CHAPTER FIVE
The bad thing about going to Spain in the spring to see bullfights is the rain. It may rain everywhere you go, especially in May and June, and that is why I prefer the summer months. It rains then too, sometimes, but never yet have I seen it snow in Spain in July and August although it snowed in August of 1929 in some of the mountain summer resorts of Aragon and in Madrid it snowed one year on May 15th and was so cold they called off the bullfights. I remember having gone down that year to Spain thinking spring would be well along, and all day on the train we rode through country as bare and cold as the badlands in November. I could hardly recognize the country as the same I knew in the summer and when I got off the train at night in Madrid snow was blowing outside the station. I had no overcoat and stayed in my room writing in bed or in the nearest café drinking coffee and Domecq brandy. It was too cold to go out for three days and then came lovely spring weather. Madrid is a mountain city with a mountain climate. It has the high cloudless Spanish sky that makes the Italian sky seem sentimental and it has air that is actively pleasurable to breathe. The heat and the cold come and go quickly there. I have watched, on a July night when I could not sleep, the beggars burning newspapers in the street and crouching around the fire to keep warm. Two nights later it was too hot to sleep until the coolness that comes just before morning.
Madrileños love the climate and are proud of these changes. Where can you get such a variation in any other large city? When they ask you at the café how you slept and you say it was too bloody hot to sleep until just before morning they tell you that is the time to sleep. There is always that coolness just before daylight at the hour a man should go to sleep. No matter how hot the night you always get that. It really is a very good climate if you do not mind changes. On hot nights you can go to the Bombilla to sit and drink cider and dance and it is always cool when you stop dancing there in the leafyness of the long plantings of trees where the mist rises from the small river. On cold nights you can drink sherry brandy and go to bed. To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the café. In no other town that I have ever lived in, except Constantinople during the period of the Allied occupation, is there less going to bed for sleeping purposes. It may be based on the theory that you stay up until that cool time that comes just before daylight but that cannot have been the reason at Constant because we always used that cool time to take a ride out along the Bosphorus to see the sun rise. Seeing the sun rise is a fine thing. As a boy, fishing or shooting, or during the war you used to see it rather regularly; then, after the war, I do not remember seeing it until Constantinople. There seeing it rise was the traditional thing to do. In some way it seemed to prove something if, after whatever you had been doing, you went out along the Bosphorus and saw the sun rise. It finished off everything with a healthy outdoor touch. But being away from such things one forgets them. At Kansas City during the Republican convention of 1928 I was driving out to my cousins' house in the country at an hour that I felt was much too late in the evening when I noticed the glow of a tremendous fire. It looked exactly as it did the night the stockyards burned and, while I felt there was little I could do about it, still I felt that I should go. I turned the motor car toward the fire. When the car came to the top of the next hill I saw what it was. It was the sunrise.
The ideal weather to visit Spain and to see bullfights and the time when there are most bullfights to see is in the month of September. The only drawback to that month is that the bullfights are not so good. The bulls are at their best in May and June, still good in July and early in August, but by September the pastures are pretty well burned up by the heat and the bulls lean and out of condition, unless they have been fed up on grain which makes them fat, sleek and glossy and very violent for a few minutes but as unfit for fighting as a boxer that has trained exclusively on potatoes and ale. Then too, in September, the bullfighters are fighting nearly every day and have so many contracts and the prospect of making so much money in a short time, if they are not injured, that they take the minimum of chances. This does not always hold true and if there is a rivalry existing between two fighters they may each put out everything they have, but many times the fights are spoiled by poor bulls in bad condition and by bullfighters who have either been wounded 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.