Toro toro toro, p.3
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TORO! TORO! TORO!, page 3

 

TORO! TORO! TORO!
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  Mercy was the only person who ever used the Machismo library for anything other than shooting billiards or admiring dead meat. She enjoyed looking at books—old books with creepy engravings. In her London apartment, a soundless television flickered unwatched in a corner while Mercy sprawled on the carpet, smoking hash through a rum-filled Turkish hookah, surrounded by magazines, comic books, Agatha Christies, selected pornography and the works of Dickens ( a long-term project ).

  Doing “one-potato, two-potato” along the top shelf, Mercy picked a Greek mythology illustrated with lithographic plates. She sat by the fire, poured out a cup of tea and opened the book on her lap. Chance provided the tale of Zeus abducting Europa. She turned a protective tissue-paper page and studied the picture. The woman with the plump thighs and small breasts didn’t seem at all to mind the attentions of the powerful horned beast standing, black and mountainous, above her. A bull! Mercy Malone was simply goggle-eyed. She gazed up at the mounted trophies around the room and felt a shudder of accelerating delight ascend her spine.

  “Name?”

  “Carlos Carretera.”

  “Age?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Address: none. Occupation?”

  “Matador de toros.”

  The captain rubbed first his eyes, then his mustache, and looked at the disheveled man standing on the other side of the desk. “A dangerous line of work,” he said. On the cardboard admission form he typed no visible means of support. “Is this your identity card?”

  “Yes. The address is my father’s. It will do you no good to contact him.”

  “We already have. He’s never heard of you. Says he has no son.”

  “It is I who no longer have a father.”

  The captain’s expression could not be described as a smile. On the corner of the ink-stained blotter lay his .9 mm Browning automatic. The portraits of his wife and sons across the desk and of the Generalissimo, hanging aslant from the pale green wall above, were placed so that the pistol’s reflection showed in the glass. This was the captain’s favorite trick. The clip in the automatic was empty, unlike the cylinder of the snub-nosed .38 caliber Smith & Wesson police special waiting in the top drawer of the desk. It was surprising how many takers he got. Enough in the past year to earn the captain three unit citations, one signed by the Comandante himself.

  But this prisoner ignored the bait; would not in fact even look at the pistol or its many reflections. The captain continued typing for a space or two on the platen after he finished the form, and when that didn’t work, he bent down and pretended to search for a sheet of escaped carbon paper under the typewriter stand. He heard Carlos Carretera clear his throat but rose to find him rocked back on his heels, staring at the ceiling. “Private!” he called, placing the admission form in a manila folder.

  The man with the tommy gun who appeared in the open doorway had a face so serious that even the sideways, patent-leather hat he wore did not seem foolish. “Sir?”

  “Show the torero the accommodations.”

  “Si, mi capitán.”

  Perhaps the poorest resident in any rural village is the local cobbler. Most villagers cannot afford shoes; often a single pair serves an entire family, coming off the shelf at most twice a year, and only for such important occasions as weddings and funerals. A mother might see all her sons married in the same boots her husband had worn to the altar. There is not much work for a cobbler in such a town.

  When Esmeralda Fabada entered the shop, the old cobbler did not even bother to look up, ignoring the clatter of goat bells hanging on the door. He was busy pasting colored pictures clipped from a National Geographic magazine onto the whitewashed walls. Between the hanging hammers, knives and awls were views of the palace at Knossos, bare-breasted Kikuyu tribeswomen, the Great Wall of China, Polynesians spearing fish by torchlight, a snow leopard crouching, assorted butterflies and tropical beetles.

  The swirl of a pleated skirt interrupted the work at hand. Esmeralda kissed the old cobbler on the cheek. “Buenos días, viejo,” she said.

  The shoemaker showed the girl his new pictures of Venezuela. “Would you like to go to the New World and see butterflies as large as umbrellas?” he asked.

  “Perhaps someday, a tour of the Americas…”

  “Butterflies so big a man could ride on one.”

  “Oh, Uncle, your imagination carries you away with it.”

  “The world is a place of miracles: fish that climb trees, whales heavier than locomotives, birds that fly all the way from Africa each year. These things do not come from the imagination. I have seen fotos. Only the mind of God could imagine such wonders.”

  “I don’t believe in miracles,” the gypsy girl said.

  “And what else is there?”

  “Deeds!”

  The old cobbler placed the glue pot on a shelf. “Then how can I help you?”

  “I need some work done. A pair of slippers.”

  “Muy bien. I must draw the outline of your feet. Here.” He placed a sheet of brown paper on the floor. “Stand here.” His pencil traced the delicate contour of her arch. “Are these to be dancing slippers?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me then, what sort of slippers?”

  “Bullfighting slippers. Zapatillas de torera. Make them without heels as is the custom.”

  The old cobbler looked at the ceiling. “A young girl walks into my shop and asks for bullfighting slippers, and she says she doesn’t believe in miracles.”

  “How much do you charge?”

  “Four hundred pesetas.”

  “I will pay half now.” Esmeralda counted out the coins and stacked them on the workbench. “When will they be ready?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, if you are in a hurry.”

  “It is you who should hurry.”

  “You can have them tonight!”

  “There is more profit in this than pasting pictures on the wall, old man.” The girl turned at the entrance. “I will return at eleven.”

  The slamming door started the string of goat bells jangling with such violence it sounded as if whole herds were stampeding. “That one is fire and wind,” the old cobbler said, holding the map of her feet in his hands.

  Doña Carlota Madrigal lowered her binoculars and covered her ears with her hands. Floor planks trembled underfoot as the tolling noon bell dislodged a cloud of rock doves from the tower’s tracery. The birds whirled out over the graveyard, turning in a single motion like a dark school of airborne fish.

  Below in the churchyard, the solitary mourner was little troubled by the reverberating bells. She lay prostrate, hugging the marble image of Arturo Madrigal, a coil of rolled stocking showing where her skirt was hiked above her plump knee.

  When the echoes died and the doves returned to their nooks in the tower, the sobbing señora gave the statue a final lingering kiss before sitting up to tug at her disheveled clothing and dab her moist eyes. After three consecutive visits, she had this private gravestone dry hump well timed, and knew from experience that late morning was when the cemetery was most often deserted. It was best to take no chances after midday. The crunching approach of footsteps in the gravel reaffirmed her precaution.

  She glanced up at a gaunt, yellow-eyed woman in long black skirts and an embroidered apron, a basket of wild flowers on her arm, field glasses in a leather case by her side. “Por favor,” the woman said, “I bring these few blossoms for my son.” Doña Carlota made the sign of the cross and knelt by the tomb, scattering a handful of petals across the polished effigy.

  The other mourner found it difficult to reply. “Arturo’s… m-madre?” she stammered.

  “Sí. I am Señora Carlota Madrigal.” The tall woman in black rose stiffly to her feet.

  “Ah, señora, your son was every fiber a man.”

  “He was very brave.”

  “Muy hombre. And yet so innocent, still a boy.”

  “You have seen Arturo work the bulls?”

  “Many times. He fought in Sevilla twelve times his second season. Each appearance was a triumph.”

  “Would you like to see some photographs taken that year? My house is not far from the church.”

  “Oh, Señora Madrigal, I would consider it an honor.”

  “I have a cocido on the stove, Arturo’s favorite. When you break bread you are no longer strangers.”

  Don Pepe Bacalao y Piñas hurried across the crowded avenue, a dog-eared copy of Life clamped under his arm. He turned left at the monument to Alfonso VII and continued past the Moorish façade of the poultry market into a district of secondhand shops and winding cobbled streets. Old black-shawled women holding straw baskets piled with asparagus sat on the curb crying mournfully for customers. Numbers of emaciated dogs nosed along the sidewalk, greeting each new smell with a lifted leg.

  At the entrance to a building at one time a cork warehouse but now divided into narrow, squalid apartments hung rows of birdcages, the property of an elderly white-haired barber who operated a small shop on the ground floor. Don Pepe paused in the doorway and called to the man, busy stropping a razor inside. He had to yell to make himself heard above the raucous cries of caged macaws, mynahs, nightingales, meadowlarks, chimney swifts, goatsuckers, thrushes, linnets, canaries, condors, buntings, martins, toucans and lovebirds: “Is the Chinaman at home?”

  “Sí, señor,” the barber answered, not missing a stroke. “Upstairs.”

  Don Pepe’s murmured “Gracias” was lost among the burbling birdsong. “Long live death. Long live death,” a parrot screamed above the uproar.

  The empresario wheezed his way up the steep stone stairs. As a rule the fat old man avoided any exertion, and with good reason, but today he was risking cerebral hemorrhage or worse, for of all his many friends in the city, only his trusted Chinese buddy, Lucky Sam Wo, could help him now.

  Don Pepe had known Lucky Sam for forty-four years, since the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, when the ingenious Oriental first arrived in the country accompanied by a Turkish wife and a Paraguayan passport. From the start they had done business together. Lucky Sam sold the empresario (then operating under the sobriquet Manitos de Oro) a pair of mechanical arms which, inserted through the sleeves of a topcoat, could be made to hold an umbrella or a book and even to turn pages. This device greatly added to Don Pepe’s early fortunes, for while the mechanical hands thumbed a volume of Unamuno on a crowded trolley, the empresario’s own golden fingers were busy in the pockets of his fellow passengers.

  Clearly, Lucky Sam Wo was a genius. Over the years, his inventions had figured in every major crime on the Iberian peninsula and many of his creations were used by the Continental underworld in capers as far away as Poland and Scandinavia. The Black Museum of Scotland Yard had on display no less than nine of the Chinese wonder’s more notable toys, including: a stethoscopelike contrivance that enabled even rank amateurs to dial unknown safe combinations, a magnetic apparatus capable of immobilizing the most sensitive burglar alarm, a revolver disguised as a banana, and a portable printing press, carried in a lady’s hatbox, which converted ten-pound notes into hundred-pound notes at the turn of a crank.

  The door to Wo’s workshop/apartment was partway open and the empresario entered without knocking, experiencing the same rush of innocence and wonder which assaulted him whenever he came here. It was like a return to childhood. Everything was unfamiliar and mysterious. As with most civilized men, the act of switching on an electric light was for Don Pepe a miracle merely taken for granted, but when confronted by this humming, blinking roomful of complex machinery he was properly awed.

  The sounds of a radio broadcast led him through the mechanical labyrinth to a workbench in the rear where he found Lucky Sam probing with a soldering iron among the tangled intestines of a disabled machine. Distracted by the empresarios shadow, the Oriental inventor glanced up through a green plastic eyeshade with visible annoyance, but his frown turned instantly to a grin of pleasure at the sight of his old comrade. “Hola, Pepito,” he said. “Como ‘stá, hombre?” Lucky Sam spoke Spanish with a pure Castilian accent completely free of any music-hall singsong. “Come. I have a new creation it will give me great pleasure to show you.” The Chinaman escorted his visitor back through the maze of esoteric appliances to a raised wooden platform on which hulked something monstrous, draped with a canvas drop cloth like a statue before its unveiling. “It is you who are the inspiration for this work, Pepe.”

  “Me?”

  “Cómo no? Remember, two years ago at the San Isidro festival we had a discussion about why the corrida was unacceptable to North Americans? We agreed it wasn’t the violence: Yankees love violence. Look at boxing. Look at American football. American football is the most violent sport in the world. Every year more young men are killed and maimed on the gridiron than in the bullring. Statistics prove this: It is safer to be a matador than a quarterback. And yet, Americans love football and hate the corrida. Why? Because of the bull. The bull suffers and is killed. Yankees are very sensitive about animals. They have beauty shops for their dogs. Societies keep you from beating your horse.”

  “Claro. I would rather be a poodle in the United States than a black man.”

  “Eso, es, Pepe, yet look at the number of Yankee tourists who go to bullfights. If only the bull wasn’t hurt there would be a great audience for the corrida in the United States. Millions could be made. However, without the moment of truth there is nothing, an empty spectacle. The problem was, how to keep the moment of truth, the danger and violence, and at the same time not harm the bull.”

  “And what was your solution, Sammy?”

  “Mira.” Lucky Sam Wo yanked away the canvas dropcloth and revealed his remarkable invention. The head was very much that of a bull; small, staring eyes, a wide pair of curved, gleaming horns, flared nostrils that seemed almost to breathe; but the rest of the body was clearly a machine: a taurine robot. Cog wheels, gears, and cables connected to tubular steel; ganglionic complexes of wires, transistors, circuitry and switches took the place of vital organs; oil glistened on ball bearings and cams.

  “Of course,” Sam Wo said, “when the padded muscles are attached and the hide sewn in place, it will look just like the real thing. The machine carries its own computer. No live bull is as brave. It is programmed to charge straight and true. And when the sword is inserted in the neck it strikes a cutoff switch and the machine drops in its tracks.”

  “Estupendo!” The empresario clapped his hands three times for emphasis.

  “I have achieved verisimilitude. Inside, a plastic bladder filled with red liquid enables the beast to vomit blood when wounded. Tubes lead to the shoulders and neck so the pic and banderillas will also draw blood. The liquid is my own formula and very realistic. Not even a surgeon could tell it from the genuine article.”

  “You are amazing, Sam, truly.”

  “The best part about my invention is its economy. Now the ring management will be able to use the same bull over and over again.”

  “I cannot find words to describe my admiration. I am speechless, amigo.” The words which Don Pepe really couldn’t find were the ones which would politely change the subject. While Lucky Sam Wo pressed a series of buttons, causing his robot bull to raise and lower its head, paw the ground, and moo (with the volume raised it became a bellow, but the neighbors complained), the empresario grunted with appreciation, looking for a way out. “Fantástico… magnífico… eh, maravilloso! Sam, I would not believe it if I were not seeing it with my own eyes. It is a wonder. I know of no one else, living or dead, not Westinghouse, not Faraday, not even the great Edison himself, who can rival your achievements; and that is why, Sam, I come to you for help.”

  Sam Wo switched off the wagging tail. “What sort of help do you need, Pepito?”

  “I will explain. Two days ago, Sevillano Chico was hurt in a car crash and the arena management have come to me for a replacement. My problem is that I have only Chicote under contract at the moment. He fought last Sunday and was disastrous; another appearance against these big bulls here in the capital would finish him for good.”

  “A simple matter, Pepe,” Sam Wo said. “We can rig a hollow banderilla to operate like a syringe. Ten thousand ccs of sodium pentothal should do the trick.”

  “No. Drugs are no good. The officials would know in a minute something was wrong. I have a better idea.”

  “Ah, then why come to me, Pepe?” The Chinaman shrugged.

  “Because only your genius can make it work. Here, look at this.” Don Pepe opened the copy of Life to a well-marked spot; a two-page spread in the science section with photos of a Yale University professor facing a fighting bull alone in the arena. The professor looked particularly vulnerable in his gray businessman’s suit. The bull, a Miura, stood transfixed less than twenty feet away. The article dealt with the psychosurgical control of violent behavior. Electrodes had been implanted in the bull’s brain and the professor could immobilize the animal in mid-charge merely by pressing a button on his radio transmitter.

  “Yes, José Delgado,” Lucky Sam Wo said. “I’ve read of his work in ESB technology.”

  “Well?” Don Pepe was impatient. “Can you do it?”

  “Can I do what?”

  “Can you build one of those little things like he’s got?”

  “Of course, it’s a simple matter; a few transistors, some electrodes—nothing to it.”

  “What about sticking it in the brain, can you do that?”

 
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