The critics of Barcelona, where the most money had been spent on his launching, wrote that Ortega began where Belmonte left off; that he combined the best of Belmonte and the best of Joselito, and that in all the history of bullfighting there had never been such a case as Ortega, nor any man who so combined the artist, the dominator and the killer. Ortega is not as impressive as his eulogies. He is thirty-two years old, and has been fighting for several years in the villages of Castilla, especially those around Toledo. He comes from a town of less than five hundred people, in the dry country between Toledo and Aranjuez, called Borox, and his nickname is the Hayseed of Borox.
In the fall of 1930 he had a good afternoon in the second-rate Madrid ring of Tetuan de las Vitorias which was then directed and promoted by Domingo Gonzales, called Dominguin, a former matador. Dominguin took him to Barcelona and rented the ring there after the season closed to give a fight featuring Ortega and a Mexican fighter called Carnicerito de Mexico. Fighting young bulls, they both had good days and filled the Barcelona ring three times in succession. Skillfully built up by Dominguin during the winter months with an elaborate press campaign and ballyhoo, Ortega was made a full matador at the opening of the 1931 season in Barcelona.
I arrived in Spain immediately after the revolution and found him ranking with politics as a café topic. He had not yet fought in Madrid but every night the Madrid papers published notices of his triumphs in the provinces. Dominguin was spending much money on his publicity and Ortega cut ears and tails each night in all the evening papers. The nearest he had fought to Madrid was in Toledo and I found good aficionados who had seen him there did not agree in their judgments of him. All agreed he had certain details that were well executed but the most intelligent aficionados said they were not convinced by his work. On the 30th of May, Sidney Franklin, who had just come to Madrid after a Mexican campaign, and I went out together to Aranjuez to see the great phenomenon. He was lousy. Marcial Lalanda made a fool of him as did Vicente Barrera.
That day Ortega showed coolness and an ability to move the cape slowly and well, holding it low, provided the bull did the commanding. He showed an ability to cut the natural voyage of the bull and double him on himself with a two-handed pass with the muleta which was very effective in punishing and he made a good one-handed pass with his right. With the sword he killed quickly and trickily profiling with great style and then not keeping the promise of his very arrogant way of preparing to kill when he actually made the trip in. All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes. He had, very obviously, been reading and believing his own newspaper propaganda.
In appearance he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house, a good, mature, but rather thick-jointed figure, and the self-satisfaction of a popular actor. Sidney, who knew that he himself was capable of putting up a much better fight, cursed him all the way home in the car. I wanted to judge him impartially, knowing you cannot place a bullfighter by one performance, so I noted his good qualities and his defects and kept my mind open about him.
That night when we got to the hotel the papers were out and again we read of another great triumph for Ortega. Actually he had been hooted and jeered on the last bull, but in the Heraldo de Madrid we read that he had cut the bull’s ear after a great triumph and been carried out of the ring on the shoulders of the crowd.
Next I saw him in Madrid in his formal presentation as a full matador. He was exactly as he had been at Aranjuez except that he had lost the knack of killing quickly. Twice again in Madrid he fought without showing anything to justify his propaganda and in addition he was beginning to have spells of cowardice. At Pamplona he was so bad he was disgusting. He was being paid twenty-three thousand pesetas a fight and he did absolutely nothing that was not ignorant, vulgar and low.
Juanito Quintana, who is one of the best aficionados in the north, had written me to Madrid about Ortega telling how pleased they were to have gotten him for Pamplona and about the price his manager was demanding to produce him. He was very eager to see him and my account of his dismal performances in and around Madrid only depressed him for a moment. After we had seen him once though he was very disillusioned and after we had seen him three times Juanito could not stand to have his name mentioned.
During the summer I saw him several times more and only once was he good even in his fashion. That was in Toledo with hand-picked bulls which were so small and inoffensive that anything he did needed to be discounted. What he has, when he is good, is a lack of movement and a serenity which is phenomenal. The best pass he makes is the two-handed one designed to cut the voyage of the bull and turn him on himself, but because he does this best he does it again and again on every bull that he gets whether the bull needs this punishment or not and consequently unfits the animal for anything else.
He makes a right-handed pass with the muleta, inclining his body toward the bull, very well but he does not link it up with other passes and he is still quite incapable of making effective natural passes with his left. He is very good at spinning between the bull’s horns, a very silly business, and he is a waster of all the vulgarities which are substituted for the dangerous manoeuvres in bullfighting whenever the fighter knows that the public is ignorant enough to accept them.
He has plenty of courage, strength and health, and friends whom I trust tell me he was truly very good at Valencia, and if he were younger and less conceited he could undoubtedly become an excellent matador if he were able to learn to use his left hand; he may, like Robert Fitzsimmons, violate all standards of age and still do this, but as a messiah he is non-existent. I would not devote so much space to him except that he has had so many thousand columns of paid publicity, some of it is very skillful, that I know that if I would have been away from Spain and only following the fights through the papers I would have probably taken him too seriously.
One bullfighter inherited the qualities of Joselito and lost his inheritance through venereal disease. Another died of bull-fighting’s other occupational disorder, and a third became a coward through the first horn wound that came to test his valor. Of the two new messiahs Ortega does not convince me nor does Bienvenida, but I wish Bienvenida much luck. He is a well-brought-up, pleasant, not conceited boy and he is going through a hard time.
Old lady: You are always wishing people good luck and telling them about their mistakes and it seems to me you criticise them very meanly. How is it, young man, that you talk so much and write so long about these bullfights and yet are not a bullfighter yourself. Why did you not take up this profession if you liked it so and think you know so much about it?
Madame, I tried it in its simplest phases but without success. I was too old, too heavy and too awkward. Also my figure was the wrong shape, being thick in all the places where it should be lithe and in the ring I served as little else than target or punching dummy for the bulls.
Old lady: Did they not wound you in horrible fashion? Why are you alive to-day?
Madame, the tips of their horns were covered or blunted or I should have been opened up like a sewing basket.
Old lady: So you fought bulls with covered horns. I had thought better of you.
Fought is an exaggeration, Madame. I did not fight them but was merely tossed about.
Old lady: Did you ever have experience with bulls with naked horns? Did they not wound you grievously?
I have been in the ring with such bulls and was unwounded though much bruised since when I had compromised myself through awkwardness I would fall onto the bull’s muzzle clinging to his horns as the figure clings in the old picture of the Rock of Ages and with equal passion.
