The barrera is the best seat if you want to see and hear what happens and to be so close to the bull that you will have the bullfighter's point of view. From the barrera the action is so near and so detailed that a bullfight that would be soporific from the boxes or the balcony is always interesting. It is from the barrera that you see danger and learn to appreciate it. There too you have an uninterrupted view of the ring. The only other seats, besides the first row in the gallery and the first row in the boxes, where you do not see people between you and the ring, are the sobrepuertas. These are the seats that are built over the doorways through which you enter the various sections of the ring. They are about halfway up to the sides of the bowl and from them you get a good view of the ring and a good perspective, yet you are not as distant as in the boxes or gallery. They cost about half as much as the barreras or the first row of gallery or boxes and they are very good seats.
The west walls of the bull ring building cast a shadow and those seats that are in the shade when the fight commences are called seats of the sombra or shade. Seats that are in the sun when the fight commences but that will be in the shadow as the afternoon advances are called of sol y sombra. Seats are priced according to their desirability and whether they are shaded or not. The cheapest seats are those which are nearest the roof on the far sunny side and have no shade at all at any time. They are the andanadas del sol and on a hot day, close under the roof, they must reach temperatures that are unbelievable in a city like Valencia where it can be 104° fahrenheit in the shade, but the better seats of the sol are good ones to buy on a cloudy day or in cold weather.
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 eve
ry 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 series of bullfights in the early spring is at the feria in Sevilla where there are at least four fights on successive days. This feria starts after Easter. If you are in Sevilla for Easter ask any one when the feria starts or you can find the dates from the big posters advertising the fights. If you are in Madrid before Easter go to any of the cafés around the Puerta del Sol or the first café on your right on the Plaza de Canalejas going down the Calle de San Jeronimo from the Puerta del Sol toward the Prado and you will find a poster on the wall advertising the feria of Sevilla. In this same café you will always find in the summer the posters or cartels advertising the ferias of Pamplona, Valencia, Bilbao, Salamanca, Vallodolid, Cuenca, Malaga, Murcia and many others.
On Easter Sunday there are always bullfights in Madrid, Sevilla, Barcelona, Murcia, Zaragoza, and novilladas in Granada, Bilbao, Vallodolid and many other places. There is also a bullfight in Madrid on the Monday after Easter. On the 29th of April of each year there is a bullfight and fair at Jerez de la Frontera. This is an excellent place to visit with or without bulls, and is the home of sherry and everything distilled from it. They will take you through the cellars of Jerez and you may taste many different grades of wines and brandies, but it is best to do this on another day than the one you plan to go to the corrida. There will be two fights in Bilbao on either the 1st, 2d or 3d of May depending on whether one of those dates falls on a Sunday. Those would be good fights to go to if you were, say, at Biarritz or St. Jean de Luz for Easter. There is a fine road to Bilbao from anywhere along the Basque coast. Bilbao is a rich, ugly, mining city where it gets as hot as St. Louis, either St. Louis, Missouri, or St. Louis, Senegal, and where they love bulls and dislike bullfighters. When they like a bullfighter in Bilbao they buy bigger and bigger bulls for him to fight until he finally has a disaster with them, either moral or physical. Then the Bilbao enthusiast says, "See — they are all alike — all cowards, all fakes. Give them big enough bulls and they will prove it." If you want to see how big bulls can be produced, how much horn they can carry on their heads, how they can look up over the barrera so that you think you are going to have them in your lap, how tough a crowd can be and how thoroughly bullfighters can be terrorized, go to Bilbao. They do not have as big bulls in May as they do during their big-bull, seven-corrida fair which starts the middle of August, but in May it will not be as hot in Bilbao as it will be in August. If you do not mind heat, really heavy, damp, lead and zinc mining heat, and want to see big, wonderfully presented bulls, the August feria in Bilbao is the place. Cordoba has 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 Andalucía 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 ñe 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.