Death in the Afternoon. Ernest Hemingway

and come back too quickly while still in bad physical condition in order not to lose their contracts or by bullfighters who are worn out after a heavy season. September may be a splendid month if there are new fighters who have only just taken the alternativa and in their first season are giving all they have to try to make names for themselves and get contracts for the next year. If you wanted to, and had a fast enough motor car, you could see a bullfight some place in Spain on every single day in September. I guarantee you would be worn out getting to them without having to fight in them and then you would have some idea of the physical strain a bullfighter goes through toward the end of the season in moving about the country from one place to another.

      Of course there is no law that compels them to fight so often. They fight for money, and if they get tired, worn out and unable to do their best through trying to fill so many contracts it does not help the spectator any who has paid money to see them. But when you yourself are travelling the same way, stopping at the same hotel, seeing the bullfight through the eyes of the bullfighter rather than the spectator who is paying a good price to see the bullfighter only once in a year perhaps, it is hard not to get the bullfighter’s point of view about his engagements. Truly enough, from any point of view, the bullfighter has no right to sign a contract which means that he must leave immediately after the fight is over in a motor car, the capes and muletas folded into baskets that are roped on over the baggage trunks, the sword cases and suitcases piled in the front and the whole cuadrilla packed tightly into the big motor car, a huge headlight on the front, to leave for a run of perhaps five hundred miles, driving all night, and through all the dust and heat of the next day to arrive in the town where they are to fight in the afternoon with barely time to wash off the dust, bathe and shave before dressing for the corrida. In the ring the bullfighter may be tired and stale, and you understand because you know the trip he has just made, having made such a trip yourself, and know that, with a good night’s rest, he will be different the next day, but the spectator who has paid his money to see him on that one day does not forgive, whether he understands or not. He calls it hoggishness for money and if the bullfighter cannot take advantage of a fine bull and get all there is out of him he feels he has been defrauded—and he has been.

      There is another reason for seeing your first and last bullfight in Madrid, for the spring fights there are not during the feria season and the bullfighters are at their best; they are trying for triumphs which will bring them contracts for the various ferias, and, unless they have been in Mexico for the winter with the resultant fatigue, and often staleness, of a double season and the faults they acquire from working with the smaller and less difficult Mexican bulls, they should be in the very best of condition. Madrid is a strange place anyway. I do not believe any one likes it much when he first goes there. It has none of the look that you expect of Spain. It is modern rather than picturesque, no costumes, practically no Cordoban hats, except on the heads of phonies, no castanets, and no disgusting fakes like the gypsy caves at Granada. There is not one local-colored place for tourists in the town. Yet when you get to know it, it is the most Spanish of all cities, the best to live in, the finest people, month in and month out the finest climate and while the other big cities are all very representative of the province they are in, they are either Andalucian, Catalan, Basque, Aragonese, or otherwise provincial. It is in Madrid only that you get the essence. The essence, when it is the essence, can be in a plain glass bottle and you need no fancy labels, nor in Madrid do you need any national costumes; no matter what sort of building they put up, though the building itself may look like Buenos Aires, when you see it against that sky you know it is Madrid. If it had nothing else than the Prado it would be worth spending a month in every spring, if you have money to spend a month in any European capital. But when you can have the Prado and the bullfight season at the same time with El Escorial not two hours to the north and Toledo to the south, a fine road to Avila and a fine road to Segovia, which is no distance from La Granja, it makes you feel very badly, all question of immortality aside, to know that you will have to die and never see it again.

      The Prado is altogether characteristic of Madrid. From the outside it looks as unpicturesque as an American High School building. The pictures are so simply arranged, so easy to see, so well-lighted and with no attempt, with one exception, the Velasquez of the small maids of honor, to theatricalize or set off masterpieces that the tourist looking in the red or blue guide book to see which are the famous ones feels vaguely disappointed. The colors have kept so wonderfully in the dry mountain air and the pictures are so simply hung and easy to see that the tourist feels cheated. I have watched them being puzzled. These cannot be great pictures, the colors are too fresh and they are too simple to see. These pictures are hung as though in a modern dealer’s gallery where they are being shown off to their best and clearest advantage in order to be sold. It cannot be right, the tourist thinks. There must be a catch somewhere. They get their money’s worth in Italian galleries where they cannot find any given picture nor see it any too well if they do find it. That way they feel they are seeing great art. Great art should have great frames and needs either red plush or bad lighting to back it up. It is as though, after having known of certain things only through reading pornographic literature, the tourist should be introduced to an attractive woman quite unclothed with no draperies, no concealments and no conversation and only the plainest of beds. He would probably want a book to aid him or at least a few properties or suggestions. That may be one reason there are so many books on Spain. For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her. France sells better than books on France.

      The longest books on Spain are usually written by Germans who make one intensive visit and then never return. I should say that it is probably a good system, if one has to write books on Spain, to write them as rapidly as possible after a first visit as several visits could only confuse the first impressions and make conclusions much less easy to draw. Also the one-visit books are much surer of everything and are bound to be more popular. Books like Richard Ford’s have never had the popularity of the bedside mysticism of such a book as Virgin Spain. The author of this book once published a piece in a now dead little magazine called S4N explaining how he did his writing. Any historian of letters wanting to explain certain phenomena of our writing can look it up in the files of that magazine. My copy is in Paris or I could quote it in full, but the gist of it was how this writer lay naked in his bed in the night and God sent him things to write, how he “was in touch ecstatically with the plunging and immobile all.” How he was, through the courtesy of God, “everywhere and everywhen.” The italics are his or maybe they are God’s. It didn’t say in the article. After God sent it he wrote it. The result was that unavoidable mysticism of a man who writes a language so badly he cannot make a clear statement, complicated by whatever pseudo-scientific jargon is in style at the moment. God sent him some wonderful stuff about Spain, during his short stay there preparatory to writing of the soul of the country, but it is often nonsense. The whole thing is what, to make a belated entry into the pseudo-scientific field, I call erectile writing. It is well known, or not known, whichever you prefer, that due to a certain congestion or other, trees for example look different to a man in that portentous state and a man who is not. All objects look different. They are slightly larger, more mysterious, and vaguely blurred. Try it yourself. Now there has or had arisen in America a school of writers who (this is old Dr. Hemingstein the great psychiatrist deducing) had, it would seem, by conserving these congestions, sought to make all objects mystic through the slight distortion of vision that unrelieved turgidness presents. The school seems to be passing now, or to have passed, and it was an interesting mechanical experiment while it lasted, and full of pretty phallic images drawn in the manner of sentimental valentines, but it would have amounted to more if only the vision of those writers had been a little more interesting and developed when, say, not so congested.

      I wonder what such a book as Virgin Spain would have been like if written after a few good pieces of that sovereign specific for making a man see clearly. Perhaps it was. We pseudo-scientific coves may be all wrong. But to those inner-searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer, it seems as though, had the brain been cleared sufficiently, by a few good pieces, there might have been no book at all.

      This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes