Matadora, in Macho Male World, Wins an Ole!

Bad omens had dogged the matadora for days.

First, the earth beneath Mexico City had heaved, leaving her manager incommunicado the week before the fight. Then the bulls she was to fight were reportedly killed in an accident when their truck tipped over in central Mexico.

Now her first bull, a stand-in, had entered the ring in Tecate. Again, the signs weren’t good. There was no long, hard charge--the mark of a well-bred bull. Instead, the animal just stopped and waited in mid-ring.

“I was walking to it and looking at the bull,” matadora Raquel Martinez said last week, recalling the moment before the grandstands at Tecate flattened like dominoes. “When I heard the sound, I looked up. Everyone was gone.”

Earthquakes, car accidents and collapsing bullrings: matadora Raquel Martinez’s life seems to mix the mythical and the mundane. A high-school clarinetist, she figured she’d teach music. She ended up reputedly the world’s only full-fledged matadora.

She fights throughout Mexico, and in North, Central and South America, and can’t even remember how many ears and tails she has won. She is married to the spokesman for the San Diego Police Department and has a 10-year-old son. She eats Sunday brunch at Bob’s Big Boy.

Of her career choice, Martinez explains simply, “I want to be recognized for something. I didn’t go to college; I wanted to do something I could be proud of. I’ve accomplished something no other woman has. It’s like having a Ph.D in bull behavior.”

Last Sunday, Martinez passed the hours before the fight in a limbo that seemed to exemplify the peculiar contrasts in her life. In a dingy room in the El Dorado Motel in Tecate, she went about small chores preparing for a performance that could kill her.

Barefoot on the brown carpet she unfurled the multicolor capes and twirled them before her one by one. She examined her swords while a telethon for the quake victims played on the black-and-white TV. She sent out for bobby pins.

Later, her first teacher, the Mexican matador El Charro Gomez, hooked her into her glittering, gold-embroidered “suit of lights.” Then she walked out, past the motel pool, in the late-afternoon sun and down the dusty street to the ring.

Born in Tijuana and raised in Imperial Beach, Martinez grew up with five uncles. They would take her camping, fishing and hunting rabbits in Baja, she remembers: “They wanted to make my sister and me strong.”

She went to Mar Vista High School and briefly to Southwestern College, where she studied music for a while, then left. She remembers jobs in electronics and at a snack bar. She burned the caramel popcorn, got fired and “knew I wasn’t cut out for anything.”

Until 1969, Martinez says, she knew nothing about bullfighting (though she later discovered a distant cousin was a matador). That year, the great Spanish matador, El Cordobes, fought in Tijuana. Martinez went with a friend to watch.

“El Cordobes had so much publicity, you couldn’t get to the seats,” she remembers. “I saw his charisma, his bravery turn on the crowd. And I saw the music, the fear, the laughter. From then on, I went to bullfights.”

She began training with a bullfighting club in San Diego and in 1971 faced her first calf. When she got in the ring, she changed her mind but her exit was blocked and the calf charged. Forced into it, she found she did everything she was trained to do.

A whole new world had opened up, she says: “I was in charge of that energy. I was in charge of . . . it !”

Martinez, who is married to Lt. Bill Robinson of the San Diego Police Department and has a young son, went to Mexico about nine years ago to try to make it in bullfighting. She found a manager, former matador Jesus Munoz. She began fighting dozens of novice fights a year.

In 1981, she became a full-fledged matadora--capable of fighting full-grown bulls. She is said to be the only one currently fighting in the world. She divides her time between an apartment in Mexico City and a house and family in San Diego.

Mornings at eight, she begins training with other bullfighters in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park--running, playing a kind of handball and practicing against human bulls. She returns home at 2:30 p.m. and showers, then returns to a bullfighters’ cafe to talk bulls. In a good year, she says she might fight 30 fights.

“She has the ability to communicate with the public when she fights,” said Adrian Romero, a Mexican matador living in San Diego. “She feels what she does. She really possesses herself and it communicates to the public. I think that’s one of the things that has really helped her get where she is. She does have that sensitivity.”

“She does a formal fight, understanding the bull and her possibilities with it,” said Paul Dobson, the San Diego restaurateur who fights as an amateur. “She is brave. She has fought a lot. That is the secret. She has what we call technique or school.”

Martinez has been injured three times--a broken foot, four broken bones in a hand and a broken nose. She has been tossed on the horns of a bull but never gored. She says she finds that slightly embarrassing: “I want to be able to say, ‘Yes, I had a goring.’ ”

She says she is increasingly religious, praying before going into the ring. She tried to learn how to sharpen swords but says she wasted too many. She is superstitious, careful about keeping her hat off the bed before a fight.

Once, she spared a bull--the ultimate compliment to a bull’s courage, bestowed by a fight’s judges at the urging of the crowd. Fighting regularly, she says she can live on the pay. She says she made $6,000 in one fight in Peru.

What she wants, she says, is to fight in the Plaza Mexico in Mexico City.

“There’s something in me that says there’s more I have to do,” she says. “I want to fight in the biggest ring in the world. Not only fight there, but fight well. Maybe then I’ll feel better about myself.”

It has not been easy being a woman in bullfighting.

She tells a story about her first weeks in Mexico City: young, blonde and speaking poor Spanish, she had a list of 27 people who might have been able to help. She recalls, “One to 26, the majority said, ‘Oh yes. But first, let’s have dinner. Let’s go dance.’ ”

The 27th, she says, was Jesus Munoz--”this old man with thick glasses, sort of scary looking. He curses, yells, screams. But he screams at you, not behind your back. He never said, ‘Let’s go to dinner.’ He wanted to see what I was.”

Munoz recognized her “aficion and bravery--my love for the bullfights and the bulls,” Martinez says. He began teaching her--how to walk into a bullring, how to control bad bulls. Instead of learning about well-bred bulls, she learned the other way around.

That has stood Martinez in good stead, she says. She says she has fought bulls that other matadors wouldn’t go near. Now, her schedule of fights has dropped to 10 this year, she says, because most men refuse to fight with her.

According to Martinez, men refuse because they fear the crowds will favor a woman. But Romero said, “I think, more than anything, they fear that if things weren’t going to roll their way, it wouldn’t look good in the newspapers the next day.”

“She’s up against a tradition which is inbred,” Dobson said. “The traditional bullfighting world does exclude women. It’s a curiosity and a lot of traditional people won’t take her seriously. It’s like having a woman priest in the Catholic Church: it’s not accepted.”

“Bullfighters are very superstitious, very traditional,” he added. “There’s a tremendous amount of camaraderie. I have to admit that one of the reasons you’re a bullfighter is the tradition. She’s bucking a tremendously strong tradition.”

She keeps her hair long, blonde, curling over her shoulders and her weight down to 120 pounds. Her son, Scott, said his mother was 23 years old, an age she later admitted her manager encourages her to use. A brief biography suggests she is 29; she concedes privately that she is older but did not want her age published.

On Sunday before the Tecate fights, Martinez sat with Robinson and Scott in a restaurant near the bullring. She wore a blue T-shirt with a San Diego police squad car printed on the back and “America’s finest” on the front. She was worried about the bulls.

Not only were they from a new ranch, because the animals scheduled for the afternoon had been killed en route, but they had been run through the streets of Tecate Saturday and Sunday, exposing them to human behavior before meeting her in the ring.

Fending off a mineral water, she said she never eats before fights. For one thing, she’s too nervous. But more importantly, she said, “In case there’s a goring, if there’s food in your system, it’s bad for the operation.”

Down the street in Room 29 at the El Dorado Motel, she had laid out her sea-blue bullfighter’s jacket and calf-length pants in the lap of an armchair. Encrusted with gold embroidery and ruby-red studs, the jacket sat upright, as though inhabited.

Martinez opened a large tooled-leather trunk, pulled out the heavy canvas capes, threaded them with wooden dowels, and spun them beside her. She brought out a matching case filled with swords--some for fighting and killing, others as spares.

Later, she stood on a chair in the skin-tight blue trousers while Gomez fastened the buttons below her knees. She threaded a red ribbon tie through the collar of her starched white shirt. She put on lipstick and walked stiffly across the room to wait.

Outside, two picadors emerged from another room, ready to assist Martinez by weakening her bull’s neck muscles with lances. Legs encased in armor against gorings, they tossed their lances into a pickup truck, climbed in clumsily and bounced onto the street.

Martinez stepped out minutes later. Glittering in gold and blue, she walked calmly through the parking lot. Joined by Gomez, she turned and walked down the sidewalk, scattered with discarded limes from the drinks of weekend revelers. At the plaza, they entered the ring.

An hour later, it collapsed.