Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

"I have a handsome lover,

Too bold to fear the Devil,

And he's the best torero

In all the town of Seville."

The extravagance of the popular enthusiasm for these fiestas de toros is often ridiculed on the stage, where dramas dealing with bull-fighting, especially if they bring in the heroes of the arena, Pepe Hillo, Romero, Costillares, are sure to take. One zarzuela represents a rheumatic old aficionado, or devotee of the sport, trying, with ludicrous results, to screw his courage to the point of facing the bull. Another spends its fun on a Madrid barber, who is likewise a brain-turned patron of the ring. Disregarding the shrill protests of his wife, he lavishes all his time, love, and money on the corridas and encourages his daughter's novio, an honest young paper-hanger, to throw over his trade and learn to torear. After two years of the provincial arenas, the aspirant, nicknamed in the ring The Baby, has nothing but torn clothes and bruises to show for his career, and his sweetheart, eager to recall him from the hazardous profession, vows a waxen bull, large as life, to the Virgin, in case he returns to papering, with its humble security and its regularity of wages. Mary hears. On that great occasion, The Baby's début at Madrid, the barber, who has just been lucky in the lottery, rents for him a gorgeous suit of second-hand finery, but in the Plaza de Toros not even a rose-and-silver jacket can shield a quaking heart. The Baby is a coward born, and from the first rush of the first bull comes off with a bloody coxcomb, crying out his shame on the shoulder of his Pilar, who shall henceforth have him all her own.

The little artist and I went into Spain with the firm determination not to patronize the bull-fight. Half our resolution we kept,—her half. Wherever we turned we encountered suggestions of the corrida. Spanish newspapers, even the most serious, devote columns to Los Toros. Bull-fighting has its special publications, as El Toril and El Toreo Cómico, and its special dialect. On the morning after a holy day the newspapers seem actually smeared with the blood of beasts. In the bull-fight season, from Easter to All Saints, corridas are held every Sunday in all the cities of southern and central Spain, while the smaller towns and villages butcher as many bulls as they can possibly afford. The May and June that I passed in the capital gave me a peculiar abhorrence of the Madrid Sunday,—that feverish excitement everywhere; the rattle of all those extra omnibuses and cars with their red-tasselled mules in full gallop for the Plaza de Toros; that sense of furious struggle and mortal agony hanging over the city all through the slow, hot afternoon; those gaping crowds pressing to greet the toreros, a gaudy-suited company, on their triumphal return in open carriages; that eager discussion of the day's tragedy at every street-corner and from seat to seat along the paseos, even at our own dainty dinner table and on our own balconies under the rebuking stars. At this strange Sabbath service the Infanta Isabel, whose mother's birth was celebrated by the slaying of ninety-nine bulls, is a regular attendant, occupying the royal box and wearing the national colors. A French bull-fighter, visiting the Spanish capital, was invited by the Infanta to an audience and presented with a diamond pin. Not even the public mourning for Castelar could induce Madrid to forego the corrida on that Sunday just before his burial. Past the very senate-house where his body lay in state rolled the aristocratic landaus, whose ladies displayed the gala-wear of white mantillas.

But the Sundays were not enough. Every Catholic feast-day called for its sacrifice. Granada could not do fitting honor to Corpus Christi with less than three "magnificas corridas." The royal saint of Aranjuez, Fernando, must have his pious birthday kept by an orgy of blood. At the fiesta of Christ's Ascension all Spain was busy staining his earth with the life-stream of His creatures. Valladolid was, indeed, ashamed to have torn to death only seven horses, but Segovia rejoiced in an expert who sat at his work and killed his bulls with drawing-room ease. Bordeaux improved the occasion, with aid of two celebrated Spanish espadas, by opening a French Plaza de Toros, and Valencia had the excitement of sending to the infirmary one torero with a broken leg and another with a crushed foot. Such accidents are by no means uncommon. A matador was mortally wounded in the Valencia ring that summer, a banderillero was trampled at the Escorial, and those favorite stabbers, Reverte and Bombita, were themselves stabbed by avenging horns.

If there is a temporary dearth of saint days, Spanish ingenuity will nevertheless find excuse for corridas. Bulls must bleed for holy charity,—for hospitals, foundling asylums, the families of workmen out on strike. If the French squadron is at Cadiz, hospitality demands a bull-fight. In the interests of popular education, an historical corrida was arranged, with instructed toreros to display the special styles of bull-killing that have prevailed from the Cid to Guerrita. Again, as a zoölogical by-play, an elephant was pitted against the bulls. This, too, had precedent, for did not Philip IV once keep his birthday by turning in among the horned herd a lion, a tiger, a camel, and a bear, "all Noah's ark and Æsop's fables"? A bull of Xarama vanquished them every one and received the gracious reward of being shot dead by Philip himself.

It was on a Wednesday afternoon, at one of the three grand corridas of the Seville Feria, that I became an accomplice in this Spanish crime. Our friends in Seville, people of cultivation and liberal views, had declared from the first that we could have no conception of Spanish life and character without sharing in the national fiesta. "We ourselves are not enthusiasts," they said. "In fact, we disapprove the bull-fight. We regard it as demoralizing to the community at large. It is, nevertheless, a thing scientific, artistic, heroic, Spanish. Besides, a large portion of the proceeds goes to charity. We do not attend the corridas, except now and then, especially when we have foreign guests who wish to see them. Before going they all regard bull-fighting as you do, as an atrocity, a barbarity, but invariably they return from the Plaza de Toros filled with delight and admiration. They say their previous ideas were all wrong, that it is a noble and splendid spectacle, that they want to see it again and again, that they cannot be too grateful to us for having delivered them from prejudice."

I winced at the word. I have a prejudice against being prejudiced, and to the bull-fight I went.