The Salzburg Tales (12 page)

The professional toreadors, the cloak-bearers, and the mounted gentlemen take their places and Don Juan along with them. With careless and gallant mien he sits, waiting for the entry of the first bull.

The bull rushes in and all thoughts and hearts, all fervent wishes, are concentrated on him. On his back is pricked the device of his breeder. He is a brown bull, small, with a flat forehead and horns close together, not one to be afraid of. He stops near the entrance and seems surprised at his surroundings. The Plaza shouts deafeningly, “What are you scared of, Bull?”

Irritated at length by the cloaks of the chulos, he dashes forward and the skirmish begins: but he is a young bull of poor quality and is soon mated. The crowd is impatient; “Send out no more tame cattle,” they shout. The sun still pours down its fierce heat. The dead bull is drawn off by the gaily dressed white mules at a gallop, amidst the hisses of the mob. Scarcely has he disappeared before the second comes in with a snort, dancing, curvetting on his hind legs, trying to pick out the device pinned in his back. Short-tempered, he dashes to the centre of the Plaza, and drawn by the dancing myrmidons in red coats, who appear and disappear behind the black horse of Don Juan, he makes for him. Thrice he rushes and thrice is held off by the Don's sword: three wounds large as pomegranates gape in his black hide along the vertebrae. The mount of Don Juan dances and slides back and forth quick as a cobra.

With a little flurry this bull is also despatched, though with more honour, and his carcass is hauled off with cheers. The third appears, a brown bull again, leaping and shaking the ribbons on his
neck. He makes a sally; then stopping short, stares truculently at his tormenters. The chulos skipping like leprechauns invite him, he makes another rush, misses a chulo, and again stops, his feet placed wide apart, and his head lowered, considering. A dangerous bull, sly, but not very bright and not quick enough on his feet: so, after a fancy-man or two has made a narrow escape and shown his pink silk stockings in a catherine-wheel over the stockade, and one of the poor knights has been unhorsed and hobbles off splashed with dust and with the blood of his mount, this bull is done to death. Not an hour gone yet, and three bulls despatched; the sun still flaming over, the ladies red as lobsters, hearts beating hard and brains bubbling like a ragout.

The next bulls will surely be fiercer. Doubtless the management has prepared some choice surprises, for this is a high festival and one patronised by the Church.

The next bull, a medium-sized black, with long, sinewy loins, bulbous forehead and shortish horns placed wide apart, rushes straight out of the gate without looking to left or right. He bears no device and he needs no bastinado: he makes for the centre of the ring, sends three chulos to the fence immediately, rips up a horse whose rider is only saved by the body falling on him, and breathing temper, without staying a second to contemplate the ruin, makes for Don Juan, behind whose mount the red-coated little tantaliser has suddenly disappeared.

Don Juan holds him off, and as the bull retires from the wounding sword, Ahura-Mazda turns like a trout and takes up another position: his beautiful eye, angry and courageous, is fixed on the bull, and he rears and dances under his master's sure hand. The bull charges again, and is again foiled and wounded. He retires a little, considering, paws the ground, gives a preliminary toss or two, paws the ground again, and suddenly infuriated by the antics of a little man in pink satin, waving a puce cloak, he gallops after him and helps him over the fence with his horns. The wounded chulo, moderately cheered,
is borne out and forgotten: the audience, mad with excitement and pleasure, shouts and cheers, “Bravo, Bull, Bravo, Bull! Go for them!” The amateur bull-fighters, poor men hoping for a little renown or a pension, are now white as chalk, and would retire: the experienced toreadors prepare to make short work of this champion. But the brilliant trappings of Ahura-Mazda again attract the bull. He makes another attack, stops short, dodges aside and assaults an unsuspecting horseman who stabs him. Notwithstanding the blow, well-aimed and well-timed, the bull presses on, driving the sword deeper into his own back, and with good luck, sends a horn straight into the poor horse's heart: the horse rears and falls to the ground stone-dead. The bull withdraws, pawing the dust, confused but glorious, with the smell of blood in his savage nostrils.

Don Juan dismounts from his horse and throws his hat in the centre of the ring. The crowd shouts. He advances a few steps towards the wary bull who seems to feel that the last act has come, and, standing now on his toes, with his tall, elegant body curved like a swan's neck and almost dancing, Don Juan stamps twice and calls the bull. He has taken the red cloak and the Toledan sword, which he hides in the cloak. Then advancing to the bull, which is suspicious and weary, he waves the cloak at his nose, audaciously holds the bull's horn with his hand, and thus twisting only his fingers and his body, foils again and again the bull's brief tosses. Or he stands at a short distance, and when the animal charges and tosses, he flicks the cloak aside, like a beau flicking snuff from his handkerchief, turns his back to the horns with a waltzing step, and takes up his position again. Or he kneels on one knee and offers the cloak to the bull, pricking him as he tosses. The audience is shouting, “Kill him! Give him the stroke,” weary of the fine play.

Don Juan unveils and holds poised flat in his hand the long blade. He does not advance it but as the bull charges for the last time, the sword runs into his neck and as if faint the beast drops to his knees. The blade stands high in the air. The bull keels over and is
dead. Jingling, the mules under the whips of the gay muleteers, trot in; the bull is attached, drawn off at a gallop, and after him the two dead horses, and sand is sprinkled over the blood in the arena.

Now the audience is in an uproar. Men rise to their feet, the Archbishop and the priests wave their hats and fans, and Don Juan, on foot, followed by a servant, goes lightly round the ring with a dancer's strut, gathering the homages, the handkerchiefs, fans and flowers that are rained down on him.

He returns once more to bow at the Corregidor's balcony, and looking up, after his reverence, remains fixed, staring for a moment, as at someone behind the Corregidor's seat. The Corregidor's lady blushes as well as she can under her nutbrown complexion, and throws a white rose into the arena. Don Juan picks up the rose, kisses it and bows deeply once more to the official box. But the Corregidor remarks, “The Cavalier is as white as a sheet!”—white as a sea-soaked pine plank, white as the beaches of Eldorado, white as a sailor's neckcloth, white as silver bullion, would have been a more appropriate description of the swart Don's pallor, but still he is pale, and he affronts the next bull, likewise a savage one, as in a dream, so that the fighting falls less to him than to another gentleman who has the honours. And when he bows to the officials, Don Juan watches fearfully to see if this man also will see, behind the Corregidor's seat, the Corregidor of Stone, removed, pedestal, bust and all, from the graveyard where he braved him yesternight, to attend in his old place at the festival.

What of the ship lost for ten years in the Spanish Main, now returned? What of the Commander returned from the grave to superintend Juan's last bullfight? Last? Why did he say last? “It is a premonition,” says Don Juan to himself: “thirty-eight dead bulls lie gory on my path of glory, perhaps there will be no more than thirtynine. But I must do my duty as a hero.”

So many bulls and more than a thousand women have yielded to his supernatural beauty, which even now, matured, pensive, but luminous, wins him the hearts of the baker's daughter, the shipbroker's
daughter, the upstart grandee's daughter, as he stands there in the four o'clock shadow just descending from the roofs. Still, with long habit and natural talent, every one of his movements is fitting, none of his glances wanders but falls direct with pride, majesty and beauty: still, when he flings down his hat, or dismounts, or calls the bulls, or kisses a handkerchief, there is in him a grace intolerable to a womanly heart, and one that no man can resist either, without a murmur of admiration and jealousy.

But suddenly, at four o'clock of a brilliant Spanish afternoon in the gay and spendthrift town of Seville, the hero, to become immortal, of women's frailty and men's misfortune, begins to think, “This year I am in my forty-fourth year: soon, I will no longer be able to smooth out the skin round my eyes, nor repress the unnatural superstitious awe and remorse which keeps creeping round my heart. I will become old, religious-mad, lunatic, a hermit perhaps, like poor Don Miguel: I will shun women, or worse, perhaps, they will find in the person and spirit of one of my unknown sons more delight than in me (for surely I have raised up unconquerable rivals in this land).”

The sixth bull, mad with pride, races in, looking neither to left nor right till he gets to the centre of the ring. There he bows his head thrice as if to the Corregidor, and paws the ground, raising a dust. This is the pride of the management, this bull, they feel sure, will reflect glory on them. This bull they have had the utmost difficulty in getting in from the pastures; on the way, he has attacked and killed two of the experienced mounted drovers; in his enclosure he has wounded one of the attendants. All eyes are on him as he stands, snorting and savage, a brilliant black such as is rarely seen.

“My time has come,” says Don Juan to himself: and gives one swift glance round the arena, at the windows and balconies of the houses. Curious thing! Where he before saw men, women and boys, he now sees only women, and one face and another seems familiar to him, but they are the faces of abandoned women, women who have wept out their beauty; their bosoms are scraggy, their lips
purple, moustached and drawn, and their eyes burn wanly, like the flares in graveyards at night. The Thousand and Three! Sold, with a cargo of silver bullion, to snivelling Sganarelle! “Look on, my beauties,” shouts Don Juan, waving his sword, as he spurs forward his horse to meet the charging bull. First encounter: the bull is not wounded, but Don Juan has only just saved his horse. The crowd roars and Don Juan hears the ferment of female shrieks. The bull bellows, and at that, in the moment of crisis, Don Juan laughs out clear and loud, HA, HA, HA, HA (“Come on,” he thinks, “you dog of the Commander!”)

The crowd cannot hear Don Juan's thoughts: they only see him fired by a superhuman flame as he draws in his rearing horse, and meets once more the charging bull. The bull is held off, but unwounded, by some miracle. He charges one after the other the flying chulos, and clears the ring of them: he fells the three other gentlemen on their three horses and leaves the combat between the hero and himself only. “Yield,” bellows the bull: “it is death and me, you deal with today.” “I know it,” says Don Juan in a clear voice, laughing, but with a feeling of trouble: “but I shall conquer you, Death, and you, Bull, and you overripe Commander!”

To the horror and delight of the crowd, Ahura-Mazda is villainously gored by the bull and falls to his knees, and Don Juan alights and takes his cloak and sword. The Thousand and Three, in whose gnawed bowels still lives a spark of love for him, shriek and wring their hands, “Have a care, Don Juan!” “Your gracious presence here, fair dames,” says Don Juan, “is warrant enough to me that I shall see stranger sights before nightfall: and what a nightfall! Shriek, Ladies, but I fight!”

He takes out his sword now, ready to despatch the bull. The bull bellows louder, with a note of triumph, and Don Juan, for the first time in his life, since his early boyhood, feels his heart misgive him. “Die then, Cavalier,” he says to himself, “if you ever feel the twinge of cowardice
;
” and he laughs louder than the bull. The deadly play begins: one must die and perhaps both will. The bull, untired, makes
fancy play deadly, and it soon becomes a question of killing him and putting him out of sight. Don Juan is pale, and many a spectator. The bull begins speaking, or so it seems to the toreador. “Repent, Cavalier, for the end has come!” “Never!” “Count over the souls you have lost!” “A thousand and three they grant me,” says Don Juan contemptuously. “And one more!” “My own,” says Don Juan. (“Repent!” he seems to hear the weeping women say. “You ask it?” he says, smiling.) “Beware,” says the bull: “you have but one moment more.” “Then leave it free from cant,” says the hero: “besides, what do I owe you? I've nothing to answer to a brute for.” “Have you not looked at me, the bull that will be your end?” Don Juan looks at the ironbound forehead, the fierce, cruel, bloodshot eyes, the black curls, the heavy jowl: “Bless my soul,” he says, “is it you, Commander? Shall I ride on your broad back to hell? At least it will be an honour I never expected.” “The flames of hell are hideous,” says the bull, grumbling in his brute voice. “For the love of heaven, leave all that to those gentlemen over there, the Inquisitors,” says the Don. “The shades of death are deep,” says the bull. “If you stay here arguing any longer,” says the Don, “they will not be deeper than night overtaking us in the arena. So prepare to die, loquacious bull, and to be roast sirloin for the friars, surly Commander! “He plants the sword aright, but somewhere he slips, and he is lifted high on the horns, as on a pitchfork. A loud cry goes up from the whole arena. The Corregidor says to his wife, “That draught which was blowing on my back has gone away.”

As they drag the bull out at a hand-gallop, the attendants feel like fainting from the strong smell of sulphur and animal oils that rise from the smoking beast. Don Juan is carried round the arena, shoulderhigh, and dying, is borne out, amidst the dying shouts. Donna Elvira, waiting at the gate, has the body carried after her sorrowfully home. But when she gets home and looks round, there is no body there; no doubt, it has been stolen on the way, for the marvellous raiment in which the soul was wrapped and the rich and costly stuffs in which the body was wrapped.