Fragile Beasts (37 page)

I puffed out my chest with pride. Not only was she standing up for me, she was standing up for me to Manuel. No one ever did that—not even his manager, one of the most powerful
apoderados
in the business.

“As I said, you can never be too sure,” Manuel went on. “You’re obviously a visitor to our city.”

“Yes. I’m American.”

“Ah, of course. American.”

He fixed her with his bedroom eyes and gave her a slow, sensual smile that turned most women into giggling jelly or she-wolves with their tongues out.

She smiled back, but her gaze flicked playfully in my direction as if she thought—she knew—it was all a game and I was in on it, too, but on her side.

“Have you been to the Prado? To El Retiro?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“Have you seen a bullfight?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you think?”

“It was very interesting.”

This response seemed to puzzle him.

“Interesting? Do you remember which toreros you saw?”

“No, but I remember the bulls.”

Without any encouragement, she began talking about each of the six bulls she had watched. She didn’t know their names or even the breeder, but she remembered their appearances—everything from whether the tips of their horns turned up or down to the amount of branding on their hides—and she remembered their performances. Eager, confused, reluctant, aggressive, magnificent, mean: she described them all.

Manuel listened. It was the first time I could ever recall a woman’s words holding his attention.

“Did it bother you that the bulls were killed?”

“No. Should it have?”

“I’m curious because you seem so fond of them.”

“All bulls and cows are eventually killed for meat. It’s their lot in life.”

“And what is your lot in life?”

“To eat the meat.”

Manuel smiled.

“Are you going to the bullfight tonight?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid not. I just got back to Madrid this morning and there are no tickets left.”

“I could get you one.”

“How is that?”

“I have connections.”

“I see.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Reina Victoria.”

His smile became a grin.

“Did you know this is where all the bullfighters stay when they come to Madrid?”

“Yes, I gathered that from all the photos on the walls of bullfighters and the mounted bulls’ heads.”

She gave me another one of her knowing glances.

“If you’ll excuse me, I really must go.”

“Your name? For when I leave the tickets.”

“Candace. Candace Jack.”

She turned her back to him and walked away. What I remember most vividly about that moment besides the sway of her hips and the shine of her hair was the fact that she didn’t ask him for his name.

She went to the bullfight that night, and Manuel was brilliant. I didn’t see her. I was too busy taking care of the capes and swords.

He knew exactly where she was sitting and as he took his victory stroll around the ring with a pasodoble playing and the applause swelling from the adoring crowd while flowers, shawls, and wine flasks were thrown at his feet, I’m certain he paused in front of her and made sure she knew who he was.

Yet afterward, she was nowhere to be found in the throng of fans waiting outside the toreros entrance hoping to catch a glimpse of their idols as they left.

He was certain then that she’d be waiting at the hotel bar for him.

She wasn’t.

We went up to his room where I helped him undress. He immediately sent me back down to the lobby to wait for her while he took his shower.

She never showed up.

He declined eating dinner and celebrating with the cuadrilla, choosing to have tapas sent to his room while I continued to wait for her.

He had me ask the front desk manager if she had come in, and he told me she’d gone out earlier and hadn’t returned.

Eventually Manuel came down to the bar where he took a seat and spent the rest of the evening with a cigar and a bottle of his favorite scotch, accepting congratulations and brushing off advances. He was so agitated, he didn’t take any woman to bed that night.

The next morning we were due to leave early. We had another corrida many miles away.

Manuel paced the lobby while we loaded the van, and finally in a fit of frustration demanded her room number from the front desk. The man working
there had no choice but to give it to him. El Soltero was one of the princes the hotel had been built to serve.

He went racing upstairs while we threw up our hands, checked the clock in the church tower across the square, and shook our heads.

It’s a cliché but it’s true for this kind of man: when he finds a woman who isn’t interested in him, he must have her.

I don’t know what he said to her or what she said to him. I only know she was at the bullfight in Valencia that night. And afterward, he had dinner with her alone.

I
T’S THE END
of a long Christmas Day that’s been an endless cycle of eating, drinking, gift-giving, arguing, laughing, attending mass, and abusing Javier for still being Mama’s favorite.

Kyle’s caricatures were a big hit, especially the one of Javier who was drawn wearing a baby’s bonnet, drinking a bottle, and sitting on Mama’s knee who was depicted as a tenth of his size.

I’ll be excited to tell Kyle he can have countless more commissions from my family if he’d be interested in the work.

I’ve stepped outside to get some air. This year was Teresa’s turn to host the holiday. She and her husband have a beautiful finca not far from town, one of the many rewards for owning all of the olive orchards for as far as the eye can see.

Tomorrow I will pay a quiet visit to Manuel’s sister, Maria Antonia. Rafael will be there as well, and we will talk about toreo and I will feel the old familiar pain and also the joy.

The sky is clear tonight, a deep indigo salted with white stars and dominated by a full moon that seems to swirl like a jostled saucer of milk if you stare at it for too long.

Candace will be sleeping under the same moon tonight four thousand miles away. I hope she had a nice day with Kyle and Klint. I hope she didn’t try to buy them clothes for their Christmas gifts.

I’ve enjoyed my trip as I always do, but I’ll be glad to go home. I’ve lived in America twice as long as I lived in Spain. Even so, to this day, I feel Spanish when I’m there yet when I come back to Spain, I feel utterly American.

People ask me which country I prefer and would I ever return permanently
to my native one. I try to make them understand that there is no competition between the two. It’s not a question of advantages and disadvantages. I’m equally bound to both. The struggle lies in the difference between a lover choosing you or you choosing a lover. I belong to Spain but America belongs to me.

M
y dad spent a lifetime playing baseball, watching baseball, and talking and dreaming about baseball; yet somehow he managed to know nothing about the game except the most important thing and that was how it made him feel.

He was hopeless with numbers. He could never remember statistics or figures. RBIs and ERAs, the clocked speed of a fast ball, the eight thousand pounds of force when the bat meets the ball: all of this was lost on him. Half the time he couldn’t remember the ball count from one player to the next.

He hated the men behind these numbers, the analysts sitting at their computers looking for hidden patterns in the games, the sports medicine doctors and scientists conducting tests and studies to find out how much force and rotation is needed for a pitcher to send a ball across a plate at more than a hundred miles an hour.

He hated the philosophers, too, the scholars and writers, the guys who didn’t play but sat around spouting romantic notions about the sport offering a peek into the American psyche or symbolizing man’s eternal struggle to get to home.

As far as my dad was concerned, all these people missed the point. Baseball was a game. Nothing more, nothing less. But it was a helluva good game, one full of unpredictability, of mind-numbing boredom that could suddenly turn into lightning-quick displays of athletic prowess and mental magnificence, one that had moments of luck in the clutch—a ball missed, a ball caught, a double stretched into a triple, a stolen base, a soft fly dropped into the only spot in the park where no fielder could get to it—that were so unbelievable, watching them unfold before him made him feel like he was part of
something bigger than his own shitty little existence, that he’d been let in on a great cosmic secret.

He’d take that knowledge and joy to work with him the next day. We’re all the same. No one is better or worse. We’re all just banking on the hope that at any moment something astonishing can happen.

But I think the thing my dad liked most about baseball was that it was a game where errors determined the outcome. One team’s superior abilities didn’t matter nearly as much as how many mistakes the other team could get them to make.

What was most important wasn’t a man excelling but a man getting the other guy to screw up. Dad could relate to that.

I don’t think Klint has ever played a game without my dad watching him. I don’t know how many people sitting here on the bleachers know this.

I know Bill does, but he’s so busy thinking about the fact that he’s never watched Klint play a game without my dad watching that I know he’s not concerned about Klint.

I’m pretty sure Coach Hill does, but it’s impossible to tell with Coach. This isn’t because he keeps his feelings hidden. (At every game he displays a wide array of emotions ranging from mad to angry to really pissed off.) It’s because he doesn’t allow himself to ever think about other people’s feelings. His players aren’t even supposed to have feelings. They have positive mental zones where they visualize everything they’re going to do correctly in the upcoming game and the pizza they’ll get afterward.

I doubt he’s worried about Klint, especially since he’s been playing better than ever during this past month of practice. All Coach cares about is that his physical talent is still there. What’s going on in his head and heart isn’t his concern. He doesn’t see him at home. He doesn’t hear him wandering around in the middle of the night when he should be asleep. He doesn’t realize that he never jokes around anymore. He doesn’t know he’s struggling more than usual in all his classes. He doesn’t understand that he’s lost his love of Doritos and Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies.

I worry about Klint, but I don’t know what I’m worried about and that makes it hard to do anything.

Sometimes I think I’m the one with the problem, and he’s fine. For instance, I worried like crazy he was going to fall apart and not be able to play
ball this season. He’s been playing better than ever, but instead of me feeling relieved, I feel a kind of dread.

Each time I’ve watched him in a scrimmage step up to the plate and I hear the crack when the ball hits the bat and gets drilled over the shortstop’s head, instead of jumping out of my seat screaming and shouting with joy, my throat closes up and my stomach crunches into a knot.

Today is his first official game. I have no doubts he’ll play fine, and I can already tell this is going to bother me.

The turnout’s not too bad for a cold, crappy day. There’s the usual hardcore parents who show up no matter what the weather’s like, and since the school we’re playing isn’t too far away, some of those parents have driven over.

A couple dozen students have shown up, too. It’s the first of April and spring definitely hasn’t sprung yet, but everyone’s already gotten rid of their coats and boots and are only wearing sweatshirts and gym shoes. Their shoes are soaked and covered with mud from the earlier rain. They’re sitting in knots, hunched over their knees, their hoods pulled up over their heads, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands together for warmth. Sitting on these bleachers when they’re cold is like sitting on a slab of ice.

The Flames also get their share of regular fans since they’re a top-twenty team. Only sixteen teams per division make it to the state championships and we were one of them last year, but we got knocked out in the first elimination round by one run. It was Brent Richmond’s error.

His dad freaked out so much, we all felt bad for him even though he’s a total jerk. School was out by then and their whole family immediately left town for a two-week vacation. They came back without Brent.

A lot of rumors flew around. Some people said his dad killed him in the Virgin Islands where they have a time-share and dumped his body off a yacht into the Caribbean. Some said they sent him to a baseball camp in Cuba. Others said a church camp in Mississippi. Still others said they brought him back home and his dad killed him here and buried him under the foundation of one of the new houses he was building in his latest Sunny Valley subdivision.

(Mr. Richmond was so upset about Brent’s screwup that he even gave the new streets in this section sort of disturbing names. That was almost a year ago, and there are still people who won’t buy a house on Whimpering Dog Lane.)