3rd Place Winner of CWA’s First Chapter Contest - “Last Sunset in San Miguel”

By Rita Dragonette

 

PLAZA DE TOROS, SAN MIGUEL de ALLENDE, MEXICO 2012

We were ten rows up, dead center, with the best view of the entire ring.

“You’re finally going to see a real live bullfight,” Rob said, squeezing my hand until I felt my fingers tight against my new gold ring. “I’m glad it makes you so happy, Rachel. You look thirty years younger. Like a girl.”

I squeezed back. The expats are right, I thought; in San Miguel anything can be possible.

A white handkerchief dropped to signal the start of festivities; the music rose. I whispered the exotic word, paseíllo, parade, as a trail of gloriously attired matadors entered the ring wearing glittering jackets accented with shocking pink, lime green, or lavender satin that matched the side stripes on their alluringly tight pants. As they moved past us, the sunlight articulated each shimmering thread in their brocade like the facets of diamonds. I smiled; reading the phrase “suits of light” as a young girl, I’d visualized them as actually emitting rays.

Short of me in a lace mantilla holding a fan, the day was everything I’d ever imagined.

With a trumpet blast, the gate burst open, and the first bull ran into the ring, skidding to a stop directly in my sight line. I unclasped my hand from Rob’s and clapped with joy, shouting along with every ¡Eje! and ¡A-ha toro! as the banderilleros whirled their fuchsia-and-yellow capes in front of the bull.

But when the lime matador arrived, swinging his cape about the bull in elaborate verónicas, the beast only lunged indifferently. The matador made barely a gesture of a side-step. They repeated the moves a half-dozen, half-hearted times. Could this be proper? The bull wasn’t even winded when two picadors entered the ring on horseback, lances held high, daring it to charge before plunging the long

blades into its hump of neck muscle. The banderilleros dashed back to take over again, efficiently planting their colorful banderilla darts into the same place in the bull’s neck.

The matador moved in with his red muleta cape and the fateful sword. 

Yes. This was the part I was most looking forward to: la hora de verdad, the moment of truth, when, surely, the fight would slow and there would be time for real peril and swash.

The bull lowered its head, then charged.

I grabbed Rob’s hand again and hung on hard.

The bull and matador performed a series of passes—some charging, some diverting—and the sword was sunk. The matador stepped back and the banderilleros distracted the staggering bull until its front knees buckled. One of them slipped his puntilla knife into the back of the bull’s head for the coup de grâce. And it was over. 

I dropped my hand from Rob’s but was too stunned to clap.

Rob gathered his things to leave. “Not exactly what you thought it would be, was it?”

“No,” I whispered, watching the matador stride out of the ring. “It seemed so fast. I thought there’d be more . . . ceremony . . . some romance.”

“I warned you.”

He checked his phone and pointed to a message for me from Paul, our executive vice president, since I’d left mine at the hotel. Because who brings a phone to a bullfight? Let alone a honeymoon? Even a working honeymoon. I reached for my bag.

“You must not go so soon,” said the gray-haired, slightly stooped Mexican woman next to me. “You have not yet learned anything.”

“About what? This?” Rob waved his phone at the ring. “These guys were nowhere near the bull, never in any real danger. Anyone who knows anything about bullfighting could see it.” He sniffed, offended, as if he were an expert rather than someone who’d read Death in the Afternoon on the plane. He shifted his sweater and water bottle into one hand, gesturing with the other for me to rise and join him. I tugged his sleeve until he sat. Paul’s message could wait. I wanted to hear what this woman had to say.

“You must put yourself into the mind of the bull,” she continued. “Imagine it. Up until now he has had a perfect life: all the food he wants, acres of grass to run free.” She raised her painted eyebrows provocatively. “Plenty of cows to service.

“Then today, they shove him into a truck and force him down a narrow tunnel. Voices are screaming and that loud music is playing. He is pushed out a gate. People and horses are coming at him, yelling and prodding. He does not know it is all to get him to charge so he can be killed. He does not know he is part of a historic ritual.” She shook her head sadly. “There is so much he does not know.”

Rob snickered and began to page through the program. “You realize there are five bulls yet to go, don’t you, Rachel? We have an appointment with the realtor at four and we aren’t going be down here long enough to reschedule.”

He’d made the appointment to humor me. I wanted to find a place here in San Miguel for a winter home, then something more permanent once he sold the company and we could both retire. Soon, I hoped.

“Are you an aficionada?” I asked the woman.

 “I suppose you could say that,” she answered, her mouth opening into a yellow smile. “I once also thought bullfighting was romantic,” her shrug admitting she’d been eavesdropping. “I admired the fierce dedication of the matadors. I read a book about it long ago.” She gave me a sly look. “I wanted to live my life all the way up—”

 “Like a bullfighter.” I finished the famous Hemingway quote that had primed my adolescent fantasy for a brave life filled with challenge and adventure.

“But I have changed a great deal in the twenty years I have lived here. Now it is the bulls I learn from. I am here every day they come.”

Her cadence was Mexican, but I saw now she was actually a gringa, somewhere in her late seventies. She had frizzled hair overbleached by the sun, and cleavage burnt to the leathery sheen of reptile skin, partly camouflaged by a massive silver necklace.

“Sylvia,” she said after I introduced myself, pressing her necklace against her heart instead of shaking my outstretched hand. She was a little witchy, but I was intrigued.

The band rose with a horn-heavy call screeching into key as the next bull exploded out the gate. The pink matador reigned over this fight.

 “These guys are pathetic,” Rob said.

“But look,” Sylvia said. “The bull is angry, so he will continue to charge, which is the point at this stage. The picadors have thrown their lances and now it is again the turn of the banderilleros. They
must get close enough to stab the bull to weaken the neck, so the sword of the matador can be thrust right into the heart and kill in a single stroke.”

“A single stroke?” I asked. “That’s not what happened with the first bull.”

“No,” she said. “It does take a very skilled matador. Many times they have to wait until the bull is ready, when the front legs give way, and it lies down. See . . .” She pointed. “Almost down but still sitting. The bull must be flat before they can end it. This is the part that is hard to watch.”  

The banderilleros leapt around the bull, waving their arms as it tried to hold up its heavy head, fighting for its life. Finally, it dropped, exhaling blood bubbles. The matador stood motionless as the knife went into the kill spot, then stalked away as if he, too, were disappointed.

The sun lowered with each bull, changing from yellow to gold to saffron. The crowd was mostly locals—men in straw fedoras sitting in buddy groups with their cervezas, chewing on cigars they’d light, puff, and snuff out, over and over to make them last through the fight. Colorfully dressed women beckoned the teenage boys hawking gnarled spikes of dry cayenne from trays looped around their necks.

Rob tried one but spit it out and had to finish off his water.

“This last bloody part seems to take longer with each bull,” I said after the fourth.

 “It depends on how long before the bull agrees to give up his spirit,” Sylvia answered. “What is important is that it should all be done well. It should not be about suffering, but about what comes before—the thrill and grace of the death dance. Then the quick, respectful ending.”

“I think we’ve had enough,” Rob said as another bull lunged out. “You’ve seen what you came for. Now it’s just the same thing over and over, and they sure as hell aren’t getting any better.” He
stretched his arms wide, puffing out his chest. “You know I can’t stand watching sports that aren’t played properly.”

I felt Sylvia stiffen at the word “sports.”

 But I couldn’t look away. There was something different about this next bull. He ran from the gate then halted, head cocked, staring at the banderilleros with an astonished expression I swore I understood.

When he charged, first toward one figure, then another, it seemed he was after something beyond, moving in a definite line to a place near the ring wall. The banderilleros rushed at him, trying to get him to go back deeper into the ring. He’d charge forward, then return to his spot, even when they swirled their capes closer and closer, even when they yelled “¡A-ha toro!” and “Mira, mira, mira,” look, look, look. Even when the lavender matador performed his verónicas.  He barely reacted when his neck became mottled with banderillas, their brightly colored papers spraying his blood further with every snap against the air. He didn’t even try to shake off the barbs. He stayed in the center of the ring only when the picadors rode up stabbing one . . . two . . . three times.

Then he ran back to his place near the wall, where he pawed the ground before turning back to face us all. Raising his head high above his ravaged neck he snorted, then became still as a stone, ready, I somehow knew, to stand there forever. 

“He has found his querencia,” Sylvia said. 

“Querencia?” I asked.

“The place in the ring where the bull feels safe, where he thinks he has won. Make it last, Big One,” she said with affection. “See? Even the banderilleros are giving him time.”

The Big One basked, magnificent in the afternoon sun. He seemed almost to smile.

But soon they returned, luring him back to the center to receive their sharp weapons. He dashed one way, then another. He tried to get back to his querencia, but the matador headed him off, dancing around him with flashy footwork and spiraling silk so the sun sparked off the facets of the suit of light and into his eyes.

Finally, he charged, chasing the elusive flash of fabric until the matador thrust the blade.

The banderilleros moved in as he swayed, flapping their capes so he’d turn his head from side to side and the embedded sword could belatedly do its job, nicking the aorta to end it all. He reeled, belching short howls of fury.

 Lie back, I wanted to signal. Give in to the relief of the dagger. I had raised a hand; around the other was the hot, wet grasp of Sylvia’s.

We stayed clenched together as the blood ran out of him. As our hands cooled. As our tears dried.

“That’s it,” Rob announced as he stood. He angled his head toward Sylvia. “Though I’m sure she’ll want to hang in through the last bull.”

“Not today,” she said. “Yes, they were terrible matadors. Though these days even the good ones rarely hit the heart.”

“Then why do you continue to come?” I asked.

“For the promise of la querencia. For most bulls, it does not happen.” She stood and took my arm. “Walk me out.”

We headed from the ring, Rob trailing behind us, tramping his feet in frustration at our pace. I heard phone keys, then his voice. “Not long, Paul. Back Tuesday . . . Awful, as predicted . . . Out of her system.”

We exited just as the body of the last bull, my bull, was dragged by a chain then hooked up to a truck hoist and raised high, his underside obscenely exposed.

“They say the meat goes to the poor,” Rob said, as if that excused it. I wondered if my bull’s dying rage would make the meat taste sharp or sour, and if the poor would notice or care.

Sylvia pulled me forward. “This does not matter,” she said. “You have seen la querencia.”

“La querencia,” I repeated. “I wonder if it’s fair, allowing the bull to feel he has a chance for a different ending.”

“No, No. It is a sweet time,” she said. “It is the best time of his life. You could see he felt the power.”  

“Yes,” I said. “He didn’t know it was only for a moment.”

LA QUERENCIA BAR, SAN MIGUEL de ALLENDE, MEXICO 2015

I’ve become suspicious of people who feel they’ve found the secret to life and want to share. I don’t begrudge them their euphoria but no longer want to be around for the letdown. It’s like falling in love; it feels special for a time before it reveals itself as exactly the same as so many things you’ve already done.

San Miguel was full of people like this. It was the only thing I didn’t love about the place.

So, when I heard via the expat underground that Rob, my ex-husband, was back in town as part of what he was calling a “journey of self-enlightenment,” it really was the limit. The world was full of charming little sanctuaries he could have chosen that weren’t the one I’d claimed as my own.

He knew better. I’d made it clear.

I hadn’t seen him in nearly three years, though I’d heard his latest girlfriend, the one who called herself a shaman, had also left him. I would bet this foray into inner knowledge, reportedly fueled by ayahuasca—a hallucinogenic of all things—was an attempt to get her back, but why was he here?

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted that I wasn’t his first stop, or even his tenth. According to the chatter, he’d been sighted everywhere . . . except the bullring.

Still, he managed to take me by surprise when he finally appeared one day, about an hour before opening.

 “What are you doing in my bar, Rob?” I pulled my peasant dress so the bodice became tighter.  Had I known this was the day he’d show up, I would have worn something with more fit and less flow—the turquoise sheath, maybe. Yes, that would have done it.

He was dressed head-to-toe in white and grinned at me, crinkling those blue eyes just so, giving that flip he did to throw back his still-full head of hair, confident as ever in his appeal.

“Rachel.” He put his arms out for a hug, only to quickly back away and settle an elbow on the bar. “Whoa. Is that expression a welcome or a warning?”

“We’ll see,” I said, glad my wit was with me. I motioned for Juval to bring two club sodas, one with a splash of lemon, one with a finger of raicilla, the earthy agave spirit I preferred to tequila.

“Relax, Rachel. I’m just passing through. I’ve been traveling a lot this year and the company can’t run itself, as you know. But when I heard you came back down here and bought this place, I had to see it.”

I wondered who had told him––the one I’d have to strangle.

He gave the room a quick once-over. “So, you did it. You didn’t need me after all. La Querencia. You were right. It’s a great name for a bar.” He laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I said, resting a hand over Sylvia’s silver necklace.

“It’s just too perfect,” he said. “You’re a barkeep. They’re the best listeners in the world. You said you wanted to get away from it all, but you’ve created the perfect place to continue to tell people what to do.”