"They are girls as insipid as bread without salt, you know, maestro. Big feet and hempen hair, but they have their good points, you bet they have! As they scarcely catch on to what one says to them, they're all smiles, showing their teeth, which are very white. And they open their big eyes wide. They don't talk Christian but they understand when one makes signs of asking a tip, and as one is a gentleman and is always lucky, they give money for tobacco and other things—and one manages to live. I have three on hand now."
The speaker boasted of his indefatigable cleverness which absorbed the savings of the governesses.
Others devoted themselves to the foreign women of the music-halls, dancers and singers who came to Spain with the desire of immediately experiencing the joys of having a bull-fighter lover. They were lively French women, with snub noses and straight corsets, so spiritually slender there seemed to be nothing tangible under their perfumed and rustling, cabbage-like, crimpled skirts; German girls with solid flesh, heavy, imposing, and blonde as Valkyries; Italians with black, oily hair, with a greenish brown complexion and a tragic air.
The young bull-fighters laughed, recollecting their first private interviews with these devout enthusiasts. The foreign woman was always afraid of being deceived, dreading to find that her legendary hero was but an ordinary man. Really, was he a bull-fighter? And they looked for his queue, smiling complacently at their wit when they felt the hairy appendage in their fingers, which was equivalent to a certificate of identification.
"You know what these women are, maestro. They spend the whole evening kissing and caressing the coleta. To entertain them one has to jump up and perform in the middle of the room and explain how bulls are fought, turning over a chair, doing cape-work with a sheet, and lodging banderillas with the fingers. Holy Sea! And then, as they are girls who go about the world dragging money out of every Christian that comes near them, they begin their begging in their broken Spanish that even God himself couldn't understand: 'Bull-fighter sweetheart, wilt thou give me one of thy capes, all embroidered in gold, to wear when I come on to dance?' You see, maestro, how greedy these girls are. As if one bought capes as freely as newspapers. As if one had oceans of them—!"
The young bull-fighter promised the cape with generous arrogance. All bull-fighters are rich. And while the gorgeous gift was on the way, they became more intimate, and the lover asked loans of his friend, who, if she did not have money, pawned a jewel; and he, growing bolder, began helping himself to anything that lay within reach of his hand. When she happened to awaken from her amorous dream, protesting at such liberties, the fine fellow demonstrated the vehemence of his passion and returned the loans to her legendary hero in the form of a beating.
Gallardo enjoyed this tale, particularly when he heard the last part.
"Aha! thou doest well!" he said with savage joy. "Be firm with those girls. Thou knowest them. Thus they love thee more! The worst thing a Christian can do is to humble himself before certain women. Man must make himself respected."
He ingenuously admired the lack of scruple in these youths who lived by levying a contribution on the illusions of passing foreign women, and he pitied himself thinking of his weakness before a certain one.
At sunset, one afternoon, the swordsman on entering Alcalá Street from the Puerta del Sol, stopped, struck by surprise. A blonde lady was getting out of a carriage at the door of the Hotel de Paris. A man who looked like a foreigner gave her his hand, assisting her to alight, and after speaking a few words he drove away while she went into the hotel.