“Leave it as it is,” said Wilson. Then, “Go get Abdulla so that he may witness the manner of the accident.”
He knelt down, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and spread it over Francis Macomber’s crew-cropped head where it lay. The blood sank into the dry, loose earth.
Wilson stood up and saw the buffalo on his side, his legs out, his thinly-haired belly crawling with ticks. “Hell of a good bull,” his brain registered automatically. “A good fifty-inches, or better. Better.” He called to the driver and told him to spread a blanket over the body and stay by it. Then he walked over to the motor car where the woman sat crying in the corner.
“That was a pretty thing to do,” he said in a toneless voice. “He would have left you too.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Of course it’s an accident,” he said. “I know that.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “There will be a certain amount at unpleasantness but I will have some photographs taken that will be very useful at the inquest. There’s the testimony of the gun-bearers and the driver too. You’re perfectly all right.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“There’s a hell of a lot to be done,” he said. “And I’ll have to send a truck off to the lake to wireless for a plane to take the three of us into Nairobi. Why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England.”
“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it,” the woman cried.
Wilson looked at her with his flat blue eyes.
“I’m through now,” he said. “I was a little angry. I’d begun to like your husband.”
“Oh, please stop it,” she said. “Please, please stop it.”
“That’s better,” Wilson said. “Please is much better. Now I’ll stop.”
The Capital of the World
Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is the diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: paco meet me at Hotel Montana noon Tuesday all is forgiven papa and how a squadron of Guardia Civil had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement. But this Paco, who waited on table at the Pension Luarca, had no father to forgive him, nor anything for the father to forgive. He had two older sisters who were chambermaids at the Luarca, who had gotten their place through coming from the same small village as a former Luarca chambermaid who had proven hardworking and honest and hence given her village and its products a good name; and these sisters had paid his way on the autobus to Madrid and gotten him his job as an apprentice waiter. He came from a village in a part of Extrarnadura where conditions were incredibly primitive, food scarce, and comforts unknown and he had worked hard ever since he could remember.
He was a well built boy with very black, rather curly hair, good teeth and a skin that his sisters envied, and he had a ready and unpuzzled smile. He was fast on his feet and did his work well and he loved his sisters, who seemed beautiful and sophisticated; he loved Madrid, which was still an unbelievable place, and he loved his work which, done under bright lights, with clean linen, the wearing of evening clothes, and abundant food in the kitchen, seemed romantically beautiful.
There were from eight to a dozen other people who lived at the Luarca and ate in the dining room but for Paco, the youngest of the three waiters who served at table, the only ones who really existed were the bull fighters.
Second-rate matadors lived at that pension because the address in the Calle San Jeronimo was good, the food was excellent and the room and board was cheap. It is necessary for a bull fighter to give the appearance, if not of prosperity, at least of respectability, since decorum and dignity rank above courage as the virtues most highly prized in Spain, and bull fighters stayed at the Luarca until their last pesetas were gone. There is no record of any bull fighter having left the Luarca for a better or more expensive hotel; second-rate bull fighters never became first rate; but the descent from the Luarca was swift since anyone could stay there who was making anything at all and a bill was never presented to a guest unasked until the woman who ran the place knew that the case was hopeless.
At this time there were three full matadors living at the Luarca as well as two very good picadors, and one excellent banderillero. The Luarca was luxury for the picadors and the banderilleros who, with their families in Seville, required lodging in Madrid during the Spring season; but they were well paid and in the fixed employ of fighters who were heavily contracted during the coming season and the three of these subalterns would probably make much more apiece than any of the three matadors. Of the three matadors one was ill and trying to conceal it; one had passed his short vogue as a novelty; and the third was a coward.
The coward had at one time, until he had received a peculiarly atrocious horn wound in the lower abdomen at the start of his first season as a full matador, been exceptionally brave and remarkably skillful and he still had many of the hearty mannerisms of his days of success. He was jovial to excess and laughed constantly with and without provocation. He had, when successful, been very addicted to practical jokes but he had given them up now. They took an assurance that he did not feel. This matador had an intelligent, very open face and he carried himself with much style.
The matador who was ill was careful never to show it and was meticulous about eating a little of all the dishes that were presented at the table. He had a great many handkerchiefs which he laundered himself in his room and, lately, he had been selling his fighting suits. He had sold one, cheaply, before Christmas and another in the first week of April. They had been very expensive suits, had always been well kept and he had one more. Before he had become ill he had been a very promising, even a sensational, fighter and, while he himself could not read, he had clippings which said that in his debut in Madrid he had been better than Belmonte. He ate alone at a small table and looked up very little.
The matador who had once been a novelty was very short and brown and very dignified. He also ate alone at a separate table and he smiled very rarely and never laughed. He came from Valladolid, where the people are extremely serious, and he was a capable matador; but his style had become old-fashioned before he had ever succeeded in endearing himself to the public through his virtues, which were courage and a calm capability, and his name on a poster would draw no one to a bull ring. His novelty had been that he was so short that he could barely see over the bull’s withers, but there were other short fighters, and he had never succeeded in imposing himself on the public’s fancy.
Of the picadors one was a thin, hawk-faced, gray-haired man, lightly built but with legs and arms like iron, who always wore cattle-men’s boots under his trousers, drank too much every evening and gazed amorously at any woman in the pension. The other was huge, dark, brown-faced, good-looking, with black hair like an Indian and enormous hands. Both were great picadors although the first was reputed to have lost much of his ability through drink and dissipation, and the second was said to be too headstrong and quarrelsome to stay with any matador more than a single season.
The banderillero was middle-aged, gray, cat-quick in spite of his years and, sitting at the table he looked a moderately prosperous business man. His legs were still good for this season, and when they should go he was intelligent and experienced enough to keep regularly employed for a long time. The difference would be that when his speed of foot would be gone he would always be frightened where now he was assured and calm in the ring and out of it.
On this evening everyone had left the dining room except the hawk-faced picador who drank too much, the birth marked-faced auctioneer of watches at the fairs and festivals of Spain, who also drank too much, and two priests from Galicia who were sitting at a corner table and drinking if not too much certainly enough. At that time wine was included in the price of the room and board
at the Luarca and the waiters had just brought fresh bottles of Valdepeñas to the tables of the auctioneer, then to the picador and, finally, to the two priests.
The three waiters stood at the end of the room. It was the rule of the house that they should all remain on duty until the diners whose tables they were responsible for should all have left, but the one who served the table of the two priests had an appointment to go to an Anarcho-Syndicalist meeting and Paco had agreed to take over his table for him.
Upstairs the matador who was ill was lying face down on his bed alone. The matador who was no longer a novelty was sitting looking out of his window preparatory to walking out to the café. The matador who was a coward had the older sister of Paco in his room with him and was trying to get her to do something which she was laughingly refusing to do. This matador was saying “Come on, little savage.”
“No,” said the sister. “Why should I?”
“For a favor.”
“You’ve eaten and now you want me for dessert.”
“Just once. What harm can it do?”
“Leave me alone. Leave me alone, I tell you.”
“It is a very little thing to do.”
“Leave me alone, I tell you.”
Down in the dining room the tallest of the waiters, who was overdue at the meeting, said “Look at those black pigs drink.”
“That’s no way to speak,” said the second waiter. “They are decent clients. They do not drink too much.”
“For me it is a good way to speak,” said the tall one. “There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.”
“Certainly not the individual bull and the individual priest,” said the second waiter.
“Yes,” said the tall waiter. “Only through the individual can you attack the class. It is necessary to kill the individual bull and the individual priest. All of them. Then there are no more.”
“Save it for the meeting,” said the other waiter.
“Look at the barbarity of Madrid,” said the tall waiter. “It is now half-past eleven o’clock and these are still guzzling.”
“They only started to eat at ten,” said the other waiter. “As you know there are many dishes. That wine is cheap and these have paid for it. It is not a strong wine.”
“How can there be solidarity of workers with fools like you?” asked the tall waiter.
“Look,” said the second waiter who was a man of fifty. “I have worked all my life. In all that remains of my life I must work. I have no complaints against work. To work is normal.”
“Yes, but the lack of work kills.”
“I have always worked,” said the older waiter. “Go on to the meeting. There is no necessity to stay.”
“You are a good comrade,” said the tall waiter. “But you lack all ideology.”
“Mejor si me falta cso que el otro,” said the older waiter (meaning it is better to lack that than work). “Go on to the mitin.”
Paco had said nothing. He did not yet understand politics but it always gave him a thrill to hear the tall waiter speak of the necessity for killing the priests and the Guardia Civil. The tall waiter represented to him revolution and revolution also was romantic. He himself would like to be a good catholic, a revolutionary, and have a steady job like this, while, at the same time, being a bullfighter.
“Go on to the meeting, Ignacio,” he said. “I will respond for your work.”
“The two of us,” said the older waiter.
“There isn’t enough for one,” said Paco. “Go on to the meeting.”
“Pues, me voy,” said the tall waiter. “And thanks.”
In the meantime, upstairs, the sister of Paco had gotten out of the embrace of the matador as skil£uIly as a wrestler breaking a hold and said, now angry, “These are the hungry people. A failed bullfighter. With your ton-load of fear. If you have so much of that, use it in the ring.”
“That is the way a whore talks.”
“A whore is also a woman, but I am not a whore.”
“You’ll be one.”
“Not through you.”
“Leave me,” said the matador who, now, repulsed and refused, felt the nakedness of his cowardice returning.
“Leave you? What hasn’t left you?” said the sister. “Don’t you want me to make up the bed? I’m paid to do that.”
“Leave me,” said the matador, his broad good-looking face wrinkled into a contortion that was like crying. “You whore. You dirty little whore.”
“Matador,” she said, shutting the door. “My matador.”
Inside the room the matador sat on the bed. His face still had the contortion which, in the ring, he made into a constant smile which frightened those people in the first rows of seats who knew what they were watching. “And this,” he was saying aloud. “And this. And this.”
He could remember when he had been good and it had only been three years before. He could remember the weight of the heavy gold-brocaded fighting jacket on his shoulders on that hot afternoon in May when his voice had still been the same in the ring as in the café, and how he sighted along the point-dipping blade at the place in the top of the shoulders where it was dusty in the short-haired black hump of muscle above the wide, wood-knocking, splintered-tipped horns that lowered as he went in to kill, and how the sword pushed in as easy as into a mound of stiff butter with the palm of his hand pushing the pommel, his left arm crossed low, his left shoulder forward, his weight on his left leg, and then his weight wasn’t on his leg. His weight was on his lower belly and as the bull raised his head the horn was out of sight in him and he swung over on it twice before they pulled him off it. So now when he went in to kill, and it was seldom, he could not look at the horns and what did any whore know about what he went through before he fought? And what had they been through that laughed at him? They were all whores and they knew what they could do with it.
Down in the dining room the picador sat looking at the priests. If there were women in the room he stared at them. If there were no women he would stare with enjoyment at a foreigner, un inglés, but lacking women or strangers, he now stared with enjoyment and insolence at the two priests. While he stared the birth-marked auctioneer rose and folding his napkin went out, leaving over half the wine in the last bottle he had ordered. If his accounts had been paid up at the Luarca he would have finished the bottle.
The two priests did not stare back at the picador. One of them was saying, “It is ten days since I have been here waiting to see him and all day I sit in the antechamber and he will not receive me.”
“What is there to do?”
“Nothing. What can one do? One cannot go against authority.”
“I have been here for two weeks and nothing. I wait and they will not see me.”
“We are from the abandoned country. When the money runs out we can return.”
“To the abandoned country. What does Madrid care about Galicia? Weare a poor province.”
“One understands the action of our brother Basilio.”
“Still I have no real confidence in the integrity of Basilio Alvarez.”
“Madrid is where one learns to understand. Madrid kills Spain.”
“If they would simply see one and refuse.”
“No. You must be broken and worn out by waiting.”
“Well, we shall see. I can wait as well as another.”
At this moment the picador got to his feet, walked over to the priests’ table and stood, gray-headed and hawk-faced, staring at them and smiling.
“A torero,” said one priest to the other.
“And a good one,” said the picador and walked out of the dining room, gray-jacketed, trim-waisted, bow-legged, in tight breeches over his high-heeled cattleman’s boots that clicked on the floor as he swaggered quite steadily, smili
ng to himself. He lived in a small, tight, professional world of personal efficiency, nightly alcoholic triumph, and insolence. Now he lit a cigar and tilting his hat at an angle in the hallway went out to the café.
The priests left immediately after the picador, hurriedly conscious of being the last people in the dining room, and there was no one in the room now but Paco and the middle-aged waiter. They cleared the tables and carried the bottles into the kitchen.
In the kitchen was the boy who washed the dishes. He was three years older than Paco and was very cynical and bitter.
“Take this,” the middle-aged waiter said, and poured out a glass of the Valdepeñas and handed it to him.
“Why not?” the boy took the glass.
“Tu, Paco?” the older waiter asked.
Short Stories Page 5