They ate and drank with that savage voracity of nocturnal feasts, to which people go with the fixed intention of excess in everything, taking refuge in drunkenness as soon as possible to acquire the happiness of stupidity.
In one end of the salon some gypsies strummed their guitars, intoning melancholy songs. One of the foreign women, with the enthusiasm of the neophyte, sprang upon a table and began to slowly move her well rounded hips, seeking to imitate the native dances, showing off her progress after a few days of instruction by a Sevillian teacher.
"Asaúra! Malaje! Sosa!" the friends shouted ironically, encouraging her with rhythmic hand-clappings.
They jested at her heaviness, but with devouring eyes they admired the beauty of her body. And she, proud of her art, taking these incomprehensible calls for enthusiastic praise, went on moving her hips and raised her arms above her head like the handles of a jar, with her gaze aloft.
After midnight they were all drunk. The women, lost to shame, besieged the swordsman with their admiring glances. He impassively let himself be managed by the hands that disputed for him, while lips surprised him with burning kisses on his cheeks and neck. He was drunk, but his drunkenness was sad. Ah! the other woman! The true blonde! The gold of these unbound locks that floated around him was artificial, gilded by chemicals applied to coarse strong hair. The lips had a flavor of perfumed ointment. Through the aroma his imagination detected an odor of vulgarity. Ah! the other one! the other one!
Gallardo, without knowing how, found himself in the gardens, beneath the solemn silence that seemed to fall from the stars, among arbors of luxurious vegetation, following a tortuous path, seeing the dining-room windows through the foliage illuminated like mouths of Hell before which passed and repassed shadows like black demons. A woman was dragging him by the arm, and he let himself be taken, without even seeing her, with his thoughts far, far away.
An hour afterwards he returned to the dining-room. His companion, her hair disordered, her eyes brilliant and hostile, was talking with her friends. They laughed and pointed him out with a deprecatory gesture to the other men, who laughed also—Ah! Spain! Land of disillusion, where all was but legend, even to the prowess of her heroes!
Gallardo drank more and more. The women who had quarrelled over him, besieging him with their caresses, turned their backs on him, falling into the arms of the other men. The guitarists scarcely played; surfeited with wine, they leaned over their instruments in pleasant drowsiness.
The bull-fighter also was going to sleep on a bench when one of his friends, who was obliged to retire before his mother, the countess, arose, as she did every day to attend mass at daybreak, offered to take him home in his carriage. The night wind did not dissipate the bull-fighter's intoxication. When the friend left him at the corner of his street Gallardo walked with vacillating step in the direction of his home. Near the door he stopped, grasping the wall with both hands and resting his head on his arms as if he could not bear the weight of his thoughts.
He had completely forgotten his friends, the supper at Eritaña, and the three painted foreign women who had quarrelled for him and then insulted him. Something remained in his memory of the other one, ever there, but indefinite and vague! Now his mind, by one of those capricious bounds of intoxication, reverted wholly to bull-fighting. He was the greatest matador in the world. Olé! So his manager and his friends declared, and it was true. His adversaries should see something when he went back to the plaza. What happened the other day was simple carelessness; Bad Luck that had played one of her tricks on him.