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  Fifteen minutes after scheduled starting time, encouraged by the trumpetings of municipal band music and the exasperated slow-handclapping of the spectators, the novillada got under way. The rejoneador, Cayetano Bustillo, aged nineteen, handsome, pink-cheeked and open-faced, dressed in the Sevillian manner in short waistcoat, leather chaps and a flat-brimmed hat, made his entry on a superb horse, executing a graceful and difficult step known to the haute école as the Spanish Trot. Bustillo’s mount was all fire, arched neck and flying mane, an almost mythological creature, and it would have needed only a background of fallen Grecian columns and sea, in place of the dull bloodred barrier fence and the sun curving on the wet sand, to turn this scene into a picture by Di Chirico come to life. Bustillo made a circuit of the ring, went out and returned on his working horse, a black Arab, spirited, more nervous than the first, with several small pink crescents left by old horn gashes on flanks and chest. The bugle was blown and bull number one came through the open gates of the toril, shattering the tensed silence of the crowd, and a kind of great contented grunt went up as they saw its size and speed. The bull came out in a quick, smooth, leg-twinkling run, at first not going dead straight but weaving a little as it looked from side to side for an enemy. Bustillo was waiting, his horse turned away, sidestepping nervously across the ring and a little to the one side; his three peons who were to work to his orders with their capes had been placed equidistant at the edge of the ring by the barrier-fence, watching the animal’s movements and trying to learn quickly from what they saw. The bull appeared not to see the horse, and selecting one of the peons it went for him, tail out still, shoulder muscles humped and head held up until the last moment when it lowered it to hook with its horns. The peon thus chosen, Torerito de Triana by name, stood his ground instead of taking refuge behind the protective barrier, the burladero, which screens the entrance to the passageway, received the bull with what looked to a layman like an exceptionally smooth and well-measured pass with his cape, and turned it so sharply that the animal lost its balance and almost fell. He then proceeded to execute three more stylish and deliberate movements with the cape. The hard-faced experts all round me exchanged looks, and there was some doubtful applause from the better seating positions. The critic of La Voz del Sur in his somewhat sarcastic account of the fight appearing in next day’s issue of the paper said: ‘Four imposing passes by Torerito – who was of course quite out of order in making them, as he had appeared solely in the capacity of a peon. But then, what can you expect? The poor chap can never forget the day when he was a novillero himself.’ Torerito and the other two peons were middle-aged men with worried eyes, blue chins, and fat bellies straining grotesquely in their tight ornamental breeches. You saw many of their kind sitting in the cafés of Jerez drinking coffee and shelling prawns with a quick skilful fumble of the fingers of one hand. These men had failed as bullfighters, remaining at the novillero stage throughout their long undistinguished careers. Now when their sun had set it was their task to attract and place the bull with their capes, to draw it away from a fallen bullfighter or picador, to place a pair of banderillas in the bull’s neck, but not to indulge in performances competitive with that of the star of the moment.

  Bustillo, who took this side-show good-humouredly enough, now called ‘Huh huh!’ to attract the bull, which at last seeming to notice the horse, left the elusive Torerito and went after it with a sudden, scrambling rush. This charge Bustillo avoided by kicking his horse into an all-out gallop that took him in a flying arc across the lengthening and curving line of the bull’s attack, and then when, from where I sat, it seemed certain that the bull had caught the horse, although its horn-thrust had in fact missed by inches, Bustillo leaned out of his saddle and planted a pair of banderillas in its neck.

  Bustillo repeated this performance several times, using more banderillas, and then the rejón, which is the javelin with which the rejoneador tries – usually without success – to kill the bull. The rising tension and the suspense every time this happened was almost unbearable. Bustillo, racing away at a tangent from the bull’s line of attack, his gallop slowed to the eye by the curvature of the ring, would seem to be forcing his horse into a last desperate spurt, and you saw the bull go scrambling after it over the sand as smoothly as a cat, the enormous squat bulk of head and shoulders thrust forward by the insignificant hind-quarters, short-paced legs moving twice as fast as those of the horse. After that the two racing masses would appear to fuse, the bull’s head reaching up and the white crescent horns showing for an instant like a branding mark in the fluid silhouette of the horse slipping by. At this second everyone got up, moved as if by a single muscular spasm, and you found yourself on your feet with all the rest, keyed up for an intolerable sight – at the very moment when the two shapes fell apart and the tension snapped like the breaking of an electrical circuit, and everyone let go his breath and sat down. Judging from his report, the La Voz man remained immune from nervous strain. ‘As for Cayetano Bustillo,’ he wrote, ‘let me say at once that as a horseman he appealed to me, but as a rejoneador – no. He was content to plant his weapons where best he could in an animal that soon showed signs of tiring. And what a slovenly trick he has of throwing down the hafts of the rejóns wherever he happens to be in the ring! Has no one ever told him that the proper thing to do is to give them to the sword-handler?’

  In the end Bustillo’s bull, tired though it may have been, had to be killed by a novillero substituting for Bustillo on foot. In the course of his action he gave what the critic described as several exhibitions of ‘motorless flight’, being caught and butted a short distance by the bull without suffering much apparent discomfort. The bull, which was too much for this novillero, died probably from fatigue and loss of blood resulting from several shallow sword-thrusts, of the kind delivered by a bullfighter nervous of over-large horns. Bustillo was accorded the mild triumph of a tour on foot round the ring, and several hats were thrown down to him, which he collected and tossed back to their owners, showing great accuracy of aim. The bugle then blew again, the doors of the toril were thrown open, and in came the second bull.

  Bull number two was prodigious. It was the largest bull I had ever seen in the ring and it brought with it a kind of hypnotic quality of cold ferocity that produced a sound like a gasp of dismay from the crowd. The three peons who were waiting for it worked in the cuadrilla, or troupe of the novillero Cardeño, a man in his thirties, whose face whenever I saw him was imprinted with an expression of deepest anxiety. The peon’s function in this preliminary phase of the fight is to try, by the simplest possible passes, the bull’s reactions to the lure of the red cape. Torerito, whose flamboyant behaviour with the first bull had caused unfavourable comment, was present again, and it was perhaps lucky for him that the bull decided on one of his colleagues, thus relieving him of the temptation to indulge in any more of the stylish bullring pranks of his youth. The peon chosen by bull number two, who was also a middle-aged man of some corpulence, was prudent enough to hold his cape well away from his body. The bull ripped it from his hands, turned in its own length, and went after the man who had started to run as soon as the bull passed him, and with a remarkable turn of speed for a man of his years and weight, reached the barrier fence and vaulted it perhaps a quarter of a second before the bull’s horns rapped on the wood. Each peon in turn tried the bull, but taking great care to keep very close to the burladero, behind which the man skipped as soon as the bull had passed. Five minutes were spent in this way, and the bugle sounded for the entry of the picadors.

  ‘The Luck of Spears’, as this business with the picadors is picturesquely called in Spanish, is one of the three main phases in every bullfight conducted in the Spanish style in any part of the world; the other two concerning the work of the banderilleros, and of the man with the sword whether novillero or full matador. It is the part of the fight which upset most foreigners as well as many Spaniards in the past, although in the last twenty-five years the horse has been fa
irly effectively protected by padding, so that the spectacle so repellent to D. H. Lawrence, and in a defensive way so amusing to Hemingway, of a horse completely eviscerated trotting obediently from the ring, is no longer seen.

  The purpose of the picador on his aged steed, and of the banderilleros who followed him, is to tire and damage the bull’s neck muscles in such a way that, without his fighting impetus being reduced, he will hold his head low and thus eventually permit the swordsman, lunging forward over the lowered horns, to drive home to the bull’s heart. These picadors are placed at more or less equal intervals round the ring, and each of them, if things go as they should, sustains one or more charges which he does his best to hold off by leaning with all his strength on the pica, jabbed into the hump of muscle at the base of the bull’s neck. A metal guard a few inches from the pica’s point prevents this from penetrating far and inflicting a serious injury.

  In this particular case, bull number two, supplied by the Marqués de Albaserrada, when lured by the capes to the first horse, showed no inclination to attack. When finally it did, it turned off suddenly at the last moment, ripping with one horn the horse’s protective padding, in passing, and completely avoiding the pica’s down-thrust. This sent up a shout of astonishment which became a continuous roar when the bull performed the same manoeuvre a second and a third time. A short discussion on strategy followed between Cardeño and his men, after which the bull, enticed once again to the horse and hemmed in by the four men with capes, charged for a fourth time, this time, however, changing its previous tactics and swerving in again when it had avoided the pica, to take the horse in the rear. Horse and rider went over, carried along for a few yards by the impact and then going down stiffly together like a toppled equestrian statue. Cardeño rushing into the mêlée to draw off the bull with his cape was tossed into the air with a windmill flailing of arms and legs. He picked himself up and straightened immediately, face emptied of pain. Great decorum is maintained in the ring in moments of high drama. The bullfighters accept their wounds in silence, but the crowd screams for them. As Aeschylus witnessing a boxing match remarked to his companion, ‘You see the value of training. The spectators cry out, but the man who took the blow is silent.’ It was at this point the man from La Voz seems to have realised that he had something on his hands justifying a report twice as long as the regular bullfight opening the season at Jerez was to get next day. ‘This bull turned out to be an absolute Barabbas’, he wrote, ‘… one of the most dangerous I have seen in my life. It gave the impression of having been fought before.’

  This sinister possibility also appeared to have suggested itself to the public, and to the unfortunate men who had to fight the bull. The first picador was carried off to the infirmary with concussion, a limp and broken figure on a board; while the others, refusing to play their part, clattered out of the ring – an almost unheard-of action – receiving, to my surprise, the public’s full support. Most of the two or three thousand spectators were on their feet waving their handkerchiefs in the direction of the president’s box and demanding the bull’s withdrawal. The bull itself, monstrous, watchful, and terribly intact, had placed itself in front of the burladero, behind which Cardeño and his three peons had crowded wearing the kind of expression that one might expect to see on the faces of men mounting the scaffold. Occasionally one of the peons would dart out and flap a forlorn cape, and the bull would chase him back, groping after him round the corner of the burladero, with its horn, without violence, like a man scooping unhopefully with blunt finger after a whelk withdrawn into the depths of its shell. The crowd was on its feet all the time producing a great inarticulate roaring of mass protest, and the bullfight had come to a standstill. A bull cannot properly be fought by a man armed only with a sword until it has been pic-ed and has pranced about a great deal, tiring itself in its efforts to free itself from the banderillas clinging to the hide of its neck. The sun-cured old herdsman at my side wanted to tell all his neighbours, some of whom were mere townspeople, just how bad this bull was. ‘I knew the first moment I set eyes on him in the corral. I said someone’s been having a game with that brute, and they’ve no right to put him in the ring with Christians … Don’t you fight him sonny,’ he yelled to Cardeño. ‘You’re within your rights in refusing to go out there and have that devil carve you up.’ That was the attitude of the crowd as a whole, and it rather surprised me. They were sympathetic to the bullfighters’ predicament. They did not want the fight to go on on these terms; and when the four men edged out from behind the burladero and the bull charged them and they threw their capes in its face and ran for their lives, the girls screamed and the men cursed them angrily for the risks they were taking. The crowd hated this bull. Bullfight regulars, as well as most writers on the subject, are addicts of the pathetic fallacy. Bulls that are straightforward, predictable, and therefore easy to fight, are ‘noble’, ‘frank’, ‘simple’, ‘brave’. They are described as ‘co-operating loyally’ in the neat fifteen-minute routine which is at once the purpose, climax and culmination of their existences, and they often receive an ovation – as did bull number one on this particular afternoon – from an appreciative audience as the trio of horses drag them, legs in air, from the ring. Hemingway, a good example of this kind of thinker, tells us in Death in the Afternoon that an exceptionally good bull keeps its mouth shut even when it is full of blood – for reasons of self-respect, we are left to suppose. No one in a Spanish audience has any affection for the one bull in a thousand that possesses that extra grain of intelligence. The ideal bull is a character like the British Grenadier, or the Chinese warrior of the last century, who is supposed to have carried a lamp when attacking at night, to give the enemy a sporting chance.

  In the next day’s newspaper report this bull was amazingly classified as ‘tame’, although it was the most aggressive animal I have ever seen in my life. When any human being appeared in the line of its vision, it was on him like a famished tiger, but tameness apparently was the professional name for the un-bull-like quality of calculation which caused this bull not only to reject the cape in favour of the man but to attempt to cut off a man’s flight by changing the direction of its charge. This sinister and misplaced intelligence provoked many furious reactions. I was seated in the barrera – the first row of seats behind the passageway. Just below me a Press photographer was working with a Leica fitted with a long-focus lens, and this man, carried away by his passion, leaned over the barrier fence and struck the bull on the snout with his valuable camera. A spectator, producing a pistol, clambered down into the passageway, where he was arrested and carried off by plain-clothes policemen and bullring servants. The authorities’ quandary was acute, because the regulations as laid down prevented their dismissing a bull on any other grounds than its physical inability to fight in a proper manner, or the matador’s failure to kill it within fifteen minutes of the time when he takes his sword and goes to face it. But physically this bull was in tremendous shape, and although half an hour had passed, the third episode of the fight, sometimes referred to in Spanish as ‘the Luck of Death’, had not yet begun.

  The outcome of this alarming farce was inevitably an anti-climax, but it taught me something I had never understood before: that bullfighters – at least some of them – can be brave in a quite extraordinary way. Black banderillas had been sent for. They are banderillas of the ordinary kind, wrapped in black paper, and their use imposes a kind of rare public degradation on the bull, like the stripping of an officer’s badges of rank and decorations before his dishonourable discharge for cowardice in the face of the enemy. The peons, scampering from behind cover, managed to place two of the six banderillas, one man hurling them like enormous untidy darts into the bull’s shoulders while another distracted its attention with his cape. After that, Cardeño, shrugging off the pleadings of the crowd, took the sword and muleta – the red square of cloth stretched over wooden supports that replaces the cape when the last phase of the drama begins – and walked toward
s the bull followed by his three obviously terrified peons. Although Cardeño had been standing in the shade for the last ten minutes, his forehead and cheeks were shining with sweat and his mouth was open like a runner’s after a hard race. No one in this crowd wanted to see Cardeño killed. They wanted this unnatural monster of a bull disposed of by any means, fair or foul, but the rules of the bullring provided no solution for this kind of emergency. There was no recognised way out but for Cardeño to take the sword and muleta and try to stay alive for fifteen minutes, after which time the regulations permit the president to order the steers to be driven in the ring to take out a bull which cannot be killed.

  Cardeño showed his bravery by actually fighting the bull. Perhaps he could not afford to damage his reputation by leaving this bull unkilled, however excusable the circumstances might have made such a course. With the unnerving shrieks of the crowd at his back he went out, sighted along the sword, lunged, and somehow escaped the thrusting horns. It was not good bullfighting. This was clear even to an outsider. Good bullfighting, as a spectacle, is a succession of sculptural groupings of man and beast, composed, held, and reformed, with the appearance almost of leisure, and contains nothing of the graceless and ungainly skirmishing that was all that the circumstances permitted Cardeño to offer. Once the sword struck on the frontal bone of the bull’s skull, and another time Cardeño blunted its point on the boss of the horns. Several times it stuck an inch or two in the muscles of the bull’s neck, and the bull shrugged it out, sending it flying high into the air. The thing lasted probably half an hour, and, contrary to the rules, the steers were not sent for – either because the president was determined to save Cardeño’s face, even at the risk of his life, or because there were no steers ready as there should have been. In the end the too-intelligent bull keeled over, weakened by the innumerable pinpricks that it had probably hardly felt. It received the coup de grâce and was dragged away, to a general groan of execration. Cardeño, who seemed suddenly to have aged, was given a triumphant tour of the ring by an audience very pleased to see him alive.