Proud of the overpowering strength that the excitement of wine had momentarily given him, he imagined all the Andalusian and Castillian bulls to be like feeble goats that he could overthrow with a single blow from his hand.
What had happened the other day was really nothing. Rubbish!... As El Nacional said, "From the best singer there sometimes escapes a cock-crow."
And this proverb, heard from the lips of many venerable patriarchs of his profession on days of disaster, inspired him with an irresistible desire to sing, to fill the silence of the street with his voice.
With his head still leaning on his arms, he began to croon a verse of his own composition, one of overweening praise of his own merit.
Who has more c ... c ... courage than God," and being unable to improvise more in his own honour, he repeated the same words again and again in a hoarse and monotonous voice, which disturbed the silence, and made an invisible dog at the end of the street bark.
It was the paternal inheritance springing up afresh in him; that singing mania which had always accompanied Señor Juan in his weekly outbreaks.
The door of the house opened, and Garabato pushed out his sleepy head, to have a look at the toper whose voice he thought he recognised.
"Ah! is that you?" said the espada, "wait a bit while I sing the last."
And he repeated several times the incomplete ditty in honour of his own bravery, till at last he made up his mind to go into the house.
He felt no desire to go to bed. Guessing his condition he put off the time when he would have to go up to his own room, where Carmen would probably be awake and waiting for him.
"Go to sleep, Garabato; I have a great many things to do."
He did not know what they were, but he was attracted by the look of his office, with its decoration of life-like portraits, frontals won from bulls, and placards proclaiming his fame.
When the electric light was turned on and the servant moved away, Gallardo stood swaying unsteadily on his legs in the middle of the room, casting admiring glances over the walls, as though he were contemplating for the first time this museum of his triumphs.
"Very good. Very good, indeed!" he murmured. "That handsome fellow is me, and that other one too, all of them! And yet some people say of me.... Curse it all! I am the first man in the world. Don José says so, and he speaks the truth."