Francisco Rivera Ordóñez: The greatest cape

Immoral spectacle or metaphor for life? Either way, bullfighting arouses passions like little else. For his new book, Edward Lewine spent a year with Spain's top matador

They look like emissaries from a more vivid world, dressed in deeply coloured costumes decorated in gold and baubles that send darts of light upon the sand. First comes a tall, pale-faced man who looks in need of a shave; then a spindly, greasy fellow. Then there is a pause and Francisco Rivera Ordóñez trots into view. He stands less than 5ft 9in and is muscled yet limber, like a gymnast. His hair is thick, the colour of good espresso. His skin is caramel. His face is striking, a matinée idol reimagined as a gypsy prince: dark eyes above sharp cheekbones and a straight nose running down to a mouth of even, white teeth. At 28, he is as beautiful as any man has the right to be.

This is Fran's first public appearance since his separation from his wife, Eugenia, the duchess of Montoro. The gossip press is still howling, and all eyes are on him. But he is used to that; he's been a prince of bullfighting from birth. Fran's great-grandfather, Cayetano Ordóñez, was a star in the 1920s and the model for the bullfighter in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Fran's grandfather, Antonio Ordóñez, starred in his own Hemingway book, and is thought to be the best matador of the latter 20th century. Fran's father, Francisco Rivera, known as "Paquirri", was killed by a bull. He is a legend.

Fran added to the family history with his own excellence in the ring and a high-profile marriage, but eight years into his career he is in trouble. He's ridden natural talent, suicidal bravery and his famous name to immediate success, spending his first three seasons as one of Spain's top matadors. Then, like many young bullfighters, he experienced a slump. With his marriage fracturing and his reputation sagging, Fran spent the run-up to the season mulling his retirement. Eventually he decided to shake off the doldrums and make his way back to the top.

"I'm very nervous," he told me the night before the bullfight. "This season is very important for me. It is time. I can take my place in la historia. When we bullfighters talk about other bullfighters, we say, 'For that guy the train has already left the station.' I think I can get on the train. I still have many things left to say."

Most non-Spaniards think of the bullfight as a sport, but it is not. A sporting event is a competition between two or more parties in which the outcome is in doubt. In bullfighting everyone knows the outcome: the bull will die. So aficionados don't come to see a fight or a contest. First, they want to admire the bulls. (This may seem paradoxical, but bullfighting fans are as interested in the bulls as they are the bullfighters.) Second, they want to see a man use a cape to make a bull charge, creating a dance with the bull, courting the danger of its horns to heighten the emotion. That's what the Spanish call the art of bullfighting, because they consider it an art form. Bullfighting isn't covered in the sports pages, but in culture. There's no Spanish word that means "bullfight". They call it a corrida, which means a "running".

The Spanish corrida is a choreographed ritual that never changes. The only thing that makes one corrida different from another is the behaviour of the bull, and what the men must do to make it submit. Typically, three matadors and their assistants kill six bulls, the matadors appearing in order of seniority. Each bull spends 20 minutes in the ring and what happens to it is divided into three acts. Act one: the bull charges a picador, mounted on an armoured horse, and the picador stabs the bull with a metal-tipped lance. Act two: banderilleros (assistant bullfighters) place three pairs of barbed sticks into the bull's hide. Act three: the matador comes out, plays the bull with the cape and kills it with a sword thrust.

If the matador stands still, makes his cape pass slowly and gracefully, bringing the bull across his body, and linking one pass after the other into a short series, he'll hear shouts of "Olé!" from the crowd. If he can construct an entire performance of linked series of passes and kill the bull cleanly on the first try, he will be awarded one ear, two ears, or both ears and the tail, according to the whim of the crowd, as approved by a bullring "president", usually a local official. This performance with the cape is the faena, and it is the point of the spectacle, the art on which the matador is judged.

If bullfighting is an art, then what does it do for the viewer? The movements a talented matador makes with a cape are beautiful, even when he's standing alone in front of a mirror. Add the charged atmosphere of the ring and the menacing beauty of the bull, and ask the matador to control the bull and work with it to create something pleasing to the eye - that is a performance that can inspire a depth of emotion. The only trouble is, that emotion rarely comes, because the art of bullfighting is made from the adversarial collaboration between a human and an unwilling animal. It was this emotion that Fran would seek to create that afternoon in Valencia.

A ring attendant opens the heavy door to the bull pens and Fran's first animal comes out, shiny black, rippled with muscle, the size of a small pick-up truck. The bulls are descended from an ancient wild strain that roamed Spain in prehistoric times. They are now bred for beauty, size, strength, speed and ferocity on special ranches. This bull is terrifying. It belongs in the forests of an earlier age, not in the middle of a city at the beginning of the 21st century. Without warning, it gallops across the sand, a rope of drool spilling from its black mouth. It lowers its head and chops hard with its right horn, taking out a chunk of wood from the fence.

Fran spreads his cape with both hands, letting it fall in front of him like the skirts of an elegant ball gown. Then he raises it, shakes it and shouts. The bull wheels and heads straight for Fran. His hat pushed down over his eyes, Fran flares his nostrils and scrunches his lips into his face, grimacing with the effort of staying still. The bull comes. Fran doesn't move. The bull lowers its head, arching its neck forward. The left horn - a white curve with a black tip - slices at Fran's left leg, but just before the horn reaches flesh, Fran drops his right hand, spreading the cape. The bull follows the cloth a few inches to the right, just enough for the horn to whistle by Fran's leg as he turns the cape, capturing the bull in the gentle slipstream of the cloth, slowing the bull and moving it across his body to the other side. "Olé!"

Whatever else Fran's critics say about him, no one can deny that he is an artist with the large purple and yellow cape called a capote, the first of two types of capes the matador uses in each performance. The capote has always been the cornerstone of his work. This is a Verónica pass, named for St Veronica, who used a cloth to wipe Christ's brow on his way to Calvary. The matador positions his lead foot outside the bull's line of attack, with his back foot in the line, gripping the big circle of the capote with hands on either side of a wedge cut out of it, and swings it in a semi-circle around his body. Fran's pass is executed as well as it can be.

Fran passes the bull a few more times, each time stepping further into the ring, gaining ground on the bull, showing it who's boss, teaching it to follow the cloth. The passes are slow and clean. The horns are always close, but never touch the cape, and Fran follows through on each pass, leaning out over the bull, forcing it to move past his body. The emotion of bullfighting is there and the Valencianos shout, "Olé!" and "Olé!" as the series unfolds. Then Fran shuts off the flow with a half Verónica, gathering the cloth at his back hip at the very last moment, suddenly removing the bull's target, whipping the bull's head around and taking away its desire to charge again. Then there is a trumpet blast and Fran's picadors trot into view. The bull charges the horses twice, taking two stabs of the spear, and then another trumpet, and Fran's banderilleros put in three sets of banderillas.

Fran takes off his hat and lays it on the sand. It is time for the faena with the muleta, a little red cape folded over a short stick. Fran and the bull are alone in the ring. The audience is all around them, and the ugly office buildings loom down over the roof of the bullring. The sky is dry for the moment and the air is filled with the guerilla warfare sounds of small firecrackers exploding and the brassy, percussive music of the bands marching, and people on the street outside. Fran starts with the muleta in his right hand, reeling off an uneven series of passes marred by the bull's growing tendency to become distracted and slide away at the end of each pass. Fran kneels, giving the animal a set of low, pretty, punishing passes, using the semaphore of the cape to command the bull to lower its neck, bringing its head down and giving Fran greater control. Then Fran stands tall again and twists the bull around his body in three rhythmic progressions of passes with the right hand, squeezing taut cries from the crowd.

The bull stands its ground, waiting for Fran to act. It is heaving and a saddle of blood drips down its back from where the picador has injured it. Fran gives the animal a few moments to catch its breath. Then he offers the cape and shouts. The bull strikes. But this time it doesn't charge in a straight line. Instead it takes its eye off the cape for a moment and makes straight for Fran. Without hesitation, Fran spins, twirling in a circle, wrapping the muleta around his leg and bringing the bull's head around with a snap, forcing it to wrench itself after the cloth, stopping it cold. Fran has solved the problem presented by the bull with courage and artistry, and Valencia loves it.

Someone in the crowd yells out: "Maestro, música!" And the band begins to play. The audience tenses, focusing its will on the sand. Fran moves the muleta into his left hand and begins to work passes, luring the bull with the small square of cloth hanging lifelessly from the stick. The series works, as does the next and the next, building up and up in emotion. Fran makes his way over to the fence and trades in the light sword he uses to give his wrist a break, for the steel death sword. Fran lines up, in profile, in front of the bull and runs in, leaning over the horns and sinking the sword into the bull's back. The sword hilt is a little below where it should be according the textbooks, but it is good enough. The bull staggers around for a few seconds, mouth open, tongue hanging out. Then it walks over to the wooden fence and folds its legs underneath its body. Dead.

The audience waves its white handkerchiefs and they award Fran an ear. The reviews in the papers the following morning will focus on Fran because he has cut the only ear of the corrida, but the critics, as usual, will be faint in their praise. "Rivera Ordóñez was good with his first bull," writes Javier Villan of El Mundo in a review that is typical of the rest, "although he could have been and should have been better."

Fran gets back to the hotel in less than 10 minutes, goes up to his room, strips and takes a quick, hot shower. Then he wraps the white hotel towel around his slender waist and settles into the couch in the sitting room of his suite to entertain the stream of guests that always come to visit a matador after a bullfight. Fran seems to be pleased. He hasn't taken Valencia by storm, but he has done well, especially considering what has been going on in his life. The season has begun and the first result has been positive. Maybe this was what he needs. Maybe this is the season.

Someone knocks on the door and Fran's manservant answers it.

"Fran," says the visitor in a public-school accent.

"Noël," replies Fran. "How are you doing?"

The two men share a warm embrace. Noël Chandler is a Welshman, a retired computer executive who lives in Spain. He is Fran's biggest fan, and this is Noël's traditional beginning-of-season visit. The two men chat about the upcoming year, where Fran will be performing and how he is feeling about the season. As Noël gets ready to leave, he asks the sort of serious bullfighting question any aficionado might ask, to discover whether Fran would be favouring bulls from any particular breeders this season. "What kinds of bulls are you interested in fighting this year?"

"Dead ones," Fran says. "Dead ones."

'Death and the Sun: A Matador's Season in the Heart of Spain', by Edward Levine, is published by Doubleday, £10.99. To order a copy at the special price of £9.99 (including p&p) call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798897