Torniu

Bulls are a recurring measure of human courage and vulnerability in the novel: the animal’s danger exposes the limits of confidence, while memories of bullfighting give Pilar a language for judging fear, love, and failure. In the wider landscape of war, that symbolic role meets the material presence of horses and the characters’ differing responses to killing animals and people.

The Bullfighter’s Claim of Safety

Pablo describes safety as a matter of understanding danger well enough to know which risks to take, likening himself to a bullfighter who is safe because he knows his work. Pilar rejects the confidence of that comparison. She answers with the counterexample that defines her view of the bull: even a practiced matador can be gored. Her recollection of Finito’s explanations makes the point sharper. He had treated the encounter as a matter of skill, as if the bull never gored the man and the man instead gored himself on the bull’s horn; afterward, he had to acknowledge that mastery did not prevent injury. Pilar’s retelling makes the bull an active force that can overturn a fighter’s sense of control, not a predictable instrument of his expertise.

The bullfighting story also gives Pilar grounds to attack Pablo’s judgment. She says that nine years spent with poorly paid matadors taught her about fear and safety, then contrasts that knowledge with Pablo’s decline into laziness, drunkenness, and cowardice during the war. For her, his language of controlled risk is not proof of courage but an illusion she has seen before: the confidence that precedes a goring. Pablo objects that she has no right to speak that way, especially before the people and a stranger. Her answer challenges not only his argument but his authority to command. The bull thus enters a dispute about leadership: danger cannot be made safe merely by claiming expertise, and experience may give the person dismissed as speaking out of turn the stronger judgment.

Memory, Intimacy, and Self-Knowledge

Pilar’s bullfighting memories are also bound to Finito as a person she loved. She recalls a day in Valencia when, after making love, she brought a cold pitcher of beer to the sleeping bullfighter and urged him to drink. Finito barely woke before falling asleep again. The remembered quietness of this moment stands beside his public identity as a matador: the man who faced the bull was also a young, resting companion in an intimate scene. Pilar contrasts that past with her life with Pablo. She acknowledges that Pablo had once been more of a man than Finito, but says that she and Pablo never shared the Valencia experience. In their present, the train they blew up remains the achievement she can still invoke against his failures.

Pilar’s reflection on ugliness extends this interest in how people see themselves and are seen by others. She says she was born ugly but feels beautiful inside, and argues that love can temporarily blind both a lover and the beloved to outward appearance. When that blindness ends, she says, a person may lose both the lover and the feeling that made self-perception possible. Her recollections of Finito and her confrontation with Pablo give this claim a lived relational context: intimacy is not simply a matter of physical appearance or public accomplishment, but also of the changing regard through which people understand their worth. The bullfighting motif belongs to that account of experience, where confidence and desire can be undone by what one did not see coming.

Animals, Killing, and the Ethics of War

The novel places the bullfighter’s risk beside a direct disagreement about killing animals. Robert Jordan says he does not like to kill animals; Anselmo, who loves hunting, says that he does not like killing men. Jordan distinguishes the two without claiming pleasure in human death: he says killing people is acceptable to him only when necessary and for the cause. Their exchange gives killing an ethical distinction that the war repeatedly complicates. Hunting can be a cherished practice, yet the deliberate death of an animal troubles Jordan; killing a person can be necessary to the cause, yet Anselmo finds no good left in it.

Anselmo explains the contrast through an earlier bear hunt. He remembers taking pride in the encounter, particularly in the bear’s paw, which was dried and nailed through the palm to a church door. The trophy preserved a source of pride in having met the animal. He cannot imagine treating a human hand the same way, and says that the hand of a man is like the paw of a bear. The comparison does not erase the difference between the bear and a person; rather, it underscores the brutal impossibility of turning a human death into a trophy of uncomplicated achievement. Against the confidence of the matador, who imagines knowledge can contain danger, Anselmo’s memory distinguishes the pleasure of recalling an animal encounter from the moral remainder of killing a fellow human being.

Horses in the Fighting

Horses carry the novel’s animal ethics into the military work of the guerrillas. During El Sordo’s last fight on a hilltop, a horse is hit as it struggles up the slope. El Sordo pulls it onward, then shoots it quickly and expertly when he needs its body to plug a gap between rocks and give him a position from which to fire. The act is at once an act of care and a tactical use of the animal: he does not leave the wounded horse to die unaided, but its death becomes part of the defense. The passage makes plain how warfare can narrow the distance between a creature treated as a companion and a resource required for survival.

The cost extends beyond that one horse. El Sordo has reached the hill with an automatic rifle and ammunition, while Joaquín and Ignacio halt to fire and buy him time to position the gun. By then, horses lie dead on the slope and summit, and the group has only recently managed to steal three; one bolted when the men tried to mount it bareback as the shooting began. Their fear and physical limits affect the movement of fighters and equipment, and the loss of the animals compounds the group’s danger. Bulls may represent the hazard faced by a skilled fighter, but the horses in the battle are not symbols alone: their bodies and reactions shape what the fighters can do.

Maria’s relation to the horses reveals another side of their presence. During the bridge fighting, she stays with them in the forest, away from a view of the road and bridge. She puts an arm around a large white-faced bay stallion she had gentled and brought gifts to while the horses were kept in the corral below the camp. Yet the firing and bombs unsettle the stallion, and Maria’s own nervous movement as she tries to comfort the animals makes them more agitated. She tries to remind herself that the fighters are positioned above and below the bridge and that she should trust Robert Jordan, but the sound of battle overwhelms her efforts to remain calm. The scene gives the horses their own fear and responsiveness: kindness can establish familiarity, but it cannot make an animal immune to the terror of combat.

The Limits of Mastery

Across these episodes, the bull is a figure for danger that resists human claims of command. Pilar uses the possibility of a goring to puncture Pablo’s assurance that knowledge guarantees safety; her memory of Finito gives that warning both professional and intimate weight. The exchanges about hunting and war broaden the question beyond the bullring, asking what kind of meaning survives a killing and whether necessity can make it clean. In battle, the horses’ fright, injury, death, and tactical use show how little control the fighters possess over the living creatures on which their plans depend. The animal world therefore tests the characters’ accounts of courage: expertise can guide action, but it cannot abolish vulnerability or remove the moral cost of what survival requires.