Weirder still, Manolete’s ugliness appeared to be a very specific strain of ugliness, one that communicated sadness and dejection. One morning, I left the biography on my coffee table, and my daughter - she was 6 then and knew nothing about the book or why I was reading it - caught sight of the portrait on the cover as she trundled by and announced, “I can’t believe they made a book about someone so ugly!” The more I read about Manolete, the more it started to feel as if this man’s face triggered some kind of slur-reflex in other human beings. Writers called him “tired-looking,” or a “popeyed, chinless, badly bodied, painfully and barely dignified man,” or “the mournful-faced, hawk-nosed Manolete,” or simply “Old Big Nose.” Even people who adored Manolete always managed to tack on some gratuitous cheap shot about the unpleasantness of his face. The peculiarity of his appearance preoccupied everyone. He was ugly the way Einstein was a genius, the way Gandhi was nonviolent, the way Jeff Bezos is rich. It took reading only a handful of pages of the biography to understand that Manolete’s conspicuous ugliness seemed to be a defining feature of his persona. They just kept taking swipe after swipe at the glum-looking, contorted hideousness of his face. He was remarkably ugly - by which I mean, people couldn’t stop remarking on how ugly he was. “He has a face that’s as dreary as a third-class funeral on a rainy day.” And this - I swear - was the very first sentence I read: And there I was at the end of the book, hewed from marble - eyes shut, unmistakable in profile - resting on top of my tomb.īefore long, I had absent-mindedly lowered myself onto my kitchen floor and pressed the spine of the paperback open to a random page, to start reading the book in earnest. There I was: suiting up in my bedazzled jacket at the height of my fame or caught candidly at close range, looking goofy and agog.
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There I was: doting on my Spanish mother, eating paella, lancing bulls. Ripping the package open and flipping through it the night it arrived, I was astonished to see my own face everywhere, from every angle. The book was slim but filled with photographs. I ordered an obscure biography of the matador, written by an American named Barnaby Conrad, who lived in Spain in the 1940s and fought bulls himself.
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An American reporter wrote: “Manolete’s death carries for his followers the impact that the death of the entire Brooklyn Dodger team would produce in Flatbush.” When Manolete died, a British newspaper reported that his funeral went on for four hours, and a military plane flew low overhead, showering the 100,000 mourners in attendance with red carnations.
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He was known as Manolete and is almost invariably described as the best bullfighter of the 1940s and among the greatest of all time. Even my mother recognized instantly that I and this anonymous Spaniard looked identical, which seemed to rattle her core belief that, in all the universe, her boychik was unique and special.Įventually, I learned who the man in the photograph was. It smacked people with an eerie jolt, joggled them into befuddled laughter or downright creeped them out. For years, I would show that picture to people at parties without a word, and every time there was a profound shock of recognition. But this photo of the matador was different. Sometimes all you get is a lot of skepticism and squinting, people searching for a sliver of correspondence between the two supposed doppelgängers just to be polite: Maybe around the mouth, I guess. I understand how subjective these things can be, how a resemblance that feels uncanny and self-evident to one person can elude everyone else.