The matador decides in which order he prefers to take his bulls. He may take the worst one first and hope to rehabilitate himself with the second in case his work with the first turns out badly. Or if he is third in the order to kill he may take the best one first knowing that he will be killing the sixth bull and if it should be getting dark and the crowd wanting to leave he will be pardoned an attempt to finish quickly and in the easiest way possible should his bull turn out to be difficult.
The matadors kill their bulls in turn in the order of their seniority; this dating from their presentation as a matador de toros in the Plaza of Madrid. If any matador is gored so that he is unable to return from the infirmary his bulls were formerly all killed by the senior-ranking matador of those remaining in the ring. Now they are divided between the remaining matadors.
The bullfight usually takes place at five o'clock or five-thirty in the afternoon. At a half hour past noon of the day of the fight the apartado takes place. This is the sorting out of bulls in the corrals with the aid of steers and, by the use of swinging doors, runways and trap doors, separating them and trapping them into the individual pens or chiqueros where they are to stay and rest until they come out into the ring in the order in which it has been determined they are to be fought. Bulls are not deprived of food and water before fighting as one may read in various guides to Spain, nor are they kept in a dark pen for several days. They are in the chiqueros in a dim light for not more than four hours before the bullfight commences. They are not fed there after they leave the corral any more than a boxer would be fed immediately before a fight, but the reason for placing them in the small dimly lighted pens is to have some way of getting them promptly into the ring, and to rest them and keep them quiet before the fight.
Usually only the matadors, their friends and representatives, the bull ring management, the authorities, and a very few spectators attend the apartado. It is usually the first time the matador sees the bulls he is to kill that afternoon. The number of spectators is kept down in most places by putting the price of tickets at five pesetas. The bull ring management wants few people at the sorting in order that the bulls may not have their attention attracted by the spectators who want to see action and so call to the bulls to excite them that they may charge the doors or the walls or each other. If they charge in the corrals they run a risk of injuring their horns or of goring each other and the management would have to replace them in the ring at the expense of a couple of hundred dollars apiece. Many bullfight spectators and hangers-on have a belief that they can talk to the bulls as well or better than the bullfighters. Protected by the high fence or the wall of the corral they try to catch the bull's eye and they utter the guttural "huh!-huh!-huhs!" that the herders and toreros use to call the bull's attention. If the bull in the pen below raises his great head with the wide horns, solid looking as wood and smoothly pointed and the hump of muscle in his neck and shoulders, heavy and wide in repose, rises in a great swelling crest under the black, hairy sheen of his hide and his nostrils widen and he lifts and jerks his horns as he looks toward the spectator then the amateur speaker of bull talk has had a success. If the bull should really charge, driving his horns into the wood, or tossing his head at the talker it would be a triumph. To hold down the number of successes and avoid triumphs the management puts the tickets at five pesetas on the theory that any one able to pay five pesetas to see bulls sorted will be too dignified to try to talk to bulls before bullfights.
There is no way they can be sure of this, and at some places in the country where they have bulls only once a year you see men at the apartado who pay five pesetas only in order to have a better opportunity to exercise their powers as talkers to bulls. But in general the five pesetas reduces the amount of sober talking. The bulls pay little attention to a drunk. I have many times seen drunken men shout at bulls and never seen the bulls pay any attention. The five-peseta atmosphere of dignity in a town like Pamplona, where a man can be drunk twice and eat a meal at the horse fair on five pesetas, gives an almost religious hush to the apartado. No one spends five pesetas there to see the bulls sorted unless he is very rich and dignified. But the atmosphere of the sorting can be very different in other places. I have never seen it quite the same in any two towns. After the sorting everybody goes to the café.
The bullfight itself takes place in a sand-covered ring enclosed by a red wooden fence a little over four feet high. This red wooden fence is called a barrera. Behind it is a narrow circular passageway that separates it from the first row of seats in the amphitheatre. This narrow runway is called the callejon. In it stand the sword handlers with their jugs of water, sponges, piles of folded muletas and heavy leather sword cases, the bull ring servants, the venders of cold beer and gaseosas, of iced fruits in nets that float in galvanized buckets full of ice and water, of pastries in flat baskets, of salted almonds, and of peanuts. In it also are the police, the bullfighters who are not in the ring at the moment, several plainclothes policemen ready to arrest amateurs who may jump into the ring, the photographers, and on seats built in it and protected by shields of boards, are the doctors, the carpenters who repair the barrera if it is broken, and the delegates of the government. In some rings the photographers are allowed to circulate in the callejon; in others they must work from their seats.
The seats of the bull ring are uncovered except for the boxes or palcos and the first gallery or grada. From the gallery the seats descend in circular rows to the edge of the rings. These rows of numbered places are called tendidos. The two rows nearest the ring, the front rows of all the seats, are called barreras and contra-barreras. The third row are known as delanteras de tendidos or the front row of the tendidos. The bull ring for numbering purposes is cut into sections as you would cut a pie, and these sections numbered tendidos 1, 2, 3, and so on up to 11 and 12 depending on the size of the ring.
If you are going to a bullfight for the first time the best place for you to sit depends on your temperament. From a box or from the first row in the gallery details of sound and smell and those details of sight that make for the perception of danger are lost or minimized, but you see the fight better as a spectacle and the chances are that, if it is a good bullfight, you will enjoy it more. If it is a bad bullfight, that is, not an artistic spectacle, you will be better off the closer you are since you can then, for lack of a whole to appreciate, learn and see all the details, the whys and the wherefores. The boxes and the gallery are for people who do not want to see things too closely for fear they may upset them, for people who want to see the bullfight as a spectacle or a pageant, and for experts who can see details even though a long way from them and want to be high enough up so they can see everything that happens in any part of the ring in order to be able to judge it as a whole.