Read Online Death and the Sun by Edward Lewine - Free Book Online Page B

yellow
capote
out with both hands, letting it fall in front of him like the skirts of an elegant ball gown. Then he raised the cape, shook it, and shouted. The bull wheeled and headed straight for Fran. His hat pushed down over his eyes, Fran flared his nostrils and scrunched his lips into his face, grimacing with the effort of staying still. The bull came. Fran didn’t move. The bull lowered its head, arching its neck forward. The left horn—a white curve with a black tip—sliced at Fran’s left leg. But just before the horn reached flesh, Fran dropped his right hand, spreading out the cape—and the bull followed the motion of the cloth a few inches to the right, just enough for the horn to whiff by Fran’s leg as he moved the cape, turning it first with his shoulder, then his waist, then his arms, capturing the bull in the gentle slipstream of the cloth, slowing the bull and moving it across his body and on out the other side.
    â€œOlé!”
    Whatever else Fran’s critics said about him, no one could deny that he was an artist with the
capote
. It was always the cornerstone of his performances, and his skill with the big cape didn’t leave him all season. This was a
verónica
pass, named for Saint Veronica, who used a cloth to wipe Jesus’s bloody brow on his way to Calvary. The
verónica
is the basic pass made with the
capote
, the man positioning his feet much as he would for a
muleta
pass—lead foot away from the bull’s line of attack, back foot into the line of the charge—gripping the big circle of the
capote
with his hands on both sides of the wedge that’s cut out of it and swinging it in a semicircle around his body. The pass was done about as well as you can do one.
    Fran passed the bull a few more times, each time stepping toward the center of the ring—as the Spanish say, “gaining ground on the bull”—teaching it who was boss, teaching it to follow the cloth. The passes were slow and clean. The horns were always close but never touched the cape, and Fran followed through on each pass, leaning out over the bull, forcing it to move past his body. The emotion of bullfighting was there and the Valencianos shouted “
Olé!
” and “
Olé!
” and “
Olé!
” as the series unfolded. Then Fran shut off the flow with a half-
verónica—
like a regular
verónica
, but the matador gathers the cloth at his back hip at the very last moment, suddenly removing the bull’s target, whipping the bull’s head around and taking away its desire to charge again.
    A trumpet blast, and Fran’s picadors trotted into view. The bull charged the horses twice, taking two stabs of the lance. Another trumpet, and Fran’s banderilleros put in three sets of sticks. Fran took off his hat and laid it on the sand. It was time for the
faena
with the
muleta
. Fran and the bull were alone in the ring. The audience was all around them, and the ugly office buildings loomed over the roof of the red brick bullring. The sky was dry for the moment, and the air was filled with the guerrilla-warfare sounds of firecrackers exploding and the brassy, percussive music of the bands marching and the people out on the streets. Fran started with the
muleta
in his right hand, reeling off several uneven series of
derechazos
that were marred by the bull’s growing tendency to become distracted and slide away at the end of each pass. So Fran got down on one knee and executed a set of low, pretty, punishing passes, using the semaphore of the cape to command the bull to lower its neck, bringing the head down and giving Fran greater control. Then he stood tall again and twisted the bull around his body in three rhythmic progressions of passes with the right hand that squeezed taut
olés
from the crowd.
    The bull stood its ground, waiting for Fran to act, its flanks heaving, a saddle of blood spreading down its back from where the