Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez is using a ballpoint pen to explain how it feels to have a half-ton bull bury a horn in you. "If someone comes up to you with this now and sticks it into your leg all the way up to here, then that is going to hurt a lot," the Spanish bullfighter says, measuring out several inches. "But if it happens at a moment when the adrenaline is flowing, when you are fighting, then it is just not the same."
This is Rivera's way of explaining his reaction when a bull sank six inches of horn into his right thigh last September. On that occasion, Rivera took off his bullfighter's black necktie and wrapped it tightly above the wound to make a tourniquet. He then went back to confront the bull.
"There is a personal thing going with each particular bull—a connection between you," Rivera explains when we meet in Ronda, southern Spain. "I just wanted to finish what I had started." We are in his maternal family's hometown, a place infused with the history of the Ordóñez clan and of the bullfight itself.
Rivera is not trying to boast. That is not his style. He just wants me to understand why a man might do such a thing. Only after he killed the bull was he taken to the operating table. Doctors discovered the horn had struck muscles, a vein, and his femur. His first season as a full-fledged matador came to an immediate halt.
Three months later Rivera has fully recovered. He has already fought in Venezuela and will tackle some of the world's most demanding bullrings when the Spanish season begins in the spring.
Inside the ring, Rivera is noted not just for courage but for a quality that bullfighting aficionados call, quite simply, "art." They mean that he brings elegance and harmony to the movements of matador and bull. "There are the three things you need to be a good bullfighter: technique, bravery, and personality. He seems to have all three," says the former bullfighting writer for Spain's El País newspaper, William Lyon.
Rivera's success comes amid a resurgence in what is a $2 billion industry in Spain alone—and which is also popular in parts of France and Portugal as well as in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador. The increasingly heated debate over the ethics of slaying animals for entertainment has been met by outsize claims that the pasturing of bulls preserves green space in Spain and that their death is painless, due to the surge of adrenaline during the fights. The style of fighting bulls close in, and taking greater risks, is another argument Rivera and stars like José Tomás and Frenchman Sebastián Castella offer. (The prospect of actually witnessing the bull draw blood can't be bad for business either.)
Rivera's appeal, however, has spread beyond the bullfighting arena. Among those attracted by his unstudied panache—and his swarthy, sinuous good looks and green eyes—is Giorgio Armani. The Italian designer persuaded him to walk the runway in Milan last season. "Cayetano has that quiet, sophisticated elegance," Armani says. "You immediately sense a man who combines great strength and poise with humility and sensitivity."
