How can we approach the enigma of Léa Vicens when we have no taste for the spells of bullfighting and risk fainting at the slightest sight of a trickle of blood? No doubt by confronting one’s own contradictions and by questioning, in a new way and with a certain self-deprecation…
How can we approach the enigma of Léa Vicens when we have no taste for the spells of bullfighting and risk fainting at the slightest sight of a trickle of blood? No doubt by confronting one’s own contradictions and by questioning, in a new way and with a certain self-deprecation, a fascination for a character a thousand miles from oneself. A fascination so strong that it is experienced here as a “control”.
Léa Vicens during the rejoneo bullfight at the Dax feria in April 2023.
Archives Philippe Salvat/SO
This story, with a hybrid composition and great freedom of tone, retraces the year when Gaël Tchakaloff followed the famous rejoneadora who hypnotizes aficionados around the world, from her finca in the arid Andalusian lands where “she lives alone with 103 animals and two revolvers” at the legendary arenas in France and Spain. The writer initially received a refusal: Léa Vicens made a habit of not confiding and of repelling unwelcome people, out of modesty but also due to lack of time. The rider trains ten to fourteen hours a day.
Sovereignty and grace
A complicity of words and silences ends up forming between the two women who are completely opposed. Gaël Tchakaloff seeks to understand how far determination and bravery can go, which combine with sovereignty and grace, which generate an art. In the feria she finds a strange mirror in which, seeing herself upside down, so to speak, she makes certain fears flow back; bullfighting passion then resembles a turning of anxiety against itself. The display of virtuosity is understood as a flirtation with nothingness, a conversion of death, and even more, a mirage that comes to life: there is something, in the fact of looking at the rider, which gives the impression of looking the impossible. It’s not nothing, one might dare to add.
If the weak go to the decent, Gaël Tchakaloff is not decent. Choosing to write about a major figure in bullfighting in our pacified and nuanced times is to designate a place of choice on the media pyre. Olé!
“Life to Death” by Gaël Tchakaloff, ed. Flammarion, 232 p., €21, ebook, €14.99.
