But across the breadth of the ring there sounded the strange eerie cry of a woman in pain. La Tarantula had struck again. The bull that had had its enormous prick in her lay in the dirt, its legs stuck stiffly up into the air. The man who was going to become her husband lay next to the bull, his life blood oozing out from a jagged hole in his belly.
When the ballad singers went through the village the next morning singing: Oh! hear of the death of El Gallo the great! they knew that they couldn't sell their printed ballad to the old men who sat in the street drinking sunshine. For they were mumbling into their beards of how La Tarantula had struck again.
Once the bull.
And again the matador.
CHAPTER SEVEN
La Tarantula died at the bullfight when her lover, El Gallo, was gored to his death. That is to say, her body still remained alive but her soul had died. She did not rush down to the infirmary where they carried the beloved body of the gored matador. She did not even attend his funeral. She did not want to see him in death. It was in life that she had last seen him, robust lusty life, redolent with the bloom of youth. That would be the memory of him that she would always carry with her.
Before this, she had laughed at the insidious rumours regarding her evil malignant influence over those who loved her. Now, her attitude toward herself had changed. She was ill-starred. Any who came into contact with her were doomed to death. Even the Miura bull was fated to die because of his contacts with her. She was poison to man.
But she continued to dance. In all of the cafes of Spain she danced.
Previously, there had been always a wild abandonment in her dancing.
Never had there been a hint of sadness. But now, she danced as though the sorrows of the world had been heaped onto her shoulders. The music she chose to dance to was always the sad, sombre type of the malagueha. But despite the melancholy of her dancing, she stirred the imaginations of those who watched her dance. The rhythm of her sensuous body attracted the lewd eyes of the men. They still camped at her feet begging her favours of her, willing to lay down everything, including life, for but one night in her arms.
But she lived for her dancing only. For in her dance she would imagine that there was only one person in the room, El Gallo, and that her movements, her actions, her desire as expressed in the posed attitudes and the muscle contortions were for him and for him only.
Over the entire breadth of the land she travelled, keeping herself from man, yet stirring them for her so that she was forced to keep moving from city to city in order to escape the advances of some hot-blooded male who was unable to control his sanity any longer.
That was how she found herself in a Moorish cafe about a year after her affair with El Gallo. Even into Africa, into Tangier, her fame as a dancer had penetrated. At first, she had turned down the offers to leave Spain. But, in time, when the men became too importune, and after she had crossed and recrossed the country, even having gone into Portugal, she decided to make the boat trip from Gibraltar to Tangier to fill an engagement at the Moorish Cafe, near the Soko Chico section.
The place she danced in was a long room with immense rafters on the ceiling. Matting carpeted the floors. Benches ranged around one side of the room. Chairs and tables filled the centre. A greater part of the floor, two- thirds of it, was occupied by sitting figures, musicians, about fifteen of them, seated cross-legged, their slippers removed, darkskinned men with white burnouses, filled the room. Here, there were no white visitors. This was a native place kept exclusively for natives. That was why the management had gone to the expense of hiring Spanish dancers. Their own dances had lost their savour by constant repetition.
For the while, these musicians danced and sang Arabian love songs.
During the intermissions, the men smoked long pipes and drank thick syrupy coffee from tiny cups.
Suddenly, the musicians struck up a song that was entirely foreign to the tunes they had previously played. The men in the audience sat up and took notice. For the music was a slow Spanish malaguena such as they had heard, some of them, across the water in Cadiz and other parts of Spain. The gypsy girl, La Tarantula, they knew was going to dance next.
She issued from a froth of curtained veils to one side of the room. Her eyes seemed to be deep expressionless pools of brackish green water.
Her gaze was still a million miles away, harking back to a time a thousand years ago, it seemed. Only her body was there dancing for them. Her mind was dead.
Slowly the music from the guitars and the mandolins took on a rising tempo. The tomtoms beat a heartbeat rhythm, enchanting the senses of the onlookers, hypnotizing their steady stares at the new gypsy dancer.
Gradually, the steady monotonous rhythm insinuated itself into their consciousness so that they forgot the time of the present and knew only that time had flowed by them and that Nirvana itself was encircling them.
Their eyes followed every movement of La Tarantula's body. Snakelike it swayed in front of them and entranced their senses. Like the flowing of fluescent waters, her body wove itself into a series of convulsions, an invitation sometimes suggesting itself in her body's grimaces, a repulsion always in the background. And as the movements of her body varied, so varied the masks on her face, changing when her body suggested unholy lust and then, in the next second, adjusting its features into a mask of utter virginal simplicity, as the body took on those attributes.
On and on she danced, her flowing arms and legs and muscles seemingly carrying her along on air currents. The music, once risen to a quick tempo, had subsided once more into the slow measures of its opening chords. The strings sobbed melancholy tears. The tomtoms beat out the rhythm of a dying heart. The castanets clacked dismal sounds. Slowly, slowly, her body subsided into a slow weaving of her torso, gradually sinking to the floor in spasms until, as the music died out into almost soundless notes, her poor tired body was inert on the floor.
For a full minute, all was quiet. Then the applause broke out in the audience. The Moors applauded wildly. The native guides who frequented the place when business was bad promised themselves that they would bring their next foreigners here for the gypsy dancer. In one corner of the room, his head almost completely immersed in the white burnouse of a native, a dark-skinned Berber was watching the proceedings. His beady eyes glittered at the sight of the gypsy body.
His tongue laved his dry lips. Clapping his hands together, he summoned the waiter, and gave him a curt order. Then he settled himself deeper into his chair and continued to stare at the gypsy girl.
His eyes closed until they were mere slits. The muscles in his chin worked like mad.
La Tarantula lay on the floor breathing heavily from exhaustion.
Tensely, her body awaited the opening strains of the next dance. This was to be the most sensational dance she had ever done. It was going to be danced with another gypsy dancer, La Niobe, a girl whom she had picked up in the Triana gypsy settlement and whom she had been teaching for the past year. It was only because of her interest in this young girl of seventeen that she had been able to keep herself alive.
All year they had been rehearsing this one dance. It was going to be the climax of her entire dancing career. Nobody had ever seen it before. Even the musicians had played their music without ever having seen the actual dance. Now, La Tarantula awaited the opening chords that would start them off. A tense air of excitement crept over the place. Word had gone around that La Tarantula was going to introduce a new and sensational dance. All eyes were glued to her figure on the floor. The lights were all turned off with the exception of one that spotlighted the recumbent figure on the stage.
The man in the white burnouse still stared out of his narrowed eye slits and laved his lips with his tongue.
The music began. First one instrument essayed a few hesitant notes, as though distantly, dimly. Gradually it became louder. Then the other instruments came chiming in, each adding a new colour to the music.
And the sum total of it all was a strangely barbaric chant that was not barbaric. Something of the barbaric masculine was missing from it. But in its place was the barbarism of women, the sweet effulgent love music that women love.
Through the veil of curtains floated the figure of La Niobe. A gasp went through the men when they saw that
