Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

The plaza de toros is of course the Roman circus. Rome created no more powerful form for an æsthetic action than this rounded, human mass concentered on sand and blood. With its arena, the bull fight wins a vantage over such western spectacles as cricket, baseball, the theater. In all of these, the audience is a partial unit: it is not above the action, but beside it. The arena of the bull fight is a pith of passion, wholly fleshed by the passionate human wills around it.

The plaza is too sure of its essential virtue to expend energy in architectural display. Here it scores another point over the modern theater whose plush and murals and tapestries and candelabras so often overbear the paleness of the play. The plaza has tiers of backless seats terracing up to balcony and boxes. The seats are of stone: the upper reaches are a series of plain arcades. The plaza is grim and silent. It is stripped for action. It is prepared to receive intensity. The human mass that fills it takes from the sand of the arena, glowing in the sun, a color of rapt anticipation. These thousands of men and women, since the moment when they have bought their tickets, have lived in a sweet excitement. Hours before the bugle, they are on their way. They examine the great brutes whose deaths they are to witness. They march up and down the sand which will soon rise with blood.

Bright shawls are flung on the palcos. Women’s voices paint the murmur of the men. A bugle sounds, and there is silence. The crimson and gold mantones stand like fixed fires in this firmament of attention. The multitudinous eyes are rods holding in diapason the sky and the arena. Two horsemen (alguaciles) prance forward through the gates. Black velvet capes fold above their doublets. From their black hats wave red and yellow plumes.

They salute the royal or presidential box; circle the ring in opposite directions and return to the gate. The music flares. They proceed once more on their proud stallions, and behind them file the actors in the drama. The toreros are first: four of them: they wear gold-laid jackets, gold-fronted breeches backed in blue, rose-colored stockings. The banderilleros in silver drape their pied capas across their arms. The picadores follow. They are heavy brutish men, with chamois leggings and trousers drawn like gloves over their wooden armor. They are astride pitiful nags, each of which is Rocinante. The shoes are encased in stirrups of steel; the spurs are savage against the pitiful flanks. Behind the picadores are the red-bloused grooms, costumed like villains. It is their task to clean up entrails and gore. And the procession closes with two trios of mules, festooned and belled, who draw the drag to which the bodies of slaughtered bulls and horses will be attached.

The cavalcade crosses and salutes. Toreros, banderilleros, picadores on nervous nags, scatter along the barriers. Again, the bugle sounds. Doors open on the interior passage which two high barriers hold as a protective cordon between the audience and the arena. A bull leaps into the glare.

His massive body is a form for the emotion of rage and for the act of plunging. The forelegs are slight beneath the heft of his shoulders whence he tapers down, so that the shoulders and head are like a swinging turret. The brute is all infuriated flesh pivoting the exquisite ferocity of horns. They are slender and curved, needle-sharp, lance-long. The bull is aware of the strange ten-thousand-headed creature that shouts at him and drives its will upon him. He understands that the mob is his foe. He bellows, circles, plunges at last to reach it. The barrier jerks him up, splintering with his onslaught. He is bewildered and stopped, pawing the sand, while the mob prepares to send its single emissaries to engage him.

The first act of the drama is formless and ends in farce. Toreros and banderilleros toy with the bull. They fling capes, side-step, dawdle with him. But gradually they withdraw the brute’s first fury from the indeterminate mob ringing him round to the accessible lives in the arena. The bull sees a horse. It capers before him in a blind presentiment of death. Its ears are tied, its eye is bandaged. Upon it a picador levels an enormous pike, steel-pointed. The bull charges and a horn sinks in the belly. Horse and rider rise and are flung in a clatter of bone, in a drench of flesh, against the barrier. The bull draws out his ensanguined horn and charges a banderillero whose cape is there protecting the picador. The crowd roars. The horse is whipped to its feet by grooms. The picador is hoisted back. The old nag’s entrails hang in a coiled horror within a foot of the ground.

The horse is the comedian of the drama. The bull tosses him. He lies on his back and his four anguished legs beat like drumsticks on the barrier. Or, losing his saddle, he plunges mad and blind around the ring, kicking his own intestines, until death takes him. Or the bull mangles him at once, and he disappears in a swirl of flesh. This is farce; and also this is the sense of the immanence of danger. The bull is drunken with his victory. The crowd, beholding the fate of a horse, laughs with a tinge of terror. For what has happened there, may happen to a man.

Enough horses have been slaughtered: their poor flesh shredded into the gleaming unconquerable sands. A bugle summons the second act of the drama.

This is the scene of the banderilleros. They are the critics, the epigrammatists, the graciosos, the chorus of the accelerant play. They bespeak the bull. They test him. They show off his subtle points—and their own. If he has faults—clumsiness, cowardice, lethargy—they correct him. They call forth his finest rage; and as he plunges on them they leave gay ribboned darts within his flesh. If he is slow to anger, they will employ darts that explode beneath the skin of their victim. They enrage him. But all the while, they sober him as well, making him realize that the holiday of the horses is no more: a harder enemy is on the field.