MANZANILLO’S FATAL THRUST
The next bull was jet-black, big, sturdy, ferocious. He scorned to charge or gore a blindfolded horse, but he chased a man wherever in sight. Such a bull is according to the Spanish heart! The audience cheered him wildly. He ripped up three or four horses just because he had to, in order to get at the man on their backs. One of the horses had been ripped up by the first bull, but his dusty entrails had been put back, the rent sewn up, and under cruel spur and bit he had been presented to the second bull to be again splendidly and finally ripped wide open, ridden around the ring by his bowing rider, bloody entrails dragging in the dust, and applauded to his death by the blood-hungry multitude! The second bull was game! The banderillas were placed with danger and difficulty. These are two beribboned sticks tipped with steel gaffs that are jabbed into the bull’s shoulders, adding to the irritation of the rosettes, and increasing his desire for revenge. In the first bull they were perfectly planted and three pairs set in. In the second only one was got in at first, then a pair, then one again. Each setting of the banderillas is a dangerous feat! The bull must be approached from the front. Just as they are stuck into the maddened animal, the banderillador must step aside. He must be quick, very quick, as quick as the toreador in planting his fatal sword thrust. And not infrequently the banderillador gets tossed, and perhaps gored and killed by the bull. Hence the act, well done, receives deafening applause. Despite his fierce courage, this splendid black bull also met at last his inevitable fate, beneath the perfectly skillful thrust of Manzanillo.
The third bull was the biggest and oldest yet. Horses were ripped up by him in exciting succession and one picador was caught under his fallen horse and badly bruised. Nor was it so easy to kill this bull. The matador lost a trifle of his nerve. The sword only went in half way. It took the bull some time to bleed internally and die. With the sword-hilt waving between his shoulder blades, he tried to follow and gore the matador, but his strength began to fail. He stood still, his head sank down, his knees bent, he knelt. And the vast audience stood in hush and silence to watch with delighted expectancy the final oncoming of death. When he rolled over quite dead, the pretty women in the box behind me shouted and waved their dainty hands in mad delight.
The fourth bull was just ushered in when the brutality and cruelty and horror of it all quite nauseated me. I rose to go. My friend told our neighbors that I was “ill.” Otherwise they could not have understood my leaving in the midst of the fight. Afterward I heard it declared to be a very fine performance, for, as a little Mexican boy exclaimed delightedly, “they killed six bulls and thirteen horses! It was magnifico!”
JUAREZ’ TOMB AND WREATHS OF SILVER
As I sat and looked out on the ten thousand faces of all classes, rich and poor, all radiant and frenzied with the blood-lust and the joy of seeing a creature tortured to the very death, and then heard the clang of the multitudinous church bells, calling to Vesper services, even before the spectacle was ended, I realized that, surely, I was among a different people, bred to a different civilization from my own; a civilization still mediæval and still as cruel as when the Inquisition sated even fanaticism with its cultivated passion for blood! I also shame to say that I met to-night two young American ladies, school teachers at Toluca, going home with two bloody banderillas plucked from one of the bulls—“Trophies to keep as souvenirs.” They “Had so much enjoyed the fine spectacle.” Thus do even my countrywomen degenerate, thus is the savage aroused within their hearts!