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 Làlanda 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, Valencia II, the son of a banderillero. Born in Madrid, he was trained by his father and he too had an older brother who was a failure as a matador. A boy of the same vintage as Chicuelo and company, he managed a cape beautifully, was arrogant, quarrelsome and brave as the bull itself in Madrid, but anywhere else let his nerves master him and felt his honor was secure in provincial disasters, if he could only triumph in Madrid. This confining of their personal honor to Madrid is the mark of those bullfighters who make a living from the profession but never dominate it.
With Julian Saiz, Saleri II, a very complete bullfighter and a splendid banderillero who had competed at one time with Joselito for a season, but who had become the embodiment of caution and safety before all things; Diego Mazquiaran, Fortuna, brave, stupid, a great killer, but of the old school, and Luis Freg, a Mexican, short, brown, with Indian hair, in his late thirties, heavy on his feet, the muscles of his legs gnarled like an old oak with the scars where the bulls had punished him for his slowness, his awkwardness and his never-varying courage with the sword; with a few more veterans and a good many more failures, those were about all the lot in those first years after the two great ones were gone.
Freg, Fortuna and the elder of the Nacionals did not please because the new way of fighting had made their styles old-fashioned and there were no longer the big bulls, that, with a brave, competent man in the ring made all that was needed for a bullfight. Chicuelo was wonderful until he was first touched by a bull. Then, utterly cowardly if the bull offered any difficulties, he was good about twice a year thereafter, only giving all his repertoire when he found a bull without any bad ideas that would move past him without deviation as though it were mounted on rails. In between the beauty of his performances with the mechanically perfect bull that he awaited all season, and his occasional, nerved up, good, scientific work with a difficult bull came some of the saddest exhibitions of cowardice and shamelessness it would be possible to see. La Rosa was gored once, frightened forever, and quickly disappeared from circulation. He was very talented as a bullfighter, but he was even more talented in another respect and he is still fighting in South America and, by combining his two talents, living very well.
Valencia II started every season as brave as a fighting cock, worked closer to the bulls each time he appeared in Madrid until the bull had only to reach a little with its horn to catch him, toss him, gore him and send him to the hospital; and when he recovered his courage was gone until the next season.
There were a few others, too. One called Gitanillo, in spite of the name he was no gypsy but had only worked as horse-tender for a gypsy family in his youth, was short, arrogant and really brave; in Madrid, at least. In the provinces, like all cheap bullfighters, he relied on his Madrid reputation. He was one of the sort that does everything but eat the bulls raw. He was unskillful at everything and relied on such business as, when the bull was tired or fixed for a moment, turning his back on the animal a foot or so in front of the horns and then kneeling, smiling at the crowd. He was gored badly nearly every season and finally recovered from a terrible horn wound that transfixed his chest, destroyed a good part of the lung and pleura and left him a cripple for life.
A doctor in Soria hit Juan Anllo, Nacional II, over the head with a bottle in an argument during a bullfight at which Nacional II, a spectator, was defending the conduct of the fighter in the ring who was dealing with a difficult animal. The police arrested the bullfighter but not the assailant and Nacional II lay in jail all night with the red dust of Soria on his clothes and in his hair, dying with his skull fractured and a blood clot on his brain while the people of the jail treated him as a drunk, trying various expedients to rouse him from his unconsciousness. He never roused. That rid bullfighting of one of the really brave men who were matadors during this decadence.