CHAPTER V
THE TORERO AT HOME
Even though one deny the right of its inhabitants to pity the man who must live and die elsewhere, even he who finds it panting and simmering in the heat of summer, will still count it no punishment to spend a fortnight in Seville. Tranquillity and that laggard humor so befitting vacation days reign within its precincts; yet it is a real city, never falling quite inert even at the hour of siesta, which is so like the silence of the grave in other towns of Andalusia. In the slender calle Rosario itself the stillness was never supreme, but tempered always by the droning of a passing _ajero_ with his necklace of garlic, an itinerant baker, or a blind crone hobbling by with the fifth or the tenth of a lottery ticket, crooning in mournful voice, "La loteria! El numero trienta seis mil quinientos cincuenta y cinco-o-o. Who will win a fortune in the loteria-a-a?" Then above all else the soft, quarter-hourly booming of the cathedral bells to mark the passing of the day, like mile-stones on a wandering highway.
Nor with all her languor is Seville slovenly. Outwardly, like all that carries the ear-mark of the Moor, she is bare. In the first brief survey one may fancy one's self in a city of dismal hovels. But this is because the houses are turned wrong-side out; a glimpse into one of the marble-paved patios, fragrant with orange-trees and cooled by fountains throwing their waters high in the dry air, forever dispells the illusion.
My first full day in Seville fell on a holiday dedicated to San Pedro which, chancing also to be my birthday, it was easy to imagine a personal festival. In truth, the celebration of the day was marked by nothing other than a bit more indolence than usual. The real fiesta began at night in the Alameda of Hercules. There, among a hundred booths, the chief object of interest was a negro, the first of his race, one might fancy, who ever invaded the city.
By day, indeed, there is little else to do in Seville than the royal occupation of doing nothing, a stroll along the Sierpes in the morning, a retreat toward noisy, glaring noonday to the cool and silent cathedral or those other churches that rival it as museums of art, there to wander undisturbed among masterpieces of Spain's top-most century. The cathedral, by the way, houses the most recent traveler in the calendar of saints. Saint Anthony of Padua, not many years ago, released by the dexterous knife of an impulsive admirer, struck out into the unknown and journeyed as far as our own New York. But there repenting such conduct at his years or daring to venture no further when his companion found a sojourn in the Tombs imperative, he returned to his place, and resumed it so exactly that only the sharpest eye can detect the evidence of his unseemly excursion.
A city that styles her most important street that "of the Serpents," even though it harbors no more of the outcasts of the pavement than many another famous thoroughfare, may be expected to abound in other strange names. Nor are they lacking. How unworthy his lodging must the worldly Sevillian feel who wanders uncertainly homeward in the small hours to his abode in "Jesus del Gran Poder"--"Powerful Jesus street." Or with what face can the merchant turn off after a day of fleecing his fellow-man toward his dwelling in "Amor de Dios"? Top-heavy nomenclature is not confined to the streets. There are many windows in which one may read the announcement of a "Media Noche de Jamon." No, it is not a new law by the cortes, but a "Middle of the Night of Ham," or, succinctly, the over-worked ham sandwich. The uninstructed may be led at sight of a building proclaiming itself an "Academia del Tiro al Blanco" into the belief that Seville is overrun with institutions of higher learning. Not so, distinctly not so. The "Academy of the Shot at the White" is what less extravagant and imaginative peoples dub a shooting gallery.
The man in the street is frequently no less colorful in his language. Yet the crisp, trenchant word common to that personage the world over is here, too, in full force, led by that never idle explosive "hombre." Dictionarically speaking, "hombre" means "man," and nothing more--which only proves how dismally the dictionary has failed to keep up with the times. For child, woman, or hen-pecked male answers to the expression as readily as to his own name. A sevillano leading a pup at the end of a string may be frequently observed to give a jerk at the leash and cry over his shoulder, "Hombre! Vamonos!"--"Come along, man!"
Anent the man in the street, it may be asserted that the Sevillian is usually there. Writers of Spanish romances have for centuries sought to win our sympathy for their love-lorn heroes by stationing them in the public way to whisper their pleadings through the cold bars of a reja. The picture is true; the lover of flesh and blood and of to-day still stands there. But so, for that matter, does the butcher's boy, the ol'-clothes man, and even less reputable persons. In Spanish newspapers the national wealth of phrase is too often overshadowed--like the news columns--by the touching assurance of personal announcements. Rare the page that is not half taken up with a black-bordered inset conveying the information that:
"Senor and Senora Perez have the honor to advise their sorrowing friends and business associates that little Willie Perez, aged six, went up to heaven at 7:32 last evening."
There is nothing like being exact and punctual in these little matters.
Toward sunset, after the siesta, it is not merely a la mode but good sense to stroll down to the banks of the Guadalquivir by the Golden Tower and drift an hour or two back and forth along the deep-shaded Alameda. There one will be in the best company in Seville--and the worst; for all the city is there, lolling in its carriage or pattering along the gravel in its hempen sandals.
But it is only at night that Seville is wholly and genuinely awake and approaches somewhat to that fountain of joy her inhabitants would have the world believe her. Then at last does she shake off entirely the daytime lassitude. The noises of the day are all there, the street-hawkers have gained a hundredfold in volume of lung, in number, and in activity, the cathedral bells seem twice as loud. Toward nine all the city and his wife and children and domestics are gathered or gathering in the great focal point, the palm-fringed Plaza San Fernando. The attractions are several. First of all is the "cinematagrafo," a moving-picture machine throwing its mirth and puerility on a sheet suspended in the center of the plaza. Second, a military band, not a caterwauling of strange noises that one would desire suppressed by fire or earthquake, but a company seriously and professionally engaged in producing genuine music, which it does from near nine till after midnight as continuously as any band could be expected to until some invention makes it possible to blow a trombone and smoke a cigarette at one and the same time. Third, there is the excitement which the mingling together in crowds brings every Latin people, and the supreme pleasure of strolling to and fro admiring one another and themselves. Fourth, if so many excuses are needed, there is fresh air and the nearest approach to coolness that the city affords.
Yet with all Seville gathered the thousand roped-off chairs around the curtain are rarely half filled; for to sit in one costs a "fat dog," as the Spaniard facetiously dubs his Lacedemonian two-cent piece. But what a multitude in the rest of the square! Out of doors all Spain mixes freely and heartily. Hidalgos with the right to conceal their premature baldness from Alfonso himself shudder not in the least at being jostled by beggars; nay, even exchange with them at times a few words of banter. Silly young fops, in misfit imitation of Parisian style, a near-Panama set coquettishly over one ear, trip by arm in arm, swinging their jaunty canes. Workingmen scorning such priggishness stride slowly by in trim garments set off by bright red _fajas_ in which is stuck a great _navaja_, or clasp-knife of Albacete. Rich-bosomed _majas_ with their black masses of mane-like hair, in crimson skirts or yellow--as yellow as the gown of Buddha--drift languorously by with restless fan. No type is missing from the strolling multitude. Strolling, too, it is, in spite of the congestion; for the slow tide-like movement of the throng not only gives opportunity but compels any lazy foreigner to walk whether he will or not. Everyone is busy with gallantry and doing nothing--doing it only as the Spaniard can who, thanks to temperament, climate, and training knows that peerless art and follows it with pleasure, not with the air of one who prefers or pretends to prefer to be working.
The Sevillian is in many things, above all in his amusements, a full-grown child. Groups of portly business men, Seville's very captains of industry, sit hour by hour watching the unrolling of just such films, as are shown in our "nickelodeons," shouting with glee and clapping each other on the shoulder when a man on the screen falls off a chair or a baker's boy deluges a passerby with flour. No less hilarious are the priests, shaking their fat sides with merriment at the pictured discomfiture of one of their guild in eager pursuit of some frail beauty. As interested as the rest are the policemen--and as little engaged in the fulfillment of their duties, whatever those may be. A poor species, a distressingly unattractive breed are these city policemen of Spain, in their uniform closely resembling checkerboard pajamas, lacking even the Hibernian dignity of size, stoop-shouldered and sunken-chested with lounging on their spines and the inordinate sucking of cigarette smoke into their lungs. Of the self-respect and pride of office characteristic of the national guardia civil they have none whatever. I recall no evening in the Plaza San Fernando that at least one pair of these wind-broken, emasculate caricatures of manhood did not fall to quarreling, dancing in rage and shrieking mutual curses in their smoke-ruined voices, while the throng dogged them on.
Families gather early in the plaza. There ensues a moment or two of idle thrumming--for father or brother is certain to bring his guitar--then out bursts the sharp, luring _fandango_; the little girls in snowy white squirm a moment on their seats, spring suddenly out upon the gravel, and fall to dancing to the click of their castanets as rhythmically as any professionals. They do not dance to "show off," they are indeed rarely conscious of attracting attention; they dance because the fire in them compels, because they wish to--and what the Andalusian wishes to do he does then and there, gloriously indifferent to whoever may be looking on. Let him who can imagine an American bringing his guitar to the public square of a large city and, surrounded by thousands, play serenely on into the depths of the night.
The Andalusian is one of the most truly musical beings on earth, in the sense that his music expresses his real emotions. Song is almost his natural mode of expression, always spontaneous, with none of the stiffness of learned music. He has no prelude, follows no conscious rules, displays none of that preliminary affectation and patent evidence of technic that so frequently makes our northern music stilted and unenchanting. He plunges headlong into his song, anywhere, at any time, as a countryman unsullied by pedantry enters into conversation.
Thus wanes the night in the Plaza San Fernando, marked by the boom of the Giralda's bells, the bawling of vendors of lottery-tickets, of titbits, of matches, of _azucarillos_, of _naranjeros_ crying their oranges, of boys carrying miniature roulette-wheels with a cone of sherbet as prize, that the little children may be taught to gamble early in life; and sharply above all else and most incessantly the alpargata-shod water-seller, with his vessel like a powder-can slung across one shoulder, his glasses clinking musically, crying, crying always in his voluptuous, slovenly dialect:
"A'ua! A'ua fresca! A'ua fresca como la nieve! Quien quiere beber?"
We have street calls in the United States, but he whose ear is daily assaulted therewith would have difficulty in imagining how musical these may be when filled, like the thrum of the guitar, the street ballad, the "carol of the lusty muleteer," and the wail of the railway announcer, with the inner soul of Andalusia.
There is to-day very little left of the national costume of Spain. One may except the stiff, square-cut sombrero, the alpargata of workman and beggar, the garb of the arriero, fitting and suiting him as if it had grown on him, the blanket which the peasant wears thrown over one shoulder, not because he realizes what a charm this adds to his appearance, but because he often sleeps out of doors or on the stone floor of public stables. Last, and least to be forgotten, is the mantilla. Except for it the women of Spain have succumbed to the ugly creations of Paris; may that day be centuries distant when the abomination masquerading under the name of woman's hat makes its way into the peninsula. Yet there is never among Spanish women that gaudy affectation of style so frequent elsewhere. Give her the merest strip of gay calico and the espanola will make it truly ornamental; with a red flower to wear over one temple and a mantilla draped across the back of her head she is more pleasingly adorned than the best that Paris can offer.
There is something unfailingly coquettish about the mantilla. It sets best, perhaps, with a touch of Arab blood; and in the Plaza San Fernando this is seldom lacking. Everywhere are morisco faces framed in the black mantilla and, as if in further reminder of Mohammedan days, there still remains the instinctive habit of holding a corner of the shawl across the chin. Thus accoutered only the Castilian "ojear" can in any sense express the power given the andaluza by her Oriental ancestry to do or say so much with a glance of her black eye. With the fan, too, she is an adept. The Japanese geisha is in comparison a bungler. The woman of Spain has her fan in such fine training that it will carry on extended conversations for her without a word from her lips, as Spanish peasants can talk from two hilltops miles apart by the mere motions of their arms.
But who of all the misinformers of humanity first set afoot the rumor that the sevillana is beautiful? "Salada" she is, brimming over with that "salt" for which she is so justly renowned; chic, too, at times, with her tiny feet and hands and graceful carriage; and always voluptuous. But one might wander long in the music-livened Plaza San Fernando without espying a woman to whom could be granted the unqualified adjective beautiful. On the other hand it is rare that one meets a sevillana, unless she be deeply marked by the finger of time, who is ugly; never, if my search was thorough, one scrawny or angular. In Spain is never that blending and mixture of all types as in our land of boundless migration; hence one may generalize. Salada, graceful, full of languor, above all wholly free from pose, is the sevillana in her mantilla. Of education in the bookish sense she has little, of the striving after "culture" to the divorce of common sense none whatever. She may--and probably does--know nothing of the sciences, or the wrinkle-browed joys of the afternoon club. But she is brimming with health and sound good sense, above all she is incontestably charming; and is not this after all--whisper it not in New England--the chief duty of her sex?
The Andalusian is primarily an out-door people; not merely in the plain and physical sense, but in life and character. He lives his life openly, frankly, setting his face in no mask of Puritanical pretension when he sallies forth into the world, being himself always, in public or in private. All in all among the sincerest, he is also the most abstemious and healthiest of peoples; not yet spoiled by luxury. His existence is reduced to simplicity; more exactly he has never lost touch with eternal nature. He takes time to live and never admits the philosophy that he must work before resting, but hinges his conduct on the creed that he must live first, and do whatever of work there is time left to do. In no sense is he lazy; rather in his sound sanity he has a real appreciation of the value of life. To-day is the great day to him. Live now is his motto, not put off living until he has earned enough to live, only to find it too late to begin. One would seek through Seville in vain for that strained, devil-chased air so stamped on our own national physiognomy. Whatever his vocation, or the hour of the day, the Spaniard has always time to choose the shady side of the street, time to halt and talk with his friends. As I watched him night by night in the Plaza San Fernando--and this is largely typical of all Spain--there came the reflection that the lands of continual striving, the lands where "culture" demands the repression of every natural emotion and enthusiasm, are dreary realms, indeed, compared with the Living Latin South. Here is not merely animation, but life, real life everywhere, no mere feigned living.
On my second Sunday in Seville I attended my second bullfight. The first I had seen from the depths of the _sombra_, believing the assertion that none but a man with Arabic blood in his veins could endure the unshaded side of the arena. But my fear of sun-stroke had melted away; moreover, the sun-side gate keeper is most easily satisfied. I bought a ticket at a corner of las Sierpes and entered the plaza as soon as the doors were opened.
Not a half-dozen had preceded me when I took a place on the stone bank directly behind the red _tablas_. On my heels appeared a rabble of ragged, joyful fellows, who quickly demonstrated that I had not, as I supposed, chosen the foremost seat, by coming to roost along the top of the barrier in front of me. One shudders to reflect what would befall individuals in an American baseball crowd who should conduct themselves as did these habitues of the Sevillian _sol_. But to the mercurial andaluz, accustomed always and anywhere to give his idiosyncrasies and enthusiasms full play, the wildest antics seem quite in place.
If, as many reputed authorities will have us believe, the Spaniard's love for "toros" is dying out, what must it have been before the dissolution began? At any rate it has not yet sunk to that point where the vast plaza of Seville will hold all who would come, even to these _novilladas_ in which the bulls are young and the fighters not yet more famous than a member of the cortes. From a dozen entries the spectators poured into the enclosure; in the blazing semicircle bronzed peasants and workmen with wine-swollen _botas_, across the shimmering sand richly attired senoritas in the white mantilla of festival, attended by middle-aged duenas and, at respectful distance, by caballeros of effeminate deportment. The espanola is as ardent a lover of bulls as the men. One must not, however, jump to the conclusion that she is cruel and inhuman. On the contrary she is in many things exceedingly tender-hearted. Habit and the accustomed way of thinking make vast differences, and the fact that Spain was for seven hundred years in continual warfare may account for a certain callousness to physical suffering.
The Spanish plaza de toros is the nearest modern prototype of the Roman Coliseum; when it is filled one may easily form a mental picture of the scene at a gladiatorial combat. By four-thirty the voice of the circular multitude was like the rumble of some distant Niagara. Howling vendors of thirst-quenching fruits climbed over our blistering knees; between the barriers circulated hawkers of everything that may be sold to the festive-humored. Spain may be tardy in all else, but her bullfights begin sharply on time. At the first stroke of five from the Giralda a bugle sounded, the barrier gates swung open, and the game was on.
It would be not merely presumptuous, which is criminal, but trite, which is worse, to attempt at this late day to picture a scene that has been described a hundred times in every civilized tongue and in all the gamut of styles from Byronic verse to commercial-traveler's prose. But whereas every bullfight is the same in its general features, no two were ever alike in the unexpected incidents that make the sport of perennial interest to the _aficionados_. An "aficionado," be it noted in passing, is a "fan," a being quite like our own "rooter" except that, his infirmity being all but universal, he is not looked down upon with such pity by his fellow-countrymen.
Seville is the acknowledged headquarters of the taurine art. In our modern days of migratory mixture of races and carelessness of social lines, toreros have arisen from all classes and in all provinces--nay, even in foreign lands. One of Spain's famous _matadores_ is a Parisian, and one even more renowned bears the nickname of the "Mexican Millionaire." But the majority of bullfighters are still sons of peasants and small landholders of Andalusia in general and the vicinity of Seville in particular. The torero touring "the provinces" is as fond of announcing himself a sevillano as are our strolling players of claiming "New Yawk" as home. Nowadays, too, the bulls are bred in all parts of Spain and by various classes of persons. But the _ganaderias_ of Andalusia still supply most of the animals that die in the plazas of Spain, and command the highest prices. Among the principal raisers is the Duke of Veragua, who boasts himself--and can, it is said, make good the boast--a lineal descendant of that Christopher Columbus whose wandering ashes now repose in the cathedral of Seville. The duke, however, takes second place to one Eduardo Miura, whose bulls are so noted for their fury that a movement has for some time been on foot to demand double fees for facing animals from his pastures.
The bulls of both my Sundays in Seville were "miuras," and fully sustained the fame of their ganadero. Each corrida began with the usual caparisoned parade, the throwing of the key, the fleeing of the over-cautious _alguaciles_ amid the jeering of the multitude. Is there another case in history of a national sport conducted by the vested authorities of government? Perhaps so, in Nero's little matinees in the toasting of Christians. But here the rules of the game are altered and to some extent framed by those authorities. Imagine the city fathers of, let us say Boston, debating with fiery zeal whether a batter should be allowed to run on the third strike! Then, too, the mayor or his representative is the umpire, safely so, however, for he is securely locked in his box high above the rabble and there is never a losing team to lie in wait for him beyond the club-house.
It is the all but universal custom, I note in skimming through the impressions of a half-hundred travelers in Spain, to decry bullfighting in the strongest terms. Nay, almost without exception, the chroniclers, who appear in most cases to be full-grown, able-bodied men, relate how a sickness nigh unto death came upon them at about the time the first bull was getting warmed up to his business which forced them to flee the scene forever. One must, of course, believe they are not posing before the gentle reader, but it comes at times with difficulty. To be sure, the game has little in common with croquet or dominoes; there are stages of it, particularly the disemboweling of helpless hacks, that give the newcomer more than one unpleasant quarter of an hour. Indeed, I am inclined to think that had I a dictator's power I should abolish bullfighting to-morrow, or next Monday at least; but so, for that matter, I should auto races and country billboards, Salome dancers and politicians, train-boys and ticket speculators. Unfortunately--
At any rate, I came out to this second corrida in Seville and left it with the hope of seeing several more. Certainly there is no other "sport" that can more quickly and fully efface from the mind of the spectator his personal cares and problems; and is not this, after all, the chief, if not the only raison d'etre of professional sport? There is an intensity in the moment of a matador standing with steeled eye and bared sword before a bull panting in tired anger, head lowered, a hush of expectancy in the vast audience, the _chulos_ poised on tiptoe at a little distance, an equine corpse or two tumbled on the sand to give the scene reality, compared with which the third man, third strike in the ninth inning of a 0-0 contest is as exciting as a game of marbles. It is his hunger for such moments of frenetic attention that makes the Spaniard a lover of the corrida, not the sight of blood and the injuries to beast and man, which, in his intoxication at the game itself, he entirely loses sight of.
The newcomer will long remember his first bull--certainly if, as in my own case, the first bandarillero slips at the moment of thrusting his barbed darts and is booted like a soccer football half across the ring by the snorting animal. Still less shall I forget the chill that shot through me when, with the fifth bull at the height of his fury, a gaunt and awkward boy of fifteen sprang suddenly over the barriers and shook his ragged blouse a dozen times in the animal's face. As many times he escaped a goring by the closest margin. The toreros did not for a moment lose their heads. Calmly and dexterously they maneuvered until one of them drew the bull off, when another caught the intruder by the arm and marched him across the ring to the shade of the mayor's box. There the youth, who had taken this means of gaining an audience, lifted up a mournful voice and asked for food, asserting that he was starving--a statement that seemed by no means improbable. The response was thumbs down. But he gained his point, in a way, for he was given a fortnight in prison. Incidents of the sort had grown so frequent of late in the plaza of Seville as to make necessary a new law, promulgated in large letters on that day's programme. Printed words, in all probability, meant nothing to this neglected son of Seville. Such occurrences are not always due to the same motive. The impulsive andaluz is frequently not satisfied with being a mere spectator at the national game. A score of times the tattered aficionados about me pounced upon one of their fellows and dragged him down just as he was on the point of bounding into the ring. Indeed, as at any spectacle the world over, the audience was as well worth attention as the performance itself. On the blistering stone terraces of an Andalusian sol animation and comedy are never lacking. In his excitement at a clever thrust the Sevillian often sees fit to fall--quite literally--on the neck of a total stranger; friends and foes alike embrace each other and dance about on the feet, shoulders, or heads of their uncomplaining neighbors. There is a striking similarity between the bantering of a famous torero by the aficionados and the "joshing" of a favorite pitcher in an American ball park, but the good day has yet to come when the recorder of a home-run will be showered in his circuit of the bleachers with hats and wine-skins, handfuls of copper coins, and tropical deluges of cigars. Nor does the most inexcusable fumble call forth such a storm of derision as descends upon a cowardly bull. The jibes have in them often more of wit than vulgarity, as when an aficionado rises in his place and solemnly offers the animal his seat in the shade. The height of all insults is to call him a cow. Through it all, the leather wine-bottles pass constantly from hand to hand. A dozen of these I had thrust upon me during the fight, and tasted good wine each time. The proceeding is so antiseptic as to warm the heart of the most raving germ-theorist, for the bota is fitted with a tiny spout out of which the drinker, holding the receptacle high above his head, lets the wine trickle down his throat. The skins so swollen when the corrida begins are limp and flaccid when it ends.
It seems the custom of travelers to charge that the apparent bravery of the bullfighter is mere pseudo-courage. Of all the detractors, however, not one records having strolled even once across the arena while the fight was on. In truth, the torero's calling is distinctly dangerous. The meanest bull that enters a Spanish ring, one for whom the spectators would demand "banderillas de fuego"--explosives,--is a more fearful brute than the king of a Texas ranch. Their horns are long, spreading and needle-pointed; the _empresa_ that dared turn into the ring a bull with the merest tip of a horn blunted or broken would be jeered into oblivion. Not a year passes that scores of toreros are not sent to the hospital.
The Spanish espada is almost invariably "game" to the last. The sixth bull of this Sunday's tournament was, as often happens, the most ferocious. He killed six horses, wounded two _picadores_, tossed a chulo as high as a one-story house and, at the first pass of Vasquez, the matador, knocked him down and gored him in the neck. A coward, one fancies, would have lost no time in withdrawing. Vasquez, on the contrary, crawled to his feet and swung half round the circle that all might see he was unafraid, though blood was streaming down his bespangled breast. The alguaciles between the barriers commanded him to retire, but it was to be noted that not one of them showed the least hint of entering the ring to enforce the order. The diestro advanced upon the defiant brute, unfurled his red muleta, poised his sword--and swooned flat on the sand. The bull walked slowly to him, sniffed at his motionless form, and with an expression almost human of disdain, turned and trotted away.
"Palmas al toro!" bawled a boisterous fellow at my elbow, and the vast circle burst out in a thunder of hand-clapping and cries of "Bravo, toro!" while the wounded espada still lay senseless in the center of the ring.
He was carried off by his _cuadrilla_, and the _sobresaliente_, which is to say the "jumper-over," or substitute, marched as boldly into the ring as if accidents were unknown. Once begun a corrida knows no intermission, even though a man is killed. The newcomer took steady aim and drove the three-foot sword to the very hilt between the heaving shoulders; then nonchalantly turned his back and strolled away. The bull did not fall, but wabbled off into the shade to lean up against the tablas as if he had suddenly grown disillusioned and disgusted with life, and the spectators, no longer to be restrained, swarmed head-long into the arena. I pushed toward the animal with the rest and just as I paused a few feet from him he dropped suddenly dead, his blood-smeared horns rattling down along the barrier.
On rare occasions the matador, disobeying the unwritten law that the animal must be despatched by a thrust down through the body, places the point of his sword just behind the horns and with the slightest of thrusts kills the bull so suddenly that his fall sounds like the thump of a barrel dropped from a height. Then does the spectator, the unseasoned at least, experience an indefinable depression as if this striking of a great brute dead by a mere prick in the back of the neck were a warning of how frail after all is the hold of the most robust on life.
As we poured out of the plaza, I halted in the long curving chamber beneath the tribunes. Twenty-two horses, gaunt, mutilated things, lay tumbled pellmell together in a vast heap. Brawny men in sleeveless shirts were pawing them over. Whenever they brought to light a mane or tail they slashed off the hair and stuffed it into sacks; when they dragged forth a hoof the shoe was quickly added to the heap of old iron in a corner. The bulls were treated with far more deference. Each lay in his own space, and the group gathered about him wore the respectful mien of soldiers viewing the last remains of some formidable fallen enemy. On my heels arrived the jingling mules with the last victim. Two butchers skinned, quartered, and loaded this into a wagon from the central markets in exactly eleven minutes, the vehicle rattled away, and the week's corrida was over.
The Spanish torero is all but idolized by the rank and file, being in this respect vastly above our professional ball players. There is little society except the purely bluestocking to which he has not the entree; wherever and whenever he appears he is sure to be surrounded or followed by admiring crowds. The famous, the Bombita family, for example, which has given four renowned matadores to the ring--and one to each of my Sevillian corridas--Machaquito of Cordoba, and a half-dozen others of highest rank are distinctly more popular and honored than the king. Nor is this popularity, however clouded by a bad thrust, transient or fleeting. Pepete, who departed this life with exceeding suddenness back in the sixties because a bull bounded after him over the tablas and nailed him to the inner barrier, is to this day almost a national hero.
Of course every red-blooded Spanish boy dreams of becoming a bullfighter and would not think of being unfamiliar with the features, history, peculiarities, and batting av--I mean number of _cogidas_ or wounds of the principal fighters. Rare the boy who does not carry about his person a pack of portraits of matadores such as are given away with cigarettes. On the playground no other game at all rivals "torero" in popularity. There is something distinctly redolent of the baseball diamond in the dialogues one is sure to hear several times on the way home after a corrida. A boy whom fate or the despotism of the family woodpile has deprived of the joys of the afternoon, greets his inhuman father outside the gates with a shout of, "Hola! Papa! Que tal los toros?--How goes it with the bulls--what is the score?" To which father, anxious now to regain his popularity, answers jovially, "Bueno, chiquillo! Tres cogidas y dos al hospital.--Fine, son! Three wounded and two in the hospital."
Having thus trod the very boards of the last act of "Carmen" and passed a splendid setting for the third in my tramp through the Sierra de Ronda, I decided to celebrate the otherwise unglorious Fourth by visiting the scene of the third. The great government Fabrica de Tabacos of Seville is one of the most massive buildings in Spain, and furnishes well-nigh half the cigarettes and cigars smoked in Andalusia. I passed through the outer offices and crossed the vast patio without interference. When I attempted to enter the factory itself, however, an official barred the way. I asked why permission was denied and with a wink he answered:
"Sh! Hace calor. It is hot, and las cigarreras are not dressed to receive visitors. Come in the autumn and I shall make it a pleasure to show you through the fabrica."
"But surely," I protested, "there are men among the employees who have admittance to the workrooms even in summer?"
"Claro, hombre!" he replied, with another wink. "But that is one of the privileges of our trade."
I strolled out around the building. Back of it, sure enough, was a cavalry barracks, and any one of a score of young troopers sitting astride chairs in the shade of the building might have passed for Don Jose. Some of them were singing, too, in good clear voices; though rather a sort of dreamy _malagueeno_ than the vivacious music of Bizet. But, alas! With Don Joses and to spare, when the factory gates opened and the thousands of _cigarreras_ so famed in song and impropriety poured forth, not one was there who could by any stretch of the imagination be cast for Carmencita. Sevillanas there were of every age, from three-foot childhood upward; disheveled gypsy girls from Triana across the river; fat, dumpy majas; hobbling old witches; slatterns with an infant tucked under one arm; crippled martyrs of modern invention; hollow-chested victims of tobacco fumes; painted _sinvergueenzas_; above all, hundreds of hale, honest women who looked as if they worked to help support their families and lived life seriously and not wantonly. But not a face or even a form that could have seduced any young recruit to betray his trust and ruin his career. Fiction, frequently, is more picturesque than fact--and far less pleasing in its morality.