“But he’s not aficionado like you are.”
Afición means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bullfights. All the good bullfighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with afición stayed there. The commercial bullfighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back. The good ones came each year. In Montoya’s room were their photographs. The photographs were dedicated to Juanito Montoya or to his sister. The photographs of bullfighters Montoya had really believed in were framed. Photographs of bullfighters who had been without afición Montoya kept in a drawer of his desk. They often had the most flattering inscriptions. But they did not mean anything. One day Montoya took them all out and dropped them in the wastebasket. He did not want them around.
We often talked about bulls and bullfighters. I had stopped at the Montoya for several years. We never talked for very long at a time. It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each felt. Men would come in from distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about bulls. These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them. They were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have afición . He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had afición , and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a “ Buen hombre. ” But nearly always there was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.
Montoya could forgive anything of a bullfighter who had afición . He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts