Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (28 page)

She starts the car, backing out slowly into the growing traffic, ready to turn in the direction of home, away from the shopping center and the beauty salon. But then, on an impulse, she decides to turn the other way and pass by the drugstore.

She sees Harry’s parked car, empty, and feels relieved, telling herself again that it is all over, and that this, too, she will make up to Ralph.

Circling the block and pulling back into the stream of cars going away from the shopping village, she drives faster, picturing to herself the scene at home when Ralph comes in from the office. “Hello, darling,” he’ll say, and then, in little-boy astonishment, “Why, darling, you’re absolutely beautiful!” And he’ll take her in his arms and kiss her in a way she’s almost forgotten—in a way, too, she knows he can kiss no one else.

Ralph isn’t home when Grace reaches the house. For a while she sits in the living room, looking out over the lawn and front walk. Now she stands before the long glass, touching her hair and the jacket of her new gabardine suit; coral, she decides, is an attractive color for blondes.

She begins to pace the floor, wondering what she will say when Ralph comes in. No, she won’t say anything. But he—what will he say? What if he doesn’t notice at all? But, of course, he will notice it. She will be sitting under the light. He will notice immediately that her hair is a different color, a rich golden blonde.

Outside, the sunlight is fading. Standing in the center of the room now, she hears his footstep on the walk and, as her heart begins to beat faster, there is a sudden stab of doubt. Has it been a mistake? She crosses to the mirror. No, it’s all right. It’s perfect. She sits down on the sofa, and then moves to a chair near the window, where the light is stronger. There’s still time to put on the overhead light, but no, that will be too obvious. This is it, by the window, in the dusk. She half-forms the words,
Bella, darling,
and they dissolve in her throat. She tries to think of the tall girl standing in the surf, but can only think of Ralph’s expression, and she begins to blush. His feet are now on the steps, now on the porch. Grace feels the hot flush of her cheeks, and she lowers her head and covers her face with her hands. She hears the door swing open behind her, his footsteps on the threshold, and then the abrupt stop. She thrills to the sharp catch of his breath, the husky, unfamiliar panic—and something more—just before he says:

“For Christ’s fucking sake, Elaine, I told you never to come here!”

N
OW, IT MAY HAVE
been the heat—for certain August afternoons in Barcelona blaze with a strange and terrible light—or, it may have been that people were feeling fed up, in some serious way they didn’t yet understand; but today, waiting for the fourth bull, the filled Arena rose up and around like the inside of a great cauldron, the living walls a huge, tortured mosaic that wavered in the black-lined heat, as though the whole thing were slowly coming to a boil.

Below, at the base of a shadow stretching halfway across the ring like a giant’s pointed hand, the veteran capeman, Rafael Marulanda, leaned heavily against the barrier, looking into the crowd, a deep, dark emptiness in his eyes, feeling nothing. He had felt nothing towards the crowd for a long time, only the hollow certainty that he himself went unnoticed.

He knew that the bull would be bad, and the matador, too, full of false grimaces, like an Italian wrestler. But for Marulanda the knowledge was only vague, and deep; it was no longer bitter, nor even alive. One would have said that he was very, very tired.

The truth was that today was a sort of anniversary for him. Twenty years ago he had made his début as a novillero. In fact he had made two débuts. On the first occasion, he had been unable to kill his bull, and had given such a poor performance otherwise that he was knocked down with cushions and bottles, and could not finish on the program. In his second, and last fight—which had taken place in this very Arena—he had been gored in the back while climbing the barrier. Since then he had worked, for twenty years, as a capeman, an assistant to the matadors.

He did not even hear the
clarine
sounding the entrance this time, only the noise of the crowd as the bull came out—the great whispery gasp of the crowd, as always, in astonishment, and he was dully reminded of his work to be done. He was the first, as it happened, for the huge bull, after an instant’s incredulity past the trap, moved rapidly forward across the ring in a big, swaying trot, his head high, nostrils searching the wind, and then broke towards Marulanda’s cape that was swinging out over the safety-break in the barrier. He watched the bull without focusing his eyes and, as he withdrew the cape, he saw the bull rage past, a heavy unevenness on the dancing light.

Very often lately Marulanda did not bother to fix things with his eyes; and now, as the bull ravaged by, and on toward the next cape, Marulanda stepped into the Arena, and he stepped against the flank of Machito’s horse, the first picador horse, which at that moment, was blindly, laboriously clanking past. The fat, shapeless Machito, all thick-neck and sour-faced, was perched on the horse like a huge egg. “What’s the matter?” he cried, pointing a stirrup at Marulanda, a stirrup thickened with spangles of copper and brass. “Drunk, is he?” and his laugh was a raucous chain of coughs. But, of the whole funereal entourage of red-shirted peones trudging with the horse, only one turned his head and shrugged.

The others were looking at the magnificent bull.

Motionless now, on the far side of the Arena, in the full brilliance of the sun, he was as a great hewn thing, a wedge of solid black, looking heavy as wet marble with his monstrous hump of back a sheen through the glassy heat.

For the next five minutes Marulanda did his work by reflex, not thinking in helping to place the bull for the picador, making wide, circling passes, and then stepping back until he was needed.

The fourth time he took the bull however, something came alive inside him, and with a sudden steely tenderness and the leaning poise of a ballerina, he executed an intricate three-chicuelina faena that culminated in facing the bull squarely before the picador, drawing a savagely sharp burst of applause from the crowd, and causing a matador leaning against the barrier to frown oddly and mutter an aside to an attendant at his elbow.

He scarcely saw the bull after that, but looked past him, sometimes into the crowd, seeing the bull as a dark image that flowed across the screen of his mind, coaxed and avoided, impersonally.

Then he was not needed with the second picador, and he stood against the barrier, holding his cape folded to his chest, the way a girl will stand with her schoolbooks. From here he saw them place the bull once more, a haze of lines and points, tracing an old, monotonous pattern—so that on the instant of the bull’s last charge, he could not have noticed how high above the satin black rock of shoulders spread the great horns, feathering out all golden, to points of brilliance in the sun.

Then Machito was down, squirming and scrambling with one leg under the horse, while the over-anxious bull rooted the ground in blind ferocity before him and the crowd jeered and whistled and stamped their feet, perhaps because Machito was in no real danger and had piced the bull badly.

They say, or did say, that Marulanda was a typical failure-through ineptitude and cowardice. This no longer disturbed him, though it used to disturb him: how it
was
strange, in fact, that he should have been a bullfighter at all, or rather, that he should have wanted it so badly. And he must have wanted it very badly, for beyond a certain point in his youth, after he had told his father, it was simply taken for granted; and all later memory turned round his father’s proud sacrifices, and the make-believe Arena, the little wooden bull, playing endless hours with the stick and cape, taking the charge with classic grace, as his friend Jose rushed crouching behind a wooden stool. And he had given Josà the torero smile, the sneer of complicity and disdain, while his father and old Gonzales, or some other friend brought along from the fields to see, looked on, unspeaking, exchanging nudges and soft, knowing smiles, and occasionally raised a glass of the cheap red wine with grand dignity:
“al torero.”

Now the banderilleros had begun, and the first pair were placed, exciting a great, meaningless response from the crowd, and it was then that Marulanda, waiting his turn, really
saw
the bull—at an instant when the first pair were placed, and the bull rose, almost as in slow-motion, hooking the empty air, then left, at the level of the man’s throat, determinedly, without heat, as though it were a question of form alone—and for Marulanda, at that instant, something like a dry flame crossed his wrist. He walked half the length of the Arena then, back to the safety-break, from where he would make his approach, without bothering to watch the second pair.

Just as he reached the break in the barrier, however, a remarkable thing happened: a child, of perhaps five or six, rushed out, laughing and shouting, into the Arena. He came out the side of the break Marulanda was standing by, so that Marulanda actually had to step aside to let him pass.

The child had entered the Arena at the worst possible moment, for the bull, having just received the second pair of banderillas, was running completely unattended and, though on the opposite side of the Arena, had turned almost at once, and was now moving straight for the child, like a gigantic toy on a string.

Stepping aside, Marulanda had thought of nothing, but as he felt the child brush past him and beyond on the tremendous roar of the Arena, it came to him as a dream of something that had happened long ago, and for an instant he thought he saw his dead father’s face in the crowd on the far side of the Arena. But the image passed with confused abruptness, leaving only the fact of the child in the Arena. And it was an awesome sight—the child and the bull, moving head-on from opposite sides of the Arena. Still, it may have been only an illusion that the bull was charging the child, that being directly opposite, and at such a distance, the bull could not have seen the child, or, even so, that he was distracted, by a chance shadow, or movement, for he suddenly veered off the line that would have brought them together and plunged towards the nearest group of men and capes—so that it was over as quickly as it had begun—though by chance, to be sure, because: in the Arena, near the bull, there was no-one who had seen the child come in; and now they were suddenly so lost, ranged around the bull in a new manoeuvre, that they failed to notice when Marulanda overtook the child and gathered him up, almost exactly in the centre of the Arena. Then they
did
notice; and they all turned to watch. And while it is not an uncommon sight—spectators rushing into the Arena, children, zealous young men flourishing their coats—it is a sight that always brings an instant of doubt, and the immobility of disbelief; so that for seconds on end, the men simply stood watching Marulanda gather the child, writhing and flailing now, and start back toward the barrier. And in those seconds the inevitable thing happened: the bull, no longer ambivalent as to which moving thing to destroy, broke toward the one line of motion in the Arena; and he broke so quickly that he was beyond the cage of men and capes before it could move again. Marulanda saw it, just as it happened, and while he ran now as fast as he could, the sharpest reality was not of the bull, but of the fantastic roar of the Arena. This finite realization came in a moment of panic, and in that moment he may have forgotten about the child, for at a point, perhaps ten feet from the barrier, when he knew the bull was upon him, he turned to face it, or avoid it, still holding the child before him, almost it appeared now, as a shield. The terrible impact was simultaneous to his turning, and while it left Marulanda, stunned, on the ground, it bore the child from him, and away.

The spectacle had an extraordinary effect on the Arena. It was as though all the people and radios of the world were screaming into a volcano. It reached a high, splitting noise, and sustained, seeming to threaten the very walls of the Arena, while on the ground, far along the barrier, the bull nudged and worried the limp body of the child, and the gathering spectators, matadors, and assistants surged wildly around the bull, at frantic cross-purposes, in trying to manoeuvre him away. Marulanda could not get up. He seemed buried under the noise of the screams. Suddenly, a bottle struck his leg, and another hit the ground near his head, throwing up dirt; then one bottle hit another one and broke as though they had exploded. At this point, the sound seemed to go abruptly beyond endurance, beyond hearing; and he thought his eardrums would burst as he slowly got to his feet, because in the Arena now there was absolute silence.

Not daring to think, he started walking towards the break in the barrier, where two policemen were standing. Just before he reached it, a well-dressed man in the second row, directly in front of him, slowly got up, and carefully raising his arm, threw a bottle as hard as he could. It struck Marulanda squarely in the chest and he crumpled to the ground, as the roar of the Arena fell on him again like an avalanche. Everything fled upward past his eyes: the huddled policemen, guns drawn, nervously backing away, towards the exits—and beyond, the face of the Arena, a livid white, all the small faces fused by the heat into a single screaming mask.

They were all screaming that he must fight the bull.

Lying on the floor of the Arena, hearing only their screams—

“ MARULANDA!!”

—he began to cry, quietly, not with pain or remorse, but like a child, or a puppy, incredulous, whimpering a weird gratitude.

A
SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE
between Soviet and American space efforts has been the constant spotlight of public attention focused on the latter, while our antagonist’s program has been carried forward in relative secrecy. This has presented tremendous disadvantages, especially in its psychological effect on the national-mind, and it harbors a dangerous potential indeed. If, for example, in climax to the usual fanfare and nationally televised countdown, the spacecraft simply explodes, veers out crazily into the crowd, or burrows deep into the earth at the foot of the launching-pad, it can be fairly embarrassing to all concerned. On the other hand, it is generally presumed, because of this apparent and completely above-board policy, that
everything
which occurs in regard to these American spaceshots is immediately known by the entire public. Yet can anyone really be naive enough to believe that in matters so extraordinarily important an attitude of such simple-minded candor could obtain? Surely not. And the facts behind the initial moon-shot, of August 17, 1961, make it a classic case in point, now that the true story may at last be told.