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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There is no part of the fiesta that appeals to the spectator seeing bullfights for the first time as does the placing of the banderillas. The eye of a person unfamiliar with the bullfight ca
In the banderillas he sees a man walk out carrying two slender sticks with barbed points; the first man he has seen go toward the bull without a cape in his hands. The man attracts the bull's attention, I am describing the simplest way of planting banderillas, runs toward him as the bull charges and as bull and man come together and the bull lowers his head to hook the man puts his feet together, raises his arms high and drives the shafts straight down into the lowered neck of the bull.
That is as much of it as the spectator's eye can follow.
"Why doesn't the bull get him?" some one seeing their first fight, or even after many fights, will ask. The answer is this, the bull ca
There is another variation of this called al quiebro in which the man is not supposed to lift either foot, deceiving the bull and giving him the false direction with a movement of his body, the feet kept still; but I have never seen this done. I have seen many pairs of banderillas that the critics called al quiebro, but I have never seen one placed without the man raising either one foot or the other.
In all these ways of placing the banderillas there are two men with capes in different parts of the ring, in general a matador in the centre and another, either matador or banderillero, in the rear of the bull so that, when the man has planted the banderillas and passed the bull's horn, by whatever means he has chosen, the bull, as he turns to pursue him, will see a cape before he has made his turn and taken out after the man. There is a definite place in the ring that each of the two or three men with capes occupies in all of the various ways of placing banderillas. The ways I have described, the cuarteo or quarter of a circle, power-to-power and its variations, in both of which the man and bull are both ru
There are, in addition to the three ways of placing banderillas that I have described, at least ten others some of which have become obsolete, such as the man who is to place the banderillas citing the bull with a chair in one hand, seating himself as the bull charges, rising from the chair to lure the bull to one side with a feint, driving in the banderillas and then sitting again in the chair. This is almost never seen now, nor are various other ways of placing banderillas which were invented by certain bullfighters and being rarely executed well except by their inventors, passed into disuse.
Bulls that take up a querencia against the barrera ca