Страница 19 из 86
It is because you may see some of these fake messiahs in action that it is important to know about them. You do not know whether you have seen a bullfight or not until you know whether the bulls were really bulls and the matadors really bullfighters.
For instance, you might see Nicanor Villalta. If you saw him in Madrid you could think he was splendid and see something very fine because, in Madrid, he keeps his feet together when he uses the cape and muleta and thus keeps from being grotesque and he always, in Madrid, kills very valiantly. Villalta is a strange case. He has a neck three times as long as that of the average man. He is six feet tall to start with and those six feet are mostly legs and neck.
You ca
If you see Nino de la Palma the chances are you will see cowardice in its least attractive form; its fat rumped, prematurely bald from using hair fixatives, prematurely senile form. He, of all the young bullfighters who came up in the ten years after Belmonte's first retirement, raised the most false hopes and proved the greatest disappointment. He started bullfighting in Malaga and he only fought twenty-one times in the ring, in contrast to the eight to ten years of apprenticeship of the run of old-time bullfighters, before he was made a full-fledged matador. There were two great bullfighters who became full matadors when they were only sixteen years of age, Costillares and Joselito, and because they seemed to skip all apprenticeship and found a royal road to learning many boys have been given premature and disastrous elevation. Nino de la Palma was a great sample of this. The only cases where these early alternatives were justified were where the boys had served years as child bullfighters and came from bullfighting families so they could make up in early paternal or fraternal training and counsel what they lacked in experience. Even then it was only successful if they were super-geniuses. I say super-geniuses because every matador is a genius. You ca
I tried to describe how he looked and a couple of his fights in a book one time. I was present the day of his first presentation as a matador in Madrid and I saw him in Valencia that year in competition with Juan Belmonte, returned from retirement, do two faenas that were so beautiful and wonderful that I can remember them pass by pass to-day. He was sincerity and purity of style itself with the cape, he did not kill badly, although, except when he had luck, he was not a great killer. He did kill several times recibiendo, receiving the bull on the sword in the old ma
That was the end of him. The next year he had the most contracts of any matador in the profession, signed because of his first splendid year, and his actions in the ring were a series of disasters. He could hardly look at a bull. His fright as he had to go in to kill was painful to see and he spent the whole season assassinating bulls in the way that offered him least danger, ru