Banderilleros are sometimes lean, brown, young, brave, skillful and confident; more of a man than their matador, perhaps deceiving him with his mistress, making what seems to them a good living; enjoying the life; other times they are respectable fathers of families, wise about bulls, fat but still fast on their feet, small business men with the bulls as their business; other times they are tough, unintelligent, but brave and capable, lasting like ballplayers, as long as their legs hold out; others may be brave but unskillful, eking out a living, or they may be old and intelligent but with their legs gone, sought out by young fighters for their authority in the ring and their skill at placing bulls correctly.

Blanquet was a very small man, very serious and honorable, with a Roman nose and an almost gray face, who had the greatest intelligence of the bullfight I have ever seen and a cape that seemed magic in correcting the faults of a bull. He was the confidential peon of Joselito, Granero and Litri, all of whom were killed by bulls and to none of whom his cape, so providential always when needed, was of any use on the days when they were killed. Blanquet himself died of a heart attack coming on in a hotel room after he had left the ring and before he had changed his clothes to bathe.

Of the banderilleros working now, the one with the most style with the sticks is probably Magritas. There is no one with the cape who has the style Blanquet had. He handled the cape with one hand with the same sort of delicacy that Rafael El Gallo did, but with the skillful, self-effacing modesty of a peon. It was watching the interest and activities of Blanquet at moments when nothing particular seemed to be happening that I learned the profundity of unseen detail in the fighting of any single bull.

Do you want conversation? What about? Something about painting? Something to please Mr. Huxley? Something to make the book worthwhile? All right, this is the end of a chapter, we can put it in. Well, when Julius Meier-Graefe, the German critic, came to Spain he wanted to see the Goyas and Velasquezes to have publishable ecstasies about them, but he liked the Grecos better. He was not content to like Greco better; he had to like him alone, so he wrote a book proving what poor painters Goya and Velasquez were in order to exalt Greco, and the yardstick that he chose to judge these painters by was their respective paintings of the crucifixion of Our Lord.

Now it would be hard to do anything stupider than this because of the three only Greco believed in Our Lord or took any interest in his crucifixion. You can only judge a painter by the way he paints the things he believes in or cares for and the things he hates; and to judge Velasquez, who believed in costume, and in the importance of painting as painting, by a portrait of a nearly naked man on a cross who had been painted, Velasquez must have felt, very satisfactorily in the same position before, and in whom Velasquez took no interest at all, is not intelligent.

Goya was like Stendhal; the sight of a priest could stimulate either of those good anti-clericals into a rage of production. Goya's crucifixion is a cynically romantic, wooden oleograph that could serve as a poster for the announcement of crucifixions in the manner of bullfight posters. A crucifixion of six carefully selected Christs will take place at ñ\e o'clock in the Monumental Golgotha of Madrid, government permission having been obtained. The following well-known, accredited and notable crucifiers will officiate, each accompanied by his cuadrilla of nailers, hammerers, cross-raisers and spade-men, etc.

Greco liked to paint religious pictures because he was very evidently religious and because his incomparable art was not then limited to accurate reproducing of the faces of the noblemen who were his sitters for portraits and he could go as far into his other world as he wanted and, consciously or unconsciously, paint saints, apostles, Christs and Virgins with the androgynous faces and forms that filled his imagination.

One time in Paris I was talking to a girl who was writing a fictionalized life of El Greco and I said to her, "Do you make him a maricón?"

"No," she said. "Why should I?"

"Did you ever look at the pictures?"

"Yes, of course."

"Did you ever see more classic examples anywhere than he painted? Do you think that was all accident or do you think all those citizens were queer? The only saint I know who is universally represented as built that way is San Sebastian. Greco made them all that way. Look at the pictures. Don't take my word for it."

"I hadn't thought of that."

"Think it over," I said, "if you are writing a life of him."

"It's too late now," she said. "The book is done."

Velasquez believed in painting in costume, in dogs, in dwarfs, and in painting again. Goya did not believe in costume but he did believe in blacks and in grays, in dust and in light, in high places rising from plains, in the country around Madrid, in movement, in his own cojones, in painting, in etching, and in what he had seen, felt, touched, handled, smelled, enjoyed, drunk, mounted, suffered, spewed-up, lain-with, suspected, observed, loved, hated, lusted, feared, detested, admired, loathed, and destroyed. Naturally no painter has been able to paint all that but he tried. El Greco believed in the city of Toledo, in its location and construction, in some of the people who lived in it, in blues, grays, greens and yellows, in reds, in the holy ghost, in the communion and fellowship of saints, in painting, in life after death and death after life and in fairies. If he was one he should redeem, for the tribe, the prissy exhibitionistic, aunt-like, withered old maid moral arrogance of a Gide; the lazy, conceited debauchery of a Wilde who betrayed a generation; the nasty, sentimental pawing of humanity of a Whitman and all the mincing gentry. Viva El Greco El Rey de los Maricónes.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The ability of a bullfighter with the muleta is what, in the end, determines his ranking in the profession, for it is the most difficult of all the phases of modern bullfighting to dominate and is the part of the bullfight where the genius of a matador has greatest latitude for expression. It is with the muleta that a reputation is made and it is by the extent of this ability to give a complete, imaginative, artistic and emotional performance with the muleta, granted that he has a good bull, that a bullfighter is paid much or little. To draw a brave bull in Madrid, have him come in ideal condition to the final act and then, through a limited repertoire, not be able to take advantage of his bravery and nobility to make a brilliant faena finishes a bullfighter's chance of a successful career. For bullfighters are now categoried, classed and paid, strangely enough, not by what they actually do, for the bull may upset their performance, they themselves may be ill, they may not be altogether recovered from a horn wound, or they may simply have off-days; but by what they are capable of doing under most favorable conditions. If the spectators know the matador is capable of executing a complete, consecutive series of passes with the muleta in which there will be valor, art, understanding and, above all, beauty and great emotion, they will put up with mediocre work, cowardly work, disastrous work because they have the hope sooner or later of seeing the complete faena; the faena that takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding, that gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy; moving all the people in the ring together and increasing in emotional intensity as it proceeds, carrying the bullfighter with it, he playing on the crowd through the bull and being moved as it responds in a growing ecstasy of ordered, formal, passionate, increasing disregard for death that leaves you, when it is over, and the death administered to the animal that has made it possible, as empty, as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you.