Memorias I

How many aficionados know that Simon Casas, ex-matador, apoderado and empresario taurino (or, in his own words, “director artístico”), is also a novelist? His novel, Asesinato en el cine Ideal, is published by the Madrid firm of Demipage and recently the same company produced a further book by Casas, Pases y Pases, which purports to be the Frenchman’s autobiography.

I say “purports” because the autobiographical concept falls away after fewer than half of its 227 pages and becomes a collection of disordered anecdotes. “My editor and I had an exchange of views on this matter," Casas told the El País journalist Antonio Lorca recently. "He asked me for some memoirs, and I offered him a memory game - not a chronological biography, but some reflections on bullfighting and life."

But Casas, named Bernard Domb shortly after his birth to Sephardic Jews (a Polish father and a Turkish mother) in Nîmes in 1947, can certainly write, which will not come as a surprise to those who have heard his creative and imaginative speeches on the topics of ferias, toreo and artistry. Unfortunately, given the author’s bohemian and romantic nature, whilst being entertained by his stories, there is always a question in the back of one’s mind as to their actual truth…

Pases y Pases begins with Casas recounting how, at the age of 16, having travelled to Spain to become a torero, he acquired the name by which he is now most known, then goes back in time to cover his early years in Nîmes. His father took him to his first bullfight when he was four years old and he recalls, six years later, an encounter with Hemingway, Cocteau and Picasso at the city’s Hotel Imperador when the latter prophesied the youngster would become a matador de toros. That was indeed achieved in 1975 when Casas took the alternativa in his home city, only to end his career as a torero the following day.

Exactly how he became a taurine empresa remains shrouded in mystery, as are the financial dealings through which he has maintained that status (Casas has always claimed he is no rich man). Casas writes that he became a communist whilst a teenager (there is nothing explicit in the book about his subsequent campaigning for the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République of Jacques Chirac), but, come the late 1970s, he was a candidate in Nîmes’ municipal elections - “With more than 3,000 votes that all came from the Left, I made the Right-wing list captained by a candidate who was not even Right-wing” - and, the list having come to power, shortly after the elections he was pronounced director of Nîmes’s Roman Arenes, responsible for putting on operas, theatre, concerts, boxing and bullfights. (Prior to this, though, in partnership with Manolo Chopera, he had already become empresa of Bayonne’s plaza.)

The chronology ends at this point and the book becomes a series of pieces on the author’s confused identity (he has said to Antonio Lorca that his becoming a Spanish citizen this year with the name Simón Domb Cases is the end of a journey in this respect) and bullfighting anecdotes.

Of particular interest to the aficionado are his pieces (some very short) on time spent with Rafael de Paula, Javier Conde, José Tomás, El Juli, Sébastien Castella and Alejandro Talavante, whom he currently manages. Casas recalls a disastrous de Paula encerrona at El Puerto de Santa María during which Camarón de la Isla sat in his car, parked outside. “There are days when it’s better to imagine what is going on than to experience things directly,” said the flamenco star afterwards. On another afternoon, Javier Conde is more concerned about a banana skin he finds in the arena than the bull in front of him! José Tomás escapes the bulls to go fishing, while the thought of being Manolete drives Talavante on to recover from a cornada. Casas writes too of Cristina Sánchez, Marie Sara and Léa Vicens.

Towards the book’s end, Casas writes that he will shortly be packing his bags and leaving the world of tauromachy. He will stay in his house in Madrid on the calle Marqués de Pontejos, embracing the anonymity of being just one more madrileño, and perhaps settle down to write another novel…