Just as though it had been arranged long before, as though his frantic
flight across half of Europe was a pre-knowledge that something of
importance awaited him in Madrid.
He reached the city in the evening, hurrying the last day's journey to
be in time for the first running of the bulls that season. He had read
Hemingway and Conrad and much of the other romantic literature of the
bullring. He wondered if there might not be something for him in this
way of life. It read so well in the books the beauty, glamour and
excitement, the courage and trial and the final moment of truth. He
wanted to evaluate it, to see it here in the great Plaza Des Torros, and
then, if it still intrigued him, go on to the festival at Pamplona later
in the season.
David checked in at the Gran Via with its elegance faded to mere
comfort, and the porter arranged tickets for the following day. He was
tired from the long drive and he went to bed early, waking refreshed and
eager for the day. He found his way out to the ring and parked the
Mustang amongst the tourist buses that already crowded the parking lot
so early in the season.
The exterior of the ring was a surprise, sinister as the temple of some
pagan and barbaric religion, unrelieved by the fluted tiers of balconies
and encrustations of ceramic tiles, but the interior was as he knew it
would be from film and photograph. The sanded ring smooth and clean,
the flags against the cloud-flecked sky, the orchestra pouring out its
jerky, rousing refrain, and the excitement.
The excitement amongst the crowd was more intense than he had known at
prize fights or football internationals, they hummed and swarmed, rank
uponrank of white eager faces and the music goaded them on.
David was sitting amongst a group of young Australians who wore souvenir
sombreros and passed goat-skins of bad wine about, the girls squealing
and chattering like sparrows. One of them picked on David, leaning
forward to tug his shoulder and offer him the wine-skin. She was pretty
enough in a kittenish way and her eyes made it clear that the offer was
for more than cheap wine, but he refused both invitations brusquely and
went to fetch a can of beer from one of the vendors. His chilly
experience with the girl in Paris was still too fresh. When he returned
to his seat the Aussie girl eyed the beer he carried reproachfully and
then turned brightly and smiling to her companions.
The late arrivals were finding their seats now and the excitement was
escalating sharply. Two of them climbed the stairs of the aisle towards
where David sat.
A striking young couple in their early twenties, but what first drew
David's attention was the good feeling of companionship and love that
glowed around them, like an aura setting them apart.
They climbed arm in arm, passed where David sat, and took seats a row
behind and across the aisle. The girl was tall with long legs clad in
short black boots and dark pants over which she wore an apple-green
suede jacket that was not expensive but of good cut and taste.
In the sun her hair glittered like coal newly cut from the face and it
hung to her shoulders in a sleek soft fall.
Her face was broad and sun-browned, not beautiful for her mouth was too
big and her eyes too widely spaced, but those eyes were the colour of
wild honey, dark brown and flecked with gold. Like her, her companion
was tall and straight, dark and strong-looking. He guided her to her
seat with a brown muscled arm and David felt a sharp stab of anger and
envy for him.
Big cocky son of a gun, he thought. They leaned their heads together
and spoke secretly, and David looked away, his own loneliness
accentuated by their closeness.
The parade of the toreadors began, and they came out with the sunlight
glittering on the sequins and embroidery of their suits, as though they
were the scales of some flamboyant reptile. The orchestra blared, and
the keys to the bull pens were thrown down on to the sand. The
toreadors capes were spread on the barrera below their favourites and
they retired from the ring.
In the pause that followed David glanced at the couple again. He was
startled to find that they were both watching him and the girl was
discussing him. She was leaning on her companion's shoulder, her lips
almost touching his ear as she spoke and David felt his stomach clench
under the impact of those honey golden eyes. For an instant they stared
at each other and then the girl jerked away guiltily and dropped her
gaze, but her companion held David's eyes openly, smiling easily, and it
was David who looked away.
Below them in the ring the bull came out at full charge, head high, and
hooves skidding in the sand.
He was beautiful and black and glossy, muscle in the neck and shoulder
bunching as he swung his head from side to side and the crowd roared as
he spun and burst into a gallop, pursuing an elusive flutter of pink
across the ring. They took him on a circuit, passing him smoothly from
cape to cape, letting him show off his bulk and high-stepping style, and
the perfect sickle of his horns with their creamy points, before they
brought in the horse.
The trumpets ushered in the horse, and they were a mockery, a brave
greeting from the wretched nag, with scrawny neck and starting coat, one
rheumy old eye blinkered so he could not see the fearsome creature he
was going to meet.
Clownish in his padding, seeming too frail to carry the big armoured man
on his back, they led him out and placed him in the path of the bull,
and here any semblance of beauty ended.
The bull went into him head down, sending the gawky animal reeling
against the barrera and the man leaned over the broad black back and
ripped and tore into the hump with the lance, worrying the flesh,
working in the steel with all his weight until the blood poured out in a
slick tide, black as crude oil, and dripped from the bull's legs into
the sand.
Raging at the agony of the steel the bull hooked and butted at the
protective pads that covered the horse's flanks. They came up as
readily as a theatre curtain and the bull was into the scrawny roan
body, hacking with the terrible horns, and the horse screamed as its
belly split open and the purple and pink entrails spilled out and
dangled into the sand.
David was dry-mouthed with horror as around him the crowd blood-roared,
and the horse went down in a welter of equipment and its own guts.
They drew the bull away and flogged the fallen horse, twisting its tail
and prodding its testicles, forcing it to rise at last and stand
quivering and forlorn. Then beating it to make it move again they led
it from the ring stumbling over its own entrails.
Then they went to work on the bull, slowly, torturously, reducing it
from a magnificent beast to a blundering hunk of sweating and bleeding
flesh, splattered with the creamy froth blown from its agonized lungs.
David wanted to scream at them to stop it, but sick to the stomach,
frozen by guilt for his own part in this obscene ritual, he sat through
it in silence until the bull stood in the centre of the ring, the sand
about him ploughed and riven by his dreadful struggles. He stood with
his head down, muzzle almost touching the sand and the blood and froth
dripped from his nostrils and gaping mouth. The hoarse sawing of his
breathing carried to David even above the crazed roaring of the crowd.
The bull's legs shuddered and he passed a dribble of loose liquid yellow
dung that fouled his back legs. It seemed to David that this was the
final humiliation, and he found he was whispering aloud.
No! No! Stop it! Please, stop it! Then the man in the glittering suit
and ballet shoes came to end it, and the point of the sword struck bone
and the blade arced then spun away in the sunlight, and the bull heaved
and threw thick droplets of blood, before he stood again.
They picked up the sword from the sand and gave it to the man and he
sighted over the quiescent, dying beast and again the thrust was
deflected by bone and David found that at last he had power in his
voice, and he screamed:Stop it! You filthy bastards. Twelve times the
man in the centre tried with the sword, and each time the sword flicked
out of his hand, and then at last the bull fell of its own accord, weak
from the slow loss of much blood and with its heart broken by the
torture and the striving. It tried to rise, lunging weakly, but the
strength was not there and they killed it where it lay, with a dagger in
the back of the neck, and they dragged it out with a team of mules its
legs waggling ridiculously in the air and its blood leaving a long brown
smudge across the sand.
Stunned with the monstrous cruelty of it, David turned slowly to look at
the girl. Her companion was leaning over her solicitously, whispering
to her, trying to comfort her.
She was shaking her head slowly, in a gesture of incomprehension, and
her honey-coloured eyes were blinded with weeping. Her lips were apart,
quivering with grief, and her cheeks were awash, shiny with her tears.
Her companion helped her to her feet, and gently took her down the
steps, leading her away blindly like a new widow from her husband's
grave.
Around him the crowd was laughing and exhilarated, high on the blood and
the pain, and David felt himself rejected, cut off from them. His heart
went out to the weeping girl, she of all of them was the only one who
seemed real to him. He had seen enough also, and he knew he would never
get to Pamplona. He stood up and followed the girl out of the ring, he
wanted to speak to her, to tell her that he shared her desolation, but
when he reached the parking lot they were already climbing into a
battered old Citroen CV. loo, and although he broke into a run, the car
pulled away, blowing blue smoke and clattering like a lawn-mower, and
turned into the traffic heading east.
David watched it go with a sense of loss that effectively washed away
the good feeling of the last few days, but he saw the old Citroen again
two days later, when he had abandoned all idea of the Pamplona Festival
and headed south. The Citroen looked even sicker than before, under a
layer of pale dust and with the canvas showing on a rear tyre. The
suspension seemed to have sagged on the one side, giving it a rakishly
drunken aspect.
It was parked at a filling station on the outskirts of Zaragoza on the
road to Barcelona, and David pulled off the road and parked beyond the
gasoline pumps. An attendant in greasy overalls was filling the tank of
the Citroen under the supervision of the muscular young man from the
bullring. David looked quickly for the girl - but she was not in the
car. Then he saw her.
She was in a cantina across the street, haggling with the elderly woman
behind the counter. Her back was turned towards him, but David
recognized the mass of dark hair now piled on top of her head. He
crossed the road quickly and went into the shop behind her. He was not
certain what he was going to do, acting only on impulse.
The girl wore a short floral dress which left her back and shoulders
bare, and her feet were thrust into open sandals. But in concession to
the ice in the air she wore a shawl over her shoulders. Close to, her
skin had a plastic smoothness and elasticity, as though it had been
lightly oiled and polished, and down the back of her naked neck the hair
was fine and soft, growing in a whorl in the nape.
David moved closer to her as she completed her purchase of dried figs
and counted her change. He smelt her, a light summery perfume that
seemed to come from her hair. He resisted the temptation to press his
face into the dense pile of it.
She turned smiling and saw him standing close behind her. She
recognized him instantly, his was not a face a girl would readily
forget. She was startled. The smile flickered out on her face and she
stood very still looking at him, her expression completely neutral, but
her lips slightly parted and her eyes soft and glowing golden.
This peculiar stillness of hers was a quality he would come to know so
well in the time ahead. I saw you in Madrid, he said, at the bulls.
Yes, she nodded, her voice neither welcoming nor forbidding.
You were crying So were you. I Her voice was low and clear, her
enunciation flawless, too perfect not to be foreign.
No, David denied it.
You were cryin& she insisted softly. You were crying inside. And he
inclined his head in agreement.
Suddenly she proffered the paper bag of figs.
Try one, she said and smiled. It was a warm friendly smile. He took
one of the fruits and bit into the sweet flesh as she moved towards the
door, somehow conveying an invitation for him to join her. He walked
with her and they looked across the street at the Citroen. The
attendant had finished filling the tank, and the girl's companion was
waiting for her, leaning against the bonnet of the weary old car. He
was lighting a cigarette, but he looked up and saw them. He evidently
recognized David also, and he straightened up quickly and flicked away
the burning match.
There was a soft whooshing sound and the heavy thump of concussion in
the air, as fire flashed low across the concrete from a puddle of
spilled gasoline. In an instant the flames had closed over the rear of
the Citroen, and were drumming hungrily at the coachwork.
David left the girl and sprinted across the road.
Get it away from the pumps, you idiot, he shouted, and the driver
started out of frozen shock.
It was happy fifth of November, a spectacular pyrotechnic display, but
David got the handbrake off and the gearbox into neutral, and he and the
driver pushed it into an open parking area alongside the filling station
while a crowd materialized, seeming to appear out of the very earth, to
scream hysterical encouragement and suggestions while keeping at a
discreet distance.
They even managed to rescue the baggage from the rear seat before the
flames engulfed it entirely, and belatedly the petrol attendant arrived
with an enormous scarlet fire extinguisher. To the delighted applause
of the crowd, he drenched the pathetic little vehicle in a great cloud
of foam, and the excitement was over. The crowd drifted away, still
laughing and chattering and congratulating the amateur firefighter on
his virtuoso performance with the extinguisher, while the three of them
regarded the scorched and blackened shell of the Citroen ruefully.
I suppose it was a kindness really, the poor old thing was very tired,
the girl said at last. It was like shooting a horse with a broken leg.
Are you insured? David asked, and the girl's companion laughed.
You're joking, who would insure that? I only paid a hundred U. S.
dollars for her. They assembled the small pile of rescued possessions,