Miracle in Seville

by James A. Michener

  When El Cordobés finished three turns, López stepped forward to await the entrance of his first bull. There were both cheers and jeers, but the Gypsy was determined to give a good performance before his Triana supporters, and even I had to admit that he was effective with his cape, better with his banderillas, astonishing with his muleta and, uncharacteristically, capable at the kill. This was the Gypsy magician they had raved about when he first appeared on the scene, and he was given both ears, the tail and three circuits of the arena.

  Diego Puerta’s second bull was regular—a wonderful Spanish word with its last syllable drawn out and pronounced -lahr to rhyme with scar, which meant ‘Not good but not bad, either.’ Puerta cut one ear.

  For the fifth bull of the afternoon El Cordobés drew No. 318, Torpedo. From the instant the bull entered the plaza and charged straight across the arena, head high, horns cocked to meet any adversary, patrons began to cry: ‘Toro! Toro!’ and the cries mounted when this noble animal left El Cordobés and his cape and from a surprisingly short distance hit the first picador with such force that the man was thrown down before he could lodge his lance in the animal’s neck muscle. From there the bull cantered purposefully to the second picador, whom he also dismounted to cheers. The first picador had now remounted, and this time he protected himself and his horse so that he was able to place one lance, a tremendous blow, which he intensified by leaning forward with all his weight. He then performed what cynics derisively called ‘the carioca,’ a dancelike trick in which the picador kept his horse’s bulky body moving in front of the bull so that the latter could not escape, while the picador continued to lean on his lance and really punish the animal. It was a disgraceful act, but it did aid the matador in reducing the power of a difficult bull; this time it reduced nothing, for the bull was more than able to withstand the extra punishment.

  At this point the president, judging that the bull had been tired adequately by the two dismountings—which had required enormous effort from the bull’s front quarter and hind legs—signaled the trumpeter to sound the call for the next act with this illustrious animal. Cordobés did not object; recognizing that he had a chance for exceptional work with the muleta, he unfurled a series of such exciting passes, one linked to another, that many in the crowd leaped to their feet shouting Toro! Toro!’ When Cordobés finished his muleta work with a monumental pass of death, which fixed the bull for the kill, people began crying ‘No! No!’ The protest became so loud that Cordobés did not prepare to kill but, instead, launched another series of pases naturales of such grace that cheers thundered across the plaza, reaching a climax when he daringly tried yet one more pass of death, most dangerous because the bull might remember the trickery from the time before and go for the exposed man instead of the muleta. Not this bull. He drove straight ahead, lifted both his horns and his front feet and came to a dead halt, awaiting the sword, but the protests against killing him became even more vociferous. The president, fearing there might be a riot if he allowed the kill, finally lifted his white handkerchief and signaled that the bull should be spared, to the resounding joy of everyone in the arena.

  Five tame oxen, castrated and heavy, entered the ring to rescue the bull and take him out alive. When they surrounded him he sniffed at them, recognized them as brothers from the corrals and the departure was completed, with women throwing flowers before the departing hero. While men near us shouted: ‘He was too brave to kill’ the Don quietly gripped my left hand and whispered: ‘Once more a Mota bull is rewarded with an indultado. The assurance of our rebirth.’

  In the pause that followed, some spectators began chanting ‘Matadors! Matadors!’ while others cried ‘Qanadero, Qanadero!’ for the breeder, and I helped Don Cayetano rise to join the three matadors as they paraded. It was an honor few ranchers had ever known in the Maestranza. When the circuits were completed, the matadors returned Don Cayetano to our box, where Puerta and Cordobés, their major work for the day completed, embraced him. Far from making such a gesture, López said venomously in a low voice that only Don Cayetano and I could hear: ‘Now we duel to the death. My sister has explained your trick,’ and Mota replied in a harsh voice I had not heard before: ‘Let it be so. You deserve to die.’

  As the fight was about to begin, Don Cayetano again bowed his head and began to pray, and again the Virgin seemed to respond, for the sixth bull performed much like the third, with which the Gypsy had achieved wonders. But then something happened that altered the entire day—indeed, my whole trip to Spain. At the conclusion of a series of cape passes that even I had to admire, López, inspired by some evil genius, stood before the confused bull and humiliated it with a series of gestures intended to denigrate it. When people began to protest, López, holding his cape in his left hand, moved directly in front of the right horn so that it touched his own breast, and then, with a powerful swipe of his right hand, he beat the bull in the face, repeating the act three times.

  ‘No!’ I shouted to Don Cayetano, but his dazed eyes looked as perplexed and sorrowful as the bull’s. Soon the entire plaza was booing, and in that instant I realized that López was abusing not the bull but its owner; he had confused the two. ‘What did you think of that exhibition?’ I asked Don Cayetano, and when he didn’t answer I shook him, for this had been a significant moment in the fight, but again he did not reply. Instead his head fell even farther forward and his hands, which I had disturbed in their peaceful clasp, dropped to his side. Supposing with horror that the old man had died, I started calling for help but stopped when I saw he was still breathing and that no external part of his body showed any signs of death. He was not dead, but had he fainted? I slapped him vigorously, but he did not respond. ‘What’s happening?’ I shouted, but no one heard me.

  In my confusion vivid images and remembered sounds started to return, tentatively at first, then in a flood. From the fight in Málaga I heard myself saying: ‘Don Cayetano, the bulls you gave those matadors looked as if they wanted to help. This one is hand-tailored for El Viti.’ Or I was again under the float, with the Virgin coming down through the cracks in the planking to give the Don reassurance. Next I heard the menacing words of Lázaro López as he warned that he had penetrated the Don’s secret. Then came the Virgin again, in the church, and her mysterious words: ‘I hear you,’ and, during the second visit, her cryptic promise: ‘Once more.’

  As I cowered in the darkness of the box, fighting to make sense of this jumbled evidence, it seemed as if an explosion suddenly blasted my mind, and for the first time I understood how the Virgin and Don Cayetano had conspired to restore the honor of his ranch. Don Cayetano had never been praying when he sat beside me; he couldn’t because he wasn’t there—he was in the bull! Determined to have his animals do well, he had, with assistance from the Virgin, become those bulls. After his many humiliations he had finally achieved afternoons of triumph; he had circled the plazas with cheering in his ears, and he had seen one of his bulls sent out alive crowned with laurels such as few bulls gather. The honor of his ranch had been restored.

  But I was sure Don Cayetano would never be satisfied with gains only for himself. He must also protect the honor of bullfighting, the efforts of all the breeders who had suffered humiliation at the hands of the villainous Lázaro López. The Gypsy must die. And he would be slain by Don Cayetano himself. As I reached this conclusion my mind was filled with a blaze of light in which I saw things clearly. At the climax of the fight Mota, the fat little rancher, the ridiculed one, would drive his right horn deep into the heart of the Gypsy, and do it in full sight of the aficionados of Seville and Triana.

  But he must act immediately, for with the conclusion of this fight, the Virgin’s obligations to the Don would end. Twice she had listened to his pleas, at Málaga and now in Seville, and twice she had rewarded him with immortal corridas, but I myself had heard her give warning: ‘Once more!’

  Then I was gripped by a terrible thought: Had Gypsy López somehow, with the aid of his clever sister, penet
rated Mota’s secret? If so, wouldn’t he plan to kill Cayetano before the latter could kill him? Yes, I now remembered his exact words during that confrontation in the church: ‘You’ll not kill me with your witchcraft bulls.’

  When my churning brain cleared, I saw that this weird plot could have only one resolution. Since López and his necromancing sister had surely guessed the Don’s secret, the Gypsy had only one escape from those deadly horns—he must kill the rancher before Mota could kill him. Fearing that Don Cayetano might be moments from death, I rushed through the passageway between the fence enclosing the ring and the stands, shouting in Spanish toward the bull: ‘Don Cayetano! He means to kill you! Don Cayetano! Leave the bull! López is going to kill you!’

  Of course, no one could make anything of the message I was trying to deliver, and before I could get anywhere near where López was finishing his preparatory work for the kill, the officials, thinking that I was one more drunken tourist, halted me and pinned me against the red fence.

  López, having given the bull an artistic fight filled with emotion, was assured of todos los trofeos if he killed decently, and he must have been tempted to try, but when I saw him put aside the wooden sword matadors used in the first stages of the muleta to take instead that long, curved-tipped steel sword that dealt real death, I saw that his face was gray, not from fear of the bull but from the secret knowledge of what he must do next.

  At this moment he spotted me pinned against the fence, and I was close enough to shout: ‘No lo hagas, López! Don’t do it!’ When he dismissed me with a wan but bitter smile, I tried again to alert Don Cayetano, still convinced that he could hear me: ‘Leave now! Now!’

  ‘Let me go!’ I shouted at the men holding me, but they feigned not to understand my Spanish, simple though the words were: ‘Suelta me!’ Still held back by stout arms, I had to watch impotently as the final act unfolded.

  Instead of properly citing the bull, no sooner had López taken the deadly sword from his peon than he ran directly at the bull, swung quickly to the left and jabbed the sword with all his might not through the hump of muscle protecting the spinal column but deep into the fleshy side of the bull and toward the heart itself. The astonished bull, mortally wounded, took two steps forward and collapsed. Before I could scream a warning to the peon running out with the dagger to complete the kill, a tremendous bronca erupted, protesting the shameful murder of this great bull. My voice smothered by the cries of outrage, my arms immobilized by the custodians, I stood powerless as the dagger man leaped forward and severed the spinal cord. Instantly, as if by magic, the bull dropped dead, and I wondered in panic whether Don Cayetano had escaped in time.

  ‘Let me go!’ I shouted, but no one heard, and by the time my captors released me I had difficulty fighting my way back to our box. The outraged spectators began leaping into the alleyway to thrash López, who was begging the police to protect him, and I wasted precious minutes elbowing my way through the riotous crowd. I had no need to hurry; the foreman of the Mota ranch came running toward me shouting: ‘Oh, Señor Shenstone! Don Cayetano is dead. Our day of greatest triumph and he’s dead!’

  When we finally reached the box a doctor who had been summoned from the crowd pointed to the flecks of blood on the rancher’s lips: ‘A blood vessel deep inside must have ruptured. You can see he was very fat.’ As I looked at his corpse I asked myself: How can I report such a story? and a voice of conscience rebuked me: You unfeeling bastard! Your good friend is dead and all you can think of is how to write about it in your story. For shame!

  Only then did I see Don Cayetano as he truly was: a man with two abiding passions, to serve the Virgin and to restore honor to his ranch. He had died in the service of both ideals, and few old men can claim as much.

  Kneeling beside the body that still remained in its chair, I straightened his hands, eased his head to one side and whispered: ‘Your secrets are safe, Don Cayetano. And your bulls did triumph. Listen to them still cheering outside.’ I was lying to the old man, for the noises in the arena came not from spectators cheering that last noble bull but from ragamuffins who were trying to kill Lázaro López, who was creeping out of the bullring surrounded by the police, who had been given their orders five hours before: ‘Go to the plaza and protect López if he gives another of his afternoons.’

  I was so unnerved that when the hospital crew came to take Don Cayetano’s body away, I followed after them aimlessly. I saw the golden sand on which Don Cayetano had paraded in triumph, and the red gate through which his bulls had charged to glory, and then I was out on the streets of Seville, wandering not back to my hotel but across one of the bridges over the Guadalquivir and into Triana, for on this night I wanted to be with the bullfight people.

  In a kind of trance I reached the Church of the Toreros, and when I looked in I saw only three flickering candles lighting the statue so revered by the Gypsies of Triana. She did not see me, for she looked over my head to the back of her church, her cross-eyed smile serene and all-embracing. I knelt before her and prayed: ‘Compassionate Virgin, whose crossed eyes see the good and bad in men, guide your faithful servant Don Cayetano Mota through the gates of heaven this night. Pray God to forgive the murderer Lázaro López. These damned Gypsies know no better. And grant me peace of mind, for mine has been badly shaken here in Seville.’

  When I left her church I continued on to El Gallito, where the aficionados of Triana in noisy numbers were celebrating the triumphs of their hero, Lázaro López. Standing unnoticed at the edge of the crowd, I could see the handsome Gypsy features of the matador above the heads of his adoring fans, and I noticed that he had one very black eye where some outraged spectator had punched him during the bronca that ended his performance.

  Unwilling to be part of any crowd that was honoring such a man, I left the bar but not Triana, for I felt compelled to probe the secrets of this mysterious town, and this brought me back to the fortune-telling house of La Egipciana. Although it seemed likely that she would be somewhere in the town celebrating her brother’s survival, I nevertheless banged on her door and was gratified when she opened it just wide enough to inspect me by the pale light in the street.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried as she admitted me. ‘The man whose woman in Texas is betraying him!’ and she indicated a seat at the table on which sat the glass sphere, still covered by the red cloth. She spoke first: ‘Were you at the corrida, Señor Shenstone?’

  ‘In the box of Don Cayetano.’

  ‘Then you saw everything?’

  Cautiously, for I could not guess what secrets she might be willing to reveal, I whispered: ‘I saw your brother murder Don Cayetano.’

  Betraying no emotion, she reached past me and removed the red cloth from the globe. Appearing to stare into the milky-white orb she said in a singsong voice that I had not heard before: ‘We Gypsies are not powerless, you know,’ and then she pointed across the street to the Church of the Toreros: ‘All the world receives help from that one.’

  ‘The Virgin?’

  ‘Yes, even in America she’s available to you. We Gypsies have our own special ways of helping each other. Why do you suppose, Señor Shenstone, that you find me sitting here in the dark on such a triumphant night? Because I know it’s on such nights that Gypsies want to talk with me, to ask questions, to give thanks.’ She paused, stared into the globe and said: ‘I was expecting my brother, and you came along. Maybe that’s better. You have difficult questions, don’t you?’ When I nodded she laughed and, as on our first meeting, I thought: What a handsome woman, what flashing eyes. But I also felt fear, because if she was able to do in that bullring what I was sure she had done—protect her brother from the full weight of heaven—what might she do to me if she became angry?

  Seeing that I was fearful, she placed her hand on my arm and said gently: ‘Ask your questions, my American friend, but even if you get the answers, they won’t do you any good, because you’ll never be able to write about them, will you?’ When I remained silent, she added
: ‘Who would believe you?’

  ‘Don Cayetano was in the bull?’

  ‘As a sensible man you must know that would have been impossible.’ Then she flashed a condescending smile as if I were a small child: ‘Do not try to solve all the mysteries.’

  ‘How did you know so much?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I know bulls. Have to if I’m to protect my brother. Everyone knew the Mota bulls had become no more than confused cows. Yet at Málaga—’

  ‘You saw that fight?’

  ‘No, but I listened to the toreros describe it, and those who studied bulls suspected that some spell had been cast.’ Suddenly she banged on the table: ‘Mr. Shenstone, you clever American who’s supposed to know everything, you sat beside him through those fights, six bulls in each—’

  ‘I thought he was praying.’

  ‘He was. The moment he stopped praying his link with the Virgin would be broken.’

  ‘How did you know the Virgin was involved?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ This so obviously perplexed me that she added: ‘But my people watch for me. What I don’t see, they see.’ Smiling mysteriously, she touched my arm again: ‘On that morning the Virgin came down from her pedestal to speak with Don Cayetano—’

  ‘You saw that?’

  Ignoring my interruption, she said: ‘Do you recall, maybe, an old woman in a shawl who ran out of the church when the Virgin left? Can you guess where she ran to?’

  ‘Your house? Egipciana? What did your spy tell you?’

  ‘She crossed herself three times and said: “Señorita Magdalena, she came down again.” And then I knew.’

  ‘You’ve seen her come down to bestow miracles?’

  ‘She doesn’t come to those like me.’