The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

At this moment the picador got to his feet, walked over to the priests’ table and stood, gray-headed and hawk-faced, staring at them and smiling.

“A torero,” said one priest to the other.

“And a good one,” said the picador and walked out of the dining room, gray-jacketed, trim-waisted, bow- legged, in tight breeches over his high-heeled cattlemen’s boots that clicked on the floor as he swaggered quite steadily, smiling to himself. He lived in a small, tight, professional world of personal efficiency, nightly alcoholic triumph, and insolence. Now he lit a cigar and tilting his hat at an angle in the hallway went out to the cafe.

The priests left immediately after the picador, hurriedly conscious of being the last people in the dining room, and there was no one in the room now but Paco and the middle-aged waiter. They cleared the tables and carried the bottles into the kitchen.

In the kitchen was the boy who washed the dishes. He was three years older than Paco and was very cynical and bitter.

“Take this,” the middle-aged waiter said, and poured out a glass of the Valdepenas and handed it to him.

“Why not?” the boy took the glass.

“Tu, Paco?” the older waiter asked.

“Thank you,” said Paco. The three of them drank.

“I will be going,” said the middle-aged waiter.

“Good night,” they told him.

He went out and they were alone. Paco took a napkin one of the priests had used and standing straight, his heels planted, lowered the napkin and with head following the movement, swung his arms in the motion of a slow sweeping veronica. He turned, and advancing his right foot slightly, made the second pass, gained a little terrain on the imaginary bull and made a third pass, slow, perfectly timed and suave, then gathered the napkin to his waist and swung his hips away from the bull in a media- veronica.

The dishwasher, whose name was Enrique, watched him critically and sneeringly.

“How is the bull?” he said.

“Very brave,” said Paco. “Look.”

Standing slim and straight he made four more perfect passes, smooth, elegant and graceful.

“And the bull?” asked Enrique standing against the sink, holding his wine glass and wearing his apron.

“Still has lots of gas,” said Paco.

“You make me sick,” said Enrique.

“Why?”

“Look.”

Enrique removed his apron and citing the imaginary bull he sculptured four perfect, languid gypsy veronicas and ended up with a rebolera that made the apron swing in a stiff arc past the bull’s nose as he walked away from him.

“Look at that,” he said. “And I wash dishes.”

“Why?”

“Fear,” said Enrique. “Miedo. The same fear you would have in a ring with a bull.”

“No,” said Paco. “I wouldn’t be afraid.”

“Leche!” said Enrique. “Every one is afraid. But a torero can control his fear so that he can work the bull. I went in an amateur fight and I was so afraid I couldn’t keep from running. Every one thought it was very funny. So would you be afraid. If it wasn’t for fear every bootblack in Spain would be a bullfighter. You, a country boy, would be frightened worse than I was.”

“No,” said Paco.

He had done it too many times in his imagination. Too many times he had seen the horns, seen the bull’s wet muzzle, the ear twitching, then the head go down and the charge, the hoofs thudding and the hot bull pass him as he swung the cape, to re-charge as he swung the cape again, then again, and again, and again, to end winding the bull around him in his great media-veronica, and walk swingingly away, with bull hairs caught in the gold ornaments of his jacket from the close passes; the bull standing hypnotized and the crowd applauding. No, he would not be afraid. Others, yes. Not he. He knew he would not be afraid. Even if he ever was afraid he knew that he could do it anyway. He had confidence. “I wouldn’t be afraid,” he said.

Enrique said, “Leche,” again.

Then he said, “If we should try it?”

“How?”

“Look,” said Enrique. “You think of the bull but you do not think of the horns. The bull has such force that the horns rip like a knife, they stab like a bayonet, and they kill like a club. Look,” he opened a table drawer and took out two meat knives. “I will bind these to the legs of a chair. Then I will play bull for you with the chair held before my head. The knives are the horns. If you make those passes then they mean something.”

“Lend me your apron,” said Paco. “We’ll do it in the dining room.”

“No,” said Enrique, suddenly not bitter. “Don’t do it, Paco.”

“Yes,” said Paco. “I’m not afraid.”

“You will be when you see the knives come.”

“We’ll see,” said Paco. “Give me the apron.”

At this time, while Enrique was binding the two heavy-bladed razor-sharp meat knives fast to the legs of the chair with two soiled napkins holding the half of each knife, wrapping them tight and then knotting them, the two chambermaids, Paco’s sisters, were on their way to the cinema to see Greta Garbo in Anna Christie. Of the two priests, one was sitting in his underwear reading his breviary and the other was wearing a nightshirt and saying the rosary. All the bullfighters except the one who was ill had made their evening appearance at the Cafe Fornos, where the big, dark-haired picador was playing billiards, the short, serious matador was sitting at a crowded table before a coffee and milk, along with the middle-aged banderillero and other serious workmen.

The drinking, gray-headed picador was sitting with a glass of cazalas brandy before him staring with pleasure at a table where the matador whose courage was gone sat with another matador who had renounced the sword to become a banderillero again, and two very houseworn- looking prostitutes.

The auctioneer stood on the street corner talking with friends. The tall waiter was at the Anarcho-syndicalist meeting waiting for an opportunity to speak. The middle-aged waiter was seated on the terrace of the Cafe Alvarez drinking a small beer. The woman who owned the Luarca was already asleep in her bed, where she lay on her back with the bolster between her legs; big, fat, honest, clean, easy-going, very religious and never having ceased to miss or pray daily for her husband, dead, now, twenty years. In his room, alone, the matador who was ill lay face down on his bed with his mouth against a handkerchief.

Now, in the deserted dining room, Enrique tied the last knot in the napkins that bound the knives to the chair legs and lifted the chair. He pointed the legs with the knives on them forward and held the chair over his head with the two knives pointing straight ahead, one on each side of his head.

“It’s heavy,” he said. “Look, Paco. It is very dangerous. Don’t do it.” He was sweating.

Paco stood facing him, holding the apron spread, holding a fold of it bunched in each hand, thumbs up, first finger down, spread to catch the eye of the bull.

“Charge straight,” he said. “Turn like a bull. Charge as many times as you want.”

“How will you know when to cut the pass?” asked Enrique. “It’s better to do three and then a media.”

“All right,” said Paco. “But come straight. Huh, torito! Come on, little bull!”

Running with head down Enrique came toward him and Paco swung the apron just ahead of the knife blade as it passed close in front of his belly and as it went by it was, to him, the real horn, white-tipped, black, smooth, and as Enrique passed him and turned to rush again it was the hot, blood-flanked mass of the bull that thudded by, then turned like a cat and came again as he swung the cape slowly. Then the bull turned and came again and, as he watched the onrushing point, he stepped his left foot two inches too far forward and the knife did not pass, but had