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

are beneath thee. And if another accident should happen—Heavens!—I believe I should go mad."

Gallardo remained thoughtful after reading these letters. Retire! What nonsense! Women's notions! They could say this easily on the impulse of affection, but it was impossible. "Cut his queue" at thirty! How his enemies would laugh! He had no right to retire while his members were sound and he could fight. Such an absurd thing had never happened. Money was not all. How about glory? And professional pride? What would the thousands and thousands of enthusiastic partisans who admired him say of him? What answer would they make to the enemies who threw it in their faces that Gallardo had retired through cowardice?

Moreover, the matador stopped to consider whether his fortune would permit this solution. He was rich, and yet he was not. His social position was not established. What he possessed was the work of the early years of his married life, when one of his greatest joys consisted in saving, and in surprising Carmen and the mamita with news of fresh acquisitions. Later he had gone on earning money, maybe in greater quantity, but it was wasted and had disappeared through various leaks in his new existence. He had gambled a great deal and had lived a life of splendor. His gambling had caused him to ask loans of various devotees in the provinces. He was rich, but if he retired, thus losing the income of the corridas (some years two hundred thousand pesetas, others three hundred thousand) he would have to retrench, after paying his debts, by living like a country gentleman off the product of La Rinconada, practising economies and overseeing the estate himself, for up to that time the plantation, abandoned to mercenary hands, had produced almost nothing.

In former times he would have considered himself extremely wealthy with a small part of what he actually possessed. Now he seemed almost a poor man if he gave up bull-fighting. He would have to forego the Havana cigars which he distributed prodigally, and the high-priced Andalusian wines; he would have to curtail the impulses of a gran señor and no longer shout in cafés and taverns, "It's all paid for!" with the generous impulse of a man accustomed to defy death, which led him to conduct his life with mad extravagance. He would have to dismiss the troop of parasites and flatterers that swarmed around him, making him laugh with their whining petitions; and when a smart woman of equivocal class came to him (if any would come, after he had retired), he could no longer make her turn pale with emotion by putting into her ears hoops of gold and pearls, nor could he amuse himself by spotting her rich Chinese shawl with wine to surprise her afterwards with a finer one.

So had he lived, and so must he continue to live. He was a bull-fighter of the good old times, such as the people represent a matador of bulls to be, liberal, proud, a reveller in scandalous extravagances and quick to succor the unfortunate with princely alms whenever they touched his rude sentiments.

Gallardo jested at many of his companions, bull-fighters of a new kind, vulgar members of the guild of the industry of killing bulls, who journeyed from plaza to plaza like commercial travellers, and were careful and mean in all their expenditures. Some of them, who were almost boys, carried in their pocket an account book of income and expenses, marking down even the five centimes for a glass of water at a station. They only mingled with the rich to accept their attentions and it never occurred to them to treat anybody. Others boiled great pots of coffee at home when the travelling season came on and carried the black liquid with them in bottles, having it reheated, to avoid this expense in hotels. The members of certain cuadrillas endured hunger and growled in public about the avarice of their maestros.

Gallardo was not tired of his life of splendor. And they wanted him to renounce it!

Moreover, he thought of the necessities of his own house, where all were accustomed to an easy existence; the full and unembarrassed life of a family which does not count money or worry about its coming in, seeing it drip ceaselessly as from a faucet. Besides his wife and mother, he had taken upon himself another family, his sister, his chattering brother-in-law as idle as though his relationship to a celebrated man gave him the right to vagrancy, and all the troop of little nephews who were growing up and becoming constantly more expensive. He would have to call to an order of economy and parsimony all these people accustomed to live at his cost in merry and open-handed carelessness! And everybody, even poor Garabato, would have to go to the plantation, to parch in the sun and become brutish as rustics! Poor Mamita could no longer gladden her last days with pious generosity dispensing money among the needy women in the ward, shrinking like a bashful girl when her son pretended to be angry at finding she had nothing left of the hundred duros he had given her two weeks before! Carmen naturally would try to cut down expenses, sacrificing herself first, depriving her existence of many frivolities that made it bright.

"Curse it!" All this meant the degradation of his family—on his account. Gallardo felt ashamed that such a thing might happen. It would be a crime to deprive them after having accustomed them to luxury. And what must he do to avoid it? Simply get closer to the bulls; to go on fighting as in former times.

He would get closer!

He answered his manager's and Carmen's letters with brief and labored lines that revealed his firm intention. Retire? Never!

He was resolved to be the same as ever, he swore it to Don José. He would follow his advice. "Zas! A thrust, and the beast in his pocket." His courage rose, and he felt equal to taking care of all the bulls in the universe no matter how big they might be.

He was gay toward his wife, although his pride was rather hurt because she doubted his strength. She should hear news after the next corrida! He meant to astonish the public to shame it for its injustice. If the bulls were good, he would be like the very Roger de Flor himself!

Good bulls! This was Gallardo's worry. It used to be one of his vanities that he never gave them a thought, and he never went to see them in the plaza before the corrida.

"I kill everything they let out to me," he used to say arrogantly. And he beheld the bulls for the first time when he saw them enter the ring.

Now he wished to examine them, to choose them, to prepare for success by a careful study of their condition.

The weather had cleared, the sun shone; the following day the second bull-fight was to take place.

In the afternoon Gallardo went alone to the plaza. The amphitheatre of red brick, with its Moorish windows, stood by itself at the base of green hills. In the background of this broad and monotonous landscape something resembling a distant flock of sheep shone white on the slope of a hill. It was a cemetery.

Seeing the bull-fighter in the vicinity of the plaza some slovenly individuals, parasites of the ring, vagabonds who slept in the stables through charity, living at the cost of devotees and on the leavings of patrons of the nearby taverns, approached him. Some of them had come from Andalusia with a shipment of bulls and hung about in the vicinity of the plaza. Gallardo distributed some coins among these beggars, who followed him cap in hand, and entered the ring through the door of the Caballerizas.

In the corral he saw a group of devotees watching the picadores testing horses. Potaje, with great cowboy spurs on his heels, was grasping a spear, preparing to mount. Those in charge of the stables escorted the manager of the horses, an obese man in a great Andalusian hat, slow of speech, who responded calmly to the insulting and abusive wrangling of the picadores.

The "wise monkeys," with arms bared were pulling the hacks by the bridle reins for the riders to try them. For several days they had been riding and training these miserable horses which still bore on their flanks the red gashes of the spurs. They brought them out to trot over the clearings adjacent to the plaza, making them acquire an artificial energy with the iron on their heels and obliging them to make turns to accustom them to running in the ring. They came back to the plaza with their sides dyed with blood, and before entering the stables they received a baptism of several bucketfuls of water. Near the trough not far away the water standing between the stones was dark red, like spilled wine.

The horses destined for the bull-fight the following day were almost dragged out of the stables to be examined and passed upon by the picadores. These worn-out remnants of wretched horse-flesh advanced, with tremulous flanks drooping with old age and sickness, a reproach to human ingratitude so forgetful of past service. Some were mere skeletons with sharp protruding ribs that seemed about to break through their hairy hide. Others walked proudly, stamping their strong hoofs, their coats shining and their eyes bright; beautiful animals that it was hard to imagine among outcasts destined to death, magnificent beasts that seemed to have been recently unharnessed from a luxurious carriage. These were the most dreaded, for they were horses afflicted with vertigo and other maladies, and behind these specimens of misery and infirmity, rang the sad hoof-beats of steeds past work, mill and factory horses, farm horses, public cab nags, all dulled by years of pulling the plough or the cart, unhappy pariahs who were going to be exploited until the last instant, forced to provide diversion to men with their pawing and springing when the bull's horns gored their shrinking bodies. To mount this miserable horse-herd, tremulous with madness or ready to drop with misery, as much courage was needed as to stand before the bull. Heavy Moorish saddles with high pommel, yellow seat, and cowboy stirrups were thrown upon them, and as they received this weight their legs almost gave way.

Potaje wore a haughty mien in his discussions with the overseer of the horses, speaking for himself and for his comrades, making even the "wise monkeys" laugh with his gypsy-like maledictions. Let the other picadores leave it to him to come to an understanding with the horse-traders. Nobody knew better than he how to make these people stand around.

A servant approached him, dragging after him a dejected hack with long hair and ribs in painful relief.

"What art thou bringing there?" said Potaje facing the man. "That can't be received. That's an animal no man alive could mount. Take it to thy mother!"

The phlegmatic contractor answered with grave calmness. If Potaje dared not mount him it was because the piqueros now-a-days were afraid of everything. With a horse like this, kind and gentle, Señor Calderón, Trigo, or any of the good-old-time horsemen could have fought bulls two consecutive afternoons without getting a fall and without the animal receiving a scratch. But now! Now there was much fear and very little shame.

The picador and the contractor insulted one another with friendly calmness, for among them abusive language lost significance from force of habit.

"What thou art," answered Potaje, "is a freshy, a bigger thief than José María the Earlybird. Get out, and let thy bald-headed grandmother that rode on a broom every Saturday at the stroke of twelve get on that raw-boned, hard-gaited beast."

Those present laughed and the contractor merely shrugged his shoulders.

"But what's the matter with that horse?" he said coolly. "Look at him, thou evil soul. Better is he than others that have