Some of them had forgotten, or maybe had never known, that a sword would be behind the red cape, and they began streaming out of Madrid's Plaza de Toros midway through the first fight. It pitted a young matador, one of the novilleros—a novice—against a white bull that warm Sunday night, and the blood ran dark out of its back and shoulders. Black bulls can mask the gore flooding out of them until it drips off their bellies and onto the bullring's sand floor, but that white bull was more frank in its stains and its suffering. That white bull made it impossible for the spectators, especially the many tourists, to pretend that they were watching anything but a long, slow death, and that was too much truth for some to bear. First, they covered their eyes with their programs, and then they bolted from their stone seats, gasping for the fresher air outside, these burned romantics, so beautiful and optimistic and naive, now feeling betrayed by a place they thought they knew.
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