Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  The air was cooling quickly as they walked back to the station, and when the rain began to fall they went into a shop to buy some food for that evening. When they came out the water was spilling from the drainpipes in gouts, as if pumped, and some car headlights were on. Holding the bag above their heads, they ran across the road, jumping the gutters. Their train emerged through a veil of water that was the colour of gelatine, with ribbons of rain flying from its roof.

  Sitting opposite each other, neither Megan nor Alexander spoke. They wiped the condensation from the window to look out. The houses on the far side of the car park were all grey; a car edged towards the barrier, enveloped in a haze of shattered rain. A young man drowsed in the corner of the carriage, his head back and his mouth open; from his girlfriend’s headphones leaked a synthesizer’s thin monotone.

  The train pulled away, but before it reached the next station it slowed to a halt at a signal, and while the train was stationary the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Angled under the clouds, a cold sunlight, like a halogen beam, made everything in Alexander’s vision appear distinct and urgent, and stamped it all into his memory. Curds of translucent beige grease were lit up around a junction, with particles of sand embedded in them. A long crust of dirt under the lip of the live rail reminded him of the soot that used to fatten on the chimney-breast in his parents’ house. Ragwort was sprouting in a cone of ballast by a corrugated iron shed, and in a nearby garden the wet outer leaves of a young maple glowed like a mesh of small electric lights. He looked at the oil-spattered stones and steel plates between the sleepers, at the slick black cables that turned under a rail like the sinews of a wrist, at the fox-coloured stains on the lengths of concrete conduit discarded beside the track. He looked at Megan. Her face was freckled with the shadows of the raindrops, and her eyes were directed towards the houses as if she were seeing a place in which she had once lived. He leaned forward to touch her hand. ‘What is it?’ he asked her.

  ‘The wine’s made me a bit glum,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t drink without eating.’

  ‘Just the wine?’

  ‘Oh yes. I think so,’ she said. ‘But I’m never going to see the world the way Liz sees it. She thinks I’m a snob.’

  ‘But you are,’ he said, and she smiled. He noticed, in another garden, a boy prancing as if under a swarm of wasps, slashing the air with a thin long stick. ‘Strange lad,’ Alexander remarked. Megan nodded, but did not speak. A train sped past, going away from the city, and she watched the faces recede. Their train heaved into motion. The clouds were becoming violet and opaque, and the gaps between them made Alexander think of gaps in hedgerows, with the sea beyond.

  Megan went into the living room and turned on the television. A few minutes later she turned it off. Alexander passed her a few pages of the newspaper he was reading. She read them quickly, then went upstairs to mark some homework.

  39. La Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda

  The river could not be looked at, and the walls and roofs of the buildings across the river were all scorched white. The shadow of the tower was like a trench cut into the stone of the pavement. A dog with hempen fur stood in the road, one paw raised, as if stunned in mid-stride.

  ‘This is purgatory,’ said Megan. ‘I don’t know how people function in it.’

  ‘That’s Triana,’ Alexander told her, gesturing with the guidebook. ‘Used to be the gypsy quarter, it says. Nothing much to see there now, according to this.’

  ‘God be praised. I’d fry before we got over the bridge.’ She removed her sunglasses as they stepped into the shadow. ‘Stop for a second, Eck. Show me how much farther.’ She touched her forearm against his. ‘Look at you, mahogany man. And look at me: half woman, half radish.’

  A drop of sweat fattened on a peak of darkened hair at her temple, and fell onto the paper. ‘We could go back to the room,’ Alexander suggested. ‘Or there’s the cathedral. That’ll be cool.’

  ‘And full of people like us. We wouldn’t want that.’ She replaced her sunglasses decisively. ‘The park it must be,’ she said, shoving him into the light. ‘Onward.’

  He bought a bottle of water from a cabin at the Plaza de España, where Megan stood beside the miniature canal, grimacing into the sun as if testing her resolve against it. They found a lawn of stiff broad-leaved grass and there they sat, under the leaves of a dusty myrtle. Megan rested her head on his lap, and he dripped water onto her lips. ‘That’s nice,’ she murmured, but she did not open her eyes. ‘So what’s left to see?’ she asked, tapping the guidebook.

  Alexander skimmed the pages. ‘The art gallery.’

  ‘Featuring?’

  ‘Carthusian monks by Zurbarán. An El Greco.’

  ‘OK. Anything else?’

  ‘Modern art gallery.’

  ‘With?’

  ‘Doesn’t say. And Don Juan’s hospital. Founded by the real Don Juan, apparently. Don Miguel de Manara. A lot of pictures by Murillo. And a painting of a rotting bishop.’

  ‘A whatting?’

  ‘A worm-riddled bishop in his coffin.’

  ‘Great. And when you say hospital –?’

  ‘A real hospital. Still in service, it would appear.’

  ‘Give it a miss, shall we?’ she said.

  ‘We haven’t seen the famous weeping Madonna either,’ Alexander continued.

  ‘Enough already,’ said Megan.

  She curled an arm for a pillow, and within a few minutes she had fallen asleep. For almost an hour she slept, while the fiacres trundled up and down the incandescent avenue beyond the trees, and car horns bickered in the city’s streets. A young couple spread a blanket underneath another myrtle and placed a radio on it; lying down beside her lover, the woman reached languorously for the switch; an impassioned male howl came out of the speaker. A policeman rode his horse at a walk along the narrow path behind the couple and back again; the saddle flashed like brass through the foliage.

  ‘That been going on for long?’ asked Megan when she awoke, nodding in the direction of the couple.

  ‘A while.’

  ‘Should have given me a kick. We could have moved.’

  ‘You get used to it. Like the sun.’

  ‘The sun I’m never getting used to. Not if it stays like this. I mean, are you enjoying yourself?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re so adaptable,’ she said, and she kissed him on the neck.

  ‘You’re really not enjoying it?’

  ‘It’s too much for a paleskin. Like having a headache all day.’

  ‘We needn’t stay, you know.’

  ‘You have a plan?’ she asked. ‘Been plotting while I dozed?’

  ‘There are two options, as I see it. Number one: we dash to the coast and get in the sea. Number two: we flee to the hills.’

  ‘Let’s go for a drink,’ she said, and by the time they reached the bar they had agreed to leave the following morning.

  At the counter a man with dyed black eyebrows and hair and an azure satin shirt was drumming his heels on the tiles to amuse two students, who squatted on their backpacks beside the door to the toilets rather than take a stool at one of the casks that served as tables. The man ceased his footwork when Alexander stood beside him. He regarded Alexander askance, and then said something that Alexander could not understand. ‘English?’ the man enquired.

  ‘Si,’ said Alexander.

  ‘English,’ the man approved. ‘I like English. I like English very much. Bobby Charlton. Winston Churchill. Florence Nightingale.’ He gestured to the barman, who put two cold glasses of fino on the counter. ‘Enjoy,’ said the man, and he smiled at Alexander and at the students and at Megan and at the students again.

  ‘Mistaken for a native?’ asked Megan.

  ‘Not for one second,’ Alexander replied, raising his glass to the man in the azure shirt, who raised his to Alexander, and to Megan, and every other person in the room. ‘I think he assumed I might speak a few words o
f his language, as I’m in his country. Shameful that I don’t, really.’

  ‘Well, we can go and be ashamed somewhere else tomorrow,’ said Megan, and she pinned the guidebook open on the cask. ‘I’ve narrowed it down to two: Ronda or Cádiz.’

  No sooner had Megan reached the end of the account of Cádiz than the students came over to ask if they could look at the book for a moment. Their names were Linda and Amy and they were from Wisconsin. It was past ten o’clock when they left.

  ‘Do you think they found our book instructive?’ Megan asked Alexander.

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Saucy little minx, that Linda,’ she said. ‘How many times were you given an eyeful of that cleavage?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Dirty flirt,’ Megan reproved. The man in the azure shirt bowed to her. ‘Your friend’s a bit miffed. You’d better buy him a drink,’ she said.

  ‘Could you go?’

  ‘He’s your friend.’

  ‘Go on. For the price of a drink he’ll be yours too.’

  ‘A singular drink? We’re going to be here all night, my dear,’ she said, and she went up to the bar, where the man in the azure shirt made her laugh by taking their empty glasses from her and making them dance a flamenco on the bar top. This, as Alexander was to recall many years later, was the last occasion on which he heard Megan laugh wholeheartedly.

  The fifth hotel they called in Ronda had a vacant room. ‘Corrida,’ the receptionist explained, and then he took them up a concrete staircase to a room at the back of the building, looking onto a light well from which a smell of hot cooking oil infiltrated the room through the cream plastic shutters. On the plywood bookcase beside the bed stood a lamp in the form of a melting candle and an ashtray that bore the name of a different hotel. The frame of the low steel bed screeched when Alexander lay on it. ‘You OK with this?’ he called, over the sound of running water.

  ‘It’s fine, Eck,’ she replied. ‘Cold water is all we need. And I’m the one that brought us here. I can’t complain. You OK with it?’

  ‘A case of this or nothing, I think,’ he said.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, too brightly. ‘But the room’s bearable anyway, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Alexander, and he closed his eyes to exclude the room, which seemed the image of his mood, not its cause.

  It was in the restaurant that Megan first put forward the idea that they might go to the bullfight. The waiter took them to a table beside a dresser that had a half-consumed leg of ham on it, and as he pushed Megan’s chair closer he looked at Alexander and said to him: ‘Orson Welles sit here. Where you are. Orson Welles.’ He pointed above Alexander’s head, where, in the midst of a mosaic of small framed photos, Orson Welles sat in the front row of a bullring, his mouth puckered and eyes tight with concentration, beside a handsome, pensive, black-eyed man whose braceleted wrist rested loosely on the barrier.

  ‘And that?’ asked Megan.

  ‘Antonio Ordóñez.’ The waiter came round the table and rapped a finger on the glass of several pictures in quick succession. ‘Ordonez, Ordonez, Ordonez,’ he repeated. ‘Of Ronda,’ he added, as though to authenticate the man, and then smoothly withdrew.

  ‘We’re eating in an abattoir,’ Alexander remarked.

  ‘Offputting,’ agreed Megan, but throughout the meal her gaze would slide onto the wall and linger there, as though on a long inscription that was indistinctly legible. ‘Look at that one,’ she would say, and Alexander would turn to look at Antonio Ordonez sweeping the ground with his cape to usher a bull into the earth, or fluttering the cape behind him like the skirt of a dancing aristocrat, or glaring at a defeated animal in proof of the potency of his will. ‘There’s something about that one,’ she said, pointing to a picture in which Ordonez, accompanied by an older and bald-headed man, stood in his full regalia on the edge of the ring, staring at the camera as if at an unwelcome intruder to whom he was affecting indifference. ‘Looks like he’s up before a firing squad in five minutes,’ she commented.

  ‘Too glamorous,’ Alexander replied. ‘More like a film star than a prisoner.’

  ‘And they’re so feminine, in a way. Look at all those curves,’ said Megan, and Alexander followed her finger to the picture of a plump-buttocked matador, arcing his arms in the shape of an urn. ‘Would you want to go?’ she asked.

  ‘Not especially.’ To his left a smiling fighter, carried shoulder-high by a jubilant gang, clutched an amputated hoof and a pair of severed ears. ‘Would you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She twisted in her seat to inspect a picture to the side of the dresser. An elegant rider, with immaculate white collar and cuffs, and hair sprucely parted and oiled, leaned out of his saddle to place a sword between the shoulders of a charging bull, as fastidiously as a butler setting a bottle of fine wine in the centre of a table. A blanched strip of typescript, like the label on a reliquary in a church museum, identified the rider as Angel Peralta. ‘I feel I should go,’ said Megan.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To understand.’

  ‘But you won’t understand. We can’t understand. We’re tourists.’

  ‘Then to misunderstand less badly,’ she retorted.

  Alexander regarded the gaunt Manolete, whose sorrowful eyes seemed to ask forgiveness of the beast that had collapsed in front of him. ‘It’s so bloody morbid,’ he complained.

  ‘I know,’ she replied, and then the waiter returned and placed the coffees on the table. ‘Qué es?’ Megan asked him, standing up to indicate a bull’s head on a wooden shield.

  Like a gallery owner with a prospective purchaser, the waiter stood alongside Megan and insinuatingly adopted a stance that was a copy of hers. ‘Bailador,’ he explained. ‘He killed Joselito. Joselito was great. Very great. The very greatest,’ he said, and he directed her to the reposeful face of the martyred Joselito and to the bronze pallbearers of his tomb.

  ‘In Seville?’ Megan enquired.

  ‘Sevilla. Yes.’

  ‘We should have seen this, Eck,’ she said, and she brought her face closer to the dead Joselito’s.

  Megan bought a couple of visors from a boy outside the ring and fastened one around Alexander’s brow. He held her hand and together they beat time as the band played a raucous paso doble, and the trio of matadors crossed the sand in their pink and sky-blue costumes, attended by their harlequin teams. The picadors made you think of Don Quixote, said Megan. Below them the matadors took their capes from the barrier and began to rehearse their passes. The capes fluttered like gigantic yellow and magenta wings. Megan lifted Alexander’s hand to her cheek and kissed it and smiled at him, but there was something like panic in her eyes.

  The first bull was grey, and its hide caught the sun like zinc. The ground boomed under its hooves when it charged the banderillero’s cape; its horn gouged the wall, and Alexander heard the rending of the wood and the furious sound of the bull’s breathing. Distracted by a second banderillero, it crossed the ring at a trot then swerved to run at a third, who scampered behind a barrier. Back and forth the bull was passed, until the matador, having studied its course to his satisfaction, looked up as if consulting the sky and came out of the crescent of shade to take his stand. Swinging his cape behind him, he turned contemptuously from the horns. The crowd applauded and Megan leaned forward, as if straining to follow an engrossing debate. Alexander opened the guidebook. ‘Says here that the pope once excommunicated all bullfighters,’ he told her.

  ‘Reasonable move,’ she said.

  He tried to read rather than watch, but a change in the noise soon made him look up. People around him were whistling, and it appeared that their derision was intended for the picadors, who were now manoeuvring their horses in the outer circle of the ring. ‘Are you understanding this?’ Alexander asked. ‘What’ve they done?’

  At that moment Megan clapped a hand to her mouth. The bull was pushing at one of the horses, buffeting the quilted blanket that hung from its flank. The p
icador stood in the stirrups and turned the head of his blindfolded horse to the barrier, then thrust his spear into the crest of the bull’s neck. Leaning on the spear, he stirred its point in the wound it had made. Rearing, the bull scraped the horse against the wooden wall; it shuddered and sprang upwards, dislodging the picador from his saddle. The horse fell twistedly, its forelegs remaining straight as its hind legs buckled, and then it was on its back. Its hoofs clattered the planks of the barrier as the bull dug its horns through the blanket, which now was stained maroon. The banderilleros flurried about, flapping their capes at the bull’s head.

  ‘This is horrible,’ said Alexander.

  ‘It is,’ replied Megan.

  ‘Shall we leave?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But this is truly, profoundly, inexcusably nasty,’ he said.

  ‘It is. It’s meant to be,’ said Megan firmly.

  Fascination and pain were in her face as she watched the bull canter below them. The skin of its flank shone like a throw of threadbare crimson satin. Jigging as if on a springboard, a banderillero incited an attack and sprinted on tiptoe to the side of the onrushing bull. Stiff-backed, bridling like a man who has been insulted, he planted a dart in a manner that elicited applause and a waving of handkerchiefs. ‘Megan, this is horrible and ridiculous,’ Alexander commented, and she nodded as though his remark were irrelevant.

  In unison with the crowd, Megan applauded when the matador turned a circle in the centre of the ring and saluted them with an upraised arm. When he spun the animal around his body, so closely that a smear of its blood was left across his chest, she edged forward on her seat. When he snatched the muleta straight up, and the bull leapt under it, grazing his sleeve with the tip of its horn, she made a sound that was in part a cheer and in part a gasp.

  When Alexander next looked up the bull was banging its brow against the matador’s legs. The matador skipped back, transferred the muleta to his right hand, and shook it goadingly. The bull walked up to the cloth and scooped its horns at it exhaustedly; it walked away, coming to a halt facing away from the man. The matador strutted into its line of sight and knelt, flinging his arms back in defiance. ‘I’m not sure I can stand any more of this,’ said Alexander.