The first days of August 1934. Sunday bullfight in Madrid. Ignacio Sánchez Mejías returned to the ring at the age of forty-three. He doesn’t need to make more money, but he needs to convince himself that he can still improve the art of bullfighting. to … Knowing that the Andalusian cattlemen’s union had vetoed Juan Belmonte, he told them that he would not fight his bulls if the veto of someone he considered his partner was maintained. Sánchez Mejías is a 27-year-old pastor, and he is a lovely person. His gesture with Belmont drew praise from Juan Verragut: “So that those who are by tradition gentlemen can learn: cattle ranchers,” he writes wryly in his memoirs in the weekly Mundo Gráfico. Juan Verragut is the pseudonym of Julián Fernández Piñero, author of the 1922 book “Memoirs of the Legion Juan Verragut”. The journalist who would write the chronicle of the death of Sánchez Mejías, a text that certainly inspired García Lorca.
“It seems I’m starting to get in my way and they want to eliminate me. I don’t like going to Manzanares. “I don’t fight bulls with my gang but with Ortega.”
At his bullfight in Santander, Mr. Pino Montano, as Sanchez Mejías is also known, stabbed the first bull and left the bullring with two ears and two tails. The summer trip starts off well, but an unexpected event upsets the agenda. On August 11, Ferragut will have to cover an unexpected bullfight by Sánchez Mejías in the Plaza de Manzanares. Unexpected because the bullfighter had to replace Domingo Ortega, the headliner, who was injured in a car accident. Sánchez Mejías comes from the bullfighting in Huesca, which is a tough bullfight and a heavy ride. His forty-three years are merciless: “It seems that I am starting to get in the way and they want to eliminate me. I don’t like going to Manzanares. “I don’t fight bulls with my gang but with Ortega,” he commented bitterly to Verragut. Not even the Ortega gang. Having just arrived at La Mancha Square, they told him that he would have to make do with an improvised gang.
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On August 15, 1934, the newspaper Mundo Grafico reported on the death of the bullfighter that certainly inspired Lorca.
“Bullfighting is reluctant”
The first bull from Ayala Ranch. Verragut observes the right bullfight. When the opportunity to kill comes, Sanchez Mejias, as usual, sits on the stirrup with his back to the barrier. The bull enters the muleta forcefully, and the piton rubs against the matador’s chest. Fear spreads throughout the arena, and he sighs and feels uncomfortable at the prospect of sex. Verragut continues to take notes: “The bull turned, and the matador, barely rising in the stirrups, fearlessly withstood the ferocious attack, and unbelievably emptied the bull, which, defeated, was searching for his body…” Death passed him by, but he did not resign himself to releasing his prey: “The Enceladus bull came back to him, so close, so fast, that it was impossible to avoid it.” Sánchez Mejías is rotated like a Goyesque doll between Morlaco’s horns.
Blood flows. “Bring the rubber!” The boy with the sword cries to stop the bleeding. Ferragut joins the delegation that takes the right-hander to a sanatorium in Madrid. There he will accompany him on the last night. The bullfighter lies face up. His dilated pupils search for the last light of the August evening: “It’s warm and heavy. “The strong smell of disinfectants is mixed with a subtler, more pungent smell, like the smell of mold,” Verragut points out. Nurses and Sisters of Charity care for the injured, dying man: “There are moments when his mouth remains twisted, in a grimace of endless pain. The affected leg is swollen and blackened under the white bandage. “But the foot turns white, as if it were without blood,” notes the legionnaire journalist.
Bullfighter playwright
Ferragot recalls the 27-year-old bullfighter’s drama “Without Reason”: “It’s like a gift of fate that the bullfighter’s mind is clouded by fever,” he says. At ten in the morning, last breath. Why did he return to the ring?, Verragut asks himself in his endless sadness. The historian concludes that from rentier Sanchez Mejias, who lives a difficult life, to the hero of popular romances. It was the most read history in those days. There is no doubt that her poet friends knew her.
In November of that year, Federico García Lorca read his book “Weeping over the Death of Ignacio Sanchez Mejías” at Gerardo Diego’s house. In 1935 he submitted the poem to Cruz y Raya Press with illustrations by José Caballero. The bull he killed was called Granadino: “Gangrene is already coming from afar / At five in the afternoon / A night’s log across the green groin / At five in the afternoon / The wounds burn like the sun / At five in the afternoon.”
“It’s warm and heavy. “The strong smell of disinfectants is mixed with a finer, more pungent smell, such as the smell of mold.”
When reading the poem, we think of Verragut’s entry dated August 15 in Mundo Grafico: the photograph on the cover of Sánchez Mejías. “Ignacio climbs the stairs / With all death on his back.” The man who defended his fellow fighters. “It will take a long time for him to be born, if he is born, / So clear an Andalusian, so rich in adventure. I sing of its elegance with moaning words/And I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees. On the 27th, Minister Urtasun leaves the bullfighter who mourned a generation of poets.
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