Toro toro toro, p.12
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TORO! TORO! TORO!, page 12

 

TORO! TORO! TORO!
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  When the rhinoceros turned, blinking in the bright sunlight, Paco Machismo stood alone in the center of the arena. His first pass, a media veronica, drew a loud cheer from the spectators, but Paco knew it was a sham. The rhinoceros was a myopic creature and had trouble distinguishing anything other than movement. Although it charged at full speed, executing a successful pass was no more dangerous than standing at the edge of the platform when a train roars through.

  The rhinoceros skidded to a stop and Paco Machismo provoked another charge, and then a third; each pass eliciting a loud “Olé!” Linking passes together in any sort of a sequence was impossible, and Paco worried about what he would do when the time came for close work with the muleta and sword. How do you control an animal that cannot see?

  The entrance of the picadors provided a distraction for Paco and a larger target for the rhino. A horse was something substantial. Draped in their quilted protective pads, they were broad as the back end of a moving van. Unlike the man with the whirling cape, the picador and his mount made no effort to avoid the impact of the berserk animal’s charge. The rhinoceros lifted both padded horse and rider on the tip of his terrible horn and tossed them over the barrera into a crowd of sword-handlers and assorted peons. Before Paco rushed in to make the quite, two more picadors were down, their skinny-legged horses sprawled in the sand like a year’s supply of dog food.

  The rhinoceros looked up from the carnage at the matador flapping his red-and-yellow cape. Paco Machismo advanced to within ten varas of the squinting brute, shouting challenges and insults: “Run, you sow! You barrel-bellied throwback! Run!”

  This was all the encouragement the rhino needed. The grunting beast drove at the man in the gold-embroidered suit, catching el número uno off balance and sending him cartwheeling into the air at the end of a four-foot horn that would be a prize addition to any Arab sheik’s medicine chest.

  Paco lay bleeding in the dirt and watched the rhinoceros rampage across the arena. Pain had yet to penetrate the shock of the tossing and he lay very still and considered his next move. Somehow he had to get back behind the barrera. The horn had torn into his right thigh, snapping the bone above the knee. Using his arms and elbows for traction, the matador began to drag himself, legs trailing uselessly behind, across the packed sand of the arena. Not far away, the rhinoceros detected the movement and lowered his gore-splattered head for another charge.

  The moment la Fabalita saw Paco Machismo go down, she was out from behind the barrera, running across the bullring to assist him. “Cuidado, Fabalita,” the crowd warned. The rhinoceros, distracted by the girl’s waving cape, galloped past el número uno’s prostrate form, storm clouds of dust gathering in his furious wake. Fabalita turned the two-ton animal with an elegant pass called “The Wings of an Angel,” sending him crashing off to the opposite side of the arena.

  “Can you walk?” she called, hurrying over to the fallen matador.

  Paco Machismo lay grimacing at her feet. “I believe the bone is broken,” he said. “I can’t put any weight on it.”

  “Here, let me help you.”

  “No!” Paco pushed away her offered hand and pointed across the bullring. “The rinoceronte! Alerta!”

  Fabalita looked up in time to see the rhinoceros bearing down full charge upon her. She stepped away from the defenseless Paco and performed a sloppy last-minute veronica as the bewildered African import roared snorting past.

  “Hurry,” Fabalita said, taking hold of Paco’s arm. “Put your weight on my shoulder and we can make it to the barrera.”

  “I don’t think so,” Paco Machismo said as he and la Fabalita took their first hobbling steps together. “The rinoceronte is extremely nearsighted; it charges only moving objects. When I was lying still on the ground it left me alone.”

  “Don’t talk. Try and conserve your strength.”

  After driving his horn repeatedly into the toril gate, the rhinoceros backed off and looked around for something less impervious to attack. “Be on guard, Fabalita,” Paco yelled, letting go of the girl’s shoulder and sliding with a groan to the ground at her feet as the rhino charged. The lady matador unfurled her cape and waited, positioning herself for another veronica.

  What should have been a simple maneuver was complicated by an inopportune wind flurry. The cape had not been wetted down and was suddenly unmanageable, filling with air and lifting like a sail over the rhino’s head where it caught on the uplifted horn and jerked free from la Fabalita’s grasp. Disarmed, the girl looked about desperately for a mono to bring another cape, but she and Paco were all alone in the arena, huddled together like survivors on a life raft as the rogue rhinoceros raged in circles around them.

  Doña Carlota Madrigal sat shivering in her black dress in spite of the boiler-room heat which had thousands of spectators fanning furiously with their programs. Venom flowed through her veins like a river of ice. She felt the frozen tendrils encircling her heart. Her eyesight clouded and lengthening shadows spread across her field of vision. She knew darkness would soon engulf her.

  Although the cold mists of death had gathered, the señora was smiling and jubilant. In the darkening arena before her, la Fabalita was at the mercy of a wild rinoceronte. A fitting end for such filth: to die in this mockery of the profession to which her Arturo had brought so much glory. And even if by chance the gypsy puta survived, the roses with their fatal sting awaited her. Carlota Madrigal closed her eyes and accepted the rarest pleasure life can offer: a happy death.

  Behind the barrera, two bullfight managers fussed and fluttered like distraught hens at the prospect of being rendered clientless. Alfredo Gazpacho cursed a cowering banderillero. “Get out there, hombre, and make the quite,” he screamed. “You signed a contract to be in Paco’s caudrilla, now get out there and do your duty or I’ll see that you never work in the corrida again.”

  “You go out if you’re so brave,” the ashen-faced torero said, handing the manager his cape. “I don’t care if I drive a bus for the rest of my life.”

  “To face that monster is suicide,” piped a trembling monosabio.

  “Cowards, all of you!” Gazpacho aimed a final kick at the banderillero’s backside. “You’re not fit to wear the suit of lights, you cheap bag of tripe.”

  Not far away, the empresario Don Pepe paced up and down moaning, “Oh, Fabalita… oh, my future, my fortune… oh, my poor, poor Fabalita…” He wrung his hands like a housefly preening. Deep in his safe-deposit soul Don Pepe was emotionally bankrupt, but any businessman would appreciate what he was going through at the moment.

  “Get down, get down,” Paco Machismo demanded, hauling on la Fabalita’s tasseled pant leg. “Lie down flat; hurry, so he won’t see you.”

  “But I can’t give up and hide in the sand,” the girl protested.

  “It is the only way. What can you do without your cape?”

  Somewhat reluctantly, Fabalita knelt beside Paco. “This is wrong,” she said. “I belong on my feet.”

  Paco grabbed her jacket with both hands and pulled her down on top of him. “Why die for nothing? Now lie still next to me and pretend to be dead. Look—see that horse twitching? The rinoceronte will see it and attack. There, what did I say? Three… four… five times he hits it with the horn.”

  “I pity the poor picador.”

  “He is safe,” Paco said. “He is under the horse.”

  “You were a fool even to take this contract,” Fabalita said. “There is no controlling that animal.”

  “I was drunk with the thought of so much money—borracho con dinero. It stole my senses away. But you took the same risks for nothing, Fabalita.”

  “I acted only to save your life, do you place no value on that?”

  “There is nothing I value more,” Paco said. “That is why my debt to you is beyond measure. Fabalita, listen, should that rinoceronte come our way again, I want you to get beneath me.”

  “What? Never!”

  “Yes, I insist. I owe you my life. My body will protect yours from the horn thrusts.”

  “Paco, no—”

  “Fabalita, I have never seen a woman like you. You excite me more than language can describe. Let this be my way of making love to you. What better place to die could a man wish for than on top of a beautiful woman?”

  “Paco…”

  Paco lifted on his elbows and covered the upper half of her body with his. “Fabalita, mi amor,” he whispered. “Mi corazón…”

  At first, she tried to push him away, but her hands slipped from against his chest and circled slowly up around his neck. Fabalita closed her dark eyes. As their lips met, the sound of galloping hoofbeats grew louder through the reverberating sand.

  Not many blocks from the bullring, two strong-arm stick-up specialists were having a business conference and had to raise their voices above the wild uproar of the crowd. “I don’t know why I keep working with you,” the first thug shouted. “It’s a waste of time to snatch anything you can’t get rid of in a hurry.”

  “You said the same thing the time we grabbed that suitcase full of radio cosas and made fifteen hundred pesetas in less than half an hour.”

  “That was different; you can’t take flowers to a fence.”

  “Who said anything about a fence? With roses like these you have no difficulty finding customers. Those two ricos waiting for a taxi across the street are what we want. Gentlemen who appreciate quality.”

  “We ought to grab that suitcase is what we ought to do. It looks like real pigskin.”

  “Too many people around. One thing at a time, amigo, now watch this. —Hola, señores, I could not help noticing that you are about to embark on a voyage, perhaps—”

  “Sorry, buddy, no hoblay Español.”

  “Oh, you Americano?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, no problem, I spik good engliss. You go now onna treep, yes?”

  “Heading straight to the airport, pal. You got a great little country here and don’t let anybody ever tell you different.”

  “Berry good. Maybe you like buy something nice for the lobbed juans at home, yes?”

  “What’s he selling, Abe?”

  “I don’t know. Whatcha got, buddy?”

  “Rosas. Mira: berry preety, yes?”

  “Not bad.”

  “You name for President Abe Leancone, yes?”

  “How much?”

  “Dígame?”

  “How much for the flowers?”

  “Only five hundred pesetas, senor. Berry chip, yes?”

  “I’ll give you three fifty, not a penny more.”

  “Tree hunner an feefty? Okay, cómo no? We make a deal, yes?”

  “Sure, buddy, it’s a deal. Pay the man, Marty, all I got is traveler’s checks. Lulu loves flowers, she’ll just die when she gets these.”

  Each time the rhinoceros drove his lancelike horn into the belly of the dead horse, the outcry from the crowd grew louder until it seemed the human voice was incapable of such a sound. But when Paco Machismo, trailing blood across the sand, pulled the lovely Fabalita into a passionate embrace before the astonished eyes of two hundred thousand fans, the wail of outrage and pain which arose was something altogether inhuman.

  Lucky Sam Wo spoke in a whisper in spite of the din. Paco Machismo’s manager had to bend down to within a centimeter of his lips in order to hear: “Will you guarantee expenses?”

  “Guarantee what?” Gazpacho demanded.

  “Only Mototoro can save them now,” the Chinese inventor said, “but I must look after my own investment as well.”

  “The machine, of course, why didn’t I think of it? I’ll pay anything it’s worth, but hurry, Paco’s hurt, this may be his last chance.”

  Lucky Sam reached into his pocket for the control unit and pressed a sequence of buttons. An instant later, the heavy wooden planks of the toril gate disintegrated as if they were no more than a paper hoop and Mototoro rumbled into the arena like the Red Ball Express. The sound of his entrance was lost in the general tempest. Unalarmed, the rhinoceros poked and prodded among the bunched intestines of a dead horse.

  Charging with Euclidian precision, Mototoro streaked across the diameter of the bullring. At the last minute, the rhinoceros raised his head, standing his ground as the determined machine drove headlong into his midsection. Grunting and squealing, the big animal dropped to his knees, scrambling free as the robot slashed and stabbed.

  Mototoro circled to one side as the rhinoceros got back on his feet, bleeding copiously from the wounds in his flank. Although badly hurt, the African giant still outweighed his mechanical adversary by several hundred kilos. This statistic was not lost on Mototoro, and the four-legged data processor kept a wary camera lens focused on the lumbering rhino. At a point midway between the two circling combatants, la Fabalita and Paco Machismo lay French-kissing in the sand, oblivious to their predicament and the insane screaming of the crowd.

  The rhinoceros initiated the attack, stumbling forward and feinting with his large horn, until Mototoro moved in for the kill. But the wily rhino anticipated the first thrust, parrying like a swordsman and sidestepping with unexpected agility. The robot was thrown off balance, skidding awkwardly in a confused effort to get away as the rhinoceros hammered against his sheet-metal bodywork. Again and again the four-foot horn found its mark with a gonglike resonance.

  Behind the barrera, the bullfight managers were frantic. “The machine is finished. They’re doomed,” Alfredo Gazpacho wailed. Lucky Sam Wo continued to smile as he tapped out new instructions on his pocket-sized control unit. Out in the arena, the entwined figures of the fallen matadors were lost in the swirling dust.

  When the haze settled, a dented Mototoro and a bleeding rhinoceros stood at opposite sides of the bullring. Mammal and machine looked one another in the eye for a moment long enough to suggest real communication, and, as if on signal, they lowered their weaponry like knights at a tournament and began to charge. They met head to head at the center of the arena with the sound of a dozen television sets falling down the stairs. A bright blue ball of electrical fire preceded the actual explosion. Mototoro went off in a burst of space-age pyrotechnics, spraying rhinoburger and spare parts high into the air.

  As the cloud of white smoke lifted, a patch of scorched sand was revealed, along with what little remained to mark the fight of the century: a stray hoof, assorted cogs, oddments of raw meat. Not far from the carnage, Paco Machismo and la Fabalita remained locked in each other’s arms. Neither the robust entrance of the robot nor the subsequent holocaust had disturbed their embrace. Fabalita was reaching into Paco’s gold-embroidered trousers when the men with the stretchers came running up. The photographers were close behind. Life was never the same again for either of them.

 


 

  William Hjortsberg, TORO! TORO! TORO!

 


 

 
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