James Salter - All That Is

Among the greatest of the poems was the dirge for the death of his friend, a bullfighter who had retired but then returned to the ring as an homage and tribute to his brother-in-law, the great Joselito. In a tight, embroidered suit, perhaps a bit too tight, he was performing in a provincial ring when a cry rose from the crowd. The sharp, curved horn of the bull had ripped like a knife through the fitted pants and the white flesh beneath.

Two days after being gored, lily flowers around the green groin , Ignacio Sánchez Mejias died in a hospital in Madrid where he had insisted on being taken. In deep liturgical sounds like the tolling of bells, the famous lament begins. A las cinco de la tarde , at five in the afternoon. The heat is still staggering. The doomed man, still in a ripped suit, is lying in the small infirmary.

At five in the afternoon.

The lines repeat themselves and roll on. A boy is bringing a white sheet, at five in the afternoon. The bed is a coffin on wheels, at five in the afternoon. From far off the gangrene is coming, at five in the afternoon. His wounds are burning like suns, at five in the afternoon, and the crowd is breaking the windows.

You lived, said Lorca, by dying and being remembered. Mejias’ death, in 1934, was like an apprenticeship for his own, prefigured but not yet known. The fierce storm that would tear the country apart was already gathering. The boy with the white sheet was coming, the bucket of quicklime was ready, and the smoothed-over dirt of the bull ring was already in shadows.

He read the Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejias aloud for the first time to a roomful of gypsies during Holy Week and slept that night in the huge white bed of a gypsy dancer, the solitary rose of your breath on my cheek .

They ate, that day, in a restaurant over a bar, with narrow stairs up which the waiters had to come with their trays. It was open to the air, there were no walls, only a roof of canvas. They were seated to one side, but to be with her was to be seen by everyone. The river, flowing slowly, was beneath them.

“What are almejas ?”

“Where do you see that?”

“Here,” he said. “Almejas a la Casera.”

“No idea.”

They ordered fried whitings, little fish, and potatoes. Even through the canvas there was the warmth of the sun. All the tables were filled, one with a party of Germans who were laughing.

“That’s the Guadalquivir,” Bowman said, pointing down.

“The river.”

“I like names. You have a very nice name.”

“The notorious Mrs. Armour.”

“I also like putting my hands on you.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You do?”

“Mm.”

They went on to Granada. The sunbaked country floated past the window of the train, through his own reflection. There were hills, valleys, thousands upon thousands of olive trees. Enid was sleeping. Perhaps from a dream or something unknown there was a faint, childlike snore, once only. She had never seemed more serene.

In the distance, on a small hill near a village, was a white house surrounded by trees, a house he might live in with her, the bedroom above the silent garden, cool and green, doors to the balcony that overlooked it, mornings of love with the sun slanted across the floor. She would bathe with the door left open and at night they would drive to a city—he had no idea which one, one not far, they were all magical—and then back later in the deep, starry night.

At the same time, he was unsure of her, you would have to be, especially when she had been silent or withdrawn. He felt he was the object of her thoughts then, or worse, not even a part of them. She sometimes glanced at him briefly as if judging. He knew not to show fear but she sometimes made him uneasy with her composure. There were times when she left to go on an errand, to the pharmacy or the consulate—she never bothered to explain why she’d gone to the consulate—and he suddenly felt with a certainty that in fact she was really leaving, that he would go back to the hotel and her bags would be gone, the clerk at the desk would know nothing. He would run in the street looking for her, the blondness of her hair in the crowd.

The truth is, with some women you are never sure. They had traveled for ten days and he felt he knew her, in the room he knew her, at least most of the time, and also sitting at the chestnut-colored bar of the hotel, but you could not know someone else all of the time, their thoughts, about which it was useless to ask. She did not so much as acknowledge the existence of the handsome bartender, so intent was she on whatever she was thinking at the time. The bartender was used to being admired and stood almost disconsolately waiting a few steps away. She hated the thought of going back to London, Enid then said.

“Me, too,” Bowman said.

She was silent.

“Your husband,” he continued.

“Oh, partly my husband. Well, more than partly. I don’t want to leave here. Why don’t you move to London?”

He hadn’t expected it.

“Move to London,” he said. “Are you going to get a divorce?”

“I’d love to. I can’t at the moment.”

“Why is that?”

“Oh, there are two or three reasons. Money is one of them. He won’t give me any money.”

“Couldn’t you get it in court?”

“It’s exhausting to think of. The battle. The courts.”

“But you’d be free.”

“Free and alone.”

“You wouldn’t be alone.”

“Is that a promise?” she said.

They didn’t return to London together. He took the plane to New York from Madrid. As it happened, there was no one in the seat next to him and he sat looking out the window for a while and then sitting back with a feeling of relaxation and deep happiness. Spain was falling away beneath them. She had taken him there. He would remember for a long time. The high, wide steps of the great hotel, the Alfonso XIII, up which, as ascending to an altar, bankers and Nationalist generals had walked. The dirt paths in the Retiro, the ranks of white statues.

On the flyleaf of the book of Lorca poems he carefully wrote the names of the hotels, the Reina Victoria, Dauro, del Cardenal, Simón. They had slept in a bed with four pillows, lost in the whiteness of them. The word for naked in Spanish was desnudo . It was the same in any language, she remarked.

He ordered a drink. The announcements were finished and there was only the low, steady sound of the engines. He saw himself sitting there as if from the outside somehow, but he was also thinking about himself. He could see himself, all of himself, from his hand holding the glass right down to his feet. How lucky he was. He could see the leg of another passenger, a man in first class, a gray-suited leg. He felt superior to the man, whoever he was, to everyone. You smell like soap, she had said. He’d had a bath. You washed all the man-smell away. It’ll come back, he’d said. The suited leg made him think of New York, of the office. He thought of Gretchen with her stigma and how it somehow made her more desirable. He thought of the girl in Virginia that Christmas, Dare, who breathed a sexuality, she would be yours in a minute if you were the one… if you were the one. It had happened and he was, in Spain with a woman who had given him the feeling of utter supremacy. He had crossed some line. Her blond hair, her lean style. He saw himself now to be another kind of man, the kind he had hoped, fully a man, used to the wonder. Enid smoked cigarettes, she did it only now and again, and breathed out the rich fragrance slowly. The light in the Ritz made her beautiful. The sound of her high heels. There is no other, there will never be another.

Later in the fall he came back to the office after lunch. It was growing colder, the crowds in the street had wind-freshened faces. The sky was without color and the windows of buildings, as happened at ever earlier hours, were alight. The office seemed unusually quiet, had everyone gone out? It was eerily still. They were not gone, but they were listening to the news. A frightening thing had happened. The president had been shot in Dallas.