The amount of cape work that is now done with the bull by the matadors alone is, of course, very destructive to him. If the object of the fight had remained, as it was originally, simply to put the bull in the best condition for the killing, the amount that the matadors use the cape, using both hands, would be indefensible. But as bullfighting has progressed or decayed so that the killing is now only a third of the fight rather than the whole end and the cape work and the muleta work a large two-thirds the type of bullfighter has changed. Rarely, extremely rarely, do you get a matador who is both a great killer and a great artist with either cape or muleta. As rarely as you would get a great boxer who was also a first-rate painter.
To be an artist with the cape, to use it as well as it can be used, takes an aesthetic sense that can only be a handicap to a great killer. A great killer must love to kill. He must have extraordinary courage and ability to perform two distinctly different acts with two hands at the same time, much more difficult than patting your head with one hand and rubbing your stomach with the other, he must have a primitive and all-controlling sense of honor, for there are many ways to trick the killing of bulls without going straight in on them; but above all he must love to kill. To most of the bullfighters who are artists, starting with Rafael El Gallo and going on down through Chicuelo the necessity to kill seems almost regrettable.
They are not matadors but toreros, highly developed, sensitive manipulators of cape and muleta. They do not like to kill, they are afraid to kill and ninety times out of a hundred they kill badly. Bullfighting has gained greatly by the art they have brought to it and one of the great artists, Juan Belmonte, learned to kill well enough. Although he was never a great killer, he had enough of the natural killer in him to develop it and such a great pride in doing everything perfectly that he finally became acceptable and secure as a killer after being deficient for a long time.
But there was always a wolf look about Belmonte and there is nothing of the wolf in any of the other aestheticians that have developed since his time, and since they cannot kill honestly, since they would be driven out of bullfighting if they had to kill bulls as they should be killed, the public has taken to expecting and wanting the maximum they can give with the cape and the muleta, regardless of its final fitting of the bull for killing, and the structure of bullfighting has been changed accordingly.
Madame, does all this writing of the bullfights bore you?
Old lady: No, sir, I cannot say it does, but I can only read so much of it at one time.
I understand. A technical explanation is hard reading. It is like the simple directions which accompany any mechanical toy and which are incomprehensible.
Old lady: I would not say your book is that bad, sir.
Thank you. You encourage me, but is there nothing I can do to keep your interest from flagging?
Old lady: It does not flag. It is only that I get tired sometimes.
To give you pleasure then.
Old lady: You give me pleasure.
Thank you, Madame, but I mean in the way of writing or conversation.
Old lady: Well, sir, since we have stopped early to-day why do you not tell me a story?
About what, Madame?
Old lady: Anything you like, sir, except I would no
t like another one about the dead. I am a little tired of the dead.
Ah, Madame, the dead are tired too.
Old lady: No tireder than I am of hearing of them and I can speak my wishes. Do you know any of the kind of stories Mr. Faulkner writes?
A few, Madame, but told baldly they might not please you.
Old lady: Then do not tell them too baldly.
Madame, I will tell you a couple and see how short and how far from bald I can make them. What sort of story would you like first?
Old lady: Do you know any true stories about those unfortunate people?
A few, but in general they lack drama as do all tales of abnormality since no one can predict what will happen in the normal while all tales of the abnormal end much the same.
Old lady: Just the same I would like to hear one. I have been reading of these unfortunate people lately and they are very interesting to me.
All right, this is a very short one, but well written it could be tragic enough, but I will not try to write it but only to tell it quickly. I was eating at the Anglo-American Press Association lunch in Paris and sat next to the man who told this story. He was a poor newspaperman, a fool, a friend of mine, and a garrulous and dull companion and he lived at a hotel too expensive for his salary. He still held his job because the circumstances which were later to demonstrate how poor a newspaperman he was had not yet arisen. He told me at lunch that he had slept very badly the night before because there had been a row going on the whole night in the room next to his at the hotel. About two o’clock some one had knocked on his door and begged to be let in. The newspaperman had opened the door and a dark-haired young man about twenty in pyjamas and a new-looking dressing gown came into the room crying.
At first he was too hysterical to make much sense except to give the newspaperman the impression that something horrible had been narrowly averted. It seemed this young man had arrived with his friend in Paris on that day’s boat train. The friend, who was a little older, he had met only recently, but they had become great friends and he had accepted his friend’s invitation to come abroad as his guest. His friend had plenty of money and he had none and their friendship had been a fine and beautiful one until tonight. Now everything in the world was ruined for him. He was without money, he would not see Europe, at this point he sobbed again, but nothing on earth would induce him to go back into that room.
He was firm on this point. He would kill himself first. He really would. Just then there was another knock on the door and the friend who was also a fine, clean-cut-looking American youth wearing an equally new and expensive looking dressing gown came into the room. On the newspaperman asking him what this was all about he said it was nothing; his friend was overwrought from the trip. At this the first friend commenced crying again and said nothing on earth would make him go back in that room. He would kill himself, he said. He would absolutely kill himself. He went back, however, finally, after some very sensible reassuring pleading by the older friend and after the newspaperman had given them each a brandy and soda and advised them to cut it all out and get some sleep.
The newspaperman did not know what it was all about, he said, but thought it was something funny all right, and anyway he went to sleep himself and was next awakened by what sounded like fighting in the next room and some one saying, “I didn’t know it was that. Oh, I didn’t know it was that! I won’t! I won’t!” followed by what the newspaperman described as a despairing scream. He hammered on the wall and the noise ceased, but he could hear one of the friends sobbing. He took it to be the same one who had sobbed earlier.
“Do you want any help?” the newspaperman asked. “Do you want me to get some one? What’s the matter in there?”
There was no answer except the sobbing by the one friend. Then the other friend said, very clearly and distinctly, “Please mind your own business.”
The newspaperman was angry at this and thought he would call the desk and have them both thrown out of the hotel, and he would have too if they had said anything more. As it was he told them to cut it out and went back to bed. He could not sleep very well because the one friend sobbed for quite a long while but finally ceased sobbing. The next morning he saw them at breakfast outside the Café de la Paix, chatting together happily, and reading copies of the Paris New York Herald. He pointed them out to me a day or two later riding together in an open taxi and I frequently saw them, after that, sitting on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots.
Old lady: And is that all of the story? Is there not to be what we called in my youth a wow at the end?
Ah, Madame, it is years since I added the wow to the end of a story. Are you sure you are unhappy if the wow is omitted?
Old lady: Frankly, sir, I prefer the wow.
Then, Madame, I will not withhold it. The last time I saw the two they were sitting
