Blood and Sand

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

It was not that he felt shocked, but he thought of his wife and little ones down in Seville. According to him all the defects and vices in the world were the result of want of education, and most certainly those poor women knew neither how to read nor write. It was also the case with himself, and as he attributed his own insignificance and poverty of brain to this deficiency, he attributed to the same cause all the misery and degradation which exists in the world.

In his early youth he had worked as a founder, and had been an active member of the "International of Workmen." He had been an assiduous listener to those of his fellow workmen, who, happier than himself, could read aloud what was said in the papers devoted to the welfare of the people. During the time of the National Militia, he had played at being a soldier, figuring in those battalions who wore a red cap in sign of their federal "intransigeance." He had spent whole days in front of those platforms erected in public places, or in those clubs which had declared themselves in permanent sitting, where the orators succeeded each other day and night, ranting with Andalusian facility on the divinity of Jesus, or the rise in price of articles of the first necessity, till the time for repression came, when a strike left him in the trying position of being a workman marked for his revolutionary opinions, and excluded from every workshop.

Then as he was fond of bull-runs, he became torero at twenty-four, just as he might have chosen any other line of life. Besides, he knew a great deal and spoke with contempt of the absurdities of existing society. He had not spent many years listening to papers being read in vain. However bad a torero he might be, he would earn more, and would lead an easier life than ever so skilled a workman. His friends, remembering the days when he shouldered the musket of the National Militia, nicknamed him El Nacional.

He always spoke of the taurine profession with a kind of remorse, apologising for belonging to it in spite of his many years' service. The committee of his district who had decreed the expulsion from the party of all their co-religionists who attended corridas, as being barbarous and retrograde, had made an exception in his favour, keeping him on the list of voters.

"I am well aware," he would say in Gallardo's dining-room, "that bull-fights are reactionary ... something akin to the days of the Inquisition.... I do not know if I am explaining myself clearly. But to read and write is quite as necessary to the people as to have bread, and it is wrong that money should be spent on us, while schools are so sadly wanted. That is what the papers that come from Madrid say. But my co-religionists esteem me, and the committee after a lecture from Don Joselito, kept me on the register of the party."

His great gravity, that not even the jokes or the comic exaggerations of fury on the part of the espada and his friends could shake, expressed an honourable pride in this exceptional favour with which his co-religionists had honoured him.

Don Joselito, master of a primary school, verbose and enthusiastic, who presided over the district committee, was a young man of Jewish origin, who brought into political strife all the ardour of the Maccabees, and was proud of his swarthy ugliness, pitted with smallpox, because he thought it made him resemble Danton; El Nacional always listened to him open-mouthed.

When Don José and the maestro's other friends, after dinner, ironically attacked El National's doctrines with all sorts of extravagant arguments, the poor man would look confused, and scratching his head would say:

"You are gentlemen, and you have been educated, I know neither how to read nor write, and that is why we of the lower orders are such simpletons. Oh! if only Don Joselito were here!... By the life of the blue dove! If only you could hear him when he starts speaking like an angel!"...

And in order to strengthen his faith, perhaps a little shaken by these attacks of ridicule, he would go next day to see his idol, who seemed to take a bitter pleasure, as a descendant of the great persecuted nation, in showing him what he called his museum of horrors. This Jew, returned to the natal country of his ancestors, had collected in a room attached to the school souvenirs of the Inquisition, and with the meticulous vindictiveness of a fugitive prisoner endeavoured to reconstruct hour by hour the skeleton of his jailor. There on the shelves of a cupboard were rows of books and parchments, accounts of autos da fe and lists of questions wherewith to interrogate the criminals during their torture. On one wall was hung a white banner with the dreaded green cross, and in the corner were piles of torturing irons, fearful scourges, every instrument that Don Joselito could pick up on the hucksters' stalls that had been used to split, to tear with pincers, or to shred, which was catalogued immediately as an ancient possession of the Holy Office.