Mira Mira Mira
Jun. 13th, 2006 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losA 28 page (if double spaced) short DEATH STORY OF DEATHNESS! Written and complete in a day and a half! Written, edited, spell-checked. Ooooooh, baby.
Within: bullfights (lots), sex (lots), stuff dying (lots), parties (some), conversions to catholocism (one)
Dude. I can see the arena from my bedroom window. I think it kind of had to get written. So far? I kind of heart it.
I have to warn you, I think the begining is lame.
I was writing Sonambulist and Delilah (whose name I am going to change now that it's become too biblically evocative) was a walk-on character, creepy and interesting, and I liked her so much I began to wonder if I could explore her more and now she has a story. I think this may be becomming a collection. Sonambulist, Mira Mira Mira and there's this wierd murder yarn evolving with the wine expert mentioned in MMM, Mimi Hamone. But... I enjoy rereading it, and that very rarely happens.
Mira Mira Mira
Author’s note:
The title literally translates to look, look, look. It is a bullfighters cry to catch the attention of the bull, but the audience is not immune to the imperative. The bullfights in this story are corridas, “runnings of bulls,” or “bull’s run,” and one is specifically a mano-a-mano. The performer who finishes the animal is addressed either as “torero,” bull handler, or “matadore,” killer.
When she was nineteen Delilah snuck past the security guards into Emmanuel's dressing room. Delilah had been in scores of commercials and had a bit part in one Hollywood movie, and was in Sevilla shooting her role for a film that was somewhat obscure even within its indie niche. Not the main part, but not negligible. Delilah was playing a jet set coke addict abroad, and that day was still wearing the costume department’s black shift dress, the makeup that hollowed her blue eyes into gooey tunnels now scrubbed off. Her brassy blonde hair was up in a clip. She wasn’t old or experienced enough to get a lot of quality stage work with good troops, but she planned to work her way into a respectable position in the business through an unfaltering list of solid, well-performed stage roles and discreetly chosen film appearances. An American Judi Dench. An attractive Mary Louise Parker. A non-emaciated Audrey Hepburn, even.
She found a door with a piece of paper bearing his typed name taped to it. Bingo. She tried the handle. Unlocked. Why would you lock it, after all? She thought. It was during the fight, the wing was under guard, and he was wearing the most valuable thing he owned. She would have to wait. Delilah ducked into the room, closing the door behind her. She touched everything, running her hands over the rim of the chair, pinching the supple leather of the seat, finding his discarded street clothes puddled on the floor.
On a whim she folded them and put them on the dressing table. She grinned at the unlabeled little pots on the right. Stage makeup, as she’d guessed when she first saw him. A little rouge for the lips, the cheeks and eyes. Thirteen thousand people watching you kill something, why not do it in lipstick? She settled in the lower right corner, judging that it was impossible to see from the door, leaning against the wall. Delilah squirmed a little knowing that while she was waiting she was missing his fights. He could get hurt, she thought, and then you’d be stuck here waiting for nothing. Wouldn’t you look like an ass?
For another hour she waited. It was the middle of summer, and she boiled alive. She’d been hot in the stands, in the cheap seats at the mercy of the sun where she was close enough to see his face, and she’d been violently jealous of the natives with their quaint, yet practical fans, but this was worse. There was no ventilation in the little box of a room. Everything-- the rickety vanity and the beat up hat rack-- looked shoddy and temporary.
And the sound told her he was coming. The explosion of cheers, the cow-like tread of everyone leaving. An especially crowded fight, being that it was the fiesta. He wasn’t important yet, only tacked onto the bill as a substitution, and she’d found out only just in time. He was no one, but, knowing nothing about the sport, Delilah believed he was destined for prominence. How else could she explain her presence here, his affect on her?
And he entered, giving the ear he’d earned to a handler, saying rapid, indecipherable words to his manager? His assistant? That wasn’t Spanish, she spoke that. Castilian? She frowned. And the door closed and he slumped into the chair, spinning dizzily like the second bull had as she’d left, a tight arc over on its side. He fell to high wooden armrest on the right, panting. The only thing missing was that massive spurt of blood from the mouth. Disgusting, she thought objectively, shivering a little.
“You do speak Spanish proper?” She asked in the language, tone critical, from her corner. Emmanuel's head shot up and he jerked towards her. The muscles in his neck strained, she noticed.
“Who in hell are you?” Castilian accent, but perfectly intelligible.
“Evidently.” She answered her own question.
He was twenty two. The booklet said so. He was born in Toledo. He’d premiered in Pamplona- a somewhat cheesy, weak beginning, she thought. Like an actor debuting in the Mickey Mouse Club. And he did look young, terribly so, younger than her even. There was blood on the back of the suit, encrusting a shoulder blade, like a bird with its wing ripped off. And both his thighs, in addition to the rest of his right leg, were coated.
“Are you hurt?”
“This?” He spread his hands, and the perforative splay of his fingers caught at her. “Not mine.”
“You tumbled hard the second round.” She wondered if that had settled her decision. He’d bounced twice on impact and she felt terror, been shocked at her own audible gasp.
“The medic said nothing was broken.” He was very still, waiting for her to explain herself, staring directly at her. His nose was too sharp, The entire line of his face was a little like a hatchet coming at you. There was demand in it, maybe a hint of need bleeding into the deep set eyes, pathos dripping into the sunken cheeks from the high brow.
She came around between him and the mirror. His head swiveled to watch her progress, and he didn’t say anything, didn’t give Delilah anything. And he stiffened in the chair when she knelt and found out that, somewhat anachronistically, a zipper rather than a button closed the costume’s high-waisted pants. To his credit, he didn’t ask what she was doing. He stood suddenly, and she sat back on her heels. He backed away from her, keeping his gaze on her face. He reached the door. Her eyes were wide and bright, her chest rose and fell with an active fear. He locked the door.
After the almost silent exchange, during which he’d kept his eyes open and rubbed her blonde hair, he asked her if she had a place to stay for the night. She laughed sharply.
“I’m not a groupie. I’m an actress.” She refastened her hair in the clip. She looked at him in the mirror discreetly as she continued to fix herself. He was still as beautiful as he had been fifteen minutes ago. She was a little surprised at herself. “A real one, not a waitress with hopes and dreams and credit card debt. My name’s Delilah Cook. You won’t have heard of me.”
He thought of introducing himself, but then, he was on the bill and in the program, and it seemed farcical. “I don’t usually get visited by actresses.”
“Marilyn sets such a bad precedent we all feel entitled to a bit of slutty behavior.”
His brown furrowed. A tight little pinch, she noted. “Marilyn Monroe, right?”
She smirked. “Indeed.”
His jaw tightened. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
She rose an eyebrow, honestly surprised, and continued to fix her makeup. “I didn’t say you were.” She made sure there was no Sangria Cream on the back of her lips, thus on her teeth, by sliding a finger in past the lips and slowly pulling it out with an audible pop. Emmanuel cleared his throat.
“Do you want dinner?”
She giggled. “I’m full, thanks.”
He tried again. “Come home with me.”
“So direct! Artless.” She closed the mascara. “If you like.”
“After you hide in a dressing room for the entirety of a fight you paid for, all you can say is ‘if I like’?” His enunciation was so pronounced, so disdainful, that she laughed again.
“What hotel?” She asked playfully, consent lacing the question like stays up her back would secure dress.
“Alfonso XIII.” The tournament had paid in perks for his willingness to come as a last minute stand in. His actual fee was far more than his usual, and he’d been picked up rather than having to ride the bus from the small town where he trained. He knew he’d have to move to a bigger city soon, probably this one, but the money to cover the investment was slow in coming. He changed, and she watched the slow sliding off of the electric bright fabric, her eyes following the sparkles of the outfit designed to guide her down his torso, over his thighs. He flushed self-consciously at how she stared. He wondered if all American girls just looked at people so freely, like this.
On two separate occasions girls had done this for him, and after he’d finished they’d wiped their mouths and left quietly as they’d come. He hadn’t known if his manager had gotten them for him, or if they’d slipped the guards money and gotten past. Famous toreros had assistants at the exit, selecting unaccompanied women who loitered for the purpose and escorting them down. Emmanuel wasn’t that famous, and he’d always wondered how the other toreadors managed. After a corrida he was so thoroughly spent he couldn’t imagine anything more strenuous than Delila’s delicate handling.
“Did you pay?” He asked uncomfortably.
“What?”
“The guards.”
She laughed. “There was an unguarded fire escape door.”
A knock. The impractical dress cape was brought in by a pe(accento)on who noticed Delilah with silent surprise. In contrast to the well-cut street clothes dumped without care on the floor, the seemingly ruined suit of lights was folded, placed on top of the dress cape and carefully laid in a box. Delilah thought it a bit late. The embroidery was marred by falls, by dirt, the hot red spots fading to a rusty brown she was sure would never lift.
The hotel was in walking distance. She asked him to pick her one of the pretty native oranges from a tree above the sidewalk. She’d tried it, spat out the incredibly sour pulp inelegantly and glared as he laughed. They were almost the same height. He’d kicked off his shoes in the match, as if to show everyone he was seriously bent on revenging himself against the bull that had impacted his side. Now he wore black leather Oxfords. He wondered if he’d recognize Delilah if he saw her on the street. She was beautiful, he could tell, but the claro American blondes tended to look so alike to him. He would memorize her face, he decided, he would trace the outline of her eyes and the line of her nose and he would know her.
He ordered room service and ate quickly while she lolled on the bed. They made love in the dark. “Have you done that before?” He asked her, after, trying to pass it off as a bit of a joke. They lay side by side. “Of course.” She’d dated without cessation since she was twelve and fucked a kid named Denis on the set of a jeans add when she was fourteen. “Haven’t you?”
He sneered audibly, and her hand, dipped over his mouth, buzzed with it. “Of course.” He smothered the defensive urge to say “More than you,” childishly. The phrases were what he’d been telling his friends and brothers since he was fourteen. The actual explanation, a few times with whores and once with a schoolmate who, though willing enough, had cried after and never looked at him again, did not seem to him an appropriate badge of prowess.
“How do you get the blood off that costume?”
“What? Oh, you don’t.”
“But isn’t it incredibly expensive? All that work, that money, for something you destroy?” She marveled.
“It’s nothing to a bull.” He shrugged. And it wasn’t. Each of them at least four years old, and 460 to 600 kilograms, raised free range, bred selectively for their intelligence, their aggression. A rosette of the breeder placed on their back. Exorbitantly expensive things, not only to be killed but to be fought and destroyed swiftly, painlessly. Well. A suit of lights was so much less wasted than a bull, each one a serious threat to the life of someone untrained and unarmed, even legitimately dangerous to a man with a sword. They were weakened. In the process they were enraged to the point of desperation.
He’d fallen today. More than forty matadores had died in this century. Not a mark of their poor craftsmanship so much as part of the art. The essence of it was this possibility. Even the great Manolete was killed at thirty --too old to fight, should never have come out of retirement-- by the bull Islero. A shock so great Islero’s dam was slaughtered to prevent the reoccurrence of such an atrocity. And Manolete. Manolete had been flawless. People still talked. Emmanuel sought her hand across the space of the bed. It was too hot to cling together. “Will you come to Madrid next week and watch me?”
She rolled over on the bed, liquid eyes facing his profile. He didn’t turn over. He was taunt, his stiffness made her feel like her hand was clutching an ivory-handled fan. Firm and unbreakable bone. Madrid was a few hours on the bullet train. “Yes.” She said. She felt sticky, her hair was plastered to her face. He fell asleep and she watched him until she too crumpled down into herself, dreaming thick illusions of static, angry color and amorphous shape.
They saw a lot of each other in the next few months. Once she made other plans and skipped one of his fights and he didn’t return her calls for a week. Afterwards he refused to talk about it. Fierce egotism burst and crested between them like solar flares. Without ever saying it she could imply that she considered him a mere sportsman rather than an artist, which hurt and infuriated Emmanuel. It was in that slight twist of her lips, only visible sometimes, when he searched for it (and he sometimes wondered if it was always there, if she were forever laughing at him and he could only see it when a wary, defensive hatred of his tired muscles, the lumbering, wickedly dangerous animal, the mawkish crowds, her, everything-- sharpened his eyes), as he, pacing the room, conducted a post-mortem. As if his care were ludicrous. He suspected she had very little taste for his profession. If he suggested going out to watch on a Sunday he wasn’t working, if he got enthused about someone’s latest stunning performance, she evaded the subject, pleading fatigue or disinterest. He had no idea what precisely had brought her to the match where they’d met. He didn’t want to ask.
It was, on her part, neither apathy or deliberate nastiness. She’d gone to her first corrida with friends, cervesas in hand, all of them wincing and gaping at the spectacle too bizarre to be taken seriously, giggling at wildly inappropriate moments and drinking in the glares of the seasoned Spanish enthusiasts. Two long stabs to weaken the back muscles- a bright jet of blood that splattered the horse. She winced as the picadore twisted in the long pole. Six obscenely festive, ribboned barbs, the bandilleros, plunged into the animal’s back. By the end the bits of ribbon would be matted down with blood, their color muted. Blood a stark, frank, shocking red against the black flank, and so much of it, the bull’s distended tongue hanging down.
She wanted the bull to charge the wood barriers and pick off the cowering assistants, or rip through the gate and make for the exit. She wanted the bull to break through the barriers and kill the people in the stands. She never stooped wanting it, even when she learned to want Emmanuel to triumph. They way they dragged the body out in a grand circle-- like Achilles to Hector, crude and profane, it was as if the spectators were being invited to further loll around, to fuck each other mawkishly in self-congratulation, in the stale joy of obvious death.
Several thousand cloth fans flickered like darting eyes and the crowd choked on its own breath, so absolute was the silence when the matadore began the estocada, the act of thrusting the sword.
She’d seen Emmanuel. He’d taken off his hat-- his first fight in this Plaza--and during the paseillo parade that marked the beginning of the corrida she had felt stirred, but during the fight itself she’d drowned in him. The costume, the traje de luces, the suit of lights, left nothing to her imagination. Emmanuel thrust the lean line of his body out to the animal as he taunted it, and the slow drape of the cape past his slim hips was nearly pornographic. His feet slid in the sand with a delicacy that shocked her. Everything was mesmerizingly bright. Every time he looked to be in danger she gasped, unable to help herself. He was talking to it, she thought, dazed, as he leaned into the bull and whispered something she could not make out, even with La Maestranza’s excellent acoustics. The intimacy between then was profound, and touched her.
And he’d whipped the sword in faster than she could really see, in a profound swish, everything happening too quickly to understand at that fatal juncture. In all the corridas she would attend, the moment of that impact would elude her in all but a handful of instances. And the following two matadores danced in her distraction, and then it was over and her friends were plucking at her clothes and planning to get drinks. She checked regularly for the next time Emmanuel would come to the city, and she’d snapped on her opportunity, too enthralled to be disgusted with herself.
In her more analytical moments she thought of herself in terms of women who followed professional wrestlers, glazed eyes and American flag T-shirts without names, sometimes marrying the absurd musclemen. She had winced and gagged at the torture of the bull, but only when it looked as if Emmanuel might die in that second match did she nearly faint with mother-fear. Her care seemed to her so futile, so limited.
But Emmanuel and the people in this country considered him more than a joke, more than an absurd Hemingway stereotype or a jock. He was an artist. She’d never agreed with calling chefs or decorators artists. Something so essential to life could not achieve the elevation, the necessary distance from pettiness, that seemed to her necessary to reach the inner core of human grandeur. And what was baser than killing something that could kill you? Corridas were art here. It made her question her own artistic relevance, and she was too driven for the reflection not to discomfort and frighten her.
What was more phallocentric than thrusting yourself in arrogance at a source of harm, in ritualizing your ability to turn your back on it? What was more patriarchal than a decorated display of conquering virility, so pronounced it bordered on the ridiculous? The heat in the stands, rising, steaming off the people and the animals, her on the backless bench, Emmanuel in the too tight, too warm, archaic costume of an 18th century Andalusian noble. The blood, the cruelty, the sheer stupidity-- and what if he were seriously hurt? She had thought she would grow to understand and enjoy it but it remained strange and stupid even in its ability to hypnotize her, and she hated it more, not less as time passed.
It didn’t get better. She’d commented on the absurd stoicism of the horses in the second act. They were gored in the flanks by the charging bull, so that their rider, the picadore, might stab the bulls neck, weaken its muscles, force it to lower its head so a single matadore with a sword could strike a killing blow. As the bull got up under the creature, past the padding and into the soft belly as if it sensed weakness in the padding, the horses did not whimper or scream. She’d seen the horse up against the wall, its pinned rider vocally panicking, and the horse was silent except for heavy breathing. When the picadore had twice stabbed the bull the horses pranced, knees high and bent, out of the ring with all the dire urgency of morris dancers as they bled through thick padding.
Delilah had wondered aloud what amazing training they underwent. Emmanuel told her with no concealment that before the match the horse’s vocal cords were slit, and choked on his laugh at her chalk-faced horror. He always made her watch. The implication was that missing his fights was a willful abandonment of him when he needed her.
A white handkerchief was used to signal appreciation, to award the torero a coveted trophy (a bit of the animal-- an ear, a tail, a head), or, in rarer cases, to spare a valiant bull. In her purse she carried one with her embroidered initials on it, which Emmanuel had given her when they’d been together a month, when she’d asked what other people meant by waving them. And she went.
He earned more now and began to rent a flat in Sevilla. As her project drew to an end she signed on to a production of Fredrico Garcia Lorca’s rural trilogy. She was told she had starring roles, and that afternoon signed she her lease for another year. Emmanuel took her out, got her drunk, bullied the jukebox into playing “Take This Waltz” and spun her around and around until he had to literally carry her back to the hotel. He was infatuated. He considered asking her to come drive the dusty eight hours with him and meet his mother. He shyly flitted through a jewelry store one day like a criminal.
He was terrified he’d stupidly blurt it out during dinner, and almost choked on sherry when Delilah asked him if he wanted to move in together. He said they’d have to marry for that. He was still a Catholic in a Catholic country, after all. Sleeping together, practically living together, was one thing, this was the suggestion of living in sin. “Should we get married, then?” she asked reasonably. “I mean, is that the next step?” He was flabbergasted. “We could afford a nicer apartment.” She inserted into the silence. He took a bite of his steak. Chewed. Finished. He told her, “We’ll see.” And he went home alone because she said she was due for a get together with some members of her cast, and wanted, rather obviously, to give him space and time to think about something he had not taken exactly as he should.
At home he took off his suit jacket. He hung it on the hanger. He put his cavarat on the tie rack. He deliberately ripped the door off the armoire. Rage had come suddenly, like a flash flood. She’d come to him and bobbed like a dinghy in the dressing room. She proposed to him in a manner that stripped it of dignity-- made it a question of mere logistics-- even as he prepared to propose to her. Delilah with her smugly excellent Spanish and English, when he couldn’t understand enough of her language to watch a film without the subtitles on. Delilah with her sexual experience, “here, do this,” “like that.” Delilah, distant and compelling, ever polite. “If you like.” Controlled Delilah with her cascade of ordered goals going unfulfilled a continent away while she labored in an alien environment, treating things in Spain as if they were amusing diversions that could give her several exotic diseases. If Delilah loved him, he doubted she wanted to.
Emmanuel started attracting more attention, and his rates tripled- easy when you made next to nothing before, but a new world of possibilities opened up to him. Delilah got offered two plum roles for the next season and took her time picking between them, filling Emmanuel with fond exasperation over her constant news updates on her haggling and prevaricating. He’d seen her last show opening night and found it enragingly opaque, and pretentiously, deliberately so, but let himself he charmed by her consummate skill and ignored everything else about the production.
Emmanuel bought a house and brought Delilah to it on a pretext. They’d had sex on the hardwood in front of the fireplace and he’d asked her, he prepared, she dazed and post coital, if she might like to meet his mother. Inside he primped like a peacock at his own orchestration. Delilah was demure for Senora Castano. His mother had smiled and, behind closed doors, approved of the pretty, accented blonde girl, with the caveat that with those hips the babies would be hell. And of course, the larger issue. Delilah, lapsed Episcopalian, begrudgingly converted, bitching all the way. Emmanuel huffily asked what she meant when she said he “Wasn’t even all that Catholic.” Two years after they met, Emmanuel and Delilah married.
Their personalities creaked and cracked and rose against each other like tectonic plates. Emmanuel held open doors and she opened the next one over without really thinking about it. When they fought it was hideous. He bellowed like his father and she screamed melodrama and threw plates she knew he could dodge. He said in very few words cutting, horrible things that she had never thought about herself and she spilled every awful thing he had ever suspected of himself in elegant, well-worded tirades.
Her sarcasm was withering to the point of emasculation, and he had a habit of fucking her silent, trying to fill her with her adoration for her, his fierce since of pride in who he was, in who they were, so fully she couldn’t say those things anymore, screwed her so her tongue might gag on the words and she would love him simply and selflessly. They rarely talked out their problems, after the sex staring at the walls in predawn silence, surpassingly cold. Desert cities are so still at night that the beat of Sevilla, the run of her traffic, the click and burble of her night life well past midnight, did not seem to reach them, seemed to go no further than its own immediate vicinity. In the late morning or early afternoon they woke cheerful.
It was midday when they awoke that Sunday, almost two years after their marriage, Delilah first. The sound of the shower woke Emmanuel, who had good enough hearing to detect an animal turning behind his back. Delilah came out naked, glanced up at him as he took her place in the bathroom and threw her gaze back down, strangely demure. When he came out she was sitting in front of the vanity in her bra and panties doing her makeup. They’d slept too late, she thought, and now they would be awake all Siesta. The hottest part of the day, when people hid in dreams.
Sunlight from partially closed curtains streamed over her, and the fine blonde hair on her body reflected brightly, guiding him from her burning crown to her thin, gold-coated legs. A dark shape spilled over the top of her thigh. Emmanuel walked over and watched. She continued to stare into the mirror. Eyeliner. Mascara. He nudged her legs apart with a knee.
“I’m sorry.” Emmanuel said. Delilah hadn’t said no, far from it, but the inside of her left thigh was bruised, the pattern of his hand against what he still considered almost fantastically pale skin. She said nothing.
He sat in street clothes, sulky and silent while she buttoned the tight red dress which gave into a richness of folded fabric at the knee. It looked to him like she couldn’t move in it, but Sevillianas had been flamancoing in these for centuries, so she must be fine. She dressed better now, he thought, with her sharp, expensive tailored garment and her no-nonsense black fan. She looked like a matadores wife. People paid them more attention. He was starting to appear in tabloids. She was getting better reviews. She cut them out of publications, the good and the bad, and put them in plastic sleeves in a plain black binder. She read them over many times. He could understand that.
They walked to the arena. The day of the fight had dawned unforgiving. It was something like a hundred degrees. Emmanuel thought he could feel rays of it, creeping up and down his spine. He carried his suit of lights in a padded black bag under his arm. The heat would be hellish when he was in it. He winced. Delilah shoved her mantilla in her handbag, and Emmanuel frowned.
“You’ll burn.”
“It’s too hot.” She said impatiently, the first real words she’d said to him all day.
They were early. She followed him into the dressing room. She did that sometimes. Emmanuel remembered when he’d come back stage after one of her plays. So many people running around, their purpose threatening in its seemingly arbitrary quality. Like racing glyphs in a language he didn’t speak. Lowering ropes, fussing at drapes, three people carrying, in a row, a table, a vase and several bouquets of flowers. Surreal. He’d wanted out. And she drifted by dressed as a thirty’s socialite and it was almost as if, for an instant, she didn’t recognize him. Arms around him then, perfunctorily, he thought, but she was so busy, swept off into the gaggles of people whose function who didn’t know, and they all needed to talk to her, and he felt like an intruder, or worse like a boy who’d crept downstairs late Christmas eve to discover his parents paused in the action of wrapping the presents and eating the cookies.
The suit slid out of the bag. He hung it in the closet, noting how Delila’s eyes followed the gesture with some smugness. She watched him dress with minute attention. He smoothed the fabric over his body, tightening the back plate, fastening the ceremonial cape for the brief time it would be on him, gartering the bright stockings. She curled her fingers in his hair when he bent to hop into the shoes, and his dislodged her gently to put on the black knitted hat.
“Maybe it’ll charge me in this dress.” She teased as she gathered her shawl and purse to go up into the stands.
He looked at her in utter confusion, as if she’d asked him why they didn’t just shoot the bulls if it was easier. “Darling, bulls are colorblind. The red-- it’s just tradition.”
“They are?”
“Yes, that’s why you have to-- with the cape, the cape work, you move it, you move your body so that--” He felt helpless in the face of her vast ignorance. “You never knew that?”
“No, I mean, I know everything else is complicated, but you know, I thought the color too. Everyone thinks the color.” She said defensively.
“You mean all this time, you never knew that.” He laughed a bit. She smiled, rolled her eyes and left.
His fight went badly. A 580 kilogram bull trounced him. The bull pinned him under it, luckily with only one leg, and didn’t gore. His assistants had to seduce it off of him with their bright pink capes. Three of his ribs smashed, and the healing time was estimated to be months by the on site medic who patched him up. A matadore, like a professional ballerina, has a limited shelf-life of about ten years, possibly fifteen if one starts early and is ludicrously lucky in terms of aging well. His months of inactivity, of lost training time and atrophied skill, were another man’s years.
As for the immediate future he asked his peon to help him stand. The animal was tired, its head low, and he would stab it through the heart and the audience would, in their wisdom, having seen how it had touched him, understand and grant him its body, and he would cut at the head and hold it aloft, and they would see, and Delilah, even now being admitted into the private corridor of the ring from the spectators arcade, she would see, that he was proficient and skilled and indestructible and by god they would all know his name, and even people he hated would be compelled to love him.
The bull, alone in the ring now, pranced whorishly for the audience. Emmanuel watched in horror as white handkerchiefs started to rise, and nearly sobbed when the presidete’s own orange flag flickered in response. An indulto. The bull was pardoned. Its spectacular performance enabled it to live out the rest of its life as a stud. Emmanuel saw red. He stood, strode into the ring to cheers for his own superb performance, his bravery and fortitude, sounds that could not reach him, and mocked the estocada with a banderilla. Had it been real, it would have been an exquisite kill. Retainers led the bull back into its pen. The indignation of completing the corrida with the bull’s breeder’s representative striding beside him, as a reward for raising such an exquisite beast, was inevitable. He wanted nothing more than to stab through the middle of the bull’s branding rosette.
Emmanuel waited until the handlers had finished with his bull and gone about their business topside before he stomped down into the pens and pulled out his sword. He got next his animal it and stared into its eyes as it balked inside the pen. He thought about how to get in with it. As it was unable to lower its horns and strike the matadore through the bars, Emmanuel grabbed its massive face and begin to whisper to the bull how he would kill it. A harsh, supple intimacy twisted his words. When he finished, panting, he stared into the creatures eyes, and he did not think he imagined the dread in them.
“Are you quite finished?” He whipped around, sword still out, not quite consciously pointing it at the source of the noise.
“Oh, it’s you.” He lowered his voice. He had forgotten about Delilah. “I thought you were upstairs.
“I’ve been waiting down here since the doctor told me you were fine and I saw the orange flag. Jose told me you would have to use a bandilleros.” His chest still heaved, but as usual he stared directly into her eyes, those black orbs in that two sharp face pinning her so thoroughly it was as if he wanted her to peel and crack down her line of symmetry. He sneered at the mere mention of the salvation of the bull. He was so frequently in contortions of disdain Delilah wondered if one day his jaw would crack under the sheer force of one last titanic expression of disgust.
“Delilah.” He pronounced it slightly wrong, as always, unable to hear the vowels sounds as she heard them but aware only peripherally of his own inadequacy, all the more enraged because he could not detect, seize and fix it. “I need to kill this animal.”
“How many do you think you’ve killed?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do.” There was fondness in her tone, a sweet smile falling out unintentionally. “You do know.”
“I don’t know. Maybe four hundred.”
She was silent. Her hair had been back in a bun this morning, with the ivory hair pick she’d bought in Calle Sierpes to wear to his mother’s funeral. Her hair was falling out, and the strands were smeared across the sides of her face. There was no light down here. Hardly any. Her hair looked as if he could follow it back out into the arena proper in the dark.
“Maybe four hundred and thirty six.” He corrected himself in the face of her silence.
“There’ll be trouble if you do.”
“They’ll keep it quiet, the presidente, the staff. Everyone will understand.”
“Emmanuel, it’s in a pen. You’ll hate yourself for this, it isn’t sporting.”
“It is if I get down there with it.”
“You’re hurt! God dammit, baby, let it go!” She cried hot little tears as she screamed. “It’s just unnecessary, let the fucking cow live!” She stepped towards him to emphasize her point. Her hands fluttered lightly, desperately over his injured flanks, and even that stung, and he hid from her how he swooned and nearly toppled because a matadore is never afraid, and he was angrier than he was hurt.
“The bull deserves to die!” Emmanuel roared. “Can’t you see I can do this? I’m not provoking an innocent! I go in there and I demand to know, “Are you death? Are you death? Are you death?” And the bull snaps and says “I am,” and it couldn’t have said it if it weren’t true! And I give it warning, I say, “Wait. Stop. Now I’m trying to kill you in earnest,” and the final third begins, and even that isn’t enough for you because nothing is! Why can’t you--”
“When they die the curl like a fetus in the ground! Don’t you look? Oh god, let it go, you need to lie down, you’re shaking!”
Backing up, looking at her all the way, Emmanuel mounted the gate and lowered himself into the pit. The bull charged him up against a wall. And Emmanuel was ready, and with his torn side he dodged the sheer force of animal and drove in the long sword. The animal’s death was transcendental-- instantaneous, the neck jerking up as if on a sting, the body dropping neatly down right before him, not a foot away. He recovered the sword with a professional's flourish and wiped it brazenly on its red cape. Delila’s never been this close before, he thought, somewhat proud of her, himself, them. My Delilah. He smiled at her.
“There.”
Delilah looked as if she were going to be sick, she shook and clenched the bars, looking not at him but the dead thing between them. Emmanuel climbed out and held her, not realizing how he smeared her, how the kill in the pen had painted him. “Shhh. Delilah, shhhh, it’s all right, you’re fine. I did it.” His beloved, lovely wife crumpled in his arms, safe. She respected him, he respected her-- what was a little blood between artists? She needed him here, appreciated that he was able to do something she couldn’t, that no one but him could do. The best matadore in the world.
And he was. Within the year they started calling him that. He finished out the season. He fought against the advice of the doctor, well before he was healed, and he performed beautifully. He got so close, said the old men, that he and the bull breathed the same air. He was a great. He escaped comparison, he was like no one but himself. He feared nothing. He was glorious. Delilah came to every fight, and watched him unstintingly.
Delilah and Emmanuel got top billing. Delilah came into the city’s stylish cultural scene, ruled by a French expatriate, the aged wine expert Mimi Hammone. In a matter of months Delilah was one of the most important people about town. Delilah dazzled parties and delighted old Mimi. Transcendently, intimidatingly talented. Piercing in person. She was fresh and urbane and so shockingly disparaging of anything she found repulsive that people began to be afraid of her displeasure. She was too funny for them to form a protective hatred of her, and she was never self-depreciating in her humor. Proud and compact. Everyone adored Delilah as a survival reflex.
Nor was Emmanuel an unwelcome guest. He was handsome. He was famous. Men panted to talk to him. He tipped at the bar. Any why not? The couple earned. They had money they didn’t know what to do with, money they just stared at in dumb incomprehension.
Delilah wouldn’t touch Emmanuel, wouldn’t look at him if he begged. And he didn’t at first, but he began to, far more quickly than he could have expected. Then he stopped, marveling at the thing between them in silent horror. Delilah slept like a stone. And when he tried she said “Stop.” Said it once, quietly but audibly.
On the way home from a party in December she fidgeted in the back seat of a taxi.
“What?” He asked.
“I don’t want you to be one of those husbands.” She muttered. “The kind that just stands there awkwardly in public and seems half dead.”
“I’m not!” He said simply, surprised but not angry. “No one thinks that.” He paused, and a niggling suspicion-- “Do I embarrass you?” He was a little incredulous. She rolled her eyes. “No, do I?” He pressed.
“Yes, yes I’m obviously embarrassed of you. What in hell are you talking about.”
“Nothing.”
On his birthday, in February, when she stared him in the eyes and slipped down out of her navy dress, he came to her as fast as could be considered walking and bent her back over the bed.
“Ow!’ She didn’t seem that offended, just slightly uncomfortable.
“Sorry.”
She didn’t offer again. He couldn’t believe he’d taken it. He felt like he had no pride. He didn’t think she’d come. She hadn’t made a sound, really, other than heavy breathing and small whimpers. During Lent he broke down and tried to touch her. She moved his hand back into his lap. “Why?” He asked. She got up and left the room.
“I love you.” She said in bed that night, right after she turned off her bedside light. He stared at the ceiling and tried not to shake. “I’m twenty six.” He thought, when she was asleep and he’d rolled over to watch her, breathing, her cheeks just perceptibly red and swollen in the moonlight. “And Delilah is twenty four.” The impossibility of how young they were struck him. Delilah breathed. “I have four years.” To do what? He was already a respectable footnote in the Mueso de la Meastranza. He wished he hadn’t killed the bull.
Emmanuel had a mano-a-mano Easter monday against Victor Jesus Guerralda, a slightly older toreador with a somewhat similar style. Three bulls each, points awarded, the best man taking the win. Delilah wore the red dress of a respectable Sevilliana out on the town on an important festival day, and she’d given in to custom and bought the ivory boned lace fan that matched her mantilla. Emmanuel knew his wife was beautiful. She kissed him on the cheek when she left him at the door of the dressing room, and she turned to go out into the stands. It stung where she’d kissed him. He wanted to die.
The first bull was dispatched with consummate skill. He toyed with it almost the full fifteen minutes allotted him. His passes earned sharp gasps from the crowd. The bulls’ flank pushed at him during one such maneuver, threatening to topple him backwards, and he literally refused to move his feet. He thought he’d topple humiliatingly, but he found his balance with a jerk of his torso. The sword went in clean and deep the first time. The full stadium screamed for him. He held out his hands and demanded more, his stance bombastic, his cry entitled, his chest heaving.
He watched the gradual sweep of white flags, expecting at least an ear from this. More, more-- it looked like the old men were holding out, hoping to provoke him to desperately fantastic performances in his last two fights. They knew what he knew. Two matches left. Two trofas in a corrida meant los maximos trofeos-- the tail thrown in--- and then the awarding of the head, and then he would be carried out on the shoulders of admirers at the fight’s end. Salida en hombres. Victory against his opponent, Guerralda, and a legendary performance in Spain’s most important arena, at its greatest corrida. The old men knew he wanted it, and they were holding out on him because they wanted to see things they had never seen before, things they couldn’t yet name. Emmanuel's eyes narrowed at their greed, their disloyalty.
But Emmanuel understood. He hadn’t done his best. There had been errors, crucial ones, and he could feel them in his body where he hadn’t dodged, along the skin he hadn’t exposed to the bull as he should have, and failure itched along his yet unbloodied uniform. He found Delilah where he’d seen her during the paseillo, blatant in her red dress, and he could find her clearly, so well was La Maestranza designed. No white handkerchief. Betrayal. She at least could see he had tried. But no, she had been watching him too long. She knew his best, and knew everything he hadn’t done. She had evaluated the match and found it wanting. But he could still win trofas maximas. He had the necessary opportunities.
His second bull was vicious, and two bandilleros had to jump the first wall to get away from it. Emmanuel raised an eyebrow. The bull gored a horse deeply, and the second, unoccupied picadore muttered to Emmanuel that they’d have to shoot it down in the pens. Fine, Emmanuel barked, eyes not leaving the animal. Once he glanced up. Delilah was a small, red gold figure in the stands. No fucking handkerchief, he thought, and it was not a complicated thought but it sank heavy as a stone. Mira mira mira. He would show her and she would see.
His passes were his most complicated. The crowd shrieked fear and delight. The old men murmured excited approval, whispering into each others deaf ears with thick-tounged enjoyment. The band played to signal the beginning of the death third. He hadn’t done more than six passes when the bull nudged his good, uninjured side, and he fell. He tried to control it, annoyed by the audible gasps of the audience as he did so-- he knew he’d fallen, goddamit-- and he tried to roll farther but not so far that the animal could be entranced by the motion and run, head down, after him, and he tired to catch himself between being trampled and being gored, tried to get up, but it must have been at just the wrong moment, and a horn slid up under, then clear through, the ribs on his good side and he was pinned and the thing was shaking, shaking him like he was so light he was insubstantial and he barely felt the pain of it when he ripped down off the animal, leaving a bit of himself up there, which slid down the horn and into the animals right eye above him and the bull shook the stingy dob of flesh out of its black socket and did not care that the blood was still floating on the lens of its eye and looked down at Emmanuel with finality. Are you death? He thought. Are you death, are you death? I am, said the bull. I am.
Below the stadium, with was a writhing sea of panic and disbelief, Delilah found the doctor outside of the infirmary. He was coming to meet her, surrounded by pale, worried members of her husband’s team. “Will he live?” she asked.
“I can’t say.” Said the doctor. Delilah punched him hard in the jaw and blood streamed down his chin. An assistant caught him and mercifully no one tried to calm her down. Her own hand hung down strangely.
“Will he live.”
“No,” muttered the doctor, and one of the men began to cry, men so unafraid to show emotion here, and it disgusted her because it terrified her, and she knew they all knew. Forty some matadores had died in the ring at the horns of a bull. These men knew what injury looked like. They all knew what death looked like. “An ambulance is on its way. We’ve got to keep him awake.”
“Is there any chance?” The doctor didn’t say anything.
“We have to try,” said an assistant whose name she tried to remember but could not. Delilah walked into the infirmary, where two men spoke uncertainly. She told them to leave. They hesitated and she screamed it. She locked a door against the rising noise outside. Emmanuel lay on the cotton mattress of the wood cot and when she sat down the old springs sagged in protest. She took off his jacket and his top, rolling the heavy, sequined fabric off him as gently as she could and tossing it in a lump beside the cot as it it were worthless rather than more expensive than any clothing she had ever owned. She poured some water from her bottle onto her handkerchief and wiped off the blood caking around his mouth.
She looked down when she felt his hand against her side. He’d ripped at the buttons of her dress. She thought of the tiny red silk buttons, spinning off under the cot in the dark. With a weakness that seemed lazy rather than feeble he was separating the sides of her dress. Her mantilla had fallen off, and she didn’t know when.
“Emmanuel?” She asked. He worked an arm out of her dress, staring at her bared skin, diligently, and he shook while he did it. She stood a little and he whimpered, but quieted when she shook herself out of her dress, threw off the shoes and ripped off the stockings and sat back down. She unzipped the pants and worked them down around his thighs. They hadn’t had sex while he was in the suit of lights since that first time. He’d tried once and she’d laughed it off.
Now her hand began to throb and she told herself she was a stupid cunt for thinking about it, and Emmanuel grabbed her hips and lowered her, and he set the rhythm and she leaned down over him and cried into his shoulder. He wrenched her face back up and stared into her eyes and she tried to stop crying. He moved her hand over the wound. She dug her small, white fingers into it, under the rent skin and he gasped and moved harder and faster. She came in a small, hard gasp, arching back away from him, and he caught her spine and pressed her down against his body as he worked until he was done. She shook with dry heaves.
They spoke softly as she dressed, pushing her stockings and shoes under the bed to join the helpless buttons and throwing on his tennis shoes, pulling the stiff dress over her head, unable to close the maimed side or zip up the back without his help, leaving the last bit that was always a bitch to zip open. She pulled her hair out of the bun, because it couldn’t be prodded into any semblance of how it should look, and zipped up his pants, her hand lingering and pressing. He grabbed her hand and kissed her fingers fervently, talking all the while.
Words came and came and then there was a well of silence, and he blinked wet eyes at her, and did not cry, and her face was smeared and ghastly, and she stood to open the door and let the doctor back in. The ambulance had arrived, and they took him to the hospital, and Delilah rode with Emmanuel knowing he could not live and knowing that she would not feel any better in ten years, in fifty. She watched the wound, a fixed point in the busy movement around her, as they prodded and dressed it, with flat eyes. He curled on the palate.
“Delilah Delilah Delilah,” he gasped, trying to move to avoid the pain, to squirm out of it. She could see something though the opening, here in the light, or several somethings that looked like wax or pudding, things she could not identify, that did not look normal or human to her but which must be bones and organs, parts of him she was never supposed to see, his body’s secrets. She was wrenched by his helplessness, at his inability to evade what was coming, at the cruelty of prolonging his death, making it grotesque by delay. He was asking her to help, to make it go away, speaking not words of love but desperation. Delilah wanted to snap his neck for him. She fluttered her hands down along his other side, the site of last year’s accident. He asked for her again, and she bent down, ear to his mouth, her long blonde hair sweeping around them like a gilded screen. They rested in a still, private country.
“I was good today,” he whispered urgently, tongue touching her ear as he hissed the words. He leaned up higher against her and lingered, his mouth against her skin, and she trembled and he felt overjoyed, and he knew she understood. “I was almost as beautiful as you.” Emmanuel teased. He smiled against her, rubbing his nose in her hair. “I was excellent.”
Within: bullfights (lots), sex (lots), stuff dying (lots), parties (some), conversions to catholocism (one)
Dude. I can see the arena from my bedroom window. I think it kind of had to get written. So far? I kind of heart it.
I have to warn you, I think the begining is lame.
I was writing Sonambulist and Delilah (whose name I am going to change now that it's become too biblically evocative) was a walk-on character, creepy and interesting, and I liked her so much I began to wonder if I could explore her more and now she has a story. I think this may be becomming a collection. Sonambulist, Mira Mira Mira and there's this wierd murder yarn evolving with the wine expert mentioned in MMM, Mimi Hamone. But... I enjoy rereading it, and that very rarely happens.
Mira Mira Mira
Author’s note:
The title literally translates to look, look, look. It is a bullfighters cry to catch the attention of the bull, but the audience is not immune to the imperative. The bullfights in this story are corridas, “runnings of bulls,” or “bull’s run,” and one is specifically a mano-a-mano. The performer who finishes the animal is addressed either as “torero,” bull handler, or “matadore,” killer.
When she was nineteen Delilah snuck past the security guards into Emmanuel's dressing room. Delilah had been in scores of commercials and had a bit part in one Hollywood movie, and was in Sevilla shooting her role for a film that was somewhat obscure even within its indie niche. Not the main part, but not negligible. Delilah was playing a jet set coke addict abroad, and that day was still wearing the costume department’s black shift dress, the makeup that hollowed her blue eyes into gooey tunnels now scrubbed off. Her brassy blonde hair was up in a clip. She wasn’t old or experienced enough to get a lot of quality stage work with good troops, but she planned to work her way into a respectable position in the business through an unfaltering list of solid, well-performed stage roles and discreetly chosen film appearances. An American Judi Dench. An attractive Mary Louise Parker. A non-emaciated Audrey Hepburn, even.
She found a door with a piece of paper bearing his typed name taped to it. Bingo. She tried the handle. Unlocked. Why would you lock it, after all? She thought. It was during the fight, the wing was under guard, and he was wearing the most valuable thing he owned. She would have to wait. Delilah ducked into the room, closing the door behind her. She touched everything, running her hands over the rim of the chair, pinching the supple leather of the seat, finding his discarded street clothes puddled on the floor.
On a whim she folded them and put them on the dressing table. She grinned at the unlabeled little pots on the right. Stage makeup, as she’d guessed when she first saw him. A little rouge for the lips, the cheeks and eyes. Thirteen thousand people watching you kill something, why not do it in lipstick? She settled in the lower right corner, judging that it was impossible to see from the door, leaning against the wall. Delilah squirmed a little knowing that while she was waiting she was missing his fights. He could get hurt, she thought, and then you’d be stuck here waiting for nothing. Wouldn’t you look like an ass?
For another hour she waited. It was the middle of summer, and she boiled alive. She’d been hot in the stands, in the cheap seats at the mercy of the sun where she was close enough to see his face, and she’d been violently jealous of the natives with their quaint, yet practical fans, but this was worse. There was no ventilation in the little box of a room. Everything-- the rickety vanity and the beat up hat rack-- looked shoddy and temporary.
And the sound told her he was coming. The explosion of cheers, the cow-like tread of everyone leaving. An especially crowded fight, being that it was the fiesta. He wasn’t important yet, only tacked onto the bill as a substitution, and she’d found out only just in time. He was no one, but, knowing nothing about the sport, Delilah believed he was destined for prominence. How else could she explain her presence here, his affect on her?
And he entered, giving the ear he’d earned to a handler, saying rapid, indecipherable words to his manager? His assistant? That wasn’t Spanish, she spoke that. Castilian? She frowned. And the door closed and he slumped into the chair, spinning dizzily like the second bull had as she’d left, a tight arc over on its side. He fell to high wooden armrest on the right, panting. The only thing missing was that massive spurt of blood from the mouth. Disgusting, she thought objectively, shivering a little.
“You do speak Spanish proper?” She asked in the language, tone critical, from her corner. Emmanuel's head shot up and he jerked towards her. The muscles in his neck strained, she noticed.
“Who in hell are you?” Castilian accent, but perfectly intelligible.
“Evidently.” She answered her own question.
He was twenty two. The booklet said so. He was born in Toledo. He’d premiered in Pamplona- a somewhat cheesy, weak beginning, she thought. Like an actor debuting in the Mickey Mouse Club. And he did look young, terribly so, younger than her even. There was blood on the back of the suit, encrusting a shoulder blade, like a bird with its wing ripped off. And both his thighs, in addition to the rest of his right leg, were coated.
“Are you hurt?”
“This?” He spread his hands, and the perforative splay of his fingers caught at her. “Not mine.”
“You tumbled hard the second round.” She wondered if that had settled her decision. He’d bounced twice on impact and she felt terror, been shocked at her own audible gasp.
“The medic said nothing was broken.” He was very still, waiting for her to explain herself, staring directly at her. His nose was too sharp, The entire line of his face was a little like a hatchet coming at you. There was demand in it, maybe a hint of need bleeding into the deep set eyes, pathos dripping into the sunken cheeks from the high brow.
She came around between him and the mirror. His head swiveled to watch her progress, and he didn’t say anything, didn’t give Delilah anything. And he stiffened in the chair when she knelt and found out that, somewhat anachronistically, a zipper rather than a button closed the costume’s high-waisted pants. To his credit, he didn’t ask what she was doing. He stood suddenly, and she sat back on her heels. He backed away from her, keeping his gaze on her face. He reached the door. Her eyes were wide and bright, her chest rose and fell with an active fear. He locked the door.
After the almost silent exchange, during which he’d kept his eyes open and rubbed her blonde hair, he asked her if she had a place to stay for the night. She laughed sharply.
“I’m not a groupie. I’m an actress.” She refastened her hair in the clip. She looked at him in the mirror discreetly as she continued to fix herself. He was still as beautiful as he had been fifteen minutes ago. She was a little surprised at herself. “A real one, not a waitress with hopes and dreams and credit card debt. My name’s Delilah Cook. You won’t have heard of me.”
He thought of introducing himself, but then, he was on the bill and in the program, and it seemed farcical. “I don’t usually get visited by actresses.”
“Marilyn sets such a bad precedent we all feel entitled to a bit of slutty behavior.”
His brown furrowed. A tight little pinch, she noted. “Marilyn Monroe, right?”
She smirked. “Indeed.”
His jaw tightened. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
She rose an eyebrow, honestly surprised, and continued to fix her makeup. “I didn’t say you were.” She made sure there was no Sangria Cream on the back of her lips, thus on her teeth, by sliding a finger in past the lips and slowly pulling it out with an audible pop. Emmanuel cleared his throat.
“Do you want dinner?”
She giggled. “I’m full, thanks.”
He tried again. “Come home with me.”
“So direct! Artless.” She closed the mascara. “If you like.”
“After you hide in a dressing room for the entirety of a fight you paid for, all you can say is ‘if I like’?” His enunciation was so pronounced, so disdainful, that she laughed again.
“What hotel?” She asked playfully, consent lacing the question like stays up her back would secure dress.
“Alfonso XIII.” The tournament had paid in perks for his willingness to come as a last minute stand in. His actual fee was far more than his usual, and he’d been picked up rather than having to ride the bus from the small town where he trained. He knew he’d have to move to a bigger city soon, probably this one, but the money to cover the investment was slow in coming. He changed, and she watched the slow sliding off of the electric bright fabric, her eyes following the sparkles of the outfit designed to guide her down his torso, over his thighs. He flushed self-consciously at how she stared. He wondered if all American girls just looked at people so freely, like this.
On two separate occasions girls had done this for him, and after he’d finished they’d wiped their mouths and left quietly as they’d come. He hadn’t known if his manager had gotten them for him, or if they’d slipped the guards money and gotten past. Famous toreros had assistants at the exit, selecting unaccompanied women who loitered for the purpose and escorting them down. Emmanuel wasn’t that famous, and he’d always wondered how the other toreadors managed. After a corrida he was so thoroughly spent he couldn’t imagine anything more strenuous than Delila’s delicate handling.
“Did you pay?” He asked uncomfortably.
“What?”
“The guards.”
She laughed. “There was an unguarded fire escape door.”
A knock. The impractical dress cape was brought in by a pe(accento)on who noticed Delilah with silent surprise. In contrast to the well-cut street clothes dumped without care on the floor, the seemingly ruined suit of lights was folded, placed on top of the dress cape and carefully laid in a box. Delilah thought it a bit late. The embroidery was marred by falls, by dirt, the hot red spots fading to a rusty brown she was sure would never lift.
The hotel was in walking distance. She asked him to pick her one of the pretty native oranges from a tree above the sidewalk. She’d tried it, spat out the incredibly sour pulp inelegantly and glared as he laughed. They were almost the same height. He’d kicked off his shoes in the match, as if to show everyone he was seriously bent on revenging himself against the bull that had impacted his side. Now he wore black leather Oxfords. He wondered if he’d recognize Delilah if he saw her on the street. She was beautiful, he could tell, but the claro American blondes tended to look so alike to him. He would memorize her face, he decided, he would trace the outline of her eyes and the line of her nose and he would know her.
He ordered room service and ate quickly while she lolled on the bed. They made love in the dark. “Have you done that before?” He asked her, after, trying to pass it off as a bit of a joke. They lay side by side. “Of course.” She’d dated without cessation since she was twelve and fucked a kid named Denis on the set of a jeans add when she was fourteen. “Haven’t you?”
He sneered audibly, and her hand, dipped over his mouth, buzzed with it. “Of course.” He smothered the defensive urge to say “More than you,” childishly. The phrases were what he’d been telling his friends and brothers since he was fourteen. The actual explanation, a few times with whores and once with a schoolmate who, though willing enough, had cried after and never looked at him again, did not seem to him an appropriate badge of prowess.
“How do you get the blood off that costume?”
“What? Oh, you don’t.”
“But isn’t it incredibly expensive? All that work, that money, for something you destroy?” She marveled.
“It’s nothing to a bull.” He shrugged. And it wasn’t. Each of them at least four years old, and 460 to 600 kilograms, raised free range, bred selectively for their intelligence, their aggression. A rosette of the breeder placed on their back. Exorbitantly expensive things, not only to be killed but to be fought and destroyed swiftly, painlessly. Well. A suit of lights was so much less wasted than a bull, each one a serious threat to the life of someone untrained and unarmed, even legitimately dangerous to a man with a sword. They were weakened. In the process they were enraged to the point of desperation.
He’d fallen today. More than forty matadores had died in this century. Not a mark of their poor craftsmanship so much as part of the art. The essence of it was this possibility. Even the great Manolete was killed at thirty --too old to fight, should never have come out of retirement-- by the bull Islero. A shock so great Islero’s dam was slaughtered to prevent the reoccurrence of such an atrocity. And Manolete. Manolete had been flawless. People still talked. Emmanuel sought her hand across the space of the bed. It was too hot to cling together. “Will you come to Madrid next week and watch me?”
She rolled over on the bed, liquid eyes facing his profile. He didn’t turn over. He was taunt, his stiffness made her feel like her hand was clutching an ivory-handled fan. Firm and unbreakable bone. Madrid was a few hours on the bullet train. “Yes.” She said. She felt sticky, her hair was plastered to her face. He fell asleep and she watched him until she too crumpled down into herself, dreaming thick illusions of static, angry color and amorphous shape.
They saw a lot of each other in the next few months. Once she made other plans and skipped one of his fights and he didn’t return her calls for a week. Afterwards he refused to talk about it. Fierce egotism burst and crested between them like solar flares. Without ever saying it she could imply that she considered him a mere sportsman rather than an artist, which hurt and infuriated Emmanuel. It was in that slight twist of her lips, only visible sometimes, when he searched for it (and he sometimes wondered if it was always there, if she were forever laughing at him and he could only see it when a wary, defensive hatred of his tired muscles, the lumbering, wickedly dangerous animal, the mawkish crowds, her, everything-- sharpened his eyes), as he, pacing the room, conducted a post-mortem. As if his care were ludicrous. He suspected she had very little taste for his profession. If he suggested going out to watch on a Sunday he wasn’t working, if he got enthused about someone’s latest stunning performance, she evaded the subject, pleading fatigue or disinterest. He had no idea what precisely had brought her to the match where they’d met. He didn’t want to ask.
It was, on her part, neither apathy or deliberate nastiness. She’d gone to her first corrida with friends, cervesas in hand, all of them wincing and gaping at the spectacle too bizarre to be taken seriously, giggling at wildly inappropriate moments and drinking in the glares of the seasoned Spanish enthusiasts. Two long stabs to weaken the back muscles- a bright jet of blood that splattered the horse. She winced as the picadore twisted in the long pole. Six obscenely festive, ribboned barbs, the bandilleros, plunged into the animal’s back. By the end the bits of ribbon would be matted down with blood, their color muted. Blood a stark, frank, shocking red against the black flank, and so much of it, the bull’s distended tongue hanging down.
She wanted the bull to charge the wood barriers and pick off the cowering assistants, or rip through the gate and make for the exit. She wanted the bull to break through the barriers and kill the people in the stands. She never stooped wanting it, even when she learned to want Emmanuel to triumph. They way they dragged the body out in a grand circle-- like Achilles to Hector, crude and profane, it was as if the spectators were being invited to further loll around, to fuck each other mawkishly in self-congratulation, in the stale joy of obvious death.
Several thousand cloth fans flickered like darting eyes and the crowd choked on its own breath, so absolute was the silence when the matadore began the estocada, the act of thrusting the sword.
She’d seen Emmanuel. He’d taken off his hat-- his first fight in this Plaza--and during the paseillo parade that marked the beginning of the corrida she had felt stirred, but during the fight itself she’d drowned in him. The costume, the traje de luces, the suit of lights, left nothing to her imagination. Emmanuel thrust the lean line of his body out to the animal as he taunted it, and the slow drape of the cape past his slim hips was nearly pornographic. His feet slid in the sand with a delicacy that shocked her. Everything was mesmerizingly bright. Every time he looked to be in danger she gasped, unable to help herself. He was talking to it, she thought, dazed, as he leaned into the bull and whispered something she could not make out, even with La Maestranza’s excellent acoustics. The intimacy between then was profound, and touched her.
And he’d whipped the sword in faster than she could really see, in a profound swish, everything happening too quickly to understand at that fatal juncture. In all the corridas she would attend, the moment of that impact would elude her in all but a handful of instances. And the following two matadores danced in her distraction, and then it was over and her friends were plucking at her clothes and planning to get drinks. She checked regularly for the next time Emmanuel would come to the city, and she’d snapped on her opportunity, too enthralled to be disgusted with herself.
In her more analytical moments she thought of herself in terms of women who followed professional wrestlers, glazed eyes and American flag T-shirts without names, sometimes marrying the absurd musclemen. She had winced and gagged at the torture of the bull, but only when it looked as if Emmanuel might die in that second match did she nearly faint with mother-fear. Her care seemed to her so futile, so limited.
But Emmanuel and the people in this country considered him more than a joke, more than an absurd Hemingway stereotype or a jock. He was an artist. She’d never agreed with calling chefs or decorators artists. Something so essential to life could not achieve the elevation, the necessary distance from pettiness, that seemed to her necessary to reach the inner core of human grandeur. And what was baser than killing something that could kill you? Corridas were art here. It made her question her own artistic relevance, and she was too driven for the reflection not to discomfort and frighten her.
What was more phallocentric than thrusting yourself in arrogance at a source of harm, in ritualizing your ability to turn your back on it? What was more patriarchal than a decorated display of conquering virility, so pronounced it bordered on the ridiculous? The heat in the stands, rising, steaming off the people and the animals, her on the backless bench, Emmanuel in the too tight, too warm, archaic costume of an 18th century Andalusian noble. The blood, the cruelty, the sheer stupidity-- and what if he were seriously hurt? She had thought she would grow to understand and enjoy it but it remained strange and stupid even in its ability to hypnotize her, and she hated it more, not less as time passed.
It didn’t get better. She’d commented on the absurd stoicism of the horses in the second act. They were gored in the flanks by the charging bull, so that their rider, the picadore, might stab the bulls neck, weaken its muscles, force it to lower its head so a single matadore with a sword could strike a killing blow. As the bull got up under the creature, past the padding and into the soft belly as if it sensed weakness in the padding, the horses did not whimper or scream. She’d seen the horse up against the wall, its pinned rider vocally panicking, and the horse was silent except for heavy breathing. When the picadore had twice stabbed the bull the horses pranced, knees high and bent, out of the ring with all the dire urgency of morris dancers as they bled through thick padding.
Delilah had wondered aloud what amazing training they underwent. Emmanuel told her with no concealment that before the match the horse’s vocal cords were slit, and choked on his laugh at her chalk-faced horror. He always made her watch. The implication was that missing his fights was a willful abandonment of him when he needed her.
A white handkerchief was used to signal appreciation, to award the torero a coveted trophy (a bit of the animal-- an ear, a tail, a head), or, in rarer cases, to spare a valiant bull. In her purse she carried one with her embroidered initials on it, which Emmanuel had given her when they’d been together a month, when she’d asked what other people meant by waving them. And she went.
He earned more now and began to rent a flat in Sevilla. As her project drew to an end she signed on to a production of Fredrico Garcia Lorca’s rural trilogy. She was told she had starring roles, and that afternoon signed she her lease for another year. Emmanuel took her out, got her drunk, bullied the jukebox into playing “Take This Waltz” and spun her around and around until he had to literally carry her back to the hotel. He was infatuated. He considered asking her to come drive the dusty eight hours with him and meet his mother. He shyly flitted through a jewelry store one day like a criminal.
He was terrified he’d stupidly blurt it out during dinner, and almost choked on sherry when Delilah asked him if he wanted to move in together. He said they’d have to marry for that. He was still a Catholic in a Catholic country, after all. Sleeping together, practically living together, was one thing, this was the suggestion of living in sin. “Should we get married, then?” she asked reasonably. “I mean, is that the next step?” He was flabbergasted. “We could afford a nicer apartment.” She inserted into the silence. He took a bite of his steak. Chewed. Finished. He told her, “We’ll see.” And he went home alone because she said she was due for a get together with some members of her cast, and wanted, rather obviously, to give him space and time to think about something he had not taken exactly as he should.
At home he took off his suit jacket. He hung it on the hanger. He put his cavarat on the tie rack. He deliberately ripped the door off the armoire. Rage had come suddenly, like a flash flood. She’d come to him and bobbed like a dinghy in the dressing room. She proposed to him in a manner that stripped it of dignity-- made it a question of mere logistics-- even as he prepared to propose to her. Delilah with her smugly excellent Spanish and English, when he couldn’t understand enough of her language to watch a film without the subtitles on. Delilah with her sexual experience, “here, do this,” “like that.” Delilah, distant and compelling, ever polite. “If you like.” Controlled Delilah with her cascade of ordered goals going unfulfilled a continent away while she labored in an alien environment, treating things in Spain as if they were amusing diversions that could give her several exotic diseases. If Delilah loved him, he doubted she wanted to.
Emmanuel started attracting more attention, and his rates tripled- easy when you made next to nothing before, but a new world of possibilities opened up to him. Delilah got offered two plum roles for the next season and took her time picking between them, filling Emmanuel with fond exasperation over her constant news updates on her haggling and prevaricating. He’d seen her last show opening night and found it enragingly opaque, and pretentiously, deliberately so, but let himself he charmed by her consummate skill and ignored everything else about the production.
Emmanuel bought a house and brought Delilah to it on a pretext. They’d had sex on the hardwood in front of the fireplace and he’d asked her, he prepared, she dazed and post coital, if she might like to meet his mother. Inside he primped like a peacock at his own orchestration. Delilah was demure for Senora Castano. His mother had smiled and, behind closed doors, approved of the pretty, accented blonde girl, with the caveat that with those hips the babies would be hell. And of course, the larger issue. Delilah, lapsed Episcopalian, begrudgingly converted, bitching all the way. Emmanuel huffily asked what she meant when she said he “Wasn’t even all that Catholic.” Two years after they met, Emmanuel and Delilah married.
Their personalities creaked and cracked and rose against each other like tectonic plates. Emmanuel held open doors and she opened the next one over without really thinking about it. When they fought it was hideous. He bellowed like his father and she screamed melodrama and threw plates she knew he could dodge. He said in very few words cutting, horrible things that she had never thought about herself and she spilled every awful thing he had ever suspected of himself in elegant, well-worded tirades.
Her sarcasm was withering to the point of emasculation, and he had a habit of fucking her silent, trying to fill her with her adoration for her, his fierce since of pride in who he was, in who they were, so fully she couldn’t say those things anymore, screwed her so her tongue might gag on the words and she would love him simply and selflessly. They rarely talked out their problems, after the sex staring at the walls in predawn silence, surpassingly cold. Desert cities are so still at night that the beat of Sevilla, the run of her traffic, the click and burble of her night life well past midnight, did not seem to reach them, seemed to go no further than its own immediate vicinity. In the late morning or early afternoon they woke cheerful.
It was midday when they awoke that Sunday, almost two years after their marriage, Delilah first. The sound of the shower woke Emmanuel, who had good enough hearing to detect an animal turning behind his back. Delilah came out naked, glanced up at him as he took her place in the bathroom and threw her gaze back down, strangely demure. When he came out she was sitting in front of the vanity in her bra and panties doing her makeup. They’d slept too late, she thought, and now they would be awake all Siesta. The hottest part of the day, when people hid in dreams.
Sunlight from partially closed curtains streamed over her, and the fine blonde hair on her body reflected brightly, guiding him from her burning crown to her thin, gold-coated legs. A dark shape spilled over the top of her thigh. Emmanuel walked over and watched. She continued to stare into the mirror. Eyeliner. Mascara. He nudged her legs apart with a knee.
“I’m sorry.” Emmanuel said. Delilah hadn’t said no, far from it, but the inside of her left thigh was bruised, the pattern of his hand against what he still considered almost fantastically pale skin. She said nothing.
He sat in street clothes, sulky and silent while she buttoned the tight red dress which gave into a richness of folded fabric at the knee. It looked to him like she couldn’t move in it, but Sevillianas had been flamancoing in these for centuries, so she must be fine. She dressed better now, he thought, with her sharp, expensive tailored garment and her no-nonsense black fan. She looked like a matadores wife. People paid them more attention. He was starting to appear in tabloids. She was getting better reviews. She cut them out of publications, the good and the bad, and put them in plastic sleeves in a plain black binder. She read them over many times. He could understand that.
They walked to the arena. The day of the fight had dawned unforgiving. It was something like a hundred degrees. Emmanuel thought he could feel rays of it, creeping up and down his spine. He carried his suit of lights in a padded black bag under his arm. The heat would be hellish when he was in it. He winced. Delilah shoved her mantilla in her handbag, and Emmanuel frowned.
“You’ll burn.”
“It’s too hot.” She said impatiently, the first real words she’d said to him all day.
They were early. She followed him into the dressing room. She did that sometimes. Emmanuel remembered when he’d come back stage after one of her plays. So many people running around, their purpose threatening in its seemingly arbitrary quality. Like racing glyphs in a language he didn’t speak. Lowering ropes, fussing at drapes, three people carrying, in a row, a table, a vase and several bouquets of flowers. Surreal. He’d wanted out. And she drifted by dressed as a thirty’s socialite and it was almost as if, for an instant, she didn’t recognize him. Arms around him then, perfunctorily, he thought, but she was so busy, swept off into the gaggles of people whose function who didn’t know, and they all needed to talk to her, and he felt like an intruder, or worse like a boy who’d crept downstairs late Christmas eve to discover his parents paused in the action of wrapping the presents and eating the cookies.
The suit slid out of the bag. He hung it in the closet, noting how Delila’s eyes followed the gesture with some smugness. She watched him dress with minute attention. He smoothed the fabric over his body, tightening the back plate, fastening the ceremonial cape for the brief time it would be on him, gartering the bright stockings. She curled her fingers in his hair when he bent to hop into the shoes, and his dislodged her gently to put on the black knitted hat.
“Maybe it’ll charge me in this dress.” She teased as she gathered her shawl and purse to go up into the stands.
He looked at her in utter confusion, as if she’d asked him why they didn’t just shoot the bulls if it was easier. “Darling, bulls are colorblind. The red-- it’s just tradition.”
“They are?”
“Yes, that’s why you have to-- with the cape, the cape work, you move it, you move your body so that--” He felt helpless in the face of her vast ignorance. “You never knew that?”
“No, I mean, I know everything else is complicated, but you know, I thought the color too. Everyone thinks the color.” She said defensively.
“You mean all this time, you never knew that.” He laughed a bit. She smiled, rolled her eyes and left.
His fight went badly. A 580 kilogram bull trounced him. The bull pinned him under it, luckily with only one leg, and didn’t gore. His assistants had to seduce it off of him with their bright pink capes. Three of his ribs smashed, and the healing time was estimated to be months by the on site medic who patched him up. A matadore, like a professional ballerina, has a limited shelf-life of about ten years, possibly fifteen if one starts early and is ludicrously lucky in terms of aging well. His months of inactivity, of lost training time and atrophied skill, were another man’s years.
As for the immediate future he asked his peon to help him stand. The animal was tired, its head low, and he would stab it through the heart and the audience would, in their wisdom, having seen how it had touched him, understand and grant him its body, and he would cut at the head and hold it aloft, and they would see, and Delilah, even now being admitted into the private corridor of the ring from the spectators arcade, she would see, that he was proficient and skilled and indestructible and by god they would all know his name, and even people he hated would be compelled to love him.
The bull, alone in the ring now, pranced whorishly for the audience. Emmanuel watched in horror as white handkerchiefs started to rise, and nearly sobbed when the presidete’s own orange flag flickered in response. An indulto. The bull was pardoned. Its spectacular performance enabled it to live out the rest of its life as a stud. Emmanuel saw red. He stood, strode into the ring to cheers for his own superb performance, his bravery and fortitude, sounds that could not reach him, and mocked the estocada with a banderilla. Had it been real, it would have been an exquisite kill. Retainers led the bull back into its pen. The indignation of completing the corrida with the bull’s breeder’s representative striding beside him, as a reward for raising such an exquisite beast, was inevitable. He wanted nothing more than to stab through the middle of the bull’s branding rosette.
Emmanuel waited until the handlers had finished with his bull and gone about their business topside before he stomped down into the pens and pulled out his sword. He got next his animal it and stared into its eyes as it balked inside the pen. He thought about how to get in with it. As it was unable to lower its horns and strike the matadore through the bars, Emmanuel grabbed its massive face and begin to whisper to the bull how he would kill it. A harsh, supple intimacy twisted his words. When he finished, panting, he stared into the creatures eyes, and he did not think he imagined the dread in them.
“Are you quite finished?” He whipped around, sword still out, not quite consciously pointing it at the source of the noise.
“Oh, it’s you.” He lowered his voice. He had forgotten about Delilah. “I thought you were upstairs.
“I’ve been waiting down here since the doctor told me you were fine and I saw the orange flag. Jose told me you would have to use a bandilleros.” His chest still heaved, but as usual he stared directly into her eyes, those black orbs in that two sharp face pinning her so thoroughly it was as if he wanted her to peel and crack down her line of symmetry. He sneered at the mere mention of the salvation of the bull. He was so frequently in contortions of disdain Delilah wondered if one day his jaw would crack under the sheer force of one last titanic expression of disgust.
“Delilah.” He pronounced it slightly wrong, as always, unable to hear the vowels sounds as she heard them but aware only peripherally of his own inadequacy, all the more enraged because he could not detect, seize and fix it. “I need to kill this animal.”
“How many do you think you’ve killed?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do.” There was fondness in her tone, a sweet smile falling out unintentionally. “You do know.”
“I don’t know. Maybe four hundred.”
She was silent. Her hair had been back in a bun this morning, with the ivory hair pick she’d bought in Calle Sierpes to wear to his mother’s funeral. Her hair was falling out, and the strands were smeared across the sides of her face. There was no light down here. Hardly any. Her hair looked as if he could follow it back out into the arena proper in the dark.
“Maybe four hundred and thirty six.” He corrected himself in the face of her silence.
“There’ll be trouble if you do.”
“They’ll keep it quiet, the presidente, the staff. Everyone will understand.”
“Emmanuel, it’s in a pen. You’ll hate yourself for this, it isn’t sporting.”
“It is if I get down there with it.”
“You’re hurt! God dammit, baby, let it go!” She cried hot little tears as she screamed. “It’s just unnecessary, let the fucking cow live!” She stepped towards him to emphasize her point. Her hands fluttered lightly, desperately over his injured flanks, and even that stung, and he hid from her how he swooned and nearly toppled because a matadore is never afraid, and he was angrier than he was hurt.
“The bull deserves to die!” Emmanuel roared. “Can’t you see I can do this? I’m not provoking an innocent! I go in there and I demand to know, “Are you death? Are you death? Are you death?” And the bull snaps and says “I am,” and it couldn’t have said it if it weren’t true! And I give it warning, I say, “Wait. Stop. Now I’m trying to kill you in earnest,” and the final third begins, and even that isn’t enough for you because nothing is! Why can’t you--”
“When they die the curl like a fetus in the ground! Don’t you look? Oh god, let it go, you need to lie down, you’re shaking!”
Backing up, looking at her all the way, Emmanuel mounted the gate and lowered himself into the pit. The bull charged him up against a wall. And Emmanuel was ready, and with his torn side he dodged the sheer force of animal and drove in the long sword. The animal’s death was transcendental-- instantaneous, the neck jerking up as if on a sting, the body dropping neatly down right before him, not a foot away. He recovered the sword with a professional's flourish and wiped it brazenly on its red cape. Delila’s never been this close before, he thought, somewhat proud of her, himself, them. My Delilah. He smiled at her.
“There.”
Delilah looked as if she were going to be sick, she shook and clenched the bars, looking not at him but the dead thing between them. Emmanuel climbed out and held her, not realizing how he smeared her, how the kill in the pen had painted him. “Shhh. Delilah, shhhh, it’s all right, you’re fine. I did it.” His beloved, lovely wife crumpled in his arms, safe. She respected him, he respected her-- what was a little blood between artists? She needed him here, appreciated that he was able to do something she couldn’t, that no one but him could do. The best matadore in the world.
And he was. Within the year they started calling him that. He finished out the season. He fought against the advice of the doctor, well before he was healed, and he performed beautifully. He got so close, said the old men, that he and the bull breathed the same air. He was a great. He escaped comparison, he was like no one but himself. He feared nothing. He was glorious. Delilah came to every fight, and watched him unstintingly.
Delilah and Emmanuel got top billing. Delilah came into the city’s stylish cultural scene, ruled by a French expatriate, the aged wine expert Mimi Hammone. In a matter of months Delilah was one of the most important people about town. Delilah dazzled parties and delighted old Mimi. Transcendently, intimidatingly talented. Piercing in person. She was fresh and urbane and so shockingly disparaging of anything she found repulsive that people began to be afraid of her displeasure. She was too funny for them to form a protective hatred of her, and she was never self-depreciating in her humor. Proud and compact. Everyone adored Delilah as a survival reflex.
Nor was Emmanuel an unwelcome guest. He was handsome. He was famous. Men panted to talk to him. He tipped at the bar. Any why not? The couple earned. They had money they didn’t know what to do with, money they just stared at in dumb incomprehension.
Delilah wouldn’t touch Emmanuel, wouldn’t look at him if he begged. And he didn’t at first, but he began to, far more quickly than he could have expected. Then he stopped, marveling at the thing between them in silent horror. Delilah slept like a stone. And when he tried she said “Stop.” Said it once, quietly but audibly.
On the way home from a party in December she fidgeted in the back seat of a taxi.
“What?” He asked.
“I don’t want you to be one of those husbands.” She muttered. “The kind that just stands there awkwardly in public and seems half dead.”
“I’m not!” He said simply, surprised but not angry. “No one thinks that.” He paused, and a niggling suspicion-- “Do I embarrass you?” He was a little incredulous. She rolled her eyes. “No, do I?” He pressed.
“Yes, yes I’m obviously embarrassed of you. What in hell are you talking about.”
“Nothing.”
On his birthday, in February, when she stared him in the eyes and slipped down out of her navy dress, he came to her as fast as could be considered walking and bent her back over the bed.
“Ow!’ She didn’t seem that offended, just slightly uncomfortable.
“Sorry.”
She didn’t offer again. He couldn’t believe he’d taken it. He felt like he had no pride. He didn’t think she’d come. She hadn’t made a sound, really, other than heavy breathing and small whimpers. During Lent he broke down and tried to touch her. She moved his hand back into his lap. “Why?” He asked. She got up and left the room.
“I love you.” She said in bed that night, right after she turned off her bedside light. He stared at the ceiling and tried not to shake. “I’m twenty six.” He thought, when she was asleep and he’d rolled over to watch her, breathing, her cheeks just perceptibly red and swollen in the moonlight. “And Delilah is twenty four.” The impossibility of how young they were struck him. Delilah breathed. “I have four years.” To do what? He was already a respectable footnote in the Mueso de la Meastranza. He wished he hadn’t killed the bull.
Emmanuel had a mano-a-mano Easter monday against Victor Jesus Guerralda, a slightly older toreador with a somewhat similar style. Three bulls each, points awarded, the best man taking the win. Delilah wore the red dress of a respectable Sevilliana out on the town on an important festival day, and she’d given in to custom and bought the ivory boned lace fan that matched her mantilla. Emmanuel knew his wife was beautiful. She kissed him on the cheek when she left him at the door of the dressing room, and she turned to go out into the stands. It stung where she’d kissed him. He wanted to die.
The first bull was dispatched with consummate skill. He toyed with it almost the full fifteen minutes allotted him. His passes earned sharp gasps from the crowd. The bulls’ flank pushed at him during one such maneuver, threatening to topple him backwards, and he literally refused to move his feet. He thought he’d topple humiliatingly, but he found his balance with a jerk of his torso. The sword went in clean and deep the first time. The full stadium screamed for him. He held out his hands and demanded more, his stance bombastic, his cry entitled, his chest heaving.
He watched the gradual sweep of white flags, expecting at least an ear from this. More, more-- it looked like the old men were holding out, hoping to provoke him to desperately fantastic performances in his last two fights. They knew what he knew. Two matches left. Two trofas in a corrida meant los maximos trofeos-- the tail thrown in--- and then the awarding of the head, and then he would be carried out on the shoulders of admirers at the fight’s end. Salida en hombres. Victory against his opponent, Guerralda, and a legendary performance in Spain’s most important arena, at its greatest corrida. The old men knew he wanted it, and they were holding out on him because they wanted to see things they had never seen before, things they couldn’t yet name. Emmanuel's eyes narrowed at their greed, their disloyalty.
But Emmanuel understood. He hadn’t done his best. There had been errors, crucial ones, and he could feel them in his body where he hadn’t dodged, along the skin he hadn’t exposed to the bull as he should have, and failure itched along his yet unbloodied uniform. He found Delilah where he’d seen her during the paseillo, blatant in her red dress, and he could find her clearly, so well was La Maestranza designed. No white handkerchief. Betrayal. She at least could see he had tried. But no, she had been watching him too long. She knew his best, and knew everything he hadn’t done. She had evaluated the match and found it wanting. But he could still win trofas maximas. He had the necessary opportunities.
His second bull was vicious, and two bandilleros had to jump the first wall to get away from it. Emmanuel raised an eyebrow. The bull gored a horse deeply, and the second, unoccupied picadore muttered to Emmanuel that they’d have to shoot it down in the pens. Fine, Emmanuel barked, eyes not leaving the animal. Once he glanced up. Delilah was a small, red gold figure in the stands. No fucking handkerchief, he thought, and it was not a complicated thought but it sank heavy as a stone. Mira mira mira. He would show her and she would see.
His passes were his most complicated. The crowd shrieked fear and delight. The old men murmured excited approval, whispering into each others deaf ears with thick-tounged enjoyment. The band played to signal the beginning of the death third. He hadn’t done more than six passes when the bull nudged his good, uninjured side, and he fell. He tried to control it, annoyed by the audible gasps of the audience as he did so-- he knew he’d fallen, goddamit-- and he tried to roll farther but not so far that the animal could be entranced by the motion and run, head down, after him, and he tired to catch himself between being trampled and being gored, tried to get up, but it must have been at just the wrong moment, and a horn slid up under, then clear through, the ribs on his good side and he was pinned and the thing was shaking, shaking him like he was so light he was insubstantial and he barely felt the pain of it when he ripped down off the animal, leaving a bit of himself up there, which slid down the horn and into the animals right eye above him and the bull shook the stingy dob of flesh out of its black socket and did not care that the blood was still floating on the lens of its eye and looked down at Emmanuel with finality. Are you death? He thought. Are you death, are you death? I am, said the bull. I am.
Below the stadium, with was a writhing sea of panic and disbelief, Delilah found the doctor outside of the infirmary. He was coming to meet her, surrounded by pale, worried members of her husband’s team. “Will he live?” she asked.
“I can’t say.” Said the doctor. Delilah punched him hard in the jaw and blood streamed down his chin. An assistant caught him and mercifully no one tried to calm her down. Her own hand hung down strangely.
“Will he live.”
“No,” muttered the doctor, and one of the men began to cry, men so unafraid to show emotion here, and it disgusted her because it terrified her, and she knew they all knew. Forty some matadores had died in the ring at the horns of a bull. These men knew what injury looked like. They all knew what death looked like. “An ambulance is on its way. We’ve got to keep him awake.”
“Is there any chance?” The doctor didn’t say anything.
“We have to try,” said an assistant whose name she tried to remember but could not. Delilah walked into the infirmary, where two men spoke uncertainly. She told them to leave. They hesitated and she screamed it. She locked a door against the rising noise outside. Emmanuel lay on the cotton mattress of the wood cot and when she sat down the old springs sagged in protest. She took off his jacket and his top, rolling the heavy, sequined fabric off him as gently as she could and tossing it in a lump beside the cot as it it were worthless rather than more expensive than any clothing she had ever owned. She poured some water from her bottle onto her handkerchief and wiped off the blood caking around his mouth.
She looked down when she felt his hand against her side. He’d ripped at the buttons of her dress. She thought of the tiny red silk buttons, spinning off under the cot in the dark. With a weakness that seemed lazy rather than feeble he was separating the sides of her dress. Her mantilla had fallen off, and she didn’t know when.
“Emmanuel?” She asked. He worked an arm out of her dress, staring at her bared skin, diligently, and he shook while he did it. She stood a little and he whimpered, but quieted when she shook herself out of her dress, threw off the shoes and ripped off the stockings and sat back down. She unzipped the pants and worked them down around his thighs. They hadn’t had sex while he was in the suit of lights since that first time. He’d tried once and she’d laughed it off.
Now her hand began to throb and she told herself she was a stupid cunt for thinking about it, and Emmanuel grabbed her hips and lowered her, and he set the rhythm and she leaned down over him and cried into his shoulder. He wrenched her face back up and stared into her eyes and she tried to stop crying. He moved her hand over the wound. She dug her small, white fingers into it, under the rent skin and he gasped and moved harder and faster. She came in a small, hard gasp, arching back away from him, and he caught her spine and pressed her down against his body as he worked until he was done. She shook with dry heaves.
They spoke softly as she dressed, pushing her stockings and shoes under the bed to join the helpless buttons and throwing on his tennis shoes, pulling the stiff dress over her head, unable to close the maimed side or zip up the back without his help, leaving the last bit that was always a bitch to zip open. She pulled her hair out of the bun, because it couldn’t be prodded into any semblance of how it should look, and zipped up his pants, her hand lingering and pressing. He grabbed her hand and kissed her fingers fervently, talking all the while.
Words came and came and then there was a well of silence, and he blinked wet eyes at her, and did not cry, and her face was smeared and ghastly, and she stood to open the door and let the doctor back in. The ambulance had arrived, and they took him to the hospital, and Delilah rode with Emmanuel knowing he could not live and knowing that she would not feel any better in ten years, in fifty. She watched the wound, a fixed point in the busy movement around her, as they prodded and dressed it, with flat eyes. He curled on the palate.
“Delilah Delilah Delilah,” he gasped, trying to move to avoid the pain, to squirm out of it. She could see something though the opening, here in the light, or several somethings that looked like wax or pudding, things she could not identify, that did not look normal or human to her but which must be bones and organs, parts of him she was never supposed to see, his body’s secrets. She was wrenched by his helplessness, at his inability to evade what was coming, at the cruelty of prolonging his death, making it grotesque by delay. He was asking her to help, to make it go away, speaking not words of love but desperation. Delilah wanted to snap his neck for him. She fluttered her hands down along his other side, the site of last year’s accident. He asked for her again, and she bent down, ear to his mouth, her long blonde hair sweeping around them like a gilded screen. They rested in a still, private country.
“I was good today,” he whispered urgently, tongue touching her ear as he hissed the words. He leaned up higher against her and lingered, his mouth against her skin, and she trembled and he felt overjoyed, and he knew she understood. “I was almost as beautiful as you.” Emmanuel teased. He smiled against her, rubbing his nose in her hair. “I was excellent.”
