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

his desires and hopes to action, with the vehemence of an impulsive man, intending to overpower the woman, to attract her and dispel by contact the chill which separated them.

"Doña Sol!" he supplicated, grasping her hands.

But she, with a simple turn of her agile right hand, disengaged herself from the bull-fighter. A flash of pride and anger darted from her eyes and she bent forward aggressively, as if she had suffered an insult.

"Silence, Gallardo! If you go on thus you will not be my friend and I will show you the door."

The bull-fighter's attitude changed to one of despair; he was humbled and ashamed.

"Don't be a baby," she said. "Why remember what is no longer possible? Why think of me? You have your wife, who, I hear, is pretty and simple; a good companion. And if not she, there are others. Think how many clever girls you can find there in Seville, those who wear the mantilla, with flowers in their hair, those that used to please me so much, who would think it a joy to be loved by Gallardo. My infatuation is over. It hurts your pride, being a famous man accustomed to success; but so it is; it's over; friend and nothing more. I am changed. I have become bored and I never retrace my steps. My illusions last but a short time and pass, leaving no trace. I deserve pity, believe me."

She gazed at the bull-fighter with eyes of commiseration, with pitying curiosity, as if she suddenly saw him in all his defects and crudeness.

"I think things that you could not understand," she continued. "You seem to me changed. The Gallardo of Seville was different from the one here. Are you really the same person? I do not doubt it, yet to me you are a different man. How can I explain it to you? Once I met a rajah in London. Do you know what a rajah is?"

Gallardo negatively shook his head blushing at his ignorance.

"It is an Indian prince."

The old-time ambassadress recalled the Hindoo magnate, his coppery face shaded by a black beard, his enormous white turban with a great dazzling diamond above his forehead and the rest of his body enwrapped in white vestments of thin and innumerable veils, like the petals of a flower.

"He was handsome, he was young, he adored me with the mysterious eyes of an animal of the forest, but he seemed to me ridiculous, and I jested at him every time he stammered one of his Oriental compliments in English. He shook with cold, the fogs made him cough, he moved around like a bird in the rain, waving his veils as if they were wet wings. When he talked to me of love, gazing at me with his moist gazelle-like eyes, I longed to buy him an overcoat and a cap, so that he would not shake any longer. However, I realized that he was handsome and could have been the joy, for quite a few months, of a woman desirous of something extraordinary. It was a question of atmosphere, of scene. You, Gallardo, do you know what that is?"

And Doña Sol remained pensive, recalling the poor rajah always shaking with cold in his absurd vestments amid the foggy light of London. In her imagination she beheld him there in his own country transfigured by the majesty of power and by the light of the sun, his coppery complexion, with the greenish reflexions of the tropical vegetation, taking on a tone of artistic bronze. She saw him mounted on his elephant on parade, with long golden hangings that swept the ground, escorted by warlike horsemen and slaves bearing censers with perfumes, his great turban crowned with white feathers set with precious stones, his bosom covered with breast-plates of diamonds, his waist bound by a belt of emeralds, from which hung a golden scimitar; she saw him surrounded by bayaderes with painted eyes and firm breasts, forests of lances, and, in the background, pagodas with multiple roofs one above another, with little bells that chimed mysterious symphonies at the slightest whisper of the breeze; palaces of more mystery; dense thickets in whose shadows leaped and growled ferocious multicolored animals. Ah, atmosphere! Seeing the poor rajah thus, proud as a god, beneath an arid sky of intense blue, and in the splendor of an ardent sun, it would never have occurred to her to present him with an overcoat. It was almost certain that she herself might have fallen into his arms giving herself up as a serf of love.

"You remind me of the rajah, friend Gallardo. There in Seville, in your native costume, with the lance over your shoulder, you were all right. You were a complement to the landscape. But here! Madrid has become very much Europeanized; it is a city like others. Native costumes are no longer worn. Manila shawls are seldom seen off the stage. Don't be offended, Gallardo; but I don't know why you remind me of the rajah."

She looked through the windows at the wet ground and the rainy sky, at the scattering flakes of snow, and the crowd that moved with accelerated step under the dripping umbrellas. Then she turned her gaze on the swordsman, stared strangely at the braid hanging from his head, at the way his hair was combed, at his hat, at all the details that revealed his profession, which contrasted with his elegant and modern costume.

The bull-fighter was—in Doña Sol's opinion—out of his element. Ah, this Madrid; rainy and dismal! Her friend who had come with the illusion of a Spain of eternal blue sky, was disappointed. She herself, seeing on the walk near the hotel the groups of young bull-fighters in gallant attitudes, inevitably thought of exotic animals brought from sunny countries to zoölogical gardens beneath a rainy sky in a gray light. There in Andalusia Gallardo was the hero, the spontaneous product of a cattle country. Here he seemed to her a comedian, with his shaven face and the stage manners of one accustomed to public homage; a comedian who instead of speaking dialogues with his equals awoke the tragic thrill in combat with wild beasts.

Ah! The seductive mirage of the lands of the sun! The deceitful intoxication of light and color! And she had been able to love that rough, uncouth fellow a few months, she had extolled the crudities of his ignorance, and she had even demanded that he should not abandon his habits, that he should smell of bulls and horses, so as not to dispel with perfumes the odors of wild animals that enveloped his person! Ah, atmosphere! To what mad deeds it drives one!

She remembered the danger in which she had stood of being killed by a bull's horns; then the breakfast with a bandit, to whom she had listened speechless with admiration and in the end had given a flower. What nonsense! And how far away it seemed now!

Nothing remained of this past which caused her to feel repentance for its absurdity except that lusty youth motionless before her with his supplicating eyes and his infantile effort to resurrect those days. Poor man! As if the madness could be repeated when one thinks calmly, and illusion, blind enchantress of life, has vanished!

"It is all over," said the lady. "The past must be forgotten, now that looking back it does not appear in the same colors. What would I not give to have the eyes I used to have! On returning to Spain I find it changed. You also are different. It even seemed to me the other day, seeing you in the plaza, that you were less daring—that the people were less enthusiastic."

She said this simply, without malice, but Gallardo imagined he divined in her voice a trace of mockery; he bowed his head and his cheeks reddened.

"Curse it!" Professional worries surged through his mind. Everything that happened was because he no longer got close to the bulls. She had said it plainly. He seemed to her a different man. If he became the Gallardo of former times perhaps she would receive him better. Women love none but the brave.

The bull-fighter deceived himself with these illusions, taking what was a caprice, dead forever, for a momentary aversion that he could conquer by force of prowess.

Doña Sol arose. The call had been long and the bull-fighter did not seem disposed to go; he was content to be near her, vaguely trusting to circumstance to draw them together. But he was obliged to imitate her. She excused herself, pleading an engagement. She was expecting her friend; they were going together to the Prado Gallery.

Then she invited him to breakfast the next morning; a quiet breakfast in her apartments. Her friend would also come. Undoubtedly it would be a pleasure to him to see a bull-fighter at close range. He scarcely spoke Spanish but he would be pleased to meet Gallardo.

The swordsman pressed her hand, answering with incoherent words, and left the room. Fury clouded his vision; his ears buzzed.

Thus she bade him good-bye—coldly, as she would an occasional friend. And that was the same woman he had known in Seville! And she invited him to breakfast with her friend who would amuse himself by examining him close at hand, as if he were a rare beast.

Curse it! He was a brave man. He was done. He would never go to see her again.

CHAPTER XV

BEHIND THE SCENES

JUST at that time Gallardo received several letters from Don José and from Carmen. The manager tried to encourage his matador, counselling him to walk straight up to the bulls—"Zas! a thrust and thou wilt put him in thy pocket." But underlying his enthusiasm a certain depression might be detected, as if his faith were dwindling and he had begun to doubt that Gallardo was "the greatest man in the world." He knew of the discontent and hostility with which the public received him. The last bull-fight in Madrid disheartened Don José completely. No; Gallardo was not like other swordsmen who went on in spite of public derision, satisfied with earning money. His matador had bull-fighter pride and could only show himself in the ring to advantage when received with great enthusiasm.

Don José pretended to understand what ailed his swordsman. Want of courage? Never. He would suffer death before he would recognize this defect in his hero. It was because he was tired, because he was not yet recovered from his goring. "And so," he advised in all his letters, "it would be better for thee to retire and rest a season. Afterward thou wilt fight again like thine old self." He offered to arrange everything. A doctor's certificate was enough to certify his temporary weakness, and the manager would settle with the plaza impresarios to arrange the pending contracts by sending a matador from the beginners' ranks, who would substitute Gallardo for a modest sum. They would still make money by this arrangement.

Carmen was more vehement in her petitions. He must retire immediately; he must "cut his queue." She was more afraid now than in the first years of her married life, when the bull-fights and the fearful suspense seemed to her conditions of existence that destroyed her peace of mind. Her heart told her, with that feminine instinct seldom mistaken in its forebodings, that something grave was going to happen. She scarcely slept; she dreaded the night hours, broken as they were by sanguinary visions. She waxed furious at the public in her letters—a crowd of ingrates who forgot what the bull-fighter had done when he was himself; evil-minded people who wished to see him die for their diversion, as though she did not exist, as though he had no mother. "Juan, Mamita and I ask it of thee. Retire. Why go on bull-fighting? We have enough to live on and it pains me to have to see thee insulted by people who