Paradoxes of life and current events: at 6:36 p.m. López Chaves received an ovation on the afternoon of his farewell to Santander in this season of his farewell, when he turns 25 as an alternative. His quarter of a century in bullfighting has been an abyss from Juli’s quarter of a century, which is also leaving. Without demagogy but with enormous respect and honesty. Chaves had a party, or a feast, a joy this Thursday, to close a tough roadmap in this Plaza de Santander. That he will definitively fasten in his native Salamanca, back in September, among teachers: Morante and, precisely, El Juli.
Twenty minutes after the start, López Chaves was walking one ear through a task that very well interpreted the height of the first of the five La Quinta cardinals, who came like an ironing board and with forces as meager as his meat. His pastueña condition followed the crutch of the man from Salamanca as far as he led him along those parallel paths. The task, carried out among cotton fields, found the hallmark of the binge that Domingo hit with the sword. To such an extent that he buried her something contrary. But he traveled with death on his back.
That was worth its prize just like the great lunge to the fourth multiplied it. It was a bull with an extraordinary drawing, balanced in harmony, finished off and, in short, a bull with remarkable background and superior humiliation. Of higher category for the right hand, which was where López Chaves based the work of his goodbye from Santander. That she was as she is: very country, rude, folksy and spread-eagled, without bending. What is there is what you see. DLCh has never deceived anyone. Not like that. And that honors him and ennobles him as a professional in one piece. Like so many battles in which he never turned his face. He linked the series of long and warm right hands, chanted with devotion and always loosely drawn. The farewell took on the status of a party when the president showed the two handkerchiefs. Domingo López Chaves celebrated it in a big way, like the door through which he would have to leave. He enjoyed the clamorous return to the ring between deep gulps of wine, that precision boot on the throat, and the tremendous finale taking handfuls of the dark soil of Cuatro Caminos as if to make an orchard. An immense joy.
Paco Ureña had given him a clear little bruise that he did not go without with little humiliation, sometimes as if he did not understand, just enough zeal to comply. Which was what Ureña did before rejoicing in flats and burying a sword blow in the soft ones. It was worth it for him to get an ear that way, which would at least sweeten the bad drink of a fifth -the first cinqueño at the fair- who was a real uncle, as well as a predator. He was around here as a hat last year, and those corralled things he pulled off with a joke. He always had Ureña within range, and more than once in serious trouble. Violence lived in him. He hunted it skillfully.
The other great bull of the La Quinta bullfight along with the fourth -when the trapío began to climb- came to be the sixth, another with five years old and extraordinary depth in his left piton. Emilio de Justo, who had made himself friendly this afternoon with a large trophy from a third party that passed by as if it were not his thing -without going on the crutch with sincerity, I think-, intoned naturally and reunited. But something would feel that he was left inside of him when, after going for the sword, he drew a series with his left foot to feet together that was the series of the run. The possible prize vanished with the steel.