by Wilbur Smith
Driving up from the coast on that sultry summer’s day, Isabella was as happy and exhilarated as she had ever been. She was in love. Now there was not the least shadow of doubt in her mind that this was the grand passion of her life. There had never been, and there could not conceivably be again, anyone to match him. She would never experience any emotion to exceed what she felt for him now. His presence beside her and those green eyes upon her made the sunlight brighter and the high dry air of the Sierra taste sweeter on her lips.
The wide plains and the mountains beyond were so like her own beloved land. They transported her back to the open horizons of the great Karoo, for there were the same lion-coloured earth and sepia rockscapes. Looking upon them, her mood was carried upwards even higher and she laughed aloud with joy and had to strive hard to prevent herself crying out: ‘Oh, Ramón my darling, I love you. I love you with all my heart and with all my soul for ever.’
Even in her giddy exhilaration, she was determined that he must say it first. That way she could be doubly certain that what she already knew was true – that he loved her as much as she loved him.
Ramón knew these mountains and he directed her over dusty back-roads to vistas of grandeur and beauty hidden far from the usual tourist routes. They stopped in one of the little villages, and he joked with the locals in their patois. He came away with a slab of the pink serrano ham cured in the snow, a loaf of rough peasant bread and a goatskin full of the sweet dark Malaga wine.
Beyond the village, they left the Mercedes parked beside an ancient stone bridge and followed the stream up through the olive groves into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. While a bearded billy-goat watched them in astonishment from the cliff above, they plunged naked into a secret pool of the river. Then, still naked, they ate their picnic lunch seated on the smooth black rocks above the water.
Ramón demonstrated how to hold the wine-skin at arm’s length and direct a hissing jet into the back of his open mouth. When she tried, the wine spurted over her cheeks and dribbled from her chin, and at her request he licked the ruby droplets from her face and from her taut white bosom. This was such fun that they forgot about the rest of their lunch and made love, Isabella still perched on her rock and Ramón standing knee-deep in the pool facing her.
‘You are incredible,’ she whispered. ‘My legs are jelly. You’ll probably have to carry me back to the car.’
They spent so much of the afternoon beside the pool that the sun was on the tops of the mountains, turning the snows to incandescent gold, when they came in sight of the castle.
It was not as large or as grand as Isabella had expected it to be. It was simply a gaunt dark building high on the slopes above the higgledy-piggledy pink-tiled roofs of the village. As they approached, Isabella saw that part of the parapet had collapsed and that the grounds were overgrown and neglected.
‘Who does it belong to now?’ she asked.
‘The State.’ Ramón shrugged. ‘There was talk some years ago of turning it into a tourist hotel, but nothing came of it.’
The caretaker was an old man who remembered Ramón’s family, and he led them through the ground-floor rooms. They were empty; all the furniture had been sold to pay the family debts, and the chandeliers were thick with dust and cobwebs. The walls of the hall were stained with rainwater from the leaks in the roof.
‘It’s so sad to see something once so lovely ruined by neglect,’ Isabella whispered. ‘Doesn’t it make you sad, too?’
‘Do you want to go?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I don’t want to be sad today.’
As they went down the hairpin track into the village, the last of the sunset was so splendid on the mountaintops that Isabella recaptured her bubbling mood.
At the inn in the village, the innkeeper recognized the family name. He ordered his two daughters up to change the bed linen in the front room, and sent his wife back to her kitchen to prepare one of the Andalusian specialities for their dinner, cocido Madrileño, a stew of chicken and the spicy little chorizo sausages on a bed of cabello de ángel, noodles so fine that they deserved their name of Angel’s Hair.
‘In Spain, sherry is the drink of the people,’ Ramón explained to her as he filled her glass. It was cold enough here in the mountains to warrant a fire in the stone fireplace, and the light of the flames played over his features making him even more improbably handsome.
‘We always seem to be doing one of three things’ – she contemplated the golden wine in her glass – ‘eating or drinking or . . .’ She sipped the wine.
‘Are you complaining?’ he asked.
‘Gloating, actually.’ She slanted her eyes at him. ‘Eat your cocido and drink your sherry, señor, you are going to need your strength.’
She awoke with the sunlight streaming in through the open window and experienced a moment’s dread that he had gone again. However, he was there beside her in the wide soft bed, watching her with that cool enigmatic expression; she felt another moment’s chill of doubt, but as she reached for him, almost diffidently, she found that he was already hard and swollen for her.
‘Oh God!’ she whispered joyously. ‘You are incredible!’ No man had ever wanted her as much as he did. He made her feel like the most desirable woman in the universe.
The innkeeper had laid a breakfast of purple figs and goat’s cheese for them in the walled courtyard. They sat under the trellised vines, and Isabella peeled the figs with her long painted nails and placed the globules of succulent flesh between his lips. Her father was the only other man she had ever done that for.
When one of the daughters brought a pot of steaming coffee out to them, Ramón excused himself and went up to their bedroom. Through the tiny bathroom window, he could see Isabella sitting in the courtyard below and heard her voice and her laughter as she tried to make herself understood in her newly acquired Spanish.
Earlier he had watched her swallow a birth control pill as she stood beside him at the washbasin. She had made a silly little ritual of it, toasting him with the glass of water. ‘Many happy returns!’ However, the pack of remaining pills was no longer in her toilet bag on the ledge above the basin.
He went back into the bedroom. The bed occupied almost the entire floor-space, and their luggage was crammed into the curtained alcove beside the door. Isabella’s big squashy leather shoulder-bag was thrown carelessly on top of her suitcase.
He paused to listen again, and heard her voice faintly through the open window. He took the bag to the bed and began to unpack it swiftly, laying out the contents in careful sequence so that he could repack it in exactly the same order. He had searched her sequinned handbag and checked the brand of birth control pills she was using on that first morning in the Kensington flat while she was still asleep. Later he had discussed them with the doctor at the embassy.
‘If the woman discontinues treatment before the tenth day of her cycle, she will almost certainly experience a fertility backlash effect and become considerably more susceptible to impregnation when she ovulates,’ he had assured Ramón.
The slim pack of pills was in one of the compartments of her black crocodile-skin purse near the bottom of the bag. Once again, Ramón straightened up to listen. There was no sound of voices from the courtyard, and he darted back to the window. He saw that Isabella still sat at the table and that the innkeeper’s black cat now had all her attention. The supercilious creature had settled in her lap and was allowing her to tickle behind his ears.
Ramón stepped back into the bedroom. There were seven pills missing from the separate date-marked compartments in the packet. From his inside pocket Ramón slipped the identical Ovanon packet with which the embassy doctor had provided him. He removed the first seven pills from their compartments and dropped them into the toilet bowl. Then he placed the two packages side by side and compared them. Now they were identical in every respect, except that the second package contained only aspirin tablets cunningly coated to resemble birth control pills.
He slipped the packet of pl
acebo tablets into Isabella’s purse and replaced her shoulder bag in the alcove. He pocketed the original package and flushed the toilet, making sure that the seven pills were gone before he washed his hands and went down the narrow staircase to where Isabella waited in the courtyard.
In Granada, Ramón took her to the corrida de toros and exulted in their great good fortune that they were to be able to watch El Cordobes work. Had not Ramón’s father been a patron of this most famous of all matadors when he was a mere novillero, they would never have procured tickets to the performance at such short notice. As it was, two tickets were delivered to their hotel on the morning after their arrival. Not only were they seated at the ringside directly to the right of the president’s box, but also before the spectacle they were invited to watch El Cordobes dress for the corrida.
Of course, Isabella had read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, and she realized the honour of that invitation. Nevertheless, she was unprepared for the obvious depth of Ramón’s respect as he greeted Manuel Benitez, El Cordobes, or for the semi-religious solemnity of the ritual of dressing.
‘You have to be Spanish to understand the bulls,’ Ramón told her as they took their reserved seats, and indeed she had never seen him so moved and emotional. His involvement was so powerful and infectious that she found herself as wrought-up as he was.
The trumpets of the entry parade sent thrills down her spine, and the spectacle was magnificent: the horses and the costumes encrusted with silver and gold and seed pearls, and the matadors strutting in their short embroidered jackets and skintight trousers that blatantly emphasized their buttocks and their bunched genitalia. Even the flaring coral pink and incarnadine satins of the capes glistened with the lubricious tones of intimate feminine flesh and served to underscore the essentially lascivious nature of the frenzy that descended upon the tiered ranks of spectators.
When the bull surged into the ring, horned head high, the great hump of his shoulders swollen with rage, white sand dashing from under his hoofs and his engorged scrotum swinging to the pounding rhythm of his charge, Isabella came to her feet and screamed with the crowd.
As El Cordobes performed the initial passes, Ramón gripped her arm and leant close to her, describing and explaining the significance of each graceful evolution, from the pure elegance of the simple verónica to the more complicated quite. Through Ramón’s eyes, she came to see it as the beginning of some movingly beautiful ritual, steeped in ancient tradition, which did not attempt to disguise its cruel and darkly tragic essence.
When the trumpets saluted the entrance of the picadors, Isabella moaned aloud and pressed her knuckles against her teeth, for she had been dreading the horses. She had read of the horror of the disembowelled horses with their entrails tangled about their legs. To calm her fears, Ramón pointed out to her the thick armour of compressed cotton and canvas and leather that protected them. In the end none of the horses was harmed even when the bull hooked viciously into their padded bodies and drove them up against the barriers.
The picador leant from the saddle and worked the steel into the bull’s hump, and the blood sprayed up in a roseate nimbus of light, and then slicked down over the bull’s shoulders so that its hide gleamed like metal in the sun.
Isabella shuddered with awful fascination, and Ramón murmured: ‘The blood is real, everything you see here is real, as real as life. This is life, my darling, with all life’s beauty and cruelty and passion.’
She understood it then, accepted it and allowed herself to be carried along on the flood.
El Cordobes took his own banderillas. He posed in the sunlight and held high the long darts wrapped in coloured paper streamers. He called to the bull, and when it came he ran to meet it with light dancing strides. As they came together, Isabella gasped, and then the master had planted the banderillas and pirouetted away. The bull dropped his head and bucked at the sting of the barbs high in his withers, but his momentum had carried him out of goring range.
The trumpets sounded the final tercio, the hour of truth, and a new mood descended upon the stadium. El Cordobes and the bull engaged each other in the stately intimate dance of death. With only the floating cape between them, the passes were so close and dangerous that the bright blood from the beast’s shoulders smeared the matador’s thighs as it swept by.
At last El Cordobes stood below the president’s box and lifted his montera cap decorated with black silk pompons to ask permission to dedicate the bull. Isabella was overwhelmed when he came to where she sat and dedicated the bull to her beauty. He tossed his montera up to her and turned and went back to face the bull.
El Cordobes performed the final passes in the centre of the ring, each one more graceful and closer to the horns than the last. Every time the crowd erupted with one primeval voice, a great burst of sound that punctuated the aching silences in which each separate pass was performed.
In the end, he prepared for the kill directly below where Isabella sat. As he sighted the bull over the long silver blade, Ramón gripped her arm hard and whispered to Isabella: ‘Look! He will take it recibiendo, the most dangerous manner of all!’ When the bull made its last desperate rush, instead of running to meet it, El Cordobes stood four-square and went in over the top of the horns. The bright point of the estoque severed the great artery of the heart, and the blood gushed up in a fountain.
On the return from the bull-ring to the hotel, neither of them spoke. They were entranced, caught up in a rapture which was mystic and semi-religious. The cruelty and the blood, the tragic beauty of the spectacle had not wearied or jaded their emotions, but had enhanced them to the threshold of a kind of spiritual agony, which cried out for release. Isabella sensed that Ramón’s need was even greater and more uncontrollable than her own.
In their bedroom whose double doors and wrought-iron balcony overlooked the gardens of the old Moorish palace, Ramón stood her in the centre of the floor. While the blades of the old-fashioned fan on the high ceiling revolved overhead, he undressed her. It seemed that in doing so, he performed another ritual as ancient as that of the corrida. When she was naked, he knelt at her feet, clasped her around the hips and buried his face in the dense warm pillow of hair in the basin of her pelvis.
She caressed his head with a tenderness that she had never felt for another human being, yet it was tinged with a great sadness and humility. She felt that a love like this was divine, and that she was not worthy of it. It was too great for any mortal being to bear.
At last he rose and took her up like a child in his arms and carried her to the bed. It was as though it had never happened before, as though he had broken through to such secret depths of her physical and spiritual being that even she had not suspected their existence.
The laws of time and space were redefined while she was in his arms. It lasted an instant and a flaming eternity. Like a comet she was transported through the full circle of the heavens. When she looked up into his green eyes, she knew with a lambent joy that his spirit was locked into hers as deeply as his flesh was entrapped within her throughout all that incredible odyssey. When she believed that she could reach no higher, survive no longer, there was an outpouring within her, as hot and copious as a flood of volcanic lava.
As the last light of day faded and their room filled with shadows, she found that she was so devastated that she could no longer speak or move; she had only the strength left to weep, and while she wept with exhaustion and fulfilment sleep overcame her.
Her entire world was a brighter, more joyous place now that she had Ramón. London, that most fascinating and vital of cities, transcended itself and became for her an earthly paradise. She saw it all through a shimmering golden mist of excitement. Each minute spent in his company was like a precious jewel set in that gold.
When they had come to London three years earlier, Isabella had resumed her studies and gained her bachelor’s degree. Surprised at her sudden studiousness, her father had encouraged her to enrol in the School of Oriental and Afr
ican Studies at London University, and she had embarked on her doctoral thesis. She had chosen as her subject ‘A Dispensation for Post-Colonial Africa’. Her thesis was advancing well, and she had hoped to complete most of it before her father’s term as ambassador ended and they returned to Cape Town.
However, all that had been before Ramón entered her life. Since then she had become a shameless truant. In the weeks since they had returned from Spain, she had not visited her tutor once, and had barely had time to open a book.
Rather than labouring on her thesis, she rose before dawn and slipped away to ride with Ramón in the park or to jog with him along the Embankment. Sometimes they worked out together in the shabby little gym in Bloomsbury run by a Hungarian expatriate who had fled his own country after the abortive rising.
There Ramón began to instruct her in the mysteries of judo and self-defence, arts in which he was frighteningly adept. Sometimes they wandered hand in hand through the galleries and museums. They dreamt in front of the Turners in the Tate, or disparaged the new acceptances at the Royal Academy. Always they ended up in the bed in Ramón’s flat in Kensington. She didn’t care to ask him how he was able to spend so much time with her instead of at his bank. She simply accepted it gratefully.
‘You’ve turned me into a junkie,’ she accused him. ‘I have to have my regular fix.’
Indeed, when he left London for eight days on some mysterious business for his bank, she moped and pined and truly sickened, even to the point of throwing up when she rose in the morning.
She kept half a dozen changes of clothing and a full range of perfumes and cosmetics at his flat and made it her duty to arrange the flowers and replenish the refrigerator daily. She was a talented cook and she loved to prepare food for him.
She began to neglect her duties at the embassy. She wormed her way out of official invitations and often left the chef and his staff to work on their own. Her father taxed her with her changed behaviour.
‘You are never at home any more, Bella. I can’t rely on you for a single thing. Nanny says that you slept in your bed only twice last week.’