He threw his hat upon the divan as if he were taking off a crown of glory that oppressed his forehead, and staggered over to the desk, leaning against it, his gaze fixed on an enormous bull's head that adorned the wall at the lower end of the office.
"Hello! Good-evening, my good boy! What art thou pretending to do there? Moo! Moo!"
He greeted him with bellowings, childishly imitating the lowing of the bulls in the pasture and in the plaza. He did not recognize him; he could not remember why the hairy head with its threatening horns was there. Gradually he began to recollect.
"I know thee, boy! I remember how thou madest me rage that afternoon. The people hissed, they threw bottles at me, they even insulted my poor mother, and thou, so gay, what fun thou hadst!—eh?—shameless beast!"
In his intoxicated state he thought he saw the varnished muzzle and the light in the glass eyes tremble with laughter. He even imagined that the horns moved the head, assenting to this question, with an undulation of the hanging neck.
The drunken man, until then smiling and good natured, felt his anger rise with the recollection of that afternoon of misfortune. And even that evil beast smiled? Those wicked, crafty, scheming bulls, which seemed to jest at the combatant, were to blame when a man was ridiculed. Ah! how Gallardo detested them! What a look of hatred he fastened on the glass eyes of the horned head!
"Still laughing? Damn thee, guasón! Cursed be the cow that bore thee and thy thief of a master that gave thee grass in his pasture! I hope he's in prison. Still laughing? Still making faces at me?"
In his fury he leaned his body on the table stretching out his arms and opening the drawers. Then he stood erect, raising one hand toward the horned head.
Bang! bang! Two shots from a revolver.
A glass globe in the hollow of one eye burst into tiny fragments and a round black hole, circled by singed hair, opened in the forehead.