When the poor lad stood opposite the novillo, the muleta and rapier in his hands, with pale face and trembling legs, his father followed all his evolutions from behind the barrier. He was always before the boy's eyes like a threatening master, ready to chastise the slightest fault in the lesson.
What the poor diestro, dressed in his suit of gold and red silk, most feared, was his return home on the evenings when his father was frowning and dissatisfied.
He would enter the tavern wrapping himself in his rich and glittering cape, to hide the rags of shirt protruding through rents in his breeches, all his bones aching with tosses the young bulls had given him. His mother, a rough, coarse-faced woman, upset by her afternoon's anxious wait, would run to meet him open armed.
"Here's this coward!" roared the tavern-keeper. "He is worse than a 'maleta.' And it is for this that I have spent money!"
The terrible stick was raised furiously, and the golden suited lad, who just before had murdered two poor little bulls, endeavoured to run away, shielding his face with his arm, while his mother interposed between the two.
"Don't you see he is wounded?"
"Wounded!" exclaimed the father bitterly, regretting it was not the case. "That is for 'true' toreros. Put a few stitches in his rags, and see they are washed.... Just see how they have served the cheat!"
But in a few days the tavern-keeper had recovered his equanimity. Anybody might have a bad day. He had seen famous matadors in just as bad case before the public as his boy. And he forthwith arranged fresh corridas in Toledo and Guadalajara, he, as before, "paying all the expenses."
His novillada in the Madrid Plaza was, according to the tavern-keeper, one of the most splendid on record. The espada, by a lucky accident, had killed two young bulls moderately well, and the public, who for the most part had entered free, applauded the tavern-keeper's son.
As he came out of the Plaza his father appeared at the head of a noisy troup of loafers, whom he had collected from all round the neighbourhood. The tavern-keeper was an honest man in his dealings, and he had promised to pay them fifty centimes a head if they would shout "Vive El Manitas"! till they were hoarse, and carry the glorious novillero on their shoulders as soon as he came out of the circus.