To return to Gijón is to return to Start over, and therefore return to Garci. It’s Agustín González at the Asturias hotel. And Antonio Ferrandis, Encarna Paso and, of course, the great Bódalo. And that lapidary phrase as a law of life in the face of death: “He only gets old when he doesn’t love himself.” And that is what Diego Urdiales feels, who loves bullfighting. As Manuel Román wants to do, who in his beardless puberty does not even think about old age. Between the two of them, the happiness of the return of the bulls to El Bibio flourished. An incomplete happiness.
The centennial square has been loved in the silence of discreet but constant work until this moment of reopening. The fans raised an ovation when the mayoress Carmen Moriyón appeared escorted by Pilar Vega de Anzo and the entire municipal corporation of victory. A banner read in Latin Gijón locuta, finite cause. As that Rome has spoken, the matter is closed. Raising a category fair in record time corresponded to Carlos Zuñiga -honored with the Tranvía de Oro de la Peña Cocheras-, and I wish he had had a greater margin to have tied the figures on this August 15 so concentrated of appointments and commitments , the most bullfighting date of the year, said the ancients. The impact and response would have been huge. As was the presentation of the posters. Even so, not a tenth part added the manifestation of the anti-bullfighting abroad with abolitionist and liberticide airs. Someone thought they saw the previous socialist mayor among the noise of megaphones with the sound of an empty can.
The hymns of Gijón and Spain went up through the round loudspeaker that projected the square against the gray sky. The clouds slid a curtain of rain while the paseílo raised the curtain of the new era. Some opened umbrellas, others went up to the stands… There was an apparent half entrance. Which translates to about 5,000 people. The expectations of the above signatory had skyrocketed. But… Pablo Hermoso de Mendoza, Diego Urdiales and Manuel Román braided a mixed poster as representatives of the three categories of bullfighting. Seniority, teaching, old glories [oficio de Hermoso para cumplir con un toro de suave tranco y echarle raza de veterano a otro encastado de Romao Tenorio]with more past than future, the one who lives in Román, the very young bullfighter from Cordoba.
Urdiales was exactly 24 years old as an alternative on Tuesday. From the hands of Paco Ojeda, the wild bullfighter of Las Marismas. The classic from Arneda offered the first bull of the fight on foot on his return to Gijón to the mayoress Moriyón with a long speech of thanks. Zacarías Moreno’s bull, red, dripping, buttoned, well-crafted, showed the fringes of meekness too soon in the form of marked affections. He dug a lot and gave himself little. And sometimes inside and overwhelming, without following the crutch with the slightest interest. Everything was reduced to that meek attack blow, as cracked as it was later. Diego sculpted a beautiful trench like bronze that summed up a quarter of a century of bullfighting.
It would be his anvil constancy and his unattainable persistence to discouragement – intertwined with the flavor of the old, the unattainable of the old – which, beyond the equator of the afternoon, raised the slab. The fifth bull, made with harmony and finished off with more face, pointed to good beginnings. Urdiales gave him the rhythm, he sought the delivery, the endings that he lacked. And through the path of making him jealous again and again, and hooking him more and more, he was reunited with beauty. Until he exploded on his right hand, which was his hand, with a round, almost spherical series, already close to tables. Among the sketches of naturals, one, perhaps more, revealed the secret of his doll. Like the sublime two-handed brooch. As tasty for his codillero as for putting his chest in front of him. He buried a full lunge that meant the first and only ear of the afternoon.