The torero was uneasy, and his look showed both anxiety and fear. Curse it! Bulls in Seville, and the first person he met face to face was a one-eyed woman! Certainly those things did not happen to any one else. Nothing could be of worse augury. Did they want his death?
The poor woman, shocked by his dismal prognostications and by his vehement anger, tried to exculpate herself. How could she think of that? The poor woman wanted to earn a peseta for her children. He must pick up a good heart and thank God, who had so often remembered them and delivered them from similar misery....
Gallardo was softened by her allusion to their former poverty, which always made him very tolerant to the good woman. All right, let the one-eyed one remain, and let what God willed happen. And crossing the patio with his back turned to her so as not to see that terrible eye, the matador took refuge in his office close to the vestibule.
The white walls, panelled with Moorish tiles to the height of a man, were hung with announcements of corridas printed on silks of different colours and diplomas of charitable societies with pompous titles, recording corridas in which Gallardo had fought gratuitously for the benefit of the poor. Innumerable portraits of himself, on foot, seated, spreading his cape, squaring himself to kill, testified to the care with which the papers reproduced the gestures and divers positions of the great man. Above the doorway was a portrait of Carmen in a white mantilla, which made her eyes appear darker than ever, with a bunch of carnations fastened in her black hair. On the opposite wall, above the arm-chair by the writing bureau, was the enormous head of a black bull, with glassy eyes, highly varnished nostrils, a spot of white hair on the forehead, and enormous horns tapering to the finest point, white as ivory at the base and gradually darkening to inky blackness at the tips. Potaje, the picador, always broke out into poetic rhapsodies as he looked at those enormous wide-spreading horns, saying that a blackbird might sing on the point of one horn, without being heard from the point of the other.
Gallardo sat down by the beautiful table covered with bronzes, where nothing seemed out of place save the thick coating of several days' dust. On the writing bureau, which was of immense size, the ink bottles ornamented by two metal horses, were clean and empty; the handsome pen tray, supported by dogs' heads, was also empty, the great man had no occasion to write, for Don José, his manager, brought him all contracts and other professional papers to the club in the Calle de las Sierpes, where on a small table the espada slowly and laboriously affixed his signature.
On one side of the room stood the library, a handsome bookcase of carved oak, through the never-opened glass doors of which could be seen imposing rows of volumes remarkable for their size and the brilliance of their bindings.
When Don José began to call Gallardo "the torero of the aristocracy," the latter felt he must live up to this distinction, educating himself so that his rich friends should not laugh at his ignorance, as had happened to sundry of his comrades. So one day he entered a book shop with a determined air.
"Send me three thousand pesetas' worth of books."
When the librarian looked slightly bewildered, as if he did not understand, the torero proceeded energetically.
"Books. Don't you understand me? The biggest books, and if you have no objection, I should like them gilt."