Blanquet

Blanquet, a serious and exceptionally skilled bullfighter, appears in Pilar’s recollection as a witness to death before it strikes. His story of Manolo Granero’s fatal encounter with the bull Pocapena gives bodily form to the disputed premonition that death can be sensed, while leaving Robert Jordan unconvinced.

Identity and Reputation

Pilar identifies Blanquet as the greatest peon de brega who ever lived, a cape-handler whose work under matadors placed him close to the dangers and rituals of the bullring. Robert Jordan recognizes him from having seen him many times: a small, gray-faced man, quick on his feet “as a rabbit,” who handled a cape with extraordinary skill.

Blanquet’s gray face, Pilar says, came from heart trouble. Among the gypsies, he was also associated with death: they said he carried it with him but could flick it away with a cape, as if dusting a table. The image joins professional mastery to a reputation he could never entirely control. His skill could turn danger aside in the ring, but the stories about him cast him as someone unusually close to danger’s foreknowledge.

The Death Sensed Before the Fight

Pilar recounts Blanquet’s account of the day Manolo Granero died. Before the bullfight, the men stopped in a chapel on their way to the ring. Blanquet had been with Granero while he bathed and dressed at the hotel, but noticed no smell of death then, nor during the tightly packed motorcar journey. The scent, as he described it, emerged in the chapel.

Blanquet said that Juan Luis de la Rosa alone shared the perception. Neither Marcial nor Chicuelo detected anything in the chapel or as the bullfighters lined up for the paseo. Juan Luis turned deathly pale; when Blanquet asked whether he, too, sensed it, Juan Luis answered that the smell was so strong he could scarcely breathe, and attributed it to his matador. Blanquet urged hope that they were mistaken, but the exchange makes the foreboding private and precise: most of the party notices nothing, while two men register an odor they cannot explain away.

That afternoon, the bull Pocapena, from the ranch of Veragua, gored Granero against the barrier at the Plaza de Toros in Madrid, in front of tendido two. The horn destroyed Granero’s skull, leaving his head wedged beneath the estribo at the base of the barrera. Pilar says she was there with Finito de Palencia and saw the killing from the seventh row of tendido three, where the angle let her see what happened. She had not smelled the warning herself; her account comes through Blanquet and the confirmation that Juan Luis later gave by nodding, while refusing to speak of it.

Credibility and Dispute

Pilar presents Blanquet as an unlikely source of invention: a quiet, serious, devout man, neither a gypsy nor given to falsehood, but a bourgeois from Valencia. She also recalls that when Blanquet had earlier spoken of sensing death around Joselito at Talavera, listeners dismissed the experience as fantasy. They suggested he had mistaken the smell of Joselito’s life and sweat, or that what he noticed was impossible to distinguish above the manzanilla in the air.

The later account of Granero’s death lends the earlier report a second witness in Juan Luis, but it does not settle the question. Pilar stresses that even the other bullfighters, their banderilleros and picadors, and the people around Juan Luis and Granero were deaf to the warning. She extends that difference in perception to herself: she claims she is not deaf to such things, whereas Robert Jordan rejects her interpretation. He proposes fear as an ordinary source of smell and objects that the episode she has been describing involved a successful action in which Kashkin was not killed. Their exchange leaves Blanquet’s place in the story suspended between testimony and superstition: the account gives the premonition vivid particulars, but no shared certainty about what it means.