Death in the Afternoon

by Ernest Hemingway

  It should, if it had Spain in it, have the tall thin boy, eight feet six inches, he advertised the Empastre show before they came to town, and that night, at the feria de ganado, the whores wouldn't have anything to do with the dwarf, he was full size except that his legs were only six inches long, and he said, "I'm a man like any man," and the whore said, "No you're not and that's the trouble." There are many dwarfs in Spain and cripples that you wouldn't believe that follow all the fairs.

  In the morning there we would have breakfast and then go out to swim in the Irati at Aoiz, the water clear as light, and varying in temperature as you sunk down, cool, deep cool, cold, and the shade from the trees on the bank when the sun was hot, the ripe wheat in the wind up on the other side and sloping to the mountain. There was an old castle at the head of the valley where the river came out between two rocks; and we lay naked on the short grass in the sun and later in the shade. The wine at Aoiz was no good so then we brought our own, and neither was the ham, so the next time we brought a lunch from Quintana's. Quintana, the best aficionado and most loyal friend in Spain, and with a fine hotel with all the rooms full. Que tal Juanito? Que tal, hombre, que tal?

  And why should it not have the cavalry crossing another stream at a ford, the shadow of the leaves on the horses, if it is Spain, and why not have them marching out from the machine-gun school across the clay white ground, very small so far away, and looking beyond from Quintanilla's window were the mountains. Or waking in the morning, the streets empty on Sunday, and the shouting far away and then the firing. That happens many times if you live long enough and move around.

  And if you ride and if your memory is good you may ride still through the forest of the Irati with trees like drawings in a child's fairy book. They cut those down. They ran logs down the river and they killed the fish, or in Galicia they bombed and poisoned them; results the same; so in the end it's just like home except for yellow gorse on the high meadows and the thin rain. Clouds come across the mountains from the sea but when the wind is from the south Navarra is all the color of wheat except it does not grow on level plains but up and down the sides of hills and cut by roads with trees and many villages with bells, pelota courts, the smell of sheep manure and squares with standing horses.

  If you could make the yellow flames of candles in the sun; that shines on steel of bayonets freshly oiled and yellow patent leather belts of those who guard the Host; or hunt in pairs through scrub oak in the mountains for the ones who fell into the trap at Deva (it was a bad long way to come from the Café Rotonde to be garrotted in a drafty room with consolation of the church at order of the state, acquitted once and held until the captain general of Burgos reversed the finding of the court) and in the same town where Loyola got his wound that made him think, the bravest of those who were betrayed that year dove from the balcony onto the paving of the court, head first, because he had sworn they would not kill him; (his mother tried to make him promise not to take his life because she worried most about his soul but he dove well and cleanly with his hands tied while they walked with him praying); if I could make him; make a bishop; make Candido Tiebas and Toron; make clouds come fast in shadows moving over wheat and the small, careful stepping horses; the smell of olive oil; the feel of leather; rope soled shoes; the loops of twisted garlics; earthen pots; saddle bags carried across the shoulder; wine skins; the pitchforks made of natural wood (the tines were branches); the early morning smells; the cold mountain nights and long hot days of summer, with always trees and shade under the trees, then you would have a little of Navarra. But it's not in this book.

  There ought to be Astorga, Lugo, Orense, Soria, Tarragona and Calatayud, the chestnut woods on the high hills, the green country and the rivers, the red dust, the small shade beside the dry rivers and the white, baked clay hills; cool walking under palms in the old city on the cliff above the sea, cool in the evening with the breeze; mosquitoes at night but in the morning the water clear and the sand white; then sitting in the heavy twilight at Miro's; vines as far as you can see, cut by the hedges and the road; the railroad and the sea with pebbly beach and tall papyrus grass. There were earthen jars for the different years of wine, twelve feet high, set side by side in a dark room; a tower on the house to climb to in the evening to see the vines, the villages and the mountains and to listen and hear how quiet it was. In front of the barn a woman held a duck whose throat she had cut and stroked him gently while a little girl held up a cup to catch the blood for making gravy. The duck seemed very contented and when they put him down (the blood all in the cup) he waddled twice and found that he was dead. We ate him later, stuffed and roasted; and many other dishes, with the wine of that year and the year before and the great year four years before that and other years that I lost track of while the long arms of a mechanical fly chaser that wound by clock work went round and round and we talked French. We all knew Spanish better.

  That is Montroig, pronounced Montroych, one of many places in Spain, where there are also the streets of Santiago in the rain; seeing the town down in the cup of hills as you come home across the high country; and all the carts that roll, piled high, on smooth stone tracks along the road to Grau should be there with the temporary wooden ring in Noya, smelling of fresh cut boards; Chiquito with his girl's face, a great artist, fino muy fino, pero frio. Valencia II with his eye they sewed up wrong so that the inside of the lid showed and he could not be arrogant any more. Also the boy who missed the bull entirely when he went in to kill and missed him again the second time. If you could stay awake for the nocturnals you saw them funny.

  In Madrid the comic bullfighter, beaten up twice by Rodalito stabbing him in the belly because he thought there was another beating coming. Aguero eating with his whole family in the dining room; they all looking alike in different ages. He looked like a shortstop or a quarterback, not like a matador. Cagancho eating in his room with his fingers because he could not use a fork. He could not learn it, so when he had enough money he never ate in public. Ortega engaged to Miss Espana, the ugliest and the prettiest, and who was the wittiest? Derperdicios in la Gaceta del Norte was the wittiest; the wittiest I ever read.

  And up in Sidney's rooms, the ones coming to ask for work when he was fighting, the ones to borrow money, the ones for an old shirt, a suit of clothes; all bullfighters, all well known somewhere at the hour of eating, all formally polite, all out of luck; the muletas folded and piled; the capes all folded flat; swords in the embossed leather case; all in the armoire; muleta sticks are in the bottom drawer, suits hung in the trunk, cloth covered to protect the gold; my whiskey in an earthen crock; Mercédes, bring the glasses; she says he had a fever all night long and only went out an hour ago. So then he comes in. How do you feel? Great. She says you had fever. But I feel great now. What do you say, Doctor, why not eat here? She can get something and make a salad. Mercedés oh Mercédes.

  Then you could walk across the town and to the café where they say you get your education learning who owed who money and who chiselled this from who and why he told him he could kiss his what and who had children by who and who married who before and after what and how long it took for this and that and what the doctor said. Who was so pleased because the bulls were delayed, being unloaded only the day of the fight, naturally weak in the legs, just two passes, poom, and it is all over, he said, and then it rained and the fight postponed a week and that was when he got it. Who wouldn't fight with who and when and why and does she, of course she does, you fool you didn't know she does? Absolutely and that's all and in no other fashion, she gobbles them alive, and all such valuable news you learn in cafés. In cafés where the boys are never wrong; in cafés where they are all brave; in cafés where the saucers pile and drinks are figured in pencil on the marble table tops among the shucked shrimps of seasons lost and feeling good because there are no other triumphs so secure and every man a success by eight o'clock if somebody can pay the score in cafés.

  What else should it contain about a country you love v
ery much? Rafael says things are very changed and he won't go to Pamplona any more. La Libertad I find is getting like Le Temps. It is no longer the paper where you could put a notice and know the pickpocket would see it now that Republicans are all respectable and Pamplona is changed, of course, but not as much as we are older. I found that if you took a drink that it got very much the same as it was always. I know things change now and I do not care. It's all been changed for me. Let it all change. We'll all be gone before it's changed too much and if no deluge comes when we are gone it still will rain in summer in the north and hawks will nest in the Cathedral at Santiago and in La Granja, where we practiced with the cape on the long gravelled paths between the shadows, it makes no difference if the fountains play or not. We never will ride back from Toledo in the dark, washing the dust out with Fundador, nor will there be that week of what happened in the night in that July in Madrid. We've seen it all go and we'll watch it go again. The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it. No. It is not enough of a book, but still there were a few things to be said. There were a few practical things to be said.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  THE SEED BULL

  At twenty-two years the horns are splintered; the eyes are slow and all the weight has gone forward and away from where eight hundred and twenty-two sons came from to the ring so that in the end the hind quarters are light as a calf's but all the rest is built into the bull's own monument.

  THE OX

  While here we have the ox built for beef and for service who might have been president with that face if he had started in some other line of work. He differs from the fighting bull in this, as well as in his general shape; his hoofs are large and broad, his tail is thick and the hairs are flaxy, not silky; he is built high instead of low and there is no hump of muscle that runs from just behind his horns until the middle of his back. He may work hard all his life or he may be made into beef early in his career but he will never kill a horse. Nor will he ever want to. Hail to the useful ox; a friend and contemporary of man.

  TWO FIGHTING BULLS

  The hump of muscle in the neck rises in a crest when the bull is disturbed. It is his tossing muscle and when the bull carries his head as high as this one in the picture a man could not reach over the horns with a sword. This muscle must be tired for the man to kill the bull properly and it is in the process of tiring this muscle so that a man may kill him by putting a sword in from in front high up between the bull's shoulder blades that the bullfight consists.

  Zurito, from Cordoba, one of the greatest picadors who ever lived, shooting the stick a little back of where it should go, having let the bull get the horn in so he may be well pegged. The style is perfect, the execution is cynical, and the horse, who will be dead very shortly (if you look closely you may assure yourself of this), is not panicky because those knees have convinced him that he is being properly ridden. The horses, incidentally, mostly come from the United States where they are bought at the St. Louis and Chicago markets at five dollars or less a head and shipped through Newport News, a shipload at a time, to Spain. The bull is rather cowardly, otherwise Zurito would not have thrown his hat, seen on the ground, to provoke a charge. Knowing the charges will be few may account for him pegging the bull further back than would be necessary ordinarily.

  Veneno, killed in the Madrid ring, pic-ing a brave bull, leaning forward onto the stick, the matadors (standing on the right) watching to see where and how the picador will fall and how the bull will turn since they must take him out and away with the capes.

  This is what happens when the saddle girth breaks and the picador falls onto the horns. Chicuelo, the matador whose face is partly hidden by the hat, seems a little late in starting in but photographs are very tricky and the fact the picador's hat is still on shows he has just arrived on the horns, which are unusually short. Only the right horn has penetrated. The other matador is Juan Anllo, Nacional II, and the chances are that he will make the quite although if the man falls from the horn when tossed and the bull sees the horse before his horn finds the man the horse will make the quite.

  Here every one is coming in to make the quite; even El Gallo, the furthest on the left whose face shows that he does not like the looks of things at all. The bull, trying to gore too fast, is bumping with his nose.

  Veronica by Juan Belmonte. Having taken the bull out away from the fallen picador the matador passes him with the cape.

  Veronica to the right made by Gitanillo de Triana. This is the second movement in the process of passing the bull by veronicas.

  Veronica to the left by Enrique Torres. This is the third movement in passing a bull by veronicas and the three matadors shown making the passes are, with the addition of Felix Rodriguez, the finest artists with the cape the ring has known. Belmonte has not the complete suavity and the low, slow swing of the other three but his is the original style on which they have improved.

  Gathering the cape toward him at the end of a series of veronicas to wind the bull around him like a belt, his right leg pushed toward the bull in that bent slant, which will be copied but never made truly until another genius comes in the same twisted body—the media veronica of Juan Belmonte. This pass is the end of a series of veronicas and serves to fix the bull in place and allow the man to walk away.

  JUAN BELMONTE

  Cagancho sculpturing with the cape. Finishing a series of veronicas with a rebolera, he has turned the bull so short that he has brought him to his knees.

  The gaonera as performed by its inventor, Rodolfo Gaona.

  BULLS FIGHTING ON THE RANGE AT COLMENAR

  BULLS IN THE CORRAL

  Five sons of Diano the seed bull

  Vicente Barrera in a pase de pecho. This picture and the one below show the basis of the emotion in bull fighting. The emotion is given by the closeness with which the matador brings the bull past his body and it is prolonged by the slowness with which he can execute the pass.

  This is Vicente Barrera in the same pass as in the photograph above except that here instead of letting the horn go by his chest he has pulled away prudently so that with the danger removed man and bull do not form one group but are separate entities held together neither by emotion nor by plastic line. A position which would be artistically correct becomes ridiculous without the danger of the horns and the necessary bulk of the bull to give it dignity.

  Grace and the lack of it in the ring are in this picture of Cagancho and the following one of Nicanor Villalta performing the same pass, an ayudado por alto, in their respective fashions.

  Nicanor Villalta, in the pass Cagancho has made in the photograph above. Villalta can be much more anti-esthetic than this but this is a fair example of his praying-mantis manner.

  Villalta kills though in a way no gypsy ever killed and it would he unfair to show how silly he looks with his feet apart and not show him leaning in after the sword.

  While when he gets his feet together he will do things like this that you see here; the bull is coming by his legs and as you watch he will spin with him so close the blood from the bull's shoulder will come off onto Villalta's belly. There is great demand for this and only Nicanor can do it.

  Here you have him spinning and if there is no blood on his belly afterwards you ought to get your money back.

  MANUEL GARCIA, MAERA

  The year before he died

  Maera in a pair of banderillas. Notice how the arms are raised and how straight the body is held. The straighter the body and the higher the arms the closer the bull's horn can come to the man.

  Maera citing the bull for the second of four pairs of banderillas he placed at Pamplona in 1924; citing for each pair from such an increasingly dangerous and seemi
ngly impossible terrain that after the second pair the audience were all shouting together "No! No! No! No!" begging him not to take such risks. He placed all four pairs perfectly in the manner and terrain that he chose, performed a brilliant faena and killed the bull as well as a bull could be killed. He had not been to bed the night before and had taken part in the amateur fight at seven o'clock that same morning.

  Maera in his characteristic right-handed pass made in the manner of a pase de pecho.

  Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, Maera's only rival as a banderillero in difficult and impossible terrains, placing a pair and letting the bull's horn come so close that it is ripping the gold embroidery from his right trouser leg.

  Ignacio Sanchez Mejias cheating in the placing of a pair of banderillas through having a number of capes flopping to take the bull away from the man as he places the sticks. Note, however, how well all the banderillas are placed together.