The Blood of the Arena by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (big screen ebook reader TXT) 📕

was to live; to keep his family happy; to earn the public's money as other bull-fighters did without those daring deeds which sooner or later would cause his death.

The next few days he felt that he ought to exhibit himself and talk with his friends in the popular cafés and clubs on Sierpes Street. He thought he could impose a courteous silence upon his detractors and prevent comment on his ill success. He spent whole afternoons in the gatherings of humble admirers he had abandoned long before when seeking the friendship of the rich. And finally he entered the Forty-five where the manager imposed his opinions by loud talking and gesticulation, upholding Gallardo's glory as of old.

Great Don José! His enthusiasm was immovable, bomb-proof! It never occurred to him that his matador could cease to be all that he had believed. Not one criticism, not one reproach for his downfall! Instead he took it upon himself to excuse him, adding to this the consolation of his good advice.

"Thou still dost feel thy wound. What I say is, 'You shall see, when he is quite well, and you will talk differently then.' Thou wilt do as before—thou wilt walk straight up to the bull, with that courage God has given thee, and, zas! a stab up to the cross—and thou wilt put him in thy pocket."

Gallardo approved with an enigmatical smile. "Put the bulls in his pocket!" He desired nothing else. But, alas! they had become so big and unmanageable! They had grown during the time of his absence from the arena!

Gambling consoled him and made him forget his troubles. He went back with fresh passion to losing money over the green table, impelled by that spirit of youth which was undaunted by lack of luck. One night they took him to dine at the Eritaña Inn where there was a great revel in honor of three foreign women of the gay life whom some of the young men had met in Paris. They had come to Seville to see the feasts of Holy Week and the Feria, and they were eager for the picturesque features of the country. Their beauty was somewhat faded, but was retouched by the arts of the toilet. The rich young fellows pursued them, attracted by their exotic charm, soliciting generous favors which were seldom refused. They expressed a wish to know a celebrated bull-fighter, one of the smartest matadores, that fine Gallardo whose picture they had so often looked at in the papers and on match-boxes. After having seen him in the plaza they had asked their friends to present him.

The gathering took place in the great dining-room of the Eritaña, a salon opening on the garden with tawdry Moorish decorations, a poor imitation of the splendors of the Alhambra. Here balls and political banquets were held. Here they toasted the regeneration of the country with fervent oratory, and here the charms of the fair sex were displayed to the rhythm of the tango, and the twang-twang of the guitars, while kisses and screams were heard in the corners, and bottles were uncorked lavishly. Gallardo was received like a demi-god by the three women who, ignoring their friends, stared only at him, and disputed for the honor of sitting beside him, caressing him with the eyes of she-wolves in the mating season. They reminded him of another—of the absent, the almost forgotten one—with their golden hair, their elegant gowns, and the atmosphere of perfumed and tempting flesh which seemed to envelope him in a swirl of intoxication.

His comrades' presence further contributed to making this memory more vivid. They were all Doña Sol's friends; some of them even belonged to her family and he had looked upon them as relatives.

They ate and drank with that savage voracity of nocturnal feasts, to which people go with the fixed intention of excess in everything, taking refuge in drunkenness as soon as possible to acquire the happiness of stupidity.

In one end of the salon some gypsies strummed their guitars, intoning melancholy songs. One of the foreign women, with the enthusiasm of the neophyte, sprang upon a table and began to slowly move her well rounded hips, seeking to imitate the native dances, showing off her progress after a few days of instruction by a Sevillian teacher.

"Asaúra! Malaje! Sosa!" the friends shouted ironically, encouraging her with rhythmic hand-clappings.

They jested at her heaviness, but with devouring eyes they admired the beauty of her body. And she, proud of her art, taking these incomprehensible calls for enthusiastic praise, went on moving her hips and raised her arms above her head like the handles of a jar, with her gaze aloft.

After midnight they were all drunk. The women, lost to shame, besieged the swordsman with their admiring glances. He impassively let himself be managed by the hands that disputed for him, while lips surprised him with burning kisses on his cheeks and neck. He was drunk, but his drunkenness was sad. Ah! the other woman! The true blonde! The gold of these unbound locks that floated around him was artificial, gilded by chemicals applied to coarse strong hair. The lips had a flavor of perfumed ointment. Through the aroma his imagination detected an odor of vulgarity. Ah! the other one! the other one!

Gallardo, without knowing how, found himself in the gardens, beneath the solemn silence that seemed to fall from the stars, among arbors of luxurious vegetation, following a tortuous path, seeing the dining-room windows through the foliage illuminated like mouths of Hell before which passed and repassed shadows like black demons. A woman was dragging him by the arm, and he let himself be taken, without even seeing her, with his thoughts far, far away.

An hour afterwards he returned to the dining-room. His companion, her hair disordered, her eyes brilliant and hostile, was talking with her friends. They laughed and pointed him out with a deprecatory gesture to the other men, who laughed also—Ah! Spain! Land of disillusion, where all was but legend, even to the prowess of her heroes!

Gallardo drank more and more. The women who had quarrelled over him, besieging him with their caresses, turned their backs on him, falling into the arms of the other men. The guitarists scarcely played; surfeited with wine, they leaned over their instruments in pleasant drowsiness.

The bull-fighter also was going to sleep on a bench when one of his friends, who was obliged to retire before his mother, the countess, arose, as she did every day to attend mass at daybreak, offered to take him home in his carriage. The night wind did not dissipate the bull-fighter's intoxication. When the friend left him at the corner of his street Gallardo walked with vacillating step in the direction of his home. Near the door he stopped, grasping the wall with both hands and resting his head on his arms as if he could not bear the weight of his thoughts.

He had completely forgotten his friends, the supper at Eritaña, and the three painted foreign women who had quarrelled for him and then insulted him. Something remained in his memory of the other one, ever there, but indefinite and vague! Now his mind, by one of those capricious bounds of intoxication, reverted wholly to bull-fighting. He was the greatest matador in the world. Olé! So his manager and his friends declared, and it was true. His adversaries should see something when he went back to the plaza. What happened the other day was simple carelessness; Bad Luck that had played one of her tricks on him.

Proud of the omnipotent strength that intoxication communicated to him at the moment, he saw all the Andalusian and Castilian bulls transformed into weak goats that he could overthrow with but a blow from his hand. What occurred the other day was nothing—liquid! as Nacional said. The best singer lets slip a false note now and then.

And this aphorism, learned from the mouths of venerable patriarchs of the bull-fighting profession on afternoons of misfortune, stimulated him with an irresistible desire to sing, and he filled the silence of the solitary street with his voice. With his head resting on his arms he began to hum a strophe of his own composition which was an extravagant hymn of praise to his own merits. "I am Juaniyo Gallardo—with more c—c—courage than God." Not being able to improvise more in his own honor, he repeated the same words over and over in a hoarse and monotonous voice that broke the silence and set an invisible dog down the street to barking.

It was the paternal heritage revived in him; the singing mania that accompanied Señor Juan the cobbler on his weekly drunken rounds.

The house door opened and Garabato, still half asleep, thrust out his head to see the drunken man, whose voice he thought he recognized.

"Ah! Is it thou?" said the matador. "Wait till I sing the last one."

He repeated the incomplete song in honor of his valor several times, until he finally decided to enter the house. He felt no desire to go to bed. Divining his condition, he put off the moment of going up to his room where Carmen awaited him, perhaps awake.

"Go to sleep, Garabato. I have a great deal to do."

He did not know what, but his office, with its decoration of vainglorious pictures, favors won in the bull-ring, and posters that proclaimed his fame, attracted him.

When the globes of electric light illuminated the room and the servant went out, Gallardo stood in the centre of the office, vacillating on his legs, casting a glance of admiration around the walls, as if he contemplated this museum of glory for the first time.

"Very good, but very good!" he murmured. "That fine fellow is me; and that one too, and all! And yet there are some people that talk against me! Curse it! I'm the greatest man in the world! Don José says so, and he tells the truth."

He threw his hat upon the divan as if he were taking off a crown of glory that oppressed his forehead, and staggered over to the desk, leaning against it, his gaze fixed on an enormous bull's head that adorned the wall at the lower end of the office.

"Hello! Good-evening, my good boy! What art thou pretending to do there? Moo! Moo!"

He greeted him with bellowings, childishly imitating the lowing of the bulls in the pasture and in the plaza. He did not recognize him; he could not remember why the hairy head with its threatening horns was there. Gradually he began to recollect.

"I know thee, boy! I remember how thou madest me rage that afternoon. The people hissed, they threw bottles at me, they even insulted my poor mother, and thou, so gay, what fun thou hadst!—eh?—shameless beast!"

In his intoxicated state he thought he saw the varnished muzzle and the light in the glass eyes tremble with laughter. He even imagined that the horns moved the head, assenting to this question, with an undulation of the hanging neck.

The drunken man, until then smiling and good natured, felt his anger rise with the recollection of that afternoon of misfortune. And even that evil beast smiled? Those wicked, crafty, scheming bulls, which seemed to jest at the combatant, were to blame when a man was ridiculed. Ah! how Gallardo detested them! What a look of hatred he fastened on the glass eyes of the horned head!

"Still laughing? Damn thee, guasón! Cursed be the cow that bore thee and thy thief of a master that gave thee grass in his pasture! I hope he's in prison. Still laughing? Still making faces at me?"

In his fury he leaned his body on the table stretching out his arms and opening the drawers. Then he stood erect, raising one hand toward the horned head.

Bang! bang! Two shots from a revolver.

A glass globe in the hollow of one eye burst into tiny fragments and a round black hole, circled by singed hair,