Читать книгу In Quest of El Dorado - Stephen Graham - Страница 9

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With all that, however, let a caveat be entered. The Spanish hold something which is increasingly valuable in our modern human society because it is all the while getting rarer—the gold of good manners. That is true, and must remain after all adverse criticism of the race. But the Spanish have a negative characteristic which through the centuries has outraged the fellow-feelings of the rest of humanity, and that is cruelty, a lust for torture.

The Auto de Fe, the ordeals of the Inquisition dungeons, these in the past; the survival of the bull ring and the plaza de gallos, these to-day and, remarked at all times, the Spanish inhumanity to horses, seem to outweigh good manners. And the behavior of the crowd about the bull ring—hideously burlesque and unrestrained, may perhaps have marked the crowds who in Seville in the sixteenth century watched brother men burn to death for the good of the Holy Father at Rome and the greater glory of God.

Spain lovers have said to me, "Do not go to the bullfight!" But in facing Spain as in facing any other country with some desire to know it, not merely to be struck by it, one must face what is dark and sinister as well as what is beautiful and annunciatory.

Hence a visit to the Square of the Bulls at Madrid on Easter Sunday, and the King is there and the President of the Sport, and a vast populace in sun and shade. Christ rose this morning; this afternoon six bulls must die. He rose indeed. Fifty thousand church bells told the world, lilies triumphant rose from bare boards in every home; we and all the children ate eggs of peace. This afternoon—Easter has gone—the populace will watch the bulls.

Next to me on the one hand sits a Japanese artist with a score of paper fans. In front are Madonna-faced women with high yellow combs in the crown of their hair and cream-colored lace hanging therefrom in an exquisite effect. The Japanese has crayons and decorates his blank fans rapidly. Group after group he sketches in on these fluttering fans, and then the grand parade of toreadors in all their finery, and then the picadors, and then the fighting. He is concentrated; he seems to feel nothing, but when his twenty fans are done he gathers them together, picks himself up, looks round him circumspectly, and departs.

I suppose bullfights are seldom described except in Spain and the Latin-American countries. In these, the descriptions may exclude all other news and cover whole issues of daily papers with colored supplements as well. But for peoples other than Spanish there is something that is intolerably cruel in the bullfight. It is even thought a little compromising in a public person to have visited one. A British Prime Minister on holiday in Andalusia indignantly denies that he went to a bullfight. It would lose him votes in England. Yet Spain is part of the civilized world and her conscience seems untroubled. Great crowds flock to see them, and in Madrid or Seville on a Sunday afternoon all the town is moving one way. Every city in Spain has its permanent amphitheater for bullfighting, and you may see as many as ten thousand spectators in the circles, tier upon tier, around the arena. On no other occasion could one see as many Spaniards together. The bullfight is for them a great national turnout.

The bulls, which have led a happy country existence up till now, are waiting, each for his last gory twenty minutes. The picadors will prick him, the staff will plant the banderillas in him, the matador will endeavor to plunge a sword into his heart, the public will hiss or clap, the asses will drag the stiff carcass around the arena and away.

A great door opens. Into the arena plunges a big black bull—"into this universe and why not knowing." He is full of mad energy and bolts for any red flag at any distance that his short sight will show him. The elegant toreros save themselves by hiding behind screens or jumping low walls. And while the bull stands thwarted and puzzled, in comes a doleful procession from the wings. The picadors arrive—men with long lances mounted on starved, jaded, spectral-looking horses. The horses are blindfolded; they also have their vocal cords cut, and whatever happens to them, dumb animals will be dumb. The men mounted on them have strong wooden saddles with hooded stirrups and their legs are cased in iron. The toreros with their red and blue capes, and the attendants dressed in deep scarlet, try to lure the bull towards the horses. They stand in front of them and then nimbly step out of the way when the enraged bull charges at them. The picadors drive their lances deep between the shoulders of the bull; the bull murders the horse, lifts horse and rider in the air; the first picador saves himself. His work is done. The second then comes forward, pricks the bull, and has his horse disemboweled. The third does the same. The fourth horse refuses to come into position to be butchered, and escapes with a laceration. The time allotted to the picadors has run out, anyway. One horse lies dead. The remaining horses are beaten till they rise, and the picadors mount them again, though the entrails are hanging out of them, and they ride them out of the arena.

The bull is bleeding. He is greatly enraged. He paws the ground like a dog seeking a bone; he bellows, he charges here and there, and always misses! But the toreros plunge colored darts into his back till he is hanging in a clatter of them, and he cannot shake them out. Then comes the matador, dressed like a gentleman, gold-embroidered, gallant, with his hair in a tiny queue behind, with his blood-red cape, with his straight flashing blade of Toledo. He faces the bull alone, and tempts him and fools him. It is part of his art to perform various showy tricks and deceits, jump the bull's back and the like. On these his repute as a bullfighter depends. Then he must beguile the bull into a convenient attitude for dispatching him in the right way. It is not too easy. The impatient crowd, which bawls and guffaws and cries out witticisms, now hisses and taunts the fighter and claps the bull when the bull makes an aggressive onslaught. The matador must take a risk and make an opportunity. Twice he essays; twice he loses his sword. New swords are brought him. And at the third attempt he puts two feet of steel into the life-blood of the bull.

The bull pauses, stares, still flourishes his horns, keeps his enemies at a distance and then, beginning to lose consciousness, kneels down on his front knees like a cow taking a rest in a meadow. The toreros are all around him. He stares at them with glazing eyes. Then the matador plucks out his sword and the bull rolls over dead. Trumpets blow; out comes the troikas of asses, and one set is harnessed to the dead horse and the other to the body of the bull. In the circles of the amphitheater ten thousand voices are busily discussing it, but ere they have got far in talk the arena has been cleared and all are hushed as the great door opens and bull number two comes rushing on to die.

It makes a devastating impression on the heart of the Northerner; makes you, for that afternoon at least, hate Spain. It is so depressing that for days you cannot get over it. The horror of it haunts one as if one somehow had learned that humanity had gone wrong and no life anywhere was worth while.

Curiously enough, however, you meet Englishmen and Americans who have been many times. I sat next to an Englishwoman who somehow had come to enjoy the fight—thought the matadors so elegant, so wonderful, thought they ran such a risk (and so they do), excused much on the ground that the meat was sold cheap to feed the people of the slums.

And now some time has elapsed, and I can well understand it. Despite all the horror and pain of it I also feel a persistent craving to go again. There is a fatal fascination in this brutal sport. You want to see those fearsome bulls killed; want to look on at death. The last Englishman I met had been to twenty-two, yet at his first he was so ill he had almost to be carried out. Cruelty, like other lusts, grows on what it feeds on. Englishmen, though naturally they at first reject it, can take pleasure in cruelty also.