The fullest account of this, and indeed of all phases of the bullfight, in English, is in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, and he makes the important point that at no point of the fight is the object to inflict pain on the bull, even though pain is inflicted. The audience is not delighting in cruelty, and, indeed, if you question anyone, you find he is absorbed in the technique of the art. He knows that the darts are there to get the bull’s head down and to slow him up until it is possible to kill him. Yet, as Hemingway says, this part of the fight does inflict suffering, “some of it useless”; if foreigners admire this part of the fight it is not, however, because they are enjoying cruelty, but because this phase “is easiest to follow.”
One pities the stupidity of the animal, and it dawns on one that the bullfight is not a true tragedy, for the forces matched are not of the same kind. It is not a combat between the strength of the man and the strength of the beast, but between the cunning, malice, the art, the will to dominance in the man and the formidable brute stupidity of the beast. Ariel is baiting Caliban, and, in the end, however strong the emotions aroused by the fight, one is eventually bored because the conclusion is foregone (as I said earlier) and because the match is uneven.
And now comes the final act. The matador himself may have planted some of the banderillas, and when he does, it is a very pretty act of courage, science, and timing. He knows that once the bull’s horns have passed him he is safe, for the animal cannot suddenly turn. And the foreigner, sitting there, becomes aware as he listens to the applause, the abuse, the counterapplause of the crowd, that there is a world of fine points of positioning, approach, and privilege that has escaped him, for the matador is testing himself not only against the bull, but against the experience of the crowd, and the long, long art of tauromachy, which most of them have at their fingertips. The third act of the bullfight is contained in the mystery of the muleta, the red cape that conceals the sword, for here lies the matador’s chance to play out the famous and beautiful passes when the bull seems to be flicked away by the edge of the cape, or drawn on by its spread or tapering edge, which spins away like a dancer’s skirt; and when these passes come quickly one after another in rapid climax, or when they spin out and seem to flower over the back of the charging animal, one hears those unforgettable short, harsh gasps of emotion from the Spanish crowd. All these passes are named: the veronica, the natural, the chest pass—there are many, and all aim at some fresh high moment of beauty or danger. They bring out the peculiar character of each matador—perhaps their peasant prudence, the brain of a Belmonte, the grace of a Joselito, the beauty of Manolete, who in their time have been discussed as if they were Velásquez, Greco, and Goya, and not as if they were boxers, wrestlers, or athletes. The literature of bullfighting is written in a language all its own; it has a parallel in the language of art criticism, since the rise of post-impressionist and abstract painting.
The moment of killing is called “the hour of truth,” and that is when, over the horns, the sword goes in. The bull stops, stares, totters, then sinks to his knees coughing up his blood and falls dead. The matador salutes the crowd. Hats are thrown in if it is a triumph. Other things if it is not. The Spanish crowd is vocal and nervous. A score of times, as if by a hidden spring, fifty men will rise to their feet in protest, and another fifty near by spring up to challenge them. These protest meetings, suddenly and spontaneously rising and as suddenly fading away, are typical of the bullfight audience, indeed also of audiences at the music halls and theatres. The Spanish protest starts up violently in all things in Spanish life. The bullfighter, the singer, the actor, the dancer, the conductor are, in this sense, the property of the audience, who are extreme in their praise and as sensitive as women to affront. They are the touchiest audiences in the world, careless often of the main setting, regardless of the general atmosphere of human indifference and personal incompetence; but unforgiving and supremely critical of the crisis, the real test, the pass they have waited for. Cynically they sit out the bad bullfights; with vocal despair they watch the bad matador make three or four thrusts and miss. Frequently the sword hits a bone and flies up into the air out of the matador’s hand; frequently and unpleasantly it slices the bull’s side in clumsy butchery. The hour of truth is often a moment of muddle. Bullfighting is an art, but not all bullfighters are good artists.
In the last twenty years very much has been written about the decadence of the art. The public complains that the bulls are smaller and safer, that they are fought too young, before their terrible horns have spread wide. There are too many small fast bulls, not enough ferocious monsters. I have seen many dull and monotonous bullfights. A foreigner who is not a fan cannot judge these public criticisms. He can only record that many people regard this period as a poor one and, like so many enthusiasts, think the great bullfights took place in their youth. The opinion of Belmonte—whose autobiography, written with the aid of a journalist, is an excellent book, and is likely to have a lasting place among the curiosities of Spanish literature—is worth quoting, for Belmonte revolutionized bullfighting.
The fighting bull of today [he says, writing however in 1937] is a product of civilization, a standardized, industrial article like Coty perfume or Ford cars. The bull is manufactured according to popular demand…. The bull is just the same fierce and well-armed wild animal that it was before, but its development has been one-sided towards making the fight: more pleasing to the eye. It is not true that it has lost courage. The modern bull charges much more often than the old one, although it is true that it does less damage. I doubt whether one of the bulls which were fought years ago could stand the strenuous faenas of today.
[Faena is the general name for the collection of passes with the cape.]
Belmonte goes on to say that the public wants a bull that is easy to play because they want a fight that “is pretty to see and full of accurate and consistent fancy fighting … fancy figures and marvellous patterns.” He would have liked to go back to the old tricky, savage, unplayable bulls. Yet when he was fighting the “easy” bulls in 1936, Belmonte fought over thirty corridas and was gored fourteen times.
I would not describe Belmonte as a typical matador—if there is such a thing. He was born a slum child in the Triana, the other side of the bridge in Seville, the gypsy quarter, and he picked up his training as an urchin going out into the fields at night and stripping off his shirt to harry the animals in their pasture. It was a form of poaching, and against the law. The urchins often played the bulls naked. Small, stunted by early poverty, often very ill, and without great physical strength, Belmonte developed a terrible, almost suicidal intensity, working so close to the bull that after one corrida he found his dress covered with the hairs of the animal. He became the intellectual artist of the bullring and was known for years as “the earthquake.” He was spiritually rather than physically ambitious. His short, slightly stooping figure with the wide shoulders, the pale face with deep sunken eyes, and the powerful jaw, which seems to belong to another man, are familiar in the streets of Seville. He has made a lot of money and, with peasant prudence, has saved it, invested it in bull-breeding. His intellectual temperament attracted writers and artists, and Belmonte’s passion for excellence, for seeing a disadvantage and making something of it, turned him to education. He was a distinctive figure in that intellectual movement which arose in Spain in the generation before the Civil War and which went to pieces when that war was lost.
The last time I was in Seville I was being pestered by one of those little street arabs who are longing to earn a penny for cleaning your boots, and who, worse still, when you fall for them, begin hammering a rubber sole on them while you read the paper. The first thing I knew about it was a nail going into my foot. After stopping the boy, I asked him his name. He told me and said: “I am Belmonte’s secretary.”
I thought this was the usual Andalusian joke, and said: “If you are his secretary where does he live?” He pointed to the flat I knew. “And what are your du
ties?”
“To report first thing in the morning. And to go to school.”
“Where is he now?”
“He left his house for his café at eleven. He is going to his farm this afternoon. He will return at seven.”
The boy was not making this up. Belmonte had taken an interest in the boy, given him odd jobs, appointed him “secretary”—and insisted on his education. The boy was an orphan. Belmonte has the reputation of one who prudently watches his money—Hemingway has stories of this—and in this shows himself a true, pretty tight-fisted Andalusian; but his admiration for intelligence and determination, which the boy had, must have made him think of his own half-starved childhood. Belmonte’s insistence on schooling is typical. When he first went to France, as an ignorant young man, he did not come back repelled, and chauvinistic about French civilization as many Spaniards do; on the contrary, he was quick, like all the best of his generation, to see the superior ease and refinement of European life.
The crickets sing under the palms of the squares of Seville, the barrel organs roll out their flamenco music, the shrines are lighted like little dolls’ houses in the narrow streets, there is the smell of jasmine, broken by the reek of oil or the frying of prawns. Artisans at their trades easily break into song in all Spanish towns. The cobbler hammers away alone, singing out:
“Today is Saturday, Today is Saturday!”
as if that line were a poem in itself. At night the crickets are shriller and louder; one small insect will be heard across the square. In the Barrio Santa Cruz, where each street bears its name in large, simple black letters that have been there since the seventeenth century, one seems to be walking on cobbled porcelain, and by the weak yellow light of the tiled courtyards, one sees the gloss of the evergreens and the ferns, the hard leaves of the orange tree, and hears the gurgle of a small fountain. Darkness, jasmine, water, and white walls. One passes the sedate small baroque churches, which are like the ornate little drawing-rooms of God, and there one may see the pearled Virgins or the carved Christs that are borne by the brotherhoods in the processions of Holy Week. Again, the continuous play of contrast in Spanish life strikes the traveller. The plain, frugal, simple life matched by the passion for some crystallization of ornament or decoration. The plain wall has the superb encrusted carving; the massive door, the wrought-iron gate, opens from the sun’s glare in the street upon a darkness that, as the eye becomes accustomed to it, gradually begins to glitter with the fierce brilliance of gold leaf and rococo. It is a greed, but carried to the pitch of extravagant art. And as one listens to the rapid, whirling, laughing music of the Sevillana, as hard as perpetual gaiety, as grave as coquetry, as one listens to the bristling rhythmic crackle of castanets, one has in mind also the cockroaches on Mañara’s velvet, the sombre steps of the barefooted and black-cowled penitents of the processions, the bitter scream of the saetas sung in the silence when the procession stops and the sweating bearers put down their loaded images for a rest. So strange are Spanish religion and love: in the eighteenth century, penitents used to scourge themselves in the street with a cat-o’-nine-tails that terminated in small balls of wax and glass, and especially paused in front of their ladies to lash harder and gratified these adored ones by splashing them with their blood. Blood, sensuality, death—Maurice Barres was not altogether wrong about the Spanish voluptuary. If voluptuousness is the word.
One sits at the café table watching the crowd go by. There are no mass men; each one is acting out a distinctive role. One sees a variety of feature, as large as anything in Gilray or Rowlandson, from the emaciated beggar, the exalted blind, to the young dandy wagging his buttocks, the bullfighter and his court, and the sad gluttons of the city. There goes the gambling Marquis looking satanically the part, and his toady, the young doctor living under his mother’s thumb. There the doctor stands talking to one of his many illegitimate gypsy children, who sells him a lottery ticket. In the upper room of some house, a succulently fat young man, “ruining himself with a woman,” may be seen, with friends in attendance, lolling with the fat young creature, who has already two soft chins. Socially the sevillanos hold court and are not solitary in their pleasures. No engagement books, no telephone numbers, no addresses—you seek your friend in the street, you whistle up the first urchin you see and send him with the message. No hours are kept. “Well,” how often one overhears the remark, “we shall see each other when we see each other, if not, not, but here or there, some time.” Find the man in his café, or in his barber’s, or in the other café. One pursues him round the town. At his house—he has always “just gone out.” The home—that is the closed place. If he is there, that is the end of his social life for that day. Outside, any time up to two or three in the morning you will find him. Life is the street. They are not shut away as we are. They have few secrets. They are at ease publicly in their virtues and vices, and their habits, Unamuno again: “Nothing human is alien to me.” A foreigner becomes bored, in the end, by the plain explicitness of Spanish life and of seeing so many basic and unabashed human beings who conceal nothing; but, for a time, the Spaniard, not seriously touched by the industrial age or the nervousness of modern man, is powerfully-refreshing. He is a man before he is a specialist, a unit, a function of the social machine. Only when we consider him as a social being are we appalled by his intolerance, his cruel inertia, and, in Seville, by the coarseness of his boasting. There is a street in Seville now named after the Falangist hero of that city, Queipo de Llano, whose rollicking, boasting, and blood-thirsty broadcasts were famous in the Spanish Civil War. Yet a drunken picaresque spirit, as outrageous as the picaresque in Don fuan, loud and raking, belongs to the place. The sevillano is stingy; but he is an actor; he loves the idea of great and notorious sins of the flesh. So many of the sevillanos have the coarse skins of those oranges that fall at last to rot in the alleys of the beautiful park, and from their faces the old Silenus looks out of wine-reddened eyes. But fiercely they will maintain the punctilio of God, the sacredness of the family, the world-breaking greatness of the country, and the wicked irreligion of the working class.
Chapter VIII
The hotels are packed out in Granada, in the spring and the autumn. They have always been full in the last two years since the exchange has been made advantageous to foreigners. These are mainly French. There are a few British and a great many Americans. Lately, those old Spanish enthusiasts, the Germans and Swiss, have started to come again. We are all regarded as ridiculous by the Spaniards who are helpful, polite, dry, and never obtrusive. It is better to be high up in Granada, on the cliff of the Alhambra, though now there is an excellent hotel in the lower part of the town, but the lower part is noisy and very ugly. The main street is a prosperous nineteenth-century Oxford Street, though it has not yet been cursed by the multiple store. The retail trade remains firmly Victorian.
The people of Granada, it must be confessed, have a proud, stiff, superior, and unsmiling appearance, which is exceptional in the south, and are more Castilian than Andalusian. One sees many Moorish types. The granadinos have a reputation for conceit and avarice, and they are certainly more self-enclosed than the effusive sevillanos, whom they despise for their playacting and boasting. For a hundred years there has been social and political tension in Granada, controlled on the surface, rabid underneath. Many years ago I used to go and see Don Fernando de los Ríos, one of the socialist leaders of the province, and a professor at the university. He was a connection of Francisco Giner de los Ríos, the great educational reformer and saint of that excellent minority of intellectuals who had become followers of Kraussism—an extinct German philosophy. Fernando de los Ríos was eminent in the Republic, but wisely worked outside of Spain in the Civil War; for by nature all his group, the one group which might have done something for Spain, despaired of the extremism of both sides. I had many lectures on the land problem in Spain from Don Fernando, many decorous and exhaustively cultural visits to the hidden architectural beauties of Granada. He was kn
own everywhere, especially in the Albaicin, the old Moorish quarter, and would take one into delightful carmens, or villas, and to modest houses where one would find a horseshoe arch of the Moors in a bedroom or a few delicate Moorish tiles, so graceful after the hideous, restored or newly manufactured tiles of the Alhambra.
Don Fernando was a respectable man. He was a little stout, sometimes wore a frock coat, but always a black coat, and pin-stripe trousers. He had a fine black beard and a soft, educated, and persuasive voice, and a gentle enunciation.
“Look,” he would say, pointing to a book on a student’s bookcase, and speaking with that curious religious glee one often hears in the voice of some precious, finger-wagging priest. “Look—he has his Das Kapital”
And Don Fernando would regard the little volume of economic dynamite with the childish affection a scientist will show for a new bomb. Don Fernando thought of revolution poetically, and with a certain unworldly pomposity. He had, of course, been in prison as a politician at one time in his life, and his loftiness and immaculate gravity caused a good deal of that picaresque malice which the Spanish tongue cannot repress, especially when it concerns their closest friends. It was fitting that Don Fernando eventually ascended to the eminence of an embassy.
Don Fernando was not suited to Spanish political life; very few of the admirable Spanish intellectuals were. Their true function was to teach and to conduct the bitter struggle for educational reform against the opposition of the Jesuits. Once in politics, Don Fernando became a fanatic. But as a humane and enlightened man he was regarded with respect and awe in Granada, and is remembered proudly now as a figure of the excellent and defeated generation. Spanish liberalism does not die out. It is merely silenced.
The Spanish Temper Page 14
