Of Bullrings, Billowing Capes and the Queen of Chula Vista

Pachanga !

The bullfighting season is on!

And no one’s going scuffing the turf more eagerly than Kay Scott and Lois Haselton. Sure, Kay’s knocking 70 and Lois 50. Kay’s a widow, an ex-liquor store manager, Lois once handled public relations for Scripps Memorial hospital and administered a nursing home.

But don’t let that fool you. That’s just Monday to Friday. You’ve heard of Jekyll and Hyde?

Come weekends that life goes . . . click! Switched off. Switched over like a TV channel selector to . . . 00.

We’re at the Plaza de Toros in Tijuana. Bright new red and white paint on the woodwork, raked dust, bubbling people, sweating barmen mixing sangrias of tomato juice and tequila, pfffssst!-ing the tops off half a dozen Superior beer bottles at a time, oblivious to the mariachis blaring out “Cielo de Andalusia,” their polished trumpets fairly ricocheting stars off from the sun.

Aficionados Serenaded

Even the giant bass guitars glow a bulbous, amber welcome to this next-holiest group below the toreros--the aficionados.

This is the in-group. Those considered serious enough to be invited to drink, eat, mingle and meet with everybody from bullring owners to matadors on the day before the first crowds come pouring through to celebrate death and valor in the afternoon.

This is the pachanga .

A Mexican with a fine white fitted suit shouts out over a dozen heads. “La Reina de Chula Vista!” Julio Vieyra, a one-time bullfighter, looks over to a little group of tall Gringos giggling like kids meeting on their first day back at school. He elbows his way through the crowds.

“Kay! Como estas? “

Julio embraces the thin, gray-haired grandmother from Chula Vista, kissing her on both cheeks.

“Aha! La cuadrilla!”

The veteran puntillero --he has the unpopular task of delivering the coup de grace to bulls with a small dagger--looks around the group of old hell-raisers. He sees the smiling schoolboy face of Whitey Kick. Whitey must be 70, but down here his eyes shine like those of a 30-year-old. His margarita arm sticks out straight to save the drink as Julio embraces him. Big Mario Ferrucci beside him is next.

Queen of Chula Vista

The Queen of Chula Vista looks around indulgently at her friends.

“We’ve been coming down here quite a number of years. We’re the cuadrilla all right. You know, the cuadrilla’s the group of toreros who support a matador in the ring. We’d be in there supporting Julio, if we were a bit younger . . . .”

“Kay! No one can be younger than you. I should call you the Princess of Chula Vista.”

Kay puffs her cigarette and smiles. The gallantry. Who else but a Latin?

The mariachis are striking up with a southern ballad. The conversation is fractured and fantastic. “Did you know,” says Reuben Padilla, former director of tourism for Baja California and now the bullring’s PR chief, “that ole comes from the Arabic Allah ? They shouted it in the time of the Moors, when the matador was spared for another pass. ‘Thank God!’ they cried. That was 1,500 years ago.”

“Did you know,” shouts someone else, “that I was at the Running of the Bulls at Pamplona last year, and the bulls were almost trampled to death by the crowd? Each one had a little red copy of ‘The Sun Also Rises’ in his hand . . . . “

“Did you know,” says Kay, “that I’ve seen Gilbert Roland, John Wayne, Robert Stack, Stephanie Powers and Robert Goulet in this very bullring--except they don’t seem to come down anymore . . . “

Somebody’s calling.

“And do you know the major ?”

Bullring Owner

A slim middle-aged man with a thin face and sharp eyes emerges from the crowd. Major Lopez Hurtado turns out to be almost 80, a self-made millionaire with two bullrings, one of them the Monumental Bullring-by-the-Sea in Tijuana. He tells of the 2 million to 3 million pesos he’s losing every year keeping his rings open, of his early years in the heroic times of Mexico, among such giants as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.

“And he still carries a gun,” mutters Kay with a wry smile.

It turns out she has also met Pancho Villa’s widow, 10 years ago, down in Chihuahua. Kay, it’s beginning to appear, knows just about everybody.

Rogelio Leduc comes smiling up to Kay. They embrace. He’s a matador, a noted rejoneador , an expert in the Portuguese style of horseback bullfighting. He’s been a professional 15 years and gored five times.

“Kay, she’s the great one here. Her late husband, Bob, he was one of the greatest aficionados. Not just a turista . . . . He knew the toreo like few men.”

Kay’s eyes melt.

Suddenly there’s a blast from a distant trumpet. It’s the mariachis, and they must be in the ring already. “La Virgen de Macarena” sounds out.

“Come,” says Kay, “this is our one chance in the year.”

“Chance?”

“You’ll see.”

We are sucked along with the crowd. Margaritas in hand up the steps to emerge . . . inside the ring, a great Roman arena. The shape, the atmosphere cannot have changed much since Androcles became the only man to leave the arena with his adversary.

“See?” Kay points down to a group forming into a little clump in the callejon --the passage behind the barrera surrounding the ring. “They’re going to fight today.”

She fought two years ago. But today she has a hand bandaged from an operation.

‘Afraid of Animals’

And Lois? “Me? Not me. I come to watch. I’m afraid of animals.”

The trumpet blasts. People already in the bleachers cheer. The brave little group prepares itself for its moment of truth.

“We who are about to die . . . “ a Gringo calls out in English.

“Here to die, gone tomorrow!” yells back another voice from the seats above. “What’s holding you up?”

Suddenly, from the other side, a red wooden door pops open. A little black bullet rockets out, then jams to a stop, twitching and bewildered in the glaring sunlight. Silence. Magically, the platoon of gladiators has evaporated behind boards. Now, half a dozen capes blossom like pink and yellow butterflies around the ring.

“ La tienta ,” says Kay. “These are 1-year-olds, females. They try them out to see if they’ll mother good bulls. They say the strain always comes through the mother. They’d never use young bull calves; their memory is too good.”

A young girl is out there, in a tight maroon suit, armed with a muleta --the red cape and sword. This kid is serious. An aficionado from Los Angeles. The yearling is lowering its head, springing forward--and bowls into her, completely missing the cape. She goes flying. The calf turns. It has horns already. This looks serious. The girl scrambles up and just makes it to the barrera .

Kay looks across. “Want to try?”

Oh, God. . . .

The telltale cape is shaking like a loose sail in a hurricane.

“Your territory is the center,” says someone. “The bull’s is the outer circle. Remember that. You’re fighting for territory.”

The long walk, like the walk to the gallows. There must be even a twinkle of glory in that stark moment. Can this be real? It’s like walking through a TV screen into a play.

Then suddenly, she’s coming. Those deadly little black eyes. The “carrump, carrump” of the hoofs. Put the cape out, put the cape out! Which side? Which side won’t she lunge at? It’s a strange feeling. A strange and even powerful, intoxicating feeling . . . . There is this animal steaming toward you with evil intent and you cannot run away. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200, BUT DO SOMETHING!!!

“FFFWOOOOFFFFFF!”

Confronting the Bull

It does itself. The miracle occurs. She goes for the cape. The blurred black bundle of dust and dribble explodes out the tunnel of the cape. Those little nascent, pointed white stubs flurry by like devil’s horns.

“Watch out!”

She’s turned on a dime. Stand to the left! No, the right. Whoosh! Don’t jump, coward! Feet are supposed to stand. You’re giving in to her. Can’t help it.

Two seconds while she paws the ground. Now it’s no one else in the world. You and her. This fight’s between us. Stay out of it. The words. The words, they say. Try it.

“ Toro . Ho, ho, toro !” Shake the cape. Come on, come on . . . .

Two passes and you’re still standing. That dangerous exhilaration of power--the feeling of immortality that occurs to those who survive narrow escapes--starts coursing hot through the veins.

“ Toro ! Hey! Toro !”

“Next!”

“Whah . . . ?”

“OK, senor , can you give the cape to this young lady . . . . “

Cheers From Crowd

So soon? Not yet . . . but there is still the walk back, to cheers from the indulgent crowd, ready to pretend to be a real crowd with a real torero. Oh, boy. To be the real thing: the bug. You’ve caught it. In this moment you realize you’ve been wasting all these good years avoiding real life. Why have you never pitted your self against the world before? Two bows, and you’re considering a third, till it dawns the cheers are now for your successor.

Back up in the bleachers, the calves look ridiculously tiny. You were letting those babies worry you?

“Don’t kid yourself,” says Kay, “the smaller they are, the faster. Turn in a flash. A butt from them hurts like hell.”

As if to underscore her words, the yearling butts the girl to the ground. She’s now fending off charges with her feet. The cuadrilla rushes in to distract the animal. She’ll mother good animals, for sure.

The girl limps out behind the safety of the barrera .

“Hey! Look at this,” she squeals a moment later, “On my ankle, see? A scar! I’m made! I can dine out on this for years!”

Sunday morning: It was once Kay’s kids’ den. A converted garage in the trees behind her house in Chula Vista where they used to play dolls, and mothers and fathers and make model planes. Now the low rafters inside look as though they’re colonized by little black bats.

They’re not . . . bats.

They are ears--Bulls’ ears. And there are tails, too. They tickle your head as you walk under them. They were given by matadors and thumb-tacked with the name of the bull and the date of the fight on yellowing cards.

Cured in Salt

“I let ‘em sit in salt a couple of weeks after we’ve been given them,” says Kay. “That dries ‘em out fine.”

A bull on the wall looks up at a banner reading “CLUB TAURINO DE CHULA VISTA,” his elephant-tusk horns the ideal hat-flip, his big black head looking as though it had just neatly punctured the wall from the outside. A brass plate beneath says his name is Antiquetero, from the Carranco bull ranch. He was put away by the matador Chucho Solorzano in the Tijuana bullring on July 7, 1974.

Kay points proudly up to a horn dangling down between the ears.

“That,” she says, “is off El Cordobes’ bull. It broke off when the bull crashed into the barrera . A friend tossed it up to me. See. Shaved. They do that nowadays.”

This is bullfight-day brunch at the club. Kay is in black slacks and stylish black and white blouse. Lois is dressed in a gray Spanish riding outfit with a wide-brimmed gray Cordova hat. The place is filling up with high-spirited people around low tables heavy with Mexican food. Many are meeting for the first time since last season. But some have spent the winter together on their other passion: opera. It somehow fits.

Kay and Lois and others have been going together to the opera for years, although Kay has recently dropped her season tickets. Lois just loves the involvement, the escape from the sensible world.

“I have had season tickets for 15 years,” she says. She edits the newsletter of the Point Loma Opera Guild. “It’s that sense of drama. Of art taking you out of your mundane life, taking you back to fundamentals, and beauty.”

“A corrida (bullfight) is a dance,” says a tall, fair, young man named Mark Schwarz, who looks like a character from “The Sun Also Rises.” He’s an amateur bullfighter himself. “This dance is a tragedy. High tragedy. It is art. Like the opera and ballet. Two living beings intimately locked together.

‘Extremely Romantic’

“It is extremely romantic. Romanticism, the Latin view of life--they’re intimately mixed up with the bullfight. At its best it becomes sublime, the matador and bull surrender their individual selves. It is metaphysical. A good matador will mold the bull to create art. It’s no surprise these people here are cultured people. When they’re not going to bullfights, they’re going to the opera. Or the theater. Ballet. Because bullfighting is theater, ballet too. A living theater with mythic qualities. An intensely romantic experience.”

“The first bullfight I went to,” says Kay, “it was 1957. The fellow I was going with asked me if I wanted to go with him. I went. I hated it. It seemed such a bloody thing. I didn’t go for another three years. But that was Carlos Arruza, a great. His son’s fighting today. I loved it. I realized what a dreadful one my first had been. But that’s what happens: I warn you. If you let it get you, it will change your life!”

The Club Taurino de Chula Vista may not be the biggest bullfight aficionado club in the country. That, of all places, is in Chicago. And at 27, it may not be the oldest. That’s in Los Angeles. But it is the only one with its own clubhouse. Here in Kay’s back yard, they meet on every second Thursday of every month, and try to invite a matador, or picador, or someone who can give them more knowledge about the sport.

“But it’s not a sport,” says someone, “it’s an art. Betty Turin, she had the sport!”

Betty Turin, now dead, was the club’s champion bun-watcher; she could recognize the tight-dressed matadors by the shape of their flanks, without having to look at their faces.

The club itself has seen more prosperous times. When they had 200 members they really felt like a group. Now they’re down to 50, and Kay misses the old days when everybody drank together, watched the fights together, then went and ate and partied together afterward.

‘The Best of Times’

“They were . . . the best of times,” she says. “These days, everyone is separated into cliques and groups.” She sighs. “Maybe it’s age.”

Someone is talking of Manolete, the great matador known as the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, and of the bung-eyed bull, Islero, who killed him. Someone else is expressing his pent-up feelings with a poem by Jeanne Elmer Tipton:

“Who knows why

Each Sunday afternoon

During the no-fight season, regardless of where we are,

An imaginary clarinero sounds

The beginnings of a corrida not seen.

As we mentally pace the floor

With an almost undefined desire

To taste the heat

Carried by sandy winds

Into eyes, hair, mouths;

To feel the honest Ole

escape into the mountain of sound

Created by aficion unlimited

Knowing and untrained together”

“ ‘Untrained,’ ” says Lois. “You know why I joined this club? It’s because I have been going down to bullfights for 20 years, and I suddenly realized I didn’t really understand a darned thing about them. Their subtleties, the difference between good and bad matadors, good and bad bulls . . . . For so many years, we all went down and made asses of ourselves. See this?”

She points to a painting of young Minoans leaping over a bull’s horns.

“Three thousand years ago. Can you imagine! This is where it started. Then evolved during the Moorish time in Spain. What we’re going to see this afternoon comes through an unbroken chain from all that! And it is still based on the same principles, of the courage of bulls and men. I find the idea awesome.” She looks at her watch. “Come on, everyone,” she says, “time’s creeping up, and it’s going to be crazy down there!”

All the way down, Lois has been playing bullfight music. They’re well psyched up by the time they get to the bullring.

At the gates an old man wanders near a ticket line.

“Gringos come here with their money . . . put prices up so high none of us ordinary citizens can see our own bullfights! Call that justice?”

Justice or no, at 4 o’clock more or less precisely, the 20th Century evaporates before an incredible and sometimes stomach-turning phantasmagoria of color, crowds, trumpets, bulls, blood and bravery, violence and grace, courage and confusion.

“Ole!’ cries Kay from the shady side, every time Luis Fernando Sanchez passes a big black bull through his cape.

Concern Expressed

“I worry for these boys,” she says. “I’ve known them all since they were kids. Luis and his two brothers--they have all become matadors. We were surprised. Their father manages the Penuelas ranch down in Aguascalientes. Carlos Arruza’s son, Manolo, that we all expected. His father was one of the matador greats. Luis--he started from scratch.”

Kay interrupts herself.

“ Ole !” she shouts. “This is pretty nice here.”

As Sanchez deftly controls the bull with a series of passes, the crowd responds with roars of “ Ole !” When he thrusts the sword cleanly behind the bull’s shoulder, and the bull wobbles to a collapse, they go wild. They stand and wave white handkerchiefs toward the little box of judges.

A few rows up from Kay, Lois is standing and cheering and waving a white Kleenex.

“ Ole ! I wish . . . I’ve got a big handkerchief I keep forgetting to bring. Ole !”

Sanchez is walking the circle, with his cuadrilla . Red roses are raining down from the stands. So are hats, women’s shoes and wineskins. The crowd wants him to get one of the bull’s ears at least. His suit of lights sparkles gold, the one color that only matadors can wear. It’s worth about $1,500 and fashioned in Spain, according to Mark Schwarz, who’s sitting next to Lois, taking notes for the L.A. Aficionados’ magazine.

The judge stands. He holds up . . . two handkerchiefs. Two ears. The crowd goes wild. Sanchez starts another round to receive the crowd’s adoration.

“One ear. That would have been right. But he didn’t deserve two,” says Schwarz. “You know, he looks so elegant from here,” says his wife, Marguerita, “but when you talk to him, he is just a simple, unsophisticated country boy.”

Someone tosses a pair of binoculars down. One of the cuadrilla picks it up. Sanchez is aiming a shoe back at the senorita who threw it down. He aims true. She catches it and her friends squeal with delight.

“His mother will be waiting,” says Kay. “You’ve no idea the hell they go through, these boys’ mothers and wives. If they were here, they would be in the chapel praying for their sons to escape injury. But, right now, they will be at home, waiting by the phone. That’s the first thing he’ll do when he gets out of the ring. He’ll ring his mom and tell her he’s all right.”

End of Fight

The end of the fight is near. The matador Meijia has bought a seventh bull because he feels he hasn’t given the crowd a great performance. That’s going to cost him about $2,000.

He gives a good fight, but, at the end, it’s a mess.

His sword doesn’t strike home. He reaches for a special sword with a crossbar near the tip. He lowers the animal’s head and stabs it in the back of his neck. The bull rears up. The sword flicks from Meijia’s hands. It whiplashes behind, and over the barrera . Suddenly there’s a commotion. A man with blood streaming from his left eye is being hurried down the callejon toward the medical team.

Kay’s friend Julio Vieyra stands ready to finish the bull off with his short dagger.

It’s not a pretty end.

Kay talks to someone about getting one of the “devices,” the red and green rosettes--or is that just the blood?--pinned to the bulls to show which ranch they have come from. Outside, under the bullring, Lyn Sherwood, who calls himself a one-man John Birch Society of bullfighting is saying he’s never seen worse bulls from such a good ranch as La Mision. He concedes that Luis Sanchez Fernandez provided the best moments, but others didn’t make full use of their material.

“Feel like paella?” asks Kay.

The mood is mellow at Tonico’s, a paella place off the top of Avenida Revolucion in downtown Tijuana. Everyone is talking about the bulls.

Spain is all around. We’re surrounded by posters. And pictures of the owner, Antonio (Tonico) Joven with famous Spanish singers like Rocio Dorcal. He is a Spaniard himself, who fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and sought political asylum in Mexico in 1948.

Kay has been coming here since he opened six years ago. She persuades Tonico to sing. Alone. No accompaniment. He sits there with his wife, and lets out the most searing Spanish Gypsy laments. Fandangos, alegrias. When he sings them, his face fills with the persecution and sorrow of the Spain he left behind.

The wine is making everyone mellow. No one wants to leave and break the spell. Back to bills instead of bulls, worries instead of wine. Suburbia instead of ceremony.

On the way back, in the jam at the border, the poem by Jeanne Almer Tipton floats through the brain.

“Others can never understand.

What excitement exists

In fuchsia and gold plus red,

With monster black

Heavily pressing his weight ahead

Past an empty target

Always ready to try again.

Our common plight

Each Sunday afternoon:

Others can never understand”