William McGivern - The Caper of the Golden Bulls

A young man in a white shirt and a red handkerchief about his neck shot past Peter. He looked frantically over his shoulder, his dark eyes full of wild lights. Then he screamed in transports of exquisite terror, and bolted on up the street.

But Peter was not alone. To his left, coming on steadily and imperturbably, were the massive horns of the lead oxen. And behind them the bulls.

A hand gripped his shoulder.

“Are you trying to be killed?”

Don Miguel, the Sword of Malaga, ran evenly alongside Peter, keeping abreast of him with the light, skipping strides of a torero. The people on the balconies recognised the old man and screamed at him.

“Slow down,” he said to Peter.

The bulls were going past them like a freight train. There was a reek of dung and sweat, spurts of dust, and the rattle and ring of their hooves on the paving stones. Peter saw the hairy nostrils and small dull eyes, lashing tails and a froth of sweat on thick pads of shoulder muscle.

“Let them go by. Slow down.”

They stopped running. Peter put both hands to his heaving sides and watched the bulls pounding up the street with the oxen.

“Amigo, where did you come from?” Peter gulped down air and shook his head; he couldn’t speak.

“I was watching for you. I waited until the last second. Where were you standing?”

“Across the plaza, near the barricades.”

“It’s funny I didn’t see you. Listen, if you wait until the last, try to get behind the bulls. You can’t trot along with them as if they were cows. It’s very dangerous.”

Men on the balcony began to shout at them.

Don Miguel looked away quickly. The lines in his tough old face seemed to sharpen; his eyes grew brighter. He said: “Stand very still, Peter.”

A towering black and white bull was trotting back along the street. A newspaper blew under its nose. The bull chopped at it viciously. It sniffed the gutters and looked up at the shouting people in the balconies.

“Stand very quietly.”

Peter didn’t need the old torero’s injunction; every joint in his body suddenly seemed to have acquired a thick, immobilising sheath of ice.

He prayed for the crowd to be silent; that was almost the worst of it, the hysterical sense-numbing noise.

The bull was twenty feet away when it noticed the two human targets standing motionless in the street. It raised its head to stare at them, and the movement caused a crest of muscle to rise steeply in its shoulders. Then it came forward in quick stops and starts, pawing delicately at the paving stones, feinting right and left with big, murderous horns, as if trying to determine whether these tall, post like objects could be frightened or startled into action.

“Very still now,” Don Miguel said, without moving his lips.

The bull stopped five feet away, and sniffed the ground. They formed a tableau under the screaming crowds, the men, the animal, the noise itself, all linked together in a pattern so volatile that it seemed ready to explode at any instant of its own interior tensions. It was a foretaste of what must be the temporal texture of eternity, Peter thought with therapeutic irrelevance; seconds that were like years, minutes that were like centuries.

Someone raised a first-floor window and flapped a bed sheet into the street.

The bull wheeled away from them and charged it.

Don Miguel pulled Peter along the street, then froze him with the pressure of his hand. The bull turned from the limp, unresisting, unsatisfactory sheet, and looked back at them.

“Stand very still.”

Another sheet flapped temptingly from a window farther up the street.

The bull went for it at a hard gallop, ripped it free with one savage chop, and continued up the street with the big white sheet flapping and trailing beneath its churning hooves.

Don Miguel smiled at the cheering people in the balconies.

“It’s like old times,” he said and wiped his forehead. “Peter, you have a story to bore children with in years to come.”

“What the devil are you doing here in Pamplona?”

“Let’s go and drink some wine. It’s not too early to start lying about the size of those horns.”

“Answer my question.”

Don Miguel shrugged apologetically. “Well, there’s an old Spanish proverb that goes this way: It is better to eat dry bread in the sunlight, than to join a feast in darkness.”

“That isn’t old, it isn’t Spanish, and it isn’t proverbial,” Peter said.

“Very few foreigners would understand that. Come along, Peter, it’s time for some wine.”

“Why won’t you answer my question?”

The old man scratched his ear. “All right. I came here to help you.”

“You’re a fool.”

“You see? That’s why I didn’t give you an answer. A man who can’t afford friends is too poor to have enemies. And a Spaniard without foes is like a bull without horns. That isn’t old or Spanish or proverbial either. But think about it, anyway. Now. Will you take some wine with me?”

Peter sighed helplessly.

They went off down the street with their arms about one another’s shoulders... One night later in the week, Peter met with a carpenter in a draughty shed near the river.

“I did my best, senior but the time was short.”

“I think you’ve done a fine job.”

“Thank you. But if there were more time I would put a sharper light in his eyes. And more of the devil in his smile. But the nose and cheeks are good. And the uniform is correct. Black, with the silver trimming on the coat and hat. It’s the style of Phillip the Second, you know. Now. You see those curls on his wig? Where they come down over his left temple? Well, just behind the lowest curl is a little lever that makes the other thing work. You can hardly see it, eh, senior The Cabezuda was propped against a wall of the shed, its fresh paint sparkling in the light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Under comically arched brows, its great black eyes were fixed fiercely at a point about six feet above Peter’s head. The pink cheeks were bigger than pumpkins. A splayed nose hung suspended over ruby-red lips which were stretched wide in a gleefully ferocious smile. The tricorn hat, austerely formal in its trimmings of black and silver, was pulled down raffishly over one eye. A drum hung from a strap around the neck, the sticks secured to the rim by loops of tasselled green cord. From the shoulders, folds of dark cloth dropped to the ground. The hems were bound with red flannel, on which sequins glittered in cabalistic patterns.

“Look!” The carpenter raised the folds of cloth and showed Peter the single four-by-four which supported the frame of the Cabezuda. Attached to this post, at right angles to the ground, was a yoke padded with leather.

“Watch!” The carpenter crouched and fitted his head through the yoke.

When he stood erect the Cabezuda rose another two feet in the air.

Peter stared appraisingly at its eyes. They were now at least eight feet above his own.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Perfect.”

He gave the happy artisan a bonus for his industry, and sent him off smiling.

From every quarter of the town came the sounds of the fiesta. Music and singing and the noise of fire-crackers, faint and joyous on the air. But it was a joy of other hearts, and it did nothing to gladden Peter’s. The shed was a comfortable haven, it seemed to him, against a mindless sort of gaiety he wasn’t able to join in.

He sat and smoked a cigarette. It was good to rest and think of nothing. He was not tired, but he was curiously discouraged.

The night before he had quarrelled with Grace. She had been dressed for dinner in a gown the colour of ivory, a saucy little diamond tiara crowning her smooth blonde head.