PLAIN PEOPLE: The Best Is Dead

Anglo-Saxons who (without His express consent) had elected God to the board of directors of the S.P.C.A. would never understand why men stood weeping last week on Mexico street corners. Or why altars in private homes were draped in black. Or why jammed movie theaters canceled feature pictures to show, over & over, newsreels of a man whose name most Anglo-Saxons had never heard. His native Spain mourned him, and Mexico,

Ecuador, and Peru. Throughout the Spanish world plain people felt that they had lost one who had given them not joy, but a bitter and glorious excitement, a pageant of death and of courage, death’s enemy.

If Charlie Chaplin and Babe Ruth and General MacArthur all died at once, Americans would not feel the loss as poignantly as millions of Spaniards and their cousins felt the death of Manuel Rodriguez—Manolete, the bullfighter. Hard as Americans might find it to understand, the story of his short life will be long and reverently remembered in the Spanish-speaking world.

Against a Closed Shop. The son of a bullfighter, Manolete had been born into that world of stylized drama, of vanity, vulgar pomp and sublime grace. He was as great as Belmonte, who dominated the “golden age” of the ’20s. Manolete followed the restrained, classical tradition of Belmonte, but he worked even closer to the bulls, spinning them around him, horns a fraction of an inch away. Manolete could do this without bravado, relaxed, dignified, almost pensive.

This year, at the height of his career, Manolete was drawn into a passionate squabble. Other Spanish bullfighters, jealous of the vast amounts of money Manolete made in Mexico, wanted to keep Mexican bullfighters from appearing in Spain. A young, rising matador, Luis Miguel Dominguin, led the Spanish closed-shop faction. Once he threatened to run Manolete out of the ring.

After Manolete was gored last July, some of the crowds began to turn from their idol towards Dominguin. Last week, at Linares, after watching Dominguín. perform brilliantly, Manolete made a supreme attempt to show his mastery.

“Who Turns His Back.” He fought, for the first time in years, a Miura bull—a large, fierce breed, not suited to Manolete’s specialty. Spaniards say: “A matador who turns his back on a Miura is a dead matador.” Manolete drew the Miura through the sanguinary dance in the sand. As he drove the sword into the bull, one of the horns tore into Manolete’s groin.

Though he had lost some of his preeminence before his death, 100,000 men followed his bier through the streets of Córdoba, where he was born 30 years ago. At week’s end bullfighters, gathered in rings throughout Spain, mourned Manolete with the formal pomp which he loved, as a good bullfighter and a good Spaniard must. In Mexico City they remembered that when word of his death came, lightning had been flashing in the darkened sky. At that moment, the crack of balls and shouted bets in the pelota courts had died away, and the voice over the loudspeaker had intoned, “Se murió el mejor” (the best is dead).

That was the way they felt in the bullfight countries, and that was the way they would go on feeling.