XV
At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded.
People had been coming in all day from the country, but they were assimilated in the town and you did not notice them.
The square was as quiet in the hot sun as on any other day.
There they were drinking, getting ready for the fiesta.
They could not start in paying café prices.
Now on the day of the starting of the fiesta of San Fermin they had been in the wine-shops of the narrow streets of the town since early morning.
Going down the streets in the morning on the way to mass in the cathedral, I heard them singing through the open doors of the shops.
I walked down the hill from the cathedral and up the street to the café on the square.
Robert Cohn and Bill were sitting at one of the tables.
I asked Bill and Robert.
Before the waiter brought the sherry the rocket that announced the fiesta went up in the square.
By the time the second rocket had burst there were so many people in the arcade, that had been empty a minute before, that the waiter, holding the bottle high up over his head, could hardly get through the crowd to our table.
They were playing the riau-riau music, the pipes shrill and the drums pounding, and behind them came the men and boys dancing.
In the crowd you saw only the heads and shoulders of the dancers going up and down.
He came out of the square, the children following him, and piped them past the café and down a side street.
Down the street came dancers.
The street was solid with dancers, all men.
They were a club of some sort, and all wore workmen’s blue smocks, and red handkerchiefs around their necks, and carried a great banner on two poles.
The banner danced up and down with them as they came down surrounded by the crowd.
Robert Cohn asked.
“We’re the foreigners,” Bill said.
The square was emptying of people and the crowd was filling the cafés.
“Where’s Brett and Mike?”
Bill asked.
The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on.
It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.
All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard.
It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.
We could not see them because the crowd was too great.
Ahead of the formal procession and behind it danced the riau-riau dancers.
We started inside and there was a smell of incense and people filing back into the church, but Brett was stopped just inside the door because she had no hat, so we went out again and along the street that ran back from the chapel into town.
The street was lined on both sides with people keeping their place at the curb for the return of the procession.
Some dancers formed a circle around Brett and started to dance.
They took Bill and me by the arms and put us in the circle.
Bill started to dance, too.
Brett wanted to dance but they did not want her to.
They had Brett seated on a wine-cask.
It was dark in the wine-shop and full of men singing, hard-voiced singing.
I put down money for the wine, but one of the men picked it up and put it back in my pocket.
Three of them were sitting on the high wine-cask beside Brett, teaching her to drink out of the wine-skins.
Beating time on Bill’s back.
Outside in the street I went down the street looking for the shop that made leather wine-bottles.
Then I asked a man and he took me by the arm and led me to it.
I paid and went out and along the street back to the wine-shop.
I did not see Brett and Bill, and some one said they were in the back room.
The man who had wanted to pay then bought me a drink.
In the back room Brett and Bill were sitting on barrels surrounded by the dancers.
Mike was sitting at a table with several men in their shirt-sleeves, eating from a bowl of tuna fish, chopped onions and vinegar.
“Stop eating their dinner, Michael,” Brett shouted from the wine-barrels.
“I don’t want to eat up your meal,” I said when some one handed me a fork.
I unscrewed the nozzle of the big wine-bottle and handed it around.
Every one took a drink, tipping the wine-skin at arm’s length.
“Isn’t that the procession?”
Mike asked.
I asked Mike.
“He’s passed out,” Brett called.
“He’s not dead,” Mike said.
As he said Anis del Mono one of the men at the table looked up, brought out a bottle from inside his smock, and handed it to me.
I could feel it warming in my stomach.
“I don’t know,” Mike said.
The Anis del Mono man wiped his mouth and stood up.
In a back room Robert Cohn was sleeping quietly on some wine-casks.
“Let him sleep,” the man whispered.
“You were only dead,” Bill said.
Cohn asked.
“Eat those garlics, Robert,” Mike said.
“Do let’s go and eat,” Brett said.
Cohn asked.
“No,” said Cohn, “what time is it?”
Going down the dark streets to the hotel we saw the sky-rockets going up in the square.
Down the side streets that led to the square we saw the square solid with people, those in the centre all dancing.
I remember resolving that I would stay up all night to watch the bulls go through the streets at six o’clock in the morning, and being so sleepy that I went to bed around four o’clock.
My own room was locked and I could not find the key, so I went up-stairs and slept on one of the beds in Cohn’s room.
I had been sleeping heavily and I woke feeling I was too late.
I put on a coat of Cohn’s and went out on the balcony.
All the balconies were crowded with people.
Suddenly a crowd came down the street.
But the bulls went right on and did not notice him.
I went back in the room and got into bed.
Back in bed, I went to sleep.
He started to undress and went over and closed the window because the people on the balcony of the house just across the street were looking in.
“One of the bulls got into the crowd in the ring and tossed six or eight people.”
“It was all so sudden there wasn’t any time for it to bother anybody.”
“Doesn’t this thing ever stop?”
Bill opened the door and put his head in.
It had filled up, and as the time for the bull-fight came it got fuller, and the tables were crowded closer.
There was a close, crowded hum that came every day before the bull-fight.
The café did not make this same noise at any other time, no matter how crowded it was.
Mike thought Brett had best sit high up for her first time, and Cohn wanted to sit with them.
Bill and I were going to sit in the barreras, and I gave the extra ticket to a waiter to sell.
Bill said something to Cohn about what to do and how to look so he would not mind the horses.
Bill had seen one season of bull-fights.
“Don’t look at the horses, after the bull hits them,” I said to Brett.
“Watch the charge and see the picador try and keep the bull off, but then don’t look again until the horse is dead if it’s been hit.”
There’s nothing but that horse part that will bother you, and they’re only in for a few minutes with each bull.
Just don’t watch when it’s bad.”
“I don’t think you’ll be bored,” Bill said.
Brett smiled at us.
“That Cohn gets me,” Bill said.
“Do you want to meet Pedro Romero?”
“He’s in room number eight,” Montoya explained.
It was a gloomy room with a little light coming in from the window on the narrow street.
The boy stood very straight and unsmiling in his bull-fighting clothes.
He wore a white linen shirt and the sword-handler finished his sash and stood up and stepped back.
Montoya said something about what great aficionados we were, and that we wanted to wish him luck.
The boy was nineteen years old, alone except for his sword-handler, and the three hangers-on, and the bull-fight was to commence in twenty minutes.
He was standing, straight and handsome and altogether by himself, alone in the room with the hangers-on as we shut the door.
“He’s a fine boy, don’t you think so?”
Montoya asked.
We found the big leather wine-bottle leaning against the wall in my room, took it and the field-glasses, locked the door, and went down-stairs.
Bill and I were very excited about Pedro Romero.
Montoya was sitting about ten places away.
After Romero had killed his first bull Montoya caught my eye and nodded his head.
But there was no comparison with Romero, although neither of his bulls was much.
Several times during the bull-fight I looked up at Mike and Brett and Cohn, with the glasses.
“Let me take the glasses,” Bill said.
Outside the ring, after the bull-fight was over, you could not move in the crowd.
We could not make our way through but had to be moved with the whole thing, slowly, as a glacier, back to town.
We had that disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bull-fight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight.
The dancers were in a crowd, so you did not see the intricate play of the feet.
Finally, we got out of the crowd and made for the café.
The waiter saved chairs for the others, and we each ordered an absinthe and watched the crowd in the square and the dancers.
Bill asked.
In front of us on a clear part of the street a company of boys were dancing.
The balls of the feet touched.
Then the music broke wildly and the step was finished and they were all dancing on up the street.
“I say,” Mike said, “that Romero what’shisname is somebody.
“Oh, isn’t he lovely,” Brett said.
“She couldn’t take her eyes off them,” Mike said.
“I didn’t feel badly at all.”
“Robert Cohn did,” Mike put in.
asked Bill.
“It’s all right,” Bill said, “so long as you weren’t bored.”
“He didn’t look bored,” Mike said.
You weren’t bored, were you, Robert?”
“You mustn’t ever get bored at your first bull-fight, Robert,” Mike said.
“He said Brett was a sadist,” Mike said.
“He said Brett was a sadist just because she has a good, healthy stomach.”
Bill got Mike started on something else than Cohn.
Bill asked Cohn.
I think it’s a wonderful show.”
“I wish they didn’t have the horse part,” Cohn said.
“The bulls were fine,” Cohn said.
“She wants to see the bull-fighters close by,” Mike said.
“He’s a damned good-looking boy,” I said.
Brett sat between Mike and me at the barrera, and Bill and Cohn went up above.
Romero was the whole show.
I do not think Brett saw any other bull-fighter.
I told her about watching the bull, not the horse, when the bulls charged the picadors, and got her to watching the picador place the point of his pic so that she saw what it was all about, so that it became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors.
I had her watch how Romero took the bull away from a fallen horse with his cape, and how he held him with the cape and turned him, smoothly and suavely, never wasting the bull.
She saw how Romero avoided every brusque movement and saved his bulls for the last when he wanted them, not winded and discomposed but smoothly worn down.
She saw how close Romero always worked to the bull, and I pointed out to her the tricks the other bull-fighters used to make it look as though they were working closely.
Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling.
Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time.
Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off.
“And God, what looks,” Brett said.
“I believe, you know, that she’s falling in love with this bull-fighter chap,” Mike said.
“Be a good chap, Jake.
“Drunk all day and spend all their time beating their poor old mothers.”
Romero waved his picadors to their places, then stood, his cape against his chest, looking across the ring to where the bull would come out.
“These bull-fights are hell on one,” Brett said.
“Oh, you’ll get a drink,” Mike said.
The next day Pedro Romero did not fight.
It was Miura bulls, and a very bad bull-fight.
But all day and all night the fiesta kept on.
XVI
The bad weather was coming over the mountains from the sea.
The flags in the square hung wet from the white poles and the banners were wet and hung damp against the front of the houses, and in between the steady drizzle the rain came down and drove every one under the arcades and made pools of water in the square, and the streets wet and dark and deserted; yet the fiesta kept up without any pause.
The covered seats of the bull-ring had been crowded with people sitting out of the rain watching the concourse of Basque and Navarrais dancers and singers, and afterward the Val Carlos dancers in their costumes danced down the street in the rain, the drums sounding hollow and damp, and the chiefs of the bands riding ahead on their big, heavy-footed horses, their costumes wet, the horses’ coats wet in the rain.
I left the crowd in the café and went over to the hotel to get shaved for dinner.
I was shaving in my room when there was a knock on the door.
Montoya walked in.
Montoya smiled his embarrassed smile.
He didn’t say anything.
I finished shaving and put my face down into the bowl and washed it with cold water.
Montoya was standing there looking more embarrassed.
“I’ve just had a message from them at the Grand Hotel that they want Pedro Romero and Marcial Lalanda to come over for coffee to-night after dinner.”
“Well,” I said, “it can’t hurt Marcial any.”
I don’t think they’ll be back to-night.”
Montoya stood embarrassed.
“Don’t give Romero the message,” I said.
“I wanted to ask you because you were an American,” he said.
They start this Grand Hotel business, and in one year they’re through.”
“There’s one American woman down here now that collects bull-fighters.”
“He’s such a fine boy,” said Montoya.
“Won’t you have a drink?”
I went down-stairs and out the door and took a walk around through the arcades around the square.
I looked in at the Iruña for the gang and they were not there, so I walked on around the square and back to the hotel.
Bill was buying shoe-shines for Mike.
Bootblacks opened the street door and each one Bill called over and started to work on Mike.
“Bill’s a yell of laughter,” Mike said.
At the next table was Pedro Romero.
He stood up when I nodded, and asked me to come over and meet a friend.
I met the friend, a Madrid bull-fight critic, a little man with a drawn face.
I told Romero how much I liked his work, and he was very pleased.
We talked Spanish and the critic knew a little French.
I reached to our table for my wine-bottle, but the critic took my arm.
Romero laughed.
“Drink here,” he said in English.
He was very bashful about his English, but he was really very pleased with it, and as we went on talking he brought out words he was not sure of, and asked me about them.
I explained that bull-fight in Spanish was the lidia of a toro.
The Spanish word corrida means in English the running of bulls — the French translation is Course de taureaux.
There is no Spanish word for bull-fight.
Pedro Romero said he had learned a little English in Gibraltar.
The bull-fight critic joked him about the number of Malagueño expressions he used.
He lived in a smaller hotel with the other people who worked for Romero.
He asked me how many times I had seen him in the ring.
I had read the accounts of his two appearances in Madrid in the bull-fight papers, so I was all right.
“But you haven’t seen it yet.
To-morrow, if I get a good bull, I will try and show it to you.”
When he said this he smiled, anxious that neither the bull-fight critic nor I would think he was boasting.
“He doesn’t like my work much.”
Romero turned to me.
“Wait till to-morrow, if a good one comes out.”
the critic asked me.
Haven’t you seen them?”
“They won’t weigh twenty-six arrobas,” said the critic.
“They’ve got bananas for horns,” the critic said.
asked Romero.
“You wouldn’t call them bananas?”
“They’re very short,” said Pedro Romero.
Still, they aren’t bananas.”
“I say, Jake,” Brett called from the next table, “you have deserted us.”
“Tell him that bulls have no balls,” Mike shouted.
Romero looked at me inquiringly.
“You might introduce your friends,” Brett said.
She had not stopped looking at Pedro Romero.
Romero’s face was very brown.
I introduced them all around and they started to sit down, but there was not enough room, so we all moved over to the big table by the wall to have coffee.
Mike ordered a bottle of Fundador and glasses for everybody.
There was a lot of drunken talking.
Pedro Romero was sitting beside Brett and listening to her.
Romero looked up smiling.
“He looks like Villalta,” Romero said, looking at Bill.
“I can’t see it,” the critic said.
“Really,” Romero said in Spanish.
Mike shouted, very drunk, from the other end of the table.
“Jake,” Mike called.
“Pipe down, Mike.”
“Tell him Brett is dying to know how he can get into those pants.”
During this Romero was fingering his glass and talking with Brett.
Brett was talking French and he was talking Spanish and a little English, and laughing.
“Tell him Brett wants to come into — — “ “Oh, pipe down, Mike, for Christ’s sake!”
Romero looked up smiling.
He started to smile at me, then he saw Pedro Romero with a big glass of cognac in his hand, sitting laughing between me and a woman with bare shoulders, at a table full of drunks.
Romero took it very seriously, and we touched glasses and drank it down, I rushing it a little because Mike was trying to make it clear that that was not at all what he was going to drink to.
But it went off all right, and Pedro Romero shook hands with every one and he and the critic went out together.
he’s a lovely boy,” Brett said.
“I started to tell him,” Mike began.
People who are out to have a good time?
For God’s sake don’t be so noisy, Cohn!”
“Oh, cut it out, Mike,” Cohn said.
Why don’t you say something?”
Mike stood shakily and leaned against the table.
Why don’t you see when you’re not wanted, Cohn?
Don’t you think I’m right?”
Don’t you think I’m right?
“Oh, don’t start that again.
Do shove it along, Michael,” Brett said.
“Don’t you think I’m right, Jake?”
Cohn still sat at the table.
“Jake,” Mike said.
“But I won’t go, Mike,” said Cohn.
Mike started toward him around the table.
Cohn stood up and took off his glasses.
He stood waiting, his face sallow, his hands fairly low, proudly and firmly waiting for the assault, ready to do battle for his lady love.
“You can’t hit him here in the hotel.”
I looked back as Mike stumbled up the stairs and saw Cohn putting his glasses on again.
Bill was sitting at the table pouring another glass of Fundador.
Brett was sitting looking straight ahead at nothing.
Outside on the square it had stopped raining and the moon was trying to get through the clouds.
A balloon would start up jerkily, on a great bias, and be torn by the wind or blown against the houses of the square.
Brett came out with Bill and joined us.
We stood in the crowd and watched Don Manuel Orquito, the fireworks king, standing on a little platform, carefully starting the balloons with sticks, standing above the heads of the crowd to launch the balloons off into the wind.
The wind brought them all down, and Don Manuel Orquito’s face was sweaty in the light of his complicated fireworks that fell into the crowd and charged and chased, sputtering and cracking, between the legs of the people.
“They’re razzing Don Manuel,” Bill said.
“Globos illuminados,” Mike said.
“That Don Manuel chap is furious.”
“Globos illuminados,” Mike said.
“Her ladyship wants a drink,” Mike said.
“How you know things,” Brett said.
Inside, the café was crowded and very noisy.
We could not find a table.
There were some English and Americans from Biarritz in sport clothes scattered at the tables.
We had acquired, at some time, a friend of Bill’s from Biarritz.
She was staying with another girl at the Grand Hotel.
The other girl had a headache and had gone to bed.
“Let’s take the bottle and come back later,” Bill said.
“I don’t want to sit here on a night like this.”
“Let’s go and look at the English,” Mike said.
“I love to look at the English.”
“They come from Biarritz,” Mike said, “They come to see the last day of the quaint little Spanish fiesta.”
“I’ll festa them,” Bill said.
Mike turned to Bill’s friend.
“I say, she is a lovely girl.
“I’ll festa them,” Bill said, “What the hell are they doing at this fiesta?”
We’re going to festa the bloody English.
I hate the English.
“I’m going to sit here,” Brett said.
“Oh, don’t!”
Can’t you see Jake and I want to talk?”
“I didn’t,” Cohn said.
Brett asked.
“He doesn’t add much to the gayety.”
He can’t believe it didn’t mean anything.”
Michael’s been lovely, too.”
“It’s been damned hard on Mike.”
“You wouldn’t behave badly.”
Brett looked at me.
“Darling, don’t let’s talk a lot of rot.”
Hasn’t he been pretty?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s been damned hard on Mike, having Cohn around and seeing him with you.”
“Don’t I know it, darling?
Please don’t make me feel any worse than I do.”
Brett was nervous as I had never seen her before.
“Let’s have one more drink of that,” Brett said.
As we came out the door I saw Cohn walk out from under the arcade.
We walked arm in arm down the side street away from the crowd and the lights of the square.
The street was dark and wet, and we walked along it to the fortifications at the edge of town.
We passed wine-shops with light coming out from their doors onto the black, wet street, and sudden bursts of music.
We walked out across the wet grass and onto the stone wall of the fortifications.
Across the plain it was dark, and we could see the mountains.
The wind was high up and took the clouds across the moon.
Behind were the trees and the shadow of the cathedral, and the town silhouetted against the moon.
“Don’t feel bad,” I said.
“I feel like hell,” Brett said.
“Don’t let’s talk.”
There were the lights of a car on the road climbing the mountain.
It was high from the rain, and black and smooth.
Brett stared straight ahead.
In the park it was dark under the trees.
“Because I’m a goner,” Brett said.
I can’t stop things.
“I can’t just stay tight all the time.”
God knows, I’ve never felt such a bitch.”
Together we walked down the gravel path in the park in the dark, under the trees and then out from under the trees and past the gate into the street that led into town.
Pedro Romero was in the café.
He was at a table with other bull-fighters and bull-fight critics.
We sat down at a table half-way down the room.
said Brett, “the things a woman goes through.”
I looked across at the table.
He said something to the other people at his table, and stood up.
I stood up and we shook hands.
“Won’t you have a drink?”
I saw he was watching Brett.
He must have felt it when Brett gave him her hand.
“Algabeno was hurt to-day in Madrid.
He spread his hand flat on the table.
“Look,” he said, “do you see any bulls in my hand?”
“There are thousands of bulls,” Brett said.
She looked lovely.
“Good,” Romero laughed.
“It’s a good hand,” Brett said.
The bulls are my best friends.”
“Always,” he said in English, and laughed.
“So they don’t kill me.”
He looked at her across the table.
It would be very bad, a torero who speaks English.”
asked Brett.
He laughed and tipped his hat down over his eyes and changed the angle of his cigar and the expression of his face.
“Don’t forget it, yet,” Brett said.
“Sit down,” Brett said to him.
He sat down and looked at her across the table.
The hard-eyed people at the bull-fighter table watched me go.
When I came back and looked in the café, twenty minutes later, Brett and Pedro Romero were gone.