Miracle in Seville: A Novel Read online

  The day was so important to the fortunes of Don Cayetano that he did not join the Saturday-night revelry in his caseta, nor did I. We went to bed in a back room, rose early and drove across the bridge to the bullfighters’ church, where we offered our prayers to the Virgen de los Toreros. Once again in the sunlight the Virgin seemed to smile at him, as if promising that his prayers would be answered. For breakfast we went to El Gallito, and as we approached the bar I chuckled at its colorful sign. Through the years Gypsy toreros about to fight in the Maestranza had stopped by to ask the rooster for good luck. If he helped them perform well, late that night they would come back, salute the tough little fellow and whisper ‘Gracias.’ Then they would turn to the church and tell the Virgin: ‘We thank you, too.’

  Breakfast at El Gallito was invariable: a hard roll toasted and soaked in olive oil and rubbed with garlic, a small copa of Machao, an anise liqueur, and perhaps a mug of bitter chocolate so thick you could hardly dunk your roll in it, accompanied sometimes by murderously greasy doughnuts laden with granulated sugar. It was a meal ideally suited for men who spend all day unloading ships docked in the nearby river—not for a magazine reporter—but I had to admit it was delicious.

  As we ate, a ragamuffin of ten or eleven came to our table and, after looking about cautiously, said: ‘I know you, Don Cayetano. My brothers and I sometimes sneak out to your ranch at night with our muletas to fight your young bulls. They’re fine animals and we hope they do well this afternoon.’

  Cayetano, who could not be happy to hear that his bulls had been caped, said gruffly: ‘You be careful doing that. You’ll get yourself killed. Boys do, you know.’

  ‘You don’t take them to the police?’ I asked Don Cayetano.

  ‘No,’ piped up the boy, ‘and that’s why we feel good about you, Don Cayetano.’ He hesitated, then added: ‘That’s why I’ve come to warn you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You yourself may be killed this afternoon.’

  Don Cayetano blanched, took the boy by the arm and asked: ‘What do you mean? I might be killed?’

  The boy drew closer, looked around the café again and said in a whisper: ‘It’s Lázaro López, he’s an ugly man.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘We heard him say the other evening—my brother and I clean up this place, so no one notices us—’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He was bragging to other bullfighters—said that on Sunday in the Maestranza he was going to kill you.’

  ‘How was he going to do it?’

  ‘The others asked the same question, but he wouldn’t answer. Said only that he had found out your secret. Knew how you did it.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say. Just repeated “I know what he’s up to with his bulls,” and no matter how many times they begged him to explain, all he would say was “We Gypsies know these things. My sister tells fortunes, you know—she solves riddles.” And then he repeated: “Tomorrow that son of a pig”—that’s what he called you—“tomorrow he dies.” ‘

  The boy had delivered his message to a man he admired and even considered in some strange way his friend, and he slipped away, but Don Cayetano, unwilling to see him go without a reward, told me quietly: ‘Run after him and give him this. I want no spies to see me talking with him.’ When I caught up with the boy he refused the money, saying: ‘I fight his bulls at night. I owe him something,’ but I insisted: ‘You’re a brave boy to fight bulls by moonlight and to come see Don Cayetano with such a message. You’ve earned the money. Take it.’ He reached for it, but before letting him have it I asked: ‘López said his sister solves riddles? What does that mean?’

  ‘She’s a strange one. A witch maybe. When I was young we were afraid of her, but when my brother’s wife was going to have a baby he went to see her and without ever seeing his wife the Egyptian told him: “Twins. One boy, one girl,” and that’s what came out. People say she sees things others don’t.’

  ‘Who is this Egyptian?’

  ‘Magdalena López. She calls herself The Egyptian. They learn how in Egypt.’

  ‘What could she see about today’s fight?’

  ‘She and López talked a long time—about Mota bulls, about mysterious happenings in Málaga, and the fight in the church.… She told him something—magic and something like that.’

  ‘You think she was serious when she warned her brother?’

  ‘Oh, yes! That one doesn’t play games.’

  Intrigued, I asked: ‘Could I see this Egyptian?’ and without hesitating he said: ‘You’ll have to give money. She tells fortunes, you know.’ When I indicated that this would be no problem he said: ‘Come along,’ and we moved toward the exit. But feeling I could not leave Don Cayetano alone in the bar, I went back and was somewhat relieved to find him surrounded by aficionados with whom he was discussing that afternoon’s corrida.

  Their interests were professional: ‘Tell me, Don Cayetano, how could your bulls have been so rotten in Puerto de Santa María and so excellent in Málaga?’

  ‘When a bull ranch is on its way back to respectability, sometimes the older bulls can be pretty bad, never rotten as you say, but difficult. A rancher like me has to live with that.’ Here he smiled expansively: ‘But he gets his joy in seeing what his new bulls are doing, and mine are on their way back. This afternoon in the Maestranza you’ll see how fine a Mota bull can be.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘I’m convinced of it. If the matadors prove equal to their task, you’ll see miracles.’

  The men listened in silence, for they respected this old man, even though his fortunes were down at the moment. He was a neighbor, a compadre, so they meant it when several of them embraced him: ‘Buena suerte, Don Cayetano.’ As I left the group I thought that in Triana it means something to be the owner of a bull ranch, even one like Mota that’s been declining.

  The boy led me to a typical Spanish cottage opposite the Church of the Toreros, a small whitewashed affair jammed in between two larger ones, also white, all of them encroaching on the sidewalk lining the road that crossed the Guadalquivir into Seville. The house, marked by a colorful sign proclaiming LA EGIPCIANA, had four windows facing the street, each barred with a heavy iron grille to prevent the riffraff from ransacking the place. Other than its sign, it was indistinguishable from a thousand others to be found in the small towns of Spain, but when the boy led me inside I found myself in a unique world, for Magdalena López was an authentic Gypsy fortune-teller, and the room in which she met with her clients exuded an air of sinister mystery. It was dominated by a round table covered by a hand-woven cloth with a fringe that reached down to the floor. On it rested a milky-white globe some twelve inches in diameter. Around the table were four comfortable-looking wooden chairs, and in the only one that had arms sat the woman who had so entranced me at the tapa bar. When she came forward to greet me, her graceful walk made her skirt sway in the most charming manner, and again I was captivated.

  The room contained many objects bespeaking her trade: a stuffed owl, a six-pointed wooden star, a deck of cards fanned out and glued to a board, a tall, slim earthenware vase containing a bundle of sticks that protruded at uneven lengths and colorful chromolithographs of the pyramids, Luxor and the Sphinx. Shades were drawn over the grilled windows facing the street, but the solitary one in the opposite wall looked out on a garden with flowers.

  ‘I bring an American,’ the boy said. In colloquial Spanish she addressed me: ‘I’m a businesswoman. I will tell you all things, but we go no further, Mr. Shenstone, until you place silver here,’ and she indicated a circle woven into the cloth covering the table. While I responded to her request the boy said: ‘Remember, Magdalena, I brought him. Something for me, too,’ and she gave him some pesetas. He then turned to me: ‘And you? How would you have found her without me?’ After I too contributed, he ran off, leaving us alone.

  As I sat down her comment proved she had continued to
monitor the movements of Don Cayetano and me: ‘You continue to visit the Virgin across the way.’ When I nodded, she continued: ‘You want to know about the corrida this afternoon, and I know the answers.’

  ‘Will your brother do well?’

  ‘Ears and tail.’

  ‘And the other matadors?’

  ‘You’re not interested in them. You want to know about the bulls of Don Cayetano.’

  ‘Will they do well?’

  ‘Why not? Under the circumstances.’

  ‘What is it you know about the “circumstances”? Which your brother also seems to know about?’

  Taking a filmy red cloth of considerable size, she draped it over the white globe and said: ‘It’s my responsibility to protect my little brother. Who took him out to the bulls of Mota on moonlit nights? Who counseled him when he was beginning to fight three-year-olds? Who advises him on his contracts, warns him which bulls to avoid, which to look for? Mr. Shenstone, I know far more about bulls and matadors than you will ever know, than most of the managers know.’

  ‘But you haven’t told me about this mysterious secret of Don Cayetano’s.’

  ‘Nor shall I, but I will tell you this. The widow in Texas that you’ve been thinking you might marry—forget her. She’s bespoken to another man. And in her place do not court a blonde. For you they are no good.’

  ‘Señorita Magdalena—’

  ‘Señora. I was married twice. First time at fourteen. I’ve always had the gift of seeing things.’

  ‘And what do you see for this afternoon?’

  ‘Tragedy. This afternoon will be remembered in Seville, but you will not be free to write about it as it actually happens.’

  ‘Your brother? Does he suffer the tragedy?’

  ‘It’s my duty to look after my brother.’

  She would tell me no more, and when I found myself back on the street I lingered a long time basking in the morning sunlight. What faced me now was an undramatic but enchanting street, with whitewashed houses, cobbled roadways, a tapa bar at the corner, shawled women drifting by, the smell of chicory burning and the muffled tolls of a distant bell. This was the real Spain, the antithesis of the glitter of the feria across the river, and as I started toward the Guadalquivir, which would take me back into Seville, I suddenly realized that I did not want to leave Triana; the answers I was seeking were to be found here in the Gypsy quarter rather than in the bullring itself.

  As I stood in the middle of the street I could see to my left the delicate tower of the Church of the Toreros in which I had imagined seeing the Virgin step off her pedestal to respond to Don Cayetano’s plea for help; to my right, huddled close to the earth, stood the fortune-teller’s cottage, where Magadalena López had instructed her brother when he came for help. The heavens toward which the steeple points, the ancient earth on which the cottage rests, I said to myself. Virgin and Gypsy. The duel between these two is as old as the stones in that bridge before they were dug from earth and cut to size. And it resumes this afternoon. What an uneven contest. The Virgin with all the powers of heaven, the Gypsy with only those fake Egyptian symbols and her animal cleverness. Bowing to the dignity of the church and saluting the Gypsy’s cottage, I made my way back to Seville and the sorting of bulls for that day’s fight.

  As always, Don Cayetano avoided the sorting. I almost wished I too had stayed away, for three American congressmen on a junket to Spain, brought by a young man from our embassy to see the bulls, learned that I was an American and bombarded me with questions. I supplied them with bits of information about bulls that I’d picked up from Don Cayetano, and when they asked how I’d learned so much, I said offhandedly: ‘I’m staying with the man who breeds these bulls.’ This led them to ask who I was and I replied: ‘A writer. Freelance usually. But this time for World Sport.’ They’d seen some of my stories and asked to be photographed with me in front of the bulls whose fates were being decided by the matadors’ peons.

  I hope they kept the photographs, for they were posed with the bull branded 318, name of Torpedo, to be fought that afternoon by the fiery El Cordobés, who would lead him to immortality. If the man who took the photos kept the negative he could earn a pretty peseta selling copies in Spain.

  When I returned to the caseta I found Don Cayetano alone in his bedroom, and I took the opportunity to ask him about something that had been puzzling me. Somewhat timidly I said: ‘Forgive me for prying, but could you tell me why when we’re here in the caseta or outside chatting with the riders who stop by or when we’re in the church you talk freely, but when we’re in the box at the fight, you refuse to talk?’

  Looking at me curiously, he said: ‘I’m worried about my bulls. Praying maybe.’ Then he added: ‘Hoping they’ll perform well.’

  ‘At Málaga it almost looked as if you were consciously willing your bulls to behave this way or that, to give maximum opportunity to the matadors. Especially with those two kills by El Viti. Have you some magical secret about communicating with animals?’

  Again he studied me, then smiled: ‘It’s in the breeding.’

  ‘But what did Lázaro López mean when he said in church that he was going to kill you today?’ He was silent. ‘And especially, what could that little midnight torero have meant when he told us that López boasted his sister had given him your secret?’

  He leaned back and said: ‘Strange things happen in Triana. Gypsies, you know,’ and he launched into an amazing yarn about how, some five hundred years ago, the first Gypsy arrived in Spain, on foot, over the Pyrenees. He was an ingratiating fellow who bamboozled the king of Spain into believing that he, the Gypsy, was from the fabled land of Prester John somewhere south of Egypt, where a colony of Christians lived in peril. On specifics the stranger had been cleverly vague; he deemed it best, he said, not to reveal the precise location of the land lest the Muslims hear and decide to invade it. What the Gypsy wanted was funds to gather an army and march through pagan lands to rescue the isolated Christians from Muslim tyranny. For some forty years this interloper lived off the riches of Spain, doing no work and making no effort to collect his liberating army. When either the king or his advisers asked when the invasion was to begin, the Gypsy had a dozen plausible excuses for his delay.

  ‘What finally happened to him?’ I asked.

  ‘The chroniclers forgot to say. Most likely he remained in Spain and brought a lot of other Gypsies here with him. I think their invasion started in his time. Been a problem ever since.’

  ‘Do you think Gypsies have secret knowledge? Does López?’

  ‘They all do. Didn’t he say his sister had powers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, maybe that’s it.’ Preferring to answer no more of my questions, he prepared for the crucial afternoon on which the fate of his ranch depended. At four he gravely said good-bye to his friends at the caseta, and I noticed that he did so with an emotion that seemed almost excessive because the bullring was not much over a mile away. But, of course, this was an important day. At the plaza, too, he treated the men he had known for many years with the same deep affection: ‘Greetings, Don Alvaro, it is truly good to see you. Hello, Domingo, you rascal.’

  Well before five we entered the ranchers’ box and I paid attention to the cartel for the day. It was promising: The afternoon would start with Diego Puerta, a matador from Seville who was justly revered in the area. He would be followed by the clownish El Cordobés, a tested crowd pleaser, and the afternoon would end with López, darling of Triana, capable of exciting even the most exacting aficionado if he had a good afternoon with a compliant bull. As for the string of Mota bulls, I’d seen them a few hours ago and judged them to be as fine as those we’d had at Málaga, and the afternoon started as it had a week before.

  Diego Puerta, highly regarded as the gentleman matador of his era, was textbook-perfect in his performance, never gaudy, never excessively daring, always at the right place at the right time. But again I had the curious feeling that his bull was cooper
ating with him almost as though he had been programmed, but when I turned to ask Don Cayetano about this, he was again praying to the Virgin, head bowed, hands across his stomach. Puerta gained two ears and in my opinion should have won the tail, too, but plaza presidents in Seville were demanding, as should be the case in Spain’s classic arena.

  El Cordobés, I must admit, was a wonder, citing the bull from a preposterous distance, much greater than anyone else would attempt, for if the bull charged, he would arrive at the matador with such force as to knock him clear out of the ring. But Cordobés knew his bulls and could judge when it was safe to pull his tricks. Walking boldly in a straight line, one foot directly before the other, he closed on the bull, which charged smoothly at the right moment and allowed Cordobés to perform beautiful cape work. He followed this grand opening with flourishes and, dropping to his knees a fantastic distance from the bull and staying there, challenged the bull until it charged right at him with such force that I thought he was done for. Without shifting his knees, Cordobés swung his cape outward just far enough to lure the bull in that direction. As the bull roared past, inches from the kneeling man, I thought: That’s an act of courage I can’t even imagine duplicating. That kid must have ice water in his veins.

  With the muleta he was brilliant, leading the bull around, as they say, ‘like his puppy dog,’ and showing the discriminating aficionados of Seville how to respond to a worthy bull. Indeed, at the height of his performance I thought the bull was the hero of this fight. Those in the stands thought so, too, and Don Cayetano, suddenly alert and observant again just as the bull died, grabbed my arm: ‘Magnificent animal. The crowd wants him to circle the arena.’ The president agreed with the spectators, and El Cordobés came to our box and led Don Cayetano to walk beside the animal that had performed with such grace and valor.