They practice in the middle of Mexico City’s large urban park. Equipped with a pair of real horns, one of them plays the bull by sliding towards the fuchsia bullfighting cape. They train to kill, but as the sunlight filters through the trees and the bullfighter dodges gracefully, hips to the side, arms perfectly perpendicular, he seems incongruously beautiful.
“It’s the ballet of death,” explains José Luis Herros. But the bull’s movement seems too slow, too graceful, I tell him.
“That’s how bulls move,” he says. When their head is down and he’s ready to gore you with his horns, he explains, he comes slowly towards you.
“The purpose of bullfighting is to face fear and death with the intelligence we are supposed to possess,” he says. “The bull has two daggers, we have this piece of cloth.”
The people who gather here are real bullfighters. Mexico City has banned the killing of bulls so that they travel outside the capital to practice their sport.
As soon as I showed interest, they showed me the scars of the moments that brought them to the brink of death. “A bull tore my chest in two,” Luis Conrado (in sweater) told me. “But I kept fighting and cut off my ear.”
Again, I thought, the beauty of this scene was incongruous with the frank talk about death.
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