Death in the Afternoon

by Ernest Hemingway

  The valor of Luis Freg, he has no art, except with the sword, is the strangest that I know. It is as indestructible as the sea, but there is no salt in it unless it is the salt of his own blood and human blood has a sweet and sickly taste in spite of its saline quality. If Luis Freg had died in any of the four times that I remember him being given up as dead I could write more freely of his character. He is a Mexican Indian, heavy-set now, soft-voiced, soft-handed, nose rather hooked, slant-eyed, full mouth, very black hair, the only matador who still wears the pigtail plaited on his head and he has been a full matador in Mexico since Johnson fought Jeffries at Reno, Nevada, in 1910 and in Spain since the year after that fight. In the twenty-one years he has fought as a matador the bulls have given him seventy-two severe horn wounds. No bullfighter who ever lived has been so punished by the bulls as he has. He has received extreme unction five different times when he was believed certain to die. His legs are as gnarled and twisted by scars as the branches of an old oak tree and his chest and his abdomen are covered with scars of wounds that should have killed him. Most of them have come from his heaviness on his feet and his inability to control the bulls with cape and muleta. He was a great killer though; slow, secure and straight and the few times, few in proportion to his other gorings, that he was wounded when killing were due to his lack of speed of foot to come out from between the horns and along the flank after he had the sword in rather than to any defects in his technique. His terrible gorings, his months in the hospitals, which used up all his money, had no effect on his valor at all. But it was a strange valor. It never fired you; it was not contagious. You saw it, appreciated it and knew the man was brave, but somehow it was as though courage was a syrup rather than a wine or the taste of salt and ashes in your mouth. If qualities have odors the odor of courage to me is the smell of smoked leather or the smell of a frozen road or the smell of the sea when the wind rips the top from a wave, but the valor of Luis Freg did not have that odor. It was clotted and heavy and there was a thin part underneath that was unpleasant and oozy and when he is dead I will tell you about him and it is a strange-enough story.

  The last time he was given up for dead at Barcelona, torn open terribly, the wound full of pus, delirious and dying, every one believed, he said, "I see death. I see it clearly. Ayee. Ayee. It is an ugly thing." He saw death clearly, but it did not come. He is broke now and giving a final series of farewell performances. He was marked for death for twenty years and death never took him.

  There you have portraits of five killers. If we can synthesize from studying good killers you might say that a great killer needs honor, courage, a good physique, a good style, a great left hand and much luck. Then he needs a good press and plenty of contracts. The location, and the effect, of estocadas and the various manners of killing are described in the glossary.

  If the people of Spain have one common trait it is pride and if they have another it is common sense and if they have a third it is impracticality. Because they have pride they do not mind killing; feeling that they are worthy to give this gift. As they have common sense they are interested in death and do not spend their lives avoiding the thought of it and hoping it does not exist only to discover it when they come to die. This common sense that they possess is as hard and dry as the plains and mesas of Castille and it diminishes in hardness and dryness as it goes away from Castille. At its best it is combined with a complete impracticality. In the south it becomes picturesque; along the littoral it becomes mannerless and Mediterranean; in the north in Navarra and Aragon there is such a tradition of bravery that it becomes romantic, and along the Atlantic coast, as in all countries bounded by a cold sea, life is so practical there is no time for common sense. Death, to people who fish in the cold parts of the Atlantic ocean is something that may come at any time, that comes often and is to be avoided as an industrial accident; so that they are not preoccupied with it and it has no fascination for them.

  There are two things that are necessary for a country to love bullfights. One is that the bulls must be raised in that country and the other that the people must have an interest in death. The English and the French live for life. The French have a cult of respect for the dead, but the enjoyment of the daily material things, family, security, position and money, are the things that are most important. The English live for this world too and death is not a thing to think of, to consider, to mention, to seek, or to risk except in the service of the country, or for sport, or for adequate reward. Otherwise it is an unpleasant subject to be avoided or, at best, moralized on, but never to be studied. Never discuss casualties, they say, and I have heard them say it very well. When the English kill they kill for sport and the French kill for the pot. It is a fine pot too, the loveliest in the world, and well worth killing for. However, any killing which is not for the pot nor for sport seems to the English and the French to be cruel. Like all general statements things are not as simple as I have written them, but I am seeking to state a principle and refrain from listing exceptions.

  Now in Spain the bullfight is out of place in Galicia and in most of Catalonia. They do not raise bulls in those provinces. Galicia is beside the sea and because it is a poor country where the men emigrate or go to sea, death is not a mystery to be sought and meditated on, but rather a daily peril to be avoided and the people are practical, cunning, often stupid, often avaricious, and their favorite amusement is choral singing. Catalonia is Spain, but the people are not Spanish and although bullfighting flourishes in Barcelona it is on a fake basis because the public that attends goes as to a circus for excitement and entertainment and is as ignorant, almost, as the publics of Nîmes, Béziers and Arles. The Catalans have a rich country, a great part of it at least; they are good farmers, good business men, good salesmen; they are the commercially elect of Spain. The richer the country the simpler the peasantry and they combine a simple peasantry and a childish language, with a highly developed commercial class. With them, as in Galicia, life is too practical for there to be much of the hardest kind of common sense nor much feeling about death.

  In Castille the peasant has nothing of the simple-mindedness, combined as always with cunning, of the Catalan or Gallego. He lives in a country with as severe a climate as any that is farmed, but it is a very healthy country; he has food, wine, his wife and children, or he has had them, but he has no comfort, nor much capital and these possessions are not ends in themselves; they are only a part of life and life is something that comes before death. Some one with English blood has written: "Life is real; life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal." And where did they bury him? and what became of the reality and the earnestness? The people of Castille have great common sense. They could not produce a poet who would write a line like that. They know death is the unescapable reality, the one thing any man may be sure of; the only security; that it transcends all modern comforts and that with it you do not need a bathtub in every American home, nor, when you have it, do you need the radio. They think a great deal about death and when they have a religion they have one which believes that life is much shorter than death. Having this feeling they take an intelligent interest in death and when they can see it being given, avoided, refused and accepted in the afternoon for a nominal price of admission they pay their money and go to the bull ring, continuing to go even when, for certain reasons that I have tried to show in this book, they are most often artistically disappointed and emotionally defrauded.

  Most of the great bullfighters have come from Andalucia, where the best bulls are raised and where with the warm climate and the Moorish blood the men have a grace and indolence that is foreign to Castille although they have, mixed with the Moorish blood, the blood of the men of Castille who drove out the Moors and occupied that pleasant country. Of the truly great fighters both Cayetano Sanz and Frascuelo were from around Madrid (although Frascuelo was born to the south), as well as Vicente Pastor of the minor greats and Marcial Lalanda, the best of the present fighters. There are fewer bullfights given all t
he time in Andalucia, due to the Agrarian troubles, and fewer first-rate matadors produced. In 1931 out of the first ten matadors there were only three from Andalucia, Cagancho and the two Bienvenidas; and Manolo Bienvenida although of Andalucian parentage was born and raised in South America, while his brother, although born in Spain, was also raised out of the country. Chicuelo and Nino de la Palma representing Seville and Ronda are both finished and Gitanillo de Triana, of Seville, was killed.

  Marcial Lalanda is from near Madrid as are Antonio Marquez, who will be fighting again, and Domingo Ortega. Villalta is from Zaragoza and Barrera from Valencia along with Manolo Martinez and Enrique Torres. Felix Rodriguez was born in Santander and raised in Valencia and Armillita Chico, Solorzano, and Heriberto Garcia are all Mexicans. Nearly all the leading young novilleros are from Madrid or from around Madrid, the north, or Valencia. Since the death of Joselito and Maera and the final retirement of Belmonte the reign of Andalucia in modern bullfighting has been over. The centre of bullfighting in Spain now, both as to the production of fighters and the greatest enthusiasm for the fight itself, is Madrid and the country around Madrid. Valencia comes next. The most complete and masterly fighter in bullfighting to-day is unquestionably Marcial Lalanda and the most complete young fighters in point of view of valor and technical equipment are being turned out in Mexico. The bullfight is undoubtedly losing ground in Seville, which was once, with Cordoba, its great centre and it is undoubtedly gaining in Madrid where all spring and early summer, in 1931, in bad financial times, in a time of much political unrest, and with only ordinary programmes, the ring was filled to capacity two and sometimes three times a week.

  Judging from the enthusiasm I saw shown for it under the Republic the modern bullfight will continue in Spain in spite of the great wish of her present European-minded politicians to see it abolished so that they will have no intellectual embarrassments at being different from their European colleagues that they meet at the League of Nations, and at the foreign embassies and courts. At present a violent campaign is being conducted against it by certain newspapers with government subsidies, but so many people derive their livings from the many ramifications of raising, shipping, fighting, feeding and butchering of fighting cattle that I do not believe the government will abolish it even if they felt themselves strong enough.

  An exhaustive study is being made of the actual and potential use of all lands used for the grazing of fighting bull stock. In the Agrarian readjustments that must come in Andalucia some of the biggest ranches are sure to be broken up, but since Spain is a grazing as well as an agricultural country and much of the grazing land is unfit for cultivation and none of the cattle produced are wasted, all being butchered and sold whether killed in the ring or the slaughter-house, much of the land now used for fighting-bull grazing in the south will certainly be retained. In a country where to give work to the agricultural laborers all machines for harvesting and sowing had to be banned in 1931 the government will go slowly about putting much new land under cultivation. There is no question of trying to cultivate the grazing land used for bulls around Colmenar and Salamanca. I look for a certain reduction of acreage in bull-raising land in Andalucia and the breaking up of a number of ranches, but believe there will be no great change in the industry under the present government although many of its members would be proud to abolish the bullfight and doubtless will do all they can toward that end and the quickest way to get at it is through the bulls, since bullfighters grow up, unencouraged, having a natural talent as acrobats or jockeys or even writers have, and none of them are irreplaceable; but fighting bulls are the products of many generations of careful breeding as race horses are and when you send that strain to the slaughter-house that strain is finished.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  If I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it. The Prado, looking like some big American college building, with sprinklers watering the grass early in the bright Madrid summer morning; the bare white mud hills looking across toward Carabanchel; days on the train in August with the blinds pulled down on the side against the sun and the wind blowing them; chaff blown against the car in the wind from the hard earthen threshing floors; the odor of grain and the stone windmills. It would have had the change when you leave the green country behind at Alsasua; it would have had Burgos far across the plain and eating the cheese later up in the room; it would have had the boy taking the wicker-bound jugs of wine on the train as samples; his first trip to Madrid and opening them in enthusiasm and they all got drunk including the pair of Guardia Civil and I lost the tickets and we were taken through the wicket by the two Guardia Civil (who took us out as though prisoners because there were no tickets and then saluted as they put us in the cab); Hadley, with the bull's ear wrapped in a handkerchief, the ear was very stiff and dry and the hair all wore off it and the man who cut the ear is bald now too and slicks long strips of hair over the top of his head and he was beau then. He was, all right.

  It should make clear the change in the country as you come down out of the mountains and into Valencia in the dusk on the train holding a rooster for a woman who was bringing it to her sister; and it should show the wooden ring at Alciras where they dragged the dead horses out in the field and you had to pick your way over them; and the noise in the streets in Madrid after midnight, and the fair that goes on all night long, in June, and walking home on Sundays from the ring; or with Rafael in the cab. Que tal? Malo, hombre, malo; with that lift of the shoulders, or with Roberto, Don Roberto, Don Ernesto, so polite always, so gentle and such a good friend. Also the house where Rafael lived before being a republican became respectable with the mounted head of the bull Gitanillo had killed and the great oil jar and always presents and the excellent cooking.

  It should have the smell of burnt powder and the smoke and the flash and the noise of the traca going off through the green leaves of the trees and it should have the taste of horchata, ice-cold horchata, and the new-washed streets in the sun, and the melons and beads of cool on the outside of the pitchers of beer; the storks on the houses in Barco de Avila and wheeling in the sky and the red-mud color of the ring; and at night dancing to the pipes and the drum with lights through the green leaves and the portrait of Garibaldi framed in leaves. It should, if it were enough of a book, have the forced smile of Lagartito; it was once a real smile, and the unsuccessful matadors swimming with the cheap whores out on the Manzanares along the Pardo road; beggars can't be choosers, Luis said; playing ball on the grass by the stream where the fairy marquis came out in his car with the boxer; where we made the paellas, and walked home in the dark with the cars coming fast along the road; and with electric lights through the green leaves and the dew settling the dust, in the cool at night; cider in Bombilla and the road to Pontevedra from Santiago de Campostella with the high turn in the pines and blackberries beside the road; Algabeno the worst faker of them all; and Maera up in the room at Quintana's changing outfits with the priest the one year every one drank so much and no one was nasty. There really was such a year, but this is not enough of a book.

  Make all that come true again; throw grasshoppers to the trout in the Tambre on the bridge in the evening; have the serious brown face of Felix Merino at the old Aguilar; have the brave, awkward, wall-eyed Pedro Montes dressing away from home because he had promised his mother he had stopped fighting, after Mariano, his brother, was killed at Tetuan; and Litri, like a little rabbit, his eyes winking nervously as the bull came; he was very bow-legged and brave and those three are all killed and never any mention made about the beer place on the cool side of the street underneath the Palace where he sat with his father and how it is a citroen show room now; nor about them carrying Pedro Carreño, dead, through the streets with torches and finally into the church and put him naked on the altar.

  There is nothing in this book about Francisco Gomez, Aldeano, who worked in Ohio in a steel plant and came home to be a matador and now is scarred and marked worse than any one except
Freg, his eye twisted so a tear runs down his nose. Nor Gavira dead at the very instant as the bull with the same cornada that killed El Espartero. Nor does it tell about Zaragossa, at night on the bridge watching the Ebro, and the parachute jumper the next day and Rafael's cigars; nor the jota contests in the old red plush theatre and the wonderful boy and girl pairs; nor when they killed the Noy de Sucre in Barcelona, nor about any of that; nor anything about Navarra; nor about the lousy town Leon is; nor about lying with a muscle torn in a hotel on the sunny side of the street in Palencia when it was hot and you do not know what hot is when you have not been there; nor on the road where dust is deeper than the hubs between Requena and Madrid; nor when it was one hundred and twenty in the shade in Aragon and the car, with no carbon nor anything wrong, would boil the water out of the radiator in fifteen miles on a level road.

  If it were more of a book it would make the last night of feria when Maera fought Alfredo David in the Café Kutz; and it should show the bootblacks. My God, you could not get in all the bootblacks; nor all the fine girls passing; nor the whores; nor all of us ourselves as we were then. Pamplona now is changed; they have built new apartment buildings out over all the sweep of plain that ran to the edge of the plateau; so now you cannot see the mountains. They tore down the old Gayarre and spoiled the square to cut a wide thoroughfare to the ring and in the old days there was Chicuelo's uncle sitting drunk in the upstairs dining room watching the dancing in the square; Chicuelo was in his room alone, and the cuadrilla in the café and around the town. I wrote a story about it called A Lack of Passion, but it was not good enough although when they threw the dead cats at the train and afterwards the wheels clicking and Chicuelo in the berth, alone; able to do it alone; it was fair enough.