Blood and Sand

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

And as the espada remained silent but smiling, delighted to find El Nacional so well informed, the latter went on like a preacher, disillusioned of the vanities of life.

"A married man ought to seek, before everything else, the peace of his household.... All women are just the same.... Rubbish. One is worth just as much as the other, and it is a folly to embitter your life by flying from one to another.... Your servant, for the twenty-five years he has lived with his Teresa, has never deceived her once even in thought, and yet I, too, am a torero, and have had my good times and many a girl has cast sheep's eyes at me."

Gallardo laughed outright at the banderillero's lecture. He really spoke like the prior of a convent. And yet it was he who wished to gobble up all the friars alive!... "Nacional, don't be an idiot! Every one is as he is, and if the women come to us, well then, let them come. One lives so short a time! And possibly some day I may be carried out of the circus feet foremost.... Besides, you do not know what a great lady is! If only you could see that woman!"...

Presently he added ingenuously as though he wished to disperse the sad and shocked look on El Nacional's face:

"I love Carmen dearly, you know it; I love her as much as ever. But I love the other one too. It is quite another thing.... I cannot explain it. It is quite another thing, and that is all."

And the banderillero could get no more out of his interview with Gallardo.

Months before, as the end of the bull-fighting season was approaching with the autumn, Gallardo had had an accidental encounter in the church of San Lorenzo.

He rested a few days in Seville before going to La Rinconada with his family. When this quiet time came round, nothing pleased him better than to live quietly in his own house, free from those perpetual journeys in the train. Killing more than a hundred bulls a year, with all the dangers and exertions of the fight, did not fatigue him half so much as those journeys lasting so many months from one Plaza to another all over Spain.

Those long journeys in full summer, under a burning sun, over scorched plains, in old carriages of which the roofs seemed on fire were most exhausting. The large water jar belonging to the cuadrilla which was filled at every station, utterly failed to quench their thirst. Besides, the trains were crowded with passengers, country people going to the towns to enjoy the fairs and see the corridas. Many a time Gallardo, after killing his last bull in a Plaza, fearing to lose his train, and still dressed in his gala costume, had rushed down to the station like a flash of gold and colours, through the crowds of travellers and piles of luggage. Often he had changed his clothes in the carriage under the eyes of his fellow passengers, pleased at travelling with such a celebrity, and had spent a restless night on the cushions, while the others squeezed themselves together to give him as much room as possible. These people respected his fatigue, thinking that on the morrow this man would give them the pleasure of a perhaps tragic emotion, without the slightest danger to themselves.

When he arrived wearied out at a town en fête, the streets decorated with flags and triumphal arches, he had to endure all the torment of enthusiastic admiration. The amateurs, bewitched by his name, met him at the station and accompanied him to the hotel. These light-hearted people who had slept well, and who mobbed him, expected to find him expansive and loquacious, as if the very fact alone of seeing them, must cause him the greatest of pleasures.