6 - El Güero and the Bull

The theory was that having me out the front of the shop would attract more custom, that Mexican provincials instinctively trust the technical know-how of a white man.
“But Maria has the knowledge, not me,” I said to Agustin, the old man who was running the show. “She’s the one with the diploma; she's the one who can fix things.”
“He’s right, Peter,” said Maria. “If they see me, the men will just laugh. They won’t think a Mexican girl can fix their televisions or generators. If they see you they’ll think you know what you’re doing.”
“Trust me,” said Agustin, getting up from the table. “And if you wear glasses and grow a beard, even better.”
I did trust him, and so the next day I got some glasses, just the frames, had my hair cut, and waited for my beard to grow.
We had an open shop front on a busy street, and above it Agustin had hammered a sign saying “Reparaciones El Güero”. I would sit behind a counter in the shop front, wearing a white shirt and glasses and a beard. The white shirt apparently showed that I was so good at repairing things I never got dirty, so I needed no overalls. The other interesting thing about me was the eye patch, and Agustin had a spin for that too: I had been injured in a boiler explosion, which was no fault of my own, but during which my wife perished, God rest her soul. This tragedy also explained why I was here in this backwater, so far from home; I was one of those wandering souls with a broken heart, you see.
The whole package made me quite popular with the ladies, some of whom would call me El Guapo, instead of El Güero, according to Maria.
“I hear them talking about El Guapo in the market,” she told me. “I heard one say to her friend today ‘Have you seen El Guapo, the one who has the repair shop? He mended my television; he could fix me up any time’.”
I pretended to be offended. “Really, Maria, I feel like an advertising hoarding.”
“Yes,” she said, patting my cheek. “But you are a very pretty one.”
So all day long, apart from siesta time, I would sit in the shop front, watching Agustin collect and return electrical goods and take cash. I didn’t even do that bit. Agustin said I was too much of a pushover to bargain with these shrewd people; he knew this because back in Mexico City he used to sell me crap from his market stall outside my apartment.
Agustin would accept some beat up television or radio or mixer and say, “That will be no problem for El Güero, will it güero?” and I would give him a serious nod and say “no problem”, while out the back it was Maria beavering away, fixing stuff. I felt bad about it, of course, but as a business model it seemed to work.
We would pull the metal blinds down for a couple of hours at midday and Maria and Agustin would set up cots in the workshop and have a snooze. I never really got into the siesta thing. Maybe if I could have slipped into a bed with Maria I would have given it a go, but that workshop wasn’t the best place for that kind of thing, and she probably wouldn’t have felt like anything amorous with her overalls on and oily fingers.
Our relationship was unclear anyway. Agustin had expected us to become husband and wife in some way, even encouraged us to spend more time together, but we had separate rooms, spaced around a courtyard at the house, Maria sharing with her children, Agustin in a box room, and me in a double to myself. Sometimes, in the early hours, my door would open and close and I would feel the sheets lift, her cool naked body wrap into mine, and we would kiss, a long deep kiss, and touch each other until we came, and then she would slip out again as the dawn was breaking.
We never talked about these moments, and there was never more to them than this. I didn’t push for more, either; I was happy enough.
So, instead of lying in a room smelling of oil and solder, listening to Agustin snore, I would put on my hat, a giant panama that Maria had given me for my birthday, and go wandering about the streets. It was a bit of a cliché, I suppose, mad dogs and Englishmen and all that, though the dogs weren’t particularly mad in that place and stayed in the shade, panting or sleeping. I normally had a couple of beers with my lunch, so with that and the heat I was pretty dreamy, though not dreaming anything in particular, kicking stones down the streets, safe under my panama from the worst of the sun.
In the afternoon, Maria’s twins would come back from the nursery. The workshop was too dangerous for a pair of two year olds, so they would have to be in the shop front, and while Agustin loved them as if they were his own, he was over 80, so it was mostly up to me.
And so it was that often in the afternoon, people would arrive to find El Güero with two small children on his knees, reading them a story or helping them colour in a flag or picture of some indigenous god or Christian saint. Somehow, word got around that they were orphans I’d picked up along the way, found abandoned and taken in. I was heading towards sainthood myself.
After we’d shut up shop in the early evening, we’d form a strange looking unit and stroll to the outskirts of town where we had bought a ragged bunch of buildings that formed our home. It wasn’t the most luxurious of places; it was edged up against a hill and frequently in the rains it would be flooded with muddy water; scorpions were a constant danger in the shower room, and the cockroach reigned supreme. But on the right evening, after the children had gone to bed, there was nothing better than sitting under the mango tree with a cold beer watching the sun set over the valley.
Most evenings, though, Maria would go straight to bed after dinner. Really she was settling the children but she would fall asleep with them. And Agustin would fall asleep also, slumped in his chair in the kitchen.
Left to my own devices with a couple of hours to kill, and rather than sit in my room listening to my old Bakelite radio, that was stuck on some indigenous language show broadcast from the mountains, I would walk the nearby streets, sharing a greeting with the old men sitting outside their homes, winking at the groups of young women out for their evening strolls, duties over, arms linked and giggling at the slightest provocation.
At the edge of town, there was a large area of beaten earth, with a basketball hoop at one end, a small goal at the other, and a row of cement steps along one edge where I could sit and watch kids and young men playing a chaotic version of basketball in the light of an arc lamp. The first few times I turned up they asked me to join them, maybe thinking my height would give one or the other team an advantage. But since I'd badly broken my leg a few years before I wasn't much good at prolonged running about, and I didn't want to injure myself and have to use the cane again, so I declined and they soon reverted to taking no notice of me.
One evening I arrived to find two men dragging an enormous canvas bag onto the football end of the court. One of them was wearing a very grubby but unmistakable costume of a matador, and so I sat down to watch.
They took no notice of me as they unpacked the bag, taking out a wooden sword, a cape, and an enormous pair of bull’s horns, still attached to the skull and with handles screwed to the back.
The matador postured and swung his sword in the dusty air, draped the cape over it, all the time pursing his lips and frowning like he’d just been insulted but was holding his tongue for the right moment. The other man, who was as small and slight as the matador and a lot older, was meanwhile heaving the horns up, trying to get a good grip on the handles. The sun was already setting behind the mountains and the cicadas were clearing their throats when the matador and the bull began to dance.
The bull scraped the ground with the rubber sole of his sandal, snorted, and then shuffled on his tiptoes toward the matador, holding the horns high and pointed down, letting them drop as he neared his target, and then arching them up quickly in an attempt to catch the matador under the ribs and remove his heart. The matador, knowing what was coming, stood his ground, offering the bull his best pose, until at the last moment he would step away — no jumping, no startled or panicky hop to the side — it was a step, almost balletic, foot arched and toes pointed, chest puffed out, cape gracefully swished over the bull’s horns, which jabbed harmlessly at the evening air.
“Olé!” the bull shouted, and then put down his horns to chat with his partner, exchanging a few ideas, demonstrating some movements.
They were at it for about an hour, snuffling, charging, avoiding, until they packed up and walked off down the hill, first waving at me and calling out “Good night, güero.”


They became a regular feature of my evenings that summer — the matador and the bull, or Pedro and Señor Alacrán, as they were known to the rest of town. If she was awake when I got back home I would tell Maria about them, run around the courtyard under the mango tree, showing her the moves that both were developing, because though the matador was learning, becoming more poised and elegant, the bull was becoming more bullish also, his shoulders stronger, his steps more certain, his brow more tightly knitted.
“The matador is allowed to use his sword now,” I said to Maria. “After the bull passes he jabs at it like this, and for the final stroke he stands his ground, draws the sword back, and thrusts it into the skull, right between the eye sockets. The bull wobbles a bit, stumbles, and crashes into the dust — boom…”
Maria laughed. “Get up, Peter,” she said. “You’ll get your clothes dirty.”
I got up off the floor, dusted myself down, and sat with Maria at the small ironwork table Agustin had made. It looked good, that table, but was a little unsteady, so that we had to hold our glasses rather than perch them there.
“They must be training for the fair,” I said. “It’s a couple of months away, isn’t it?”
I had seen the posters from last year’s fair, hanging in yellowing strips from lampposts and on street walls, but still you could see the picture of a cowboy in a sombrero riding a bucking bronco, some clowns, a Ferris wheel: “Feria de San Juan Martín, For All Ages!” they said in bold type. It was an annual event that lasted several days, with marches and parades, dances and concerts, and a rodeo, nine months after which, from what I'd heard, half the town’s young maidens gave birth.
“Maybe we should do something special for the fair,” said Maria. “Something to do with the shop.”
“What if we get one of those mechanical bulls,” I said. “We could charge a few pesos. The men would love a chance to show off.”
I’d seen one of these years before, when I’d first got to Mexico and was living on a friend’s roof. I spent hours watching people getting thrown off this mighty machine they’d set up in a park to promote some soft drink that made you more macho.
It didn’t matter who you were, though, sooner or later you would get thrown off the bull. I tried it myself, and it was only moments before I was lying face down in the dust, but that had been a long time before, and I thought it was time to try again.
“I don’t know,” said Maria. “Someone could get hurt.”
I was about to put my argument to her, when she stood, leaned on my shoulder and kissed my cheek.
“No,” she said. “No bulls. Good night.”
“Good night,” I said.
It was a sticky hot night, and the air was full of flying insects so that probably I should have gone to my own room to hide from mosquitoes behind the mesh windows. But I wanted to be in the open, and so I got a cold beer and a glass of tequila from the kitchen and went back to the ironwork table, sipped and stared at the mango tree, the bougainvillea on the trellis, thinking how quickly life had changed for me, how just months before I’d been living in the city, a big apartment to myself, with a woman who came twice or more times a week to have sex with me and who I barely knew, a woman that cared for me almost as little as I’d cared for myself.
Back then I was the loneliest I’d ever known, but then I’d met Agustin and Maria, moved to this little place, this simple life, and when I looked at it, it was the closest I had ever known to a family. And it was terrifying, because some day it would have to end, some day I’d get thrown off.
The last night I was in the city the phone rang for the first time. It was Dolores, the woman that fucked me, kept me there, paid me for translations that nobody read, a woman that Agustin feared enough to make him run.
“You’re such a fool that you’ve saved yourself, Peter, for now at least,” she said. “My husband saw you. He’s not the quickest of men, but sooner or later he’ll work out that I brought you here to have my fun with. He’ll get you first. But he has no imagination. A bullet in the head is the best he could do. So I’m going to let you go with the old man and the maid.”
“Okay,” I said. Of course later I thought of a thousand things I could have said, or a thousand questions, but at the time I could think of nothing else but "okay".
“I’ll come looking for you one day,” she said then. “And I will find you.”
I said nothing, I was feeling relief, excitement about the offer Agustin had made — a new life.
"Have you ever wondered, Peter," she said then. "What it would feel like to watch yourself bleed to death?"
"No," I said.
She laughed gently and the line died.
One day — it could be any day, and I had no idea what she might be capable of doing. Cutting me was easy for her, and it hadn’t mattered that much to me then, but like I said, I was in a family now, and it wasn't just for that it mattered; I was liking life.


Maria fought me the whole way about the mechanical bull. It was the first time we’d argued, and there were even tears, but for some reason I had it in my head that I was going to go through with this; this was my thing.
“You’re not going to stop me, Maria,” I said one evening over the kitchen table. “It’s my money, my idea, my thing.”
“I don’t think it’s such a bad one,” said Agustin. “It’ll be fun.”
Maria glared at him. “Someone will get hurt,” she said. “And knowing him, it will be Peter.”
I banged my fist on the table, which was a first for me. “If I’m going to get hurt it will be my own fault and my own doing,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” she said, looking a little concerned.
“I’m talking about getting on that fucking bull and fucking riding it till it fucking dies,” I said.
That was when the tears started. I’d never sworn at her before or even raised my voice.
I found her an hour later under the mango tree. She wasn’t crying anymore, but she didn’t look happy.
I sat down beside her and put my hand on hers. It was a little too hot to actually hold hands, but the contact was good, and she didn’t pull away.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” she said.
“I won’t.”
She turned to me. “I’ve never seen you so passionate about anything,” she said. “And over a silly mechanical bull.”
I shrugged. “It’s not the bull,” I said. “It could have been anything. Maybe it’s a stupid idea, but it’s mine, not Agustin’s, and I’m doing the work, not you. Don’t you see?”
“I suppose so,” she said. She thought a while. “Are you bored here, Peter? Will you leave us?”
I was shocked; I didn’t know how she could imagine me wanting to leave. It was the first time I’d seen anyone insecure about me.
“I don’t want to leave,” I said. “How could I? I love this life. It’s beautiful here.”
She said nothing for a while, but then straightened up. “Just promise me you’ll do everything you can to make it safe,” she said. “I don’t want to have to nurse you again.”


But just a week before the bull arrived, I became a bull myself.
Señor Alacrán had twisted his ankle jumping off the running board of a truck, and was out of action. He and Pedro thought of me and turned up at our wrought iron gates one Sunday afternoon, Señor Alacrán on crutches, the matador pouting beside him.
“We’re looking for El Güero,” they said. Maria was suspicious, but I was excited. It was the first time I’d had visitors, and it made me feel sort of important. I waved them through to the kitchen, got everybody a beer, and the three of us sat at the table looking at each other while Maria and Agustin watched on and the children played in the courtyard.
“I didn’t see you yesterday,” I said. “You were great the other night, though. Very… elegant.”
“Not so elegant now,” said Señor Alacrán, tapping his leg with his crutch. “That’s why we’re here. We need you to be the bull.”
“Me?” I said. “I’ve never been a bull before; I wouldn’t know where to start.”
I heard some laughter at the other end of the table and turned to glower at Maria and Agustin.
Señor Alacrán held up a hand. “You’ll be fine, güero,” he said. “I’ll be there to help you every step of the way. You’re a little scrawny, but I think you’ll manage.”
“We’ve asked just about everybody we could think of,” said Pedro. “Nobody has the time.”
“Our first choice, of course,” said Señor Alacrán, glancing at Pedro. “Was El Güero, since you seem to have such an interest in the sport.”
I instinctively leaned down and rubbed my dodgy leg, and I was about to give my excuses when Maria spoke.
“May I ask,” she said. “If you are still using a wooden sword?”
“Oh yes,” said Señor Alacrán. “El Güero will be quite safe.”
That did it for me; safe or not, dodgy leg or good, I would be the bull.
“I’ll do it,” I said.


Quite a crowd turned up that evening as news spread that El Güero was now El Toro, and they had brought large coolers full of beer and steaming pans of tamales. I got stage fright, I suppose you would call it, and felt quite sick and dizzy to begin with.
Those horns were heavy too. I asked whether something made of aluminium and roughly the right shape might do just as well. Señor Alacrán informed me, with puffed up chest, that only the real thing would do if the matador were to get a feel for the fear.
“He must be able to imagine the bull’s unbreakable and fierce hatred for all mankind within that skull, güero, he must feel the mass of the beast behind those horns, and all that weight concentrated into their sharps tips, which, if he is not skilful, might rip him apart, tear open his chest or rip out his bowels before the very eyes of his friends and loved ones.”
I was impressed. Pedro was looking nervous.
“The matador,” said Señor Alacrán, now declaiming to the crowd, gesturing dramatically with one hand while leaning heavily on his crutch with the other. “The matador is no match for a full grown fighting bull in terms of weight and muscle and weapon. He has only his intelligence, his grace, his knowledge of the bull’s single-mindedness with which to defeat the bull.”
“And a sword; he has a sword,” someone shouted from the crowd.
“A cape too,” said someone else. “That cape is pretty useful. You drape it over the bull’s eyes and move around; that confuses him.”
“Anyway,” came a third voice. “This bull only has one eye. That’s not fair.”
It was getting dark by then, and I thought that the light of the arc lamp would not hurt my oversensitive eye too much; I took off my patch.
Several people took their breath in, theatre style, and there was a ripple of applause.
“Let’s get started,” I said.
It wasn’t easy. Those horns really were heavy and hard to manipulate. But I did my best. I was quite a bit taller than Pedro, so in my charges toward him I could keep the horns chest height, then dip them suddenly as I got close, arc them up, find myself jabbing my horns into the night sky as the crowd behind me applauded.
I was told off a few times for anticipating Pedro’s moves.
“No, güero,” said Señor Alacrán. “You must think like a bull, not like a man. A bull has no cunning, he runs straight for his target, brute force is his weapon. Think like this: you have one purpose alone, to mow Pedro down and dance on his face.”
“He is more likely to toss Pedro around like a rag,” someone said in the audience.
“Will you be quiet?” said Pedro, wiping the back of his neck with his cape. “I’m trying to concentrate.”
“We won’t be quiet when it’s a real bull chasing you around the ring,” said the heckler. “We’ll be too busy laughing.” And they laughed now by way of practice.
After a while, however, the crowd began to get tired or bored, beers and tamales exhausted, and wandered off in clumps, chattering and demonstrating their own takes on how the matador should move, because it really is a dance, and no two people dance the same.


“If you ask me, it’s cruel,” said Maria that night. “They run around, taunting the bull until he’s exhausted, and stick swords in him like he’s a pin cushion. I won’t be watching.”
“I used to go to bullfights as a boy,” said Agustin. “It was fun. But there hasn't been a bullfight in this town for many years. I don't know why they've brought it back and I'm not sure I have the stomach for it any more. As you get older, watching things die loses its appeal.”
“It’s not for real, though, is it?” I said. “I mean they’re not going to bring a real bull and kill it out there on the ring? They’re just going to do the theatrical bit, run around and pose, then let the bull go.”
Agustin shook his head. “You don’t get it until it hits you in the face, do you Peter?”


“I don’t know if I can do this,” I told Pedro and Señor Alacrán the next day. “I don’t really approve; I’m from England.”
The two of them looked at me as though it was English I was speaking to them. “What are you talking about?” said Señor Alacrán. “Do you have a headache?”
“No,” I said.
“Well get on with it, then,” he said. “We have only a few weeks left.”
I opened my mouth to protest some more, but I didn’t know where to start. So I told myself that I was only pretending to be a bull, helping my friends out, that what happened on the real day was nothing to do with me.


The mechanical bull arrived a few evenings later on the back of a pickup. It was heaved into the courtyard and I signed a clipboard with a flourish and gave the driver a tip that made him grin at me like I was an idiot. But once we’d taken the mechanical bull out of its box, it was quite disappointing — a lot smaller than it had looked in the newspaper advert.
We stood around it, examining it from various angles. Agustin was the first to speak.
“It’s a child’s toy,” he said. “If you put a grown man on that he will break it.”
“Rubbish,” I said. “It’s small, but I’ll bet it’s powerful.”
I straddled the machine and sat down, so far down that my knees were sticking up into the air. Maria bit her knuckles and there was a twitching around Agustin’s lips. After all the arguments and anticipation, the only thing I could do was laugh, maybe with relief. By the time I’d finished laughing I had my arm around Maria’s waist and she was leaning into me, her arm around my shoulder.
“It will be a big hit with the children,” said Agustin. “You can charge them a few cents a ride.”
“No,” I said, raising myself up. “We will give them rides for free, but we will set up a stall with all the uncollected items from the shop and sell them to the parents. Five hundred pesos each.”
Agustin opened his arms and drew me to him; our first embrace.
“My boy,” he said.


There was a large black car with Mexico City plates parked near to the shop the day the fair began, and it spoiled the view of my new sign, which said “El Güero Presents The Little Bull — Children Free”.
Not far from the little mechanical bull that we’d set up in the street and surrounded with mattresses, Agustin had placed a trestle table with electrical goods on and under it, ready to be sold, and unlike the items I used to buy from his previous stall in Mexico city, everything worked.
I was in charge. I maintained the queue of small children and ran around waiting to catch them as they wobbled on the machine. Maria switched it on and off, turned the speed up or down according to the balance skills of the child. There was no fixed time that the child could be on the bull; either they fell off, or their parents bought something from Agustin, or they did neither for just that little bit too long and the machine was switched off again.
By the end of the first day, Agustin had sold almost everything, and so the next morning he went down to the market and bought a job lot of toys. His markup was fifty percent; I had never seen him so happy.


Workmen arrived in trucks that afternoon and set about constructing a wooden ring on the sports ground. It was little more than a five bar fence with a gate, really. I watched them with Pedro — Señor Alacrán was busy somewhere.
“How do you feel about this?” I said.
Pedro shrugged. “If it is my fate to die beneath the hoofs of a bull then so be it,” he said.
He’d learned this dramatic way of talking from Señor Alacrán; it was part of his training.
“I mean, how do you feel about killing an innocent animal?” I said.
“A bull is not innocent,” he said. “Not this kind anyway; they are bred for the ring; bred to thirst for the blood of a matador like me.”
“Shall we go and look at this bloodthirsty creature?” I said.
Pedro nodded and pouted, and we set off the hundred metres or so to the enclosure where the beast was being held.
“He looks sad,” I said.
“Don’t be foolish, güero,” said Pedro. “A bull knows no such emotion.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s just staring at the floor, and he’s not very big.”
He looked, in fact, like he’d not long entered bulldom, and he was still suffering the pangs of adolescence; he should have been in a bedroom somewhere, masturbating.
“Bull!” Pedro shouted. “Hey, bull! I will meet you on the stage of life and death!”
The bull’s ears twitched.
“You’ve scared him now,” I said.
Pedro twisted his head and upper body away, his lower half followed shortly after. “I will see you on Sunday, güero,” he said. “We will reserve a good place for you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Oh,” said Pedro, pausing a moment. “There was a woman looking for you the other day, city type, fine looking woman.”
“What did she want?” I said.
Pedro shrugged. “She just asked if I knew of a white fellow named Peter. I said yes, he owns the electrical repair shop. That’s all. Quite rude, your friend; didn’t even thank me.”


“I may have to go away a while,” I said to Maria as we weaved our way through the crowded central square that evening. People had come down from the mountains, wrapped up in their shawls, their fine chiselled features distinctive in the shadows of their hats. They were cheerful mostly, but at the same time there was an edginess among some of the men, standing in enigmatic groups on the street corners, drinking mescal from clay cups. I’d heard rumours recently of unrest in the mountains, people were getting tired of the corruption of officials, and more than one police officer had been run out of a village by men wielding machetes.
Maria stopped in front of a stall selling mangoes, stripped of their skin, sticks rammed into them, their juices trickling onto the floor, the paprika sprinkled on them staining the flesh blood red.
“Why?” she said. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I may be wrong, but I think Dolores has come for me.”
Maria paid for two mangoes and gave one to me. “And will you go with her? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I have no choice,” I said.
“Yes you do,” she said. “You can tell her you’re staying with us, with the children, and Agustin, and me.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“Why?” she said. “Why is it not simple? Do you love her?”
“No, of course not,” I said. I nibbled at the mango, but I didn’t have much of an appetite.
“Then stay with us,” she said.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “You’ve heard Agustin talk about her, about the people she’s killed, the ways she’s killed them.”
She rolled her eyes. “Agustin is always telling stories,” she said. “He half scares himself to death with his stories. He hates that woman because she stole his land, you know that.”
“But what if the stories are true?” I said.
“If they’re true, why go with her?” she said.
“To protect you,” I said, and though it was the first time I’d actually known it, it was true.


The big day finally arrived.
The local saint was taken out of the church, paraded round the town and treated to an open air mass and a danzon competition, with beautifully dressed couples dancing slowly, the women's hips mesmerising, swaying gently to the rhythm of Veracruz. For the children there were races, magicians and clowns, pony rides, face painting and helium-filled balloons.
But the culmination of the day was to be the rodeo and bullfight. What looked like a small circus arrived with a group of bad tempered ponies, and locals were challenged to ride them round the bull ring. The brave or drunk clambered over the fence to sit on the back of the horse, and usually were thrown in seconds, some of them dragged off barely conscious, one with an unmistakable hoof print on his forehead. Some riders, maybe a bit more sober, managed to stay upright for a while, their bodies, legs and heads whipping at the air as the ponies pranced, but they too were eventually thrown.
The audience was mostly male, young and old, drunk and good natured; sitting on the fence or peering through it, they cheered the riders as they rode, cheered them more as they thumped into the yellow dirt. I’d been given a prime position as Pedro promised, and was able to see the whites of the eyes of both rider and ridden, felt the testosterone filling the air as the action got louder and more frantic.
It seemed like it would go on for hours, but there came a point when there were no more comers and the ponies were exhausted, so that the last rider just had a sluggish trot round the ring, which was not so entertaining. It was time for the main attraction.
The bull was manhandled into the ring and a near hush fell on the audience. He stood at the far side of the ring from me, shoulders slumped, eyes focused on the middle distance. I wondered if he knew what he was in for, whether since his birth he had known that the time would come when he would die, humiliated, for the entertainment of some people who would later eat him.
But the people were not so happy either. I heard mutterings about his size, about him not being a proper fighting bull, about his horns being barely formed.
Pedro stepped into the ring. He’d got himself a new outfit, a tight-fitting mariachi looking number in black, red and gold, an enormous sombrero on his head — the first I had ever seen outside the tourist markets — and a sword in his hand. It was a fairly overcast day, so there was no glinting steel, but he did look both impressive and ridiculous at the same time. The audience applauded politely while Pedro made long, slow steps toward the centre of the ring, swishing his cape from side to side.
A mariachi band struck up a funereal version of La Cucaracha as Pedro stood in the middle of the ring, sideways to the bull, back arched, sombrero pushed to the back of his head, waiting.
The bull was not interested.
“Get El Güero,” someone shouted. “He might be more lively than this calf.”
A few people laughed, but mostly there was embarrassed silence. Pedro stamped his foot and the bull raised his head and looked at the matador, ears twitching. Pedro stamped his foot again. The bull, finally getting the hint, reversed a few steps, and then began a half-hearted trot towards the man. It wasn’t a big ring, and it didn’t take him long to reach his destination. In fact, he overshot it and found himself looking at the legs of the audience dangling from the fence. There were some cheers and applause, but no olés. The bull clumped around until he was facing Pedro and then threw himself forward, this time with more vigour. Again he found himself facing legs, and again he turned, frustrated to the point of snorting, and ran full pelt at Pedro, kicking up dust and showing murderous resolve, so that when Pedro stepped aside this time he almost stumbled; but all that training paid off, and the matador’s cape grazed the bull’s head, his sword found its mark in the bull’s back.
Some in the crowd were cheering loudly, others complaining louder that this fight was unfair, the bull unready, still wet behind the ears, someone said. The bull himself, having clattered this time into the fence and scattered a few people, didn’t know or care about this; he was just seriously pissed off. He turned again to face his assailant, but this time there were two men in his line of vision; the usual one, and another — taller, whiter, standing in the open doorway and waving his arms.
“Bull!” I was shouting. “This way!”
I didn’t have a plan, exactly, but for some reason I felt responsible for that animal. By the time he was bearing down on me, though, he seemed less of a friend and more of a massive piece of meat that might crush me. I turned and ran full pelt down the street, hearing the roar of the crowd behind me.
I was told later that the audience thought this ridiculous spectacle was all part of the act, that Pedro was supposed to be left standing alone in the ring, watching open mouthed as the bull hurtled down the street in pursuit of me, like a scaled down version of Pamplona, and so as I ran quickly into town, pursued by the bull, the audience came quickly after, not wanting to miss a thing.
Standing in our shop front, Maria and Agustin saw me turn the corner first, closely followed by the bull and our audience, as I instinctively headed for home. Maria, ever prepared, took her first aid kit from under the counter.
But though I'd instinctively headed for the safety of family, as I reached Reparaciones El Güero I knew that I could not bring this dangerous beast home, and I continued past the shop and down the hill toward the centre of town. I wasn’t tiring yet, but neither was the bull, and he was drawing level with me. He didn’t seem up for a fight, though; I looked down at him, and his big black eyes looked back up at me.
But we should have been looking where we were heading rather than at each other, because where we were heading was straight into the path of a big black car with Mexico City plates.
The car was crossing a junction, itself pursued by a group of indigenous men waving machetes, but the bull’s mass, ploughing into the passenger door, was enough take up most of its momentum, and push it a meter or so sideways. I, meanwhile, hit the bonnet and clattered across it until I was sitting on the street, stunned, looking up at the driver's window, which rolled slowly down to reveal the driver.
"Hello Peter," she said.
I was distracted a moment by the shouts of the crowd arriving from down the hill, mingled with the angry cries of the machete-wielding men, but I was told that Dolores leaned calmly out of the car and drew a blade across my cheek, paused a while, smiled as the blood began to drip onto my chest, then started the car up and sped off, followed by the mob.


"Will it leave a scar?" Maria said, as she examined the dressing on my wound. Agustin had just seen off the last of the well-wishers that had followed me home after I was tended at the local clinic.
"Only a light scar, hardly noticeable," I said.
"I just knew something would go wrong today," she said. "I don't know if you're the luckiest man alive or the stupidest. What were you thinking?"
"It's not my fault she cut me," I said. "Agustin was right; that woman is a psychopath."
"And a government spy," said Agustin. "Come to lay the ground for government agents to take over the indigenous councils in the mountains."
"What?" I said. "What are you talking about?"
Agustin shrugged. "That's what they thought, those men that were chasing her, that she was a spy. Someone must have told them a few tales."
Then he winked and offered me a beer. It was just what I needed after all my exertions.
"Well thank goodness she's gone," said Maria. "You are not to go anywhere near that woman, Peter, even if she does come after you. We'll be here, won't we Agustin?"
Smiling stung a bit, but I did it anyway. Agustin sighed and sat at the table with us.
"I reckon we've got no choice but to look after our own," he said.
"I don't think she'll come back," I said. "What would she want with me?"
"Unfinished business," said Agustin. "This woman will never let anything go. It's not about you; it's about winning the game."
I wasn't so sure, and at least she was gone for now, and despite the aches and pains, I felt good.
"What about the bull?" I said.
"Fearsome headache," said Agustin. "But he's safe. He was supposed to be on a spit by now, but instead he's become the town mascot."
"You saved him, Peter," said Maria. "I'm so proud of you."
"Yes," I said. "I suppose I did, after all."


I went to visit the bull the next day. Pedro was already there, leaning on the fence of the bull's enclosure. It looked like the two of them had settled their differences, and Pedro was feeding him hay.
"I think that knock on the head has driven all the bloodlust out of him," said Pedro as I leaned on the fence beside him.
"Yes," I said. "He seems a lot happier too, despite the bandage on his head."
Pedro nodded.
"I'm sorry I stole your show," I said.
"Think nothing of it, güero," said Pedro. "I'm glad in the end not to have his death on my hands. I'm not sure what I was thinking. Me, a bullfighter? Look at me güero. I'm no more a bullfighter than you are."
"Call me Peter, would you?" I said. "I don't want to be El Güero anymore."
Pedro frowned. "I can't call you that, that is my name." He thought a while and then, brushing hay dust from his hands, held his right one out to me. "I will call you compadre."
So I had a family and a compadre, more a brother than a friend. I shook his hand.
And together we fed hay to the bull as the light faded and the cicadas cleared their throats once more, and a battered pickup truck turned the corner and stopped in the middle of the street, the door of the pickup creaking open, and a familiar frame stepping out, cowboy boots clunking onto the floor.
"Just the man I was looking for," he said.

Ray Hoskins

No comments: