Interviews with taurinos

Interviewing taurinos, particularly toreros, is not easy. All too often, matadors come out with the same old stuff - their toreo has reached a new phase or is becoming more mature, they feel fear before a corrida, cornadas are the medals of their profession, etc. It’s very hard to get beneath that sheen.

I’ve some personal experience of this, having interviewed a number of toreros when I was editing the Club Taurino of London’s magazine La Divisa. It certainly helps if you know a torero well, which was not a position I was ever in. I recall in particular an interview Jacob Plieth and I did with Rafael Rubio Rafaelillo. It was covering the same old ground when Javier Carpes, a CTL member and long-standing friend of Rafa who was also in the room, said, “Ask him about his brother.” So Jacob asked the matador how his brother had influenced him and Rafa responded: “He died… He was a big influence on my life, on everything… an important person. He didn’t understand bulls, he wasn’t a great aficionado in terms of having a deep understanding of toreo and tauromaquia, but he understood life. He was more concerned with people and with my personality. He always let me know that, once everything went well in my life, it would be reflected in my career - a torero performs better when he feels good and is focused. In my childhood, I was a bit rebellious and difficult. I called my brother ‘Daddy’ as he dealt with my rebelliousness. All through my childhood, he transmitted calmness to me, brought out the best in me. He gave me life lessons about always having the possibility between good and bad choices. There’s a good path you can take in life and a bad path. In the end, I took the good path. He helped me a lot when I was a child and when I was becoming a man; thanks to him, I approached my life, and also my career, in the right way.

Rafaelillo

“He died on February 4, 2006. I was 16 at the time. It’s something that will affect me for the rest of my life. I’ve never understood the reason for his death, but it’s made me more mature. After he died, all his previous advice about life, which I’d never taken into account before, arose in my mind. I put it into place and then my career started to take off. I began to triumph as a matador the following year when I had my first success in Madrid with a bull of Dolores Aguirre. Everything in life happens for a reason. In 2008, before my first exit on shoulders in Pamplona, I went to see a psychologist. I’d lost my faith, my motivation. Sometimes I used to cry wearing the suit of lights. I felt empty because of my brother’s death. Without doubt, he has been the most important person in my life and career – his company and the values he transmitted to me are always with me. He was a special person.”

Thanks to Javier’s knowledge of Rafaelillo, we’d unearthed information about the matador we’d never come across before and the interview as a whole took on a more intimate tone thereafter.

Given the formulaic nature of most interviews and their questionable usefulness, it is interesting that two of the first five publications by a new taurine imprint, El Paseíllo, are collections of interviews.

The most recent is La Inteligencia del Toreo: De Marcial Lalanda a Vargas Llosa by Andrés Amorós, which presents extracts from 20 interviews the respected taurine critic of ABC has carried out over the years, sometimes for the newspaper, sometimes as background for other books he was involved in writing. The book consists almost entirely of interviews with matadors - from Marcial Lalanda, Pepe Luis Vázquez, Manolo Vázquez and Jaime Ostos through to Morante de la Puebla, Manzanares hijo, Daniel Luque and Andrés Roca Rey - although it also contains discussions with a rejoneador (Diego Ventura), the photographer Cano and the Nobel-winning author and aficionado Marío Vargas Llosa.

Amorós usefully gives a short introduction to each piece, setting out some of the protagonist’s history and sometimes too the context in which the interview took place. The author counted Pepe Luis and Manolo Vázquez amongst his friends, so it is unsurprising that these are two of the most revealing interviews in the book. Pepe Luis, in his late eighties at the time of the interview, discusses the importance of technique as well as aesthetics and provides views on the toreros of his day. His brother Manolo comments: “To become a good torero you have to have bravery, of course, but, in addition to vanquishing one’s fear, you need the courage to keep searching for your particular artistry, your own identity, that which makes you different from the rest.” He speaks movingly, too, about the solitude of the bullfighter.

Many of the interviewees bemoan the current general attitudes towards bullfighting. Paco Camino comments that no one is forced to attend bullfights; Enrique Ponce points out that the toro bravo is synonymous with Spain; while Iván Fandiño sees toreando as an expression of freedom. Antonio Ferrera reveals he is inspired by the ‘lidia total’ of Luis Miguel Dominguín, while Morante de la Puebla speaks of the toreros that have influenced him but says that dreaming of toreo is better than actually performing it.

The least revealing of Amorós’s interviews are those that take place around particular themes or events, for instance a brief chat with Luis Francisco Esplá on Gallito’s significance and an interview with José Miguel Arroyo Joselito prior to his one-off reapppearance at Istres in 2014. A similar criticism can be made about the first of El Paseíllo’s collection of interviews, Vicente Zabala de la Serna’s Ya nadie dice la verdad, where, for instance, an interview with César Rincón is confined to discussing the situation with bullfighting in Colombia.

This is a project in collaboration with the photographer José Aymá, whose sombre monochrome pictures accompany the text. The 23 interviews, conducted in the period 2012-22 and previously published in Zabala’s newspaper El Mundo, range from Curro Romero, Rafael de Paula and Manuel Benítez El Cordobés to Juan Ortega, Pablo Aguado and Tomás Rufo, although, once again, there are exceptions to matadors as subjects, in this case with the Lozano family (in their roles as empresas and apoderados) and the Las Ventas veedor Florencio Fernández Florito. And some of the pieces are not interviews at all; there is an excellent fly-on-the-wall description of Enrique Ponce’s return to bullfighting after his serious 2019 injury at Valencia and a less interesting article on Andrés Roca Rey in Pamplona three years later. A couple of the articles are effectively the author listening in to discussions between Curro Romero, Pepe Luis Vázquez hijo and Juan Ortega and between Emilio Muñoz, Espartaco and Paco Ojeda.

Zabala’s approach is different from Amorós’s in the sense that there is no introduction to his interviews: rather, one dives straight in. The different personalities of the toreros, e.g. the timidity of Curro Romero and Manzanares hijo, the egocentric boastfulness of Rafael de Paula and Diego Urdiales’ sense of being on the margins of toreo (at the time of his 2019 interview, he had yet to appear in a bullring controlled by the Matilla family), are on full display. The pieces are interesting, but one gets the sense that here is a journalist at work rather than Amorós’s more considered set of dialogues between aficionados.