Paula McLain - The Paris Wife

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.