Surrounded by Memories

                                                                                    

The talisman

     Above my desk is a framed bullfight poster, faded over the years. It announces the bullfight at the Downtown Tijuana Bull Ring, El Toreo de Tijuana, Sunday June 9, 1963, at 4:00 P.M. On one half, it reads, “Featuring the number one bullfighter of the world today,” and in large bold red letters “PACO CAMINO,” right under his name, “Victorious in Mexico’s Bullfighting Season and the 1963 Fair of Madrid, Spain.” Impressive, right?

     On opposite half is a once colorful printed image of matador Paco Camino, forever captured in youth, blue and gold suit of lights, his mouth agape, his expression defiant, his sword raised triumphantly in the air, and, behind him, charging a red muleta, a massive beast, banderillas in place, the animal’s horns appearing to pop out of the painting. I believe it’s my oldest personal possession, since I was fifteen, everything else abandoned somewhere along my life’s journey.

     Though it’s in front of me, I often forget the poster is there, among other objects I’ve saved, family photos, gifts from students, and souvenirs from my travels, my mind always cluttered with other things. But, if I think about the poster, I remember Sunday afternoons in the early 1950s and 60s visiting my Mexican aunt and uncle’s home in Santa Monica, or my grandmother. At the time, there was only one Spanish-language television station in Los Angeles, Channel 34, which they watched regularly, unless there were those television programs about wild animals in Africa. They enjoyed those, too. I spent many a weekend at my relatives’ homes, to escape the chaos of my own family home, two bedrooms crowded with five younger siblings.

     The bullfights, either from Mexico or Spain, came on every Saturday, at 4:00 P.M. on the Spanish language station. It wasn’t that my grandmother, aunt or uncle were bullfight aficionados. No, they watched because that’s the only program on at that hour, in Spanish, even if they laughed heartily when a bull chased a fat picador from the arena.

     Usually, they’d talk, and I’d lie on the rug, lost in the strange, foreign spectacle, complete with drama, music, and pageantry, tragedy but a second away. In those days, they’d show everything, from the beginning as a new animal rushed into the arena to the grisly end, and two horses dragging out the dead animal’s carcass, nothing like any sport I’d watched or played. The fiesta brava struck a chord, a real enigma.

     I had to know more, so I searched the local library and, surprisingly found a section on bullfighting, extensive, at least a half-shelf, for a community library in the western part of Los Angeles. I first read a book by the man they called the godfather of American bullfighting, Sidney Franklin (born Sidney Frumkin), a Jew from Brooklyn N.Y, who began his career in the 1920s and became a full-fledged matador, in 1945.

     Then there was a book by writer-painter-torero, Californian, Barnaby Conrad, who fought in the 1940s and ‘50s, the darling of the moderns, like Hemingway, Truman Capote, John Steinbeck, and so many celebrities, writers and actors. Conrad’s book, Matador, became a taurine classic and a bestseller. I can’t forget the tall, slim, handsome Philadelphian, John Fulton Short, who, like Conrad, earned the coveted alternativa, making him a professional torero. As a painter, one of Fulton Short’s mediums was real bull’s blood.

     Yet, the encyclopedia, the motherload of bullfighting books in English, was Ernest Heminway’s Death in the Afternoon, not only an encyclopedia but bible, delving into the mysteries of victory and defeat, violence and tragedy. Hemingway explained, in detail, not just the art of bullfighting but the stories of the greatest bullfighters, the lexicon and the history.

     I recall the biographies of Manolete, Carlos Arruza, and Conchita Cintron, a “rejonadora,” woman who fought on horseback and dismounted for the kill. How strange, as I write, all these names and ideas rushing into my head, and I haven’t thought about any of this in decades, not since the last bullfight I attended, when I saw a torero brutalize an animal, and I realized I could no longer condone what I had once infatuated me. I understood it was, for me, no longer a mystery of man’s victory over darkness but man’s inhumanity to animals.

     But, back to 1963. Each week in Los Angeles, before the Sunday corrida in Tijuana, the Los Angeles Times advertised the bullfights in the newspaper’s Calendar Section, and Monday morning wrote reviews of Sunday’s corrida in the Sports Section, to the chagrin of true aficionados who argued la fiesta brava wasn’t a sport but an art.

     In Los Angeles specific Mexican cafes and restaurants tacked up posters promoting each Sunday’s corridas. There was a Hollywood bullfight club, Club Taurino de Hollywood, and noted celebrities would travel to Tijuana in droves, each Sunday, and fill Tijuana’s hotels, party, and, on Sunday, at 4:00 P.M. crowd into the first rows, sunny section, in the old Tijuana bullring downtown. So many people from Southern California began attending, Tijuana’s empresario, Rafael Gaona (how could I still remember that detail?) constructed a new, larger bullring, a 25-thousand-seater they called La Plaza Monumental, or the “Tijuana’s Bullring by the Sea,” so close was it to the Pacific shores.

     Before Hollywood’s adoration of the Wests, Chamberlins, abdul-Jabbars, Shaqs, Kobes, and Jordans, movie stars and starlets admired the toreros of the day, like Paco Camino, Alredo Leal, Manuel Capetillo, Rafael Osuna, and El Cordobes. I guess everybody was reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, but instead of flying off to Pamplona, they headed south to Tijuana.

     In my bedroom, I began hanging posters on my walls, my own small collection if taurine paraphernalia, not only posters but capotes, banderillas, and muletas, and I could hardly wait for the next week when cafes and restaurants in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles hung up the new posters. On Mondays, the day after the bullfight, I’d sneak up to wherever I saw a poster hanging and swipe it from the door or wall. Sometimes, the posters were just cheap paper copies. I liked the ones printed on cardboard. They looked so much better, more professional.

                                                                                        

If memory serves

     Which brings me to the day I rode my bike up Pico boulevard, towards Westwood, where there was a Spanish restaurant, El Matador, no, not Mexican but Spanish, like paella-Spanish. I knew they hung a poster on the main entry to advertise Tijuana’s Sunday bullfights. As I approached, I said, “Yes,” there it was, hanging right where I thought it would be, a beautiful poster featuring Paco Camino, in 1963, the world’s number one bullfighter.

     It was about noon, the restaurant not yet open for business, but the front door open. Rather than just take the poster, something drew me inside the open door. It was dark. Nervously, I stepped inside. I could just make out a long bar then booths, tables and chairs. A large man saw me and approached. “Can I help you,” his voice boomed?

     I asked, shyly, that since Sunday’s bullfight had already passed, if I could have the bullfight poster hanging on the front door. I guess he wasn’t ready for that. He said, “Come in, come in.” I stepped deeper into the cavern. “So,” he said, “you like bullfight posters?” I told him I had a collection hanging on my wall at home. He smiled and with one finger, motioned me inside. He asked me to follow him, which I did.

     He took me into the bowels of the restaurant. I’d never been in a place so elegant. There were a few employees rushing about. The man walked down a flight of stairs. I was right behind him. At the bottom, I saw rows of wine bottles, hundreds of them. It was cool down there. He took me into another room, a museum of bullfight posters, not the small carboard ones I’d been collecting, but large mural-size posters, the kind they display on the walls outside the major bullrings in Spain.

     We walked from one to another, he pointing to his favorites, originals, some very old, and some autographed. I stood there, mesmerized, the beautiful life-like prints of paintings rendering men and bulls in deathly combat, every painting different. He told me where and when he’d collected them, during different fiestas throughout Spain, Mexico, and Latin America, and over many years. After, we walked back up the stairs, he asked me my name and told me he was the restaurant owner. I didn’t know how to respond. He looked rich and distinguished. I was just a working-class Mexican kid afflicted by a passion we both shared.

     Once outside in the light, I thanked him. Really, I had no words just emotions, kid emotions passing through me, unable to put into words, or to tell him how much his kindness had affected me. He reached out and took the poster from the door. He handed it to me and wished me luck.

     Now, as I look up at the poster on the wall in front of me, I remember, it’s not just a poster but history, a part of my past, for better or worse, and, like all objects we all have around us, they tell a story, if we are open and willing to listen.