The Blind Man of Seville (54 page)

The door into the dark swung open. Silence. A single voice shouted encouragement and the half-ton bull burst
into the sunlit plaza and the roar of the crowd. The bull looked about, charged, gave up and eased to a trot. Pepe called the bull, which thundered past him with no interest in the cape and savaged one of the barriers with his horns. Pepe brought him back and executed two
media verónicas
with the cape and the crowd broke their silence for him.

A trumpet announced the picadors, who trundled out with their lances on their blindfolded, mattressed horses. Pepe drew the bull into one of the picador’s horses. As the bull hit, the picador leaned down on his lance and drove the point into the hump of muscle. The horse’s front legs came off the ground. The crowd cheered the bull’s willingness to charge and its strength.

The picadors left the ring. Pepe’s team lined up with their banderillas, which they placed efficiently into the bull’s neck. Pepe came out for his faena and Javier and Paco leaned forward to study the final act.

The nervousness and disinterest in the cape the bull had shown at the beginning became more apparent in the faena. It took Pepe nearly half his faena to persuade the bull to take to the muleta. When the bull finally responded the band played a slow
paso doble.
Pepe went on to kill the bull well. Javier and Paco thought it had been a creditable performance with a distracted bull. The crowd applauded, but no white handkerchiefs dabbed the air asking for an ear.

Pepín Liria’s first bull did not take to the ring. It burst out into the bright roar, took ten strides and turned tail. It trotted around, butting the barriers. Its only moment came when, running through the cape, a horn caught in the ground and the bull performed a perfect half-ton somersault.

Vicente Bejarano’s bull was strong and fast and interested in the muleta. The crowd took to the animal, but it was not Bejarano’s day. He could not forge any connection
with the beast and, although he produced some fine sculpted moments, never controlled the bull.

At 18.40 the sun was still shining on the expectant crowd sitting in
Sol
when the door opened into the plaza and Biensolo trotted out and took stock. There was no rushing madness, there was no charging at barriers or senseless butting. He looked around the plaza and decided it was his.

The crowd murmured, unsure of this bull, worried that it might know more than it should. Pepe walked out towards him and laid his cape at his feet. The bull took exception to the intrusion and charged him, fast, direct, head down. From that moment the crowd knew that this was the bull of the day and that if Pepe could control him then they would see something unique.

‘This should have been Pepín’s bull,’ said the man sitting next to Paco.

‘You watch,’ said Javier. ‘You’ll be crying with the rest of us by the end of this.’

Pepe performed two full
verónicas
and a
chicuelina
with the cape. The crowd went wild with anticipation. Words were spoken between the torero and the picador and when Biensolo drove into the mattressed side of the horse with such stupendous violence that both man and horse were carried aloft right to the barrier, the crowd erupted. They loved this bull.

Paco grabbed Javier around the neck and kissed his brother on the forehead.

‘Éso es un toro, no?

One of Pepe’s banderilleros excelled in placing the banderillas. The horn tips were practically in the man’s armpits as he leaned over on his slanting sprint and there was a breathless, frozen moment when man and beast became one, before miraculously separating.

Pepe came out for his faena and the crowd stilled to
the purest silence in Spain. The silence of respect for the bull.

The bull, mouth closed, shoulders heaving, a red sash of blood running down his right flank to the top of the foreleg, looked at Pepe. Pepe screwed the baton, which brought the muleta out to its full extension, into his palm. He walked towards the bull, pointing the toe of each shoe at him, holding the muleta behind him. The bull was patient. At four metres Pepe turned a shoulder to the beast and opened out his chest and slowly produced the muleta, as if to say: ‘May I offer you this?’ The bull took to it, ran hard and fast and dropped his horns. Pepe seemed to hold him there, forcing him to slow down, so that only when the nose met the muleta did Pepe allow him to go forward, drawing him on, telling him that this was the royal pace. And it was a beautiful thing to see, the gradual tensile twisting of Pepe’s body, smooth and strong as red-hot wrought iron.

He brought Biensolo back and forth, and with each pass the dance improved, the relationship grew stronger, the mutual respect deepened. It was done so slowly that the audience didn’t notice that the connection had been made, the pact understood, that man and beast would play this out to its only possible conclusion.

At no point in the faena did Pepe try to dominate too much and it was this that he’d understood about the bull from the moment Biensolo had entered the ring. This was the bull’s space and he’d allowed Pepe into it.

He performed his
naturales.
Biensolo thundered past him as if he was moving the whole of Spain forward on his horns. Then Pepe stood before the bull and just showed him one corner of the muleta, no bigger than a terracotta floor-tile, from behind his back. Some women in the audience couldn’t stand it and gasps and squeaks of fear broke out. The bull crashed past the lonely figure,
the reed in the wind bending slightly in the draught. Without turning, Pepe showed him another corner of the muleta and again Biensolo tore past him. Even the men broke at that. Paco had his fists buried in his eyes. The man next to him was crying. They knew that they were seeing it. The impossible genius of man and beast in their dance of death.

The silence was so absolute when Pepe went to exchange the straight sword for the curved killing sword that Javier believed he could hear the sound of Pepe’s light-black pumps on the sand of the plaza. The bull watched him, front legs slightly splayed, foreleg and shoulder still slick with blood, chest heaving in silent bellows, the banderillas clacking a death rattle on his back. His dance partner returned, the muleta under his arm, the new lethal sword at his side. Pepe’s long shadow met the bull’s head and walked into him.

The horns came up. Their minds re-engaged. The crowd, who knew that if Pepe killed Biensolo well he would get everything — ears, tail,
La Puerta del Príncipe —
tightened their already constricted silence. Pepe released the muleta. It dropped like a bucket of blood. The bull nodded, assenting to his kind collaboration. Pepe looked at the position of the bull’s feet and, with several short passes, manoeuvred him to the barrier and then teased him with flicks of the muleta until he stood just right with his horns pointing into the Sombra crowd. Pepe, with his back to Javier now, moved lightly as if he might disturb a sleeping child. The sword came up. Pepe aimed at the coin-sized target between the bull’s shoulders. His feet braced themselves against the plaza floor. His body was no longer human but had assumed the shape of a brilliant wading bird.

The moment. The speed was breathtaking as the two forces shunted together.

But it was wrong. Pepe’s head came up. The sword struck bone and span away. The right horn sliced into his inner thigh and with a derisive flick Biensolo tossed him in the air. It was so fast nobody moved as Pepe tumbled in the triumphant updraught from the bull’s horns. The reed body came down, as broken as a torturer’s victim, and the horn disappeared into his belly. The bull drove forward, head down, a recollected atavism at work now that their pact had been broken. He rammed into the planks of the barrier with a splintering thud that seemed to wind the entire audience.

Pepe’s team erupted over the wall. The stillness went out of the crowd and a keening cry went up from the women. Javier ran down, stumbling over the heads of the horrified spectators. He sprinted to the barrier where Pepe was pinned. The bull savagely rammed his quarry with brand new, brilliant strength. Pepe grasped the horn in his stomach with both hands like a general who’d seen disaster and dispatched himself. His face bore only the sadness of regret.

The team worked to distract the bull. Hands reached over the barrier to hold Pepe. His rag legs, with a ghastly slash of red where the femoral artery thumped out thick, dark, vital blood, flapped and slapped against the wooden planks.

The bull pulled away, turned viciously on the waving capes around him and eyed each one individually like a victorious but unpopular emperor who has to endure the frivolity of peacetime politics.

They lifted Pepe over the barrier, arms now open, the red burgeoning from his stomach, and for a moment he was as pitiful as a
pietá
as they rushed him from the ring towards the infirmary.

Javier ran after the six men holding Pepe, who reached out a hand to him. The news travelled fast and they didn’t
bother with the infirmary but took him directly to the ambulance. The paramedics put him on a stretcher and threw him into the back.

Pepe called for Javier, his words hardly more than breath.

Falcón leapt over the back of the paramedic who was already slapping a compress on to Pepe’s stomach wound. The ambulance lurched away from the plaza. The other paramedic cut away the trouser and plunged his hands into the gaping wound in Pepe’s thigh. Pepe arched his back, cried out in agony. The paramedic called for a clamp. A packet was thrown at Javier, who tore it open and held the clamp out to the paramedic whose hands were in the wound, trying to find the artery. Javier took hold of Pepe’s hand, cradled his head in his lap. There was no blood in Pepe’s face and the pallor of death was creeping over him. Javier gripped his shoulders, whispered in his ear everything that he could think of that would help him hold on.

The ambulance careered down Cristóbal Colón, sirens blaring, and headed down the underpass by the Plaza de Armas. Pepe ran his tongue over his lips. His mouth was as dry as cardboard from the catastrophic fluid loss, his hand as cold as dead meat. The paramedic cut up the sleeve of Pepe’s traje de luces and tore a sack of blood from the fridge. The other paramedic shouted for the clamp. Javier leaned forward and they clamped the femoral artery. He turned to help plug in the litre of blood to Pepe’s arm. Javier roared at Pepe to hold on. He saw him trying to speak. He put his ear to his lips. Even the boy’s breath was chill.

‘I’m sorry for that,’ said Pepe.

29

Tuesday, 24th April 2001, Seville

It had rained during the night. The new day arrived rinsed and refreshed. The sun played over the beads of moisture on the dripping trees and the first jacarandas came into high purple flower. Falcón stopped when he saw them, pulled over and dropped his window. He had rarely done this in the city — found in nature an expression of the complexities of the human condition. But the high, fragile, fern-like green leaf of the jacarandas feathering against the clean blue sky with the clusters of pale purple flowers hanging in the windless morning spoke the same language, could talk to anyone about pain.

He turned on the car radio. The local news was all about Pepe Leal. The media were trying to make a story about the fact that just as Pepe was going in for the kill his head had come up. A bullfight journalist talked inconclusively about the incomprehensible distraction. Someone on the panel mentioned camera flashes, the number of people trying to capture the moment. Another person said he remembered a bigger flash. The bullfight journalist scoffed. The myth had begun. Falcón turned off the radio.

By the time he arrived at the Jefatura the men had already dispersed. Only Ramírez remained. They shook
hands. Ramírez embraced him and offered his condolences. He handed him a message, which told him that Comisario León wanted to see him as soon as he arrived. He took the lift up to the top floor, looking at his vague reflection in the stainless-steel panels. He was held together by threads. There would be no resistance from him.

Ten minutes later he was going back down. The weight of command had been lifted from his shoulders. He had been given two weeks compassionate leave and would have to undergo full psychological assessment on his return. He had said nothing. He was defenceless. He went to his office and cleared out his desk to find there were no personal items, only some letters, which he put in his pocket, and his police-issue revolver, which he should have returned to the armoury but didn’t.

At 6 p.m. he attended the funeral of Pepe Leal. The whole bullfighting community was in attendance. Paco was there, inconsolable and uncontrollable. He bawled into his hands, his shoulders shaking, the whole tragedy weighing down on them. Everybody cried. The mourners, the cemetery workers, the flower sellers, the onlookers, the grave visitors. And the grief was genuine, except that it wasn’t for Pepe Leal. He was almost unknown to these people. He was not a great name. As Javier stood in dry-eyed suffering amongst the weeping and the snivelling, he understood what this grief was for. They were mourning their own losses — youth, prospects, health, talent. The death of Pepe Leal had, temporarily at least, brought an end to possibility. It was for this reason that Javier found it kitsch and he wouldn’t cry with them, and he wouldn’t join them afterwards but went home to his bruised and silent house and the compassion of his enforced leave.

He sat in his study, still in his mac, doodling on a paper with a pencil. He wanted to get out of the city. Biensolo’s horn had punched a hole in the Feria and Falcón would leave the city to bleed over Pepe’s death. He took out a map of Spain, placed the pencil over Seville and span it three times. Each time it pointed directly south, and south of Seville there was nothing apart from a small fishing village called Barbate. But beyond Barbate, across the straits, was Tangier.

The phone rang, startling him. He didn’t answer it. No more condolences required.

The following morning he packed a bag, including the unread journal, found his passport and took a cab to the bus station at the back of the Palacio de Justicia. Five and a half hours later he boarded a ferry in Algeciras to Tangier.