Death in the Afternoon. Ernest Hemingway
almost depraved, style of Belmonte was grafted and grown into the great healthy, intuitive genius of Joselito and in his competition with Juan Belmonte, bullfighting for seven years had a golden age in spite of the fact that it was in the process of being destroyed.
They bred the bulls down in size; they bred down the length of horn; they bred them for suavity in their charges as well as fierceness because Joselito and Belmonte could do finer things with these smaller, easier bulls. They could do fine enough things with any bulls that came out of the torils; they were not helpless with any of them but, with the smaller, easier bulls they were certain to do the wonderful things that the public wanted to see. The big bulls were easy for Joselito although they were difficult for Belmonte. All bulls were easy for Joselito and he had to make his own difficulties. The competition ended when Joselito was killed in the ring on May 16, 1920. Belmonte went on one more year, then retired, and bullfighting was left with the new decadent method, the almost impossible technique, the bred down bulls and, as bullfighters, only the bad ones, the hardy, tough ones who had not been able to learn the new method and so no longer pleased, and a crop of new ones, decadent, sad and sickly enough, who had the method but no knowledge of bulls, no apprenticeship, none of the male courage, faculties or genius of Joselito, and none of the beautiful unhealthy mystery of Belmonte.
Old lady: I saw nothing decadent or rotten about the spectacle we observed to-day.
Nor did I, to-day, madame, for the matadors were Nicanor Villalta, the courageous telephone pole of Aragon; Luis Fuentes Bejarano, the valorous and worthy workman, the pride of Union Labor, and Diego Mazquiaran, Fortuna, the brave butcher boy of Bilbao.
Old lady: They all seemed to me to be most valorous and manly chaps. In what way, sir, do you speak of decadence?
Madame, they are most manly chaps although Villalta’s voice is a shade high sometimes, and the decadence I speak of does not apply to them but to the decay of a complete art through a magnification of certain of its aspects.
Old lady: Sir, you are hard to understand.
I will explain later, madame, but indeed decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
Old lady: I always understood it to mean that there was something rotten as there is at courts.
Madame, all our words from loose using have lost their edge but your inherent concepts are most sound.
Old lady: If you please, sir, I do not care for all this discussion of words. Are we not here to be instructed about the bulls and those who fight them?
If you so wish, but start your writer to talking of words and he will go on until you are wearied and wish he would show more skill in using them and preach less of their significance.
Old lady: Can you not stop then, sir?
Have you ever heard of the late Raymond Radiguet?
Old lady: I cannot say I have.
He was a young French writer who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil if you follow me, madame.
Old lady: You mean?
Not exactly, but something of the sort.
Old lady: You mean he——?
Precisely. When the late Radiguet was alive he often wearied of the tenuous, rapturous and querulous society of his literary protector, Jean Cocteau, and spent the nights at an hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens with one of two sisters who were then working as models in the quarter. His protector was greatly upset and denounced this as decadence saying, bitterly, yet proudly of the late Radiguet, “Bebé est vicieuse—il aime les femmes.” So you see, madame, we must be careful chucking the term decadence about since it cannot mean the same to all who read it.
Old lady: It repelled me from the first.
Then let us return to the bulls.
Old lady: Gladly, sir. But what finally happened to the late Radiguet?
He caught typhoid fever from swimming in the Seine and died of it.
Old lady: Poor chap.
Poor chap, indeed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Those years after Joselito’s death and the retirement of Belmonte were the worst bullfighting has gone through. The bull ring had been dominated by the two figures that, in their own art, remembering of course that it is an impermanent and so minor art, were comparable to Velasquez and Goya, or, in writing, to Cervantes and Lope da Vega, though I have never cared for Lope, but he has the needed reputation for the comparison, and when they were gone it was, as though in English writing Shakespeare had suddenly died, and Marlowe retired and the field left to Ronald Firbank who wrote very well about what he wrote about but was, let us say, a specialist. Manuel Granero of Valencia was the one bullfighter the aficion had great faith in. He was one of three boys who had, with protection and money furnished, been made into bullfighters by the best mechanical means and instruction; practicing with calves on the bull ranches around Salamanca. Granero had no bullfighting blood in his veins and his immediate family had wanted him to be a violinist, but he had an ambitious uncle and natural talent for bullfighting, aided by much courage, and he was the best of the three. The other two were Manuel Jiminez, Chicuelo, and Juan Luis de la Rosa. As children they were all perfectly trained miniature bullfighters and the three of them all had pure Belmontistic styles, beautiful execution in everything they did, and they were all three called phenomenons. Granero was the soundest, the healthiest, and the bravest and he was killed in Madrid in the May following the death of Joselito.
Chicuelo was the son of a matador of that same name who had been dead some years from tuberculosis. He was reared, trained and launched and managed as a matador by his uncle, Zocato, who had been a banderillero of the old school and was a good business man and a heavy drinker. Chicuelo was short, unhealthily plump, without a chin, with a bad complexion, tiny hands and with the long eyelashes of a girl. Trained in Sevilla and then on the ranches around Salamanca he was as perfect a miniature bullfighter as could be manufactured and he was about as authentic a bullfighter, really, as a little porcelain statuette. After the death of Joselito and Granero and the retirement of Belmonte bullfighting had him. It had Juan Luis de la Rosa who was Chicuelo in everything but the uncle and the way he was built in the altogether. Some one, not a relative, had put up the money for his education and he was another perfectly manufactured product. It had Marcial Lalanda who knew bulls from being brought up among them—he was the son of the overseer of the breeding ranch of the Duke of Veragua, and he was advertised as the successor of Joselito. All he had as successor at that time was his knowledge of bulls, and a certain way of walking as he cited the bulls for the banderillas. I saw him often in those days and he was always a scientific bullfighter, but he was not strong and he was listless. He seemed to take no pleasure in bullfighting, to derive no emotion or elation from it and to have much controlled, but depressing, fear. He was a sad and unemotional bullfighter, although he was technically skillful and completely intelligent, and for once that he was good in the ring he was mediocre and uninteresting a dozen times. He, Chicuelo and La Rosa all fought as though they were condemned to it rather than as if they had chosen it. I believe that no one of them could ever completely forget the death of Joselito and of Granero. Marcial had been in the ring when Granero was killed and had been unjustly accused of not having made an effort to take the bull off of him in time. He was very bitter about this.
Bullfighting then, too, had two brothers, the Anllos, from Aragon. One, the older, Ricardo, they were both called Nacional, was of medium height and thick set, a monument of probity, courage, undistinguished but classic style and bad luck. The second, Juan, called Nacional II, was tall, with a thin mouth and slanting eyes. He was ungraceful, angular, very brave and with a style of fighting as ugly as you could see.
There was Victoriano Roger,