Blood and Sand

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

The grandmother occupied an armchair at the head of the table. But when the espada had guests—and they were all people of a certain social position—she refused to take the place of honour, but Gallardo insisted.

"No," protested Gallardo, "the little mother must preside. Sit you down there, mother, or we won't have any supper."

Offering her his arm, he would conduct her to her chair, lavishing on her the most affectionate caresses, as if he wished to make up for the torments his vagabond youth had caused her.

When El Nacional looked in during the evening for an hour, rather with the feeling of fulfilling a duty towards his chief, the party became more lively. Gallardo, wearing a rich zamorra,[68] like a wealthy landowner, his head bare, and the pig-tail smoothed forward almost to his forehead, welcomed his banderillero with loquacious amiability. What were the amateurs of "the sport" saying? What lies were they spreading? How were the affairs of the Republic getting on?

"Garabato, give Sebastian a glass of wine."

But El Nacional refused the preferred civility. No wine, thanks, he never drank. Wine was the cause of all the working classes being so hopelessly behindhand. All the assembly burst out laughing, as if something amusing had been said which they were expecting, and the banderillero began at once to air his opinions.

The only one who remained silent, with hostile eyes, was the saddler. He hated El Nacional, seeing in him an enemy. He also, like a good and faithful husband, was prolific, and a swarm of brats tumbled about the tavern, hanging on to their mother's skirts. The two youngest were godchildren of Gallardo and his wife, so that in this way there was a sort of connection between the two. Hypocrite! Every Sunday he brought the two children, dressed in their best to kiss the hands of their godparents, and the saddler grew pale with anger whenever El Nacional's children received any present. "He came to rob their own children. Possibly the banderillero even dreamed that part of Gallardo's fortune might come to those godchildren. Thief! A man who did not even belong to the family!"...

When the saddler did not receive El Nacional's discourses in sulky silence or with looks of hatred, he endeavoured to mortify him by saying that in his opinion every one who propagated revolutionary ideas among the people was a danger to honest people and ought to be shot at once.

El Nacional was ten years older than his chief. When the latter was beginning to bait at the capeas, Sebastian was already banderillero in recognized cuadrillas,[69] and had lately returned from America, where he had killed bulls in the Plaza at Lima. At the commencement of his career he had enjoyed a certain amount of popularity because he was young and agile. He also for some little time had figured as "the torero of the future," and the amateurs of Seville, fixing their eyes on him, hoped that he would have eclipsed the matadors from other towns. But this lasted only a short time. On his return from his American journey with the prestige of distant and possibly nebulous feats, all the populace of Seville rushed to the Plaza to see him kill. Thousands of people could not obtain admittance. But at this moment of decisive proof "his heart failed him," as the amateurs said. He planted the banderillas steadily as a serious and conscientious worker fulfilling his duty, but when it was a case of killing, the instinct of self-preservation, stronger than his will, kept him at a distance from the bull, and he was unable to take advantage of his great stature and his strong arm.

El Nacional therefore renounced the higher glories of tauromachia, he would be a banderillero and nothing more. He must resign himself to being, as it were, a day labourer of his art, serving others younger than himself, in order to earn the poor wages of peon, with which to maintain his family, and save sufficient to start some small business. His kindness and his honourable habits were proverbial among his colleagues of the pig-tail, consequently his chief's wife was much attached to him, seeing in him a kind of guardian angel of her husband's fidelity. When in summer Gallardo, with all his men, went to a café chantant in some provincial town, anxious to enjoy himself and have a fling, El Nacional would stand silent and grave among the singers in diaphanous dresses, with painted mouths, like some ancient Father of the desert amid the Alexandrian courtezans.