Death in the afternoon

Manolo Martinez of the barrio of Ruzafa in Valencia, slight, with his round eyes, his twisted-crooked face, his thin smile, looks as though he belonged around a race track or like one of the best of the tough citizens you knew around the poolrooms when you were a boy. Many critics deny he is a great killer because he has never had any luck in Madrid and the editors of the French bullfight paper, he Toril, a very good periodical, deny him all merit because he has sense enough not to risk his life when fighting in the south of France where any sword that disappears into the bull, no matter how placed, or how trickily inserted, is universally applauded. Martinez is as brave as Fortuna and he is never bored. He loves to kill and he is not conceited as Villalta is; when it comes out well he is pleased, seemingly as much for you as for himself. He has been greatly punished by the bulls and I saw him get a terrible cornada one year in Valencia. His work with cape and muleta is unsound, but if the bull is a frank, fast charger Martinez works as close as any man can pass bulls. This day he had a bull that hooked to the right and he seemingly did not notice the defect. The bull bumped him once in passing with the cape and the next time Martinez passed him on the same side and did not give him room he caught him with the horn and tossed him. He was unwounded, the horn had slid along the skin without catching and had only torn his trousers, but he had come down on his head and was groggy and on his next turn with the cape he took the bull all the way out into the centre of the ring and there, alone, tried to pass him closely on the right side again. Of course the bull caught him, his defect had been accentuated by his success at getting the man before, and this time the horn went in, and Martinez went into the air on the horn, the bull tossed him clear, and as he lay still on the ground, gored at him again and again before the other bullfighters ru

The valor of Luis Freg, he has no art, except with the sword, is the strangest that I know. It is as indestructible as the sea, but there is no salt in it unless it is the salt of his own blood and human blood has a sweet and sickly taste in spite of its saline quality. If Luis Freg had died in any of the four times that I remember him being given up as dead I could write more freely of his character. He is a Mexican Indian, heavy-set now, soft-voiced, soft-handed, nose rather hooked, slant-eyed, full mouth, very black hair, the only matador who still wears the pigtail plaited on his head and he has been a full matador in Mexico since Johnson fought Jeffries at Reno, Nevada, in 1910 and in Spain since the year after that fight. In the twenty-one years he has fought as a matador the bulls have given him seventy-two severe horn wounds. No bullfighter who ever lived has been so punished by the bulls as he has. He has received extreme unction five different times when he was believed certain to die. His legs are as gnarled and twisted by scars as the branches of an old oak tree and his chest and his abdomen are covered with scars of wounds that should have killed him. Most of them have come from his heaviness on his feet and his inability to control the bulls with cape and muleta. He was a great killer though; slow, secure and straight and the few times, few in proportion to his other gorings, that he was wounded when killing were due to his lack of speed of foot to come out from between the horns and along the flank after he had the sword in rather than to any defects in his technique. His terrible gorings, his months in the hospitals, which used up all his money, had no effect on his valor at all. But it was a strange valor. It never fired you; it was not contagious. You saw it, appreciated it and knew the man was brave, but somehow it was as though courage was a syrup rather than a wine or the taste of salt and ashes in your mouth. If qualities have odors the odor of courage to me is the smell of smoked leather or the smell of a frozen road or the smell of the sea when the wind rips the top from a wave, but the valor of Luis Freg did not have that odor. It was clotted and heavy and there was a thin part underneath that was unpleasant and oozy and when he is dead I will tell you about him and it is a strange-enough story.

The last time he was given up for dead at Barcelona, torn open terribly, the wound full of pus, delirious and dying, every one believed, he said, "I see death. I see it clearly. Ayee. Ayee. It is an ugly thing." He saw death clearly, but it did not come. He is broke now and giving a final series of farewell performances. He was marked for death for twenty years and death never took him.

There you have portraits of five killers. If we can synthesize from studying good killers you might say that a great killer needs honor, courage, a good physique, a good style, a great left hand and much luck. Then he needs a good press and plenty of contracts. The location, and the effect, of estocadas and the various ma

If the people of Spain have one common trait it is pride and if they have another it is common sense and if they have a third it is impracticality. Because they have pride they do not mind killing; feeling that they are worthy to give this gift. As they have common sense they are interested in death and do not spend their lives avoiding the thought of it and hoping it does not exist only to discover it when they come to die. This common sense that they possess is as hard and dry as the plains and mesas of Castille and it diminishes in hardness and dryness as it goes away from Castille. At its best it is combined with a complete impracticality. In the south it becomes picturesque; along the littoral it becomes ma