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Updated: May 18, 2025
The bull watches suspiciously, suddenly charges, and the muleta is passed over its head; the matador does not move a muscle, the bull turns and stands quite motionless. Another charge, another pass. And so he continues, making seven or eight of various sorts, to the growing approbation of the public. At last it is time to kill. With great caution he withdraws the sword; the bull looks warily.
Gradually decoying him along the edge of the ring with the muleta, Frascuelo paused in front of the royal box with his victim, and played him for a while, preparing in the meantime to give him the coup de grâce. This is done when the bull is preparing for the final charge; the espada meeting him with his sword, plunges it hilt deep, just at the back of the head, and severing the dorsal column.
He motions his companions to stand back and goes close to the bull. He is quite alone, with his life in his hands a slender figure, very handsome in the gorgeous costume glittering with fine gold. He arranges the muleta over a little stick, so that it hangs down like a flag and conceals his sword. Then quite solemnly he walks up to the bull, holding the red rag in his left hand.
And so he awaited the charge until the bull was within actual arm's-reach, when with a swift rise from the chair and a turn of his body quick as that of a fencer's supple wrist, he bent and stuck the teeth-held banderilla in the bull's shoulder as he swept past. Now was the time for the kill. El Tigre received his sword, muleta, and cape.
In his right hand is the long Toledan blade la espada, while in his left he holds the muleta, or small red flag about a foot square, which is his weapon of defence, and on the skill of using which his safety depends.
Compare them with the men of to-day, with your Rafael Molina, who allows himself to be gored, playing with a heifer; with your frivolous boys like Frascuelo. I have seen the ring convulsed with laughter as that buffoon strutted across the arena, flirting his muleta as a manola does her skirts, the bewildered bull not knowing what to make of it. It was enough to make Illo turn in his bloody grave.
The muleta is a straight two-foot stick over which the cape is draped, and, held in the matador's left hand, usually is extended well to the right of his body. Thus in an ordinary fight the bull is actually charging the blood-red cape, and not the matador.
But, with Sofia an onlooker, determined to make this the fight of his life, El Tigre tossed aside the muleta, wrapped the crimson cape about his body, and stood alone awaiting the bull's charge, his malleable sword-blade bent slightly downward, sufficiently to give a true thrust behind the shoulder, a down-curve into heart or lungs.
This is the great duel between the single man and the bull. The matador advances, sword in hand, with the muleta, the red cloth for the passes, over his arm.
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