The bull is the part of the fiesta that controls its health or its sickness. If the public, in the person of the individual paying spectator, demands good bulls, bulls that are big enough to make the fight serious, bulls that are from four to five years old so that they are mature and strong enough to stand up through the three stages of the fight; not necessarily huge bulls, fat bulls, or bulls with giant horns, but simply sound, mature animals; then the breeders will have to keep them on the pastures the proper time before they sell them, and the bullfighters will have to take them as they come and learn to fight them. There may be bad fights during the time that certain incomplete fighters are being eliminated through their failures with these animals, but the fiesta will be healthier in the end. The bull is the main element of the fiesta and it is the bulls that the highest-paid bullfighters are constantly trying to sabotage by having them bred down in size and horn and fought as young as possible. It is only the bullfighters at the top who can impose their conditions. The unsuccessful bullfighters and the apprentices have to take the big bulls that the stars refuse. It is this that accounts for the constantly increasing number of deaths among matadors. It is the moderately talented, the beginners and the failures as artists who are most often killed. They are killed because they attempt, and the public demands that they attempt, to fight the bulls, using the technique that the leaders of bullfighting use. But they are forced to try this technique, if they are to attempt to make a living, on the bulls that the leaders refuse, or that are never offered to them because they would most certainly refuse, as too dangerous and as impossible to perform with brilliantly. This accounts for the constant goring and destruction of many of the most promising novilleros, but it will in the end produce some great bullfighters if the period of apprenticeship is of the proper duration and if the apprentice has good fortune. A young bullfighter who has learned to fight with yearlings and has been carefully guarded in his career and only been allowed to face young bulls may fail with big bulls entirely. It is the difference between shooting at a target and shooting at dangerous game or at an enemy who is shooting at you. But an apprentice who has learned to fight with the yearlings, acquired a good pure style, and then perfects his technique and learns bulls by going through the hell of facing the huge, rejected, sometimes defective, supremely dangerous bulls, that he will have in novilladas if he is not protected by the impresario of the Madrid ring, will have the perfect education for a bullfighter if his enthusiasm and his courage are not gored out of him.

Manuel Mejias, Bienvenida, an old-time bullfighter who trained his three sons to fight with yearlings, making of them such skillful, completely rounded, miniature fighters that as child wonders, working only with calves, the two older boys filled the bull rings of Mexico City, Southern France and South America, while they were barred from appearing in Spain by a child-performer law, launched his eldest son, Manolo, at the age of sixteen, as a full-fledged matador, jumping him from child performer with two-year-olds to full matador rather than have him go through the hell of being a novillero. The father believed, and rightly, that the son would not have to face as big nor as dangerous bulls as a full matador as he would as a novillero; that he would make more money as a full matador, and that if his passion and courage were to be taken out of him working with mature bulls, it was better for him to be as highly paid as possible while he lasted.

The first year the boy was a failure. The transition from working with the immature to the mature bulls; the difference in speed of charge; the responsibility; in short the insertion of constant danger of death into his life robbed him of his style and boyish elegance. He was too visibly solving problems and impressed by his responsibility to be able to give a good afternoon of bulls. But in the second year, with a sound scientific education in bullfighting behind him, a training that started when he was four years old, a complete knowledge of how to execute every suerte in bullfighting, he had solved the problem of the mature bulls and triumphed in Madrid on three successive occasions, triumphed in the Provinces wherever he went, with bulls of all breeds, sizes and age. He showed no fear of bulls because of their size, he understood how to correct their defects and how to dominate them and he has done work with the biggest kind of bulls, work of extreme brilliance, that the leaders of the decadent bullfighters have only been able to do, or would only attempt, with bulls that were deficient in size, strength, age and horns. One thing he did not attempt; to kill properly, but everything else he did well. He was the highly publicized Messiah of the year 1930, but one thing is lacking before he can be judged; his first severe horn wound. All matadors are gored dangerously, painfully and very close to fatally, sooner or later, in their careers, and until a matador has undergone this first severe wound you cannot tell what his permanent value will be. For no matter how much he may keep of his courage you cannot tell how it will affect his reflexes. A man may be as brave as the bull himself to face any danger and still, by his nerves, be unable to face that danger coldly. When a bullfighter can no longer be calm and put danger away after the fight once starts, can no longer see the bull come calmly, without having to nerve himself, then he is through as a successful bullfighter. Nerved-up bullfighting is sad to watch. The spectators do not want it. They pay to see the tragedy of the bull; not the man. Joselito was only gored badly three times and killed fifteen hundred and fifty-seven bulls, but the fourth time he was gored he was killed. Belmonte used to be wounded several times each season and none of his wounds had any effect on his courage, his passion for bullfighting, nor his reflexes. I hope the young Bienvenida boy will never be gored, but if he has been by the time this book comes out and it has made no difference to him, then it will be time to talk about the inheritance of Joselito. Personally I do not believe he will ever be the inheritor of Joselito. Finished as his style is and with all his facility in everything but killing, still, watching him in action, it seems to me to smell of the theatre. Much of his work is tricked, it is a more subtle trick than any we have seen yet and it is a very pretty trick to watch; seemingly very gay and lighthearted. But I fear very much that the first big wound will take away his lightness and that the trickiness will then be more visible. Bienvenida, the father, deflated as badly as Nino de la Palma did after his first horn wound, but in breeding bullfighters perhaps it is the way it is with bulls and the valor may come from the mother, and the type from the father. It is unfriendly enough to predict a coming lack of courage, but the last time I saw it the much advertised Bienvenida smile was very forced, and all I can say is that I do not believe in this particular Messiah. In 1930 Manolo Bienvenida was the local Redeemer of bullfighting, but by 1931 there was a new one: Domingo Lopez Ortega. The critics of Barcelona, where the most money had been spent on his launching, wrote that Ortega began where Belmonte left off; that he combined the best of Belmonte and the best of Joselito, and that in all the history of bullfighting there had never been such a case as Ortega, nor any man who so combined the artist, the dominator and the killer. Ortega is not as impressive as his eulogies. He is thirty-two years old, and has been fighting for several years in the villages of Castilla, especially those around Toledo. He comes from a town of less than five hundred people, in the dry country between Toledo and Aranjuez, called Borox, and his nickname is the Hayseed of Borox. In the fall of 1930 he had a good afternoon in the second-rate Madrid ring of Tetuan de las Vitorias which was then directed and promoted by Domingo Gonzales, called Dominguin, a former matador. Dominguin took him to Barcelona and rented the ring there after the season closed to give a fight featuring Ortega and a Mexican fighter called Carnicerito de Mexico. Fighting young bulls, they both had good days and filled the Barcelona ring three times in succession. Skillfully built up by Dominguin during the winter months with an elaborate press campaign and ballyhoo, Ortega was made a full matador at the opening of the 1931 season in Barcelona. I arrived in Spain immediately after the revolution and found him ranking with politics as a café topic. He had not yet fought in Madrid but every night the Madrid papers published notices of his triumphs in the provinces. Dominguin was spending much money on his publicity and Ortega cut ears and tails each night in all the evening papers. The nearest he had fought to Madrid was in Toledo and I found good aficionados who had seen him there did not agree in their judgments of him. All agreed he had certain details that were well executed but the most intelligent aficionados said they were not convinced by his work. On the 30th of May, Sidney Franklin, who had just come to Madrid after a Mexican campaign, and I went out together to Aranjuez to see the great phenomenon. He was lousy. Marcial Lalanda made a fool of him as did Vicente Barrera.