Death in the Afternoon. Ernest Hemingway

      CHAPTER FOUR

       Table of Contents

      The best bullfight to see first would be a novillada and the best place to see a novillada is Madrid. The novilladas usually start about the middle of March and there is one every Sunday and usually every Thursday until Easter when the major fights or corridas de toros start. After Easter, in Madrid, starts the first subscription season of seven bullfights. Books of tickets for all seven fights are sold and the best seats are always subscribed year in and year out. The best of all seats are the barreras in the middle of the shade where the bullfighters put their capes over the red wooden barrier. There is where they stand when they are not in the ring; it is there that they have the bull brought when they are going out with the muleta; it is to there they come to sponge off after the killing. A seat there is equivalent in what you see and hear to being in the corner of a boxer during a fight or to sitting in the dugout or on the bench in a baseball or football game.

      You will not be able to buy any of those seats during the first or the second abono or subscription season at Madrid, but you can get them for the novilladas that come before, between and after the regular bullfight season, on Sundays and, usually, Thursdays. When you buy a barrera seat ask where the capes are put. “Adonde se pone los capotes?” and then ask that you be given a seat as close as possible to them. The ticket seller may lie to you in the provinces and give you the worst seat he has but he may, because you are a foreigner and seem to want to have a really good seat and know what one is, give you the best that he has. I have been lied to most in Galicia where the truth in any business transaction is hard to come at, and treated best in Madrid, and, of all places, Valencia. In most parts of Spain you will find the institution of the subscription or abono and the re-venta. The re-venta are ticket brokers who take over all or most of the unsubscribed tickets from the bull ring management and sell them at a twenty per cent increase over their face value. The bull rings favor them sometimes because while they buy the tickets at a discount yet they insure the paper being disposed of. If the tickets for the fight are not all sold it is the re-venta that has the big loss, not the bull ring—although the bull ring usually manages to have big losses in some manner or other. Since you will seldom, unless you are living in a town, be there at the time the subscription or abono for a fight or series of fights is opened, and since, in all cases, old seat holders have a right to renew their subscriptions before new ones are taken, and since these subscriptions are taken two or three weeks before the fights at some place perhaps difficult to find and open only from, say, four to five in the afternoon, the chances are you must buy your seats from the re-venta.

      If you are in a town and know you are going to the bullfight buy your seats as soon as you are decided. The chances are there will be nothing in the Madrid papers about any bullfight before it is to take place except a small classified advertisement under Plaza de Toros de Madrid in the column of espectaculos. Bullfights are not written up in the papers in advance in Spain except in the provinces. But in all parts of Spain they are advertised by large colored posters which give the number of bulls to be killed with the names of the men who are to kill them, the breeder who is furnishing them, the cuadrillas and the place and hour of the fight. There is usually also a list of prices of the various seats. To these prices you must expect to add the twenty-per-cent commission if you buy the tickets from the re-venta.

      If you want to see a bullfight in Spain there will be one of some sort in Madrid every Sunday from the middle of March until the middle of November, weather permitting. During the winter there are rarely any fights in Spain except very occasionally in Barcelona and sometimes in Malaga or Valencia. The first formal bullfight of each year is at Castellón de la Plana late in February or early in March for the fiesta of the Magdalena and the last one of the year is usually in Valencia, Gerona, or Ondara in the first part of November, but if the weather is bad these November fights will not take place. There will be fights every Sunday in Mexico City from October until, and probably through, April. There will be novilladas in the spring and summer. Dates of bullfights in other places in Mexico vary. The days on which there will be fights in other towns in Spain than Madrid vary, but, in general, except for Barcelona, where they are held almost as regularly as in Madrid, the dates coincide with the national religious festivals and the times of the local fairs or ferias which usually commence on the Saint’s day of the town. In an appendix to this book I have given a list of the dates of the main ferias, so far as these are fixed, on which bullfights will be held in Spain, Mexico and South and Central America. It is easy, easier than you can believe, in a two or three weeks’ trip to Spain to miss a chance to see bullfights, but using this appendix any one can see a bullfight if they want to be at any of the places on any of the fixed dates, rain permitting. After the first one you will know if you want to see any more.

      Aside from the novilladas and the two subscription seasons at Madrid the best place to see a series of bullfights in the early spring is at the feria in Sevilla where there are at least four fights on successive days. This feria starts after Easter. If you are in Sevilla for Easter ask any one when the feria starts or you can find the dates from the big posters advertising the fights. If you are in Madrid before Easter go to any of the cafés around the Puerta del Sol or the first café on your right on the Plaza de Canalejas going down the Calle de San Jeronimo from the Puerta del Sol toward the Prado and you will find a poster on the wall advertising the feria of Sevilla. In this same café you will always find in the summer the posters or cartels advertising the ferias of Pamplona, Valencia, Bilbao, Salamanca, Vallodolid, Cuenca, Malaga, Murcia and many others.

      On Easter Sunday there are always bullfights in Madrid, Sevilla, Barcelona, Murcia, Zaragoza, and novilladas in Granada, Bilbao, Vallodolid and many other places. There is also a bullfight in Madrid on the Monday after Easter. On the 29th of April of each year there is a bullfight and fair at Jerez de la Frontera. This is an excellent place to visit with or without bulls, and is the home of sherry and everything distilled from it. They will take you through the cellars of Jerez and you may taste many different grades of wines and brandies, but it is best to do this on another day than the one you plan to go to the corrida. There will be two fights in Bilbao on either the 1st, 2d or 3d of May depending on whether one of those dates falls on a Sunday. Those would be good fights to go to if you were, say, at Biarritz or St. Jean de Luz for Easter. There is a fine road to Bilbao from anywhere along the Basque coast. Bilbao is a rich, ugly, mining city where it gets as hot as St. Louis, either St. Louis, Missouri, or St. Louis, Senegal, and where they love bulls and dislike bullfighters. When they like a bullfighter in Bilbao they buy bigger and bigger bulls for him to fight until he finally has a disaster with them, either moral or physical. Then the Bilbao enthusiast says, “See—they are all alike—all cowards, all fakes. Give them big enough bulls and they will prove it.” If you want to see how big bulls can be produced, how much horn they can carry on their heads, how they can look up over the barrera so that you think you are going to have them in your lap, how tough a crowd can be and how thoroughly bullfighters can be terrorized, go to Bilbao. They do not have as big bulls in May as they do during their big-bull, seven-corrida fair which starts the middle of August, but in May it will not be as hot in Bilbao as it will be in August. If you do not mind heat, really heavy, damp, lead and zinc mining heat, and want to see big, wonderfully presented bulls, the August feria in Bilbao is the place. Cordoba