Death in the afternoon

Joaquin Rodriguez, called Cagancho, is a gypsy who is the inheritor of Gallo as far as grace, picturesqueness and panics go, but in no sense inherits Gallo's great knowledge of bulls and of the principles of bullfighting. Cagancho has statuesque grace, majestic slowness and suavity of movement, but faced by a bull which will not allow him to put his feet together and prepare his passes he shows he has no resources and if the bull deviates at all from mechanical perfection, the gypsy becomes panic stricken and will get no closer to the animal than the tip of his muleta held at the greatest distance possible from his body. He is a bullfighter who, if you should happen to see him with a bull he had confidence in, could give you an afternoon you would not forget, but you might see him seven successive times and have him act in a way that would disgust you thoroughly with bullfighting.

Francisco Vega de los Reyes, called Gitanillo de Triana, is a cousin of Cagancho who can be very good with the cape and while he lacks Cagancho's grace with the muleta is much more able and courageous with it although his work is fundamentally unsound. While he is doing a faena he seems unable to get rid of the bull properly, to send him far enough with each pass so that, as he turns, he does not cut back in too quickly and so is constantly getting the bull on top of him when he wants him least and has been gored many times through his own awkwardness. Like Chicuelo and Marquez he is not well nor strong and while there is no reason for the public to excuse a highly paid performer on the grounds of his health, since there is no law which requires him to fight bulls unless he is in condition to do so, yet the physical condition of a bullfighter is one of the things that must be taken into account in judging his work critically even though he has no right to evoke it as excuse to the paying spectator. Gitanillo de Triana is cheerfully brave and naturally honorable in the ring, but the confident unsoundness of his technique gives you a feeling that he may be gored at any time while you are watching him.

Since writing that about Gitanillo de Triana I saw him destroyed by a bull in Madrid on Sunday afternoon, May 31, 1931. It had been over a year since I had seen him fight and on the way to the ring in a taxi I wondered if he would be changed and how much I should have to revise what I had written about him. He came out in the paseo with long-legged easy swing, dark-faced, better looking than he had been before and smiling at every one he recognized as he came up to the barrera to change capes. He looked healthy, his skin clear-tobacco brown, his hair that had been discolored by the peroxide they had used to soak out the clotted blood after a motorcar accident in which he had been severely hurt in the last year I had seen him, was ebony black again and shining, and he wore a silver bullfighting suit to emphasize all this black and brown and seemed very pleased with things.

With the cape he was confident, managing it beautifully and slowly; the style of Belmonte except that it was being done by a long-legged, thin-hipped, dark gypsy. His first bull was the third of the afternoon and after being very good with the cape he watched the banderillas placed; then, before he went out with sword and muleta, he motioned to the banderilleros to bring the bull closer in to the barrera.

"Watch him; he hooks a little to the left," said his sword handler as he handed him the sword and the cloth.

"Let him hook as he wants; I can handle him," Gitanillo drew the sword out of the leather sheath that went limp as the stiffness was gone and strode, long legging, toward the bull. He let him come once and go by for the pase de la muerte. The bull turned very quickly and Gitanillo turned with the muleta to let him come by on the left, raised the muleta and then rose himself into the air, his legs wide spread, his hands still holding the muleta, his head down, the bull's left horn in his thigh. The bull turned him on the horn and threw him against the barrera. The bull's horn found him, picked him up once more and threw him against the wood again. Then as he lay there the bull drove the horn through his back. All of this did not take three seconds and from the instant the bull first lifted him Marcial Lalanda was ru

When his father came to see him, Gitanillo said, "Don't cry, little papa. You remember how bad the automobile thing was and they all said we wouldn't get over it? This is going to be the same way." Later he said, "I know I can't drink, but tell them to moisten my mouth. Just moisten my mouth a little."

Those people who say they would pay to go to a bullfight if they could see the man gored not just always the bulls killed by the men, should have been at the ring, in the infirmary, and later in the hospital. Gitanillo lived through the heat of June and July and the first two weeks of August dying finally then of meningitis from the wound at the base of the spine. He weighed one hundred and twenty-eight pounds when he was gored and he weighed sixty-three pounds when he died and during the summer suffered three different ruptures of the femoral artery, weakened by ulcers from the drainage tubes in his thigh wound and rupturing when he coughed. While he was in the hospital Felix Rodriguez and Valencia II came in with almost identical thigh wounds and were both discharged as able to fight, although their wounds were still open, before Gitanillo died. Gitanillo's bad luck was that the bull threw him against the base of the wooden fence so that he was against something solid when the horn made that chop at his back. Had he been lying on the sand in the open ring the same horn stroke that wounded him fatally would probably have thrown him into the air rather than driven through his pelvis. The people who say they would pay to see a bullfighter killed would have had their money's worth when Gitanillo became delirious in the hot weather with the nerve pain. You could hear him in the street. It seemed a crime to keep him alive and he would have been much luckier to have died soon after the fight while he still had control of himself and still possessed his courage rather than to have gone through the progressive horror of physical and spiritual humiliation that the long enough continued bearing of unbearable pain produces. To watch and to hear a human being in this time should, I suppose, make one more considerate about the horses, the bulls and other animals, but there is a quick pull forward on a horse's ears to tighten the skin over the vertebrae at the base of the skull and an easy stroke by the puntilla between the vertebrae that solves all a horse's problems and drops him dead without a twitch. The bull gets death within fifteen minutes of when the man starts to play him and all wounds he receives are in hot blood and if they do not hurt any more than the wounds a man receives in hot blood they ca