Fragile Beasts (42 page)

Her mother had died when she was a baby and her father never remarried.
She was very close to him and only she had the ability to cheer him. Whatever she did or said, it warmed his stern widower’s heart, and his black eyes would sparkle as he watched her give orders to the household staff or jump into a Jeep with one of the hands to drive out to a pasture to inspect a new bull.

His son, however, was an embarrassment to the family, and his daughter never lost an opportunity to point out this fact to him.

By the time their father passed away, he was completely estranged from El Gato. He left Bonifacio a living but left the family business, the estate, and all the land to Carmen.

She was in her fifties when I met her and as energetic and controlling as she’d ever been. She was still attractive: a handsome woman, though never pretty, who tried to distract from her mannish features by painting them in garish makeup and dressing in a flamboyantly feminine manner. Her party gowns were extravagant, tightly corseted affairs made of sequin-spangled taffetas in the same garish palette of colors that her beloved toreros wore. Her business wear was equally colorful but in the form of pencil skirts and fitted suit jackets adorned with some type of beading, embroidery, or lace at the lapels and cuffs.

The night of Manuel’s death she greeted me before the corrida wearing a scarlet suit lavishly trimmed in jet bugle beads. She was the only person in Manuel’s circle besides Luis who knew I was there. In her typical fashion, she was delighted to see me and extended a warm invitation to me to sit with her in the president’s box, but she didn’t inquire about where I’d been or what I’d been doing or anything at all about my personal life.

She somehow managed to embody both sides of all coins to me: she was a man and a woman; the new world and the old Spain; generous and small; stunning and frightening.

My affair with Manuel was well known in the bullfighting world before it ended. People knew El Soltero was not so solitary anymore. The former lothario who each year had cut a path through Spain’s new crop of beauties as cleanly and determinedly as a farmer wielding a scythe was now content to sit and watch a single American rose bloom in the sun.

Carmen had no choice but to take an interest in me since she adored Manuel. At first she regarded me as merely another conquest and barely tolerated me. Then, as time passed and she saw Manuel’s uncharacteristic devotion to me, she began to befriend me.

The turning point, I believe, was the day he took me to her ranch to look at bulls. Apparently, he’d never done this with a woman before. We saw Calladito that day. He was a magnificent animal—a solid mass of muscle the color of a clear midnight with brilliant white horns, as thick as a sapling’s trunk, elegantly curved skyward into lethal points of bone. Manuel watched him intently, breathlessly, his dark eyes glimmering with a passion I’d only seen when we’d been in bed together. He was in love.

When we returned to the house, for the first time ever Carmen slipped her arm through mine, not Manuel’s, and led me off to one of her terraces where a gorgeous lunch was waiting for us, all the while chatting confidentially to me about frivolous female matters that we’d never discussed before as if we were long-lost sorority sisters.

Eventually she went so far as to decide I was the one for him. It was time for him to settle down. It would be good for him to have a lifelong companion, a real home, children and stability. She mentioned marriage to me before Manuel did, and later on when Manuel and I had argued publicly about my hesitancy to leave America for good, she took it upon herself to try and convince me my concerns were trivial.

“A country is just a place; a man can be a world,” she told me once after pulling me aside at one of her dinner parties.

I didn’t pay much attention to her at the time. She was prone to dramatic, metaphor-ridden proclamations and always delivered them in a hushed, hurried voice while grabbing my wrist and staring deeply into my eyes before someone else caught her eye and she rushed off suddenly with her taffeta rustling and a dazzling smile parting her painted lips.

In hindsight, I’ve thought of those words often over the years and I’ve realized the wisdom behind them. Carmen had been right. I had made the wrong choice because I didn’t understand the all-important difference between a place and a world and why one is so much more precious than the other: you can find a new place but a lost world is gone forever.

Carmen, of all people, understood why I needed to spare Calladito the shame of dying outside the ring. She knew Manuel would not only want it; he would demand it. But she was first and foremost a businesswoman and wasn’t going to let one of her prize bulls trot away for a peseta less than he was worth.

I paid dearly for Calladito, but there was no way around it. Carmen wasn’t
the only one who required money. Even with the assistance of one of the most powerful breeders in Spain along with her agreement to sell, I still wouldn’t have been able to bypass the laws and superstitions governing bullfighting if the corrida had been in Madrid or Sevilla or any other major town or city. I wouldn’t have even been given a chance to plead my case. The officials were much more important there, public men with much more at stake and many more eyes watching them.

This had been a one-man corrida in the torero’s small, insignificant hometown. The president of the bullfighting organization was a grasping mill owner I’d met once before who was easily corrupted. His only involvement in bullfights consisted of showing up for them, where he sat on his mock throne in his lofty box listening to the roar of the crowd and watching the sea of white handkerchiefs before deciding whether or not to grant the torero an ear. He had no great love or commitment to the art; he was only interested in the local prestige and the free drinks he received afterward if he had abided by the crowd’s wishes, which he always did.

I was also overwhelmingly pitiful and ghastly standing with Carmen in one of the poorly lit stone corridors beneath the ring, trembling in my chic, slim, pale green summer suit covered in Manuel’s blood. My nylons were ripped, my shoes and hat lost, my knees and the palms of my hands bloody and encrusted with sand, my hair hanging loose around my dust-covered, tearstained face.

Outside and above us, people moaned and wailed. Inside and down the hall from us Manuel’s body lay on a cold, metal infirmary bed while his family stood around him sobbing and praying. They were rarely able to see him perform because the travel was difficult and expensive, but tonight he had come home and they had all been in the audience: his mother, his father, his sister, her husband, and her three-year-old son, Juan Manuel, who would grow up to be Rafael’s father.

I was able to bribe the president.

In 1959, there were about sixty pesetas to a dollar. I paid six million pesetas for Calladito. Roughly $100,000. That would be the equivalent of paying almost $1 million for him now.

At the time I remember thinking about the men who had been on strike back home and one dead man in particular who had originally sent me fleeing
to Spain. Calladito had cost fifty times more than one of them earned at a year’s hard labor. He had cost a generation of miners.

It seemed appropriate to me that I was buying him with Stan’s money.

According to Spanish history, the bull who killed Manuel Obrador was put to death that same evening at the plaza de toros in Villarica. It’s a necessary part of his legend.

The reality was Calladito was spirited off under cover of night to the nearest port city like a wanted fugitive along with a stubborn, imperious, grief-stricken twenty-year-old Spanish youth whose devotion to Manuel was so great, it even extended to the woman he had loved.

T
HE SOUND OF
a car coming in my direction shakes me out of my reverie.

To my great surprise, I see Cameron’s Cadillac coming up the drive. He never stops by unannounced, and even scheduled visits are rare.

He slows as he approaches and rolls down the window. I continue walking and he’s forced to drive slowly in reverse in order to stay with me.

“Hi, Aunt Candace.”

“Hello, Cameron.”

“Where are you going?”

“For a walk.”

“Why don’t you come with me back up to the house? I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

“Why don’t you park the car and come with me?”

“I don’t think so. I’m not dressed for it. Come on. Get in.”

“I want to finish my walk first.”

“Why? Why can’t you finish it later? You have the whole day to take a walk.”

“I’ve already started it.”

“For Christ’s sake, why do you have to be so difficult?”

“Why do you have to be so lazy?”

“I’m not lazy. I’m wearing a suit and good shoes, and I don’t want to go walking down some goddamned country road.”

“Then I’ll see you at the house when I get back.”

He puts on his brakes so forcefully, gravel flies out from under his tires.

My heart leaps into my throat, but I refuse to show that I am startled. I quicken my pace.

I hear his car door slam and the sound of him muttering under his breath as he comes up behind me.

“Are you happy now?” he asks me, already sounding out of breath.

“No,” I reply.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re walking with me.”

“You invited me.”

“I never thought you’d accept.”

“Aunt Candace,” he practically shouts at me. “Would you stop for a minute?”

I do.

“What do you want, Cameron?”

He thinks for a moment about what his response should be. I watch the exertion in his face as his brain begins to grapple with ideas.

“I want to talk to you about your will,” he blurts out.

“Ha,” I laugh.

I continue laughing as I turn and hurry on my way.

He catches up with me.

“I know you were at Bert’s office on Monday. I know you changed your will.”

I stop and gasp.

“How dare you?”

“How dare I what?”

“Pry into my affairs. How did you hear about this? Do you have a spy in his office? Surely, Bert couldn’t have told you.”

“Of course not. Bert would never tell me anything. He’d have his tongue ripped out before he’d talk about your so-called affairs. It doesn’t matter how I found out. You’re not giving those kids any of our money.”

“Our money? There is no ‘our money.’ There’s your money and my money, and I’ll do whatever I please with mine.”

“You didn’t do something stupid, did you?”

“I want you to leave me alone.”

“Aunt Candace, what did you do? Did you make those two janitor’s boys your heirs?”

I’m so furious, I’m struck speechless.

“I’ll fight it,” he goes on. “Whatever you’ve done. After you’re dead in the ground, I’ll take them to court and I’ll fight it. They’ll have to spend half the money you left them on legal fees before they find out they’re not getting any of it.”

It’s difficult to gather my thoughts. I look down at my hands and notice they’re actually trembling with rage.

“I have been very disappointed in you over the years,” I tell him, picking my words precisely and delivering them very slowly so there can be no misunderstanding between us. “You have depressed, and angered, and occasionally even disgusted me but never before have you repulsed me. Now go back to your car and get off my property.”

We stand toe to toe with our eyes locked for what seems an eternity. A wealth of emotions play over his face, most of them awful, but for one bittersweet second I think I see the same loss in his eyes that I’ve sometimes felt for him.

He turns and storms back to his car.

I start walking again and try to ignore him. I hope he’ll drive past at some ridiculous speed but once again, he slows down as he approaches me. He has to lean across the front seat to yell at me this time.

“I knew it,” he shouts over the sound of the engine. “I knew you were going to get suckered in by those two boys. You’re easy prey. Childless old lady. She can finally pretend she has kids.”

I continue walking, with my head held high, but with tears stinging my eyes.

“Do they tell you they love you? Do they give you good-night kisses?”

I do something I’ve never done to anyone in my life.

I give him the finger.

M
y confrontation with Cameron leaves me rankled for days. His visits always upset me, but I’m usually able to forget about them in a matter of hours. This one, however, won’t stop plaguing me.

I don’t know what upset me more: his belief that he could tell me what to do, his assumption that I could be “taken in” by someone, his audacity in snooping into my private legal affairs, or the fact that I haven’t received the affection he assumed I’m getting even though he assumed it would only be given to me as part of a grand scheme to get my money.

Is it possible to feel bad because someone
hasn’t
tried to take advantage of you?

When I took in Kyle and Klint eight months ago, I was convinced I was mounting a rescue mission. After meeting their mother, I believed keeping them away from her was a noble cause tantamount to stepping between two baby seals and a club-wielding Canadian. I also wanted to spite Cameron after he told me I wasn’t allowed to do it. And I suppose, in some small way, I wanted to please Shelby.

I never really stopped and thought about the boys as human beings and that a relationship could or should develop between us. I tended to see them more as a project to be undertaken or large lumps of clay to be molded. I never thought about what they might need from me outside of large amounts of food and a constant supply of new socks.

I thought they could reside here in my home as if it were a sort of very large bed-and-breakfast but one in which the owner had no interest in interacting with the guests.

I never thought I would become attached to them or, worse yet, want them to become attached to me.

I don’t think they dislike me. This is something in my favor. Even Klint has thawed slightly, although it’s difficult to tell. The boy has still never smiled in my presence, yet I believe progress has been made. He makes eye contact with me now, and he answers all straightforward questions without being prodded, although I tend to think he does both because he’s finally surrendered to my training like a weary dog to a stubborn master.