immortal hero of Byron's poem, is one of these. Casanova, the Italian rake, is another. The third should be El Gallo.
El Gallo was a man with three testicles. There are many who doubted this claimed duplication of those necessary glands of reproduction. In fact, during his lifetime, except to those women who experienced the pleasure derived from his excessive ballocks, and their name was legion, his three balls were more myth than fact. But when El Gallo was finally brought low by a bull, when he was lying on his deathbed in the Plaza de los Toros infirmary, then it was that the medical men and El Gallo's retinue of picadors and hangers-on were convinced that the myth was, in reality, fact. For they saw, dangling between his legs, an enormous sac, a pouch that might have been mistaken as being diseased but which was really filled with three full-healthed testicles that still gave indication of their owner's sexual powers, although he lay on his hospital pallet in death. But I get too far ahead of the story.
Let us go back to the time when La Tarantula first met this man of fucking prodigalities, this paragon of cocksmen.
It was a strange fact, but neither had ever seen each other until the time of their first meeting. While El Gallo was performing in Barcelona, La Tarantula was dancing at the cafe in Madrid. Or if she was performing in Seville, El Gallo was proving his mettle in Zaragosa.
So it went during the earlier part of their mutual success in their particular arts. Until they met in the cafe on the famous Calle de la Serpiente in Seville.
It was Saturday night. The day had been a muggy moist one. Few of the regular cafe hounds were about. They were resting in some shaded nook secluded from the rays of the burning sun, sleeping in siesta. The waiters took their orders for wine listlessly, and just as listlessly returned, shuffling and yawning and wondering when the night would come so that they, too, could go home to sleep. High up in the wooden rafters of the smoked ceiling bluebottle flies droned. The guitarists strummed their instruments listlessly, almost automatically, the fire of the music lost in the lethargic, languid drowsiness of the atmosphere.
The singers came out onto the stage at one end of the great room, mopped their brows, and sang their ballads and songs. None was interested enough to applaud them. Only Beppo, the clown, got a rise out of the few who comprised the audience, when he drew his handkerchief across his forehead and then wrung almost a pint of water from the sponge concealed in his kerchief. Even the fiery matadors on the posters that emblazoned the walls seemed to have lost their customary vivacity, for their bright swords did not gleam as of old and their lances drooped like spent penises.
Suddenly a change came over the place. It dropped its listless drowsiness and became alive. For into the cafe had come none other than El Gallo himself, the great matador who was scheduled to appear tomorrow afternoon at the Plaza de los Toros. With him appeared a dozen other men, his picadors and banderilleros together with the usual hangers-on who dog the footsteps of every important personage, especially those who are as free with their money as was El Gallo.
Immediately, the waiters became galvanized into action. The bluebottle flies came down from the rafters to the tables where they glittered among the gold ornaments of the matador's habiliments. The guitarists' hands moved more quickly and their music took a spurt into the strains of the gay, intoxicating bars that usually introduced the entrance of La Tarantula. And Don Balthazar, the proprietor of the cafe, walked back to the dressing room of his star attraction, for whom he was paying dearly, and pleaded with her to put her best into her next dance. 'He is there!' he puffed, 'he is there!'
'He?' La Tarantula asked, 'who is he?'
'He!' Don Balthazar puffed again, 'you do not know who HE is? why! you only have to say HE is here and all know that HE is none other than EL GALLO, himself!'
'But what has he to do with me?' La Tarantula insisted, shrugging her shapely shoulders and adjusting a stray curl of black hair under her mantilla.
'It has to do with me!' the little fat man yowled. 'When El Gallo is here, that means that business is here! Come! you are on next! They are playing your entrance song!' And, without another word, he flounced out again, bound for the kitchen and the cellar for more orders in regard to the entrance of El Gallo.
In her dressing room, La Tarantula smiled to herself as her maid touched her up for the last time. 'How do I look?' she asked of the maid as she stared absent-mindedly into the mirror, her mind straying elsewhere.
The maid stood back and clasped her hands together in an attitude of adoration. All she could say was 'Adorable!' Then changing suddenly,
'but there is the repeat for your entrance, senora!'
'They can wait!' her mistress said, her mind still afield.
In the cafe, the newcomers were banging on their tables, demanding the entrance of the dancer. The waiters had already brought their cargoes of wine bottles, which had been unceremoniously tipped into the throats of the company. El Gallo was seated a bit apart from the rest of the group. He was toying idly with a thin-shelled glass of pure white liquid, aguardiente. He drank nothing else. He liked the absinthe-like odour. But, better still, he liked the jolt that went through his system after every drink. For physical jolts to him now were few and far between. Life had paled. The zest was diminishing.
The killing of bulls, once so physically vivifying, had lost its savour.
Even women had become flat and uninviting. Liquor, fiery liquor like aguardiente was all that was left for him. On the morrow, there would be thousands to cry his name, there would be bulls to kill. But something would be missing. And, as he mused so, separated from his companions, El Gallo twirled his glass and stared into its depths for a hint of some future interest in life. He did not hear the orchestra take a sudden spurt. He did not hear the applause that came with it. But, in the rotund belly of his drinking glass, he saw the reflection of a divine figure enter on the stage. For the moment he thought that it was only a mirage, that it was only a figure conjured up out of the depths of his imagination, that he was seeing only that which he wanted to see. But no! the figure in the glass remained. It looked alive. Then he became conscious of the sudden reactivation of his surroundings. He heard the applause. He heard the cries of 'Ohe La Tarantula nina ohe!' He heard the quick rhythm of the twanging strings under the nimble flying fingers of the musicians. Convinced now that there was something for him to see, El Gallo half turned in his chair. In his line of vision on the stage he saw something that made a catch settle in his throat. His eyes widened. A feeling came to him that he hadn't experienced for twenty years. Twenty years ago, when he had first seen a woman's naked body, the body of his mother's maid, he had throbbed in the first stirrings of an adolescent's passion. And now, after twenty years, after twenty years of constant fucking, he found himself reacting like a young lad viewing his first nude woman.
The glass in his hand slipped from his fingers and crashed to the floor.
All turned to El Gallo. They saw him staring with a frank unmistakable gaze at the dancer on the stage. Zurito, the favourite picador of the matador, edged over to his master. 'She is bad medicine, El Gallo!' he whispered to him.
'Who is she?' El Gallo demanded hoarsely.
'La Tarantula!' the picador replied. 'She is not for us, master. 'Tis said she kills those she loves. Men shy away from her!'
'Not El Gallo!' the matador replied grimly. Already the thrill of women was beginning to evidence itself in him. The jaded flagging fatigue seemed to be dissipating. A feeling of the expectancy of joy replaced it. He recalled the first time he had sensed that emotion. His first professional bullfight. His first after his schooling at the novilladas. The short wait for the first bull. The cries of the crowd who knew that it was his first bull. The overpowering happiness of expectancy. That was what he felt recreated in him again. Madre de Dios! What a woman this was going to be! Already he had but to look at her and his senses reeled in a fever. And, what was more, there was her name and her reputation. La Tarantula. The killer of men. Was life going to hold something for him once again? He settled himself deeply into his chair, his eyes glued to the dancing woman on the stage, his heart beating time with the barbaric music.
On the stage La Tarantula began her dance. The guitarist first gave a startling introduction of pizzicati on his strings. Then she stamped with her little feet. But it became more a dance of the body than the feet.
And, more to the rhythm of the castanets, La Tarantula moved heir body languidly like a lily in a pool, her arms shifting sinuously like live snakes. Her whole body shook in the ecstasy of her dance as wave after wave of emotion, of pure feeling swept over her limbs, her hips all tremulous with a subdued fire. Her head lay cocked on
