Days of the Dead (19 page)

All was done in love, in understanding that the dead Artois would want his friends to laugh as well as weep. The tunes January had played had been the boy’s favorites, lively and quick-stepping. People had smiled as they sang.

The old man had not understood.

And January was aware, looking at the faces of the men and women on the plank seats in the sun below the boxes—listening to the cries of respect, of approval, of awe that swept like wind across the packed crowd—that he did not understand what was going on here. He saw there was skill and artistry involved, as well as brute courage. One of the matadors had it, though another was so nervous, he made all kinds of mistakes, jeered and laughed at by the
aficionados,
until he finally had his thigh ripped open from groin to knee. Even the clowns, who leaped and capered about the ring, or ate mock banquets before the charging bull only to spring aside at the last second in showers of breaking plates, had a panache and timing that some of the graver
toreros
lacked.

And he saw how it was a spectacle of bravery, even though the bull was carefully and systematically disabled by having its blood let and its heavy neck muscles—the muscles that controlled its ability to gore—sliced with lances and jabbed with darts, while it was confused, panicked, maddened by the firecrackers attached to the banderillas and bursting all around it.

Yet seeing all that, the cruelty of it revolted him. The cruelty, and the assumption that because men were men, they had the right to torment and kill; the right to encourage the spectacle of death, for their own amusement or for what they perceived as their own spiritual fulfillment.

He left the box and descended the rickety wooden steps in semi-darkness, for evening was coming on. Once outside, he sought for a way around the rough-plastered adobe wall of the ring to the back, where he knew the corrals must be. This was not easy, for the San Pablo bullring stood in the tangle of small streets between the city’s heart and the grubby barrios that fringed the lake on the east, and there were houses of adobe, and other, more ramshackle buildings of mud and thatch built up against its wall. By keeping the bullring wall in view on his right, January threaded his way through the narrow alleys till he found one wide and thick with trampled mud and cow-dung, and this he followed to the square beside the Church of San Pablo, where the makeshift corrals and chutes had all been set up to separate out the bulls from the small herd of steers with which they’d traveled from the ranges where they’d run wild for years.

He’d watched the men working the ring, the assistants running up and down the narrow shadowy slot between the
barreras
and the first row of seats, carrying jugs of water for the
toreros,
or spare swords or extra capes. Had observed the carpenters who swiftly repaired the barriers when one of the bulls rammed into it; the physician who waited for the gored matador to be carried out. With the exception of the physician, most of these workers had looked to be either
indio
or mestizo, and January assumed that a Prussian valet could not, in the weeks since his master’s death, have acquired enough of the
torero
’s obvious skills to have sought that kind of employment.

That left either the hawkers of oranges and ginger-beer who made their way up and down the aisles—and he knew Werther had insufficient Spanish to understand that many people shouting orders to him all at once—or the handlers of the cattle before they got into the ring.

With luck Werther—who might be a dark-haired Bavarian for all January knew—would at least be distinguishable from the lower-caste Mexicans among whom he worked.

And so it proved. The shadows were lengthening and the dust in the air was like shimmering golden soup among the cramped pens built in the square, but as he picked his way through the labyrinth of rough pine-pole fences, January could see at a distance the only man who might remotely be of German extraction: tall, blond, and what was generally described as “strapping.” The young man wore no hat, and though his face and throat were burned a painful shade of magenta, January could see he was extremely handsome, almost beautiful. One of the picadors, riding out of the black arch of shadow that led to the space beneath the tiers of benches and so to the ring, called out something to the blond man, and January heard him shout back,
“Ja, ja—schrekliche Kuh . . .”

Then he turned and saw January striding toward him across a small open corral.

And bolted as if January had been aiming a gun at him.

Startled, January plunged in pursuit. His mended white shirt like a flag in the sun, Werther vaulted over a fence into a pen full of steers, snaked through the dusty, shifting mass of horns and hooves. January slipped under a fence, dashed through a narrow chute to head him off. He yelled, “Halt!” as Werther sprang over the fence at the far side of the steers, who were now milling angrily—rangy Mexican animals with enormous horns, wild and nervous as deer. January scrambled between two flimsy railings, dashed into another corral, and skidded to a stop as Werther shot open a gate at the far side of the open space, to release from its chute a bull the size of the Mexico City Cathedral.

The bull came out of the chute like a steam locomotive and charged January without so much as an instant’s hesitation. January bolted for the nearest fence, though he hadn’t seen a fence in Mexico that looked like it could stand up to a determined ramming, and this one was no exception, four or five skinny trunks of stripped lodgepole pine lashed to an upright with hanks of rawhide. He slid through it and into the next pen and the animal hit it full-on, snapping one of the poles outright and wrenching the ends of two more in their bindings. The bull let out a bellow and piled up and over the fence, head tossing, small black eyes furious. January had heard how fighting bulls were bred to charge anything that moved, and he understood, terrifyingly, the courage of the matadors now, to stand still and control that rank, raw-smelling onrush of flesh and rage.

He vaulted over another fence and the bull crashed that one as well, horns glinting wickedly, so close January felt the hot drops of its spittle strike the back of his head. He pelted across the pen beyond, sprang up the next fence. There was nothing beyond that—a chute and the back wall of a mud-brick
pulqueria
that bordered the square. The bull smashed the fence full-force while January was still atop it, the impact of half a ton of blind animal rage nearly hurling him down on top of the bull. He caught his balance as the beast backed for another charge. Its neck muscles rippled as it flung its head sideways, then charged the post to which January clung. January leaped down into the chute, heard the bull bellow behind him, its horns snagged.

“Andele!”
cried a high voice above the thunder of hooves, the stink of cattle and dust. January backed along the chute, ready to leap onto the fence again if the bull followed him in; he saw the picador to whom Werther had been speaking—and Rose, of all people, on foot with her long pink skirts gathered in one hand and an eight-foot pike in the other—driving half a dozen dusty-flanked steers through the nearest gate into the pen with the bull.

“I’m gonna kill that fool cabbage-eater!” cursed the picador—who, January saw with a certain degree of surprise, was a woman. As Rose shut the gate behind the steers, the picador worked her horse through the maze of chutes around the pen: “You, Sambo, this way, eh? And slow—wait till he pulls his head free. . . . He don’t see so good, that Señor Cojones, eh?”

January waited until the bull had pulled his head back out from the entangling pieces of the chute, then cautiously followed the chute around until he was away from the pen. Enraged and filled with terror alone, once among members of his own kind, the bull seemed to forget January’s existence completely.

January was shaking all over as he made his way around to where Rose and the picador waited in one of the small holding-pens.

“
Mierda!
My little boy, he got more sense than that cabbage-eating German, eh?” The picador pushed the gate shut behind him with her pike. “Now we gotta run in one of the substitute bulls, an’ they’re both crazy bulls, you know? Potosí bulls, you never know which way they charge. That bastard there, he’s a good Gran’ Zac’, at least he charge straight. But they learn fast, bulls. Now he know it’s the man he gotta go after, not that stupid little red rag they wave. So he’s spoiled for the ring.”

She spat on the ground. She was a lush-breasted mestizo girl, her black hair braided into a
torero
’s pigtail and dented steel shin-guards glinting dully over tight buckskin breeches.

“You work fast, honey,” she added to Rose. “How you know so fast we gotta get the steers in around Señor Cojones, eh?”

“I grew up in the country.” Rose shaded her eyes, looking up at the woman. “On Grand Isle, someone was always doing something silly and getting chased by a bull.” She’d lost her hat in her rush to rescue, and her soft brown curls lay over her shoulders; she might have been discussing the cultivation of hollyhocks.

“She was headin’ for the steers’ pen the second that bull come outa that gate. What’d you do to that unfertilized egg, eh”—the picador used the word
huero,
a common term in Mexico for a blond—“that he didn’t want to talk to you that bad?”

“I’ve never met him in my life,” January said, and slapped the dust from the sleeves of his jacket. “I need to speak to him, yes, but I can’t imagine why he thinks I’d mean him harm.”

“Well, maybe that’s just how they say hi to their friends in Germany, eh?” She laughed at her own joke, high and rough, like a child.

“You don’t happen to know where I could find him in town, do you?”

“What, you think I follow him home at night for his blue eyes?” She shook her head. “He just a peon, you know? They need so many to push the steers around and keep track of the bulls. With the Army out lookin’ for anybody that got two good legs these days, they hire whoever they can get here. Old
Huero
knew the difference between a steer and a bull, so they hire him even though he can’t talk Spanish. I ain’t never seen him around my barrio, but that don’t mean nuthin’.”

From the dark maw of the arch someone shouted something. The woman yelled back, “All right, keep your pants on!” She reined her scrawny horse around and tucked the pike up under her arm. “I gotta go. One thing I tell you, after givin’ the best bull of the day lessons in what he gotta chase, you can bet
Huero
ain’t gonna be back here.” And she tapped her mount’s sides with the spiked rowels of her spurs and trotted back into the dark beneath the gate.

Beside him, Rose said in a thoughtful voice, “You really shouldn’t have shouted, ‘I know you murdered Fernando,’ you know.”

Taken by surprise, January laughed so hard, he had to lean against the fence. From the pen the bull watched him, suspicion in its piggy eye.

“If it’s any comfort,” Rose went on, linking hands with January as they edged through the chutes and pens, “I should say that Werther’s immediate reaction of attack and flight at the sight of you should put paid to Ylario’s contentions of his innocence. Whether Ylario will believe that or not is another matter.”

January shook his head. “It has to have been Ylario who told him I was seeking him,” he said. “He reacted
on sight . . .
and as I’m probably the only black man in Mexico City other than Anthony Butler’s slaves, I doubt he was mistaking me for someone else. Or
. . . would
he have had a reason to flee one of Butler’s slaves?”

They stopped in the first
pulqueria
they passed, for January to get a shot of the curiously mellow-tasting liquor to stop his hands from shaking. The place was empty, its proprietors and its entire clientele being at the
corrida.
It was the first time January had been afoot in Mexico City that he hadn’t been mobbed by
léperos.
They were all at the ring as well—he could hear the shouting, like gusts of wind sweeping the clear evening sky.

A round-eyed
indio
girl dippered the liquid from a barrel, staring in wonder at the well-dressed, dust-covered couple—one of them a black man at that—who came in to buy. The pulque was virtually raw and had a punch like Señor Cojones’s charge. When permitted to age, pulque was barely stronger than a good German beer.

“I can’t imagine why Anthony Butler would even know of Werther Bremer’s existence,” Rose mused. “Much less send his slaves after him, particularly when he has in his employ gentlemen like our friend Mr. Dillard and that pig-headed rhinoceros of a secretary who kept asking who your master was. If I were Butler, I wouldn’t let my slaves out of the house at all, given that if they ran away here, there’d be no legal way of getting them back.”

“They may not be slaves at all, you know.” January cracked a peanut, turned the papery shell over between his huge fingers, as if he expected to find the answer to the riddle written inside. “I mean, legally, of course, they’re not, here, but they may be freedmen back in South Carolina as well. I wonder how I’d go about finding that out.”

“Mr. Dillard would be able to tell us.”

“He would,” January agreed. “If you can think of a way of asking him without the question being immediately relayed back to Butler.”

Rose said, “Hmmn.”

Consuela’s coachman was gone, doubtless comfortably ensconced in the sun-side seats of the bullring, watching some other innocent brute being tormented and killed. Zama, too, had disappeared. The crackle of firecrackers splintered in the fading air from over the bullring wall, and the hungry sea-surge howl of the crowd. The street was lined with carriages, but not a coachman or footman was to be seen. Only old Cristobál, apparently asleep with his back against the wall of a dilapidated convent on the opposite side of the street, a rifle across his knees.

January had to look twice to realize that every carriage was where Cristobál could see it.

“Anthony Butler may be innocent as the day is long,” said January, helping Rose into the carriage. “Ylario was certainly keeping things from me when we talked, and just because he sincerely hates Santa Anna’s favorites taking the Principles of Universal Law into their own hands doesn’t mean he wouldn’t feel justified in doing so himself to protect Bremer. But if there’s some reason it’s Butler’s slaves that Werther is afraid of, we have to go carefully. Any approach I make to anyone in Butler’s household is going to be reported back to Butler one way or another—and me being just about the only black man in Mexico City, he’s not going to have too much of a problem figuring out who’s asking questions.”