"Your arms, your legs are darker, browner": a Cook Islander at a bullfight
The noise from the arena can be heard outside, from the stand selling bamboo fans made in Taiwan. Queues of people line up to get in. Many of them are dressed in quick-drying travelling shorts with mix-and-match T-shirts made from hemp and organic cotton. Jandals or flip-flops or thongs slap against the sun-heated cobblestones. Heavy cameras, underused and overpaid for, are worn like lanyards round their necks. They dab at their sweaty cheeks and foreheads with cotton handkerchiefs, the sunscreen and insect repellent applied earlier in the day soiling the fabric. Many of them speak in heavy accents – sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. Sometimes in a language you don’t quite recognise.
This is your third bullfight. This is how you spend your Saturday afternoons now.
You climb the internal concrete stairs and wait for the first round to end. The doors to the arena will eventually reopen. When they do, you go in. Your naked face smacks the shield of heat once more. You gasp and drown in the humidity, taking little wasp breaths as you weave your way up to one of the middle rows.
The wives and girlfriends of the bullfighters are in front of you, but you never worry about getting caught. They never look back. You noticed this about them the first time you watched them. So you sit two rows exactly behind her, so that when he’s in the arena teasing the crowd, gesticulating with choreographed hand and head movements, and he turns her way and blows a kiss in the air, you can catch it. You watch it sweep across the circular dirt pit and float above the heads of the other onlookers like a decapitated dandelion. You snatch it and you guard it and, later, you pull it out from the shadows of your memory and place it beneath your pillow.
You lay your head upon it and dream.
Fanfare fills the stadium. The peal of trumpets alerts the crowd and a chariot with three horses trots around the edge of the bullring. The animals, resplendent in red and yellow flags and gold and silver adornments, are escorted into the arena by men in blue trousers with stripes of scarlet flames running down their sides. Their shirts are unblemished, taut and crisp, and their blue hats remind you of the caps your father wore to the greyhound races in Addington. The men are poised and alert like a row of soldiers, and the horses, joined by chains, strut between them, in a trance. The leader carries a whip. It’s brown, not black and frayed like the one you kept hidden under your bed back home, which makes you smile. You try not to think about it – what he could use his whip for.
You live in cotton dresses and singlets and shorts that cling to your skin as soon as you leave your hostel. The sun is hot, but it doesn’t burn like you’re used to, and although your face, your neck, your arms, your legs are darker, browner, and that makes you self-conscious amongst these European crowds, your skin doesn’t peel. It doesn’t dry up and flake away from your cheekbones. Instead, your skin glows like lit barbecue charcoal as the horses are led out of the ring.
*
Your father was a man’s man. He loved racing and rugby and protecting his girl. So when he found out you finally dumped Manu, it pleased him.
"I’m sorry, baby."
"No you’re not, Dad." The silence confirmed it.
"Look," he said, "you’re better off without him. That island boy was holding you back."
"We’re islanders too! And you always say that. They’re never good enough for you – brown, black or . . . blue."
"No, they’re never good enough for you." It was Manu’s idea to catch a bullfight.
"It’s not like watching a rugby game, you know," you argued. "The animals actually die."
Las Ventas was a popular bullring near the budget hotel you’d booked for a treat. After six months of backpacking through Europe, you’d slept in plenty of hostel rooms shared with other travellers. Many of them Australian. Like Jack – Jack the Australian.
"Running of the bulls. Heard of it, mate?" Both you and Manu had shrugged. "It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done," said Jack. "Scarier than that time I killed a snake with my bare hands."
"That tree snake?" you asked.
"It was dark, and I didn’t know it was a tree snake."
Manu was always up for a new adventure. That’s what you loved about him in the beginning. The way he showed up at your flat on a Saturday, the borrowed tent and sleeping bags in the boot. The Post-it notes inside your university library books. The bad poetry. The drunken karaoke. The day you met his mama.
"You are from Christchurch?"
"Yes, Mama."
"And your father? Where is he from?"
"Rarotonga," you said. "He came over to study and play rugby. But he got an injury at work and couldn’t play rugby anymore."
"And your mother? Where is she?:
"Divorced. Dad brought me up. It’s just me and him." Mama frowned and then raised a bowl to your face.
"Chop suey?"
You don’t know why it surprised you that Manu hadn’t told her you were vegetarian. You left the pork belly pieces from the chop suey on your plate, and later you heard them being scraped from the plate into the rubbish bag. This, you tell yourself, is why his mama hated you.
Still, Manu had chutzpah. At least in the beginning. "Come on, babes," he’d said. "It’s not like we have to run with them. We’ll be safe in the stands. They can’t get us from there. They won’t even see us. They probably wear blinkers."
That last bit horrified you. No, you told him. Fuck no.
But as you both lay in your private budget-hotel bed, his fingers crawling over your bare thighs, his breath on your face, his tongue sliding down the side of your neck, you relented. And hand in hand you walked to Las Ventas, your jandals slapping the burning concrete. You joined the throng of tourists, whose sunburnt cheeks and fanny packs gave them away. You climbed those concrete steps to your seats in the Heavens and you peered through plastic binoculars you wished you’d left behind.
And that’s when you first saw him. José. The matador.
The only thing that protected him from the charging bull was his cape, a flimsy piece of fabric versus a human-killing animal. He didn’t even have a horse he could ride away on like the picadors. It shocked you that it excited you to be this close to death. To know that this man, this mere mortal man, could die in front of you. You didn’t think twice about your attraction to him, and the thought of stripping off his bravado and having his vulnerability exposed to you, just you, even for that one night, excited you even more.
"He’s a what?" your dad would ask. "A matador, Dad."
"A matador?"
"Yes, Dad. He’s an athlete. A professional athlete. Like an All Black but more dangerous."
"He kills innocent animals for a living?"
"Dad?"
"Yes, daughter?"
"You worked at the freezing works, or did you forget?"
That evening after the bullfights, while you and Manu sat in the bar across the road from your cheap hotel – him sinking a jug of beer, you a jug of sangria – you spotted him, José, sitting on one of the stools. The rage inside your gut, which churned like hot chilli when you spotted the young groupies with him, caught you off guard. You couldn’t hear him from your table, but you could see him, and he was as animated in that bar as he was in the bullring. He laughed openly, unselfconsciously, from the belly in a way that reminded you of home. Your aunties and uncles and cousins. Your dad. You craved a piece of that homeliness.
Manu went to the bar for another round of drinks. You tried to be discreet, but José had noticed you noticing him, and by the time he crossed the room to say a friendly ‘hola’, you’d already decided what you wanted to do. The next day, you turned up at the hotel room you shared with Manu, packed your backpack, and moved into the hostel.
*
The crowd in the stadium roars, filling your head like expanding foam. The sight of the bullfighters still amuses you. Manly. Masculine. Macho. Pink – pink and yellow capes, pink socks with flats, flats with gold buckles.
It sickens you to watch these fights, but it thrills you to see your man on the battlefield. It thrills you to watch the crowd work themselves up. You think of Roman gladiators and Russell Crowe.
They release the bull. You know by now that the first few victims are the runts. At that first bullfight, you were shocked by the size of the first bull you saw and you fretted over the safety of the picador, who circled the bullring on horseback, armed only with a single lance. But after being prodded and teased for many agonising minutes, the bull’s charges becoming less frantic and its reactions more relenting, it was finally put out of its misery, and by the time the next bull had entered the pit, your allegiance had shifted.
The bull stamps across the ring, urged on by the picador. It’s poked and it’s aggravated and when it charges at the bullfighter, you’re pleased that it does. You hope that the bullfighter will fall off his horse, trip over his flats, rip the frills on his blouse. When he jumps behind one of the safety barriers, you simmer at the unfairness. You want to run down to the ring and shove him back in, tell him to pick on someone his own size, like an average-sized woman.
"Olé!" screams the crowd.
You peer down at the other halves, owning the stadium like footballers’ wives. From the back they seem uninterested, with their sweatless, taut bodies and unfrizzable hairdos. You look over at her. You’ve seen her face only twice. Once in a photograph on his bedside table and then last week while you waited in line to get in. She sashayed past as if you were part of the souvenir stand.
The picador prods the bull with his pica, eventually thrusting it with enough force to pierce the back of the bull’s neck. A second pica is stabbed into its back. They waggle like your acupuncture needles. Again the bull charges, but slower this time, as the picador jumps another barrier.
One of the matadors runs into the ring, flapping his cape to distract the bull. You watch in horror as the bull rushes for it, knowing the bullfighter will step aside. When he throws the cape, it gets caught in the bull’s horns, blocking the bull’s sight as it loses its bearings.
"Olé!"
The bull slows down. When the matador stabs his sword between its shoulder blades, the bull digs its hooves into the dirt. It pushes its haunches out and suspends its front legs in the air. You’re close enough to hear its cries. The noise punches you in the throat and your body lurches.
The bullfighter spurs on the crowd like a rock star, circling the ring and striking the air with his fist. The crowd takes the bait. The energy in the arena is heightened by their cheering, their desperation to witness more death. The bull, barely conscious, struggles to stand as the matador prances around its disabled form. With one final heave, the bull collapses. It lies in the pit and dies.
"Olé!"
The first three rounds of fights are grisly enough, but you know they will only get worse from here, and you’ve witnessed the slaughtering of two bulls already. You’ve witnessed the slaughtering of two bulls.
You know José is next and the thought of him in his finery excites you. The way he glitters reminds you of the mirror ball in the bar the night you met. When Manu came back with the drinks, José was showing you a scar on his forearm from the time he nearly got killed.
"Hola," he said when he saw Manu hovering. "José." He offered his hand and Manu took it. In the fragmented light from the mirror ball, you caught glimpses of the whites in their knuckles. Their eyes were locked and you were encouraged by this. You could tell by the way José had reached out to you that affections like this were normal. This is what you remembered when you fought with Manu when he wanted to leave. You remembered this when you went home with José.
*
José struts to the centre of the bullring. The crowd’s reaction pleases you. As expected, he turns your way.
He raises his hand to his lips, then waves his open palm at you, inducing another cheer from the crowd, which makes you blush and hold your breath as you watch his invisible kiss float high above the heads of the men, the women, the wives, the girlfriends – her. You reach out to catch it and through splayed fingers you watch as he stares at you, his kiss now trapped between your fingertips, and at that instant you see her put her hand to her face and wave at him, so you do the same, kissing the fingertips of your free hand, blowing gently, letting your breath carry your kiss to him, high above the heads of the men and the women and the wives and the girlfriends and her, and you watch him pluck it from the air, lock it in his fist and stamp his chest with it, so you do the same, pressing your fist with his locked-up kiss against your breast.
The crowd roars one final time as a bull enters the pit. José eyeballs the animal. His back is stiff. His feet are set wide apart. You watch him fan out his cape, attracting the bull’s attention. The bull is bigger than the others you’ve seen that day and you panic even though you know to expect this. You know not to worry about him, but you do. You worry about him as if he were as fragile as that defenceless animal.
The bull kicks one of its hind legs into the dirt, winding itself up like a toy. Dirt particles rise from the ground. José waves his cape, half of the fabric now concealing him from the bull’s stony gaze. He waves the cape to the other side and this time the bull charges.
"Olé!"
The bull thunders towards José, ignoring the cape and the crowd and the cheering. But the horror of man and animal colliding, the sight of José losing his footing, the hard landing on his back, the rubber limbs, the snap of his neck are second to what comes next.
You watch her jump to her feet. You watch her race down the steps towards the bullring. You watch as the bull is hustled out of the ring and you watch her run into the centre of the pit. She drops to her knees. She cradles his head in her lap. And for the first time since you started coming to these bullfights, you scream.
"Plaza de Torros" is taken from one of the year's best books of fiction, the short story collection Beats of the Pa'u by Maria Samuela (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30), available in bookstores nationwide.
Next week's short story is by Auckland writer Michael Morrissey.
