At your first bullfight if you are alone, with no one to instruct you, sit in a delantera de grada or a sobrepuerta. If you cannot get these seats you can always get a seat in a box. They are the most expensive seats and the farthest from the ring, but they give a good panoramic view of the fight. If you are going with some one who really knows bullfighting and want to learn to understand it and have no qualms about details a barrera is the best seat, contrabarrera the next best and sobrepuerta the next.
If you are a woman and think you would like to see a bullfight and are afraid you might be badly affected by it do not sit any closer than the gallery the first time. You might enjoy the fight from there where you will see it as a spectacle and not care for it at all if you sat closer so that the details destroyed the effect of the whole. If you have plenty of money, want not to see but to have seen a bullfight and plan no matter whether you like it or not to leave after the first bull, buy a barrera seat so that some one who has never had enough money to sit in a barrera can make a quick rush from above and occupy your expensive seat as you go out taking your preconceived opinions with you.
That is the way it used to happen at San Sebastian. Due to various grafts of ticket resale and the reliance of the management on the wealthy curiosity trade from Biarritz and the Basque Coast, the barreras, by the time you buy them, cost a hundred pesetas apiece or over. A man could live a week on that in a bullfighters’ boarding house in Madrid, go to the Prado four times a week, buy good seats in the sun for two bullfights, buy the papers afterwards and drink beer and eat shrimp in the Pasaje Alvarez off the Calle de Vitoria, and still have something left to get his shoes shined with.
Yet by buying any sort of seat within diving range of the barrera at San Sebastian you could be sure of having a hundred-peseta seat to occupy when the citizens who knew they were morally bound to leave the bull ring after the first bull stand up to make their well-fed, skull and bones-ed, porcellian-ed, beach-tanned, flannelled, Panama-hatted, sport-shod exits. I’ve seen them go many times when the women with them wanted to stay. They could go to the bullfight, but they had to meet at the Casino after they had seen the first bull killed. If they didn’t leave and liked it there was something wrong with them. Maybe they were queer. There was never anything wrong with them. They always left. That was until bullfights became respectable. In nineteen thirty-one I did not see one leave within range and now it looks as though the good days of the free barreras at San Sebastian are over.
CHAPTER FOUR
The best bullfight to see first would be a novillada and the best place to see a novillada is Madrid. The novilladas usually start about the middle of March and there is one every Sunday and usually every Thursday until Easter when the major fights or corridas de toros start. After Easter, in Madrid, starts the first subscription season of seven bullfights. Books of tickets for all seven fights are sold and the best seats are always subscribed year in and year out. The best of all seats are the barreras in the middle of the shade where the bullfighters put their capes over the red wooden barrier. There is where they stand when they are not in the ring; it is there that they have the bull brought when they are going out with the muleta; it is to there they come to sponge off after the killing. A seat there is equivalent in what you see and hear to being in the corner of a boxer during a fight or to sitting in the dugout or on the bench in a baseball or football game.
You will not be able to buy any of those seats during the first or the second abono or subscription season at Madrid, but you can get them for the novilladas that come before, between and after the regular bullfight season, on Sundays and, usually, Thursdays. When you buy a barrera seat ask where the capes are put. «Adonde se pone los capotes?» and then ask that you be given a seat as close as possible to them. The ticket seller may lie to you in the provinces and give you the worst seat he has but he may, because you are a foreigner and seem to want to have a really good seat and know what one is, give you the best that he has. I have been lied to most in Galicia where the truth in any business transaction is hard to come at, and treated best in Madrid, and, of all places, Valencia.
In most parts of Spain you will find the institution of the subscription or abono and the re-venta. The re-venta are ticket brokers who take over all or most of the unsubscribed tickets from the bull ring management and sell them at a twenty per cent increase over their face value. The bull rings favor them sometimes because while they buy the tickets at a discount yet they insure the paper being disposed of. If the tickets for the fight are not all sold it is the re-venta that has the big loss, not the bull ring — although the bull ring usually manages to have big losses in some manner or other. Since you will seldom, unless you are living in a town, be there at the time the subscription or abono for a fight or series of fights is opened, and since, in all cases, old seat holders have a right to renew their subscriptions before new ones are taken, and since these subscriptions are taken two or three weeks before the fights at some place perhaps difficult to find and open only from, say, four to five in the afternoon, the chances are you must buy your seats from the re-venta.
If you are in a town and know you are going to the bullfight buy your seats as soon as you are decided. The chances are there will be nothing in the Madrid papers about any bullfight before it is to take place except a small classified advertisement under Plaza de Toros de Madrid in the column of espectaculos. Bullfights are not written up in the papers in advance in Spain except in the provinces. But in all parts of Spain they are advertised by large colored posters which give the number of bulls to be killed with the names of the men who are to kill them, the breeder who is furnishing them, the cuadrillas and the place and hour of the fight. There is usually also a list of prices of the various seats. To these prices you must expect to add the twenty-per-cent commission if you buy the tickets from the re-venta.
If you want to see a bullfight in Spain there will be one of some sort in Madrid every Sunday from the middle of March until the middle of November, weather permitting. During the winter there are rarely any fights in Spain except very occasionally in Barcelona and sometimes in Malaga or Valencia. The first formal bullfight of each year is at Castellón de la Plana late in February or early in March for the fiesta of the Magdalena and the last one of the year is usually in Valencia, Gerona, or Ondara in the first part of November, but if the weather is bad these November fights will not take place. There will be fights every Sunday in Mexico City from October until, and probably through, April.
There will be novilladas in the spring and summer. Dates of bullfights in other places in Mexico vary. The days on which there will be fights in other towns in Spain than Madrid vary, but, in general, except for Barcelona, where they are held almost as regularly as in Madrid, the dates coincide with the national religious festivals and the times of the local fairs or ferias which usually commence on the Saints day of the town. In an appendix to this book I have given a list of the dates of the main ferias, so far as these are fixed, on which bullfights will be held in Spain, Mexico and South and Central America. It is easy, easier than you can believe, in a two or three weeks’ trip to Spain to miss a chance to see bullfights, but using this appendix any one can see a bullfight if they want to be at any of the places on any of the fixed dates, rain permitting. After the first one you will know if you want to see any more.
Aside from the novilladas and the two subscription seasons at Madrid the best place to see a
