Men Without Women

  Manuel rose to his toes, sighting along the steel, and charged.

  Again there was the shock and he felt himself being borne back in a rush, to strike hard on the sand. There was no chance of kicking this time. The bull was on top of him. Manuel lay as though dead, his head on his arms, and the bull bumped him. Bumped his back, bumped his face in the sand. He felt the horn go into the sand between his folded arms. The bull hit him in the small of the back. His face drove into the sand. The horn drove through one of his sleeves and the bull ripped it off. Manuel was tossed clear and the bull followed the capes.

  Manuel got up, found the sword and muleta, tried the point of the sword with his thumb, and then ran toward the barrera for a new sword.

  Retana’s man handed him the sword over the edge of the barrera.

  “Wipe off your face,” he said.

  Manuel, running again toward the bull, wiped his bloody face with his handkerchief. He had not seen Zurito. Where was Zurito?

  The cuadrilla had stepped away from the bull and waited with their capes. The bull stood, heavy and dull again after the action.

  Manuel walked toward him with the muleta. He stopped and shook it. The bull did not respond. He passed it right and left, left and right before the bull’s muzzle. The bull’s eyes watched it and turned with the swing, but he would not charge. He was waiting for Manuel.

  Manuel was worried. There was nothing to do but go in. Corto y derecho. He profiled close to the bull, crossed the muleta in front of his body and charged. As he pushed in the sword, he jerked his body to the left to clear the horn. The bull passed him and the sword shot up in the air, twinkling under the arc-lights, to fall red-hilted on the sand.

  Manuel ran over and picked it up. It was bent and he straightened it over his knee.

  As he came running toward the bull, fixed again now, he passed Hernandez standing with his cape.

  “He’s all bone,” the boy said encouragingly.

  Manuel nodded, wiping his face. He put the bloody handkerchief in his pocket.

  There was the bull. He was close to the barrera now. Damn him. Maybe he was all bone. Maybe there was not any place for the sword to go in. The hell there wasn’t! He’d show them.

  He tried a pass with the muleta and the bull did not move. Manuel chopped the muleta back and forth in front of the bull. Nothing doing.

  He furled the muleta, drew the sword out, profiled and drove in on the bull. He felt the sword buckle as he shoved it in, leaning his weight on it, and then it shot high in the air, end-over-ending into the crowd. Manuel had jerked clear as the sword jumped.

  The first cushions thrown down out of the dark missed him. Then one hit him in the face, his bloody face looking toward the crowd. They were coming down fast. Spotting the sand. Somebody threw an empty champagne-bottle from close range. It hit Manuel on the foot. He stood there watching the dark, where the things were coming from. Then something whished through the air and struck by him. Manuel leaned over and picked it up. It was his sword. He straightened it over his knee and gestured with it to the crowd.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Oh, the dirty bastards! Dirty bastards! Oh, the lousy, dirty bastards! He kicked into a cushion as he ran.

  There was the bull. The same as ever. All right, you dirty, lousy bastard!

  Manuel passed the muleta in front of the bull’s black muzzle.

  Nothing doing.

  You won’t! All right. He stepped close and jammed the sharp peak of the muleta into the bull’s damp muzzle.

  The bull was on him as he jumped back and as he tripped on a cushion he felt the horn go into him, into his side. He grabbed the horn with his two hands and rode backward, holding tight onto the place. The bull tossed him and he was clear. He lay still. It was all right. The bull was gone.

  He got up coughing and feeling broken and gone. The dirty bastards!

  “Give me the sword,” he shouted. “Give me the stuff.”

  Fuentes came up with the muleta and the sword.

  Hernandez put his arm around him.

  “Go on to the infirmary, man,” he said. “Don’t be a damn fool.”

  “Get away from me,” Manuel said. “Get to hell away from me.”

  He twisted free. Hernandez shrugged his shoulders. Manuel ran toward the bull.

  There was the bull standing, heavy, firmly planted.

  All right, you bastard! Manuel drew the sword out of the muleta, sighted with the same movement, and flung himself onto the bull. He felt the sword go in all the way. Right up to the guard. Four fingers and his thumb into the bull. The blood was hot on his knuckles, and he was on top of the bull.

  The bull lurched with him as he lay on, and seemed to sink; then he was standing clear. He looked at the bull going down slowly over on his side, then suddenly four feet in the air.

  Then he gestured at the crowd, his hand warm from the bull blood.

  All right, you bastards! He wanted to say something, but he started to cough. It was hot and choking. He looked down for the muleta. He must go over and salute the president. President hell! He was sitting down looking at something. It was the bull. His four feet up. Thick tongue out. Things crawling around on his belly and under his legs. Crawling where the hair was thin. Dead bull. To hell with the bull! To hell with them all! He started to get to his feet and commenced to cough. He sat down again, coughing. Somebody came and pushed him up.

  They carried him across the ring to the infirmary, running with him across the sand, standing blocked at the gate as the mules came in, then around under the dark passageway, men grunting as they took him up the stairway, and then laid him down.

  The doctor and two men in white were waiting for him. They laid him out on the table. They were cutting away his shirt. Manuel felt tired. His whole chest felt scalding inside. He started to cough and they held something to his mouth. Everybody was very busy.

  There was an electric light in his eyes. He shut his eyes.

  He heard some one coming very heavily up the stairs. Then he did not hear it. Then he heard a noise far off. That was the crowd. Well, somebody would have to kill his other bull. They had cut away all his shirt. The doctor smiled at him. There was Retana.

  “Hello, Retana!” Manuel said. He could not hear his voice.

  Retana smiled at him and said something. Manuel could not hear it.

  Zurito stood beside the table, bending over where the doctor was working. He was in his picador clothes, without his hat.

  Zurito said something to him. Manuel could not hear it.

  Zurito was speaking to Retana. One of the men in white smiled and handed Retana a pair of scissors. Retana gave them to Zurito. Zurito said something to Manuel. He could not hear it.

  To hell with this operating-table. He’d been on plenty of operating-tables before. He was not going to die. There would be a priest if he was going to die.

  Zurito was saying something to him. Holding up the scissors.

  That was it. They were going to cut off his coleta. They were going to cut off his pigtail.

  Manuel sat up on the operating-table. The doctor stepped back, angry. Some one grabbed him and held him.

  “You couldn’t do a thing like that, Manos,” he said.

  He heard suddenly, clearly, Zurito’s voice.

  “That’s all right,” Zurito said. “I won’t do it. I was joking.”

  “I was going good,” Manuel said. “I didn’t have any luck. That was all.”

  Manuel lay back. They had put something over his face. It was all familiar. He inhaled deeply. He felt very tired. He was very, very tired. They took the thing away from his face.

  “I was going good,” Manuel said weakly. “I was going great.”

  Retana looked at Zurito and started for the door.

  “I’ll stay here with him,” Zurito said.

  Retana shrugged his shoulders.

  Manuel opened his eyes and looked at Zurito.

  “Wasn’t I going good
, Manos?” he asked, for confirmation.

  “Sure,” said Zurito. “You were going great.”

  The doctor’s assistant put the cone over Manuel’s face and he inhaled deeply. Zurito stood awkwardly, watching.

  IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

  In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

  We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket. The hospital was very old and very beautiful, and you entered through a gate and walked across a courtyard and out a gate on the other side. There were usually funerals starting from the courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.

  The doctor came up to the machine where I was sitting and said: “What did you like best to do before the war? Did you practise a sport?”

  I said: “Yes, football.”

  “Good,” he said. “You will be able to play football again better than ever.”

  My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said: “That will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion.”

  In the next machine was a major who had a little hand like a baby’s. He winked at me when the doctor examined his hand, which was between two leather straps that bounced up and down and flapped the stiff fingers, and said: “And will I too play football, captain-doctor?” He had been a very great fencer, and before the war the greatest fencer in Italy.

  The doctor went to his office in a back room and brought a photograph which showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the major’s, before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little larger. The major held the photograph with his good hand and looked at it very carefully. “A wound?” he asked.

  “An industrial accident,” the doctor said.

  “Very interesting, very interesting,” the major said, and handed it back to the doctor.

  “You have confidence?”

  “No,” said the major.

  There were three boys who came each day who were about the same age I was. They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier, and after we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back together to the Café Cova, which was next door to the Scala. We walked the short way through the communist quarter because we were four together. The people hated us because we were officers, and from a wine-shop some one would call out, “A basso gli ufficiali!” as we passed. Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and then we did not any of us know how it was going to be afterward. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it any more.

  We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage across his face, and he had not been at the front long enough to get any medals. The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer had been a lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had only one of. He had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital. Although, as we walked to the Cova through the tough part of town, walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the wine-shops, and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle them to get by, we felt held together by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand.

  We ourselves all understood the Cova, where it was rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours, and there were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers on a rack on the wall. The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that the most patriotic people in Italy were the café girls—and I believe they are still patriotic.

  The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders. I was a friend, but I was never really one of them after they had read the citations, because it had been different with them and they had done very different things to get their medals. I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes, after the cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all the things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at night through the empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying to keep near the street lights, I knew that I would never have done such things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when I went back to the front again.

  The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I stayed good friends with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because he would never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never be accepted either, and I liked him because I thought perhaps he would not have turned out to be a hawk either.

  The major, who had been the great fencer, did not believe in bravery, and spent much time while we sat in the machines correcting my grammar. He had complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we talked together very easily. One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language to me that I could not take a great interest in it; everything was so easy to say. “Ah, yes,” the major said. “Why, then, do you not take up the use of grammar?” So we took up the use of grammar, and soon Italian was such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him until I had the grammar straight in my mind.

  The major came very regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed a day, although I am sure he did not believe in the machines. There was a time when none of us believed in the machines, and one day the major said it was all nonsense. The machines were new then and it was we who were to prove them. It was an idiotic idea, he said, “a theory, like another.” I had not learned my grammar, and he said I was a stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool to have bothered with me. He was a small man and he sat straight up in his chair with his right hand thrust into the machine and looked straight ahead at t
he wall while the straps thumped up and down with his fingers in them.

  “What will you do when the war is over if it is over?” he asked me. “Speak grammatically!”

  “I will go to the States.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No, but I hope to be.”

  “The more of a fool you are,” he said. He seemed very angry. “A man must not marry.”

  “Why, Signor Maggiore?”

  “Don’t call me ‘Signor Maggiore.’”

  “Why must not a man marry?”

  “He cannot marry. He cannot marry,” he said angrily. “If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose.”

  He spoke very angrily and bitterly, and looked straight ahead while he talked.

  “But why should he necessarily lose it?”

  “He’ll lose it,” the major said. He was looking at the wall. Then he looked down at the machine and jerked his little hand out from between the straps and slapped it hard against his thigh. “He’ll lose it,” he almost shouted. “Don’t argue with me!” Then he called to the attendant who ran the machines. “Come and turn this damned thing off.”

  He went back into the other room for the light treatment and the massage. Then I heard him ask the doctor if he might use his telephone and he shut the door. When he came back into the room, I was sitting in another machine. He was wearing his cape and had his cap on, and he came directly toward my machine and put his arm on my shoulder.

  “I am so sorry,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder with his good hand. “I would not be rude. My wife has just died. You must forgive me.”

  “Oh—” I said, feeling sick for him. “I am so sorry.”

  He stood there biting his lower lip. “It is very difficult,” he said. “I cannot resign myself.”

  He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. “I am utterly unable to resign myself,” he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door.