reached to our table for my wine-bottle, but the critic took my arm. Romero laughed.
“Drink here,” he said in English.
He was very bashful about his English, but he was really very pleased with it, and as we went on talking he brought out words he was not sure of, and asked me about them. He was anxious to know the English for Corrida de toros , the exact translation. Bullfight he was suspicious of. I explained that bullfight in Spanish was the lidia of a toro . The Spanish word corrida means in English the running of bulls—the French translation is Course de taureaux . The critic put that in. There is no Spanish word for bullfight.
Pedro Romero said he had learned a little English in Gibraltar. He was born in Ronda. That is not far above Gibraltar. He started bullfighting in Malaga in the bullfighting school there. He had only been at it three years. The bullfight critic joked him about the number of Malagueño expressions he used. He was nineteen years old, he said. His older brother was with him as a banderillero, but he did not live in this hotel. He lived in a smaller hotel with the other people who worked for Romero. He asked me how many times I had seen him in the ring. I told him only three. It was really only two, but I did not want to explain after I had made the mistake.
“Where did you see me the other time? In Madrid?”
“Yes,” I lied. I had read the accounts of his two appearances in Madrid in the bullfight papers, so I was all right.
“The first or the second time?”
“The first.”
“I was very bad,” he said. “The second time I was better. You remember?” He turned to the critic.