Toro! Toro! Read Free

didn’tmind. The other calves would be milling around but I wouldn’t let them have even a taste. My hand was for Paco only. Once or twice his nurse mother came wandering over and shook her horns at me, but I always kept on my side of the fence and she soon lost interest.
    I’d spend all the hours I could on that fence just talking to Paco, scratching his head and having my hand sucked off. Maria was forever fearful of discovery, and kept badgering me to come away. But luckily, Father and Mother never did find out about our secret meetings, not then, not ever.
    Paco grew fast in his first year. He grew horns where there had been none, and often played at fighting with the other yearlings, mock battles which he always won. Sleek and fast, Father had already picked him out as the finest and noblest bull calf in the herd. Sometimes I would help Father move the herd to fresh pastures. We did it on horseback, with the brown and white Cabrestro bullocks in amongst them to gentle them as we drove them. I always rode Chica, the oldest, steadiest mare on the farm. She could have done it all with her eyes closed, I expect. Even then, when the bulls were running all together, you could pick out Paco easily. He would be at the front with the big bulls, the five-year-olds, the giants. I was so proud of him, but never spoke of him to anyone but Maria. She did warn me over and over again not to become too fond of him. I remember that. “All animals have to die, Antonito,” she told me. “And you’ll only be sad.” But I was six years old, and death meant nothing to me. I never gave it a thought. I had some shadowy understanding that it happened, but it was of no interest to me, because it happened to old people, old animals. Paco was young. I was young. So I paid my sister’s words ofvery little heed. warning
    The dawning of the terrible truth was slow at first. I was walking back home from school one day when I came across some bigger boys hanging about by the well in Sauceda. A couple of them were playing at something in the street, egged on by the others. It was a game I hadn’t seen before, so I stopped to watch.
    One of the boys, my cousin Vittorio, was pushing a strange-looking contraption. It had a single wheel and two handles, like a wheelbarrow. However, the wheel did not push a barrow but a crude wooden frame with horns sticking out of the front, bull’s horns. It was a simulated bullfight – I could see that now. I’d seen pictures in the village café of matadors with their capes, of bulls charging them. I’d alwaysthought of it as some kind of dance. Vittorio was running at José with the bull machine, and José was sidestepping neatly at the last moment, so that the horns passed him by and charged only into his swirling crimson cape. And each time they all cried:
“Ole! Ole!”
It was balletic, mesmerizing, and I stayed for some while in the background, completely entranced.
    Then José had a stick in his hand, and the chant went up: “Kill the bull! Kill the bull! Stick it in him! Stick it in him!”
    Suddenly, in my mind, it was Paco charging the cape and the stick was a sword flashing in the sun, and there was blood in the dust and they were all cheering and laughing and clapping. I turned away and ran all the way home, the tears pouring down my cheeks. I would ask Maria. Maria would tell me itwas all right, that this was not what really happened in the corrida, that it was just a game, just a dance.
    I found her collecting the eggs. “It’s a dancing game, isn’t it?” I cried. “They don’t really kill the bulls. Tell me they don’t.”
    And I told her everything I had seen. She kissed away my tears, and did her very best to reassure me. “It’s all right, Antonito,” she said. “Like you say. It’s a game, just a dancing game.”
    “And will Paco have to play it?” I asked.
    “I expect so,” she said. “But anyway, he won’t know much about it. Animals don’t think like we do, Antonito.