She knew he could not run across the ring if his life depended on it and she watched him walk slowly to the fence and wipe his mouth on a towel and look up at her and shake his head and then wipe his face on the towel and start his triumphant circling of the ring.
She saw him moving slowly, dragging around the ring, smiling, bowing, smiling, his assistants walking behind him, stooping, picking up cigars, tossing back hats; he circling the ring sad-eyed and smiling, to end the circle before her. Then she looked over and saw him sitting now on the step of the wooden fence, his mouth in a towel.
Pilar saw all this as she stood there over the fire and she said, “So he wasn’t a good matador? With what class of people is my life passed now!”
“He was a good matador,” Pablo said. “He was handicapped by his short stature.”
“And clearly he was tubercular,” Primitivo said.
“Tubercular?” Pilar said. “Who wouldn’t be tubercular from the punishment he received? In this country where no poor man can ever hope to make money unless he is a criminal like Juan March, or a bullfighter, or a tenor in the opera? Why wouldn’t he be tubercular? In a country where the bourgeoisie over-eat so that their stomachs are all ruined and they cannot live without bicarbonate of soda and the poor are hungry from their birth till the day they die, why wouldn’t he be tubercular? If you travelled under the seats in third-class carriages to ride free when you were following the fairs learning to fight as a boy, down there in the dust and dirt with the fresh spit and the dry spit, wouldn’t you be tubercular if your chest was beaten out by horns?”
“Clearly,” Primitivo said. “I only said he was tubercular.”
“Of course he was tubercular,” Pilar said, standing there with the big wooden stirring spoon in her hand. “He was short of stature and he had a thin voice and much fear of bulls. Never have I seen a man with more fear before the bullfight and never have I seen a man with less fear in the ring. “You,” she said to Pablo. “You are afraid to die now. You think that is something of importance. But Finito was afraid all the time and in the ring he was like a lion.”
“He had the fame of being very valiant,” the second brother said.
“Never have I known a man with so much fear,” Pilar said. “He would not even have a bull’s head in the house. One time at the feria of Valladolid he killed a bull of Pablo Romero very well–”
“I remember,” the first brother said. “I was at the ring. It was a soap-colored one with a curly forehead and with very high horns. It was a bull of over thirty arrobas. It was the last bull he killed in Valladolid.”
“Exactly,” Pilar said. “And afterwards the club of enthusiasts who met in the Café Colon and had taken his name for their club had the head of the bull mounted and presented it to him at a small banquet at the Café Colon. During the meal they had the head on the wall, but it was covered with a cloth. I was at the table and others were there, Pastora, who is uglier than I am, and the Nina de los Peines, and other gypsies and whores of great category. It was a banquet, small but of great intensity and almost of a violence due to a dispute between Pastora and one of the most significant whores over a question of propriety. I, myself, was feeling more than happy and I was sitting by Finito and I noticed he would not look up at the bull’s head, which was shrouded in a purple cloth as the images of the saints are covered in church duing the week of the passion of our former Lord.
“Finito did not eat much because he had received a palotaxo, a blow from the flat of the horn when he had gone in to kill in his last corrida of the year at Zaragoza, and it had rendered him unconscious for some time and even now he could not hold food on his stomach and he would put his handkerchief to his mouth and deposit a quantity of blood in it at intervals throughout the banquet. What was I going to tell you?”