TRAVELING IN STYLE : Dances With Bulls : Bullfighting Is as Entrenched in Spanish Culture as Goya and El Greco, No More So Than in the Mountain Town of Ronda, Where the Modern Bullfight Was Born

He was just a stick figure then, a skinny teen-ager with a shock of black hair who had never fought in a real bullfight. He called himself Jesulin, or “Little Jesus,” and looked about 13 years old. When we saw him step onto the sand wearing a suit of lights like a party costume, we figured it must be a joke.

I had brought my American friends to the bullring in Ronda, a strikingly romantic town of 22,000 in the mountains above the Costa del Sol, for a taste of quintessential Spain. We had eaten tapas and sipped sherry in the new sector, built after the Christians defeated the Moors, and peered over the side of the dramatic Tajo Gorge, Spain’s most celebrated suicide site.

It was May and the night before had been frigid as we slept wrapped in blankets in a friend’s old, unheated house just off the Carrera de Espinel. But the sun had done its work and the afternoon had turned warm and then hot: bullfight weather. By the time we reached our seats in the upper level of Ronda’s marvelous bullring, by most accounts the oldest in Spain, we had pulled off our sweaters.

I knew the other bullfighters scheduled for the novillada , or novice fight, and the breed of bulls. This Little Jesus had been brought in on short notice to appear with two of the most promising novices in Spain after a third suffered a horrendous goring in Seville. But I wasn’t too disappointed, and the prospect of watching a bullfighter’s debut seemed exciting to my friends--though that was before we saw how adolescent he looked. As Jesulin gingerly moved across the ring toward the bull that was silently watching him from the other side of the sand, it seemed to take all the strength he could muster in his matchstick arms just to keep the heavy pink cape from dragging along the ground.

The bullfight is an unpredictable combination of factors, and what you expect to happen almost never does. That day, the most senior of the bullfighters, who would soon graduate to full matador, found nothing to work with in his bull. The next bull’s personality exposed a lack of substance in the second bullfighter’s style, just as some weaknesses of a classical pianist can be masked by playing Grieg or Schonberg but are invariably exposed by Bach.

Then Jesulin stepped out amid a hum of chatter--for he is from a nearby town called Ubrique and seemed to have brought with him plenty of supporters--and triumphed. Not only could he hold the cape, it turned out, but he also showed off a stripped-down artistry that made us gasp. It was unadorned of the needless flourishes more-experienced bullfighters add to their repertoires to please a crowd that usually knows no better.

Not Jesulin. He had a dignity that belied his appearance, and bullfighting is all about dignity, of both man and animal. Closer to dance or theater than sport and reported under the rubric of Culture in Spanish newspapers, bullfighting doesn’t match man against bull so much as unite them to create profound emotion. At least, that’s what is supposed to happen, and what does happen when it is done well, which is every now and then.

For that reason, and not because of blood-thirst or moral vacuity, about 43 million spectators attended bullfights last year in Spain and France, and the list of bullfighting’s artistic and intellectual fanatics includes not only Ernest Hemingway but Orson Welles (whose ashes are buried on a farm outside Ronda), writers Kenneth Tynan and and Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain’s King Juan Carlos and his aging mother, Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Michener, CBS broadcaster Robert Trout and, for what it’s worth, Madonna.

Jesulin de Ubrique did it well that day. He created emotion through his dominance of the animal, and with each pass made the attentive spectator sense time standing still, and his or her own mortality hovering near. Jesulin earned an ear off his first bull as a trophy, and with his second bull he was better; by then, even my American friends understood what was happening. After his second kill, he was hoisted onto a handler’s shoulders and carried off as the conqueror of the afternoon.

That was six years ago. Today, at 21, Jesulin de Ubrique begins the new bullfight season--which started in earnest in the coastal city of Castellon in March and continues into October all over Spain and southern France--as the most popular matador in the world. He has, regrettably, learned to alter his way of fighting bulls to please the masses, and become rich because of it, earning an estimated $8 million last year.

When he is playing to the crowd, I can hardly watch him anymore, though he is a hit with the teen-age girls and the tourists. To follow bullfights, however, you learn to ignore what you must and cherish what you can. So, no matter how much Jesulin panders, I think of him with gratitude. I’ve seen him when he was good, unexpectedly, on a warm and sunny day, with friends--and what’s more, I saw it in Ronda.

Any bullfight is a classic Spanish experience (one of the few uniquely Spanish experiences left, Spaniards will tell you), but a bullfight in Ronda is archetypal. The bullring there dates to 1785. It is perfectly round (an architectural feat then) and supported by double-decked columns of stone, which give it a Hellenic air. There is a wonderful taurine museum inside, with old posters and swords and suits of lights, and the crowd gathers in the square nearby to eat and drink and argue about matadors. The bulls have a tameness bred into them now, but not much else has changed since Pedro Romero created and codified the modern spectacle here 200 years ago.

Romero, born in 1754, was the son and grandson of bullfighters and founder of the Ronda school of toreo , an artistic sensibility that has evolved into what we now consider the modern spectacle. He popularized the cape and the concept of outwitting a bull not with body movements but purely with your arms and a scrap of red cloth. And he invented the cuadrill , in which lesser bullfighters, dressed in silver instead of gold, aid the matador by performing tasks in the ring.

During a multifarious life that lasted until he was 85, Romero killed more than 5,000 bulls without being seriously gored. Goya painted him. And when Hemingway wanted a name for the bullfighter in “The Sun Also Rises,” he appropriated the most famous bullfight name of all.

Hemingway’s Pedro Romero is a character modeled after another bullfighter who also happens to be from Ronda. That was Cayetano Ordon~ez, one of Hemingway’s favorite matadors in the 1920s, although he later wrote disparagingly of him in “Death in the Afternoon.”

In 1959, Hemingway spent a summer in Spain chronicling a rivalry between the bullfighters Luis Miguel Dominguin and Antonio Ordon~ez, Cayetano’s son. Hemingway rode in Ordon~ez’s car and sat with him while he dressed, and wrote about it all for a Life magazine article that became the book “The Dangerous Summer.” Ordon~ez started his career as Ronda’s favorite son, not just Cayetano’s, for that’s the way the city is, and by the time he ended it in the ‘70s, he belonged to all of Spain, too.

After Ordon~ez retired, he became the manager of the Ronda bullring, picking the bullfighters and negotiating the contracts. I saw him there on that day in 1989, balding and flabby but utterly recognizable, behind the ticket window. Beside him stood his teen-age grandson Francisco, born to his daughter Carmen and her husband, the great Spanish bullfighter Francisco Rivera, known as Paquirri, who died a national hero after he was gored in the ring in 1984.

Since then, Francisco Rivera Ordon~ez himself has developed into a bullfighter. He was scheduled to graduate from novice to a full matador last month and will likely appear in Ronda at the festival there this September. Ticket prices will be high, for Ronda considers any Ordon~ez its own, but if you can get there, the emotion you’ll feel in the bullring will be worth the price.

But getting to Ronda--on any day, from almost anywhere--is not so easy. A destination of travel writers and other sojourners with time to spare, it is not actually on the way to any place.

If you are in Seville and are driving to Malaga and the Costa del Sol on Spain’s popular southern resort coast, well, it’s stupid to try to go through Ronda. If you’re in Marbella and want to climb up through the hills, the road is easy to find (Route C339 is the official name), but the driving is difficult: You go from sea level to more than 3,500 feet up on twisting highway. Plenty of tourists list Ronda as a possible destination, but far fewer ever actually get to see its rather desolate beauty.

Ronda’s charms aren’t those of a sophisticated world capital, nor can its setting compare with Florence, San Francisco or even Seville; think of it more as a dramatically situated mountain town you suddenly come upon that just happens to date from the 14th Century.

Not far from the city is Benaojen and the resort of Molino del Santo, where I stayed when I passed through last year. The English couple that converted this water mill into a hotel serve extraordinary meals on a terrace under the willow trees and offer simple but charming accommodations. Around the corner from there is Ubrique, where Jesulin is from, which has imposing rock formations and good buys in leather goods. And a bit farther on is Arcos de la Frontera, the most graceful of the so-called White Towns.

In the other direction, about eight miles north of Ronda, is Setenil, a village built into the mountainside with cave-like streets. You can use Ronda as a base from which to see all of this with car trips each day, and still be back in time for a drink as the sun goes down and a dinner of bull’s-tail stew near the bullring at the restaurant named after Pedro Romero.

Just be sure to plan so that you’re in the city for a bullfight, which is not as easy as it sounds. It’s possible to spend all summer visiting Spain and never see one, or even be in a city or town when one is happening. But you could also spend all summer traveling from one bullfight to the next, seeing five or six or seven a week for several months, even following a particular bullfighter from plaza to plaza, as some wealthy aficionados do.

Most everywhere in Spain has its own feria , or festival, often held to honor a saint, and most bullfights are invariably staged during feria or just before. Feria lasts two weeks in Seville every April, in May and June in Madrid, a week or slightly more in Bilbao and Valencia and Malaga and some of the other large cities. Occasional bullfights are held at all the major plazas on random Sunday afternoons, but you can’t count on them.

Ronda traditionally offers just four bullfights a year, two with matadors and two with novices, and half of those come at its September feria , which in this case is named not for a Catholic saint but, predictably enough, for Pedro Romero. That’s who is revered in Spain: saints and bullfighters, along with generals and painters. It has been that way for a few hundred years and shows no sign of changing.

One of Ronda’s bullfights is among the most important and interesting in all of Spain, and certainly the prettiest. It’s called the Goyesca, and it pays homage to Goya, whose taurine interest was responsible for some of the most stirring Spanish art ever produced. For one September afternoon, Ronda’s bullring steps back into the early 19th Century. The matadors dress in costumes of the era, and the bullfight becomes a period piece. It always attracts some of the best and most serious matadors in Spain.

To walk Ronda’s streets, you wouldn’t think the people there knew much of Goya, let alone cared enough to celebrate him. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly cultured city, aside from the bullfights (and there are even Spaniards who would argue strongly that bullfighting is not culture but a pagan slaughter).

Once a bandit lair, Ronda today is a banking town and a military garrison, renowned throughout southern Spain for its alcohol consumption, though you won’t find that fact in any of the guidebooks. It’s simply that when the banks close for the day in early afternoon, the population goes drinking. Several times I have found myself wandering through the old stone streets far too late at night, having imbibed far too much in the guise of companionship and international amity.

Ronda is a tourist town, too, and there are some good places to stay, such as the Reina Victoria, which overlooks the gorge. There are plenty of restaurants where you can fill up on basic Andalusian food, which is tiny bits and pieces of things and plenty of sherry and a lot of fried fish. And there is history to see. The Iglesia de Santa Maria la Mayor is a 15th-Century church that formerly housed a mosque, while the Casa del Rey Moro is exactly that: the house of a former Moorish king legendary for drinking wine from the skulls of Christians he slew.

But my best hours there have been spent either in the bullring or in the Pen~a Taurina Pepe Luis Martin, a sort of combination restaurant and fan club for a local bullfighter--precisely the bullfighter, in fact, who was forced to withdraw from that 1989 novillada that gave Jesulin his chance. You can sit outside in the afternoon warmth at little metal tables, or go inside and order a drink and a meal and look at the posters from Martin’s bullfighting career, and maybe even meet the matador himself. He is still in his 20s but does not get many fights these days.

The first time I went to the Pen~a Taurina was after Jesulin’s bullfight six years ago. The sun dropped swiftly to the horizon and the chill came on, and we put on our sweaters and stopped in for a beer.

There we saw a small child, an urchin who couldn’t have been more than 6 years old. He was pretending to fight bulls and he put on quite a show with an imaginary cape, dominating the imaginary animals in superb style and even killing them with an imaginary sword. We shouted encouragement at him and applauded, and he managed to stay in character until the end--the second great performance we had seen that day. He even took a victory lap around the dining room as though it was the plaza .

That child is a teen-ager by now, and though he’s still probably an aficionado, the odds are remote that he ever became a matador, probably just as well considering how many of them are badly hurt and how few ever really succeed. But I’ll remember that evening in the Pen~a Taurina as long as I’ll remember Jesulin, or anything else I’ve experienced in Spain in a dozen visits. I’ve seen the Gaudi buildings in Barcelona and trooped through the dark corridors of El Escorial; I return to Seville every April for the bulls and I visit the Prado whenever I’m in Madrid, if only to see the El Grecos.

All of that has moved me, but I keep coming back, year after year, chasing that feeling I had watching somebody’s 6-year-old son stop time for us in Ronda. Every now and then I get it, in a bullring or a gallery, or watching the sun go down from beside the Tajo Gorge, and during those moments I feel like all I want is within my grasp, and that I probably will never die.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK / Ronda Roundup

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Spain is 34. The city code for Ronda is 5. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 117 pesetas to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: American, Continental, Delta, TWA, United, and Iberia have daily flights from Los Angeles to Madrid via New York, Miami and other North American gateway cities. Iberia offers connecting flights from Madrid to Malaga. From Malaga, rent a car and drive the serpentine C344 road to Ronda, about 40 miles west.

Where to stay: Reina Victoria, Doctor Fleming 25, telephone 287-12-40. Recently renovated, Ronda’s famous, handsome luxury hotel was built in 1906 with the usual Victorian comforts and filigree. All 89 rooms are air-conditioned. Overlooks the spectacular Tajo Gorge. Rates: $100-$200. Hotel Molino del Santo, Bajada de la Estacion, near Ronda in Benaojen, tel. 216-71-51. A former water mill that has only 10 simple but comfortable rooms and is in tranquil Grazalema Park. Rates: $77-$82.

Where to eat: Don Miguel, Calle Villanueva 4, tel. 287-10-90, with an unbeatable location overlooking the Tajo Gorge, serves tenderly prepared lamb, fowl and desserts; $60 for four courses. Pedro Romero, Virgen de la Paz 18, tel. 287-11-10, named after modern bullfighting’s founder, is filled with taurine mementos and is a logical place in town to get rabo de toro ; $50 for four courses. Molino del Santo’s restaurant (see above) serves excellent ham, rabbit and vegetarian dishes; $34.

Bullfight information: Ronda’s annual feria , or festival, is held in mid-September. It includes the Goyesca, which attempts to replicate a bullfight Goya might have painted. Exact dates for these and other bullfights are announced later in the summer. The Spanish magazine El Ruedo, published in Madrid, is a good source. Or call the Ronda bullring itself, tel. 287-69-67.

Getting tickets: Seats often sell out well in advance, but tickets are usually available the day of the fight from resellers, reventas, sanctioned by the bullring, who work out of kiosks near the entrance. Expect to pay $100 and up for good seats for popular fights.

For more information: Spanish National Tourist Office, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 960, Beverly Hills, 90211, (213) 658-7188.