Tonio smoothed his hair. In the past five years his hairline had been slowly moving back. That could push a man to make decisions.
“You lack a sense of proportion,” he said. “You misjudge the importance of things. I have my mind on bulls. On a first-class ganaderia for the brave bulls. I’ve fought nearly nine hundred fights. I’ve been gored seven times, and lost two horses. I’m going to move the rest of my bulls to the Palmita. I’m going to give up fighting.”
He rose and walked briskly from the room and toward his bedroom. Abilene half-ran to keep up, and when she touched him on the shoulder, he stopped and turned around to face her.
“Sage is gone now,” he said.
She thought they might as well get that out of the way. It was a different order of anxiety from the terrible things that had happened in Mexico City.
“He grew very careless. He was having accidents. He lost an outbuilding, and a cowboy. He wrecked his plane taking off—”
Startled, Abilene drew breath in puffs, as though she were asthmatic.
“It was not so serious,” Tonio said smoothly, “but it was a warning. He had his plane repaired and flew away for good.”
“Because you wouldn’t renew his lease?” She was scared, asking him that, and there was no real reason to ask, except that she wanted him to know she knew. It was a very small thing she wanted to do, for Sage.
“Why no,” Tonio said. “We had never been able to sit down to negotiate the lease, for all his troubles with the ranch. You Americans have the expression. He was losing it.”
“So, like Girard, he left without being run off?” This was a surprise to Abilene, that Tonio had preferred it that way. There was no doubt in her mind that he had manipulated everything. Nothing was outside his jurisdiction.
If he had not wanted her at the ranch, they would not have brought her across on the ferry.
“I am going to redecorate the ranch house,” Tonio said. “You could help me with that. Colors, furniture, all that sort of thing. You could give me a woman’s view.” He seemed sincere, as if, half a moment before, they had not been speaking about the American, Michael Sage.
“I have never chosen so much as a curtain in my life,” Abilene said.
“All you have to know is what you like.”
Abilene felt exhausted from the long day, the trip from Mexico. The tension of seeing Tonio again seemed to strike her from behind, like someone with a board. She almost lost her balance.
“Go to bed, chiquita,” Tonio said gently. “I missed my siesta, myself.” He kissed her forehead and patted her arm. “I knew you’d come back,” he said.
That was when she realized he had never been sure at all.
It was afternoon. She went down by the river bank and stood near the ferry, looking up and down the bank, to see where you could walk if you were out at night. She thought it could be done, like so many things, if you knew your way in the dark.
She was down by the river when a jeep came, and a car. There were men in uniforms, carrying guns. Workers appeared out of nowhere to line the central yard and watch. Abilene walked up to the guardhouse to ask Sapo what was going on. Two of the young groundskeepers were teasing the cat with sticks, poking at it and jumping back as its paws clawed air in front of them.
Sapo said it was the federales come to take Sofia away.
Sofia!
The audit had caught her thievery. Hers, not Claude’s.
Her little red Volkswagen sat parked near the overgrown tennis courts.
“And look,” Tonio said of it, later on that evening. “Look what we found in her things. You didn’t say you had lost it.”
He handed Abilene her gold bracelet.
He took her for a ride in the jeep. She had been home for days, but they had not been together. She had been going to her room early to lie and wait for sleep that came hours and hours later. Tonio had not pressed her. He had called her once a day, to go with him when he went down to the practice ring. When they brought the horses out for him to ride, the javelina came out of the brush too.
The lowering sun illuminated the land. Tonio was sweaty from the horses. He said, “I’ve been wondering if you are anemic, something left over from the surgery, maybe, or you didn’t eat right in the city.”
She said nothing.
Somewhere far out he stopped the jeep and climbed down. They walked around for a few moments. She was standing by the jeep. He came behind her and pushed against her through her clothes. She could not help herself; she drew away from him, against the metal of the jeep.
“So it isn’t buggery that turns you on?” he said harshly. “What do I have to do? If I talk revolution, will you be horny? Will you come back to life? If I lock you in a room and take away your shoes, will you be excited then, Abilene? Will you?”
He jumped into the jeep and drove away, leaving her behind. Over a little knoll he disappeared. It was raining now. In a quarter of an hour it would be dark. This far out, there would be cats. She didn’t know where they went in the rain.
She sat down to let the dark and wet pour over her. The smell of woman would attract animals. That would settle things. This was what she had expected. It was so like Tonio to find a perfect way.
Tonio had made a great arc with the jeep. From another direction, he came back to her.
“I missed you,” he said at supper. She said quietly, “I missed you too.”
“I’m bringing over the young secretary from the packing house. Remember I told you she is learning English? You can practice with her.”
“All right.”
“And you’re going to learn to ride, too. We talked about that.”
“Maybe.” She was afraid of horses. Of course they would put her on an old horse, a gentle animal. They would not expect much of her. She thought the cowboy assigned to teach her would resent her. It would shame him to spend his time that way.
Still, it was better than doing nothing.
“Where’s Tacho?” she asked. If Tacho came around, he could take her over to the hotel to swim. Maybe after Claude was gone.
“He’s gone. For good. He’s gone to Torreon, to work in his brother’s shop, selling clothes.”
“Gone?”
“I tell you, I am retiring. It was time for Tacho to settle down. You see, now he’ll get a wife, have babies.”
“But not me? It’s not time for me to go away and have babies and settle down?”
“You wouldn’t want that.” He knew her.
“Everyone else seems to be going.”
“Oh yes. Mickey too.”
“Where has Mickey gone?”
“Back to Austin. He’s going to work on an advanced degree in geology. He thinks he can work it out to stay in Texas, because of his son.”
“How can he do that? I mean, how can he afford it?”
“It seemed a reasonable plan to me, not like his fantasies about fighting bulls.”
“You gave him money?” She knew Tonio had only contempt for Mickey. There had been a reason for this generosity. Something had been settled between them in this way.
“He did some things for me. Earned his out.”
“But here I am.”
“With me.”
Tonio had a packet of psylocibin. The tablets were small and pink. A friend had bought them in Amsterdam, where such things are carefully made. Tonio showed them to Abilene in the palm of his hand.
She looked at the pills, tiny compressed pods of memory and sensation. The helicopters, the flares, the bodies in the rain. Pola’s hand slipping from her own.
The tablet left a taste of lipstick in her mouth. There was something in the binder that tasted of lipstick. She sat propped against pillows on Tonio’s bed, greedy for the first wave of sensation.
Tonio, benign, brought a stack of photographs, some la
rge manila envelopes, and a letter opener to bed. Most of the pictures were for publicity releases for the new season, shots of Tonio on horseback in his fine regalia, his three-corner hat, his arm arched over the bull with the long barb headed for its neck. “In my last season,” he said, “I will fight only four times. And I will give all the money away, to charity.”
He used the steel knife to slit an envelope along one long side.
The washes came over Abilene like a thousand hands massaging her. They were suspension and forgetting. Tonio showed her a photograph of a house he was thinking of buying in San Miguel de Allende. The house floated up, and through its open door Abilene saw Pola sitting on a chair, her needlepoint in her lap.
Tonio took the photographs away. Across the room from her, he sat in a wicker chair with a high winged back, and he watched her for a long time. “You’re very high?” he said in his faraway pleased voice. “You don’t really need me, do you?”
Later in the night he came to her and helped her take off her clothes. She felt sweet cream flowing from her. She felt him beside her, but she could not tell what he was doing; she could not tell where they came together, and where they separated.
Once she looked at his face and saw his eyes, tiny reduced eyes, like in his photographs. He cared for no one. She saw his eyes as he looked at the bull, and the eyes said, the bull has lived for this moment with me. He looked at her like that. His eyes were windows onto what was real, in his past, and in the future. She saw how the bull wavered, looking for an escape route, dreaming wildly of pasture, even as it was caught in Tonio’s gaze, trapped in the path of the horse, hapless, hapless bull.
She woke and watched Tonio dress. It was morning. She was surprised to be in his bed. It was the first time she had ever spent the whole night in his bed.
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” she said. “I was scared. I didn’t like it.”
He took something from one of his drawers. She saw that the stacks of photographs, and the envelopes, lay on the dresser. He poured a glass of water from the thermos on the table by the bed, and he came and sat down beside her.
“This is Valium. Take it and sleep it off. You’re right, you’ve gotten too spacy for drugs now.” He smiled at her. “But you were very sexy, Abby. You were very wet and open for me.”
He knew what he was doing. He had known she was in bad shape from the city, that it would not be so simple a thing to be herself again. He had given her the drug to help her break a barrier in herself. Tlatelolco had covered her like a membrane, until last night.
He was always in charge. He always knew everything, and that was a way of protecting her.
“Thank you,” she said.
It wasn’t until she woke for the second time in Tonio’s room that she saw how he had transformed his spare African room into something lush: carpet on the floor, embossed shades on the windows, a mink bedspread folded and laid on a lacquered trunk at the foot of the bed.
She had not noticed the changes before.
She went to her room and bathed in a deep bath of tepid murky water. She dressed in a white blouse she had bought in the city, and a yellow skirt, with an old pair of sandals she had not taken to the city. She put her bracelet on her arm, wondering where it had been, and what was true and what was not.
She went into the library and looked at the spines of the books there: books on the corrida, books on Hitler, all kinds of books on nature and wild animals, and shelves of old novels, mostly romances, that must have once belonged to Tonio’s mother.
She went to each bedroom and tried the door, but all were locked except hers and Tonio’s. She went into the kitchen. The lunch had been cleared away, and all the pots were washed, hanging from hooks above the warming table. A plate of cold tortillas sat to the side, on the stove. She ate them with a piece of cheese from the refrigerator, and then ate an orange, peeling it slowly.
Everyone was at siesta.
She went back to Tonio’s room. It was still unlocked, the bed unmade. He wasn’t there.
She took the things from his dresser to the bed, and began looking at them. First she looked at the bullfight pictures again. She had never felt the thrill of the fight when she watched Tonio, not like other bullfighters. She had never considered the possibility that he might be hurt, though she knew he had been in the past. He was aloof and mighty, above the bull, until he dismounted for the kill. The crowds went wild for him when he killed. He made clean and deep and swift kills, not like other matadors who sometimes struck bone or a pad of flesh too far off mark, so that bulls bled from their noses and fell on their knees to die slow ugly deaths.
Out of the slit envelope she pulled more pictures. The first one was of her.
She is coming out of a store with a package under her arm. Her shoes!
Another. She stands in front of the library mural on the university campus, with Hallie and Refugio.
She walks on a broad avenue with Adele.
She is getting out of Isabel’s car.
She stared at the images. She felt dirty and afraid.
“You’re very photogenic,” Tonio said, from behind her. “And utterly naive.”
“How could you?” She was still staring at the pictures.
“Mickey wanted some old pictures of you, and I wanted new ones,” Tonio said playfully. “We made a trade.”
Now she looked at him. “Old pictures!” she remembered Mickey that day at lunch when he was so crazy. Pictures—”Tonio,” she said. Just his name.
“I only gave him two. You look very pretty in them.”
“It’s nasty, Mickey having anything like that. I was with you. You took those pictures.”
“I’m not sentimental.” He had thousands of photographs of himself, in fights, on hunts, with beautiful women.
“But why? Why these?” She swept her arm across the pictures, brushing them off the bed. There were more, part of the way out of the envelope. She drew them out.
She stands on the step in front of her apartment—Claude’s apartment—and on the walk in front of her stands Gato.
“Why, Tonio?”
He was changing his boots, getting ready to ride. “You were very stupid, all summer,” he said calmly. “I tried to warn you.”
She pulled her head up, stretching her neck, and heard it crack. Her heart was beating very fast. All right, she thought. He was looking out for me.
Knowing everything is a kind of protection.
Felix would have talked to Tonio before he got her out of the prison. Maybe, even, it was Tonio who called Felix. Maybe Isabel called Tonio. Maybe the officials—
She got off the bed, onto her hands and knees, to pick up the spilled pictures. When she reached for the envelope on the bed to put them away, she saw that there was one more.
She is with Pola, turning into an alley at Tlatelolco.
That day. It had to have been that day.
“Mickey,” she said. “That miserable—”
“Now Mickey is in Austin.” Tonio sounded neutral, neither smug nor annoyed.
Abilene looked at him. She was kneeling by his bed with photographs in her hands. “You were—” Her voice was small. Her throat had constricted, and the sound would not come out clearly. “You were looking out for me?”
Tonio gave the smallest nod of his head. Maybe.
She picked up the photograph of herself with Pola.
“But you know. You would have known.” It had been planned so precisely—flares and white gloves and hidden revolvers. Army trucks on the avenue, ready to move in on signal.
She stared at Tonio, daring him to deny it. Sadly, she said, “You could have stopped us.”
“It’s too bad, your little friend—” He hadn’t run out of words when he stopped. He had simply said all that he thought was worth saying. Too bad. Not meaning it.
It
was true, he could have stopped them.
She said it again, shrieking her grief and anger. She grabbed for Tonio’s letter opener and stood, holding it up near her head, point out, toward Tonio. Anger was a clean white light bleaching everything around her.
Tonio took the knife from her in one swift motion and slapped her face hard. “I have no interest in this kind of melodrama, Abby. This is your life. I didn’t make it, you did. You took that girl out to the plaza. You came back here.”
Anger filled her and swept around her and held her in place. If she could find its center, she would know what to do.
“I do want you here, you know,” Tonio said, and walked from the room.
She realized that Pola would have been dead by the time Tonio saw the photograph, but she still thought he was to blame.
She washed her face and steadied herself, and she walked down through the gate into the yard. The stable boy was bringing the white Arabian out. Tonio was standing near the guardhouse, waiting. Sapo stood at the door, saying something to him and laughing, rubbing his belly, and once patting his pistol like a pet.
Abilene saw the little javelina with its high stickery back, trotting out of its hiding place, ready for Tonio’s ride. Down toward the ferry, before the ground sloped, a big truck was parked and workers were climbing in the back for the ride to San Marta. The foreman’s pickup was parked in front of the bunkhouse.
She heard birds and the shriek of the monkey leaping down onto the guardhouse roof to watch Tonio. She heard the chatter of men down by the trucks.
She stood away from Tonio, but he saw her and smiled.
Tonio knelt beside the cat where it lay sprawled in the sun. He reached to stroke it, and the cat turned onto its back to have its belly scratched. This was all the cat had—sleep, the dreams of prey, and Tonio.
She saw Tonio looking at her, and then she saw the cat’s head surge upward, and its teeth close on Tonio’s hand. As Tonio jerked away, he pulled the cat forward till its chin rammed into his knee. At the impact, the cat sprang back to the end of its chain as the man stepped back and up, holding his torn and bleeding hand out from his body.
Gringa Page 29
