Fragile Beasts (41 page)

“Hey, Miss Jack. We wondered where you were,” he says.

“I decided to eat outside this morning.”

“It’s still pretty cold.”

“The cold air is good for me. Don’t you have somewhere to put those?” I ask about the sandwiches.

“Yeah, sure.”

He sets them down on my table and makes his brother turn around so he can unzip his backpack.

“Come on,” Klint says. “We’re gonna be late.”

Luis gives me my toast and fusses around in order to have an excuse to stay and watch me interact with the boys so later he can tell me how I failed to do it correctly.

“Hey, look at this,” Kyle exclaims and pulls a book from his brother’s backpack. “Are you finally reading it?”

It’s the biography of Roberto Clemente I bought Klint for Christmas.

“Put it back. I gotta read a book for my gov class on a famous politician or humanitarian.”

“I thought he was a baseball player,” I comment.

“He was also a great humanitarian,” Kyle informs me. “He had el duende.”

“Possibly,” I say, solely to rankle Luis. “He was Hispanic, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. He was Puerto Rican. So what are you saying? Are you saying gringos can’t have it?”

“Gringos,” Luis repeats with a sharp laugh.

“What’s wrong with saying gringos?”

“It’s not used in Spain except as a joke. It’s a Mexican word.”

“What do Spaniards call people who aren’t Spanish?”

“Unfortunate.”

I try not to smile. He shouldn’t be encouraged.

Kyle returns the book and finishes stuffing the sandwiches into his brother’s backpack.

“Are you going to the game?” he asks me.

I look over at Luis, who widens his eyes at me.

“I don’t think so. Not today. I’m feeling tired.”

“But you just got up,” Luis points out.

“Yes, thank you, Luis, I know. I’ve been feeling tired in general.”

“Well, you gotta come someday,” Kyle says. “You gotta see Klint play. He’s on fire.”

I study the boy. It’s hard to imagine him “on fire.” I see him more as the smoldering remains of a house that’s been burned to the ground.

“Come on,” Klint says again and they head off.

“You should go,” Luis says once they’ve departed. “We have a baseball star living in our house. Don’t you read the papers?”

I pick up the paper again in lieu of an answer and hold it up between my face and his.

“You know I don’t like to go out.”

“You went out a few days ago.”

“To see Bert.”

“That’s different, I know. Nothing would keep you from seeing Bert. Not any kind of phobia.”

“I don’t have a phobia.”

“You have a people phobia.”

“I am not afraid of people. I went to see Bert on a business matter.”

“And that’s why he sends you two dozen yellow roses the next day?”

I put the paper down on the table.

“Oh, please. What do you think went on? We made wild passionate love on his desk?”

“I doubt it could be very wild. Dusty, perhaps.”

“That’s enough,” I snap.

He holds up his hands like he’s surrendering himself to a Wild West sheriff.

“Your love life is none of my business,” he says.

“I don’t have a love life.”

“Speaking of Satan.”

“The expression is, ‘speak of the Devil.’ I’ve told you that thousands of times.”

I turn around in my chair to see what he can possibly be referring to.

Jerry has come out of the barn and is walking toward the Jeep.

“Luis, you are the most infuriating, unfair, resentful, malicious …”

“Ah, see,” he interrupts me, smiling. “There’s some passion. So maybe it’s for Jerry not for Bert.”

“It’s for you,” I cry, heatedly.

Our eyes meet, but only for a moment before we quickly avert our stares out of embarrassment. I’m certain I’m blushing.

“Mornin’, Miss Jack,” Jerry calls across the drive.

“Good morning, Jerry,” I return the greeting, cheerfully. “How are you?”

“Can’t complain. Mornin’, Luis.”

“Good morning, Jerry,” Luis says lightly, clearing away my toast before I have a chance to eat any.

I sigh.

There was a time in the not so distant past when I would have demanded Luis bring back my breakfast. I might have even ordered him into the kitchen to scramble some eggs for me even though I wasn’t hungry.

I don’t have the energy for it anymore. Arguing seems like such a waste of time to me now.

Luis, on the other hand, still actively looks for reasons to fight with me. I don’t hold it against him. He’s at a different stage of life than I am. I celebrated my seventy-seventh birthday several months ago. Eighty is looming on the horizon. Luis is ten years my junior, and I know to young people like Kyle and Klint and Shelby and Starr those years don’t matter at all. To them, we’re just two old people, but to me, those years matter very much.

In the middle of life a decade isn’t as important. A thirty-year-old is very much like a forty-year-old (although you don’t realize this until you’re almost an eighty-year-old). It’s in childhood and old age that the years seem to stretch out endlessly. A twenty-year-old to a ten-year-old is impossibly ancient and a sixty-year-old to a seventy-year-old is enviably young.

This is because time passes more slowly at the beginnings and ends of our lives. As children time is thick and sweet like syrup yet we can’t wait to get older. We enter adulthood and time escapes like water through an open hand. Then it slows again in the twilight years, becoming the congealed consistency of fat skimmed off a stewed chicken, and we have nothing left but to wait for death. It’s not morbid to feel this way. It’s the reality of life. Life ends.

In his latest letter, Rafael wrote about how all people fear death while animals don’t know what it is. I used to fear death, but I don’t anymore. Fear comes from the unknown, but before there can be the unknown there must be the known. Animals never face this dilemma. They’re blessed with the ignorance that comes from living solely by instinct without consciousness.

Lately I feel as though I’m subsiding into a sort of animal clarity. My consciousness has been saturated. I’ve seen the world change too much. I
know
too much.

I find myself not caring at all about the life I’ve led. I’m neither satisfied nor disappointed by it. I’m neither impressed by my accomplishments nor hampered by regrets. I don’t sit around wishing I had taken that trip to Bali or learned to play the piano or returned Ted Kennedy’s call.

My thoughts seem to center almost entirely on my body, on the animal me: I’m tired; I ache; my eyesight is failing; my sense of taste is fading; my hair is falling out; my bladder has spasms and my intestines barely move at all.

In the midst of all this, a wonderful thing has happened; I’ve realized I’ve lived as much as I want to.

Toreros refer to death as
la vieja compañera
, the old friend, because he’s always with them. I’ve come to think of death the same way.

I’m not ready to embrace him yet, but it’s somehow comforting to know he’s waiting for me, especially during moments when I’m not feeling at all well and some morally superior Spaniard has decided to tease me about something that happened forty years ago.

I don’t know exactly what Luis expected of me. That I should have never given myself to anyone ever again since I once belonged to Manuel? That I
should have lived trapped forever in some perverse kind of chastity where I was forced to remain faithful to a ghost?

I wonder what he would have done if I’d been a typical woman, one who would have wanted to marry and have children or with my looks and money, one who wanted to be an unapologetic slut? How would he have dealt with me throwing slews of parties and indulging in countless affairs rather than whiling away one afternoon with a handyman in the barn?

It was a summer day. I wandered into the barn as I had done countless times before. Jerry was pitching hay. He had his shirt off. He was slim but very muscular and slick with sweat.

I was thirty-five. Manuel had been dead for six years, and I still had more than half my life to live. On the surface I was young and beautiful, but my soul was old and my heart was ugly.

I’d been lonely. I’d had sexual longings. I craved companionship. I wanted to be adored and cared for. I wanted to make love again but with only one man. A dead man. I tried but I could never make myself feel any other way.

Jerry and I greeted each other. I commented that he looked hot and asked if I could bring him something cold to drink. He said he had a cooler full of beer. I asked him if I could have one. He looked surprised and a little uncomfortable but he complied with my request.

A beer in a barn on a hot summer day with a stoic, hardworking, sweaty, muscular man who never even graduated from high school and as far as I could tell wasn’t the least bit interested in money and power, or artistic perfection and fulfilling a destiny: what could be less complicated?

It was this simplicity that led to the sex, my realization that for a brief moment in time, I might be able to shut down my thoughts. I might be able to slip outside my emotions and back into my body and only feel with my skin.

I was the one who stood too close to him. I was the one who kissed him. He dropped and spilled his beer. There was a moment where I thought he might be afraid of me or my brother but whatever caused him to hesitate, he quickly pushed it aside.

I wanted to be filled by him. I wanted to be grabbed and hammered. He complied and it felt good, but it didn’t stop me from thinking.

To this day I don’t know how Luis found out. I know Jerry would have never told him. He must have been spying. He probably came looking for me when I didn’t return to the house. We did do it twice.

Afterward, it never crossed my mind that it might happen again. It may have crossed Jerry’s mind. I don’t know. He does spend a lot of time in that barn.

I get up from the table, tighten my scarf around my head, and start off on my walk without telling Luis where I’m going.

Today I begin by heading down the driveway. I don’t feel up to tramping across fields or walking in the woods alone. There are too many things to trip over.

I’ve been meaning to have Luis take me in the Jeep on a search for Ventisco. I haven’t seen him since the day Shelby and I were taking this same walk last September. I think that might have been the day she first asked me about taking in Klint and Kyle.

The bull’s become increasingly adept at hiding and even more resistant to human contact than usual. It took the men five days to find him several weeks ago when it was time for his annual checkup, and he gave them such trouble they didn’t even try to bring him in.

This is also when we usually take sperm to sell to breeders. I’ve never cared much for this practice, but it has made me a tremendous amount of money. This year it’s not going to happen. Maybe it won’t ever happen again.

Ventisco has been the wildest of my bulls. He has no tolerance or use for people. I’ve often wondered how he’d perform in the ring, but then my thoughts always drift to a favorite fantasy where Manuel and Ventisco meet here, alone, in these chilly quiet fields far away from the cheering crowds and blistering sun of a Spanish bullring. In my mind I watch Manuel stride across the green grass, unadorned, with a practice cape draped over his arm. Without crystals, without a cuadrilla, without a sword, he plants his feet and makes a magnificent sweep of the fabric while singing out, “Hey, Toro!” I see Ventisco charge and the two of them dance against the backdrop of the ravaged, smoky hills and I finally know the marriage of my two great loves: a spectacular, doomed Spaniard and my beautiful, poisoned Pennsylvania.

Ventisco’s father, Viajero, was a more sociable bull. I believe this came from the fact that he was such a remarkable physical specimen and, like all extremely attractive creatures, had a compulsion to be admired. I kid you not. I truly believe this animal knew how to pose. I have more photos of Viajero than of my other two bulls put together. I have more photos of Viajero than I do of Cameron’s wedding.

I suppose there’s great irony in the fact that my favorite bull was Calladito, the one who took Manuel’s life, or maybe it makes perfect sense since he was the only one of the three that Manuel knew. From the moment he fell, I was consumed by a desperate desire to save this animal that he admired tremendously, but I was only able to do so because of extraordinary extenuating circumstances.

The breeder, Carmen del Pozo, was in the audience that evening. She had become a friend of mine during the year I’d spent with Manuel and had been a dear friend of Manuel’s for most of his life.

She was a striking, alternately charming and terrifying woman who had gone as far in life as was possible for her sex in Franco’s Spain. Her family had bred bulls for generations, and her older brother, Bonifacio, was the obvious heir to the
ganaderia
, but he had no head for business, was affected and lazy, and had little fondness for the animals that had made his family one of the wealthiest and most respected in all of Spain.

He had tried to be a torero himself, having been attracted to the glamour of the profession as a boy without giving any thought to the hard work and danger involved, and he failed miserably. His capework was clumsy, his movements hesitant, his stiff practiced stance comical.

Even the bulls didn’t seem to take him seriously. They would make a few runs at the skittish jerks of his capote, then plant their hooves solidly in the ground and glance around at the faces in the crowd as if to say, “Are you kidding?”

Bullfight aficionados particularly hated him. They had no tolerance for seeing their precious art sullied by the spoiled son of a breeder who had no grace or scruples.

El Gato de Circo, they called him. The Circus Cat. The only animal in the circus who doesn’t work.

Carmen was the complete opposite of her brother. While he spent money on gambling and women and dabbled in bullfighting solely because of a love for attention, she stayed at home with her father and made herself indispensable.

She was an early riser, went late to bed, and rushed around the ranch all day long from the barns and outbuildings to the corrals and back again to the main house, with her skirts tucked up, a pencil sticking out of her long dark braid, and a bunch of keys jangling at her hip.