The Paris Wife (29 page)

“Hem doesn’t like this one bit,” Duff said. My eyes followed hers to where Ernest stood in the ring watching Harold. His expression was grim. A picador passed within a foot of him, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

“He can’t stand another man besting him,” I said, but Duff and I both knew that Ernest had been angry with Harold all week, ever since he found out about the lovers’ tryst in St.-Jean-de-Luz. It was bad enough that Harold got to have Duff when Ernest was hampered with a wife and child, but then Harold had spent every day in Pamplona following Duff around like a poor sick steer, making an ass out of himself. It was all too much.

The next bull in the ring was slimmer and quicker. He moved like a cat, loping first toward one wall then another, changing direction on a dime. One local with a dark shirt got too close and was shoved to his knees. The bull reared his head around, and the man fell farther and was trampled. Everyone hurried to distract the bull. Ernest had him for a moment by swinging his cape wide to one side. Other men waved their arms and called out, but the bull returned to the man who hadn’t yet risen and pushed him with his head. The man’s legs came over his own head just as the bull jerked to one side, his right horn moving into the man’s thigh just under his buttock and zipping down to the knee. He cried out sharply, and we saw his thighbone flash white, and then blood running freely before the picadors rushed the bull and forced him first to the wall and then behind the fence where he would wait nine hours and then be killed.

That was the end of the amateurs. The ring emptied quickly, and Duff and I climbed down to meet the boys. We hadn’t spoken a word to each other since we saw the goring. When we got to them we saw they were silent, too.

Out on the street, we made our way to a café.

“I’ll be damned,” Bill said as he walked beside me. His face was flat and white. His shoes were covered with dust. We found a table and had just ordered a round of the thick beer we liked to have with lunch when the gored man was taken past us on the street on a stretcher. A bloodied sheet covered him from the waist down.

“
Toro, toro!
” someone in the café yelled drunkenly and the man sat up. Everyone cheered, and then a young boy ran over with a glass of whiskey, which the man drank and then threw back empty to the boy, who caught it well with one hand. Then everyone cheered again.

“It’s a hell of a way to live, isn’t it?” Duff said.

“I can think of worse,” Ernest said.

Our beer had come and we got to it. The waiter brought gazpacho and good hard bread and some nice fish poached in lime, and though I didn’t think I would be able to eat after the sight of the goring, I found I was hungry and that it all tasted very good to me.

Harold stayed to one side of the table, well out of Ernest’s way, but when Pat finally showed up with Don, he was pale and irritable, and Harold seemed not to know where to move or whom he could speak to safely. And for the rest of the lunch our table was like an intricate game of emotional chess, with Duff looking to Ernest, who kept one eye on Pat, who was glaring at Harold, who was glancing furtively at Duff. Everyone was drinking too much and wrung out and working hard to pretend they were jollier and less affected than everyone else.

“I can take the bulls and the blood,” Don said to me quietly. “It’s this human business that turns my stomach.”

I looked from him to Ernest, who hadn’t spoken to me or so much as glanced at me since breakfast. “Yes,” I said to Don. “But what’s the trick for it?”

“I wish to hell I knew. Maybe there is no trick.” He drained the last of his beer and signaled the waiter for more.

“Sometimes I wish we could rub out all of our mistakes and start fresh, from the beginning,” I said. “And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.”

He laughed grimly, solemnly, while on the other side of the table, Duff was whispering something in Ernest’s ear while he cackled roughly, like a sailor. I turned my chair at an angle away from them where I didn’t have to see them at all. As soon as I did this, I had the clearest memory of Fonnie and Roland a hundred years ago in St. Louis, and how she couldn’t stand to look at him because she thought he was weak and detestable. Their story had always been full of sadness and misery. Roland had returned home from the sanitarium, but hadn’t recovered any sense of peace. He and Fonnie led utterly separate lives now, though staying in the same house on Cates Avenue, for the sake of the children.

What was happening between Ernest and me was nowhere near as dire, I hoped, but he was hurting me with every whisper and look in Duff’s direction. And I found myself feeling differently about marriage, and about the damage lovers could do to one another, irreparable damage sometimes, and almost without thinking.

“How sad and strange we all are,” I said to Don.

“That’s what had me so maudlin yesterday. I’m sorry about that, by the way.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for. Let’s just be good friends who know these things but don’t have to say them.”

“All right,” he said, and looked at his hands, and drank some more of his beer, and the afternoon wore on this way until it was time for the corrida.

The young matador Cayetano Ordóñez was a boy, really, but he moved so naturally and with such grace it seemed as if he were dancing. The deep red serge of his cape was alive with even the slightest flick of his arms. He had a way of planting his feet and leaning forward slightly, facing whatever came and urging the bull to charge him with the slightest gesture or glance.

Ernest had been in a foul mood when we entered the ring for the corrida but was starting to come awake as Ordóñez moved. Duff got up to sit nearer to him, seeing the change.

“My God, but that’s a fine man,” Duff said.

“He’s the real article all right,” Ernest said. “Watch this.”

Ordóñez was leading his bull in, turning one veronica and then another tighter one with his cape, drawing the bull magnetically. The picadors had backed off because they knew Ordóñez had him and was in complete control. It was a dance, and it was also great art. His knowledge was primal and ancient and he carried it so naturally and easily for one so young.

“Some are just going through the motions,” Ernest said. “It’s pretty, all right, but it doesn’t mean anything. This hombre, he knows you have to get near enough to die. You have to already be dead really in order to live and to conquer the animal.”

Duff nodded, taken over by his enthusiasm, and, God help me, I was too. Ernest’s eyes, as he spoke, were suddenly nearly as alive as Ordóñez’s cape. The intensity bubbled up from a deep place in him and came into his face and his throat, and I saw the way he was connected to Ordóñez and the bullfight, and to life as it was happening, and I knew that I could hate him all I wanted for the way he was hurting me, but I couldn’t ever stop loving him, absolutely, for what he was.

“Now look,” he said. The bull came in low, his left horn pushed forward, his neck twisting. Ordóñez’s thigh was inches from the bull’s powerful legs, and he leaned nearer, so that when the bull’s head lifted, searching for the cape, he just grazed Ordóñez’s belly. We could almost hear a whisper as the horns passed the cloth of his silk jacket. A gasp went up in the crowd, because this is what they had come to see.

“You’ll never see it done better than that,” Ernest said, throwing his hat to his feet in respect.

“Goddamned beautiful,” Duff said.

We all sighed, and when the bull had been broken and was on its knees, bowing, Ordóñez ran the sword in clean. Everyone stood, cheering, the whole crowd moved and taken over by the spectacle and the mastery. I stood, too, and applauded like crazy, and I must have been standing in a particularly bright ray of sun because Ordóñez looked up at me then, up and into my face, and his eyes took in my hair.

“He thinks you’re
muy linda,
” Ernest said, following Ordóñez’s eyes to me. “He’s honoring you.”

The young matador bent over the bull, slicing off its ear with a small knife. He called a boy over from the stands and sent him to me with the ear cupped in his palms. He delivered it shyly, barely daring to look at me, but I could tell he felt it was a very great privilege to carry it for Ordóñez. I didn’t quite know how to accept it, what the rules were for such things, and so simply held out my hands. It was black and triangular and still warm, with only the faintest trace of blood—the strangest thing I’d ever held.

“I’ll be damned,” Ernest said, clearly very proud.

“What will you do with it?” Duff asked.

“Keep it, of course,” Don said, and handed me his handkerchief so I could wrap it inside and also wipe my hands.

Still standing, I held the ear in the handkerchief and looked down into the ring where Ordóñez was being buried in flowers. He glanced up at me, bowed low and deeply, and then returned to being adored.

“I’ll be damned,” Ernest said again.

There were five more bullfights that day, but none matched the beauty of the first. When we went to the café after, we were all still thrumming with it, even Bill, who couldn’t stomach most of the day, particularly the way two of the horses were gored and went down and had to be killed quickly while everyone watched. It was all terrible and terribly intense, and I was ready for a drink.

I passed the ear around the table so everyone could admire it and be horrified in turn. Duff got drunk very quickly and began to flirt openly with Harold, who was too surprised and pleased to be discreet about it. The two disappeared at one point, which had Pat furious. When an hour or more had passed, they wandered back in a very jolly mood, as if nothing were amiss.

“You little bastard,” Pat said to Harold. He stood and immediately lurched to one side.

“Oh, put a lid on it, darling,” Duff said blithely. But Pat wouldn’t be chided.

“Just get the hell away from us, would you?” he said to Harold.

“I don’t think Duff would like that. You want me here, don’t you?”

“Of course, darling, I want everyone.” She reached for Ernest’s glass. “Be a pal, would you?”

Ernest nodded; she could have the glass, could have every drink on the table as far as he was concerned. It was Harold who disgusted him. “Running to a woman,” he said under his breath. “What’s lower than that?”

The waiter came around with more drinks and food, but the evening wouldn’t be set right. A canker boiled up and tainted everything that had been so powerful and fine.

Ernest sensed this, too, and tried to bring the talk around to Ordóñez and his posture, his veronicas.

“Which is the veronica, again?” Duff said.

“It’s when the matador stands turned to the bull with his feet fixed and swings the cape away from the bull very slowly.”

“Yes, of course,” Duff said. “It was marvelous, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t believe her, Hem,” Pat said meanly. “She doesn’t remember any of it.”

“Give a girl a break, Pat.” She turned back to Ernest. “I’m just a little tight now. I’ll remember more tomorrow. I swear I’ll be good then.”

Ernest looked at her sadly. “All right,” he said, but he was clearly disappointed in her and with the whole group. The air had gone out of everything.

Back at the hotel that night, I took the ear, folded it into several more handkerchiefs, and put it in my bureau drawer.

“The thing will stink before long,” Ernest said, watching me do it.

“I don’t care.”

“No, I wouldn’t either.” He started to undress slowly and thoughtfully. “When this is all over,” he said finally, “let’s follow Ordóñez to Madrid and then Valencia.”

“Will it ever be over?”

“Of course it will.” He turned to face me. “Ordóñez was wonderful, wasn’t he? He makes all of this seem very ugly and very stupid.”

I closed the bureau drawer, then took off my clothes and climbed into bed. “I’m ready to forget Pamplona. Why don’t we try now? Help me, will you?”

At the end of that very long week, we disbanded, and everyone went off separately. Don left for the Riviera looking sad and exhausted. Bill and Harold were headed back to Paris, but took Pat and Duff as far as Bayonne. Ernest and I boarded a train to Madrid, where we took rooms at the Pension Aguilar, an unfashionable hotel in the Calle San Jeronimo that was small and very quiet with no tourists. It was like heaven after Pamplona. We went to the bullfights every day and were there the afternoon Juan Belmonte, arguably the best torero of all time, was badly gored in the belly and carried off to the hospital. We’d followed his fights for some time, and Ernest had always admired his bowlegged and hard-jawed determination, but we began to see, even before Belmonte was injured, that Ordóñez was nearly as great as the master. His movements were perfection, and his bravery never wavered, and we watched him, both of us, in awe.

One afternoon Ordóñez paid me the very great honor of letting me hold his cape before the corrida began. He came very close and I saw the utter smoothness of his boy’s face and the depth and clarity of his eyes. He said nothing when he handed the cape to me but was very serious.

“I think he’s in love with you,” Ernest said, when Ordóñez had walked away to build energy in the crowd.

“How could he be? He’s a child,” I said, but I was proud and felt changed by the honor.

Back at the hotel that night when we were dressing for dinner, Ernest said, “I’m working out a new novel. Or it’s working itself out, really, in my head. About the bullfights. The hero will be Ordóñez, and the whole thing will take place in Pamplona.” His eyes were bright, and the enthusiasm in his voice was unmistakable.

“That sounds awfully good.”

“It does, doesn’t it? I’m calling the young torero Romero. It starts at a hotel, at three in the afternoon. Two Americans are staying there, in rooms across the hall, and when they go to meet Romero, it’s a great honor and they notice how alone he is, and how he’s thinking about the bulls he’ll face that day. He can’t share that with anyone.”

“He would feel that way, wouldn’t he?” I said. “You have to write it.”

“Yes,” he said, and although we left and had a long and delicious dinner with several bottles of wine between us, he was already with the book, inside of it. Over the coming days, his thinking grew deeper. He began to write in intense spurts, in the cafés early in the mornings, and in the hotel very late at night, when I could hear the aggressive scratching of his pencil. When we left Madrid for the fiesta at Valencia, he’d filled two thick notebooks, two hundred handwritten pages in fewer than ten days, but he wasn’t happy with the opening anymore.