The matador lives for a single sensation: triunfo total. Total triumph over an enraged 1,000-pound bull until the beast is killed. But in the sport’s bloody history –from the Roman circuses of the first century B.C. to the present day– no matador has tasted triumph like Cristina Sánchez’s: She has conquered not only beasts and death but the machistas as well.

Machistas are the most incorrigibly macho men in Spain, the country where machismo was invented. For years, they did everything in their power to drive Cristina crazy and make her give up bullfighting. There had been other female bullfighters, but none had shown Sánchez’s promise. She was first in her class at Madrid’s bullfighting academy. Now she is 24 and has practiced on more than 150 bulls and is in Europe’s top professional ranks as matador de toros. «I want to make the machistas eat their words,» she used to say. But in time she became confident enough to ignore them; her passion, after all, was for perfection, not defiance.

Bullfighting, Ernest Hemingway said, is «the only art in which the artist is at risk of death.» But most people just don’t see it that way and can’t understand the cruelty of having thousands of bulls killed in the plazas every year. It is hard to believe that Cristina, who lives in a Madrid suburb with her parents, is capable of such violence. Her girlish bedroom is adorned with stuffed animals and a picture of Plácido Domingo. «I am a woman in the rest of my life and a bullfighter in the ring,» she says. She does not feel pity for the bull: «Never. If he is a good bull, combative and generous in his fight, I sometimes feel badly that he has to die. But all bulls, like all men, eventually die. It is more glorious to die in a ring than to be killed in a slaughterhouse.»

PART ONE: READING COMPREHENSION

1. Answer the following questions without copying from the text.
a) What makes Cristina Sánchez special in the world of bullfighting?

b) What is her present attitude towards the machistas?

c) What is Cristina Sánchez’s position on the question of cruelty to the animals in bullfighting?

  PART TWO: WRITING
Choose ONE. Write about either 1 or 2.

Option A: Write a letter to Cristina Sánchez saying, either why you admire her way of life,
or why you do not like it. Do not use your real name.

Option B: Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who was fascinated by bullfighting
and saw the bullfighters as brave and artistic men. Imagine he was alive today and had
been asked to write an article for an American newspaper explaining his passion for
bullfighting. Write the title of the article and what it would probably say.

3. Vocabulary

Explain next words in English, write the phonetics and also an example: enraged, beast, to give up, defiance, pity.