Complete Short Stories (17 page)

My friend Señor Colom is really a music critic, but that position is worth nothing, only a few pesetas a week; he gets his living from being a bull critic. A regular matador earns about two or three thousand pounds a fight, so his agent can afford to pay the critics well
to say how much genius and valour he has, even if he hasn’t. Señor Colom writes exactly what he really thinks about concerts, but bullfights are different; he makes the agent himself write the review, then reads it over for grammar-faults and puts in a few extra bits, and signs it. That is the custom.

Anyhow, Señor and Señora Colom and I went, and the U.S.A. fleet was in port and two American
sailors sat next to us. It seems that the Captain-General had measured the bulls’ horns himself and told the herdsman: ‘When these beasts are dead I will measure their horns again. If they have been shortened and re-pointed, someone will go to prison.’ Then he had checked the pics to see that they didn’t have longer points than is allowed, and also sent a vet to see that nobody gave the bulls a laxative
to make them weak. So it was going to be fun to watch.

The Captain-General was in the President’s box and after the march-past he waved his handkerchief and the trumpets blew and the first bull was let loose. He was a great cathedral of a bull, and rushed out like the Angel of Death. But when the cape-men came out and began to cape him, there was a sudden growl and loud protests and everyone
shouted
‘Bizgo! Bizgo
!’ which meant that the bull was squint-eyed and wouldn’t answer to the cape. So the Captain-General sent the bull away, and Poblet, who should have fought it, gave a nasty grin, because there were no substitute bulls. One had got drowned when he slipped off the gangplank of the steamer, and another had got horned by a friend. The Captain-General looked furious.

The next
bull was very fierce, and the cape-men ran for their lives behind the shelters. One of them couldn’t quite get there, so he dashed for the wooden wall and shinned up and escaped into the passage behind. The bull jumped right over the wall after him and broke a news-photographer’s camera and spectacles, and gave him an awful fright. The crowd laughed like anything. Then the trumpets blew again and
‘in came the cavalry’ as Señor Colom always calls the picadors. The bull went smack at the first horse, before the peon who led it had got it into position, and knocked all the wind out of its body. The picador was underneath kicking with his free boot at the bull’s nose. One of the two American sailors fainted, and his friend had to carry him out. Four more American sailors fainted in different parts
of the ring; they are a very sensitive class of people.

This bull was Broncito’s.

Broncito is a gipsy and engaged to Calvo’s sister. He is very superstitious, and that morning had met three nuns walking in a row, and told Calvo he wouldn’t fight. Calvo said: ‘Then you will never be my brother-in-law. Would you disgrace me before the public? Would you have me kill your bulls for you as well as
my own? I don’t like them any more than you do.’ So Broncito promised to fight. Well, the picador wasn’t hurt, they never are. The cape-men drew the bull away and the peons got the horse up again, and it seemed none the worse. And the picadors did their work well and so did the banderilleros. But Broncito was trembling. He made a few poor passes, standing as far away as he could, and then offered
up a prayer to the Virgin of Safety, the one who saves matadors from death by
drawing the bull away with a twitch of her blue cape. The bull happened to be in the right position, standing with his legs apart, so Broncito lunged and actually killed it in one. The public was furious because he hadn’t played the bull at all, hardly, and the play is what they pay to see.

The third bull was Calvo’s,
and Calvo was terribly valiant because he was so ashamed of Broncito. He made dozens of beautiful passes, high and low, also veronicas and some butterfly passes which everyone but Señor Colom thought wonderful. He had known the great Marcial Lalanda who first perfected them and said that Calvo’s were both jerky and ungenial; though, of course, he couldn’t
write
that for his paper. Calvo killed
after two tries and was rewarded with both ears. His chief peon cut off the tail too, and gave it to him, but the Captain-General had signalled only for the ears, so the peon got fined 500 pesetas for presumption.

After the interval, with monkey-nuts and mineral water, it was Poblet’s turn again. His bull came wandering in very tranquilly, had a good look round and then lay down in the middle
of the ring. After a lot of prodding and taunting of which he took no notice, they had to send for a team of white and black oxen, with bells, who came gambolling into the ring and coaxed him out again. Do you know the story of Ferdinand the Bull? It ends all wrong. Bulls like Ferdinand don’t go back to the farm to eat daisies. I’m afraid they get shot outside the ring by the Civil Guard, like deserters
in battles.

The public was getting impatient. It booed and cat-called like anything, but the fifth bull (Broncito’s again) was a supercathedral; soap-coloured and with horns like an elephant’s tusks. Broncito was sick with horror, and when both the horses had been knocked down before the picadors could use their pics, and only one banderillero had been tall enough to plant his pair of darts well,
he went white as a sheet. He pretended to play the bull but it chased him all over the place and the crowd roared with laughter and made rude jokes. So he shook his fist at them and called for the red
muleta
and sword and then, guess what! He
murdered
the bull, with a side-pass into his lungs instead of properly between the shoulder-blades. There was an awful hush from the Spaniards, who couldn’t
believe their eyes – it was like shooting a fox; but tremendous cheers came from the American sailors who thought Broncito had been very clever. Then of course the cheers were drowned by a most frantic booing, and the Captain-General sprang to his feet and cursed terribly. The next thing was that two
guardias
arrested Broncito and marched him off to prison.

The last bull was easily the best of
the six and Calvo was more anxious than ever to show off. He wanted both ears
and
the tail
and
the foot (which is almost never given) and when he came to play the bull he dedicated it to the public and did wonderful, wonderful, fantastic things. There’s a sort of ledge running round the wooden wall which helps cape-men when they scramble to safety. He sat down on it, to allow himself no room to
escape
from a charge, and did his passes there. Afterwards he knelt and let the bull’s horns graze the gold braid on his chest. And did several
estupendous
veronicas and then suddenly walked away, turning his back to the bull, which was left looking silly. Calvo had waved all his cape-men far away and the crowd went wild with joy. But some idiot threw his hat into the ring, which took the bull’s
attention from the
muleta,
and Calvo got horned in the upper leg and tossed up and thrown down. Then the bull tried to kill him. I don’t know how many more sailors fainted; I was too busy to count.

Suddenly an
espontáneo
in grey uniform with long hair simply hurled himself into the ring and grabbed Calvo’s sword and red
muleta
and drew the bull off. It was our sloppy new postman! And while the
peons carried Calvo to the surgery, he played the bull very valiantly and got apotheosistical cheers, louder even than Calvo’s, and the Captain-General himself applauded although the postman was committing a crime. Everyone expected Poblet to enter and finish off the bull, but Poblet had now also been arrested for insulting the Lieutenant of the Civil Guard for insulting Broncito; so there was no
other proper matador left. But Calvo petitioned that the postman should be allowed to finish off the bull, for having saved his life. The Captain-General consented and, when I waved madly, the postman recognized my yellow frock and rededicated the bull to me – me, Aunt May! Because it was my birthday and because of the Esq. And though the poor boy was rustic and quite without art, as Señor Colom
said (and wrote), he managed to kill his enemy at the second try.

Then, of course, he was arrested too. All
espontáneos
are.

But the Captain-General let him off with a caution and a big box of real Havana cigars.

Ever your loving niece,
Margaret

D
EAREST
A
UNT
M
AY
,

I must at last explain that long telegram I sent you from Olga, who’s my ballet teacher, asking for all those pairs of flesh-coloured net tights to be put on the B.E.A. plane. I hope you didn’t think that they were for the Dolorous Nuns to wear themselves. It is a story rather like the ‘Belle of the Ballet’ serial in
Girl,
though nobody gets kidnapped
or locked into a spidery cellar. Olga’s a Polish
refugiada,
who escaped from the Russians to Sadler’s Wells in England and said: ‘I’m a prima ballerina from Warsaw. Please, can I have a job?’ So they gave her a scrubbing-brush and a pail. Olga scrubbed floors for ages, but three years ago she escaped from the English to Majorca. The Governor allowed her to start a school for Classical Ballet here,
because his wife had seen Moira Shearer’s
Red Shoes
and thought that it was very artistic and in good taste; but Brunhilda Schwarzfuss, the German lady who has a
Tanzgruppe
here, wasn’t at all pleased by the news.

Brunhilda is square and bouncy and wears a sort of deerstalker hat. She waves her drumstick and shouts: ‘Now,
niñas,
I’ll put on the gramophone today and you’ll all be little horses
galloping along the sands and suddenly putting your heads down and kicking up your heels. Bang, bang, bang! Off you run!
Muy bien! Muy bien!’
After two goes of that, she changes the record and they play at being soldiers, or else rabbits. Then the bigger girls express their emotions in dances they invent themselves, which means waggling their arms and tossing their heads back and giving a few
backward kicks, or pretending to be terribly afraid of something and push it off without looking at it. Or they play at shepherdesses and fawns. The shepherdesses are the neat girls; the fauns are the clumsy ones, whose mothers have asked Brunhilda to run some of the fat off them and make them easier to marry. The shepherdesses waltz around and the fauns jump after them and pretend to blow pipes.
It is all rather awful, because they don’t learn a single
one
of the 120 basic positions of ballet, and the windows are tight shut to prevent draughts and most of the girls are afraid of the cold showers afterwards and rub themselves with Majorcan eau de Cologne instead.

Last year Olga married an American called Bill, the nice poor sort of American. He is a composer and was a trumpeter. But he
sold his trumpet to marry Olga and had to teach English for a living instead. Bill said to Olga: ‘We must advertise if we want this school to pay. The best way is to put on a good show at the Plaza.’ Olga said: ‘Oh, no, Bill, my girls aren’t ready. After only three years I should be ashamed.’ Bill said: ‘Nonsense, nobody here will know the difference, and the girls will get experience. Let’s do
Glasnov’s
Four Seasons
and aim for early April.’

How Olga worked us! We almost hated her sometimes, though she’s so sweet really, because we had to go straight from our various convents to ballet class and never had time for a sit-down supper and came home nearly dead at about ten o’clock. But the Nuns thought that dancing was idleness, and made us work dreadfully hard at Visigothic Kings and
Principal Exports of Spain and The Properties of Solid Bodies, to show we were industrious. We had to get ‘Outstanding’ on our weekly reports instead of just ‘Approved’. And Sor Juana one day reprobated me for practising ballet steps in the playground and called me presumptuous; but I said I was just cold. And she said: ‘Don’t answer back, my daughter. You ought to bear the cold bravely!’ Well, that
afternoon we found a hot-water bottle lying about in a corner of the playground. It must have fallen from under Sor Juana’s skirts; so my companions chose me to give it back to her, which I did very politely without a word.

I’m at the Sacred Tunics, but the Little Flowers who have a big new convent down the road pay Brunhilda to give their girls dancing lessons. Of course, I don’t really
know
who had said what; only it’s certain that the Mother Superior of the Little Flowers took aside all the girls who go to Olga’s and warned them that she was of doubtful antecedents and that, if they took part in the public performance of the
Four Seasons,
they’d all get zero on their term’s report. Luckily one of the girls was the daughter of the man who fabricated the convent beds and tables and
chairs and things. They are six months behindhand with paying. So she went crying to her father and said: ‘Father, will you let them insult Olga? After you and Mother, she’s the best person in Majorca.’ And he answered: ‘Enough, child, I’ll tell them things.’ So he did, and after that the Little Flowers even let the girls go off early to rehearsals.

Bill hired the Plaza Theatre for April 1st
and taught the orchestra the
Four Seasons
music. It had taken him weeks to prepare it for the right number of instruments and copy out the parts. Then about New Year we read an ‘interviu’ in the
Prensa Palmesana
in which Brunhilda said that Classical Ballet was very bad for the legs and very monotonous and already going out of fashion, and that she would put on a performance in the Plaza early
in March with all her
Tanzgruppe
pupils. When the man from the
Prensa
asked what would she show, she answered: ‘The
Four Seasons,
danced with all naturalness and liberty of expression.’

One of Olga’s girls is the niece of the man who has a mortgage on the Plaza Theatre, and she went crying to her father and said: ‘Father, will you let them insult Olga? After you and Mother she’s the best person
in Majorca.’ And he answered: ‘Enough, child, we’ll tell them things, the insects.’ So next day his brother made the theatre owner warn Brunhilda that the Plaza would probably be out of action all March because it was to be altered for 3-D. So that was all right. Then suddenly the convent of Dolorous Nuns started giving Olga’s pupils zero even if they were top of the class. I found out from the
bus-man who collects the Dolorous daygirls from the other side of Palma that someone had told terrible lies about Olga’s being a Protestant and in love with the theatre-owner. But Olga’s confessor happened to be the Dolorous Nuns’ confessor too, so
he
told them things. Don’t think that our Majorcan nuns aren’t good people. They are terribly good; but the trouble is they just don’t like Classical
Ballet.