FOR WHOM THE BULL TOILS

El Magnified, whose real name was Lorenzo Garza, did not like the look of this bull. This bull did not charge straight and clean, coming into the cape with a sharp whoosh. This bull did not charge at all, the cabron, and this day the crowd did not like Lorenzo Garza but much preferred Armillita, who worked in the decadent style of the imitators of Belmonte and (Lorenzo Garza thought) was not of sufficient worth to exhibit himself mano a mano with El Magnifico in the Plaza de Toros in Mexico City. Lorenzo Garza spat in the sand. Then he drew his sword from underneath the muleta, profiled and lunged at the bull.

The small, black bull backed away just as the sword point reached the spot between its shoulders. The sword flew out and landed in the sand. Lorenzo Garza picked it up. He profiled and lunged again. Again the bull backed away.

A flat seat-cushion, hard like a mattress, sailed down from the crowd and landed somewhere near Lorenzo Garza. "Obscenity," muttered Lorenzo Garza. "I obscenity in the milk of their mattress." He was sweating and cursing and the bull was standing there and the crowd was yelling and the cushions and bottles were falling all about him because the unprintable bull did not want to be killed.

As Lorenzo Garza picked up his sword and for the tenth time prepared to try to kill this bull, there were so many bottles and cushions falling that he could not go on. The next thing Lorenzo Garza knew, he was standing by the barrera and the steers were trying to take the bull away. When the bull would not go with the steers, they brought in a cowboy, but the cowboy with his lasso was no better than Lorenzo Garza had been with the estoque and they brought in the steers again. After what seemed a long while to Lorenzo Garza the bull went away with the steers. The crowd was cheering the bull. "Obscenity," said Lorenzo Garza, and made an appropriate gesture to the crowd. The crowd did not like that, either.

And so, in Mexico City last week, the peculiarly Spanish democracy of the bull ring manifested itself and caused a small, black bull, like Ferdinand, to be sent to spend the rest of its life among the flowers and the cows, and Lorenzo Garza, El Magnifico, to be fined 1,000 pesos for making obscene gestures to the sovereign aficionados of Mexico.

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