It is not often to see Francisco Rivera in the city where his father took the alternative. Although he explains that he sometimes visits Barcelona for business meetings, his presence in the neighboring municipality of Badalona is completely new. Together with his wife, the designer Lourdes Montes, he has opened the Banak flagship store, the largest in all of Europe.
The Valencian firm is decorating the Sevillian house of the Rivera Montes family and, thanks to the bullfighter’s voracious involvement in the choice of furniture, his wife has discovered a new line of business: “In a meeting with the interior designers, I asked him joking if he could pick something and he replied ‘The sofa cushions?’. Well, that’s how the idea was born to make a capsule collection that will be released in the autumn”, says the designer, who has been working since January on the sixth collection of flamenco dresses with her firm, Miabril.
As the couple tour the store’s two floors, she evokes the baby moment when she looks at the cribs and children’s bedrooms. Parents of Carmen (7) and Curro (4), miss their first months. Francisco (49) doesn’t see himself having any more children: “I’m already on the road to being a Papuchi: next year I’ll turn the ham”, he jokes.
They have been together for twelve years and their stability is crisis-proof. The ones that have lived – overcome with a lot of love and without selfishness, according to their recipe – have strengthened them as a couple. We set them a game: what is the best of the other and what should they improve on. She begins: “I like how good a father he is and how easy it is to live with him: he is very flexible and makes everything very comfortable. But I should pay more attention. For example, he assures me that he told me things that he did not tell meâ€. The bullfighter defends himself: “Because I think so, and even though I forget later I am convinced that I told you. I from Lourdes adore its principles and values. As a mother, I can’t even explain, and as a woman, how she fights for everything, for her projects, for her family, for me. It’s not selfish at all.”
Francisco prefers not to comment on the cover of ¡Hola! with Isabel Pantoja wrapped in a cloak, because it gives her “bad energy”. The songwriter has always ignored both Paquirri’s last will and the sentence that in 1994 forced her to hand over to Francisco and Cayetano the batch of personal items that her father bequeathed to them. “I am a Christian and I believe that when you die there is an afterlife. In the conversation this lady will have with my father, I would not like to be her. Depriving two children of the memories of their father… This is not good peopleâ€.
The couple agrees that the separation of Cayetano Rivera and Eva González should not affect their respective children: “We have a very good relationship and we will be family all our lives”. Francisco does not dare to answer his cousin, Canales Rivera, who accused him of interfering in his bullfighting career. Lourdes invites him to do it and finally enters: “The bull doesn’t give anything away to anyone. He doesn’t care if you are brunette, blonde, tall, short or if you have money. The only thing that matters is what you know how to do in front of the bull. I have never asked for help. They can criticize my professional career, but I showed my face every afternoon and what I have achieved has been with effort, work and bloodâ€.
