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Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida: The Saga of César Rincón
By Allen Josephs

Allen Josephs paints an accurate and intimate portrait of life in and around the world's most prestigious bullrings to demonstrate how and why the corrida remains a sacred and integral part of Hispanic culture.

Sample - HTML | PDF | Purchase Now

13

Ave César

Avianca ﬂight 010, proceeding from Paris via Madrid to Santa Fe de Bogotá, arrived many hours late, landing at midnight on October 11–12, 1991, exactly 499 years after Columbus had ﬁrst gone ashore on the little island he named San Salvador.

The new Salvador of Colombia, the conquistador of the Old World stealing Spain’s thunder a year before the celebration of the discovery of the New World, was greeted by a crowd no less impressive than the Roman mobs that thronged to greet the ancient Caesars. Tens of thousands, led by the mayor of Bogotá and the governor of the Department of Cundinamarca, waited at El Dorado Airport for the arrival of Julio César Rincón, and the streets were lined from the airport to the Plaza Bolívar, thirty kilometers away in the old colonial center of the city.

It was the largest crowd César Rincón had ever seen. Everyone was there, he said, his friends, people he had never seen, the high society of Bogotá, the beggars, the young, the old, the beautiful and the not so beautiful, as well as some who were just curious. And they were all acclaiming him, applauding, even dancing. It was, he remarked, crazy. A hoarse voice rent the night: “¡Viva Colombia!” The municipal band of Bogotá played the national anthem and everyone began to sing. You could hear people sobbing. A baby cried. “I cried too,” said Rincón, “hot tears” (F-S 37).

The police formed a cordon around Rincón, dapper in a navy suit with white shirt and dark print tie, trying to protect him from the human tide of touchers, kissers, and well-wishers. They ﬁnally managed to perch him on a ledge in the airport, above the dangers of the mob, so he could respond to the hundreds of print and media journalists. César Rincón was terriﬁed by this crowd, so di=erent from the público of the plaza de toros. Perhaps because of that, he spoke of the fear and of the soledad, the aloneness, of the torero, and he said, “I am happy. But you cannot imagine how much fear I have felt for so many months in order to be back here with you again” (I&B 142).1

     Then came thirty kilometers of shouting, ﬂag-waving multitudes, thirty kilometers of celebration and music and horn honking, with César Rincón riding high on a ﬁre truck so people could see (but not touch) him. He claimed it was the greatest salida a hombros he had ever had. But he wondered if all this did not somehow transcend the bulls. Colombia, he thought, needed these sudden emotional charges, these grand events, to remove some of the sting from national shame. Something to forget the violence and the conﬂict. It needed someone—a torero, a soccer player, a cyclist—someone to be proud of, someone in the papers for the right reasons (JV 13). He must have felt as though he were carrying the entire country with him up there on that comically inappropriate but practical ﬁre truck. Later he would remark, “Every time my name appears in the papers
. . . it’s as though all Colombia were washed clean of so many insulting things” (JV 202).

Rincón, pleased though he was by the extraordinary acclamation—how many ﬂags, how many scarves, how many scraps of paper did he autograph?—wanted to get home, wanted to be home without thirty kilometers of people, wanted to alone with his soledad. Years ago his mother had told him, “Someday you will come back here. . . .” Now that day had come, to wipe away the memory of all the empty-handed homecomings in the interim. But Mamita was not there to share it with him, and he spent a few hours resting in the uptown Hotel Cosmos (F-S 37).

     The next morning the parade downtown began at 8:00. Escorted by three helicopters, Rincón spent ﬁve hours on the ﬁre truck (ﬁfteen meters long, made in the USA) like a war hero, then received two decorations: the ayuntamiento (city hall) of Santa Fe de Bogotá conferred on him the Orden Civil del Mérito and the president of the republic awarded him the Cruz de Boyacá,2 the highest distinction Colombia confers. Among the many things César Gaviria said to César Rincón while decorating him, what impressed Rincón most was not the praise showered upon him by the president but this remark: “Five hundred years had to pass for a criollo to be carried on shoulders through the great gate of the worldwide cathedral of toreo.” (Technically a criollo, a creole, is a Spaniard born in the New World, but by extension it has come to mean a native of the New World and especially, in current usage, a mestizo.)

     As Rincón was replying, “That’s a lot of years,” he remembered the Colombian journalist who had written just a short time before that mestizaje, the mixing of Spanish and Indian blood, could not produce great toreros (JV 51). That mind-set, of course, was part of the problem. As Germán Castro Caycedo, a popular Colombian journalist and writer, would explain, taurine writers had always insisted that great toreros practically had to be born in Triana. Then along came this Camilo Pardo Maña, himself a mestizo, claiming that mestizaje could not produce great toreros. “There existed a certain taurine racism,” Castro Caycedo continued, “practiced by the indios and the mestizos themselves. César Rincón has broken that evil spell, as it were, that negative attitude” (JV 259–60). Out in the street a banner, recalling Bolívar’s dream, proclaimed: “César, Emperador de Colombia.”

     Rincón also liked Gaviria’s phrase “César Rincón’s twenty-six years of vigilia [watchfulness, perseverance] were mightier than the inertia of half a millennium,” and he remembered the president’s quotation from Federico García Lorca that the plaza de toros is the only place you can go “with the assurance of seeing death surrounded by the most dazzling beauty.” Death as a spectacle. That, mused Rincón, is one of the greatest things about the ﬁesta, something those who attack the ﬁesta reject and condemn. It is not a barbarity because it is not gratuitous. It is a creative act aimed at the revelation of art. And every art, he thought, every stellar moment of humanity, has a counterbalance of sacriﬁce, risk, even of immolation (JV 53).

President Gaviria’s last words impressed Rincón as having a signiﬁcance that went beyond their application to the art of toreo: The ﬁesta brava, said the president, “beyond the mere spectacle, symbolizes man’s capacity for transformation and puriﬁcation. Courage and intelligence and art, against strength and brutality and fear. Death serves as a pretext so that life can be a;rmed.” Perhaps, thought Rincón, that is the only way to govern Colombia: intelligence and art against brutality and fear. He wondered if Gaviria were converting a discourse on the nature of the art of toreo into political theory and, remembering another comment of Gaviria’s—that man “ought to divest himself of his original animal nature and discipline the force of his intelligence. Both the bull and the tauric elements of the torero die”—believed the president was, indeed, speaking metaphorically (JV 56).

     To all of this Rincón replied brieﬂy, trying to unite the past and the present: “Five hundred years after that twelfth of October, on which there was a conquest, a Colombian, on this twelfth of October, has returned triumphant. In the name of Colombia, Spain opened for me the gates of the world. Now we have brought something back here” (JV 56).

© 2002 University Press of Florida. All Rights Reserved.

< Back to the Reading Room

Reading Room: Sample
Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida: The Saga of César Rincón By Allen Josephs Allen Josephs paints an accurate and intimate portrait of life in and around the world's most prestigious bullrings to demonstrate how and why the corrida remains a sacred and integral part of Hispanic culture.
Sample - HTML \| PDF \| Purchase Now
13 Ave César Avianca ﬂight 010, proceeding from Paris via Madrid to Santa Fe de Bogotá, arrived many hours late, landing at midnight on October 11–12, 1991, exactly 499 years after Columbus had ﬁrst gone ashore on the little island he named San Salvador. The new Salvador of Colombia, the conquistador of the Old World stealing Spain’s thunder a year before the celebration of the discovery of the New World, was greeted by a crowd no less impressive than the Roman mobs that thronged to greet the ancient Caesars. Tens of thousands, led by the mayor of Bogotá and the governor of the Department of Cundinamarca, waited at El Dorado Airport for the arrival of Julio César Rincón, and the streets were lined from the airport to the Plaza Bolívar, thirty kilometers away in the old colonial center of the city. It was the largest crowd César Rincón had ever seen. Everyone was there, he said, his friends, people he had never seen, the high society of Bogotá, the beggars, the young, the old, the beautiful and the not so beautiful, as well as some who were just curious. And they were all acclaiming him, applauding, even dancing. It was, he remarked, crazy. A hoarse voice rent the night: “¡Viva Colombia!” The municipal band of Bogotá played the national anthem and everyone began to sing. You could hear people sobbing. A baby cried. “I cried too,” said Rincón, “hot tears” (F-S 37). The police formed a cordon around Rincón, dapper in a navy suit with white shirt and dark print tie, trying to protect him from the human tide of touchers, kissers, and well-wishers. They ﬁnally managed to perch him on a ledge in the airport, above the dangers of the mob, so he could respond to the hundreds of print and media journalists. César Rincón was terriﬁed by this crowd, so di=erent from the público of the plaza de toros. Perhaps because of that, he spoke of the fear and of the soledad, the aloneness, of the torero, and he said, “I am happy. But you cannot imagine how much fear I have felt for so many months in order to be back here with you again” (I&B 142).1 Then came thirty kilometers of shouting, ﬂag-waving multitudes, thirty kilometers of celebration and music and horn honking, with César Rincón riding high on a ﬁre truck so people could see (but not touch) him. He claimed it was the greatest salida a hombros he had ever had. But he wondered if all this did not somehow transcend the bulls. Colombia, he thought, needed these sudden emotional charges, these grand events, to remove some of the sting from national shame. Something to forget the violence and the conﬂict. It needed someone—a torero, a soccer player, a cyclist—someone to be proud of, someone in the papers for the right reasons (JV 13). He must have felt as though he were carrying the entire country with him up there on that comically inappropriate but practical ﬁre truck. Later he would remark, “Every time my name appears in the papers . . . it’s as though all Colombia were washed clean of so many insulting things” (JV 202). Rincón, pleased though he was by the extraordinary acclamation—how many ﬂags, how many scarves, how many scraps of paper did he autograph?—wanted to get home, wanted to be home without thirty kilometers of people, wanted to alone with his soledad. Years ago his mother had told him, “Someday you will come back here. . . .” Now that day had come, to wipe away the memory of all the empty-handed homecomings in the interim. But Mamita was not there to share it with him, and he spent a few hours resting in the uptown Hotel Cosmos (F-S 37). The next morning the parade downtown began at 8:00. Escorted by three helicopters, Rincón spent ﬁve hours on the ﬁre truck (ﬁfteen meters long, made in the USA) like a war hero, then received two decorations: the ayuntamiento (city hall) of Santa Fe de Bogotá conferred on him the Orden Civil del Mérito and the president of the republic awarded him the Cruz de Boyacá,2 the highest distinction Colombia confers. Among the many things César Gaviria said to César Rincón while decorating him, what impressed Rincón most was not the praise showered upon him by the president but this remark: “Five hundred years had to pass for a criollo to be carried on shoulders through the great gate of the worldwide cathedral of toreo.” (Technically a criollo, a creole, is a Spaniard born in the New World, but by extension it has come to mean a native of the New World and especially, in current usage, a mestizo.) As Rincón was replying, “That’s a lot of years,” he remembered the Colombian journalist who had written just a short time before that mestizaje, the mixing of Spanish and Indian blood, could not produce great toreros (JV 51). That mind-set, of course, was part of the problem. As Germán Castro Caycedo, a popular Colombian journalist and writer, would explain, taurine writers had always insisted that great toreros practically had to be born in Triana. Then along came this Camilo Pardo Maña, himself a mestizo, claiming that mestizaje could not produce great toreros. “There existed a certain taurine racism,” Castro Caycedo continued, “practiced by the indios and the mestizos themselves. César Rincón has broken that evil spell, as it were, that negative attitude” (JV 259–60). Out in the street a banner, recalling Bolívar’s dream, proclaimed: “César, Emperador de Colombia.” Rincón also liked Gaviria’s phrase “César Rincón’s twenty-six years of vigilia [watchfulness, perseverance] were mightier than the inertia of half a millennium,” and he remembered the president’s quotation from Federico García Lorca that the plaza de toros is the only place you can go “with the assurance of seeing death surrounded by the most dazzling beauty.” Death as a spectacle. That, mused Rincón, is one of the greatest things about the ﬁesta, something those who attack the ﬁesta reject and condemn. It is not a barbarity because it is not gratuitous. It is a creative act aimed at the revelation of art. And every art, he thought, every stellar moment of humanity, has a counterbalance of sacriﬁce, risk, even of immolation (JV 53). President Gaviria’s last words impressed Rincón as having a signiﬁcance that went beyond their application to the art of toreo: The ﬁesta brava, said the president, “beyond the mere spectacle, symbolizes man’s capacity for transformation and puriﬁcation. Courage and intelligence and art, against strength and brutality and fear. Death serves as a pretext so that life can be a;rmed.” Perhaps, thought Rincón, that is the only way to govern Colombia: intelligence and art against brutality and fear. He wondered if Gaviria were converting a discourse on the nature of the art of toreo into political theory and, remembering another comment of Gaviria’s—that man “ought to divest himself of his original animal nature and discipline the force of his intelligence. Both the bull and the tauric elements of the torero die”—believed the president was, indeed, speaking metaphorically (JV 56). To all of this Rincón replied brieﬂy, trying to unite the past and the present: “Five hundred years after that twelfth of October, on which there was a conquest, a Colombian, on this twelfth of October, has returned triumphant. In the name of Colombia, Spain opened for me the gates of the world. Now we have brought something back here” (JV 56). © 2002 University Press of Florida. All Rights Reserved. < Back to the Reading Room