Luis Gomez, El Estudiante, is a young medical student with a keen, brown, good looking face and a good figure that might serve as a model for a formalized young matador type, who possesses a good sound classic modern style with cape and muleta and kills quickly and well. After three seasons of fighting in the provinces in the summer and studying medicine in Madrid in the winter, he made his debut last fall in Madrid as a novillero and had a great success. He became a full matador at Valencia in the corridas of San Jose in March of 1932 and according to aficionados, whom I trust, he was very good and showed great promise although, occasionally with the muleta, his valor and desire to make a faena led him into compromising situations which he was unconscious of and from which he was saved only by luck and good reflexes. On the surface it seemed he dominated the bulls but in reality luck saved him more than once; but with intelligence, valor and a good style, he is a legitimate hope as a matador if his luck holds during his first full campaign.
Alfredo Corrochano, son of Gregorio Corrochano, the very influential bullfight critic of the Madrid monarchist daily, A. B. C., is a matador made to order by his father under the influence of Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, the brother-in-law of Joselito, whom Corrochano attacked so bitterly and virulently during the season that saw his death. Alfredo is a dark, slight, contemptuous and arrogant boy with a rather Bourbonic face a little like that of Alfonso XIII as a child.
He was educated in Switzerland and trained as a matador at the testings of the calves and brood stock of the bull ranches around Madrid and Salamanca by Sanchez Mejias, his father and all those who toady to his father. For about three years he has fought as a professional, first with the Bienvenida boys as a child performer, then last year as a full novillero. Due to his father’s position, his presentation in Madrid aroused much feeling and he was made to feel the bitterness of all the enemies his father’s often excellent and extremely well written sarcasms had made, as well as those who hated him as a son of the middle-class royalist and believed he was depriving boys who needed bread to eat of the chance to earn it in the ring.
At the same time he profited by the publicity and curiosity all this feeling aroused and through his three appearances as a novillero in Madrid he bore himself insolently, arrogantly and very much like a man. He showed he was a good banderillero, an excellent dominator with the muleta, with much intelligence and vista in handling of the bull, but with a lamentably bad style with the cape and an utter inability to kill properly or even decently. In 1932 he took the alternative in Castellon de la Plana in the first corrida of the year and according to my informants he was not changed since I had seen him except that he was trying to remedy his vulgar way of making the veronica by substituting various picturesque tricks with the cape for that one irreplaceable test of a fighter’s serenity and artistic ability. As a curiosity his career will be extremely interesting, but I believe that unless he acquires security in killing he will soon cease to interest the public, once his novelty as a son of his father has been thoroughly exploited.
Victoriano de la Serna was a young novillero who had that necessity for the production of a phenomenon, a great afternoon in Madrid, in September of 1931. He was taken up, exploited, shown near Madrid, with hand-picked, small bulls, where a disaster could be minimized and a triumph made much of by the Madrid critics paid to attend, then at the very end of the season he was presented for his second Madrid appearance as a full matador. He showed that the elevation was premature, that he was green, insufficiently grounded in his profession and needed much more seasoning and experience before being able to handle the mature bulls securely.
This season he has a certain amount of contracts signed last year before his failure in Madrid but in spite of his undoubtedly phenomenal natural ability, his too early elevation to a matador would seem to have started him on the quick descent to oblivion, well greased as it is by all those other phenomenons who have slid along it before him. As always, I hope for the performer, who is less guilty than his exploiters, that I am wrong and that he may miraculously learn his trade while practicing it as a master but it is such a defrauding of the public to do so that even when a matador does so learn his craft, the public rarely forgives him and when he is secure enough to satisfy them they have no wish to see him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There are only two proper ways to kill bulls with the sword and muleta and as both of them deliberately invoke a moment in which there is unavoidable goring for the man if the bull does not follow the cloth properly, matadors have steadily tricked this finest part of the fight until ninety of one hundred bulls that you will see killed will be put to death in a manner that is only a parody of the true way to kill. One reason for this is that rarely will a great artist with the cape and muleta be a killer. A great killer must love to kill; unless he feels it-is the best thing he can do, unless he is conscious of its dignity and feels that it is its own reward, he will be incapable of the abnegation that is necessary in real killing. The truly great killer must have a sense of honor and a sense of glory far beyond that of the ordinary bullfighter.
In other words he must be a simpler man. Also he must take pleasure in it, not simply as a trick of wrist, eye, and managing of his left hand that he does better than other men, which is the simplest form of that pride and which he will naturally have as a simple man, but he must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. Because the other part, which does not enjoy killing, has always been the more articulate and has furnished most of the good writers we have had a very few statements of the true enjoyment of killing.
One of its greatest pleasures, aside from the purely aesthetic ones, such as wing shooting, and the ones of pride, such as difficult game stalking, where it is the disproportionately increased importance of the fraction of a moment that it takes for the shot that furnishes the emotion, is the feeling of rebellion against death which comes from its administering. Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes; that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin, and a pagan virtue. But it is pride which makes the bullfight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador.
Of course these necessary spiritual qualities cannot make a man a good killer unless the man has all the physical talent for the performance of the act; a good eye, a strong wrist, valor, and a fine left hand to manage the muleta. He must have all of these to an exceptional degree or his sincerity and pride will only put him in the hospital. There is not, in Spain to-day, one really great killer.
There are successful matadors who can kill perfectly though without great style when they wish, luck being with them, but who do not attempt it often because they do not need to in order to hold their public; there are matadors who might have been great killers in the old days, who started in their careers killing bulls as well as it could be done, but who, through their lack of ability with cape and muleta, early ceased to interest the public and so have few contracts and lack the opportunity to develop their art with the sword or even to keep in practice; and there are matadors who are starting their careers who still kill well, but
