Fragile Beasts (16 page)

I’ve also overheard conversations about Klint in the grocery store, the drugstore, Sam’s Club, and even once while waiting for Candace at her doctor’s office. People are impressed and proud, yet their praise is tainted with jealousy and resentment. For every man sitting at a bar telling glowing tales of Klint Hayes driving in the winning run in the district championship game and guessing at how much money he could make as a pro, there’s another one claiming he’s a stuck-up kid who thinks he’s better than everyone else and that his success comes from luck.

In Villarica, the love we felt for Manuel was a pure love. We didn’t judge his human failings or begrudge him his successes. We expected nothing from him, so we could never be disappointed. The very existence of this kind of man brought us happiness, and we repaid him by letting him live his life his own way. Like the bulls he met in the ring, we kept our distance and only approached him on special days with pesetas in hand to see him perform. We let him run free and took great joy in watching him chase his destiny.

This is not to say he didn’t rub some people the wrong way. He had a famous temper and when he wasn’t in the ring, his desire for excitement and need for control sometimes got him in trouble. He left a path of wrecked cars, ruined women, frazzled priests, frustrated reporters, and pleading letters from his mother wherever he went.

For six months out of the year, the life of a torero is filled with travel, none of it glamorous. Even today there are no jets or bullet trains that can get them, their team of assistants called a “cuadrilla,” and all their equipment from one fiesta de toros to the next. They must drive from town to town, usually in the middle of the night, over rural, twisting roads, some that haven’t been widened or improved for hundreds of years.

During the winter, they rest and practice and usually live in one place. Manuel tried living in Madrid but got into too much trouble. By his twenty-fifth year, he had moved to a finca about eighty kilometers southeast of the city. Villarica was about the same distance from Madrid but in the opposite direction. This put him far from his hometown but he still visited several times a year.

These visits caused uproars in our town. The girls dressed prettier; the
men stood straighter; the nuns living in the convent on the hill crossed themselves more often. Even the little dogs that roamed our streets yapped louder than usual.

The few businesses in town made sure to have all his favorite things on hand. The tobacco shop ordered boxes of his favorite cigars. The
panaderia
baked dozens of
marquesitas
, and as dawn broke the day of his arrival, the mouthwatering smell of sweet buns and almonds filled all our homes. On the chalkboards hung outside their doors, the restaurants advertised
perdiz estofada con alubias
, the traditional partridge stew served with white beans that he loved. The bars stocked bottles of his favorite whisky, a Scottish malt that was almost impossible to get during these closed-off times during Franco’s regime when very little was imported; but a local merchant had connections and was always able to supply the bars with enough bottles to keep Manuel happy.

The Obrador farm on the outskirts of town became a temple where people went to worship. After siesta, men wandered down the frozen dirt road bordered on both sides by rows of slumbering olive trees and gathered with Manuel’s father outside his humble stone house where they stood smoking and stamping their feet to keep warm and discussed predictions for the quality of bulls next season. Women brought gifts of food and wine to his mother knowing she would be doing much entertaining and hoping they’d be invited.

Every unmarried girl between the ages of sixteen and thirty made a pilgrimage, all claiming the visit was done out of friendship for his younger sister, Maria Antonia, but mother and sister knew the allure of their Manolo and were highly suspicious when it came to female maneuvering. They knew these women were only trying to determine what his exact movements would be during his visit, and they divulged very little.

With her true friends Maria would sit shiny-eyed, her dark, lovely face animated with laughter and rapid-fire chatter, and wonder about the new dress or piece of jewelry Manuel would bring her from Madrid and which members of his cuadrilla might pay a visit while he was here.

Within my own family, Manuel’s visits were always of great importance, too. My father owned the most popular restaurant in town and we also rented the rooms above it. During the bullfight season we did a healthy business, but in winter, things got slow. Manuel’s homecomings always guaranteed a crowd of people every night, some hoping to catch a glimpse of him because it was
well known he loved my mother’s cooking, and others simply because knowing he was back put everyone in a festive mood.

I was ten years younger than Manuel, a boy of fifteen when he came home for a week in early February 1955. I was the fifth of eight children. As in all large families, each sibling had a well-defined role to play and a label to go with it: the responsible one (the eldest); the spoiled one (the baby); the smart one; the pretty one; the lazy one; the funny one; and the bad seed. I was the invisible one, but if anyone had ever noticed me long enough to find out anything about me, I would’ve been called the dissatisfied one.

I can’t say that I hated Villarica or my life, and I certainly didn’t hate my family. We were a loud, boisterous, combative bunch, constantly at odds with one another but as tightly connected as the stitches in the clothing my mother sewed for us. We weren’t well-off by any means, but we weren’t starving either. Considering the size of our family and the times we lived in, we couldn’t complain.

I don’t know why I wanted to leave. I wasn’t a dreamer or a thrill seeker. I was very levelheaded. I had no grand delusions about being rich or famous or waking up one day and discovering I had a great talent like Manuel Obrador. I didn’t know what I wanted or why I wanted it; I only knew I wanted something else, and this something else gnawed at me day and night.

M
ANUEL HAD BEEN
home for two days according to gossip but had yet to make his way into town. He hadn’t been to the bakery for his
marquesitas
, or the tobacco shop for his cigars. He hadn’t been spotted strolling through the plaza or going to confession. Both days my mother had killed and plucked a dozen partridges just in case. Manuel’s
estofado
was so popular that customers asked for it days, even weeks, after his visits and so she needed to add more meat to the giant stew pot every day.

It was siesta and I’d been sent to fetch fresh goat’s milk from a nearby farm.

I had made the journey countless times during my life. When I was a young boy, I used to think the distance would get shorter as my legs grew longer but this never happened. Instead, as I got older my thoughts grew larger and the distance seemed to double.

The town was completely deserted except for the silence. Not the soft, muffled silence I’ve come to know after a Pennsylvania snowfall but the hard, shiny silence of winters in central Spain.

Every shutter was closed. Every door locked. Every child and dog subdued. Every cage of birds covered. Even the wisps of white smoke crept reluctantly from the chimneys as if they feared they might make a noise if they rushed too quickly and crashed into the wall of bright blue sky.

I was concocting a story in my head where I was the only person left alive on the earth and the best thing about it would be that I’d never have to wait my turn to use the bathroom when my thoughts were interrupted and the silence was shattered by loud slapping sounds coming from behind me.

I turned around and saw a man running toward me down the cobble-stoned street in his bare feet!

Even in the height of summer no one ever went in their bare feet. Part of the reason was common sense. The ground was simply too hot. But the other reason was shame. Going barefoot was a sign of poverty and a reminder of the harsh times of the Civil War, a memory still fresh in all our minds. If a child was seen without shoes in town, the fact would be shouted from one house to the next by the female in charge and within minutes, a mother would be dragging her scandalous child back home by the ear.

The only person I’d ever heard of who openly flouted this convention and got away with it was Manuel Obrador, who not only went barefoot as a boy but used to yell back at the old ladies who chastised him that it was none of their business (when everyone knew everything was their business).

In the ring he’d been known to throw off his shoes in disgust when a bull was being difficult and finish his capework in his bright pink socks.

“Chico!” the man cried when he spotted me. “Help me!”

He was upon me in a matter of seconds.

“You have no shoes,” I sputtered.

“It’s okay. I can run faster.”

“But it’s freezing cold.”

“Then take me someplace warm. Please.” He glanced wildly behind him. “You have to hide me.”

As if to show me the truthfulness of his words, the quiet street erupted into a clatter of running feet in shoes and a storm of angry bellowing I wasn’t sure was human.

“Quickly,” the barefoot man pleaded with me.

“My father’s restaurant,” I told him and set down the sealed pails of goat’s milk in a doorway, knowing I could come back for them later. “This way. It’s close.”

We took off and were in the dining room in a matter of minutes. I never stopped once to look behind me.

“Is there another way out?” he asked me, his dark eyes filled with panic.

Before I could even answer him, we heard his pursuer shouting outside our door.

I rushed him to a back table. He crawled underneath and I positioned the chairs around him so it would be next to impossible to see him even though the tablecloth didn’t quite reach the floor.

Our front door burst open and a crazy man holding a knife came charging in.

“Where is he?” he screamed at me. “Where is that
chulo?
I will kill him.”

A girl came running in after him. She was dressed, but I could tell by her flushed face and tousled hair that she’d been recently undressed.

“No, Papa! No!” she screamed and threw herself on him.

The man pushed her onto the floor and came toward me waving his blade, his face purple with rage.

“He thinks because he plays with bulls he can do whatever he wants? He thinks he owns everyone? He thinks he runs this town like a king? There is no king in Spain anymore, and there will be no king in Villarica. I will chop off his head myself.”

“Papa, please,” the girl continued pleading from a sobbing heap on the floor.

The man grabbed me by the front of my shirt and shook me.

“Where is he? Are you hiding him? That makes you guilty, too. I’ll cut off your ears like you’re one of his bulls and parade around the town with them.”

I’d never been so scared in my life but at the same time, I felt electrified. I didn’t believe he’d cut me but if he did, I’d die a noble death.

I realized who was hiding under my table. I’d be the boy who saved El Soltero. All of Spain would write songs about me, and the pope would declare me a saint. My face would be on holy cards, and beautiful women would cry for me on the steps of the church. My mother would be sad to lose me, but
she’d be proud of my sacrifice. I’d become the favorite child, and none of my brothers and sisters would ever be able to topple me from my martyr’s throne.

“You have to get out,” I told the man, my voice shaking a little and sounding much quieter and meeker than I wanted it to. “You have no right to be here.”

He let go of me and put the tip of his knife blade against my throat.

“I’m going to search every inch of this place. I’m going to turn it upside down. You can’t stop me. You’re a mouse.”

My entire body was instantly covered in sweat, even parts of me I didn’t know were capable of sweating: my elbows, my ears, the backs of my knees, my butt cheeks.

I swallowed hard and felt the cold metal nick into the skin of my neck.

“I can wake up my father and four brothers,” I told the man and looked above me at the rooms upstairs as if we lived there when actually we lived a few blocks away and there wasn’t anyone nearby to help me. “They won’t like it.”

Some sanity began to slowly return to his eyes.

He lowered his knife.

“This isn’t over,
ratero!”
he growled at me.

He turned and on his way out, he grabbed the girl’s arm and yanked her up from the floor. He dragged her out of the restaurant and I was frightened for her, but as they passed our front windows, she smiled at me and mouthed the word, “Gracias.”

I was still watching them when the sound of chairs scraping on wood made me turn around.

Manuel Obrador emerged from beneath the table.

Seeing him now, no one would have ever guessed that he was a man who’d just been pursued barefoot through the frozen town by a knife-wielding lunatic intent on murdering him.

He pushed his thick black hair out of his eyes and smoothed it back on his head, then brushed at the dust on the knees of his pants and straightened his shirt.

He wasn’t much taller than I was but he had a presence that filled the large room. He had a taut, athletic body and a natural cockiness that came from self-awareness, not arrogance. He was almost too good-looking. I fell in love with him at first sight, and I was a boy. I couldn’t imagine what happened to
girls when he crossed their paths, but then again, after what I’d just been through, I had some idea.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked me.

“El Soltero,” I said with something close to awe in my voice.

He laughed.

“Under the circumstances, I guess it only makes sense you’d choose to call me ‘the bachelor’ instead of by my Christian name. Right now I’m much more the first than the second.”

He looked all around him. He knew where he was. He’d been here many times.

“Who was that man?” I asked him.

“I can’t say for sure,” he replied lightly. “We were never properly introduced, but I have a feeling he’s the father of the girl who was with him. She I know very well.”