Or I'll Dress You In Mourning The Story of El Cordobes and the new Spain he stands for

May 20, 1964. On the rain-soaked, treacherous sands of Las Ventas -- the great bullring of Madrid -- the most idolized, most controversial, most highly paid matador in Spain's history faced the moment of truth with a peculiarly dangerous, half-blind, infuriated bull. For Manuel Benitez, "El Cordobés," this corrida confirming his elevation to the rank of matador de toros for an unprecedented fee of one million pesetas was the culmination of half a lifetime of bitter struggle. For 23,000 frenzied aficionados caught up in the drama unfolding before them in the arena, and for a television audience of nearly two-thirds of the population of Spain, it was a moment of emotional intensity without parallel in the twenty-five years since the end of the Spanish Civil War. For millions of his countrymen, this young man whose phenomenal rise from poverty and obscurity had brought him -- and them -- to this extraordinary moment was a symbol of all that their country had endured in the last quarter of a century and of the profound changes that were sweeping through their national life. Twenty-eight years before, in the spring of 1936, Manuel Benitez was born, the last of five children of a poor Andalusian family ("We lived on the second floor ... you got up on a ladder ... there was one room ... and one window on the street ... "), in the small town of Palma del Rio, only months before his family, the town, and all Spain, were plunged into the fatal violence of the Civil War. 'Or I'll Dress You in Mourning' is the story of Manuel Benitez -- and of the long road that he and his country traveled from those desperate times to that triumphant hour at Las Ventas when Spain stood still, sharing the climactic ordeal of its hero El Cordobés.