La Matadora

“The important thing is that you never lose sight of the bull’s face,” says Maripaz Vega. “Never.”

Vega is a phenomenon that couldn’t have existed throughout most of the Spain that Ernest Hemingway knew. She is Spain’s only woman bullfighter. During Franco’s dictatorship, women were banned from attending a bullfight, to say nothing of actually fighting. But before and after, bullfighting has been the most macho of sports.

In this theatrical play of man versus nature, Vega is woman versus nature, and woman versus men who say the bullring is no place for a woman. Attitudes toward bullfighting in Spain are changing though, and Vega occupies an unusual place in that. In a sport steeped in tradition, and one so central to Spanish identity, Vega is challenging tradition while keeping it alive. And if the public is more open to the idea of a matadora, it is also less interested in bullfighting in general. Polls show a waning interest in bullfights.

Vega blames it on competition from other forms of entertainment that didn’t exist in the sport’s glory days. But more and more people see the sport as cruel. Vega sees it as art. Done properly, she says, a bullfight ends quickly. The sword penetrates the spine, plunges in the heart and ends a bull’s life more cleanly than a slaughterhouse.

The question of cruelty aside, Vega makes it look like art. Unlike Hemingway, I can’t claim to have an aficion for bullfighting. I couldn’t tell a good matador from a bad one. But I can see the grace in Vega’s work.

She invites us to watch her practice with her brother Jorge. We follow them to Malaga’s empty La Malagueta bullring. It’s 6 p.m., and after winding through the back hallways of the stadium, we walk out into the sun, already beginning to slant behind the stands.

It’s a different world here, reduced to light and shadow, form and space. Just a hard-packed sand arena, barren, and a circle of stands.

“Even without the bull I’d be nervous,” I say, looking up at the stands above us.

“You should see Mexico City. The crowd is twice as big,” Jorge says.

Their equipment is simple. A pair of bullhorns on a plastic tube for Jorge to take the role of bull. A pink capote for Vega to lure in the bull, switching to a red cape after she gets permission for the kill, and a sword to do the job.

“What, is it made of lead?” Cristina asks as she hoists the capote herself.

Jorge makes a less than convincing, gangly, bull, huffing and snorting as he charges his sister. She lures him with sounds and gestures and draws him with distance. She teases him with the capote, dances with him, brings him close to her, then spins him away. The pink cape flourishes as she spins, carving her body in an arc, knee forward, leg back. “Grace under pressure,” as Hemingway said.

She turns her back on the bull and walks away, but keeping a subtle eye on it. In a true bullfight, she says, she would watch the bull, she would watch the crowd, and she would play with them both.

Vega switches to the red cape, smaller and lighter than the capote. The sword is hidden, but occasional glints of sunlight flash on it. Eventually, when the bull and the crowd are ready, she draws out the sword and readies for the kill.

Vega opens the space and closes the space between her and Jorge the bull. When the bull, approaches, all four legs on the ground, head down, she is ready to sink the blade into its spine.

What other sport ends in death?

“This is definitely left over from the Romans,” Cristina says. “It’s the same thing. A man putting his life at risk in front of the crowd.”

Watching Vega, though, I realize my first perceptions were wrong. The bullring may seem like a place of extremes, but it’s all subtlety. The matador – or the matadora – plays with the bull and the crowd. She chooses the time and manner of death. These things that seem like extremes – man and nature, light and shadow, even tradition and change – are all part of a dance that never stands still.