My Face for the World to See

by Alfred Hayes

  Again, she paused; evidently it was something she was debating. Something I should, or should not be told; I urged her, thinking others had urged her, to tell me. “I was frightened,” she said.

  Frightened? I frowned at the phone. By what?

  “You.”

  I? I’d frightened her? My God. I couldn’t possibly have done anything to frighten her. I’d never frightened anybody. I was one of the least frightening of people.

  “In your sleep,” she said. “Don’t you know? You screamed out, several times; and cursed; and then, once, you began to cry.”

  I? I’d cried? In my sleep?

  “Yes.”

  A pause, then, “I thought it was because I was there,” she said. “I lay there, and couldn’t sleep, and listened to you, and I was afraid to move. Should I have awakened you? You seemed to be suffering, and it was awful: the way you cursed. There must be someone, or something, you hate very much.”

  I?

  “Hello?” she said. “Hello?”

  18

  A WEEK later, I said to her: “Would you like to go down to Tijuana Sunday? Charlie asked me. He’s going down to see the bullfights.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “I thought you might like to go. Have you seen a bullfight?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “Very much.”

  “All right. I’ll pick you up early, or if you’d like . . .”

  “What?”

  “I was going to suggest you stay over here Saturday night. That would make it simpler than driving over in the morning.”

  “I don’t know what to do about the cat.”

  “Bring him here. We’ll leave food for him.”

  So Saturday afternoon she brought the cat, and some clothes, and then in the morning we went down to Tijuana.

  19

  THE CARS came steadily across the International Bridge. The little donkeys, painted with stripes to look like zebras, and with sombreros on, and sailors mounted on their patient backs, were being photographed. You could smell the tacos on the small sidewalk carts. The bars in the clubs were crowded and it was only three o’clock in the afternoon. At Caliente they were running off the eighth race, and there were long lines in front of the two-dollar windows and the neon numbers on the tote board over the green lawn beyond the track flickered the odds very palely in the sunlight.

  “Kiss it for luck,” Charlie said. He held out the ticket he bought on the eighth race. “I haven’t hit all afternoon.”

  She laughed, and kissed the pari-mutuel stub.

  She had had three silver fizzes, and she was enjoying herself. She hadn’t, she said, had so much fun since she was at Del Mar, for a week, years ago.

  “The time we went to Del Mar,” she said, “it was crazy. They rented a DC-4 and flew down.”

  “They?” I said.

  “Some people I knew. The only thing was, it turned out the pilot wasn’t licensed.”

  “What happened?” Charlie said.

  “I got killed,” she said, laughing. She looked out toward the flower-banked track, and the horses being walked to the post.

  “Like it?” Charlie asked.

  She nodded, happy. “This is fun. I’m so excited.” She looked excited, too: I’d never seen her sparkle so. This was evidently one of the things she liked very much to do: a track, in the club section, with a private table, and the people there, looking at her.

  It was the huge white straw hat she wore. The hat, like her laughter, was a possession of the past. It was something she had worn once, perhaps at Del Mar, when those anonymous friends had rented the DC-4. She looked at me.

  “We have to go to Santa Anita every week when the season opens,” she said. “It will be wonderful, getting out.”

  Charlie thought so, too. “What are you hiding her for?” he said. “A lovely girl like that.”

  She looked that Sunday afternoon so very different from the girl who’d been in his beach house, shivering by the fire. Charlie had been astonished. She was unrecognizable.

  “I’m not hiding her.”

  After all, if there was a change, I’d something to do with it. She was very pretty: you could see the Mexicans looking at her. It had possibly been that all she had needed was something simple like this: a public admiration, and the opportunity of wearing the enormous hat. Possibly, even the nights together. The memory of her teeth grinding faded. She was really awfully pretty. Then the long shot came in, paying twenty to one, and she laughed again, delighted, clapping her gloved hands. “It’s because I kissed your ticket,” she said to Charlie. And to me: “See? Aren’t I luck?”

  At a quarter to four we took a taxi to the bull ring.

  20

  SHE SAT very straight on the hard wooden bench looking toward the ring bright-eyed and eager. It was going to be fun. Then the musicians, in their white pants and striped shirts, stood up and began to blow on their trumpets. It was the music for the bulls. She saw the gate swing open and the bull come plunging out with two of the streamers in his shoulder and abruptly everything was different than she had expected. She wasn’t quite sure yet of the difference. It was all very gay, very festive, there, with the Indian faces and the hot sand and the men selling beer, and the famous people who had come down to see the fights and whom Charlie knew. His little bald head glistened as he stood up and smiled and waved to them, or called halfway across the stands, “How are you, doll?”

  Doll (I thought it might be Paulette Goddard) nodded and smiled.

  “Compañero!”

  It was Charlie shouting again.

  “Who is it?” I said.

  “Gilbert Roland.”

  Every place you went there were a certain number of the same people who always knew each other. You got used to it after a while at the Legion on Saturday nights or at the ball park.

  Then the first bull came plunging out of the darkness.

  She was being very animated still in the seat beside me. She was all right until the bull went into the horse, and the crowd shouted, and the picador put his iron into the animal’s shoulder. She had not understood until then why the horses were blindfolded, or why they wore the heavy quilting. Her hand clutched at my arm and the whole gay expression of her face changed. She was rigid now. She watched disbelievingly as the bull tried to lift the horse and the armored picador on his horns. They were running across the sand with capes, shouting at the bull. She moaned a little. I heard her say: no, no. She was getting it now as a distinct and outrageous shock, as almost something physical being done to her each time the bull went into the horse, and the horse reared and the picador wheeled him back into position, blinded and trembling, or the bull cornered the horse and the man against the wooden barrier and worked at the padded underbelly with his horns. When they took the bull away with the capes and set him up in the ring, she relaxed a little. She was very white. Still, she couldn’t turn entirely away. She thought it would be easier now that the thing with the horse was over. It always looked as though it were going to be easier to take when the picador trotted the blindfolded horse out.

  “It’s horrible,” she cried.

  But she didn’t know why it was horrible. She thought of it only as outrageously cruel. She saw the horse as helpless and when the picador went into the bull with his iron lance she saw the bull as helpless. It was all so public. It was out there in the open and the shouting of the Mexicans and the music playing and the cries of the men selling beer through all of it added to the confusion of what she was hearing and feeling and seeing. If it had all taken place in a solemn silence she would not have felt so sick. The sand glared and the sun shone. The handlers leaned with their hands over the barrier watching and smoking. They looked decapitated. An Indian boy crouched on his heels in the aisle above us. He had a charming face and he was eating a bar of candy. Everybody seemed pleased. She could hear the pleased shouts. The confusion came from what she was looking at and what she heard: shouts of
pleasure, shouts of applause, and a sightless horse below. She had no idea how pale she was.

  Because of the distance, the moment with the banderillas seemed less cruel. She could see the darting and diagonal run of the man in his brilliant clothes across the sand and then the little standards planted in the bull. It did not look too bad from here. The bull’s immense tongue was beginning to drip saliva. The great mouth hung open and the great eye rolled. Snot, in blobs, formed at the wide nostrils. It stood there, tormented. Then the band played again and the matador came delicately and slowly out with his cape and sword. Blood, when you looked closely, increasingly stained the dark hide from beneath the wounds made by the gay banderillas. She tried to smile now as the capework began. I took her hand; she was rigid and sweating. Each time the bull plunged close to the man her fingers clutched. The shouts mounted with each successful pass.

  “Beautiful,” Charlie said.

  The matador turned slippered in the sand. The bull was maneuvered into the set he wanted. He had two tries at the hump, and then the sword went in and vibrated a little as he stepped away from the bull and the tongue hung grotesquely out of the laboring mouth looking like something which had been half cut away from the animal and now blood started to come from the mouth, too. The blood, and the snot, and the manure, all yellow, streaking its rear hoofs, which in its fear and its anger the animal had discharged. It stood there and did not fall yet and then it sank down at last into the sand in which all together now there were the sword and the dying animal and the animal’s blood and the snot and the manure. It was dying and then it was dead and then to be sure it was dead they came and put the short knife into the neck and there it was: the triumph. He was awarded an ear. The air was full of enthusiastic pillows now being thrown into the ring and a few hats and a woman threw a shoe. The movie people down at the barrier stood up and applauded. The brassy music played. The matador began his slow smiling triumphal march about the arena. And the men came out of the stalls whipping a team of mules and attached the dead bull to a leather chain and they dragged the animal out of the arena. The matador circled the ring. He kissed the woman’s shoe; he wore the thrown hat; his smile distributed itself among the beer bottles and the candy bars and the summer furs. He was quite wonderful at that moment in his sequins, bowing a little, with his little plaited pigtail, and having proved what he had come into the ring to prove: that he was skillful and that he was brave. He walked the sand like a man who had attained a momentary perfection. It was always impressive.

  She was glad the first encounter was over. She was trembling. She was glad the bull was gone and the ring empty and that there seemed to be no blood. She listened to the stands and looked at them, the dark faces she had seen near the tacos stands and outside the clubs and waiting at the taxis, and she shivered a little and couldn’t quite believe it. “Do they always cheer like that?” she said. “Do they always throw cushions? Do the women always behave like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s awful.”

  “Shall we go?”

  “No.”

  She looked toward the ring. She was going to endure it. She was going to be like the other people down there in the stands. She attempted a smile, but it was an uncertain smile. “I’ll get used to it, won’t I?” she said. “If I keep watching? You get used to it, don’t you?”

  The gate opened and a bull plunged out and she was back in it. She went rigid again. The respite had been short. She had not realized it would begin again so quickly. She had thought there would be a respite of a sort. She had not thought they would begin it again and do it all over again: the music, and the horns driven into the horse, and the lance, and the first blood, and the wearing down of the bull.

  She wanted so much to be able to sit elegantly and attractively there in the stands, in her nice summer frock and the large straw hat she wore, and she wanted to be like a sort of minor, a diminutive queen among them, enjoying a popular spectacle, and she just couldn’t make it. She just couldn’t watch it. She felt wretched. Her insides hurt. She began to cry at last out of wretchedness, a little sort of crying, as though she couldn’t help herself, and because they wouldn’t stop it down there below in the ring. She wanted them to stop it. She was so ill. She was so exhausted. Why couldn’t they stop it? Why didn’t someone go to the matador, slippered and lean and elusive, and the deliberate volutions of the cape, and the waiting sword, and make him understand and he would stop it. It hurt so to watch. She hated the man in the ring and all his murderous finery. She hated the faces so dark and so indifferent and so many of them all turned outward and looking on as though it were not what it was. But they didn’t stop it. They went right on presenting it to her. It went remorselessly on, sensation after sensation, blow after blow, until she was exhausted with the stiffening of her stomach and her breasts and her spine, that stiffening as she tried to resist the impact of each successive episode on the sand in the hot and partially shaded ring. It was all so different than she had expected. She was feeling so pitifully outraged. It wasn’t fun at all. It wasn’t anything like a game. She was crying because of the enjoyment she had thought she would have and the picture she would have made and it was too much. When the third bull went into the third blindfolded horse and got his horns under and lifted and toppled both of them, the picador and the horse, and the crowd all standing now screamed, she screamed too. The bull was going at the horse as it frantically kicked, blindfolded, on its side. The picador in all his armor was trying to crawl away. She screamed. When they came running out with capes, stamping their feet and hoo-hooing at the bull, and got the bull away, she moaned a little and leaned over and vomited. The silver fizzes and the eggs we had had in their hot sauces and a little of yesterday’s wine, too. The vomit spread in a dark stain at her feet, and all around us the crowd was standing and shouting, and down there it went on and on.

  21

  I STOOD in the doorway and I whistled and the cat didn’t come. We were back from Tijuana. She had looked with loathing at the posters from Mexico City my landlady had hung on the wall of the room with the bar in it, and I put her to bed, because of the way she was feeling and the long drive back, and then I whistled for the cat and the cat didn’t come. I had to be at work in the morning and it was late and I was tired and the arrangement was that I would drive her home on my way to work. I went to bed, too, and she had a slight fever in the night, so that finally I went into the other room and slept on the couch beside the bar. When I got up in the morning, I made coffee and woke her, and went to the door again and whistled and went out into the garden to look for the cat. It was getting late and I wanted to go to work. I walked down the street a way and under one of the palm trees there was the lid of a cardboard box and under it a tail. It was the cat: what was left of it. Somebody had evidently shoveled it to the sidewalk with the lid of the box and then put the cardboard over it and to make sure I picked up the lid and looked at it. It was Morgan, all right: and his eyes weren’t yellow any more. I stayed there, crouched over, with the cat under the piece of cardboard. There wasn’t anything I could do but go in and tell her. When I told her I knew exactly what she would think. She had slept with me and the cat was dead because of it. She hadn’t anything but the cat. Now because she had come to the house and stayed and then gone with me to Tijuana she didn’t have the cat any more. A car went by; someone came out of an apartment house. Had I killed the cat? She would think that. I knew that was exactly what she would think. I would have to go in and tell her. She’d go out and look at it as I had done. She would run out of the house, with a small cry. She would see from under the cardboard lid the extended tail. Morgan was dirty now. He had been in the gutter among the cars for some time. She had gone to Tijuana and hated the bullfights and she had been sick and now the cat was dead. It would be a proof of a kind. I stood up and started back toward the house. I knew I was going to be late to work that morning.

  22

  SHE DISCOVERED I was kind, and that she
liked being with me. She said: “It’s so long since I’ve felt anything at all.” At first, it was frightening to feel even these small tendrils of sensation pushing their way through the rocky heart.

  “You’re not falling in love?”

  “You say it so grimly.”

  “It’s a grim subject.”

  No, she wasn’t falling in love, she reassured me. It was simply that she’d been in a sort of darkness of no feeling at all for so long. Now there were these touches of sweetness. These quickenings. These unexpected gusts. They were, despite the fact that she knew she was not in love, a bit disturbing. She had spoken to Dr. Ritter (still invisible to me, still unseen) about them.

  “What did he recommend?”

  “He thought you might be good for me.”

  So she had that sanction, which she somehow needed: I was something the doctor recommended. I wasn’t to think of it, though, as the equivalent of some obscure pill she was taking. She’d always remember it as one of the good things that had happened to her: that we’d met at all, and been together, and that I’d come in a time that was so important to her. Her eyes shone gratefully. She’d always think of it as lucky, as a beneficent thing, as fortunate in the sense that I was the sort of person I was and the difference between myself and the others (the others crowding her past which had existed before the eventful evening she’d walked into the sea) was exactly the kind office she needed. Because she wasn’t, after all, deceiving herself; she wasn’t, even with the nights spent at my apartment and the clothes which gradually found their way into my closet, building upon what she knew was illusory; she knew I’d never leave my wife.

  It, of course, stung; she seemed so certain of it; it had all the finality of a life sentence. I didn’t like at all the way her judgment locked me so permanently in.