My mother was overdressed for a bullfight. So were we. She had on this A-line, chocolate-brown dress that matched her hair, and one inch heels in the same color. My father had given it to her that morning at the nervous hospital before she checked out. We had been to fetch her. She wanted to be with us.
I was going to see my first bullfight in Pamplona with my mother. I knew it was a strange thing for a girl to want to see, because my mother said so. I wanted to see the red cape twirl in the air. I wanted to see the bull scratch his foot on the ground.
On the way to the arena my father took off his white suit jacket. He laid it carefully across the backseat of the taxicab. He put his arm around my mother. He played with one of her gold earrings, tracing the outline of the hoop. I pulled on my gray sweater. I wanted to take it off. My father just turned his head from side to side, in an exaggerated “No” at me. I stopped fussing but it made me mad. I just looked down at my brother’s white buck shoes.
My mother was petite. She looked fragile. Her hair was different, as if she had chopped it off in a fit of anger, and one of the nurses had tried to make it look right again. Still, she was beautiful. My father rolled the window of the back seat down for us. My brother hung his head down a little, and then leaned it out of the window.
He was the only one sensibly dressed. Frank looked up in the sky, and at what the birds were doing. He wore a thin linen shirt and some cotton pants. My mother didn’t care if he wore a dress jacket. He was too small to be noticed yet. I was younger, but I was a girl. Girls got judged more. I was supposed to look nice and put my hands in my lap as if I was getting ready to pray. I sat with my hands in my lap, wishing I could hang my head out the window.
My father told me about a time before we were born, when my parents had seen a toreador gored and then flung into the air. He fell back onto the edge of the ring. “Good for the bull,” my mother had said. He remembered that. That she had rooted for the bull.
My mother described the bull as if it were a person to us. It was big, brown, fierce and sincere. My father told us he liked that bull because it didn’t take anything from anybody. My father said he wanted Frank to be like that. My mother believed if the toreador had hit the bull it wouldn’t have budged an inch. The bull was big. She liked that. And she touched my father’s chest with the palm of her hand across the front seat, where he had turned to talk to the three of us.
I was the one who would be stout and big like my father, bending to light one of my mother’s cigarettes. My face was good, but I would be a fleshy girl. She put her hand on my head and her Girard Perregaux watch stuck in my hair. My father tried to help and it just got worse. My mother left the watch on my head and Frank pulled the hair, separating it into little strands. My mother had nervous hands.
Frank’s real name was Frances. For the saint. But my dad said it was a sissy name. Only my mother could call him that without being corrected by him. I pressed my fingertips on Frank’s wrist, and his hand closed over the top of mine. It was noisy and hot getting out of the cab.
My father argued with the driver that he had parked too far away from the street where people ran with the bull. The driver told him the stadium would be very congested if we waited and ran with the bull. My father wouldn’t pay unless we were closer. He wove through a side street and put us within half a block of the beginning of the run. My father gave him a tip that was big enough to make him stop resenting this inconvenience.
We weren’t rich but we looked it. My parents were young enough to see that the future was a ways away, and they had time to prove themselves to the world. My mother stayed with our grandmother. My father stayed in his barracks. There was money for frivolous things.
People were all over, laughing and talking and bumping into each other. Two horsemen, in all their bright colors and feathers, suddenly burst into the middle of the ring at a gallop. They turned in opposite directions and galloped round the arena on each side. When their paths crossed, my parents and Frank gave a loud Ooh! but the horses didn’t run into each other.
I worried about the bullfighter as we sat down in our seats. I thought that if he could fly into the sky at the whim of the bull, we might not see him. His gold ornate costume was the color of the sun. He could fly toward the sun and then crash down on my mother and crush her. Her heart could explode like a star going nova.
My mother kept waving her small fist in the air. The three of them were shouting. Even Frank. My father pounded his fists on the side of the wood bench, vibrating my legs. This wasn’t the glamorous matador twirling in his magical red cape. The toreador took advantage, waving the red and yellow cloth and then running away. The clowns ran in and pushed sharp sticks in the bull’s back, and then they ran away.
It wasn’t a fair fight. It wasn’t a dance. It was just some men who were ganging up on an animal. I looked at Frank’s shoes for comfort. I closed my eyes and decided to think of a different day. I thought of the day that I decided I wanted to see a bullfight. It was the week of Las Fallas and we had gone to Valencia. There toilets are unnecessary, from the look of the streets, and the children are violent. Looking back on it, I think now that no one there understood the danger of life.
People spent all year long building these cardboard statues up to thirty feet in the air, and then they burnt them for everyone to see. We saw a sculpture of four muscular horses. I was sure it would fall into pieces, and that one of the tails would fall, burning horribly into the crazy crowd.
One of the children ran up to Frank and put a firecracker in his hand. They lit it, and it exploded just above his head as he threw it. Wild-eyed older people were pouring gasoline on everything in sight. The crowd was impatient for fire then, like the stadium people wanted to see the bulls’ blood now.
I was on my father’s shoulders. I could see everything. Someone lit a hanging line of sparkling poppers that strung across the plaza and ended on a gasoline-soaked paper. It burned quickly and spread and sparks fell on the crowd. We were pushed back by the earnest spray of the firemen’s hose, the way people were pressing against me now, in the bullfight stadium.
Occasionally the fire would ignite a pinwheel and sparks of white would start anew. A pinwheel flew loose and spun off horizontally, and bounded on like a mad short-hop ball. I thought of all the flames because they were pretty. Not like this. Then suddenly I was with them again when Frank threw an arm around me. I turned my face into his chest, but I never opened my eyes.
My father was angry with me when he saw me hiding. He told me to look. The toreador moved his cape and watched the way the bull changed angles and turned his horns. The scene was making me dizzy. I was seasick from the moving bodies around me. I closed my eyes. My father pulled at my shoulder. He wanted me to look at it. He said it was beautiful. My insides got sick. His arm was heavy on my shoulder, and the bull was already wounded.
We ran with the bull earlier. I lost my bolo hat. My mother bought it for me at a booth, in the open market near Corte Ingles. It was in a window of a shop that was off a small pedestrian street near a café. She let me run loose with Frank to look at things. She watched me to see what excited me. She always figured out our hearts. I loved that hat. It made me feel strong like my father.
My mother drank her glass of wine and she took her pills with it. Before the pills my mother got really bad sometimes. My father cried in front of us. After I turned five though, he didn’t want us to cry anymore. Frank never cried. Sometimes he used to when my mother cursed my father from her hospital bed. There was a war and my father was building helicopters for it. People were dying. He was killing children. It frightened me and Frank.
My father finished his fairly expensive table wine by himself as my mother watched us shop. When we wandered back, she had Frank sit in her place, on one of the white ice cream table chairs next to my father. My father looked funny in the curly-q wrought-iron chair.
My father’s legs sprawled out underneath the table. His feet were below ours under the chair. Frank’s hung down not touching anything; the tips of my toes touched the ground. They rested there. Then my father got up and covered our eyes with his big hands. My mother put my hat on my head. She handed Frank the pocketknife he wanted.
I lost the black hat she gave me, while we ran into the arena. My father made sure the bull and most of the people had gone ahead before he let us run. While we ran, the bead holding the ties underneath slipped out. It flew up and out behind me. The hat had little tassels all around it like the ones male dancers sometimes wore. I begged for it. I wanted it.
My father said that it was a hat for a boy. My mother said let her have what she wants. She tied that hat under my chin. She told me it fit perfectly. She said that God meant me to have that hat. She kissed my cheeks. Then she let me and Frank kiss her on her right cheek. We kissed her one at a time, as a sign of respect. My father gave my mother a slap on the thigh. He held her, folding his arms around her crossed ones.
Men at other tables looked at my mother. She had good looks, glamour girl style. If she were taller, she could have just stepped out of the cover of a fashion magazine except for the hair. She didn’t really even need makeup because of her dark eyelashes. My father looked at the other men with pride. He touched my mother’s thigh. It was something for him to have such a wife.
When I got older, I wondered about the music in Spain. It meant something to me. It seemed to be saying something about my mother. As we ran with the bull, I could hear rhythms. They excited me like my father’s loud jazz drumming did. Bits of music floated from shops. The songs came to me as something so quick and so visceral.
Everything was going fast. I wanted to go after my birthday hat. My mother just pushed me forward slightly. You could get trampled underfoot by people if you looked back. She pinched my arm to make me run faster. It made me mad later when I saw the bruise. Frank cleared the way in front of me, his hand stretched out in front of him like a prow.
I felt people’s footsteps vibrating against the ground. The rhythm and vibration went into my legs. We didn’t watch the bull go by. He was ahead of us. But I still think I could hear his four hoofs hit the ground, two at a time. Hitting, silence, and then Hitting. I heard all the crowd noise and then some quick and insistent music with horns that frightened me.
I ran as fast as I could, but my father picked me up in his arms, and ran with me sitting on his shoulders so I could see it all. He told Frank to sprint, and I stopped seeing him for a moment. His head was lost in a crowd of grown peoples’ chests. When we were almost there, my mother got swept up in the crowd ahead of us. A man had lifted her off the ground. He was not as big as my father was, but she still looked small next to him. Her arms hung loosely around his broad shoulders. She moved her feet in a pretend running motion, losing a shoe. She was laughing.
A muscular man who was running along side of her in the street swept up her shoe, running faster to hand it to her. He handed it to her and she laughed again. It sounded like rain. They disappeared into the arena, and my father carried me in his arms, pressed tight to his chest. I could smell his smell, a nice smell of a man and basil. He rubbed the fresh leaves of basil under his arms because my mother liked it. It was mixed on his shirt with the smell of the talc my mother wore.
My father stomped his feet as the bull passed the fighter’s twirling red cape. He made several passes at the bull. Somehow the toreador had flung the bull into the air. The animal’s body rested in my father’s lap as if it were weightless. I saw my mother, impaled through her side, on one of the bull’s horns. She sighed. I watched a perfect drop of blood fall from her lips onto her breast. She brushed Frank’s cheek with one hand. She said, “Wasn’t it funny,” as she curled her hand. She moved her fist in a circle, meaning ironic. Then she died.
I opened my eyes again and looked into the ring. The toreador had taken out his sword. He waited, ready for his kill. My father breathed hard; he leaned in toward the ring. Someone pushed from behind, squashing my stomach toward my knees. Then I lost time. I just faded out of myself, like I do sometimes when things get too upsetting.
I was in my father’s arms. I had fainted from the heat of the crowd. He felt me wiggling. He asked me if I could walk. I was on the ground again. Everything was over. Suddenly we were walking down the street. We must have walked a long way. I didn’t see the arena anymore. I noticed my father smelled a little sour like dried sweat when he put me down. Frank put out his hand and I held it.
All the cabs were nowhere to be seen. How could we have walked so far without my noticing? My father’s face squinched up as he asked my mother who those men were. The one who grabbed her up in the arena. The one carrying the shoe. His face was red. He was really angry. My mother said they were strangers.
I remember how she was brave, and stood up to his anger. I could tell he was going to hit her. He had before. I remember it when I struggle. I am so much older, looking back. Still, I know my father blew bad smoke out of a Robusto he lighted, and that he was smelling like old grapes.
Frank stood between them. My mother smoothed her dress with her hands, touching herself from her waist to her hips. She smiled. Frank asked if we could go home. Frank slipped his hand across my shoulder. He wished me a Happy Birthday. My father looked at my mother. My mother looked at my father.
She bent down and looked in my eyes. She told me for as long as I lived, to remember that once I had a black hat with black tassels that the wind took away. She told me to remember that the wind was so jealous of how I looked in that hat, that it had to sweep it away for itself. She told me the hat was mine forever because I would always know where it was. She told me she was mine too. My father looked at my mother. My mother looked at my father. My father raised his arm. My mother squeezed my hand and smiled at me as my father hailed the white taxi.
Ann Holley is a graduate of the Master’s of Fine Arts program at LSU where she polished this story with the help of professor and writer Moira Crone. It began at California State University Northridge and was dusted off for her thesis. She received her BA from California State University Northridge and her master’s of Fine Arts at Louisiana State University. She was the winner of the Robert Olen Butler award for fiction while studying at LSU and her thesis is housed at LSU main library. This is her first published story. She lives in Baton Rouge with her mate and cats and dogs.
