If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There is no part of the fiesta that appeals to the spectator seeing bullfights for the first time as does the placing of the banderillas. The eye of a person unfamiliar with the bullfight cannot really follow the cape work; there is the shock of seeing the horse struck by the bull and no matter how this affects the spectator he will be liable to continue to watch the horse and miss the quite that the matador has made. The work with the muleta is confusing; the spectator does not know which passes are difficult to make and, it all being new, his eye is hardly competent to distinguish one move from another. He watches the muleta as something picturesque and the killing may be done so suddenly that unless the spectator has very trained eyes he will not be able to break up the different figures and see what really happens.
Often enough, too, the killing will be done so without style or sincerity, the matador making as little of it as he can in order to decrease its importance, that the spectator will have no idea of the emotion and the spectacle that a properly killed bull will give. But the placing of the banderillas he sees clearly, he follows it easily in all its details and almost invariably, when it is well done, he enjoys it.
In the banderillas he sees a man walk out carrying two slender sticks with barbed points; the first man he has seen go toward the bull without a cape in his hands. The man attracts the bull’s attention, I am describing the simplest way of planting banderillas, runs toward him as the bull charges and as bull and man come together and the bull lowers his head to hook the man puts his feet together, raises his arms high and drives the shafts straight down into the lowered neck of the bull.
That is as much of it as the spectator’s eye can follow.
“Why doesn’t the bull get him?” some one seeing their first fight, or even after many fights, will ask. The answer is this, the bull cannot turn in a shorter space than his own length. Therefore, if the bull charges, once the man has passed the horn he is safe. He may pass the horn by taking a course which brings him at an angle toward the bull’s course, judging the moment of encounter when he puts his feet together so that the bull’s head is down, sinking the sticks and pivoting on them past the horn. This is called placing them poder-a-poder or force to force.
The man may start from a position so that he makes a quarter of a circle as he crosses the bull’s charge, thus placing them al cuarteo, the commonest way, or he may stand still and await the bull’s charge, the finest way of planting them, and as the bull reaches him in his charge and is about to lower his head to hook the man lifts the right foot and sways to the left so that the bull follows the lure of his body, then sways back, brings his right foot down, and drives down the sticks. This is called placing the banderillas al cambio. It may be done, of course, to either the right or left. The way I have described it the bull would pass to the left.
There is another variation of this called al quiebro in which the man is not supposed to lift either foot, deceiving the bull and giving him the false direction with a movement of his body, the feet kept still; but I have never seen this done. I have seen many pairs of banderillas that the critics called al quiebro, but I have never seen one placed without the man raising either one foot or the other.
In all these ways of placing the banderillas there are two men with capes in different parts of the ring, in general a matador in the centre and another, either matador or banderillero, in the rear of the bull so that, when the man has planted the banderillas and passed the bull’s horn, by whatever means he has chosen, the bull, as he turns to pursue him, will see a cape before he has made his turn and taken out after the man.
There is a definite place in the ring that each of the two or three men with capes occupies in all of the various ways of placing banderillas. The ways I have described, the cuarteo or quarter of a circle, power-to-power and its variations, in both of which the man and bull are both running, and the cambio and its variations, in which the man stands still and awaits the bull’s charge, are the usual ways of placing banderillas in which the man seeks to perform brilliantly.
They are usually the ones used by the matador when he takes the banderillas himself and their effect depends upon the grace, cleanness, decision and domination that the man puts into them and the proper placing of the shafts. They should be placed high up on the top of the shoulders, well back behind the bull’s neck, they should be sunk together, not spread apart, and they should not be placed where they will interfere with the sword thrust. Banderillas should never be placed in the wounds made by the picadors.
A banderilla properly placed pierces the hide only and the weight of the shaft causes it to hang down the bull’s flank. If it is driven in too deep it stands straight up, makes it impossible to work brilliantly with the bull with the muleta, and instead of a sharp prick that has no lasting effect it makes a painful wound that discomposes the bull and makes him uncertain and difficult.
There is no manoeuvre in the bullfight which has, as object, to inflict pain on the bull. The pain that is inflicted is incidental, not an end. The object of all the manoeuvres, in addition to giving the most brilliant spectacle, is to try to tire the bull and slow him in preparation for the killing. I believe that part of the bullfight which inflicts most pain and suffering, some of it useless, on the bull is the placing of the banderillas. Yet it is the part of the fight which causes least repugnance to American and British spectators.
I believe this is because it is the easiest to follow and to understand. If all of the bullfight were as easy to follow, appreciate, understand and see the danger of as is the placing of the banderillas the attitude of the non-Spanish world toward the bullfight might be very different. In my own time I have seen the attitude of American newspapers and popular magazines changed greatly toward bullfighting by some presentation of it, as it is, or an honest attempt at this presentation in fiction; and this before the son of a Brooklyn policeman had become a capable and popular matador.
There are, in addition to the three ways of placing banderillas that I have described, at least ten others some of which have become obsolete, such as the man who is to place the banderillas citing the bull with a chair in one hand, seating himself as the bull charges, rising from the chair to lure the bull to one side with a feint, driving in the banderillas and then sitting again in the chair. This is almost never seen now, nor are various other ways of placing banderillas which were invented by certain bullfighters and being rarely executed well except by their inventors, passed into disuse.
Bulls that take up a querencia against the barrera cannot be banderilla-ed by the use of the quarter or the half-circle method of running across the line of the bull’s charge, placing the sticks as the man’s line of movement crosses that of the bulls, since the man after passing the horn would be caught between the bull and the barrier and such bulls must be banderilla-ed on this bias or al sesgo. In this manoeuvre the bull being
