Death and Money in the Afternoon by Shubert Adrian;

Author:Shubert, Adrian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 1999-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Partisans, “Real Fans,” and Others

To talk about the “crowd” as if it were a single entity is misleading. Top bullfighters all had their fans, and this partisanship could be extremely intense. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the French traveler Jean François Bourgoing reported that “during my first residence in Madrid, the amateurs were divided between . . . Costillares and Romero, as elsewhere between two celebrated actors. Each party was loud in its praises, as positive in its decisions as ever were with us the Gluckists and the Puccinists.”83 In the 1860s the great rivalry was between El Tato and El Gordito. Both were from Seville, but El Tato was the idol of the Madrid fans, and by 1867 “El Gordito and his team could not move without whistles, shouts, and other expressions unknown since the times of the royalists.” There was even a special newspaper set up and “other means” brought to bear to force El Gordito to break his contract and leave the capital. But El Gordito was the favorite in the provinces, and “in some places the authorities had to put the troops on alert” when Tato was in town. Two decades later the rivalry was between Guerrita and El Espartero. “In the Casinos and Clubs there were long, grave, and above all noisy debates over whether Guerrita was better than El Espartero. . . . The competition caused incredible excitement. In Sevilla the two groups got into such a state that more than once they came to blows, and it was necessary to protect one idol from the ire of his rival’s fans. Guerrita was escorted from the bullring by armed guards: He had performed admirably and the victory made the esparteristas furious.”84

Francisco Montes felt that such partisanship often went too far, disrupting the proper order of the spectacle and even leading to unneccessary injuries.

We know that, unfortunately, the rivalries that partisan and imprudent spectators foment among the bullfighters with their resolute shouts and applause are frequent; for this reason, on many occasions when one bullfighter’s party is dominant in the bullring . . . they protest against the bull being killed by the person who should do it and oblige him to hand the sword over to the mob’s favorite—and it is always the mob that acts this way—so that he can shine with a bull that belonged to another.85

Montes spoke with authority. In April 1834 the mayor of Madrid sent a note to the police to inform them that “at tomorrow’s bullfight there might be some problem because of the presence of Francisco Montes . . . please take the necessary measures to prevent the partisans of one bullfighter or the other from upsetting the peace or from reaching the point of some thoughtless people mistreating he who they identify as the object of public animadversion.”86

At least one bullfight magazine saw such excessive partisanship as harmful to the development of the bullfighting art. For La Nueva Lidia, this meant that bullfighters could

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