My Face for the World to See (New York Review Books Classics) by Alfred Hayes

Author:Alfred Hayes [Hayes, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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