Death in the afternoon

The one really great fight that Manolo Bienvenida made in all of 1931 was the last day at Pamplona when he was more afraid of the public and their anger at his previous cowardly performances than he was of the bulls. He had asked the governor for troops to protect him before the fight and the governor told him if he went into the ring and performed well he would need no protection. Each night at Pamplona Manolo had been on the long-distance telephone hearing news of the chopping down of trees on his father's ranch by the peasant jacquerie in Andalucia; groves of trees being cut down and charcoal burnings started, pigs and chickens killed, cattle driven off; the ranch, which was not yet paid for and which he was fighting bulls to complete the payment on, being gradually pillaged in the sound Agrarian sabotage plan of the Andalucian revolt and being nineteen years old and hearing his world destroyed over the telephone each night, he was worried enough. But the boys at Pamplona and the peasants from the country around who were spending their savings to see bullfights and not seeing them, through the cowardice of matadors, could not go into the economic causes of a matador's abstraction and lack of interest in his work and they rioted against Manolo so violently and so scared him that finally, afraid of being lynched, he gave a splendid afternoon on the last day of the fair.

If there was a penalty of suspension from his profitable business operations, Cagancho might give a good afternoon oftener. His excuse is that he runs danger and the spectator does not, but one is being paid proportionately and the other is paying, and when the spectators protest is when Cagancho refuses to run danger. True, he has been gored, but each time through an accident such as a sudden gust of wind that left him uncovered when he was working close to a bull that he believed safe. There is the one chance he ca

ot eliminate and after he comes back to the ring from the hospital he will not even come close to a bull he believes to be harmless since there is no guaranty the wind will not blow up while he is working, or the cape get between his legs, or that he might not step on the cape or even that the bull may not go blind. He is the only bullfighter I have been glad to see gored; but goring him is no solution since he behaves much worse on coming out of the hospital than before he went in. Yet he keeps on having contracts and robbing the public because they know that when he wishes he can do a complete and splendid faena, a model of perfect execution, and end it by killing beautifully.

The best killer to-day is Nicanor Villalta who started in by tricking his killing, using his height to lean over the bull as he blinded him with his huge muleta and has now so purified, so mastered, and so perfected the art that, in Madrid at least, he kills nearly every bull he faces closely, confidently, correctly, securely and emotionally, having learned the way to profit by his magic left wrist really to kill instead of merely tricking. Villalta is an example of the simple man that I spoke of at the begi

ing of this chapter. In intelligence and in conversation he is not as smart as your twelve-year-old sister if she is a backward child and he has a sense of glory and belief in his greatness that you could reach high enough to hang your hat upon. Added to this he has a semi-hysterical bravery that no cold valor can compete with in intensity. Personally 1 find him insufferable although he is pleasant enough if you do not mind conceited hysteria, but with sword and muleta in Madrid he is the bravest, most secure, and most consistent and emotional killer in Spain to-day.

The best swordsmen in my time were Manuel Vare, called Varelito, probably the best killer of my generation; Antonio de la Haba, called Zurito; Martin Aguero; Manolo Martinez and Luis Freg. Varelito was of moderate stature, simple, sincere and a consistently great killer. Like all killers of only moderate height he took much punishment from the bulls. Not yet recovered from the effects of a horn wound received the year before, he was unable to kill with his old style in the April fair in Seville in 1922 and, his work unsatisfactory, the crowd jeered and insulted him all through the fair. Turning his back on a bull after he had put the sword in the bull caught him and gave him a terrific wound near the rectum that perforated the intestines. It was almost the same wound that Sidney Franklin received and recovered from in the spring of 1930 and it was the same sort of wound that killed Antonio Montes. He, Varelito, being gored late in April, lived until May 13. As they were carrying him down the passageway around the ring to the infirmary, the crowd, which had been hooting him a minute before, now murmuring with the rush of talk that always follows a serious cogida, Varelito kept saying, looking up at them, "Now you've given it to me. Now I've got it. Now you've given it to me. Now you've got what you wanted. Now I've got it. Now you've given it to me. Now I've got it. Now I've got it. I've got it." He had it although it took nearly four weeks for it to kill him.

Zurito was the son of the last and one of the greatest of the old-time picadors. He was from Cordoba, dark and rather thin; his face very sad in repose; serious and with a deep sense of honor. He killed classically, slowly and beautifully with a sense of honor that forbade him to use any advantage, or trick, or to deviate from a straight line as he went in. He was one of four novilleros who were sensations in their class in 1923 and 1924 and when the other three, who were all much riper than he, though none of them were very ripe, became matadors he became one himself at the very end of the season although his apprenticeship, in the sense that an apprenticeship should continue until the craft has been mastered, was not finished.

None of the four had served a proper apprenticeship. Manuel Baez, called Litri, the most sensational of the four, was a prodigy of valor and wonderful reflexes, but insensate in his bravery and very ignorant in his fighting. He was a brownfaced, bowlegged little boy with black hair, a face like a rabbit and a nervous tic of vision which made his eyelids wink as he watched the bull come; but for a year he substituted bravery, luck and reflexes for knowledge and while he was tossed, literally, hundreds of times he was often so close to the horn that it could not get a good chop at him and his luck saved him from all but one serious horn wound. We all spoke of him as carne de toro, or meat for the bulls, and it really did not make much difference when he took the alternativa since he fought on a nervous valor that could not last, and with his faulty technique he was certain to be destroyed by a bull and the more money he made before it happened the better. He was fatally wounded in the first fight of the year in Malaga early in February of 1926 after he had been a matador one full season. He need not have died of that wound if it had not become infected with gaseous gangrene and his leg amputated too late to save his life. The bullfighters say, "If I must be gored let it be in Madrid," or if they are Valencian they substitute Valencia for Madrid, since it is in those two cities that there are most serious bullfights; therefore most horn wounds and, consequently, two of the greatest specialists in that surgery. There is no time for a specialist to come from one city to another for the most vital part of a wound treatment which is the opening and cleaning to avoid the possibility of infections of all the multiple trajectories a horn wound makes. I have seen a horn wound in the thigh with an opening no larger than a silver dollar which when probed and opened inside had as many as five different trajectories, these being caused by the man's body revolving on the horn and, sometimes, by the end of the horn being splintered. All of these i

er wounds must be opened and cleaned and at the same time all incisions in the muscle must be made so that it will heal in the minimum of time and with the least possible loss of mobility. A bull ring surgeon has two aims; to save the man, the aim of ordinary surgery; and to place the torero back in the ring as soon as possible in order that he may fulfil contracts. It is his ability to get the fighter back to work rapidly that makes a horn-wound specialist able to command high fees. It is a very special sort of surgery, but its simplest form, which is the caring for the ordinary wound, which comes oftenest between knee and groin or between knee and ankle, since that is where the bull's lowered horns catch the man in goring, is to ligate the femoral artery with promptness if it has been opened, and then find, with the finger usually, or with a probe, open and clean all the various trajectories which a horn wound may have, at the same time keeping the patient's heart going with camphor injections and replacing the lost blood with injections of normal salt solution and so forth. Anyway, Litri's leg infected in Malaga and they amputated it, having promised him, when he was anaesthetized, it was only to clean the wound; and when he was conscious and found the leg gone he did not want to live and was in great despair. I was very fond of him and wished he might have died without the amputation since he was marked to die anyway when he took the alternative and was certain to be destroyed as soon as his luck ran out.