Blood and Sand

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

CHAPTER IX

About this time Gallardo received several letters from Don José and from Carmen.

The manager evidently wished to encourage his matador, advising him as usual to go straight at his bull.... "Zas! a thrust, and you put him in your pocket!" But through his warm-hearted enthusiasm could be traced a slight discouragement, as if his perfect faith was a little staggered, and he had begun to doubt if Gallardo were still "the first man in the world."

He had received accounts of the discontent and hostility with which the public received him, and the last corrida in Madrid had fairly disheartened poor Don José. No, Gallardo was not like other espadas, who could go straight on through all the whistling of the audience, satisfied as long as they earned their money. His matador had genius and professional pride and could show himself off in a circus only if he were received with great applause. A mediocre result was equivalent to a defeat. The people were accustomed to admire him for his reckless, audacious courage, and anything that did not come up to that meant a fiasco.

Don José pretended to know what was wrong with his espada. Want of courage?... Never. He would die sooner than admit that fault in his hero. It was that he felt wearied, that he had not yet entirely recovered from the tremendous shock of his "cogida." "And for this reason," he advised in all his letters, "it would be better for you to retire and rest for a season. Afterwards you can come back and fight, and be the same as ever." And he offered himself to make all necessary arrangements. A medical certificate would be sufficient to explain his momentary inaction, and he would come to some agreement as to all pending contracts with the managers of the different Plazas, by which Gallardo would supply a rising torero to fill his place at a moderate salary. So by this means he would still be making money.

Carmen was the most earnest in her persuasions, using none of the manager's circumlocutions. He ought to retire at once, he ought to "cut off his pigtail," as they said in his profession, and spend his life quietly at La Rinconada or in his house in Seville with his family, she could bear it no longer. Her heart told her with that feminine instinct which seldom erred that something serious would occur. She could scarcely sleep, and she dreaded the night hours peopled with bloody visions.

Then she wrote furiously against the public, an ungrateful crowd, who had already forgotten what the torero had done when he was in his full strength. Bad hearted people, who wished to see him die for their own amusement, as if he had neither wife nor mother. "Juan, the little mother and I both beg of you to retire. Why go on bull-fighting? We have enough to live on, and it pains me to hear these people insulting you who are not worthy of you. Suppose another accident happened to you? Jesus! I think I should go mad."

Gallardo was very thoughtful for some time after reading these letters. To retire!... What nonsense! Women's worries! Affection might easily dictate this, but it was impossible to carry it out. Cut off his pigtail before he was thirty! How his enemies would laugh! He had no right to retire as long as his limbs were sound and he was able to fight. Such an absurdity had never been heard of. Money was not everything. How about his fame? And his professional pride? What would his thousands and thousands of admiring partisans say? What could they reply to his enemies if those latter threw it in their teeth that Gallardo had retired through fear?

Besides, the matador paused to consider if his fortune would admit of this solution. He was rich, and yet he was not. His social position was not yet consolidated. What he possessed was the result of his first few years of married life, when one of his greatest pleasures had been to surprise his mother and Carmen with fresh acquisitions. After that he had made money in even larger quantities, but it had run away and vanished in a hundred channels, opened out by his new life. He had played high, had led an expensive and ostentatious life. Many farms, added to the extensive estate of La Rinconada, to round it off, had been bought by loans furnished by Don José or other friends. He was rich, but if he retired and lost the splendid income from the corridas, often two or three hundred thousand pesetas a year, he would have to curtail his expenses, pay his debts, and live like a country gentleman on the income from La Rinconada, looking after things himself, for at present the estate, managed by hirelings, produced very little.