Rose for Winter by Laurie Lee Read Free Book Online

with the Maestro Realito, I took lessons on the instrument in my room.
    My instructor, one of Seville’s most respected professors of the guitar, was a small sad man, exquisitely polite and patient, poorly but neatly dressed, and addicted to bow-ties made of wallpaper. Each day, at the stroke of ten, he knocked softly at my door and entered on tiptoe, as though into a sick room, carrying his guitar-case like a doctor’s bag.
    â€˜How are we today?’ he would ask sympathetically, ‘and how do we proceed?’
    Silently, he would place two chairs opposite each other, put me in the one facing the light, sit himself in the other, and then ponder me long and sadly while I played. Infinite compassion, as from one who has seen much suffering, possessed his face while he listened. An expression also of one who, forced to inhabit a solitary peak of perfection, has nowhere to look but downwards at the waste of a fumbling world.
    After an hour’s examination, during which he tested all my faulty coordinations, he would hand me a page of exercises and bid me take them twice a day. Then, with a little bow, his chin resting mournfully upon his paper tie, he would leave me to visit his next patient.
    Sometimes – but only very occasionally – he would relax at the end of the lesson, empty his pockets of tobacco dust, roll himself a cigarette, smile, and take up his guitar and play to me for an hour. Then his eyes would turn inward and disappear into the echoing chambers of his mind, while his long white fingers moved over the strings with the soft delicacy of the blind, lost in a dream of melody and invention. And faced with the beauty of his technique, the complex harmonies, the ease and grace, the supreme mastery of tone and feeling, I would feel like one of the lesser apes who, shuffling on his knuckles through the sombre marshes, suddenly catches sight of homo sapiens, upright on a hill, his gold head raised to the sky.
    Spanish bull-fighting is a thing of summer, of heat, dust and sharpest sun and shadow. Quite rightly it belongs to a time of hot light and hot blood, and one does not look for it in winter. Even so, there are occasional out-of-season corridas held for amateurs, for charity or as trial contests for promising boys. And such a one was held on our second Sunday in Seville, organized in honour of the Patron Saint of the Air Force, and we went to see it.
    We arrived late to find the gates of the bull-ring locked and a large crowd struggling among a squad of mounted police. A man with a megaphone told them to go home, that the corrida had begun and the ring was full. We were just on the point of turning away when a party of gold-braided officers arrived, we fell in behind them, doors were thrown open, officials saluted us, and in no time at all we found ourselves ushered into a private box high above the arena.
    Before us lay the classic scene: the ring of sand, the crescent of sunlight, the banked circle of spectators with dark-blue faces like flints in a wall, and the two almost motionless antagonists below us – the bull-fighter with bowed head, standing in silence; and coughing in the dust, a young bull dying.
    We had arrived at the second kill of the afternoon; but we saw four more, the best and the worst – the best magnificent, the worst a crime. In a corrida of this nature one may see anything. The young toreros, eager to establish names for themselves, are often capable of a feverish bravado, but more often suffer from a kind of hysteria which loses them control of both bull and themselves. The bulls, too, are often a green, unpredictable lot, capable of nobility, treachery and excruciating cowardice. Not rarely, in such circumstances, the boy gets killed as well as the bull.
    The second bull that afternoon seemed to have been killed with some skill, for as the boy stood there with his blood-stained sword, he received no groans or hisses. A quartet of plumed horses dragged away