Eagle in the Sky

  ‘I’ll pay the bill downstairs.’ He picked up his bag. ‘Stay loose,’ he said.

  Paris was spoiled for him now, so he took the road south again towards the sun for the sky was filled with swollen black cloud and it rained before he passed the turn-off to Fontainebleau. It rained as he believed was only possible in the tropics, a solid deluge that flooded the concrete of the highway and blurred his windscreen so that the flogging of the wipers could not clear it swiftly enough for safe vision.

  David was alone and discomforted by his inability to sustain communication with another human being. Although the other traffic had moderated its pace in the rain, he drove fast, feeling the drift and skate of his tyres on the slick surface. This time the calming effect of speed was ineffective and when he ran out of the rain south of Beaune it seemed that the wolf pack of loneliness ran close behind him.

  However, the first outpouring of sunshine lightened his mood, and then far over the stone walls and rigid green lines of the vineyards he saw a wind-sock floating like a soft white sausage from its pole. He found the exit from the highway half a mile farther on, and the sign ‘Club Aéronautique de Provence’. He followed it to a neat little airfield set among the vineyards, and one of the aircraft on the hard-stand was a Marchetti Aerobatic type F260. David climbed out of the Mustang and stared at it like a drunkard contemplating his first whisky of the day.

  The Frenchman in the club office looked like an unsuccessful undertake, and even when David showed him his logbook and sheafs of licences, he resisted the temptation of hiring him the Marcheta. David could take his pick from the others – but the Marchetti was not for hire. David added a five hundred franc note to the pile of documents, and it disappeared miraculously into the Frenchman’s pocket. Still he would not let David take the Marchetti solo, and he insisted on joining him in the instructor’s seat.

  David executed a slow and stately four-point roll before they had crossed the boundary fence. It was an act of defiance, and he made the stops crisp and exaggerated. The Frenchman cried ‘Sacré bleu!’ with great feeling and froze in his seat, but he had the good sense not to interfere with the controls. David completed the manoeuvre and then immediately rolled in the opposite direction with the wing-tip a mere fifty feet above the tips of the vines. The Frenchman relaxed visibly, recognizing the masterly touch, and when David landed an hour later he grinned mournfully at him.

  ‘Formidable!’ he said, and shared his lunch with David – garlic polony, bread and a bottle of rank red wine. The good feeling of flight and the aroma of garlic lasted David all the way to Madrid.

  In Madrid suddenly it began to happen, almost as though it had been arranged long before, as though his frantic flight across half of Europe was a pre-knowledge that something of importance awaited him in Madrid.

  He reached the city in the evening, hurrying the last day’s journey to be in time for the first running of the bulls that season. He had read Hemingway and Conrad and much of the other romantic literature of the bullring. He wondered if there might not be something for him in this way of life. It read so well in the books – the beauty, glamour and excitement – the courage and trial and the final moment of truth. He wanted to evaluate it, to see it here in the great Plaza Des Torros, and then, if it still intrigued him, go on to the festival at Pamplona later in the season.

  David checked in at the Gran Via with its elegance faded to mere comfort, and the porter arranged tickets for the following day. He was tired from the long drive and he went to bed early, waking refreshed and eager for the day. He found his way out to the ring and parked the Mustang amongst the tourist buses that already crowded the parking lot so early in the season.

  The exterior of the ring was a surprise, sinister as the temple of some pagan and barbaric religion, unrelieved by the fluted tiers of balconies and encrustations of ceramic tiles – but the interior was as he knew it would be from film and photograph. The sanded ring smooth and clean, the flags against the cloud-flecked sky, the orchestra pouring out its jerky, rousing refrain – and the excitement.

  The excitement amongst the crowd was more intense than he had known at prize fights or football internationals, they hummed and swarmed, rank upon rank of white eager faces and the music goaded them on.

  David was sitting amongst a group of young Australians who wore souvenir sombreros and passed goat-skins of bad wine about, the girls squealing and chittering like sparrows. One of them picked on David, leaning forward to tug his shoulder and offer him the wine-skin. She was pretty enough in a kittenish way and her eyes made it clear that the offer was for more than cheap wine, but he refused both invitations brusquely and went to fetch a can of beer from one of the vendors. His chilly experience with the girl in Paris was still too fresh. When he returned to his seat the Aussie girl eyed the beer he carried reproachfully and then turned brightly and smiling to her companions.

  The late arrivals were finding their seats now and the excitement was escalating sharply. Two of them climbed the stairs of the aisle towards where David sat. A striking young couple in their early twenties, but what first drew David’s attention was the good feeling of companionship and love that glowed around them, like an aura setting them apart.

  They climbed arm in arm, passed where David sat, and took seats a row behind and across the aisle. The girl was tall with long legs clad in short black boots and dark pants over which she wore an apple-green suede jacket that was not expensive but of good cut and taste. In the sun her hair glittered like coal newly cut from the face and it hung to her shoulders in a sleek soft fall. Her face was broad and sun-browned, not beautiful for her mouth was too big and her eyes too widely spaced, but those eyes were the colour of wild honey, dark brown and flecked with gold. Like her, her companion was tall and straight, dark and strong-looking. He guided her to her seat with a brown, muscled arm and David felt a sharp stab of anger and envy for him.

  ‘Big cocky son of a gun,’ he thought. They leaned their heads together and spoke secretly, and David looked away, his own loneliness accentuated by their closeness.

  The parade of the toreadors began, and they came out with the sunlight glittering on the sequins and embroidery of their suits, as though they were the scales of some flamboyant reptile. The orchestra blared, and the keys to the bull pens were thrown down on to the sand. The toreadors’ capes were spread on the barrera below their favourites and they retired from the ring.

  In the pause that followed David glanced at the couple again. He was startled to find that they were both watching him and the girl was discussing him. She was leaning on her companion’s shoulder, her lips almost touching his ear as she spoke and David felt his stomach clench under the impact of those honey-golden eyes. For an instant they stared at each other and then the girl jerked away guiltily and dropped her gaze – but her companion held David’s eyes openly, smiling easily, and it was David who looked away.

  Below them in the ring the bull came out at full charge, head high, and hooves skidding in the sand.

  He was beautiful and black and glossy, muscle in the neck and shoulder bunching as he swung his head from side to side and the crowd roared as he spun and burst into a gallop, pursuing an elusive flutter of pink across the ring. They took him on a circuit, passing him smoothly from cape to cape, letting him show off his bulk and high-stepping style, and the perfect sickle of his horns with their creamy points, before they brought in the horse.

  The trumpets ushered in the horse, and they were a mockery – a brave greeting from the wretched nag, with scrawny neck and starting coat, one rheumy old eye blinkered so he could not see the fearsome creature he was going to meet.

  Clownish in his padding, seeming too frail to carry the big armoured man on his back, they led him out and placed him in the path of the bull – and here any semblance of beauty ended.

  The bull went into him head down, sending the gawky animal reeling against the barrera and the man leaned over the broad black back and ripped and tore into the hump
with the lance, worrying the flesh, working in the steel with all his weight until the blood poured out in a slick tide, black as crude oil, and dripped from the bull’s legs into the sand.

  Raging at the agony of the steel the bull hooked and butted at the protective pads that covered the horse’s flanks. They came up as readily as a theatre curtain and the bull was into the scrawny roan body, hacking with the terrible horns, and the horse screamed as its belly split open and the purple and pink entrails spilled out and dangled into the sand.

  David was dry-mouthed with horror as around him the crowd blood-roared, and the horse went down in a welter of equipment and its own guts.

  They drew the bull away and flogged the fallen horse, twisting its tail and prodding its testicles, forcing it to rise at last and stand quivering and forlorn. Then beating it to make it move again they led it from the ring stumbling over its own entrails.

  Then they went to work on the bull, slowly, torturously, reducing it from a magnificent beast to a blundering hunk of sweating and bleeding flesh, splattered with the creamy froth blown from its agonized lungs.

  David wanted to scream at them to stop it, but sick to the stomach, frozen by guilt for his own part in this obscene ritual, he sat through it in silence until the bull stood in the centre of the ring, the sand about him ploughed and riven by his dreadful struggles. He stood with his head down, muzzle almost touching the sand and the blood and froth dripped from his nostrils and gaping mouth. The hoarse sawing of his breathing carried to David even above the crazed roaring of the crowd. The bull’s legs shuddered and he passed a dribble of loose liquid yellow dung that fouled his back legs. It seemed to David that this was the final humiliation, and he found he was whispering aloud.

  ‘No! No! Stop it! Please, stop it!’

  Then the man in the glittering suit and ballet shoes came to end it, and the point of the sword struck bone and the blade arced then spun away in the sunlight, and the bull heaved and threw thick droplets of blood, before he stood again.

  They picked up the sword from the sand and gave it to the man and he sighted over the quiescent, dying beast and again the thrust was deflected by bone and David found that at last he had power in his voice, and he screamed:

  ‘Stop it! You filthy bastards.’

  Twelve times the man in the centre tried with the sword, and each time the sword flicked out of his hand, and then at last the bull fell of its own accord, weak from the slow loss of much blood and with its heart broken by the torture and the striving. It tried to rise, lunging weakly, but the strength was not there and they killed it where it lay, with a dagger in the back of the neck, and they dragged it out with a team of mules – its legs waggling ridiculously in the air and its blood leaving a long brown smudge across the sand.

  Stunned with the monstrous cruelty of it, David turned slowly to look at the girl. Her companion was leaning over her solicitously, whispering to her, trying to comfort her.

  She was shaking her head slowly, in a gesture of incomprehension, and her honey-coloured eyes were blinded with weeping. Her lips were apart, quivering with grief, and her cheeks were awash, shiny with her tears.

  Her companion helped her to her feet, and gently took her down the steps, leading her away blindly like a new widow from her husband’s grave.

  Around him the crowd was laughing and exhilarated, high on the blood and the pain – and David felt himself rejected, cut off from them. His heart went out to the weeping girl, she of all of them was the only one who seemed real to him. He had seen enough also, and he knew he would never get to Pamplona. He stood up and followed the girl out of the ring, he wanted to speak to her, to tell her that he shared her desolation, but when he reached the parking lot they were already climbing into a battered old Citroën CV100, and although he broke into a run, the car pulled away – blowing blue smoke and clattering like a lawn-mower – and turned into the traffic heading east.

  David watched it go with a sense of loss that effectively washed away the good feeling of the last few days, but he saw the old Citroën again two days later, when he had abandoned all idea of the Pamplona Festival and headed south. The Citroën looked even sicker than before, under a layer of pale dust and with the canvas showing on a rear tyre. The suspension seemed to have sagged on the one side, giving it a rakishly drunken aspect.

  It was parked at a filling station on the outskirts of Zaragoza on the road to Barcelona, and David pulled off the road and parked beyond the gasoline pumps. An attendant in greasy overalls was filling the tank of the Citroën under the supervision of the muscular young man from the bullring. David looked quickly for the girl – but she was not in the car. Then he saw her.

  She was in a cantina across the street, haggling with the elderly woman behind the counter. Her back was turned towards him, but David recognized the mass of dark hair now piled on top of her head. He crossed the road quickly and went into the shop behind her. He was not certain what he was going to do, acting only on impulse.

  The girl wore a short floral dress which left her back and shoulders bare, and her feet were thrust into open sandals. But in concession to the ice in the air she wore a shawl over her shoulders. Close to, her skin had a plastic smoothness and elasticity, as though it had been lightly oiled and polished, and down the back of her naked neck the hair was fine and soft, growing in a whorl in the nape.

  David moved closer to her as she completed her purchase of dried figs and counted her change. He smelt her, a light summery perfume that seemed to come from her hair. He resisted the temptation to press his face into the dense pile of it.

  She turned smiling and saw him standing close behind her. She recognized him instantly, his was not a face a girl would readily forget. She was startled. The smile flickered out on her face and she stood very still looking at him, her expression completely neutral, but her lips slightly parted and her eyes soft and glowing golden. This peculiar stillness of hers was a quality he would come to know so well in the time ahead.

  ‘I saw you in Madrid,’ he said, ‘at the bulls.’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, her voice neither welcoming nor forbidding.

  ‘You were crying.’

  ‘So were you.’ Her voice was low and clear, her enunciation flawless, too perfect not to be foreign.

  ‘No,’ David denied it.

  ‘You were crying,’ she insisted softly. ‘You were crying inside.’ And he inclined his head in agreement. Suddenly she proffered the paper bag of figs.

  ‘Try one,’ she said and smiled. It was a warm friendly smile. He took one of the fruits and bit into the sweet flesh as she moved towards the door, somehow conveying an invitation for him to join her. He walked with her and they looked across the street at the Citroën. The attendant had finished filling the tank, and the girl’s companion was waiting for her, leaning against the bonnet of the weary old car. He was lighting a cigarette, but he looked up and saw them. He evidently recognized David also, and he straightened up quickly and flicked away the burning match.

  There was a soft whooshing sound and the heavy thump of concussion in the air, as fire flashed low across the concrete from a puddle of spilled gasoline. In an instant the flames had closed over the rear of the Citroën, and were drumming hungrily at the coachwork.

  David left the girl and sprinted across the road.

  ‘Get it away from the pumps, you idiot,’ he shouted, and the driver started out of frozen shock.

  It was happy fifth of November, a spectacular pyrotechnic display – but David got the handbrake off and the gearbox into neutral, and he and the driver pushed it into an open parking area alongside the filling station while a crowd materialized, seeming to appear out of the very earth, to scream hysterical encouragement and suggestions while keeping at a discreet distance.

  They even managed to rescue the baggage from the rear seat before the flames engulfed it entirely – and belatedly the petrol attendant arrived with an enormous scarlet fire extinguisher. To the delighted applause of the
crowd, he drenched the pathetic little vehicle in a great cloud of foam, and the excitement was over. The crowd drifted away, still laughing and chattering and congratulating the amateur firefighter on his virtuoso performance with the extinguisher – while the three of them regarded the scorched and blackened shell of the Citroën ruefully.

  ‘I suppose it was a kindness really – the poor old thing was very tired,’ the girl said at last. ‘It was like shooting a horse with a broken leg.’

  ‘Are you insured?’ David asked, and the girl’s companion laughed.

  ‘You’re joking – who would insure that? I only paid a hundred US dollars for her.’

  They assembled the small pile of rescued possessions, and the girl spoke quickly to her companion in foreign, slightly guttural language which touched a deep chord in David’s memory. He understood what she was saying, so it was no surprise when she looked at him.

  ‘We’ve got to meet somebody in Barcelona this evening. It’s important.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said David.

  They piled the luggage into the Mustang and the girl’s companion folded up his long legs and piled into the back seat. His name was Joseph – but David was advised by the girl to call him Joe. She was Debra, and surnames didn’t seem important at that stage. She sat in the seat beside David, with her knees pressed together primly and her hands in her lap. With one sweeping glance, she assessed the Mustang and its contents. David watched her check the expensive luggage, the Nikon camera and Zeiss binoculars in the glove compartment and the cashmere jacket thrown over the seat. Then she glanced sideways at him, seeming to notice for the first time the raw silk shirt with the slim gold Piaget under the cuff.

  ‘Blessed are the poor,’ she murmured, ‘but still it must be pleasant to be rich.’

  David enjoyed that. He wanted her to be impressed, he wanted her to make a few comparisons between himself and the big muscular buck in the back seat.