Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

Not a half-dozen had preceded me when I took a place on the stone bank directly behind the red tablas. On my heels appeared a rabble of ragged, joyful fellows, who quickly demonstrated that I had not, as I supposed, chosen the foremost seat, by coming to roost along the top of the barrier in front of me. One shudders to reflect what would befall individuals in an American baseball crowd who should conduct themselves as did these habitués of the Sevillian sol. But to the mercurial andaluz, accustomed always and anywhere to give his idiosyncrasies and enthusiasms full play, the wildest antics seem quite in place.

If, as many reputed authorities will have us believe, the Spaniard's love for "toros" is dying out, what must it have been before the dissolution began? At any rate it has not yet sunk to that point where the vast plaza of Seville will hold all who would come, even to these novilladas in which the bulls are young and the fighters not yet more famous than a member of the cortes. From a dozen entries the spectators poured into the enclosure; in the blazing semicircle bronzed peasants and workmen with wine-swollen botas, across the shimmering sand richly attired señoritas in the white mantilla of festival, attended by middle-aged duenas and, at respectful distance, by caballeros of effeminate deportment. The española is as ardent a lover of bulls as the men. One must not, however, jump to the conclusion that she is cruel and inhuman. On the contrary she is in many things exceedingly tender-hearted. Habit and the accustomed way of thinking make vast differences, and the fact that Spain was for seven hundred years in continual warfare may account for a certain callousness to physical suffering.

The Spanish plaza de toros is the nearest modern prototype of the Roman Coliseum; when it is filled one may easily form a mental picture of the scene at a gladiatorial combat. By four-thirty the voice of the circular multitude was like the rumble of some distant Niagara. Howling vendors of thirst-quenching fruits climbed over our blistering knees; between the barriers circulated hawkers of everything that may be sold to the festive-humored. Spain may be tardy in all else, but her bullfights begin sharply on time. At the first stroke of five from the Giralda a bugle sounded, the barrier gates swung open, and the game was on.

It would be not merely presumptuous, which is criminal, but trite, which is worse, to attempt at this late day to picture a scene that has been described a hundred times in every civilized tongue and in all the gamut of styles from Byronic verse to commercial-traveler's prose. But whereas every bullfight is the same in its general features, no two were ever alike in the unexpected incidents that make the sport of perennial interest to the aficionados. An "aficionado," be it noted in passing, is a "fan," a being quite like our own "rooter" except that, his infirmity being all but universal, he is not looked down upon with such pity by his fellow-countrymen.

Seville is the acknowledged headquarters of the taurine art. In our modern days of migratory mixture of races and carelessness of social lines, toreros have arisen from all classes and in all provinces--nay, even in foreign lands. One of Spain's famous matadores is a Parisian, and one even more renowned bears the nickname of the "Mexican Millionaire." But the majority of bullfighters are still sons of peasants and small landholders of Andalusia in general and the vicinity of Seville in particular. The torero touring "the provinces" is as fond of announcing himself a sevillano as are our strolling players of claiming "New Yawk" as home. Nowadays, too, the bulls are bred in all parts of Spain and by various classes of persons. But the ganaderías of Andalusia still supply most of the animals that die in the plazas of Spain, and command the highest prices. Among the principal raisers is the Duke of Veragua, who boasts himself--and can, it is said, make good the boast--a lineal descendant of that Christopher Columbus whose wandering ashes now repose in the cathedral of Seville. The duke, however, takes second place to one Eduardo Miúra, whose bulls are so noted for their fury that a movement has for some time been on foot to demand double fees for facing animals from his pastures.

The bulls of both my Sundays in Seville were "miúras," and fully sustained the fame of their ganadero. Each córrida began with the usual caparisoned parade, the throwing of the key, the fleeing of the over-cautious alguaciles amid the jeering of the multitude. Is there another case in history of a national sport conducted by the vested authorities of government? Perhaps so, in Nero's little matinées in the toasting of Christians. But here the rules of the game are altered and to some extent framed by those authorities. Imagine the city fathers of, let us say Boston, debating with fiery zeal whether a batter should be allowed to run on the third strike! Then, too, the mayor or his representative is the umpire, safely so, however, for he is securely locked in his box high above the rabble and there is never a losing team to lie in wait for him beyond the club-house.

It is the all but universal custom, I note in skimming through the impressions of a half-hundred travelers in Spain, to decry bullfighting in the strongest terms. Nay, almost without exception, the chroniclers, who appear in most cases to be full-grown, able-bodied men, relate how a sickness nigh unto death came upon them at about the time the first bull was getting warmed up to his business which forced them to flee the scene forever. One must, of course, believe they are not posing before the gentle reader, but it comes at times with difficulty. To be sure, the game has little in common with croquet or dominoes; there are stages of it, particularly the disemboweling of helpless hacks, that give the newcomer more than one unpleasant quarter of an hour. Indeed, I am inclined to think that had I a dictator's power I should abolish bullfighting to-morrow, or next Monday at least; but so, for that matter, I should auto races and country billboards, Salome dancers and politicians, train-boys and ticket speculators. Unfortunately--

At any rate, I came out to this second córrida in Seville and left it with the hope of seeing several more. Certainly there is no other "sport" that can more quickly and fully efface from the mind of the spectator his personal cares and problems; and is not this, after all, the chief, if not the only raison d'être of professional sport? There is an intensity in the moment of a matador standing with steeled eye and bared sword before a bull panting in tired anger, head lowered, a hush of expectancy in the vast audience, the chulos poised on tiptoe at a little distance, an equine corpse or two tumbled on the sand to give the scene reality, compared with which the third man, third strike in the ninth inning of a 0-0 contest is as exciting as a game of marbles. It is his hunger for such moments of frenetic attention that makes the Spaniard a lover of the córrida, not the sight of blood and the injuries to beast and man, which, in his intoxication at the game itself, he entirely loses sight of.

The newcomer will long remember his first bull--certainly if, as in my own case, the first bandarillero slips at the moment of thrusting his barbed darts and is booted like a soccer football half across the ring by the snorting animal. Still less shall I forget the chill that shot through me when, with the fifth bull at the height of his fury, a gaunt and awkward boy of fifteen sprang suddenly over the barriers and shook his ragged blouse a dozen times in the animal's face. As many times he escaped a goring by the closest margin. The toreros did not for a moment lose their heads. Calmly and dexterously they maneuvered until one of them drew the bull off, when another caught the intruder by the arm and marched him across the ring to the shade of the mayor's box. There the youth, who had taken this means of gaining an audience, lifted up a mournful voice and asked for food, asserting that he was starving--a statement that seemed by no means improbable. The response was thumbs down. But he gained his point, in a way, for he was given a fortnight in prison. Incidents of the sort had grown so frequent of late in the plaza of Seville as to make necessary a new law, promulgated in large letters on that day's programme. Printed words, in all probability, meant nothing to this neglected son of Seville. Such occurrences are not always due to the same motive. The impulsive andaluz is frequently not satisfied with being a mere spectator at the national game. A score of times the tattered aficionados about me pounced upon one of their fellows and dragged him down just as he was on the point of bounding into the ring. Indeed, as at any spectacle the world over, the audience was as well worth attention as the performance itself. On the blistering stone terraces of an Andalusian sol animation and comedy are never lacking. In his excitement at a clever thrust the Sevillian often sees fit to fall--quite literally--on the neck of a total stranger; friends and foes alike embrace each other and dance about on the feet, shoulders, or heads of their uncomplaining neighbors. There is a striking similarity between the bantering of a famous torero by the aficionados and the "joshing" of a favorite pitcher in an American ball park, but the good day has yet to come when the recorder of a home-run will be showered in his circuit of the bleachers with hats and wine-skins, handfuls of copper coins, and tropical deluges of cigars. Nor does the most inexcusable fumble call forth such a storm of derision as descends upon a cowardly bull. The jibes have in them often more of wit than vulgarity, as when an aficionado rises in his place and solemnly offers the animal his seat in the shade. The height of all insults is to call him a cow. Through it all, the leather wine-bottles pass constantly from hand to hand. A dozen of these I had thrust upon me during the fight, and tasted good wine each time. The proceeding is so antiseptic as to warm the heart of the most raving germ-theorist, for the bota is fitted with a tiny spout out of which the drinker, holding the receptacle high above his head, lets the wine trickle down his throat. The skins so swollen when the córrida begins are limp and flaccid when it ends.

It seems the custom of travelers to charge that the apparent bravery of the bullfighter is mere pseudo-courage. Of all the detractors, however, not one records having strolled even once across the arena while the fight was on. In truth, the torero's calling is distinctly dangerous. The meanest bull that enters a Spanish ring, one for whom the spectators would demand "banderillas de fuego"--explosives,--is a more fearful brute than the king of a Texas ranch. Their horns are long, spreading and needle-pointed; the empresa that dared turn into the ring a bull with the merest tip of a horn blunted or broken would be jeered into oblivion. Not a year passes that scores of toreros are not sent to the hospital.