Juliano looked about the room, at the clothing tossed over a chair, the socks crumpled beside the bed, the bureau where her powder, lipstick and cologne lay as she had last touched them. “Yes, Muno, I suppose you are. She was beautiful, and young, and gave you all of herself.”
Muno bit his lips and moved his head numbly from side to side. “Do you hate me, Juliano?”
“Hate? No. I despise you!”
“You don’t understand,” Muno said. “A baby would have messed up everything, right when I’m on the edge of better things. Did you know that a famous manager has come all the way from Mexico City to watch me in the arena tomorrow?”
“I see.” Juliano made a slight motion of his hand to Jose and they started toward the door.
Muno jerked himself upright from the sofa. “Juliano...”
Juliano pushed Jose into the hall, then stopped and turned in the doorway.
Muno held out a hand. “Juliano, hatred will not bring her back.” Juliano stood and looked at him. “Please, Juliano...” Muno said. “It is over, done. Nothing can change that.”
“How quickly will you forget her, Muno?”
“Juliano...”
“Will you bring home another tomorrow night?”
Muno’s face hardened. “Get out! Get out! You are a fool, like your sister. Get out, and don’t come back!”
When the full moon was at zenith that night, Juliano nudged Jose awake.
Jose sat up on the straw ticking, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles and making gulping noises. “What is it, Juliano?”
“Come on, we are going across to the arena. It is as bright as day outside. I can’t lay here.”
Jose’s hands fell limply from his face. “What? What is this?”
Juliano was already standing beside the bed, pulling his cotton blouse over his head and shoulders.
“Muno Figero has drawn the bull called Santiago for tomorrow.”
“Si, but what has this...”
“I would try Muno’s shoes,” Juliano said. “I would test this bull. Now. In the arena. Will you help me chute the bull and work him back into the pen — or must I do it all by myself?”
Jose’s eyes showed white with fear. “You are crazy, Juliano. You will kill yourself!”
“But I won’t argue,” Juliano said. “Are you coming to help me or not?”
Mumbling an incoherent prayer, Jose leaped out of bed.
Shortly, the bull Santiago took his first exploratory steps into the strange, new world of the arena when Juliano shouted to Jose to open the gate.
Limned in the moon glare in the center of the arena, Juliano watched the bull pause and paw the sand. He knew that Santiago had seen him and was taking a moment to size up the enemy, the situation. Santiago was a sleek, black Piedras Negras, almost nine hundred pounds with horns that swept dangerously outward and upward at the tips, a far better bull than was usually seen in San Carla.
Afraid that his dry mouth and constricted throat had lost the power to speak, Juliano lifted his threadbare old cape with trembling hands. He stomped the sand. “Toro!” he said “Toro!”
Santiago circled as if unaware of the two-legged creature’s existence. Then the night exploded with the thunder of his hoofs.
Juliano choked back the urge to bleat and flee. Sweat burned his eyes. His hands were shaking the cape almost uncontrollably.
Santiago grew to monstrous size as the charge closed the distance. His eyes threw back red moonbeams. Juliano kept his gaze fastened on the needle-sharp horns. They dipped, hooking, and a flick of the cape changed their course by a scant degree.
Suddenly, the bull was past, and Juliano realized he was in one piece. He turned. Santiago was already wheeling, charging again. This time, it was less frightful. Juliano’s heart ceased to be a choking mass in his throat.
Another pass, with the cape swirling. Then again, and again.
Juliano dared a laugh. He stomped his bare foot. “Toro!”
The seconds became minutes, and a thin haze of dust clouded the surface of the sand. Santiago turned, hooked, and the cape swept him safely past.
“Toro! Toro!” Juliano flaunted the cape. He turned the bull in half a dozen more passes, working toward the side of the arena. Santiago was beginning to lather. It is enough, Juliano decided, and he leaped behind the barricade.
Jose, who had watched it all from the safety of the wooden shelter, pounded Juliano on the shoulder. “You were one of them, Juliano! A real torero.”
“I have practiced the cape many months.” Juliano was out of breath and soaked with sweat. “Now we work Santiago into the chute, back into the pen so that no one will ever know he was in here tonight.”
Jose shook his head, still dumbfounded. “My brother — and a real live bull.”
“Perhaps I had not only much practice but the strongest of inspirations,” Juliano said.
“Did you not feel alone and naked?”
“As naked as Belmonte must have felt.” Juliano’s eyes met his brother’s. “When he was a boy, the Great One would swim a river on a bull ranch at night and fight the bulls alone, secretly. It is the way Belmonte learned. He was too young to know then that he was sending many matadors to their deaths. If he had only known...”
Juliano turned, craned, looking over the top of the barricade. Santiago claimed the center of the arena, head lifted, horns gleaming, forehoof pawing, challenging all comers.
“When they first face a man, they think he and the cape are one. So the cape distracts them,” Juliano explained. “But the second time around — should there be one — the bull in his wisdom knows the truth. This is the reason great care is taken from the day of their birth to keep them from facing a cape, until they go into the arena. Nothing is more deadly than a cape-broken bull such as Muno Figero will face when he meets Santiago in the arena tomorrow.”
Jose nodded in slow comprehension of truths his brother had learned while he, Jose, slept the evenings away.
“I think Muno Figero will not live to see Mexico City,” Jose decided.
And for once Juliano was quite certain that his duller brother was right.
Easy Mark
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1971.
The two youths at the front corner table marked me from the moment I strolled into the psychedelic, nether-world decor of the Moons of Jupiter.
I was surely a sudden out-of-kilter detail on the scene. My appearance stamped me as the most reprehensible of straights: businessman, establishment man; specter from the far side of the generation gap. Fortyish, brushed with gray at the temples, lean, conditioned from regular workouts, I was smoothly barbered, tailored in a five hundred dollar suit of English cut, with coordinated shirt and necktie.
A cool young hostess, blonde and topless, decided I was for real. She smiled a greeting to take me in tow and threaded a way through a dimly lighted, pot-smoke-hazed broken field of tables and hovering, pale faces. In passing, I drew a few glances, ranging from the sullen to the amused. Empty, bored young eyes lifted, noted the stranger, and dropped again to contemplation of existence and a world they had rejected. I was of no more real interest than the movement of a shadow — except to the pair at the corner table. They studied every detail about me as I was seated and ordering a drink.
On the bandstand a four-piece rock group, as hairy as dusty and moth-eaten young gorillas, suddenly assailed the senses with electronic sound. The lighting came and went like a Gehenna fire, swirling faces from corpse-green to paranoid purple to jaundice yellow, cycling and recycling until the brain swam and burst from the brew of shattering sound and color.