The bull's head lowered to the red cloth. The feathered lances danced in his sides as he whirled. His tongue hung out; his back and sides were crusted white.
Finally the matador dropped the cloth contemptuously on the bull's mouth and the crowd beat pots and pans, waving their hats. He stood back and knelt before the bull. They shouted ahh! and leaped to their feet as he shoved the knife in! They waved papers and handkerchiefs until the bull fell. They awarded the matador the ears.
Men with spades came to clean up the manure and the blood. Around the ring they threw sombreros and jackets. Exuberant, the matador hurled them back. As he went around the ring, a snowstorm of sombreros and shirts came, even a wineskin. He strode to the center of the ring, fell on his knees. Then he rode out on his admirers' shoulders.
The bull lay on the sand. He had now transcended the icy white barrier to understanding established by silver (pitchers of silver and abalone; weirdly gray mirrors of silver: all colors appear in those mirrors, but half-obscured as by angular white sparks of preciousness); some silver has a yellow gleam, but the edge of a silver bowl seems pure white. . They came and pulled the lances out. The three funeral horses dragged him around the ring. He made a track in the dirt.
So we know about ivy and trees, but what if the ivy were mere wires; what if the trees were only square white pillars in the dimness between trains; what if the leaves were incandescent lights? Then the forest would be light-spangled darkness, lit the way my legs glowed luminous green under a certain bar. Then I'd know I was in New York. Outside of this forest other died trees whose wiry roots dangled down like ivy over the concrete wall of the parking lot. The Hudson River was a root boring past the chilly eastern towns whose wall-bricks were a pathwork of dirty colors. I'd thought I was going to go outside the city often but then I didn't because whenever I started planning that I got a bad feeling about it — usually after I remembered those dying trees. So instead I visited the dog poisoner.
He was not an evil man at all; he possessed rules. The dog had to have annoyed him more than once. People needed to have treated him badly at the same time. There could be no risk to him. Those conditions being met, he'd lay down the strychnined meat.
The dog would bolt that food, crunching bones between yellow teeth. The poison was in the best parts, the fatty parts. First the dog would stretch out, happily gnawing the last thick bone. Then suddenly it would cock its head. It raised its ears, listening alertly to the bells which only it could hear. Something was happening or had just begun to happen which the dog did not understand yet because the growling whimpering convulsions had not begun. The dog knew only that what was happening was extremely important. It chewed no bone; clanged the bronze bells of death.
Thus far I've written as if the bells never lied, as if the appearance of that sound, whether silvery or iron (as Poe would put it), was invariably more than rhetorical — as if, in short, supernatural law were quite simple. But one summer's night we walked past the scraping and squeaking of the long narrow streetcar (it's very old, Adnan said, it's not Amsterdam!) and duly arrived at the marble and glass ice cream bar which gleamed with glasses on glass shelves, which gleamed mirrors. A redhead and a brunette in slatey uniforms lived behind the counter, the brunette sloshing a foamy ice-coffee in her hand, then stirring, the redhead slowly drying glasses until they gleamed with late night brilliance from behind their marble bastion with its trays of filled ashtrays and dirty coffee cups. I was in one of those moments of suspension, hence susceptibility to the supersensible, because Francis and Adnan were chatting in Serbo-Croatian, which I didn't understand; so first I looked at the redhead, who ignored me; then I gazed upon the brunette, who scowled and glared; and then I sat drinking my mineral water (thirstily, because it was a very sultry September) and I listened to the bells. They'd rung me through that afternoon's long blocky buildings, each with its blue street-plaque on a corner; and I remembered the hot gush of window-air in the taxi, my back beginning to sweat in the bulletproof vest within the gray hideaway windbreaker (which two yean later would be claimed by Francis's murderers in Mostar; I left that; I remembered almost everything else). I wasn't thinking about Mostar. The taxi driver kept shaking his head when he heard I was going to Sarajevo. Francis had decided not to go because it was too dangerous. We'd turned past the Red Cross van, down pastel-yellow-facaded streets. Still that heavy soggy summer feeling. Everyone was sitting under the cigarette-branded awnings.
The driver had been in a battle. They'd had to pull back.
Is Dubrovnik safe? I said.
Not yet.
Can I buy a gun?
Nobody will do that for you. Everybody's afraid.
Anyway, said the driver abruptly, the worst thing I've ever seen wasn't a battle; it was a traffic accident.
It was then, and again that night in the ice cream bar, that I heard John Donne's bell tolling for me, warning and prophesying with ominous gloom; Francis had heard it, too, and taken more heed than I. He awaited my return from Sarajevo. One might say that whoever disregards the bells believes in absolute freedom; and yet I tell you most truthfully that later that night I could not sleep because I was so certain that the morrow would introduce me to my death; and yet I was powerless to avoid going. I saw the end as surely as when I awaited the arrival of Francis's family in Split two years later; no one could decide when the funeral would be, and the family could not come for three or four days yet, so I stood watching a procession dedicated to Dule, the patron saint of Split; waiting for the end to flash wittily through this celebration of Christian peace; hymns shrilled through the loudspeakers and white-robed men with red crosses on their hems strode forward with their arms folded. Now here came the nuns and little children; there marched the dignitaries of the church; I saw the palanquin of the icon — so many people were singing! Here were the police, there more nuns, now an old lady with a flower; and then at last came the real force, the boys in camouflage behind their general. . They knew; they called the tune on that sunny windy evening of bells. And when I'd lain on the floor of
Adnan's room that other night earlier, Francis snoring softly on the couch, I thought and believed that in only a few hours I would see and I would know; I would meet my end! And I was terrified. I lay with a dry throat, wishing that I didn't have to go. And of course I didn't have to. Nobody was forcing me to go. And yet I couldn't not go. Whatever sent me to Sarajevo and whatever preserved me were not my own forces. And the next day only a yellowjacket stung me; the sniper's bullet missed my ankle by a good six inches. So I lived on, in a kind of unbelieving unreality, and Francis lived on in safety; it was only next time that we went to Mostar. And that day neither of us heard any echoing ringing; and I lived and Francis died.