Dagonet Abroad

by George R. Sims

After the picadors have ridden out, the banderilleros commence on the bull. Their feat is a dangerous one. They have to go up to him and stick long darts, ornamented with coloured paper, into his neck. Both darts must be stuck to a nicety side by side. The banderillero must wait till the bull comes full tilt at him, stick the darts in, and slip aside. This is a feat requiring perfect aim, a quick eye, and a steady foot. While this is going on the toreros continue to draw the bull now this way and now that with their mantles. When, maddened by the darts hanging into his bleeding neck, he dashes at them, they have to run for their lives, and leap the barrier. By this time the poor beast has been baited and worried and chased and chivied until he is fairly tired. Now the bugle sounds for the last act, and all is intense excitement.

The espada advances to the president’s box, takes off his hat, and says ‘Señor President, here is to you, to your family, and all Spaniards.’ He then says that he will kill the bull. All the assistants retire. The espada takes a long Toledo sword and his red cloth, and advances to the bull. Man and beast are alone in the great ring. Intelligence and skill are pitted for the first time in the contest against brute force and passion. But daring, graceful, and clever as the matadors are, the chances are a thousand to one in their favour. The bull—poor beast—always runs at the cloth and not at the man. The matador’s real danger is a slip when running from the bull. But the toreros, or assistants, are all watching, and at the slightest symptom of danger they rush at the bull and turn him, or envelop his head with their cloaks. Fight he never so bravely, the bull is doomed. He must be killed—that is the rule of the game.

There are a score of names for the different passes and feints and tricks the matador performs with the bull for a few minutes, until he raises his sword in token that he intends to kill it. He baits the bull now this way and now that with the red cloth until he gets the animal to run fairly at him. Then he thrusts the long sword just between the left shoulder and the blade. If the thrust is true and well delivered, the bull falls on his knees. His proud head is raised in defiance for a moment, and then he falls over on his side dead. When the blow does not kill him, the butchery is completed by one of the toreros with the ‘puntilla.’ There are many ways in which the espada receives the last charge of the bull. Some are dangerous, and are only practised by the great masters of the art. Some of the matadors will even dispense with the red cloth, called in the parlance of the ring ‘muletta,’ and defy the bull with folded arms. These feats call forth deafening applause.

When the bull is dead, a team of gaily-bedecked mules enters, and drags out first the dead horses, and then the dead bull. The sand is raked over the pools and tracks of blood, and another bull is turned into the arena to go through the same performance. The second bull that I saw was furious at first, but was baited at last into absolute terror. Long before it came to the turn of the matador the poor brute was bellowing piteously, and trying to leap the barriers and escape. At last he got behind a dead horse, and, making a rampart of it, gored its carcass again and again. It took the whole staff five minutes to get him out into the arena to be killed.

After the bull-fight proper was over, I witnessed a curious spectacle. As the last of the four bulls fell to the ground dead, hundreds of the spectators leaped over the barriers into the arena and took off their cloaks. Then a young bull with knobs on its horns was turned loose among them for them to bait. Hundreds of lads became amateur toreros, and practised the art on the harmless animal. He knocked down a dozen and tossed one or two, to the intense amusement of the spectators. I left young Madrid thus amusing itself, and came out of the Plaza de Toros a wiser man as to bull-fights and a much sadder one. If I live fifty years in Spain, I never want to see such another cruel ‘game of blood.’

The bull-ring is the amusement of Spain, but the theatre is well patronized. I always study the theatres of foreign countries when I get a chance, and the Spanish theatre is one of the most curious I have seen. The Opera or Teatro Real is the principal, and is patronized by the aristocracy. Gayarré is the star there at present. The Teatro Español is devoted to the legitimate drama. The other theatres which play operettas, farces, and topical reviews are the Apolo, the Princesa, the Variedades, the Lara, the Eslava (so called after a priest who left the money to build it), and the Novedades. I will deal with this latter class first.

At nearly all Spanish theatres the performance commences at half-past eight, and is divided into four parts, each of which is called a ‘funcion.’ You pay for each of these—so much for entrance and so much for your seat. Thus, when you go to the Apolo, the performance commences at half-past eight with ‘La Gran Via.’ This is over at a quarter-past nine, and out you all go. A new audience now comes in and sees the first act of ‘Cadiz,’ an operetta, which terminates at ten. Out you all go again, and a fresh audience comes in and sees the second act of ‘Cadiz,’ which is over at a quarter to eleven. Out we all go again, and a fourth audience fills the theatre for another performance of ‘La Gran Via,’ which terminates about half-past eleven.

There is a prison scene in ‘La Gran Via.’ Several Vias are represented. One of them is called the ‘Via de la Liberdad,’ and it shows the side of a prison wall.

Some time before I arrived in Spain there had been a military revolt, and six sergeants who had taken a prominent part in the insurrection were confined in a State prison on the charge of high treason, but—owing to the notoriously lax discipline of Spanish prisons—the sergeants very shortly afterwards managed to make their escape, and eventually they succeeded in crossing the Pyrenees into France.

The escape of the sergeants is a standing joke among Spaniards of every shade of political opinion, and the scene in which the six sergeants are seen scudding along the prison wall, called the ‘Via de la Liberdad,’ is always received with tremendous roars of laughter, and it is probably the main cause of the great success of ‘La Fiesta de la Gran Via.’