A Bullfighter's Sacrifice (Have your barf bag ready)
Victor Barrio, the matador who died after a goring in a Spanish bullring yesterday afternoon, had that calm, serene look when I met him briefly last summer. He had just emerged from the capila or chapel, a room that’s built into the backside of bullrings for matadors and their cuadrilla or helpers to pray. Per custom, I nodded his way (bullfighters don’t like to talk in the fearful moments before they enter the ring) and admired his long face, the embodiment of ambitious youth, which I had just gazed at in an oil painting at a nearby restaurant only a few hours earlier.
That bullfight was held in Cantalejo, a town in the province of Segovia, north of Madrid, where Barrio was from. His family and friends had filled the seats of the tiny, third-class plaza: Barrio was still struggling to find his breakout moment as a professional, and during a time when the ancient taurine industry was struggling against modern forces. Protests and the collapse of the Spanish economy in recent years had resulted in a dwindling number of bullfights, forcing younger talents like Barrio to risk more daring passes to stand out.
We had followed Barrio’s cousin to the performance from Casa Roman, an old-school taverna owned by Barrio’s family near Sepulveda, the town where he was raised, which specialized in cordera lechal, a suckling lamb native to the area. Around the stately dining room upstairs that afternoon sat a table of other young matadors, friends of Barrio from Seville. He had invited them to his region to watch him perform, and there was a giddy, jubilant energy floating around the dining room. On the tables were decanters filled with the remnants of costly wine bottles; cigar ash; and lamb bones.
(snip)
Then we were off to see Barrio, the Local Boy Turned Hero, one of the dwindling and courageous few who still train and dream to be bullfighters in a modern world that rejects them. Bullfighting is not a sport: It’s a modern sacrifice, a commercialized relic that has its roots in the pagan religion of the ancient world. The bulls were considered gods back then, and those who sacrificed the gods were high priests. The goal of modern matadors is to achieve a kind of union and closeness with the bull, to symbolically face and unify themselves with death, to deliver a cathartic moment the audience can feel and live through. Young talents like Barrio are faced with enormous pressure—financially, culturally, spiritually.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/bullfighters-sacrifice.htm
Glad to see most of the comments are giving the writer exactly what he deserves......
Death to bullfighting!!!
= new reply since forum marked as read
