I Never Saw A Matador Come Carelessly
To His Work.
He is usually pale and alert.
He studies the bull for a
moment with all his eyes. He waves the blood-red engano, or lure, before
his face. If the bull rushes at it with his eyes shut, the work is easy.
He has only to select his own stroke and make it. But if the bull is
jealous and sly, it requires the most careful management to kill him.
The disposition of the bull is developed by a few rapid passes of the
red flag. This must not be continued too long: the tension of the nerves
of the auditory will not bear trifling. I remember one day the crowd was
aroused to fury by a bugler from the adjoining barracks playing retreat
at the moment of decision. All at once the matador seizes the favorable
instant. He poises his sword as the bull rushes upon him. The point
enters just between the left shoulder and the spine; the long blade
glides in up to the hilt. The bull reels and staggers and dies.
Sometimes the matador severs the vertebrae. The effect is like magic. He
lays the point of his sword between the bull's horns, as lightly as a
lady who touches her cavalier with her fan, and he falls dead as a
stone.
If the blow is a clean, well-delivered one, the enthusiasm of the people
is unbounded. Their approval comes up in a thunderous shout of "Well
done! Valiente! Viva!" A brown shower of cigars rains on the sand. The
victor gathers them up: they fill his hands, his pockets, his hat. He
gives them to his friends, and the aromatic shower continues. Hundreds
of hats are flung into the ring. He picks them up and shies them back to
their shouting owners. Sometimes a dollar is mingled with the flying
compliments; but the enthusiasm of the Spaniard rarely carries him so
far as that. For ten minutes after a good estocada, the matador is the
most popular man in Spain.
But the trumpets sound again, the door of the Toril flies open, another
bull comes rushing out, and the present interest quenches the past. The
play begins again, with its sameness of purpose and its infinite variety
of incident.
It is not quite accurate to say, as is often said, that the bull-fighter
runs no risk. El Tato, the first sword of Spain, lost his leg in 1869,
and his life was saved by the coolness and courage of Lagartijo, who
succeeded him in the championship, and who was terribly wounded in the
foot the next summer. Arjona killed a bull in the same year, which
tossed and ruptured him after receiving his death-blow. Pepe Illo died
in harness, on the sand. Every year picadors, chulos, and such small
deer are killed, without gossip. I must copy the inscription on the
sword which Tato presented to Lagartijo, as a specimen of tauromachian
literature:
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