Matador, Mi Amor

by William Maltese

  “What happened?” Alyssa was acutely aware that everything looked and smelled very much like a sick room. So, who had been ill?

  “You had me scared to death,” Karen said. “Thank goodness you’ve finally come around.”

  “Have I been ill?”

  “Darling, you haven’t said anything coherent for the last four days. I’ve been frantic.”

  “How nice of you to come, mother,” Alyssa said, looking around for something to eat; she was famished, “but as fit as I feel, now, I’m sure it couldn’t have been anything too serious.”

  “It was a virus,” Karen informed. “I was assured a lot of people get it, and get over it, with bed rest, but that was of little consolation, let me tell you.” She fluffed the pillows behind Alyssa’s back and head.

  “How did they contact you?” Alyssa saw an orange on a saucer by the telephone and reached for it and the knife beside it. More often than not, even Alyssa had trouble tracking down her mother.

  “Ty called me, darling.”

  “Ty Gordman?”

  “He was in quite a state.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Alyssa used the knife blade to score the orange rind for easier peeling. “How did he find out I was sick?” She stopped what she was doing. She remembered what happened just prior to her collapse. Had she actually said all of those horrible things to Adriano? She must have been made hysterical by whatever the “bug” she’d caught. Surely, Adriano must have realized that.

  And, what about Fanuco?

  In the interim, Karen wasn’t talking about Adriano or Fanuco but about Alyssa’s ex-fiancé.

  “Ty did what?” Alyssa was jerked back to the then and there.

  “You simply can’t imagine how they’ve been treating him. They beat him. With clubs. The last time I was there, he could hardly see out of one eye. I told them to let him out, but they won’t do anything without your say, and you’ve been completely incoherent.”

  “Back up a little, mother.” Momentarily, Alyssa forgot the orange in her lap as well as her hunger for it which had prompted her to begin peeling it.

  “Now, Alyssa, I know how horrible it must sound, but you can’t blame the man, can you? I mean, he loves you, darling. He does.”

  “You’re telling me Ty shot and killed all of those bulls?”

  “He merely wanted you back home with him where you belong.” Karen reached forward to smooth a stray lock of hair out of Alyssa’s eyes. “Granted, he might have resorted to fairly unorthodox methods, but.…”

  “Ty…killed…my…bulls?”

  “You would have thought he’d killed a whole village of people, the way the authorities are acting,” Karen said. “I tell you, Alyssa, we simply must get that poor man out of that horrible jailhouse as soon as humanly possible.”

  “And the threatening note I received?” Alyssa wondered if this wasn’t all fantasy after all—nothing but a macabre nightmare. “Did Ty write that, too?”

  “I’m afraid that little note does seem to have the police rather upset,” Karen admitted. “Even when I tried to explain to them how it was all part of a harmless lover’s scheme, they refused to budge. You would think hot-blooded Spaniards would appreciate the pathos of this little tale of passion. Or, is it only the Italians who are hot-blooded?”

  “Mother, Ty, in that note, actually threatened my life!”

  “Come now, Alyssa,” Karen cajoled. “You and I both know he wouldn’t hurt a hair on your head. The only reason he did any of this is because he was sure you found him unromantic and a bit wish-washy.”

  “Now, I just find him crazy!”

  “Crazy with love,” Karen dismissed, as if Alyssa was somehow missing the point. “I’m sure he would have had second thoughts had he known the authorities were incapable of understanding such affairs of the heart. Do you know that they kept him for over two days before he could even make a phone call?”

  “How did they find out he was killing my bulls?”

  Karen glanced nervously around the room, as if she suspected it contained concealed listening devises.

  “Apparently, your foreman staked out a bull and brought Ty to it like some poor tiger falls for the ploy offered up by a decoy goat. You were unconscious, and poor Ty was beaten senseless and hauled off to that dreadful jail in Trujillo where he’s still beaten regularly as clockwork.”

  Alyssa remembered how badly Adriano looked after her men had finished with him, and she could just imagine how Ty looked, about now, after having been caught red-handed.

  Poor, innocent Adriano! Alyssa had made horrible accusations the morning of her collapse, all false. “What about Adriano Montego?” She tried to appear casual. She began a renewed effort at peeling the orange.

  “He called a couple of times to see how you were,” Karen said. “Right now, though, he’s in Madrid.”

  “Madrid?”

  “Some kind of charity event, as I understand it. He’s actually going to fight six bulls in one afternoon, someone said.”

  “Adriano is going to fight them? Adriano Montego?”

  “Surely, you don’t find that so surprising, do you, my dear? He is Lalo Montego’s son, after all.”

  “But Fanuco de Galena was scheduled to do it.”

  “Oh, you mean that poor young man laid up at the Hidalgo Hacienda?”

  “He’s not dead, then?”

  “He’s well on his way to a complete recovery, but he’s certainly not up to fighting even one bull for awhile yet. Since all of the tickets to the performance were sold out weeks in advance, Adriano graciously volunteered to step in.”

  “What day is it today?”

  “It’s Thursday, darling. There’s plenty of time for you to get well enough to attend the performance if you so desire. As a matter of fact, Ladonna and Joaquín Hidalgo stopped by just this morning to see how you were doing and to say they and Victoro Isidro are flying to Madrid for the occasion. They’re saving seats for us, although I can’t imagine why you’d want to go see such a thing. Even when I was married to Lalo, I found the whole spectacle more than a little distasteful.”

  “At least the bulls have a better chance in the arena than with a man holding a rifle to their heads,” Alyssa reminded. She broke the orange in half and relayed one of its juicy segments to her mouth.

  “Yes, of course, there is that,” Karen reluctantly admitted. She walked back to the curtains which were now gently blowing in a slight breeze incoming from the courtyard.

  “My goodness, being back here brings back old memories,” she said, obviously proposing to move their conversation elsewhere. “I don’t remember things quite so green. Certainly, I don’t remember it so quiet. Then, it never was quiet when I was here. Lalo always had scads of people milling around.” She pulled back the edge of the fluttering cloth, allowing a ray of sunshine to enter through the breach and bathe a section of her face.

  Alyssa watched her. She could well see how Lalo Montego might have, at one time, been attracted to the woman. Alyssa’s mother was still very attractive. Granted, there were wrinkles at the corners of her eyes not completely muted by her last facelift, and her still luxurious hair wasn’t naturally that shade of attractive blonde, but she was still striking, nevertheless.

  “Lalo Montego was really a very wretched man,” Karen said, turning back to her daughter. “In retrospect, I don’t know what I ever saw in him. Certainly, he didn’t like women. Certainly, he didn’t like men. He had to have been the most destructive human being I ever met. Maybe that was part of his attraction, like a flame that draws moths in to their destruction.”

  She let out a long sigh. Obviously, she wasn’t at all sure she liked being back—even now that Lalo was long dead and buried.

  “Tell me about Adriano Montego,” Karen said, coming back to the bed and sitting down on the edge of it. To occupy her hands, she began picking up the segments of orange peel Alyssa had discarded on the bedspread. She piled them neatly on the saucer. “Joaquín sa
ys Adriano is nothing like his father.”

  “Joaquín said that?”

  “‘You’d never know he was Lalo’s son at all,’ is how he put it. I rather had the impression he hoped I would pass on that bit of information to you. Fond of Adriano, are you?”

  “Adriano and his father are about as different as Ladonna Hidalgo and her father,” Alyssa said in order to get the conversation off her feelings for Adriano; she wasn’t sure of them herself without having to try and explain them to her mother. As soon as she said what she said, though, she felt a slight twinge of guilt. She’d had very little to do with Ladonna since meeting her. Certainly, she didn’t know enough about the woman to be making bitchy observations about Ladonna and her father.

  “Well, yes, I can very well see where anyone might see the difference between Ladonna and Joaquín,” Karen admitted. “At least that, though is easily explained away, isn’t it?”

  Alyssa found her mother’s reply decidedly curious. “Easily explained away?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly,” Karen said. A small smile (although, obviously, not one of amusement) played on her lips. She turned more toward her daughter and smiled more genuinely. “But, what possible good can come of my stirring up that smelly barrel of fish all of these years later?”

  “I don’t understand, mother,” Alyssa’s curiosity was genuinely whetted.

  “Nor is there any reason why you should understand, my dear,” Karen said, patting the bedspread ballooned over her daughter’s legs. “Your mother has no right to foist all of her unhappy memories on you.”

  “Sometimes it helps to talk about them,” Alyssa prodded.

  “Hmm,” Karen hummed, as if she’d heard that idea expressed before but still wasn’t really convinced. Again, she got up; again, she went to the window and fiddled with its curtains. “I really shouldn’t have come back, you know? Poor Ty just sounded so needy on the telephone. I always did have a soft spot for him—as you very well know.” She glanced fully at her daughter and flashed an attractively youthful smile. “I suppose that’s why I was so anxious for you two to get back together. Ty always seemed such a stable young man. An ideal husband for any woman in a world full of completely unsuitable young men.”

  Alyssa could have debated Ty’s stability, considering his recent rampage of shooting bulls and authoring poison-pen letters, but she didn’t.

  “Why should you listen to your mother, or to anyone else, when making decisions of the heart? God knows, your mother certainly didn’t pay too much attention to anyone, either. My, oh, my, though, didn’t I make a mess of things in not doing so?”

  “Were all your choices so bad?” Alyssa asked, eventually hoping to steer the conversation back to Ladonna Hidalgo.

  “Oh, your father was certainly the best of the lot.” Again, she moved the curtains and peered out as if she saw things which had occurred in the courtyard years ago when last she’d not only been in the hacienda but mistress of it. “He was fun, but thought there was more to marriage than just good times. He wanted to play father, and, for awhile, I was quite ready to let him. But, Lalo Montego? My God, that man was a walking time bomb for any women! He held nothing sacred, except possibly, at one time, his friendship for Joaquín Hidalgo.”

  “I thought you told me he botched even that.”

  “He was well on his way to doing just that, for sure,” Karen admitted. “That was one of the main reasons I decided to leave him. I figured I didn’t have much chance of keeping his loyalty when he seemed so hell-bent on shattering the one friendship he had left since his boyhood.”

  “Everyone I’ve spoken to, here, seems under the impression the two men remained friends up until Lalo died.”

  Karen turned back toward the bed and said, “Tell me, what exactly you have against Ladonna Hidalgo?” She folded her arms across breasts kept elevated by plastic surgery.

  “It’s a long story, mother,” Alyssa said, “and, probably, in the final analysis, one based mainly on very little more than petty jealousy.”

  “Sometimes it does help to talk about these things, you know?” Karen said; a small smile was back on her lips.

  “Touché, mother!” Alyssa finished off the rest of the orange, surprised at how quickly she was regaining her strength.

  Once again, Karen came back to the bed and sat down on it. She reached for her daughter’s hands and held them within her own.

  “I must have looked horribly upset when Joaquín dropped his little bomb that you and Adriano Montego were ‘interested’ in each other. I kept imagining how my own daughter would soon be forced into undergoing the very same brutal nonsense that I’d endured with a Montego. I haven’t been much of a mother to you, Alyssa, but I really do want you to be happy. Do you love him?”

  “Actually, I have my doubts.”

  “What kind of doubts?”

  Alyssa shrugged. Still, she resolved to try and put her feelings into words. Since she had always complained that her mother was never one for mother-daughter talks, she couldn’t very well be faulted for trying one now—even if it appeared a little late in the day.

  “Adriano was engaged to Ladonna.…”

  “What?” Karen interrupted, even though it was obvious Alyssa had been prepared to say more. “Adriano Montego and Ladonna Hidalgo? Engaged?”

  “It’s a logical marriage when you think about it, mother,” Alyssa said. “Joaquín and Lalo were friends. They had adjoining ranches which could have been combined by the marriage.”

  “What a sick bastard Lalo had to have been to put his stamp of approval on that!” Karen said, screwing her face up in genuine disgust. She shut her eyes and physically shuddered.

  “Actually, Adriano thought his father was really against it and that Lalo left the ranch to me so the wedding wouldn’t go through. Though, Adriano, nor anyone else, seems to know why that might have been his plan.”

  “Well, I know!” Karen said, seeing finally why her daughter had ended up with the ranch that should have belonged to Adriano Montego. “I’m glad to discover that Lalo had a limit to his perversions, beyond which even he wasn’t prepared to go.”

  “You know?” Alyssa pressed.

  “They loved each other, did they? Adriano and Ladonna?” Karen ignored her daughter’s query.

  “Adriano says, no. He insists it was merely something they were prepared to do because Joaquín would have liked it to happen. Adriano doubts Ladonna can ever really love anyone.”

  “Like father, like daughter, “Karen said.

  “You think Joaquín incapable of love?” Certainly, Alyssa was ready to give him the benefit of a doubt.

  “Of course, Joaquín is capable of love.” Karen gave Alyssa’s hands a hearty squeeze. “He loved Elisa and Lalo Montego to a fault.”

  “Elisa?” Her mother had lost her.

  “Joaquín’s wife, my dear, back in those prehistoric days when your mother was mistress of this hacienda. Later, I heard she died when Ladonna was born. The wages of sin, and all of that, I supposed.”

  Alyssa waited for her mother to clarify, and Karen, after a preparatory sigh, did so. “Joaquín was in Madrid, arranging for the sale of some bulls, or whatever it is men do when they pack up and head off for days on end. Lalo took advantage and, as it turned out, Elisa wasn’t all that adverse to his attentions.”

  “Ladonna is Lalo and Elisa’s daughter?”

  “Shall we sit, here, and count the months?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was time. Adriano knew it. Alyssa knew it. Yet, they both lingered a bit longer within the warmth offered by the covers and by each other’s naked flesh.

  “I have to go, babe,” he said finally, giving her a kiss before pulling away.

  She let him get up. She wouldn’t hold him back; even though, she was filled with a definite apprehension regarding that afternoon he would spend in the corrida with six bulls.

  “It’s just something I have to do,” he said. “Not for my dead father. Not for Fanuco. Not ev
en for Sister Dominica’s orphanage; although, that is probably as good a reason as any. I have to do it to prove something to myself. Prove that I can do it.”

  Alyssa thought the whole ritual came across as some kind of primitive initiation, like that of those African tribes who had to have its male members individually go forth and kill a lion with a spear before officially considered ushered into adulthood. If the notion was absurd that Adriano had to kill six bulls before he could become his own man, it was no more absurd than so many of life’s other many foibles.

  “I have to know,” he said, “whether I kept out of the ring only to spite my father, or because I really didn’t have the inclination or skill to be a matador. Up until now, I really don’t have the answer, but I will after this afternoon.”

  Alyssa laid there in the bed, watching the man she loved. Simultaneously, she coveted the warmth his body had left in the bed with her.

  He dressed, but not yet in the traditional suit of lights. He would don that later, along with the traditional montera and false coleta, within a small room at the Plaza de Toros. Then, after that, he would go to a small arena chapel and pray.

  After he left her in their hotel room, the next time Alyssa would see him would be when he was entering the bullring, the heavy silk of his embroidery-encrusted costume catching brilliant rays of the afternoon sunshine. She was uneasy. She was afraid for him but she wouldn’t try to stop him, intuitively knowing that the best way to hold onto a man was often just giving him leave to go.

  It wasn’t as if he was leaving her forever. No way! He was Lalo Montego’s son, and how many fiestas had Lalo gone through before his moment of death in the afternoon? Even Lalo’s eventual death on the horn of a bull became suspect, considering the incestuous marriage ceremony it aborted.

  When Adriano finished dressing, he came over to the bed, leaned down, and kissed her again. She wrapped his neck with her arms, pulling him down closer. When he pulled away, this time, he said. “You will come?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”