Carlos Fuentes - Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

He was barefoot. Now Sparky knelt before him, helping him put on his black shoes, and the eyes of the bullfighter met those of the sword handler as they followed the swift, soaring flight of the swallows, their eyes blinded by the afternoon summer sun that moved so slowly and was so distant from his own agony.

— What time is it?

— Five-twenty.

— Let’s go to the plaza.

He arrived in an apple-green suit of lights, and gazed up at the high iron balcony, the pediment facing the Royal Display Grounds, as if expecting to see someone there waiting for him. Time had been shattered into isolated moments, separated from each other by the absence of memory. He tried to remember the events just prior to his dressing. How had he gotten here? Who had hired him? What was the date? He knew the day: it was Sunday, Sunday seven, that’s what the boys outside the bullring sang, Saturday six and Sunday seven, but time was still fragmented, discontinuous, and all he could remember was that Perico of Ronda had told him that some very important people were coming from Cádiz, and from Seville, Jerez, and Antequera, too; but it was the people from Cádiz who had come to the house to warn him: —Tell the Figura we’re going to be out there, see if he’ll give us the great fight he owes us this time.

The words were almost a threat, and that was what Rubén Oliva found disconcerting and bitter. But no, he was sure it was just well-wishing. He made a great effort to concentrate, to tie it all together, everything that had been happening, acts, thoughts, memories, desires, the ebb and flow of the day, a succession of distinct moments, yet linked to each other, like the passes he would string together this afternoon, if he was favored by luck and was able to overcome the strange state that held his will; in it, time seemed to have been ruptured, as though many distinct moments, from different times, had taken residence in the house of time that was his soul. He had always been a man of the present. That was what his profession demanded, that he banish memory; in the ring, memory is no more than a longing for the sweetest, the most peaceful times: it is, in the ring, the presentiment of death.

To live in the moment, but a moment tied to all other moments, like a stupendous series of passes, that’s how to drive away nostalgia and fear, the past that is lost to us and the future that awaits us when we die. He thought of all that, kneeling before a wide-skirted, rosy Virgin, with her Child on her knees, in the chapel on the plaza. The angels flying above her were the true crown on that queen, but Rubén Oliva found them unsettling: they were angels with incense burners, and on their faces were mocking smiles, almost grimaces, which distanced them from ironic complicity, setting them apart from the central figure of the Virgin? the Mother? Their smiles made him wonder what they had been perfuming. He thought they gave off a miasma of perspiration and the dark humors of long, tiring, penitent pilgrimages.

And there was something else he wished he knew: what had happened between his prayer imploring the Virgin for protection (he couldn’t remember it, but that’s what it had to have been) so that he would come safely out of the ring he had not yet entered, and his arrival just now at the entrance, where, alone with his cuadrilla, he was getting ready for the bullfight, suddenly realizing that this was a cattleman’s contest, that he, Rubén Oliva, would fight six bulls in the next three hours. He would have the opportunity — six opportunities — to prove that his previous fight, which was so renowned, had not been a fluke after all. Now, with luck, he could show that he was capable of defeating fear, not once but six times.

— I’m not afraid this time — he said, loud enough for the sword handler to hear when he hung the bullfighter’s cape over Rubén’s left shoulder.

— Figura … If I may … said Sparky, embarrassed, not meeting the bullfighter’s eyes, arranging the cape over Rubén’s left hand, and leaving his right hand free to hold the hat, which Rubén Oliva dropped and the swordhandler picked up, alarmed, putting it back in Rubén’s hand without a word, just as the music announcing the beginning of the fight was heard.

Then Rubén entered the arena, and he experienced the unexpected, and it was simply fear, simple fear, the perfectly banal horror of dying right in the middle of his debate with himself, before he could answer the questions: am I a good artist, am I a true bullfighter, can I give a good performance today, or is that no longer possible, and will I die, will I live to see forty, or is it too late? Those questions had always been provisional (which was natural, Rubén Oliva told himself), because all the while he was fighting the interminable fight, there was a public in front of him and around him that was going to give or withhold their applause, their sympathy, the trophies of the fight. But not this time: this time, the public did not exist for him.

Nervously, breaking an almost sacred tradition, he looked behind him, but his cuadrilla showed no surprise, they seemed to see a normality that he was denied: the two stories, the hundred thirty-six columns, the sixty-eight arches, the four sections of the plaza of Ronda full of people turned toward Rubén Oliva, anxious to see if he would fulfill his promise this time. The picadors looked at the crowd, the banderilleros looked at the crowd, but Rubén Oliva did not.

He walked into the glory of the arena, perspiring not from the familiar burden of the suit of lights which he wore, or from the secondary fear that its weight would plant him motionless in this beach of blood. He was not afraid of that, even when Sparky gave him the look he knew so well, the one that said you’ve forgotten something, Rubén, you’re not doing it right. What, what have I forgotten, Sparky?

— You forgot to salute the president’s box, Figura, the sword handler murmured as he removed the display cape and gave him the one he would use in the bullfight.

Rubén Oliva assumed his position, the heavy cape, starched and stiff, held between his spread-out legs. The eighteen pounds of thick fabric seemed to rest on the flimsy pedestal of his dancer’s shoes. It was a ballet of sun and shade, the matador thought, standing there waiting for the first bull, an instinctive decision, waiting in the ring rather than watching the bull from the entrance to assess its color, its temperament, its speed, which might differ from the bullfighter’s expectations.

He moved forward and halted, presenting his cape like a shield to the bull, which came tearing out of the pen to its encounter with Rubén Oliva, who was without fear that afternoon because he couldn’t see anyone in the seats; he looked first at the sun and the shade and then adjusted himself to meet the bull, halting him with a feint of the cape, making a long pass, as timeless as the two singular presences Rubén Oliva recognized at that moment: not the bull, not the public, but the sun and the moon; that was what he thought during the eternal first pass that he made at the wild animal, black as the night of the moon in its half of the arena, raging against the sun that occupied the other half, which was Rubén, blazing in the ring, a luminous puppet, a golden apple, the matador.

It was the longest pass of his life because he didn’t make it, it was made by the sun he had become, the sun he had envisioned in his endless agony, Rubén Oliva, prisoner of the sky, pierced through by the rays of the sun that was himself, Rubén Oliva, who held the fighting cape over the sand, not ceding his place in the center of the sky to the picadors, who were impatient, alarmed, satisfied, envious, astonished, afraid perhaps that this time Rubén would offer what he was offering — what the public, invisible to the bullfighter, acknowledged with a growing roar: the olés that rained down on him from the sky, broad and round as pieces of gold, fading in the shadows, as if the promised victory were a fruit of Tantalus, and the moon, residing in the shadowed stands, said to the bullfighter, not yet, everything requires a period of gestation, life’s beginning, rest, so pause now, feint now, give us a display of art that will never be forgotten: your slowness was such, Rubén (the shadows told him, the moon told him), that the bull didn’t even graze your cape, now show us something more than your adolescent valor, when you clung to the dark bulls and rubbed your sex against their skin; now show us the courage of distance, of domination, of the possibility that the bull will cease to obey, will pierce you, transforming you from an artist into a hero.