Death in the Afternoon Read online

  Why did you like that?

  Old lady: It seemed so sort of homey.

  Madame, you are a mystic. You are not among friends here. Let us go to the Café Fornos where we can discuss these matters at leisure.

  Old lady: Wherever you wish, sir, provided it is clean and wholesome.

  Madame, there is no wholesomer place in the Peninsula.

  Old lady: Will we see the bullfighters there?

  Madame, the place is packed with them.

  Old lady: Then let us be off.

  Fornos is a café frequented only by people connected with the bullfights and by whores. There is smoke, hurrying of waiters, noise of glasses and you have the noisy privacy of a big café. We can discuss the fight, if you wish, and the old lady can sit and look at the bullfighters. There are bullfighters at every table and for all tastes and all the other people in the café live off bullfighters in some way or another. A shark rarely has more than four remoras or sucking fish that fasten to him or swim along with him, but a bullfighter, when he is making money, has dozens. The old lady does not care to discuss the bullfight. She liked it; she is now looking at the bullfighters and never discusses things she has enjoyed even with her most intimate friends. We talk about it because there were a number of things you say you did not understand.

  When the bull came out did you notice that one of the banderilleros ran across his course trailing a cape and that the bull followed the cape driving at it with one horn? They run him that way always, at the start, to see which horn he favors. The matador, standing behind his shelter, watches the bull run by the trailing cape and notices whether he follows the zig-zag-ging cape on both his right and his left sides, this showing whether he sees with both eyes and which horn he prefers to hook with. He also notices whether he runs straight or if he has a tendency to cut ground toward the man as he charges. The man who went out with the cape in both hands after the bull had been run, and cited him from in front, standing still as the bull charged, and with his arms moving the cape slowly just ahead of the bull's horns, passing the bull's horns close by his body with a slow movement of the cape, seeming to keep him controlled, in the folds of the cape, bringing him past his body each time as he turned and recharged; doing this five times and then finishing off with a swirl of the cape that turned the man's back on the bull and, by cutting the bull's charge brusquely, fixed him to the spot; that man was the matador and the slow passes that he made were called veronicas and the half pass at the end a media-veronica. Those passes were designed to show the matador's skill and art with the cape, his domination of the bull and also to fix the bull in a certain spot before the entry of the horses. They are called veronicas after St. Veronica who wiped the face of Our Lord with a cloth and are so called because the saint is always represented holding the cloth by the two corners in the position the bullfighter holds the cape for the start of the veronica. The media-veronica that stops the bull at the end of the passes is a recorte. A recorte is any pass with the cape that, by causing the bull to try to turn in less than his own length, stops him brusquely or checks his rush by cutting his course and doubling him on himself.

  The banderilleros are never supposed to use both hands on the cape when the bull first comes out. If they use only one hand the cape will be trailed and when they turn it at the end of a run the bull will turn easily and not sharply and brusquely. He will do this because the turn of the long cape gives him an indication of the turn to make and gives him something to follow. With the cape held in both hands the banderillero can snap it away from the bull, flop it brusquely out of his sight and stop him dead, and turn him sharply so that he twists his spinal column, lames himself, has his speed cut, not by being worn down, but by laming, and make him unfit for the rest of the fight. Only the matador is supposed to use two hands on the cape during the early part of the fight. Strictly speaking the banderilleros, who are also called peones, are never supposed to use two hands on the cape except when bringing the bull out from a position he has taken and refused to leave. But in the way bullfighting has developed, or decayed, with emphasis increasingly placed on the manner of execution of the various passes rather than their effect, the banderilleros now do much of the work of preparing the bull for killing that was formerly done by the matador; and matadors without resources or science, whose only ability is their plastic or artistic talent, have their bulls, if these offer the slightest difficulty, prepared, worn down, dominated and everything but killed by the skilled and destructive cape of an experienced banderillero.

  It may seem foolish to speak of almost killing such an animal as a fighting bull with a cape. Of course you could not kill, but you can so damage the spinal column, twist the legs and lame the animal and, by abusing its bravery, force it to charge uselessly again and again, each time recorting it ferociously, that you may tire it, lame it, and deprive it of all speed and a great part of its natural forces. We speak of killing a trout with a rod. It is the effort made by the trout that kills it. A catfish arrives at the side of the boat in full possession of all its force and strength. A tarpon, a trout or a salmon will often kill himself fighting the rod and line if you hold him long enough.

  It was for this reason that banderilleros were prohibited from caping the bull with both hands. The matador was supposed to do all of the preparation for killing and the killing himself. The picadors were to slow the bull, to change his tempo, and to bring down the carriage of his head. The banderilleros were supposed to run him at the start, to place the banderillas quickly and in such a position as to correct any faults of hooking if they existed, and never to do anything to destroy the strength of the bull, in order that he might come intact into the hands of the matador who was supposed, with the muleta, to correct any tendencies toward hooking to one side or the other, to place him in position for killing and to kill him from in front, making him lower his head with the red serge of the muleta and killing him with the sword, driving it in high up at the top of the angle between the two shoulder blades.

  As the corrida has developed and decayed there has been less emphasis on the form of killing, which was once the whole thing, and more on the cape work, the placing of the banderillas and the work with the muleta. The cape, the banderillas and the muleta have all become ends in themselves rather than means to an end and the bullfight has both lost and gained thereby.

  In the old days the bulls were usually bigger than they are now; they were fiercer, more uncertain, heavier and older. They had not been bred down to a smaller size to please the bullfighters and they were fought at the age of four and a half to five years instead of three and a half to four and a half years. Matadors often had from six to twelve years of apprenticeship as banderilleros and as novilleros before becoming formal matadors. They were mature men, knew bulls thoroughly, and faced bulls which were brought to the highest point of physical force, strength, knowledge of how to use their horns and general difficulty and danger. The whole end of the bullfight was the final sword thrust, the actual encounter between the man and the animal, what the Spanish call the moment of truth, and every move in the fight was to prepare the bull for that killing. With such bulls it was not necessary to give emotion for the man to pass the animal as deliberately close to him with the cape as was possible. The cape was used to run the bulls, to protect the picadors, and the passes that were made with it, by our modern standards, were exciting because of the size, strength, weight and fierceness of the animal and the danger the matador ran in making them rather than by the form or the slowness of their execution. It was exciting that the man should pass such a bull at all, that a man should be in the ring with and dominate such an animal furnished the emotion rather than that he should deliberately, as now, try to pass the points of the horn as mathematically close to his body as possible without moving his feet. It is the decadence of the modern bull that has made modern bullfighting possible. It is a decadent art in every way and like most decadent things it reaches its fullest flower at its rottenest point, which is
the present.

  It is impossible, day in and day out, to fight bulls that are really bulls, huge, strong, fierce and fast, knowing how to use their horns and old enough so that they have their full growth, with the technique that has been developed, starting with Juan Belmonte, in modern bullfighting. It is too dangerous. Belmonte invented the technique. He was a genius, who could break the rules of bullfighting and could torear, that is the only word for all the actions performed by a man with the bull, as it was known to be impossible to torear. Once he had done it all bullfighters had to do it, or attempt to do it since there is no going back in the matter of sensations. Joselito who was strong (Belmonte was weak), healthy (Belmonte was sickly), who had an athlete's body, gypsy grace and an intuitive and acquired knowledge of bulls that was never surpassed by any bullfighter; Joselito for whom everything in bullfighting was easy, who lived for bullfighting, and seemed to have been made and bred almost to the measurement of what a great bullfighter should be, had to learn Belmonte's way of working. Joselito, the heritor of all great bullfighters, probably the greatest bullfighter that ever lived, learned to torear as Belmonte did. Belmonte worked that way because of his lack of stature, his lack of strength, because of his feeble legs. He did not accept any rules made without testing whether they might be broken, and he was a genius and a great artist. The way Belmonte worked was not a heritage, nor a development; it was a revolution. Joselito learned it, and during the years of their competition, when they each had around a hundred corridas a year, he used to say, "They say that he, Belmonte, works closer to the bull. It looks as though he does. But that isn't true. I really work closer. But it is more natural so it doesn't look so close."

  Anyway, the decadent, the impossible, the almost depraved, style of Belmonte was grafted and grown into the great healthy, intuitive genius of Joselito and in his competition with Juan Belmonte, bullfighting for seven years had a golden age in spite of the fact that it was in the process of being destroyed.

  They bred the bulls down in size; they bred down the length of horn; they bred them for suavity in their charges as well as fierceness because Joselito and Belmonte could do finer things with these smaller, easier bulls. They could do fine enough things with any bulls that came out of the torils; they were not helpless with any of them but, with the smaller, easier bulls they were certain to do the wonderful things that the public wanted to see. The big bulls were easy for Joselito although they were difficult for Belmonte. All bulls were easy for Joselito and he had to make his own difficulties. The competition ended when Joselito was killed in the ring on May 16, 1920. Belmonte went on one more year, then retired, and bullfighting was left with the new decadent method, the almost impossible technique, the bred down bulls and, as bullfighters, only the bad ones, the hardy, tough ones who had not been able to learn the new method and so no longer pleased, and a crop of new ones, decadent, sad and sickly enough, who had the method but no knowledge of bulls, no apprenticeship, none of the male courage, faculties or genius of Joselito, and none of the beautiful unhealthy mystery of Belmonte.

  Old lady: I saw nothing decadent or rotten about the spectacle we observed to-day.

  Nor did I, to-day, madame, for the matadors were Nicanor Villalta, the courageous telephone pole of Aragon; Luis Fuentes Bejarano, the valorous and worthy workman, the pride of Union Labor, and Diego Mazquiaran, Fortuna, the brave butcher boy of Bilbao.

  Old lady: They all seemed to me to be most valorous and manly chaps. In what way, sir, do you speak of decadence?

  Madame, they are most manly chaps although Villalta's voice is a shade high sometimes, and the decadence I speak of does not apply to them but to the decay of a complete art through a magnification of certain of its aspects.

  Old lady: Sir, you are hard to understand.

  I will explain later, madame, but indeed decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

  Old lady: I always understood it to mean that there was something rotten as there is at courts.

  Madame, all our words from loose using have lost their edge but your inherent concepts are most sound.

  Old lady: If you please, sir, I do not care for all this discussion of words. Are we not here to be instructed about the bulls and those who fight them?

  If you so wish, but start your writer to talking of words and he will go on until you are wearied and wish he would show more skill in using them and preach less of their significance.

  Old lady: Can you not stop then, sir?

  Have you ever heard of the late Raymond Radiguet?

  Old lady: I cannot say I have.

  He was a young French writer who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil if you follow me, madame.

  Old lady: You mean?

  Not exactly, but something of the sort.

  Old lady: You mean he-------?

  Precisely. When the late Radiguet was alive he often wearied of the tenuous, rapturous and querulous society of his literary protector, Jean Cocteau, and spent the nights at an hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens with one of two sisters who were then working as models in the quarter. His protector was greatly upset and denounced this as decadence saying, bitterly, yet proudly of the late Radiguet, "Bebé est vicieuse — il aime les femmes." So you see, madame, we must be careful chucking the term decadence about since it cannot mean the same to all who read it.

  Old lady: It repelled me from the first.

  Then let us return to the bulls.

  Old lady: Gladly, sir. But what finally happened to the late Radiguet?

  He caught typhoid fever from swimming in the Seine and died of it.

  Old lady: Poor chap.

  Poor chap, indeed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Those years after Joselito's death and the retirement of Belmonte were the worst bullfighting has gone through. The bull ring had been dominated by the two figures that, in their own art, remembering of course that it is an impermanent and so minor art, were comparable to Velasquez and Goya, or, in writing, to Cervantes and Lope da Vega, though I have never cared for Lope, but he has the needed reputation for the comparison, and when they were gone it was, as though in English writing Shakespeare had suddenly died, and Marlowe retired and the field left to Ronald Firbank who wrote very well about what he wrote about but was, let us say, a specialist. Manuel Granero of Valencia was the one bullfighter the aficion had great faith in. He was one of three boys who had, with protection and money furnished, been made into bullfighters by the best mechanical means and instruction; practicing with calves on the bull ranches around Salamanca. Granero had no bullfighting blood in his veins and his immediate family had wanted him to be a violinist, but he had an ambitious uncle and natural talent for bullfighting, aided by much courage, and he was the best of the three. The other two were Manuel Jiminez, Chicuelo, and Juan Luis de la Rosa. As children they were all perfectly trained miniature bullfighters and the three of them all had pure Belmontistic styles, beautiful execution in everything they did, and they were all three called phenomenons. Granero was the soundest, the healthiest, and the bravest and he was killed in Madrid in the May following the death of Joselito.

  Chicuelo was the son of a matador of that same name who had been dead some years from tuberculosis. He was reared, trained and launched and managed as a matador by his uncle, Zocato, who had been a banderillero of the old school and was a good business man and a heavy drinker. Chicuelo was short, unhealthily plump, without a chin, with a bad complexion, tiny hands and with the long eyelashes of a girl. Trained in Sevilla and then on the ranches around Salamanca he was as perfect a miniature bullfighter as could be manufactured and he was about as authentic a bullfighter, really, as a little porcelain statuette. After the death of Joselito and Granero and the retirement of Belmonte bullfighting had him. It had Juan Luis de la Rosa who was Chicuelo in everything but the uncl
e and the way he was built in the altogether. Some one, not a relative, had put up the money for his education and he was another perfectly manufactured product. It had Marcial Làlanda who knew bulls from being brought up among them — he was the son of the overseer of the breeding ranch of the Duke of Veragua, and he was advertised as the successor of Joselito. All he had as successor at that time was his knowledge of bulls, and a certain way of walking as he cited the bulls for the banderillas. I saw him often in those days and he was always a scientific bullfighter, but he was not strong and he was listless. He seemed to take no pleasure in bullfighting, to derive no emotion or elation from it and to have much controlled, but depressing, fear. He was a sad and unemotional bullfighter, although he was technically skillful and completely intelligent, and for once that he was good in the ring he was mediocre and uninteresting a dozen times. He, Chicuelo and La Rosa all fought as though they were condemned to it rather than as if they had chosen it. I believe that no one of them could ever completely forget the death of Joselito and of Granero. Marcial had been in the ring when Granero was killed and had been unjustly accused of not having made an effort to take the bull off of him in time. He was very bitter about this.

  Bullfighting then, too, had two brothers, the Anllos, from Aragon. One, the older, Ricardo, they were both called Nacional, was of medium height and thick set, a monument of probity, courage, undistinguished but classic style and bad luck. The second, Juan, called Nacional II, was tall, with a thin mouth and slanting eyes. He was ungraceful, angular, very brave and with a style of fighting as ugly as you could see.

  There was Victoriano Roger, Valencia II, the son of a banderillero. Born in Madrid, he was trained by his father and he too had an older brother who was a failure as a matador. A boy of the same vintage as Chicuelo and company, he managed a cape beautifully, was arrogant, quarrelsome and brave as the bull itself in Madrid, but anywhere else let his nerves master him and felt his honor was secure in provincial disasters, if he could only triumph in Madrid. This confining of their personal honor to Madrid is the mark of those bullfighters who make a living from the profession but never dominate it.