The third act ends with the appearance of the muleta and sword. Between the shoulders lies the heart by way of the estocada, and every effort is predicated on whether it can be deemed a clean death.

Whether a bull meets its good end or is granted the exclusive indulto, he passes this way but once. No bull ever fights more, and there are no second opportunities for immortality.

Its ears are an award, its tail a trophy. For the toreador, there is a strict hierarchy to those earning the right to be carried aloft over lesser men’s shoulders.

Bullfighting is not for the squeamish or the timid. It is not an unblemished event. If a witness loves animals as I do, it is particularly unsettling to the senses.

The experience is not of prolonged torture but a fleeting equanimity of all. In an instant or a few are shown strength, weakness, heroism, fear, transience, and infinity. They can each be seen, but only if one never wavers and does not hazard to look away.

A fool loves the bullfight for the idea of the kill. Most fantasy toreadors leave well before observing the finish of their first, an olive-green hue on them, an indecisive lump in their throats. Do not attend to revel in masculinity. Come only those of either sex who would examine their own humanity. Any others will find disillusionment and horror here, for it is not spectacle.

The bullfight is no sport. It is art. In Spain it is so listed in the newspaper, though no longer in Catalonia, as it is banned as of last Sunday.

The bullfight is brutality and splendor. Cruelty and compassion. The grotesque and the glorious. It is all, because it is actual existence and not existence as we would prefer it to be.

In this sanitized society of precaution and perpetual adolescence, it demands we recognize we reside in a world that belongs to nature, both human and animal, which are far more akin than we would often care to recall.

The bullfight is all of these things because the bullfight is life, and a celebration of it as can be told only through this—the ballet of death.