Trouble (23 page)

We came up out of a huge, clean, near-empty subway station and set off across a huge
avenida
with traffic whizzing along. We marched down a quiet, narrow residential street. The “paps,” as I was now calling them chummily to myself, were quiet, trailing behind us, obviously used to trying to make themselves invisible and letting the famous go about their business. Maybe because of Wayne’s jacket, they reminded me of wildlife specialists studying ibises at a watering hole, trying not to change their behavior. But I could feel both Raquel and myself acting for their benefit, mounting thin plaster replicas of our natural, untrammeled personalities to create a puppet show of our friendship, ourselves. We neither diminished nor augmented ourselves; we projected parallel, false selves that were neither better nor worse than the people we were when unobserved.

The stadium was indeed huge, and I wondered how I would find Felipe, but he was waiting as promised right at the entrance, near a cluster of booths and kiosks selling bottles of water, seat cushions, souvenirs, and programs. He wore jeans and a dark blue shirt under a long wool coat. His face looked younger and more beatific than usual under a black watch cap. His cheeks were glowing. He looked so young, so healthy and vital. I wanted him again instantly. He seemed to see only me as we walked toward him. He kissed me three times, on one cheek, then on the other cheek, then back again to the first cheek, and then he held on to my shoulders and looked into my eyes and kissed my cold lips with his preternaturally warm ones. “Hello, Josefina,” he said in his lovely, warm, accented voice.

“Hello, Felipe,” I replied, hoping against hope that the cold air wasn’t making my face look haglike and ancient.

Felipe greeted Raquel and allowed himself to be introduced to the silent crowd of camera-wielding men, who obviously had zero interest in meeting him or having anything to do with him.

We had time, Felipe told me, to go across the street for a quick drink and some lunch; the place was not bad. Raquel was indifferent to the idea of lunch, and the paps were busy sniffing around the place, so the two of us ran through six lanes of whizzing traffic to the other side of the
avenida
and tumbled into a warm, plain little restaurant. We sat on high stools at a high table and watched an American football play-off game on an overhead TV while we ate platefuls of grilled, spiced pieces of tender meat with greasy french fries and drank bottles of Negra Modelo. Felipe rested his knee against mine. We ate with unself-conscious concentration and intent; I was starving. When we’d finished, he offered me a cigarette and we lit up and ordered another round of beers. Just then, Raquel and the boys came in shivering and sat at the table next to us, chattering like old friends. Felipe ignored them, concentrated his attention on my face, and talked to me in a low voice.

I was flummoxed by how much I liked him, how easy it always was to fall back into our attraction and rapport. I felt as if we were in cosmic alignment. Everything I said seemed to interest him; everything he said made sense to me. When Anthony and I had first started up together, our relationship had been immediately fraught with misunderstandings, missteps, doubts, and insecurities, which had been painful but had led to a lot of sex, which managed to obscure our differences temporarily, because we were so attracted to each other, but sex solved nothing; our problems always resurfaced again later. I had thought, when I married him, that by living together and building a life in tandem, over time, the deep, instinctive understanding we lacked would finally manifest itself. Then, when it turned out that I was infertile, I had thought that by adopting a baby and raising her together, it would happen. But it hadn’t, obviously. And here it was, effortlessly, with this stranger I had met on vacation. I just hoped I got to sleep with him at least once before I had to go back to my real life.

Behind me, I heard Raquel bantering with the boys. I detected in her voice a thin wire of bright strain, but I was sure no one else would have noticed; no one else there knew her at all. One part of me smoked and drank and talked and laughed and flirted with Felipe; the other half of me was trained on Raquel, worrying about her, feeling empathetically how tightly wound she was, how brittle her laughter sounded. She was rising to the challenge, and I had no doubt that she intended to survive this, but I wasn’t sure how much stamina she truly had. I wanted her to win; I wanted to help her. But there was only so much I could do. I could hold her hand and keep her warm at night and babysit her and cheer her on, but in the end, whatever she did next was entirely up to her. I knew that, rationally, and I knew she knew it, too, but it was hard for me to accept the fact that I couldn’t do more for her than I was already doing.

“You’re worried about your friend?” Felipe asked quietly.

I noticed that around his pupils were two golden coronas like rays of light around eclipsing planets. “How did you know?” I asked him.

Felipe paid our check; he insisted. We all went back outside, ducked across the avenue, and made our way back to the entrance of the stadium, where Felipe also insisted on buying my ticket for me. The seven of us traipsed down a very long, curving corridor and came out into our section of the stadium. We had bought tickets on the sunny side, where seats were both cheaper and warmer. Felipe maneuvered us a little apart from everyone else; the two of us sat huddled together for warmth, rubbing our four hands together. Flashbulbs went off around Raquel; under their cover, I leaned in to Felipe. We kissed as if we were just starting with our mouths and were about to devour each other whole. I pulled back, laughing at how turned on we both were.

The crowd roared as music played and three matadors ran out into the huge dirt ring and bowed. Then they all ran out again.

“Did you used to come here as a kid?” I asked Felipe.

“My father was a boxer; he’s retired now. But he liked to bring me to the bullfight sometimes before his own fights. He thought it would bring luck and stamina; a macho superstition maybe, but he never got seriously injured, and he had a good career.”

“Did you like coming here?”

“It scared me, but I kind of liked it.”

“Like fairy tales,” I said. “Darkness made manifest.”

I caught Raquel’s eye. She winked at me, but her face looked pale and pinched.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to Felipe.

I motioned for Raquel to follow me, and without looking back, I headed up the stairs to the back of the stands. I turned when I reached the top; she was right behind me. We stood side by side against the cement wall.

A bull burst into the ring. It bucked and ran and jumped, no doubt from the shock of hearing the huge crowd shouting and cheering. Two toreadors teased the bull, finally inducing him to chase one of them to the edge of the ring, where the toreador slipped through a doorway to safety while the bull leapt impotently around in the dirt.

“You okay?” I said.

“I feel like shit. Do I look awful?”

“You look beautiful, as always. Don’t worry, the pictures will be good. You’ll show them all. This is worth it; you’ll be glad you faced them down.”

“So what did you want to tell me that was so important?” she asked. I sensed something—not impatience, but a steely tone in her voice that hadn’t been there since the beginning of this trip but which I had heard in her voice before, in years past, when she was angry about something.

“I wanted to give you moral support,” I said. “You seemed like you could use a break from those guys.”

She stared straight ahead and didn’t reply.

“Are you mad at me?” I asked her.

She clutched my arm and buried her face in my coat as if she were wiping tears on it. “Oh God no,” she said. “God no! I’m mad at myself. Here I am, courting these guys I would normally run away from. What a loser.” I put my arm around her. She leaned into me and rested her head on my shoulder. “This bullfight stuff is freaky, I’m warning you,” she said. “They hand-raise him and feed him like a king, and then—boom, out of nowhere—they shove him out in front of all these people and torture him until they kill him. He trusts people; he’s never had any reason not to.”

Two men on blinkered, leather-draped horses rode into the ring.

“The picadors,” Raquel and I said in unison, having been good little apple-polishing students on the subway.

“He’ll look like a pincushion in fifteen minutes if they do their job right,” she said. “I remember this from last time. They’re weakening him for the matador. By the time they get done with him, the bull will have lost a lot of blood.” She looked a little bloodless herself at the thought. “In the old days, before they put leather blankets on the horses, they used to die all the time, too. Remember
Death in the Afternoon?”

“You gonna make it through this?” I asked.

“Of course I will,” she said. “Seriously, you can go home with your boyfriend tonight, I solemnly swear I will not fall into ruin and decay while you’re gone. I’ll be fine. I’ll go to evening Mass, then show these boys a nice time at the cantina, give them something to talk about when they get home. That redhead’s kind of cute.”

“He is not!”

“I’m kidding.”

“I can’t go to Felipe’s,” I said. “I don’t want to leave you alone right now.”

“Don’t treat me like a special-needs kid,” said Raquel. “Like I’m riding the short bus in my helmet. I mean it. Let’s go.”

We walked back down to our seats. I slid in next to Felipe; without looking at me, he took my cold hand in his warm one and pulled me close. I winced as a picador plunged his lance into the bull’s shoulder. I was trying not to look at the bull’s face, but it was hard to ignore his expression as he was stuck full of painful things for no apparent reason. Of course I remembered Hemingway’s terse and haunting bullfight descriptions of the beauty of the dance between the matador and bull. To me, this whole thing seemed like yet another manifestation of the deep, visceral, passionate pleasure men took in killing animals for sport in an organized fashion. Sure, there were female bullfighters, but I doubted that, left to their own devices, a country of only women would have engineered such a spectacle even once over the course of a thousand years, let alone in an ongoing manner. I wasn’t sorry to be there, since bullfights went on every week all over the world with or without me and always would, but it wasn’t the most pleasant thing to watch. Raquel had been right: The expression on the bull’s face wrecked everything.

The bull went down on his knees, his face streaming with blood, and I got the feeling he would have liked to rest there for a moment to recuperate in peace, maybe have a few nurses come in with cool cloths to bathe his wounds and give him a little morphine, but he determinedly got back up again while the picadors rode around on their horses, circling for another attack. The matador, a lithe young man in a little bolero jacket and tight yellow satin pants that frankly outlined his package, waved a red cape at the bleeding bull dramatically, with an air of anticipation, as if there could be any doubt in anyone’s mind as to the outcome of this encounter.

“Does the bull ever win?” I asked Felipe.

“Sometimes he does,” said Felipe. “But usually not.”

“So he’s killed almost every time,” I said. “I can see why.”

“They cut him up and sell his meat outside. You know that, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “But what happens to the bull if he wins? Is he taken home to live out his natural life in comfort?”

“Yes,” said Felipe. “He’s used for stud, which means he gets to have a lot of sex.”

“I’m rooting for the bull,” I said.

“Women often do,” said Felipe in an indulgent tone that should have annoyed me but didn’t at all. “Half of you anyway. The other half are thinking about how sexy the matador is.”

I looked at the matador. I liked a little more meat on a man and a little less prancing.

“Are a lot of matadors gay?”

He shook his head. “Matadors are the luckiest men in Mexico for getting women.”

“That guy has to be gay,” I said. “Look how slinky he is. Look at his cute little butt in that outfit.”

“No thanks,” said Felipe. He put his arm around me and put his lips on my forehead. I leaned into him.

The first bull died a bad death. It was painful to watch; the matador failed to kill the bull cleanly the first time with his sword. He had to stab the bull again, and, horribly, again. Still, the animal finally staggered to his feet and tried to run away; then finally, at the edge of the ring, he collapsed, dead. Horses came trotting out to cart the big carcass away as the crowd booed the matador, who skulked off, probably to get drunk and sleep it off and try to forget the whole debacle.

“He’s probably glad it’s over,” I said.

“For him, it isn’t,” said Felipe. “He has to fight one more bull, later.”

There was a break, and then it all started again: the toreadors, the release of the bucking fresh bull into the ring, the picadors on horseback with their lances. This bull was testy, and the second matador of the day seemed phlegmatic and subdued. This bull did not seem to want to engage with him, and the matador, for his part, looked as if he would rather have been home on the couch watching TV and drinking beer; they had no chemistry whatsoever.

“This is the wrong bull for this matador,” I said.

Felipe laughed.

When the second fight was finally over, the bull was carted off to be cut up, sold, and eaten.

The third matador had a finesse and grace the first two had lacked; he seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He stepped into the ring without fuss and began moving around quickly, efficiently, keeping his eyes on the bull, who was frantic and aggressive. The matador quietly stood his ground, controlling the bull with little drama, dancing him close to the cape, leading him in a swirl of movement.

“Olé!” the crowd shouted as he executed a beautiful pass.

This third matador killed the bull on the first try, but the fight seemed not quite up to snuff, according to the reaction of the crowd; they cheered him when the bull was dead, but I sensed wariness in their applause, something withheld.