En Petit Comité

Hemingway on San Sebastian

"If you have plenty of money, want not to see but to have seen a bullfight and plan no matter whether you like it or not to leave after the first bull, buy a barrera seat so that someone who has never had enough money to sit in a barrera can make a quick rush from above and occupy your expensive seat as you go taking your pre-conceived opinions with you.
That is the way it used to happen in San Sebastian. Due to various grafts of ticket resale and the reliance of the management on the wealthy curiosity trade from Biarritz abd the Basque coast, the barreras by the time you buy them, cost 100 pesetas apiece or over.
A man could live a week on that in a bullfighter's boarding house in Madrid, go to the Prado 4 times a week, buy good seats in the sun for 2 bullfights, buy the papers afterwards and drink beer and eat shrimp in the Pasaje Alvarez off the Calle de Vitoriam and still have something left to get his shoes shined with.
Yet by buying any sort of seat within diving range of a barrera at San Sebastian you could be sure of having a hundred-peseta seat to occupy when the citizens who knew they were morally bound to leave the ring after the first bull stand up to make their well-fed, skull and bones-ed, porcellian-ed, beach-tanned, flannelled, Panama-hatted, sport-shod exits.
I've seen them go many times when the women with them wanted to stay. They had to meet at the Casino after they had seen the first bull killed. If they didnt leave and liked it there was something wrong with them. Maybe they were queer.
There was never anything wrong with them. They always left.
That was until the bullfights became respectable. In 1931 I did not see one leave within range and now it looks as though the good days of the free barreras at San Sebastian are over."