Death in the Afternoon - Ernest Hemingway

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the only other feria in May where more than two bullfights are given and its dates vary, but on the 16th there is always a bullfight at Talavera de la Reina; on the 20th one at Ronda, and on the 30th one at Aranjuez.

      There are two ways to go to Sevilla by road from Madrid. One goes by Aranjuez, Valdapenas, and Cordoba and is called the highroad of Andalucia and the other is by Talavera de la Reina, Trujillo and Merida and is called the road of Extremadura. If you are in Madrid in May and driving to the south you can see the fight at Talavera de la Reina on the 16th if you go by the Extremadura road. It is a fine road, smooth and rolling, Talavera is a good place in fair time and the bulls, nearly always furnished by a local breeder, the widow Ortega, are moderately big, vicious, difficult, and dangerous. It was there that Jose Gomez y Ortega, called Gallito or Joselito, who was probably the greatest bullfighter that ever lived, was killed on the 16th of May, 1920. The bulls of the widow Ortega are famous because of that accident and as they do not make a brilliant fight and are big and dangerous they will usually be killed, now, by the disinherited of the profession.

      Aranjuez is only forty-seven kilometres from Madrid on a billiard smooth road. It is an oasis of tall trees, rich gardens and a swift river set in brown plain and hills. There are avenues of trees like the background of Velasquez canvases, and on May 30 you can drive out there, if you have money or get a special-rate third-class round-trip railway ticket or go on a bus if you haven’t (there will be a special bus leaving from the Calle Victoria opposite the Pasaje Alvarez), and, coming from the hot sun of the bare, desert country, suddenly, under the shade of the trees, see brown-armed girls with baskets of fresh strawberries piled on the smooth, bare, cool ground, strawberries you cannot reach around with thumb and forefinger, damp and cool, packed on green leaves in wicker baskets. The girls and the old women sell them and bunches of wonderful asparagus, each stalk as thick as your thumb, to the crowd that comes off the special train from Madrid and Toledo and the people who drive into the town in motor cars and ride in on busses. You can eat at booths where they grill steaks and roast chickens over a charcoal fire and drink all the Valdapenas wine you can hold for five pesetas. You can lie in the shade or walk and see the sights until time for the bullfights. You can find the sights in Baedeker. The bull ring is at the end of a hot, wide, dusty street that runs into the heat from the cool forest shade of the town and the professional cripples and horror and pity inspirers that follow the fairs of Spain line this road, wagging stumps, exposing sores, waving monstrosities and holding out their caps, in their mouths when they have nothing left to hold them with, so that you walk a dusty gauntlet between two rows of horrors to the ring. The town is Velasquez to the edge and then straight Goya to the bull ring. The ring itself dates from before Goya. It is a lovely building in the style of the old ring at Ronda and you can sit in a barrera seat and drink wine and eat strawberries in the shade with your back to the sand and watch the boxes fill and see the girls from Toledo and all the surrounding country of Castille come in and drape their shawls over the front of the boxes, sitting, with much fan waving, to smile and talk with the pleasant, conscious confusion of amateur beauties under inspection. This girl inspection is a big part of bullfighting for the spectator. If you are near-sighted you can carry a pair of opera or field glasses. They are taken as an additional compliment. It is best not to neglect a single box. The use of a good pair of glasses is an advantage. They will destroy for you some of the greatest and most startling beauties who will come in with cloudy white lace mantillas, high combs and complexions and wonderful shawls and who in the glasses will show the gold teeth and flour-covered swartness of some one you saw last night perhaps somewhere else and who is attending the fight to advertise the house; but in some box you might not have noticed without the glasses you may see a beautiful girl. It is very easy for the traveller in Spain seeing the flour-faced fatness of the flamenca dancers and the hardy ladies of the brothels to write that all talk of beautiful Spanish women is nonsense. Whoring is not a highly paid profession in Spain and the Spanish whore works too hard to keep her looks. Do not look for beautiful women on the stage, in the brothels or the canta honda places. You look for them in the evening at the time of the paseo when you can sit in a chair at a café or on the street and have all the girls of the town walk by you for an hour, passing not once but many times as they walk up the block, make the turn and come back, walking three or four abreast; or you look for them carefully, with glasses in the boxes at the bull ring. It is not polite to focus the glasses on any one not in a box, nor is it polite to use them from the ring itself in those rings where the admirers of girls are allowed to stay in the ring to circle about before the fight and congregate before any special beauties. To use glasses when standing on the sand of the ring is the mark of a voyeur, a looker in the worst sense; that is a looker rather than a do-er. But to use the glasses on the boxes from a barrera seat is legitimate, and a compliment, and a means of communication and almost an introduction. There is no better preliminary introduction than acceptable sincere admiration and there is no way admiration at a certain distance can be conveyed or any response noted better than with a good-looking pair of racing glasses. Even if you never look at girls the glasses are good to watch the killing of the last bull if it is getting dusk and the bull is being killed on the far side of the ring.

      Aranjuez would be a fine place to see your first bullfight. It would be a good place if you were only going to see one bullfight, much better than Madrid, since it has all the color and picturesqueness that you want when you are still in the spectacle stage of appreciation. Later on what you will want at a bullfight, good bulls and good matadors being given, is a good public, and a good public is not the public of a one bullfight fiesta where every one drinks and has a fine time, and the women come in costume, nor is it the drunken, dancing, bull-running public of Pamplona, nor the local, patriotic, bullfighter worshippers of Valencia. A good public is Madrid, not the days of the benefit fights with elaborate decorations, much spectacle and high prices, but the serious public of the abonos who know bullfighting, bulls, and bullfighters, who know the good from the bad, the faked from the sincere and for whom the bullfighter must give his absolute maximum. The picturesque is for when you are young, or if you are a little drunk so that it will all seem real, or if you never grow up, or if you have a girl with you who has never seen it, or for once in a season, or for those who like it. But if you really want to learn about bullfighting, or if you ever get to feel strongly about it, sooner or later you will have to go to Madrid.

      There is one town that would be better than Aranjuez to see your first bullfight in if you were only going to see one and that is Ronda. That is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with any one. The entire town and as far as you can see in any direction is romantic background and there is an hotel there that is so comfortable, so well run and where you eat so well and usually have a cool breeze at night that, with the romantic background and the modern comfort, if a honeymoon or an elopement is not a success in Ronda it would be as well to start for Paris and both commence making your own friends. Ronda has everything you wish for a stay of that sort, romantic scenery, you can see it if necessary without leaving the hotel, beautiful short walks, good wine, seafood, a fine hotel, practically nothing else to do, two resident painters who will sell you water colors that will frame as attractive souvenirs of the occasion; and really, in spite of all this, it is a fine place. It is built on a plateau in a circle of mountains and the plateau is cut by a gorge that divides the two towns and ends in a cliff that drops sheer to the river and the plain below where you see the dust rising from the mule trains along the road. The people who settled it when the Moors were driven away, came from Cordoba and the north of Andalucia, and the bullfight and the fair that starts the 20th of May celebrate the conquest of the town by Ferdinand and Isabella. Ronda was one of the cradles of modern bullfighting. It was the birthplace of Pedro Romero, one of the first and greatest of professional fighters and, in our times, of Nino de la Palma who started to be great but after his first severe goring developed a cowardice which was only equalled by his ability to avoid taking risks in the ring. The bull ring at Ronda was built toward the end of the eighteenth century and is of wood. It stands at the edge of the cliff and after the bullfight when the bulls have been skinned and dressed and their meat sent out for sale on carts they drag the dead horses over the edge of the cliff and the buzzards that have circled over the town and high in the air over the ring all day, drop down to feed on the rocks below the town.

      There is one other feria with a series of bullfights that sometimes comes in May although the date is movable, and it may not come until June, and that is Cordoba. Cordoba has

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