by Lily King
For the first time, Lola felt danger for the matador. The bull’s horns were wide and sharp. There were black drops of blood on the ground. The matador’s face was wet and pale. Beneath her own arms it was slick with sweat. The man and the bull were no longer separate. They seemed part of one inexplicable thing as their bodies anticipated each other, drawing closer, then separating, then coming back together. Lola watched them with a feeling rising and rising that she could not name. The matador’s steps became less delicate. There was blood on the inside of his thigh. A few rows below her, a shirtless man pulled his girlfriend close for a long kiss, and Lola could see their red wet tongues tumbling over each other. She found herself wishing the matador would go for the sword and then was horrified by the wish. But he did exactly that, hiding it behind the cape for several more passes, receiving the bull backhand, then so close to his stomach that he had to curl his upper body over the beast to miss the wide horns passing through, which flooded her body with that same unfamiliar feeling she’d felt since the beginning of the fight. It was not the bull or the matador or the rolling tongues or the arms around her or the blood in the ring or her own slippery sweat, but it was all these things together. She felt like standing up and walking a long, long way; she felt like bursting into tears.
The sword was unsheathed now, and when the bull charged, he seemed to know, to expect, to nearly want the blow. He received the sword straight down to its base, carried it for two unsteady steps, then fell splay-legged and it was over. The feeling throbbed stronger inside her. Her father asked if she was all right. When she shook her head, he brought her closer to him and she gave in to the protection of his arms.
The music started up, tinny circus music that promised clowns and gags, not the slaying of animals, one after the other. Marc, holding Lola, tried to meet my gaze. I looked away. Why had he brought us here to this bloodbath? I was angry now, angry and sickened by Spain and all that had happened under its empty sky. I watched the horses instead of Marc, watched how with every nerve they wanted to bolt from the bull and how their riders with their reins and spurs and crops kept them in place, how training had overcome desire, how they obeyed decorum before their own instinct. I kept my eyes on these horses, for they had everything to teach me.
The matador wasn’t in the ring for more than a minute before the next bull lunged and tossed him into the air. He was flung high, up and over the bull’s body. Everyone rose to see. He landed on his back and lay flat on the ground, while the bull began to poke and prod. His shrieks were audible above the din of the crowd and the shouting of the other fighters, who had run out to distract the bull.
The children gripped me on either side. Guillaume’s cheek was pressed to my upper arm and Lola clutched my leg. They trusted my body; touching it would keep them safer. They trusted that no one in the stands would want to see the matador die. And they trusted he would not, for their father had brought them here and they trusted him too. The bull was quickly pulled off and José Ramón lifted onto a stretcher and carried out waving. The bull was killed swiftly by another sword, without drama or flourish. But I could feel the terrible restlessness in the stands as the horses with their sleigh bells were trotted out past the rumpled spot with the human blood to the dead bull, a restless dissatisfaction, as if the wrong death had occurred. For people wanted more. People—all of us—want more and more. I glanced over at Marc. His face held all the hope and sadness in the world. He turned to me and, over Lola’s head, said silently, “I miss you.” I saw his hand fall from Lola’s shoulder and slip under the folds of her sweater behind her.
When my hand met his, he clasped it tight, then stroked each finger individually. His touch was so familiar to me, now, that through it I could hear his voice, see his lips, taste his kiss.
The last bull shot out directly across the center of the ring.
Pleated shadows fanned out from the feet of the horses. Odile glanced up to see that the ring lights had been lit. Wasn’t there, she would write, something nearly comforting about the certainty of death?
Guillaume was ashamed at having tried to test God. I’m sorry, he offered up. I’m sorry, he pleaded again, but he couldn’t get through.
Lola could not shake the sight of the injured matador, writhing on the horn of the bull like a bug on the point of a pin.
Odile studied how the light fell on the glittering arm that held the sword. Did love, she wondered, include this desperate yearning to present the world as truly beautiful to someone else?
A spray of blood streamed out from the bull’s nose, but Guillaume did not pray. He did not try to conjure up God in a place he’d clearly abandoned.
As the matador sank the sword, the woman in front of Lola put down her second sandwich to cry out, “Sí, señor!” The feeling returned, and the sweat that clung to Lola’s body began to chill and make her shiver.
The matador sighted the bull with his sword, and Guillaume felt the agony of the animal, whose breathing was now a steady stream of blood, whose legs no longer moved in relation to each other, and whose eyes had become human with an expression of stunned betrayal. He remembered Christ’s doubt on the cross, asking his Father why he had forsaken him. He bowed his head for the bull and for an end to its pain and felt finally that he was being heard.
The matador sighted the bull with the sword, and Odile imagined telling Alexandre about this day. He would only want to hear how the matador was gored by the bull. She wondered if there was enough paper in Paris for all her letters to Aimée.
The matador sighted the bull with the sword, and Lola trembled with the chills until she remembered her sweater behind her. She turned around and lifted it. Our two hands lay one on top of the other, frozen in place like two bodies found under ice. She waited for them to jerk apart, but they remained still. She waited for our voices to begin explaining, but we were silent. Then the crowd rose, for the bull had fallen with the fourth sword. On either side of her we applauded. “Don’t clap!” Guillaume said seriously, but we ignored him, beating our hands together throughout the whole finale as the bull was brained and the matador, hoisted up onto the shoulders of the men in black, held up the salmon-pink ears. On either side of Lola, her father and I clapped and clapped, as if we might never have had to stop.
* * *
When we got back to the hotel, Lola insisted on going up alone to get her mother. “Alone,” she said, shoving Guillaume away.
“We can just call her from here.” Marc pointed at the lobby phone, and only the unbent fingers revealed his desperation.
“No.” She punched the green elevator button until the doors wobbled open.
I knew it hurt her to be so rude to her father, whose face looked like a crumpled paper bag. Because the other children had witnessed this impudence, he said her name with disapproval but couldn’t carry out further admonishment.
Guillaume and Odile went to sit on one of the couches in the middle of the lobby. Marc and I trailed behind, choosing seats at opposite ends. I followed the ascent and descent of both elevators by the illumination of digits above the sealed doorways. When the left doors parted again, Nicole stepped out in a canary yellow dress. Lola had changed her sweater.
Guillaume flew into his mother’s arms, and though they’d been apart no more than three hours, the gesture didn’t seem an exaggeration. Nicole was a half-forgotten, wonderfully familiar sight, and we all greeted her with kisses. I felt so overwhelmed by Nicole’s presence—her bright dress, her thick smells, her moisturized skin—that I did not at that moment think of what Lola might have told her or how, watching the embrace, she would be realizing the extent of my deception. Even now, even with a witness, it did not feel wholly like deception. It still seemed impossible to deceive Nicole, who was saying to us, “You all look utterly green. I can’t even say who looks the worst.”
This wasn’t a reproach aimed at Marc, for she examined him the longest with a gentle eye, as if she’d known he’d come back from what he insisted on doing havi
ng enjoyed it the least.
“Yes, I can,” she said and nearly touched him.
Lola hovered near her mother, as if she wanted to hold her hand or take her arm but had lost courage before making contact. Beside Nicole, she was stiff, angular, and ungainly. Her knees were like door knockers, her neck, which had seemed so beautiful in Cuenca, a veined stalk. She tried to be the first one to describe the bullfight, but each time she’d secured her mother’s focus, she was unable to remember what she planned to say. When Guillaume mentioned that one of the matadors had been gored, Lola pleaded for her mother’s attention, but when she got it the incident seemed to dissolve before her eyes and she had to let Guillaume tell exactly where he’d been seized and how he’d been flung.
Carmen, the hostess, greeted us at the door of the retaurant and led us to a table in the center of the room. Odile remained standing beside her mother’s chair, describing each matador and his outfit perfectly. Using herself as a mannequin, she re-created the jacket and pants, cuffs and lapels with such detail that at the end of every description it seemed she was wearing the suit herself. Guillaume interrupted her to tell about each death. When he got to the last one with the four swords, Lola jumped in shrilly, impaling a piece of bread with her knife. Her piercing voice made heads at several tables turn in irritation. Nicole scolded her. Marc flattened himself against the back of his chair, Guillaume took back possession of his story, Odile prepared her next suit, and Lola, out of habit, out of a desperate desire not to cry at the table, looked to me, but I could not receive her and turned my attention instead to the approaching waiter.
He was the one with the square jaw and closely cut gray hair who Nicole said belonged in an American detective movie. He knew to communicate through me. After he had taken our orders, he asked if it were true that we were leaving tomorrow. I said it was and he told me that the staff had enjoyed us, that we were good people, and hoped we had a pleasant trip back to Paris. I thanked him and he went back to the kitchen.
“He wished us a good trip back.” I couldn’t bring myself to translate buena gente, though I knew Lola had understood because it had been an expression on cassette four. I thought now of those cold wet afternoons listening to the Spanish tapes in the kitchen with Lola, waiting only for the sound of Marc’s shoes. And I thought of how once in the fall we’d sat, the three of us, on the couch watching a movie, our three pairs of bare feet lined up in front of us on the coffee table. Noticing the length of Marc’s toes, I’d said, “Look at your—” I hadn’t known the word then and, instead of interrupting myself to ask, continued, “those little things at the end of your feet.” I remembered how we were slouched on the couch, how much chocolate we’d eaten, and how our laughter seemed to shake the whole boat.
“You don’t look like you’ve recovered yet,” Nicole said to me, after our plates had been cleared.
“I’m all right.” I brushed imaginary crumbs off the cloth. I did not want the attention. I wanted to slip away, to be again who I’d been on that couch, an American girl who spoke a handful of French phrases. I could say too much now. I could be expected to explain myself.
“Was it really awful?”
Lola, who’d received only sharp reprimands from her mother since they’d sat down, looked on in misery. I wanted to explain to her that Nicole couldn’t always give what was asked of her, not to Marc, not to her children. But the chance for that kind of talk was gone forever. Lola would never, should never, forgive me.
“No, it wasn’t so bad.” I knew I should volunteer more, but faltered.
Marc rallied. He sat up in his chair and asked Nicole what she’d been doing, whether she’d finished her book, who she’d seen on the beach. He turned to Odile and asked her if she was sad because her friend had gone. Odile’s eyes welled and he reached out to pat her arm, laughing sympathetically, saying something about the brief intensity of holiday friendships. Odile shook her head, but the brimming tears choked whatever she wanted to say.
To me, Marc said, “Your boyfriend’s working tonight.”
“He’s been looking over here,” Lola added reluctantly, as if she were breaking a vow.
“No, he hasn’t!” I smiled—the three of us smiled—in terrible momentary relief.
As if he sensed his sudden importance, the young waiter, the one with the broken front tooth and the inch-long pinky nail, came and squatted by me. He had been our regular waiter at lunch. He too had heard we were leaving tomorrow. He asked, pulling out a paper bar napkin from his pocket, if he could give me his address. I felt my face redden. The whole table was watching this exchange. I knew I should offer mine but didn’t. I took the napkin and thanked him. I didn’t know how to tell him I’d keep in touch but he helped me. He asked, “¿Me escribirás?” and I said, “Te escribiré.” For a moment I forgot my blushing and my audience and felt only the strange simplicity of four words. Later, in the hotel room, after Lola had fallen asleep, I went over them. ¿Me escribirás? Te escribiré. It was all I ever wanted to remember of Spain.
Windows and Trains
LOLA WAS TRYING HARD TO FORGIVE ME. IN OUR HOTEL ROOM THE LAST NIGHT IN Formentor, on the plane the next day, in the taxi back home to the barge, she gave virtuoso performances. Her banter, laughter, and affection were so convincing that at times I caught myself believing the incident had not only been forgiven but forgotten. But then I’d catch her offguard with a hardness in her eye like the hardness of the river when we saw it again after Spain, when on that raw afternoon it refused to carry any reflection. Losing Lola was like losing gravity. I didn’t realize how much I’d depended on the weight of her love until it was gone.
Her relationship with her mother seemed to suffer the most. Instead of swallowing her frustrations and opinions, she lashed out now and snapped back. Nicole punished her impertinence each time more severely, so that by the end of the first week of the spring term, all of Lola’s young pleasures—candy, TV, telephone, and overnights—had been taken away.
On the Monday morning of the children’s second week back at school, after I had made Guillaume’s favorite breakfast (banana pancakes and German sausages), quizzed Odile on more science formulas, and fixed a strap on Lola’s knapsack, I sat down in the emptied-out kitchen amid the dirty dishes. Nicole never emerged before ten, and Marc had gone off early to a meeting before the kids had risen. I’d heard him leave, though he avoided the kitchen now.
I thought of Lola hurrying to school, taking the quai steps two at a time. On the rue Greuze, she’d have to take her math book out of her bag and carry it in her arms because it was so heavy. At the entrance to the lycée, Francine and Charlotte would be waiting. She hadn’t told either of them much about the trip. They were too envious: Francine of the money the Tivots had to go to Spain and Charlotte of the family itself. On holidays, Charlotte always had to go stay with her father in Rouen while her two brothers came to Paris to visit their mother. Lola would wait for them to finish their cigarettes (she herself hated the taste, but she liked the smell of other people smoking), wondering, as they ground them out on the stone wall, if she would ever tell them what had happened on her last day in Spain. Then the final bell would ring, and they would be carried in a great wave into the building and down the high-ceilinged hallways to class.
I looked around the room. Another week of making messes and cleaning them up. The milk and juices sat, lids off, on the counter. Butter, jam, syrup, and cereals were wedged between the half-eaten plates on the table. On the stove, fat congealed in one frying pan, butter in another. A big bowl of batter dripped between them. Glasses and mugs were scattered about. The coffeepot still gave out a dry gasp now and then. I felt foreign and unwelcome in this room that was once my sanctuary. My suntanned hands made the cutlery unfamiliar. The stone table I had set and cleared and wiped a thousand times refused to acknowledge me. The shiny appliances threw back an unrecognizable face. Only the window remained the same.
It was not a porthole or a series of small panes that you
might expect on a boat, but a wide expanse of glass that cast the room in one of the infinite combinations of light the sky and the river schemed. It had been mine for months. I’d never seen any of them stand at the sink for more time than it took to drop down a plate or glass, or take more than a glance out of it to check for rain. But I knew that window intimately. I knew the temperature outside by how much cold it let in through its cracks. I knew when the phases of the moon appeared in its frame: the crescent came at dawn, the sallow half in the midafternoon, and the full moon at midnight, its light pooling in silver puddles at my feet. I knew its smell, its scratches, and the sound of wind across its belly.
Then Nicole came in and stole it from me.
She seemed oblivious to the mess as she reached behind a dirty frying pan for the kettle. While she waited for the water to boil, she stood at the sink and stared out the window.
I couldn’t understand why she was up so early until I saw that the clock read ten-thirty. I’d been sitting at the table for nearly three hours. I moved to clean up but she was blocking the sink so I sat back down, relieved. It was Monday, shopping day, and there was laundry and ironing, and Guillaume had a dentist appointment at three, but the thought of carrying out any of these tasks turned my limbs to stone.