Zurito
The retired picador Manuel Garcia asks for one last favour in 'The Undefeated' — a big man with enormous hands.
To get Manuel Garcia out of the bullring before it kills him. He asks him why he does not cut off his coleta, the bullfighter's pigtail, and says he will cut it off himself.
The book
At a glance
- A picador, and by Manuel Garcia's estimate the best living one
- Zurito; Manos to Manuel, short for the nickname Manosduros
- Older than Manuel — ten years, Manuel says — and retired from riding
- Not stated; he earns more for one night's work than Manuel's whole fee for the fight
- The only steady one in the corral, with its eye uncovered and its ears freed
- He rides, and Manuel cuts off the pigtail if the night goes badly
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeZurito is the picador in 'The Undefeated', one of the fourteen stories in Men Without Women, the 1927 collection by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. A picador rides into the bullring on a padded horse and drives a long lance into the muscle above the bull's shoulders, which weakens the animal and brings its head down for the matador. Manuel Garcia, an aging matador, thinks him the best picador living. He has stopped riding.
Manuel finds him in a Madrid café, reading a newspaper across the table from where he has fallen asleep, and asks him to lance the two bulls at a cheap night fight. Zurito says no twice, and then makes an offer instead: he will ride, if Manuel agrees to retire when the night goes badly. He is a big man with a heavy brown face, older than Manuel, and he does not enjoy any of this.
How the book draws them
- The hands he is named forZurito's nickname is Manosduros, and Manuel shortens it to Manos, the Spanish word for hands. He never hears it without thinking of his own enormous ones, and when Manuel uses it in the café he puts them out on the table self-consciously.
- The condition he attachesHe refuses the favour twice, says he is too old and is not pic-ing any more, and then leans forward across the table and offers the deal: he will pic, and if Manuel does not go big the next night, Manuel quits. “You got to quit,” he says. “No monkey business. You got to cut the coleta.” Manuel agrees and privately does not believe a word of it.
- He will not watch his friend fightManuel tells him reproachfully that he should have seen him before the goring. “I don't want to see you,” Zurito says. “It makes me nervous.”
- The one steady horse in the corralBefore the fight he tries his horse in the dark, wheeling it to see that it answers the bit and the spurs. He has taken the bandage off its right eye and cut the strings that tied its ears shut, and he means to ride it through the whole night. Sitting in the saddle waiting for the parade, he has already worked through the entire fight in his head. The other picadors talk on both sides of him and he does not hear them.
- What he does with the lanceWhen the bull charges the horse, Zurito sinks the point into the hump of muscle above its shoulder, leans his whole weight on the shaft, hauls the horse into the air with his left hand and swings it clear so the horns pass underneath. A man in the crowd slaps the newspaper critic on the back to make him look. The bull comes out of it with blood running smooth and steady down its black shoulder.
- What he says about the two men working the bullWatching from the barrier with one of Retana's men, he calls the young banderillero Fuentes good and says he is standing too close. When the same man says of Manuel that there is a great bull-fighter, Zurito answers, “No, he’s not,” and lets it stand. He says it without any particular unkindness, in the middle of watching him work.
Manuel is gored and carried to the infirmary. Zurito comes heavily up the stairs in his picador clothes, without his hat, and stands over the table while the doctor works. He asks Retana for the scissors and holds them up so Manuel can see what they are for. Manuel sits up and tells him he could not do a thing like that, and Zurito puts them down at once: he was joking, he says, he will not do it. Retana shrugs and leaves. Zurito stays, tells Manuel he was going great, and is still standing there, awkwardly, when the anaesthetic goes on.