of the term (resolving an equation on movement, the suerte, González argues, involves a precise understanding of timing and of positioning both before and after the leap); its economic usage (businesses making moves that place them ahead of their competitors and El Cordobés’s salto marking him out from all other toreros); and the physical activity of jumping into the air, which leads González to return to Benítez’s frequent cogidas as a novillero and also mention the matador’s flying of his own Piper aeroplane from corrida to corrida. “The public adored El Cordobés because he flew, just as the saints did in the pictures on calendars, ethereal, mystical and celestial […] By accomplishing the salto de la rana, El Cordobés attained ongoing sainthood in people’s eyes, a saint who flew because he was not only above the ground, but also above the circumstances of bullfighting, and social, historical and political conditions, precisely because he knew how to fly, because he was other-worldly but also one of their own.”

It would be unfair, though, to characterise the book based on the above piece of writing. For the most part, González applies an excellent knowledge of the social, political and cultural conditions of the time to the story of El Cordobés’s career, incorporating contemporary writings on the taurine phenomenon.

One of the book’s illustrations

This is no book, however, for a detailed analysis of Benítez’s toreo (did the Cordoban really have a magic left hand - “a deformed wrist” as González puts it - or was that just a subsequent justification by taurine critics for the matador’s popularity?). What González is really after is a portrayal of a people finally emerging from the austerity of a straitjacket dictatorship with the figurehead of a matador from the wrong side of the tracks who cared little for bullfighting’s past and traditions and only about making an impact in the present. For González (continuing the pop analogy), Benítez - whose hair was unruly in advance of the Beatles’ - is also the precursor of punk, someone who fought bulls according to his own values, a taurine equivalent of Sid Vicious (mis)appropriating Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. In the author’s eyes, the climatic point of Benítez’s toreo came with his 1970 appearance in Jaén’s Feria de San Lucas when, after a cogida, the matador dispensed with his muleta, passing the bull a cuerpo limpio like today’s recortadores before climbing onto the animal’s back, then killing it in the usual way, the public going on to award this performance two ears and a tail.

I would have liked to have read a bit more about Benítez’s life post-retirement (sadly too, his astonishing 2014 performance at the age of 77 in a festival at Córdoba receives no mention), but ‘El Cordobés y el Milágro Pop’ is an enjoyable read and a worthy addition to the canon of writing about the fifth bullfighting caliph.