Enrique Ponce, false door | Culture

After thirty-four years of alternative, Enrique Ponce said goodbye to Madrid through the front door. Perfect epilogue, if that award had been deserved. It wasn’t. Ponce, an undisputed – and discussed – figure in bullfighting in recent decades, was given two ears and carried on their shoulders at the end of the celebration because it was what he had to do.

As happened last year with El Juli, Madrid, this new Las Ventas plaza invaded by a triumphalist, sentimental and deeply ignorant public, gave itself over to a bullfighter who was never a bullfighter of this plaza. Such is life. And memory. Or the lack thereof, in this case.

They took him out to greet him after the parade and then they vibrated with a false, cheesy and superficial bullfighting, lacking truth and emotion. And things started out awry. His first bull, the second, from Garcigrande, broke a piton against the horse’s breastplate and, despite incessant protests from the public, the president kept him in the ring.

Correct decision, according to the regulations, but more than debatable in terms of “image” or “sensitivity.”

Ponce had to cut things short with the angry animal, but he was able to expand on the fourth, by Juan Pedro Domecq, a horned bullfight made to measure for his bullfighting. Noble to the point of exhaustion, like his brothers, he passed without pain or glory on the horse, he moved with difficulty in banderillas and reached the last third without a gram of brave breed in his gut.

After toasting the public in the very center of the arena, Ponce demonstrated once again that he is a consummate master when it comes to keeping invalids on their feet. Without ever lowering his hand and almost always using his prodigious beak, he created a performance without emotion, adjustment, or depth, but much cheered by the majority of spectators.

The end of the work, in the round, bending in front of an authentic corpse project, excited the isidros (who also return to the square on these dates) and after a stab, they and the president presented him with two ears of very little weight.

Another was given to the confirmer Samuel Navalón – dedicated and dignified all afternoon – after being overturned by the sixth, also outcast, but who, due to his lack of strength, defended himself and protested at the embroque. The fuck woke the audience up from their lethargy and after a finale that was as courageous as it was tremendous, the scarves came out again.

With the first, a tame and unequal specimen of Garcigrande whom he received on his knees in front of the pigsty door, he left some estimable rounds, he overworked himself and was about to hear the three warnings.

David Galván left empty-handed, even though he was lucky to be third, the “best” of such livestock swill. Like the rest, it also went out soon, but, until then, at least it was started with a certain greed, joy and alacrity. The prologue, beautiful and inspired, was hopeful, but the successive rounds of crutches, always out of order, quickly dispelled any glimmer of hope. Faced with the dying fifth, they were not even created.

In the end, on shoulders and in the middle of a crowd, Ponce left. The bad thing is that his bullfighting and his party remain.