Montes the Matador | Page 2

day, but there are just as good men now as ever there
were. When I was in Ronda, four years ago, I went to see Montes. He
lives out of the town in a nice, little house all alone, with one woman to
attend to him, a niece of his, they say. You know he was born in Ronda;
but he would not talk to me; he only looked at me and laughed--the
little, lame, conceited one!"
"You don't believe then, in spite of what they say, that he was better
than Lagartijo or Mazzantini," I asked.
"No, I don't," Frascuelo replied. "Of course, he may have known more
than they do; that wouldn't be difficult, for neither of them knows much.
Mazzantini is a good matador because he's very tall and strong--that's

his advantage. For that, too, the women like him, and when he makes a
mistake and has to try again, he gets forgiven. It wasn't so when I began.
There were aficionados then, and if you made a mistake they began to
jeer, and you were soon pelted out of the ring.
Now the crowd knows nothing and is no longer content to follow those
who do know. Lagartijo? Oh! he's very quick and daring, and the
women and boys like that, too. But he's ignorant: he knows nothing
about a bull. Why, he's been wounded oftener in his five years than I in
my twenty. And that's a pretty good test. Montes must have been clever;
for he's very small and I shouldn't think he was ever very strong, and
then he was lame almost from the beginning, I've heard. I've no doubt
he could teach the business to Mazzantini or Lagartijo, but that's not
saying much... He must have made a lot of money, too, to be able to
live on it ever since. And they didn't pay as high then or even when I
began as they do now."
So much I knew about Montes when, in the spring of 188-, I rode from
Seville to Ronda, fell in love with the place at first sight, and resolved
to stop at Polos' inn for some time. Ronda is built, so to speak, upon an
island tableland high above the sea-level, and is ringed about by still
higher mountain ranges.
It is one of the most peculiar and picturesque places in the world. A
river runs almost all round it; and the sheer cliffs fall in many places
three or four hundred feet, from the tableland to the water, like a wall.
No wonder that the Moors held Ronda after they had lost every other
foot of ground in Spain. Taking Ronda as my headquarters I made
almost daily excursions, chiefly on foot, into the surrounding
mountains. On one of these I heard again of Montes. A peasant with
whom I had been talking and who was showing me a short cut back to
the town, suddenly stopped and said, pointing to a little hut perched on
the mountain-shoulder in front of us, "From that house you can see
Ronda. That's the house where Montes, the great matador, was born,"
he added, evidently with some pride. Then and there the conversation
with Frascuelo came back to my memory, and I made up my mind to
find Montes out and have a talk with him. I went to his house, which

lay just outside the town, next day with the alcalde, who introduced me
to him and then left us. The first sight of the man interested me.
He was short--about five feet three or four, I should think--of well-knit,
muscular frame. He seemed to me to have Moorish blood in him. His
complexion was very dark and tanned; the features clean-cut; the nose
sharp and inquisitive; the nostrils astonishingly mobile; the chin and
jaws square, boney--resolute.
His hair and thick moustache were snowwhite, and this, together with
the deep wrinkles on the forehead and round the eyes and mouth, gave
him an appearance of great age. He seemed to move, too, with extreme
difficulty, his lameness, as he afterwards told me, being complicated
with rheumatism. But when one looked at his eyes, the appearance of
age vanished. They were large and brown, usually inexpressive, or
rather impenetrable, brooding wells of unknown depths. But when
anything excited him, the eyes would suddenly flash to life and become
intensely luminous. The effect was startling. It seemed as if all the vast
vitality of the man had been transmuted into those wonderful gleaming
orbs: they radiated courage, energy, intellect. Then as his mood
changed, the light would die out of the eyes, and the old, wizened,
wrinkled face would settle down into its ordinary, ill-tempered, wearied
expression. There was evidently so much in the man--courage,
melancholy, keen intelligence--that in spite