Madrid:

The Corrida

Shrill and mocking, the noise spurted from thousands of pursed lips. It poured down from every corner of Las Ventas, from the last row of the tendidos to the umbrella-lined circle of barrera seats around the ring,a whistling wail that was as accepted a part of the bullfight as the trumpet's call or the crackling gaiety of the pasodoble. It marked the entry into the bullring of a pair of mounted men. As they passed into the ring, one swung to the right the other to the left. Their horse's right eye's were patched over with blindfolds and their flanks hidden under thirty-three pounds of quilted cotton canvas.

The riders were only a little less grotesque. They wore big felt hats, their brims curled upwards, embroidered bolero jackets and cream colored chamois breeches. In their right fists they clutched the symbols of their trade, called picas of varas, eight foot long wooden poles capped by  four and a half inch spikes tapering abruptly to blunt points one inch long. They were the Picadors, the pariahs of the bullring.

Brutal, bloody, graceless, the task they were about to perform was an ugly intrusion into the spectacle that pretended its end was beauty. It was the most criticized, the most disliked and, perhaps, the least understood act in the ritual of the bullfight Anglo Saxons sickened watching it, shocked by the suffering of the horses. Spaniard suffered with them, not for the pain it brought to the horses but for the abuses it all too often directed at the bull.

Once the jeers that had marked their entry into the bullring had seemed the loveliest sounds Jose Siguenza's ears had ever heard. It was nineteen years earlier, on a hot July afternoon in the Plaza de Toros of San Roque next to the granite slopes of Gibraltar.

Jose was just eighteen years old then, and opening before him, for the first time, were the gates of a bullring. The chamois trousers of his borrowed Picador's costume were patched and baggy. His embroidered jacket flopped loosely about his shoulders. On his head the the wide-brimmed  Castoreno the Picadors's hat, hung over his ears with the listless air of an old row boat foundered in six inches of water. Yet Jose  thought himself the most splendidly dressed as any scarlet jacketed noble riding off to the hounds. So excited had he been that he wanted to kick his horse and go charging into the ring.

That moment had represented the culmination of all his youthful dreams, the realization of Jose's one aim in life. Where most young Spaniards aspired to be Matadors, Jose own aspirations had pointed him elsewhere. He had always wanted to be the man on horseback.

His birth had destined him for quite a different task, that of a docker as his father was, as his grandfather had been, on the wharves of Algeciras. By the time he was fourteen he was a full fledged docker staggering under the crates his boyish frame hauled from the ships unloading at Algeciras. But the young stevedore daydreamed of other tasks for his swelling muscles. One day he retrieved from the debris-littered wharves a magazine whose cover was adorned with the  portrait of a man who was to become his idol, his guide in his fight from the docks. His name was Rafael Andrada. He was a forty five year old Sevillano and he was a picador. So precise were the placing of his pic that he bore the nickname of "El Artillero",the gunner.

Soon El Artilllero's Portraits papered the wall over the straw sack on which young Jose Siquenza slept. He began to spend his Sunday's and holidays working as a labourer in the Plazas around his home, hitching up the dead bulls to the horses that dragged them from the ring, smoothing out the sand and guiding into the plazas the mounts of the men whose functions he coveted. Finally on that July afternoon in 1945the impresario of San Roque had asked him to fill in for an ailing horseman. Totally confident of his untested capacity, Jose put on the picador's uniform and , for the first time, settled onto a horse.

Now Jose,  the first Picador of the finest Matador of Spain, the former docker stood at the very pinnacle of his craft. He was among the most esteemed and respected member of his union. He held, in fact, the position that had been El Artillero's when he had pasted his boyhood idol's photo to his wall. No giggling band of girls would ever scamper after his fleeing footsteps when he left the front door of his hotel. But he was, nonetheless, a pre-eminent member of the most envied and romanticized fraternity in Spain.

"The Gates Of Fear"

They call them the "Gates Of Fear". 

Twenty million people now fixed their gaze upon the gates' wooden beams and rusted hinges. Every head in Madrid's packed Plaza de Toros was twisted in their direction. The long black tube of the television camera lay trained upon them, offering to an eager Spain a symbolic curtain about to rise on the drama so many anxiously awaited. The rusted doors opened directly onto the sand of the Las Ventas bullring. Behind them, in the dark and humid passageway, waited six brave bulls of Don Jose Benetiz Cubero,ready to test the courage of the men who would challenge their right to that rain soaked sand.

From the Book "Or I'll Dress You In Mourning" Autobiography of Manuel Benitez "El Cordobes" .(Larry Collins &Dominique Lapierre 1968.)