“What’s wrong with all of us, Bill? Can you tell me that?”
“Hell if I know,” he said. “We drink too much for starters. And we want too much, don’t we?”
“What is it we want exactly?” I said, feeling a stir of melancholy and confusion. I wondered how Bill was making sense of the way Ernest was throwing himself so obviously at Duff. What
“Everything, of course. Everything and then some.” He scratched his chin and then tried a joke. “My headache today proves it.”
I studied him for a moment. “If this is a festival, why aren’t we happy?”
He cleared his throat and looked away. “We shouldn’t miss the amateurs, right? Hem says it’s the best show for your money and that I should get right in.”
I sighed. “You don’t have to prove anything to him. You didn’t seem to go in for the running.”
“No,” he said, seeming slightly ashamed. “But I’m ready to give it another go. I’m not dead yet.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just one of those things.”
The amateurs had long been Ernest’s favorite element of the fiesta. For years he’d been practicing veronicas with everything from the curtains to my old coat and getting good at them. Now he could bulldog the bulls, spinning away at the last moment. Afterward he’d be high and happy and practice some more in our room at the hotel with the cape he’d bought from a shop well off the square that didn’t cater to tourists. The cape was heavy red serge with simple black braid as a border all the way around. He had started collecting corks for the bottom of it, because it was the corks that allowed the matador to really control the cape and swing it well and wide.
When it was time for the amateurs that morning, he took the cape with him as he climbed down into the ring with several dozen eager men and boys all ready to test their wits. Bill went, too, but Harold stayed put for the moment, a few seats down from Duff.
“Pat’s still pretty green this morning,” Duff said when I took my seat beside her. “It was a long night.”
“So I heard.”
“We missed you, you know. Everything’s more fun with you along.”
I gave her a sharp look, thinking she was putting me on, but her face was open and warm. That was the thing about Duff; she was a wreck with men, but a good chap all the way around, and she had her own code. I didn’t believe she’d actually sleep with Ernest even if he’d wanted to-because she liked me and knew being a wife was hard business. She’d been married twice already and was set to marry Pat if they ever pulled together the money for it. She told me once that she’d never been very good at marriage but that she didn’t seem to be able to stop giving it a go.
Down in the ring, the picadors had pretty good control of things, so the action seemed light and fairly harmless. There was only one bull in the ring at a time, and this first was caramel colored and slow moving. It came along and shoved its foreleg against Bill’s rump, and he fell to one side like a character in a cartoon. It had everyone laughing. Ernest was just getting into the spirit of things when Harold climbed past us and got down into the ring, too.
“Oh, Harold,” Duff said to no one in particular because he looked like a caricature of a rich and helpless American in his pale yellow Fair Isle sweater and snow-white sneakers. We both watched him. “I’ve told him there’s nothing between us, you know.”
“I’m not sure he hears it,” I said, trying to be as delicate as possible.
“Men hear what they like and invent the rest.”
Once Harold had reached the ring, he looked up to where we were and smiled broadly. The caramel bull was near him and getting nearer, and Harold dodged to one side to avoid the horns, as everyone did. The bull trotted past and then whirled to come again, and that’s when Harold grabbed onto the horns and let the bull carry him for a few paces. It was like watching a well-rehearsed circus act. Harold had to be as surprised by his success as much as anyone, but when the bull set him down again, light as a feather, he turned back to us, looking jubilant.
“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 cafe.
“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.
“
“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.
