During the days that followed, Father Agamedes stocked up his already well-stocked larder with the gratitude of his parishioners, It’s not very much, I’m afraid, but it comes from the heart, this is for all you did for us, a pint of beans, a little bag of maize, a laying hen, a bottle of olive oil, three drops of blood.
OLÉ. ON THE ORDERS of the president of the bullring, the constable enters the arena, inspects the locks on the corrals, counts the number of halters, decides that there are enough, takes a turn about the arena to get a good view of the whole thing, the tiered benches, the boxes, the bandstand, the seats in the shade and in the sun, sniffs the odor of fresh dung on the air and says, They can come in now. The doors are opened and the bulls enter, these are the bulls that will be fought today according to the rules and precepts of the art, taunted with a cape, stuck with darts, beaten with sticks and finally crowned with the hilt of the sword, whose point and blade pierce my heart, olé. They are brought in by the guards, they come from near and far, from places we have already mentioned, but not, as chance would have it, from Monte Lavre, and gradually the ring fills up, not the benches, the very idea, no, the audience is composed entirely of guards, who stand around, in the shade where possible, their rifles at the ready, well, they don’t feel like men without them. The ring starts filling up with dark cattle, captured from leagues around in heroic combat, with the guards on the attack, at the charge, there they are bearing down on those beastly strikers, those lions of the sickle, those men of sorrows, These are the captives from the battle, and at your feet, lord, we lay the flags and cannon seized from the enemy, see how red they are, but not as red as they were at the beginning of the war because, meanwhile, we have heaped dust and spit upon them, you can hang them in the museum or in the regimental chapel where the recruits kneel, waiting to have revealed to them the mystical fate of being a guard, but perhaps it would be preferable, lord, to burn them, because the sight of them offends the feelings you taught us to have, and we want no other feelings. The constable, with the benign authorization of the president of the bullring, had ordered the arena to be scattered with straw, so that the men, because they are men not lions and have neglected to bring their sickles with them, can sit or lie down, grouped more or less according to their village of origin, such gregarious instincts are hard to give up, but there are a few others, too, who go from group to group, offering a word here, a hand on the shoulder there, a glance or a discreet gesture, so that everything, as far as possible, is safe and clear, and now it’s just a matter of waiting.
The guards are keeping watch from their viewing platform, and one of them says to the other, with a hearty, military laugh, It’s like the monkey house at the zoo, all we need are some nuts to throw to them, that would be funny, watching the monkeys scrabbling for food. This implies that some of the guards have traveled, that they have visited a zoo, practiced the rules of summary observation and of expeditious classification, and if they say that the men of sorrow herded into the bullring in Montemor are monkeys, who are we to contradict them, especially when they are pointing their riffles in our direction, we say riffle to provide a sort of half rhyme with pistol, although piffle would be funnier, and there’s plenty of that about. The men talk to pass the time or to prevent it from passing, it’s a way of putting your hand on your heart and saying, Don’t go forward, don’t move, if you take another step, you’ll crush me, what did I ever do to you.
