Blood and Sand

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

This wandering existence made them exercise the cunning of primitive man to satisfy their wants. In the neighbourhood of country houses, they would crawl on their stomachs to steal the vegetables without being seen. They would watch whole hours for a solitary hen to come near them, and having wrung her neck would proceed on their tramp, to light a fire of dry wood in the middle of the day, and swallow the poor bird scorched and half raw with the voracity of little savages. The field mastiffs they feared more than bulls; these watchdogs were difficult brutes to fight, when they rushed upon the boys showing their fangs, as if the strange aspect of the latter infuriated them and they scented enemies to personal property.

Sometimes when they were sleeping in the open air near a station waiting for a train to pass, a couple of Civil Guards would rouse them. However, the guardians of law and order were pacified when they saw the red cloth bundles which served these vagabonds as pillows. Very civilly they would take off the urchins' caps, and finding the hairy appendage of the pig-tail, they would move off laughing, and make no further enquiries. They were not little thieves; they were "aficionados" going to the "capeas." In this tolerance there was a mixture of sympathy for the national pastime, and respect towards the obscurity of the future. Who could tell if perhaps one of these ragged lads, with poverty stricken exterior, might not become in the future a "star of the art," a great man who would pledge[57] bulls to kings, would live like a prince, and whose exploits and sayings would be recorded in the newspapers!

At last an evening came, when, in a town of Estremadura the Zapaterin found himself alone.

In order the more to astonish the rustic audience who were applauding the famous toreros "come purposely from Seville," the two lads thought they would fix banderillas in the neck of an old and very tricky bull. Juanillo had fixed his darts in the beast's neck and stood near a staging, delighting in receiving the popular ovation, which expressed itself in tremendous thumps on his back and offers of glasses of wine. An exclamation of horror startled him out of this intoxication of triumph. Chiripa was no longer standing on the ground of the Plaza. Nothing remained of him but the banderillas rolling on the ground, one slipper and his cap. The bull was tossing his head as if irritated at some obstacle, carrying impaled on one of his horns a bundle of clothes like a doll. By violent head-shakes the shapeless bundle was flung off the horn pouring out a red stream, but before it reached the ground it was caught by the other horn, and twirled about for some time. At last the luckless bundle fell into the dust, and lay there limp and lifeless, pouring out blood, like a pierced wine skin letting out the wine in jets.

The grazier with his bell oxen drew the brute into the yard, for no one dared to approach him, and the unhappy Chiripa was carried on a straw mattress to a room in the Town Hall which usually served as a prison. His companion saw him there with his face as white as plaster, his eyes dull, and his body red with blood which the cloths soaked in vinegar—applied in default of anything better—were unable to staunch.

"Adio, Zapaterin!" he sighed. "Adio, Juaniyo!" and spoke no more.

The dead lad's companion, quite overcome, started on his return to Seville, haunted by those glassy eyes, hearing those moaning farewells. He was afraid. A quiet cow crossing his path would have made him run. He thought of his mother and the wisdom of her advice. Would it not be better to devote himself to shoe-making and live quietly?... Those ideas, however, only lasted as long as he was alone.

On arriving in Seville he once more felt the influence of the pervading atmosphere. His friends surrounded him anxious to hear every detail of poor Chiripa's death. The professional toreros enquired about it in La Campana, recalling pitifully the little rascal with the scarred face who had run so many errands for them. Juan, fired by such marks of consideration, gave rein to his powerful imagination, and described how he had thrown himself on the bull when he saw his unlucky companion caught, how he had seized the brute by the tail, with other portentous exploits, in spite of which poor Chiripa had made his exit from this world.

This painful impression soon disappeared. He would be a torero and nothing but a torero; if others became that, why not he? He thought of the weevilled beans, and his mother's dry bread, of the abuse which each new pair of trousers drew on him, of hunger, the inseparable companion of so many of his expeditions. Besides he felt a vehement longing for all the enjoyments and luxuries of life, he looked with envy at the coaches and horses; he stood absorbed before the doorways of the great houses, through whose iron wickets he could see court-yards of oriental luxury, with arcades of Moorish tiles; floors of marble and murmuring fountains, which dropped a shower of pearls day and night over basins surrounded by green leaves. His fate was decided. He would kill bulls or die. He would be rich, so that the newspapers should speak of him, and people bow before him, even though it were at the cost of his life. He despised the inferior ranks of the torero. He saw the banderilleros who risked their lives, just like the masters of the profession, receive thirty duros only for each corrida, and, after a life of fatigues and gorings, with no future for their old age but some wretched little shop started with their savings, or some employment at a slaughter-house. Many died in hospitals; the majority begged for charity from their younger companions. Nothing for him of banderilleros, or of spending many years in a cuadrilla, under the despotism of a master! He would kill bulls from the first and tread the sand of the Plazas as an espada at once.

The misfortune of poor Chiripa gave him a certain ascendancy among his companions, and he formed a cuadrilla, a ragged cuadrilla who tramped after him to the "capeas" in the villages. They respected him because he was the bravest and the best dressed. Several girls of loose life attracted by the manly beauty of the Zapaterin, who was now eighteen, and also by the prestige of his pig-tail, quarrelled among themselves in noisy rivalry, as to who should have the care of his comely person. Added to this, he now reckoned on a Godfather, an old patron and former magistrate, who had a weakness for smart young toreros, but whose intimacy with her son made Señora Angustias furious, and caused her to give vent to all the most obscene expressions she had learnt while she was at the Tobacco factory.