Weekend (25 page)

She was furious and, when someone whistled as she passed, she became more furious at the gawky stranger and went into Marks & Spencer and bought a fine black cardigan, which she wore on the way home. What she had convinced herself at the time was an attitude of defiance to the attitudes of all men had come to seem to her now a gesture of submission to the attitudes of one man.

Sitting with a fresh glass of wine, she saw that black cardigan as her beginning to conceal the reality of who she was. She might as well have bought a mask.

It had been a trivial thing to do but perhaps it had become definitive. It seemed to her that, since then, readjusting her sense of herself to come closer to his demands had become a habit. It hadn’t happened dramatically but by an accumulation of tiny deaths of instinct and impulse that grew together like a coral island, on which she was stranded. For the truth was that all her small submissions hadn’t brought them any nearer. The further she had gone from the spontaneity of herself, the further she had gone from the possibility of maintaining any dynamic connection with him.

It seemed so obvious now. But she reflected that the minutiae of our behaviour are often too small to decipher until they cohere with time into one massive statement which we can sometimes only read when it is too late to make
significant alterations. When Alan phoned her in the evening of that summer day, for example, she had still been very angry. But he was apologetic and he explained that the intensity of his love for her made him sometimes irrationally jealous. Wasn’t jealousy one measure of love? And then they both had to laugh at the outrageousness of their reactions.
Kama
fucking
Sutra
became code between them for saying that one or the other was becoming stupidly jealous.

It had appeared funny at the time but maybe they had been laughing all the way to the divorce courts. Meanwhile, behind the laughter, she supposed that the more she was adapting herself to fit his image of her, the more he was becoming bored with her. And the more, perhaps, she was becoming bored with herself. Perhaps that was why she had changed the spelling of her name from Vicky to Vikki after Alan left her. In spite of what Andrew had said, it was a sympathetic magic which didn’t seem to have worked, she had to admit.

Not much had worked, she thought. Not the attempt to change her mind as well as her name by going to university at thirty-seven. Not her commitment to Jason. She had managed to talk to him tonight. He had sounded so happy that it depressed her. She felt completely unnecessary. She thought she had got everything wrong.

She remembered Harry Beck mentioning
Heart of Darkness
. One of the passages she had underlined in the book was apposite to the way she felt, she suspected. She went to retrieve the book now and found what she was looking for, marked by an asterisk in the margin. She was hesitant to read it again.

‘Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets.’

She had plenty of those. She sat feeling locked inside the quotation like a condemned cell. But she couldn’t resist wishing that some message might still arrive there, a reprieve, no matter how tenuous or improbable. Or temporary.

Like a ringing phone? With Andrew at the other end?

In the sunlit office where I booked my ticket on a different day and in another town, they had given me the traditional choice between sun and shade – sol y sombra. I had opted for the more expensive sombra. This evening in Girona I see I needn’t have bothered. Sombra is your lot. The sky is like a lead casting. It will leak spasmodic rain throughout. This is just another working day in the bull-ring.

The crowd is sparse and we seem to be mainly tourists. Like people who may visit a solemn cathedral just to say they’ve been there and to loot its imposing stillness with their cameras, some of us might be said to be cheapening the meaning of the place with the shallowness of our motives. But that won’t matter too much here. Unlike so many modern events, where hype replaces judgement with hysteria and glamorises mediocrities into superstars, the bullfight contains at its heart something so purely dark that it defies superficiality of response. Superficiality may be all you bring to it, right enough, but then all you are cheapening is yourself.

The parade they call the paseo is over. The matadors, the banderilleros, the picadors, the drivers with their small harnessed horses which will drag out the body of the bull – all have paid their respects to the president’s box. The old men with their flat wooden rakes have made smooth again the
surface of the sand. One of them had a long cigarette dangling from his mouth. It was startlingly white in the dully lucid air.

There is a stillness, a brief congealing of time. The ring is empty. I am aware how remorselessly the space is defined by the red-painted barriers of wood between the ring and the barrera, behind which a man who is in trouble or who has abandoned his nerve can find concealment from the bull. These are the burladeros. Behind them wait the matador and his banderilleros, each with no more protection than his tight-fitting suit of lights and a cape.

The entrance of the bull will always be one of the most physically electrifying things I have ever seen, like a surge of primal memory in the blood. Suddenly, in the carefully contrived structure of the ring, there appears the essence of the animal, as if summoned by necromancy out of a darker past we used to share with it. It is like watching a Lascaux cave painting come to life. The span of the horns is shocking. The beautiful power of the bull is overwhelming.

You realise what a frail species we are. In the gasp of the crowd I sense admiration and envy and fear. We are lucky to be sitting in our man-made safety, out of distance of its questing rage. We were not always. It is trotting relentlessly around the ring, its head on a high and threatening swivel, looking for anything that will challenge it. How, you imagine, could such majestic and fearless power ever be subdued? But then that is the story of the bullfight. It is the story of ourselves.

For see what happens. Throughout the six encounters with six bulls the same ritual forms will be repeated in the same exact sequence. First, the matador and his banderilleros will show themselves slightly beyond the edges of their shelters and shout to the bull: ‘Hoy, hoy, hoy. Toro.’ Having
encouraged it to make maybe half a dozen long and powerful charges, they will have withdrawn again just in time behind their burladeros to let the bull horn the wood. Then they will play it gingerly and briefly with their capes. Then the picadors will enter on their horses, which are heavily protected with metal and padding. With their wooden lances tipped with steel, they will stick it. If they are good enough, they will wound it only in the morrillo, the hump of muscled flesh that rises at the base of its neck when it is angry. This same place will be the target for the banderilleros who follow. Holding a banderilla in each hand, they must time their lateral run across the horns of the charging bull and place both of the harpoon-tipped dowels wrapped in coloured paper in the morrillo.

Finally, the matador will have his dance of death alone with the bull. He must give it its chances with his cape, invite it near but past his body, work close to the horns, make a graceful ballet of the danger he is in. At moments of arrogant confidence in his mastery, he will turn his back in the immediate vicinity of the standing bull’s head and strut slowly towards the facing crowd, inviting plaudits. When the bull’s head hangs low enough, he will sight along his sword and, as the bull advances, sink the sword to the hilt, if he is good, in the one small space on the shoulders that isn’t blocked by bone. The bull sinks slowly. The death of the bull is elemental and it is infinitely sad. Its vast strength thaws into death before your eyes, like a mountain melting.

Six times it happens here tonight, with differing degrees of skill from the matadors and the banderilleros and the picadors. But one thing is constant. It is the awesome power the ritual holds in itself. The more you watch honestly, the more it unfolds its dark meaning.

It begins with a gang against the bull, for no single man
could take on the beast in its primal state. Man had to hunt in packs. It proceeds by using the tamed part of the animal world against the untameable part. The broken-in horse will be man’s servant in the killing of what is wild. Only after the horses have carried the picadors will two men take on the bull in flight, with weapons. And only then will the matador alone elaborately demonstrate his authority over the bull to the point of death.

We have been watching the enactment of a tragic myth – the story of man’s mastery of the animal world. All the bull has is the power of his blood and we drain him of it before we can face him one on one. The bull has one trick – fearless strength. We have many. The bullfight symbolises these.

It has always been a shaky myth, one we are not entirely sure of – which is why the bull must die or the myth won’t hold. It has always been a cruel story, which is why it must be told with such great style. The dignified grammar of the bullfight is how we make an art of our cruel mastery, to justify it. At least we have grace. It is not so much an evolution myth as a civilisation myth. It is how we came to be where we are.

Now that we are here, many would no doubt wish to ban the bullfight. But I don’t see how we can, at least not ban what it stands for from our natures. It would be like putting lace doilies over ineradicable bloodstains. They may not be visible that way but they’re still there. They still mean what they meant.

Bring your attitudes of refined outrage to the bullfight if you wish. I will not share them.

Later, in the centre of Girona, I eat a long slow meal alone. It is a soft evening. I am remembering a small blond boy in front of me who cried through much of the bullfight. Those
were wise tears. I am watching people eating and talking and walking in the colonnaded square. I am feeling how sweetly fragile life is. I am thinking how thin the membrane of civilisation is on which our lives walk delicately, liable to fall through at any moment into darker places.

Rereading the sentences, he wondered where the compulsion had come from to write them. Those bullfights had happened a long time ago. He had watched them and come away and finally taken a taxi to the airport. In the time between then and now he hadn’t realised how vividly the capes were still swirling and bulls still subsiding into stillness on the sand somewhere in his memory.

It was strange that he should have resurrected that day for himself now. It occurred to him that perhaps the theme of the weekend had brought it to the surface and his mind had been working quietly away, like a clerk collating further evidence for a lawyer’s case. But the words he had written felt more personal to him than that. When he had sat down in the dawn light at Willowvale he hadn’t been looking for evidence to support an argument, he suspected. He had been looking for evidence of himself.

What had taken him back to Girona was the intensity of what he had felt then. It was the need to reclaim a moment where he had thought he might find an utter authenticity of feeling, unalloyed with self-delusion. The man at the bullfight then was nearer to himself than he was now. In revisiting him he had been trying to meet with a sense of who he was that went beyond the improvisational performance he knew had
become his daily life. It was a performance that didn’t quite convince even himself.

He thought he knew why he had felt the need to discover that earlier sense of himself. Something had been quietly haunting him all weekend, and it wasn’t the ghost of Willowvale. It was something he had felt the morning before he left, when he was in his flat with Mary Sue. It was an emanation of himself which suddenly confronted him like a doppelgänger, the ghost of who he might have been.

It was almost as if Mary Sue were talking past him to where she knew he really was. She accepted the levity he had refined into an unguent to let intimacy pass painlessly into departure. She had maintained the levity, proving better at it than he was, but she had done it abstractedly, as if waiting for who he might really be to show up. He wished he
had
shown up because, in turning himself into an identikit of the casual lover, he hadn’t allowed her the space to do more than be the same. He had sustained it to the end. Even inside the cab, before he dropped her off, he had defied closeness by sustaining a three-way conversation involving the driver.

He felt in a way that he had missed the chance of meeting her because there hadn’t been enough of him present to make up a couple. That doppelgänger was the missing part of him that should have been there. At least he had found him sitting alone in a sparse crowd on a dull night in Girona.

He would want him along if he met Mary Sue again. He looked at the phone on the desk beside him. He picked up the piece of paper on which he had written on Friday morning and checked the number, although he already knew it by heart. But he wondered how you recovered something when you weren’t sure what it was you had lost. He dropped the piece of paper back on the desk.

He looked again at what he had written about the bullfights, skimming it. He couldn’t imagine any use to which he could put it. But that was how he had started to write years ago, reclaiming his experience for himself, earning a sense of himself from what happened to him rather than letting it just happen. It was what he told his students: even if they never published anything, there was a value in what they were doing. It would at least make them better readers. More importantly, the most inalienable right anybody had was the right to try to arrive on their own terms at an honest understanding of their own experience. To wrestle it into words wasn’t the worst way to go about that. Wasn’t that what he had been trying to do? To travel back through words for a purpose no more rewarding than an arrival at an attempted understanding of his own experience. It certainly put his latest rejection in a perspective that modified its significance. In the process he had also been doing something for the sake of trying to get it right. That was it.