Preying on Malchus
At
the door mother reined us together. “So now, though I understand practically
nothing of what we’re giving grace to, we will sit for a moment before the
plane takes you off.” I knew such moments of silence were guy-wires for good
luck, not bad, but the faces were grim on mama, now closing her eyes, and papa,
who had already been sitting in his armchair near the window, and my older
sister and younger, who cried differently, and the silver-headed neighbors and
David, who’d conspired on this foray when it seemed all a lark, at best. He was
the only other cowherd in our recently matriculated gymnasium class—everyone
else had far more fitting things to do, here in Orhei or forty kilometers south
in Chisinau, the inconceivable center of our universe.
I don’t know what the others were
imagining—Moorish thieves or some red-eyed bull pinning me down as I ran from
thin alleys to a corrida that surely wouldn’t suffer fools. I pretended not to
be thinking as such—it was the lasting effect our study of Hemingway had on me:
not to think. I didn’t care so much for Nick Adams saying so ad nauseam; I preferred the strange
subtlety of Jake Barnes and his way of deflecting and inflecting, “must be swell
being a steer,” disbanding the fact that he was more that than man in his own mind. Jake could read Nick’s stories, I figured,
but not vice versa. David asked the prof why we were spending so much time on this
one author. Laconically, the prof let us know that sanctioned pieces from O
Henry and Jack London some twenty years ago absorbed themselves into a
sanctioned piece of Hemingway now. The school library held what dander it did,
and, in relative freedom (the prof’s, at least) we were obliged to read into
our modern realities, regardless of what we made of them.
Other concerns, in that colloquy of
silence at the door, pertained to the vagaries of who would meet me and take me
for God knows what training and—let it not be thought—the specter of my never
returning home. This sitting was supposed to defray any airplane mishap (frankly
the last demolition on anyone’s mind); perhaps superstition works, as I naturally
arrived in one piece, from Chisinau to Bucharest to Milan to Malaga. I commandeered
my bare essentials into the airport Interpol screens, all the while summoning
in my memory a rough video made about a year ago, with the help of David as
gaffer and my no-good cousin as picador: though the upload didn’t pay for the
flight, it sufficed to invite me into the country and audition for a singular
spot as an alien matador de toros, an absurd leap of faith to what I felt I was
fated to be.
In this video I had toyed with the
biggest bull of our emaciated herd, fluttering a pink window curtain as I’d seen
in countless more authentic renditions online. My cousin on horseback goaded
the bored bull to the center of my designs, which couldn’t include an actual
killing, just the semblance of the process. In fact, all liveliness was at
stake here: the bull’s, my own, and the myriad picadors that would vie for
blood money (starting with my cousin, who said he’d cut my balls off if I
didn’t send him his fair share in Spain). He hadn’t received an invitation, so,
he said, I would have to represent the larger situation—I wouldn’t know enough
about bulls, he contended, without his non-gymnasium expertise.
Same point about my start-up
Spanish, crammed pell-mell in lieu of my exams: I would have taken them by
instinct and done well, knowing it wouldn’t make a difference towards an
academic placement. Cowherds were everywhere in Moldova, and nowhere within
Chisinau, besides at the Agrara State University. I had put my hopes in the
literature faculty at Alecu Russo State in Balti, but even that provincial city
required better family connections than I remotely had. No one in my ancestry
had been anything except a farmer, a Soviet soldier, an occasional monk. David
was in similar circumstances and put his mind and soul into a provisional
acceptance at Agrara; my cousin resented the imminent prospect that the whole herd—and no
extra money—would be in his hands alone. “This better work out, Bogdan,” he
leveled, “or you better die trying.”
I was a little surprised to be met
at the Malaga airport, from what little details they provided. The delegation
of three spoke broken English, then Spanish when I told them I was trying to
learn that, then English again when I was unclear, probably in both. “Romanian
is like us—la lengua romantica,” declared the burly man seemingly in charge;
the taller, thinner man pulled the elbow of the pretty girl and joked, “people
here like foreign tongues.” Since she smiled, I did too. I was going to be
their homunculus, I readily knew, and what was really on my mind or tongue
would be of nearly no importance. I answered some rudimentary questions and
gave them a few as well: where would I stay, for instance, and how would I get
paid? “All in good time,” the burly man assured. “Your instincts are right. You
will be for us the first from afar to battle our bulls. You will, if your
instincts are right, be an international star.”
So set the training, and the promos
withal. I was nicknamed ‘el virgin’ despite the faulty syntax and the push of
sex to keep me occupied. The girl, named Beatriz, was my escort from the
terminal to a turnstile of dormitory rooms; she didn’t live with me, but
replied compliantly to the calls I’d reluctantly make every day on the cell
phone they gave me. “Beatriz,” I’d mumble, “I’m not, um, quite sure what, I
mean… why I”—“I running to you,” she’d breathe out, believably, and hang up.
We’d eat a leisurely dinner on my frugal budget and walk and embrace, barely
speaking the whole time. She said she was proud of what I was doing, but that
begged more questions than I was willing to ask. What did she know of the training, for
instance, or my motives or aptitude? I had completed banderillero qualification
unscathed, but hadn’t managed my first faena and in fact ran swordless out of
the practice ring that very afternoon. The bull (rejected, of course, for fiesta),
with dreadlock banderillas seemed to mock my stare-down, my charge and vault
into his nape. Four times I tried, each only stoking the beast’s rage. My sword
went skin deep on the final attempt, and I then had nothing in hand to feign my
sought superiority. The senior matador mercifully stepped in, struck the aorta
in a matter of seconds, and spontaneously cut off the ear and presented it to
me with a satisfied air. Now, with Beatriz, after a third glass of jerez, I blurted
out the indignity: “why give that trofeo to me?” Beatriz blew lightly into my
face and pulled me to dance and made me forget such failings and reasons to
second-guess.
I posed in a pastel-drawn poster for
the pressing Torremolinos crowds and trained ardently to fit that bill: I
secretly wondered whether any of the animals I had herded in Moldova would have
assumed as much valor. Things there were fierce in an unpronounced way, as
David wrote of renewed pressures for someone in his extended family to finance
his acceptance to Agrara. ‘There are whispers again of selling a kidney,’ he confided,
even if his own was off-limits. One incentive to get into Agrara was to defer
(and, more importantly, upgrade) the military obligation, where expendable
organs were the last thing on anyone’s mind. I hadn’t received a waiver, of
course, to opt out of the army, so in that regard my flight to Spain would get
me into legal trouble. Less trouble, I knew, would be a kidney extraction on
the black market. I secretly tabulated that as an option, if and when a goring
would happen.
“Si,”
emphasized Beatriz, “—‘if’ is no true.” She more often said sí to my
mostly silent musings, and I joked I didn’t have an ear for the difference
between ‘if’ and ‘yes’ in isolation. “Es no importante,” she assured, “sólo que
sabes tu potencia como un hombre.”
“En verdad, tu hombre?”
“Sí,” she snuggled into my neck, “mi varón.”
Despite some raised eyebrows (from
everyone but the burly man, who secured me a one-year visa), I was fast-tracked
to fight in less than six months. I had by this time killed my practice bulls,
and even gave a totemic trofeo to Beatriz. She was predictably pleased as if
‘see, I knew you could’ was her explicit role in the whole production. I
thought back to how my cousin had broached the idea in the first place, based
somewhat on my no-nonsense approach to corralling cattle. I happened to wrangle
one belligerent bull into his pen with a combination of tarmac maneuvers,
common sense, and my knack as a gymnast; thus began the tumble of video
evidence and tweaks, downloads and uploads, queries and instant replies. Most
of what I had to do was unlearn my sense of bovines and even my sense of self.
I had leaned on pragmatism all my life, and almost everything around me
betrayed that instinct. Even the ritual of toreadors to pray at the corrida
chapel wasn’t pragmatic, exactly, but part of the mysticism of the whole
affair.
“Our
nada who art in nada?” I had joked in our walk-through with Miguel, the
trainee most intuitive to my complex presence; but now I entered the closet-sized
chapel with nothing of Hemingway on my mind. Miguel was along as a banderillero
but everyone else had years of experience on us. They led the prayers, brief
and muttered with lithe motions of crossing self, from forehead to liver. I
retained my orthodox method, slower, the transept in reverse, and bowing from
the waist. Others also had their nuanced differences: style defined the
mannerisms and would be each fighter’s go-to skill in the ring.
We walked the circumference and
acknowledged the mostly foreign crowd: Americans, Germans, Brits, and
Scandinavians cheered heartily among the locals during the introductions in
Spanish and English. No Moldovan tourists would conceivably tally as part of
the gate sales, nonetheless I was applauded most vigorously, a veritable extension
to their Andalusian experience. The burly man and some other sponsors caught my
eye in a mocked up president’s box—this corrida was too small for all the
official fittings. Only a few horses were dressed, for instance, and the
picadors were intent on their survival for future shows; history had it that their
occasional deaths only bemused the crowds, anyway. Bulls would die in this
little venue, to be sure. A meatpacking truck was plugged into the dock,
hungry, it looked, for that purpose. From the expression on a fair sample of
faces, I could see ‘business’ latent in everything: money was made in the
question of ethics to the vagaries of honoring tradition to the necessary
expenditures which included the notion of why I was here. The burly man would
benefit most of all, I figured, and my cousin perhaps not at all. His ‘die
trying’ invaded my concentration as I watched the first and second fights, done
precisely to routine. I was billed third, the trumpets now heralding my
entrance.
By design I hadn’t seen my bull
before; indeed it hadn’t seen light for a couple days, the shadowy cast of
handlers pummeling it to its weakened state, then pricking it back to a cynical
vivacity. I could smell the turpentine used to sting its hooves and underside,
and, seeing how easily the pikes and banderillas had stuck with each passing, I
felt sorry for the creature and wanted it to expire quickly. I looked up at the
president’s box and wondered if they had provided too safe a bet. No one
returned my glance. The peones in fact had to rouse the animal more often than
divert its charge, and I had to strategize how I’d lure him into my cape to get
the tandas going. I went to one knee early on—in practice sessions, that might
have been an ultimate move when the bull had all but given up. The crowd
applauded politely, I thought, but they seemed shiftless. The sun was boring
down upon the event and evaporating the sheen of blood upon the bull’s
shoulders. I had spent time enough in over-flourished passes and thus I called
my mozo de espada for the sword, casting an eye to the burly man, who stolidly
sat. Rhythmic clapping began as I lined up for the estocada, and as I ran on
the tips of my toes the bull suddenly charged, causing me to divert and run to the
closest buladero. My poenes reacted tentatively, rather surprised by this
burst. I strode to the center for another go, identical (if not worse) than the
first. I’d have two chances more, but these garnered a greater effect for the
bull, which had timed his surge wisely. The crowd’s interest became animated,
and gradually a hundred little white handkerchiefs jiggled at arms’ length all
around the ring. The president, who by now I realized was the wispy figure
sitting beside the burly man, motioned to a trumpeter to sound an adviso,
compelling another pass. That failing, a second adviso, and then a third. I had
managed to scrape the sword between the horns on these last runs, but could not
power over the violent upward thrust of the bull’s head. I handed over my sword
and waited for what next I was supposed to do. The handkerchiefs were waving
rigorously now, and the president rose and played pensive to the drama. I
improvised at this lingering and looked squarely at my nemesis, still hoofing
the sandy clay. To a collective gasp I ran straight at him with no muleta or
sword and timed my leap to narrowly miss its jutting right horn and slap the
morrillo where I should have planted the sword. I spun to a stop and looked
back up to the president’s box. I saw no smile but an orange handkerchief, to
the evident appreciation of the crowd. My last obligation was to honor them,
clapping, and see myself out, and though I’m sure I did so too quickly, the
ordeal felt endless.
Miguel confirmed, when I asked, that
the bull would be destroyed out of sight. “Rules are it can’t fight again—you
know that.”
“I do.”
“A true indulto at a bigger corrida
would retire that animal back to the ranch. I’m not sure what the president
issued here, but it would be too costly to transport, and the butcher has
already paid up anyway. He’ll want his goods.”
“I failed, Miguel.”
“You were a star. You rejuvenated
the crowd.”
“I’m not made for this. The bull
beat me.”
“No. He stayed alive. A blesséd
reminder for us all.”
The burly man masked his enthusiasm
to some degree—“don’t get used to that outcome”—yet clearly he knew the
investment was working to his favor. “You need to speed up the tandas, and
practice your estocada. You can’t look up at us for instruction, but you can
play up the crowd more. ‘El virgin’ they call you, I know. But now you are a torero and I want you to carry yourself
like one.”
“I need to send money home,” I said
evenly. “My family extends their greetings and knows you’ve taken proper care of
me; they’re patient but impoverished—”
“All will be taken care of. Tell
them about today, and the crowd that stood for you. Such word of mouth will
bring us all wealth.”
“They’re worried, of course, that
I’ll get hurt. I need them not to worry about that, and one sure way would be
to send them my earnings—”
“—Which has to as yet be earned. You
must realize, young Bogdan, how much it has cost us to put you through
training. No? You think Beatriz comes free, for example?”
“I never asked for her—”
“But you like, yes? And, vitally, el
virgin, you need her. All toreros need reason to fight. You eat well tonight,
and rest tomorrow. Train two days hard and then you’re back on this weekend’s
ticket. Bigger crowds come for that. And bigger cash.”
“The beginning of cash?”
“Sí,” he turned to be done with our
talk. “If you kill the bull proper.”
I trained hard those two days, and
took to praying in a simulated chapel during breaks. I prayed for money,
pronouncing it mammon on purpose and
promising not to serve it, just like I promised not really to break the sixth
commandment, other than to offer due sacrifice. I hadn’t uttered ‘Hail Marys’
before coming to Spain, but the other toreros impressed upon me its supreme
importance, and there could be no disagreement. Some asked how things were done
in my homeland and I told them: things are done poorly, often with too much
booze and many, many hours to kill. I described the peasants selling melons and
brooms at roadsides, hours and hours of waiting for anyone who’d stop, eyeing
ambivalently the equivalent pyramids of ware by a neighbor, not wondering how
any other economy in the world worked. “No, I mean religion,” I was reminded of
the original question. Well, that is,
in part, people’s religion. Waiting for something to happen. Being not so
surprised when it does or it doesn’t. Reading the passing world, writing with
fingers in the dust. Cutting a melon when it can’t be sold. Sweeping the dusty
remains away. They didn’t ask me anything more, and I didn’t tell them that I
read every night from the little bible mother had packed, not quite on the sly,
in the folds of extra underwear.
I was slated that weekend to
banderillero duty on the recommendation of the senior toreador: the pink cape
was better for stirring up bulls, and the banderilla runs would bring
confidence to my next estocada. Agreeable enough, but it meant I was not going
to be announced by name or nationality, inevitably delaying my payday all the
more. I did well against four different bulls and drew praise from each
matador. The burly man nodded his head, too: “I knew you could plunge with a
little more practice. We’ll give it another week and see where things stand.”
Faster than that, though, our
leading toreador was thrown and trampled, and one of his peones gored badly in
his attempt to drag his master to safety. I also jumped in to divert the bull,
whose twirling and bucking went on upwards of a minute. The two men lay
motionless, and instead of being hoisted upon the shoulders of fellow toreros,
the doctor ran out to them and barked unscripted orders. The peon was bleeding
badly from his gut, so it was he that the doctor decided would fly out of the
stadium shoulder high and into the waiting ambulance. The toreador, on the
other hand, might have broken his back. He was still unconscious and the doctor
was frantically lifting his eyelids, prying his mouth, trying the places on his
twisted frame that would create a reflex. The breathing was shallow and
labored, and a cardiac arrest seemed imminent. A stretcher came out just as the
doctor would have attempted resuscitation, so he instead instructed a gentle
roll to enable the stretcher to wedge under him and whisk him away. The crowd
was murmuring at this point—they had been deathly silent from the moment we
forced the bull to his pen—and their obligatory applause sounded
none-too-hopeful as the lead attraction made his paralyzed exit.
Outside the chapel there was animated
discussion on what to do next, especially as one of the matadors went with his
friend to try to coax him to consciousness. After ten minutes of back and forth
(the burly man calculating everything), I was asked to change costume and
complete the third fight—the same slot I had performed the previous week.
“You’ll bill me, then?” I had the brashness to ask, to which the burly man bellowed,
“God damn your billing, you fight for all of our lives!”
And I did. My estocada was perfectly
smooth and deep, felling the bull instantly despite his formidable strength. My
name was announced with the epithet ‘El Virgin’, to the crowd’s further
delight. I looked at the president’s box and the burly man smiled and panned
the crowd to remind me of my continued work to do likewise. It was emotionally
difficult to play for adulation while my injured colleagues were foremost on my
mind. Miguel, sensing as much, joined me as the outstanding banderillero of the
fight, then guided my attention back to the president, who had by this time gestured
for a trofeo. Wisp of a man that he was, he carefully made his way to the wall,
held the severed ear at arm’s length and presented it to me with words I
couldn’t catch for the roar all around. ‘El Virgin! El Virgin!’ began the unlikely
chant, rhythmically not unlike the ‘Moldova, Moldova’ they might have known, if
I had only been billed that way today.
Beatriz hadn’t been in the stands,
but she had heard everything through Miguel. “Mi varón,” she beamed, as if to
repudiate what everyone else called me. We met as planned at the plaza major,
lights just coming on to diffuse the dusk. I had forgotten to bring the trofeo,
drying out under a beer mug on my windowsill. “What would I do with another one
anyway?” she gibed, “listen better?”
“I thought that’s what one does. The
recipient cashes in on all the beef, which your family can enjoy more than
mine. I, on the other hand, can’t send anything home…”
She sighed at that and leaned into
me, more perfumed than usual. “You hungry now?”
“Not very.”
“That’s good. Maybe we eat some
tapas now, but then I got us tickets to Lorca.”
“Really. How would you suppose I’d
like Lorca?”
“Miguel told me.”
“Today? He added that tidbit on top
of everything else?”
“No, last week. He much talks about you.”
I didn’t pursue that as we ate at a
bistro, nor could I suitably relay the details of the afternoon. Instead I
asked how she knew Lorca. “Everyone in Andalusia knows his poetry. My teacher
had us memorize ‘Ode to Salvador Dali’—I’ve forgotten most of it by now; pero alabo tus ansias de eterno limitado—that
was my favorite line.”
“Wouldn’t Dali be Lorca’s nemesis? A
fellow non-Castilian artist caving in to Franco, who probably issued Lorca’s
death warrant?”
“It may be true. Artisans, like
toreros, had his especial attention. All for España—or if no, cuidado!”
We taxied to the theatre to get
there on time. I looked at the meter perhaps too often, and Beatriz told me not
to worry—she had money tonight for a change. I thought of Brett Ashley and Jake
and the damned good time they could have had together, but kept that to myself.
Beatriz held my hand as she did when we strolled. “Gulayem,” I responded when she asked me to
remind her of that verb in Russian—I was still a mix of languages with her and
she rather liked certain things I said, or tried to say.
The play promised to be dour and
unromantic. I couldn’t exactly decipher why Beatriz would decide to take me
here, as if the house of Bernarda Alba represented some extremity she wanted me
to see—innocent, incarcerated women—or some value she wanted to convey—“You’ll
get used to it,” an older sister tells the youngest, Adela, who has the youth
and chutzpah to break out of the their monstrous mother’s regime. Adela, but
even her eighty-year-old grandmother wants “a man to get married to and be
happy with!” Beatriz smiled through Bernarda’s command: “Lock her up!”—her own
mother!—and as the curtain began to fall, the octogenarian screamed through the
arms that restrained her, “I want to get away from here! Bernarda! To get
married by the shore of the sea—by the shore of the sea!”
The intermission wasn’t long
(there’d be another), but Beatriz touched upon that idea—not us, explicitly,
but the image of a seaside wedding. “I couldn’t live without the sea,” Beatriz
confessed.
“Then you’d die in Moldova!” I said
inelegantly, even though she took it well.
“Why go back there? You’ll be rich
soon and can buy a house for your parents here, too.”
“What would they do here?”
“What they do there—it’s same. Only
here is the sea.”
She hadn’t before expressed any
geographic fervor. We took our seats again and watched the slow implosion of
the second and third acts. Adela, desperately in love with Pepe, hangs herself
as Bernarda scares him off with a shotgun. “Pepe,” she shouted into the
audience, “you’re running now, alive, in the darkness, under the trees, but
another day you’ll fall.” Then to her horrified cast, “Cut her down! My
daughter died a virgin. Take her to another room and dress her as though she
were a virgin. No one will say anything about this! She died a virgin.” A
shuffling ensued and the curtain jerked down as if the cord were caught outside
its spool. Another sister tried to voice Adela’s love, but Bernarda was
resolute: “Tears when you’re alone!” The curtain slipped another meter. “We’ll
drown ourselves in a sea of mourning. She, the youngest”—slip—“daughter of
Bernarda Alba,”—another slip, and sensing it, she stepped across the
proscenium—“died a virgin. Did you hear me?” The curtain tumbled, Bernarda
alone, glaring above the frozen audience. “Silence, silence, I said.” No
applause. “Silence!” And the house went pitch black.
Beatriz had cowered into me, and we
left honoring Bernarda’s imperative. We took another taxi to my room and kissed
as if we were Adela and Pepe. In the middle of the night, I queried whether the
tapas had been enough—I had in my little fridge calamari rings and eggs I could
fry up. “Desayuno, Bogdan,” she whispered, and melded to sleep until then.
The next months were auspicious, to
the point that I could finance my own apartment (not quite at the sea) and send
earnings to my parents and cousin, a bit less to David, and provide more felicitous
dates for Beatriz. She now joked that ‘El Virgin’ was—“how you say, some
oxymoron? You are everyone’s love.”
“Does that mean you love me?”
“Sí.”
“And so you’ll marry me?”
I hadn’t seen her cry before and
expected anything but that. She also didn’t anticipate—let alone the
question—the reach this one-year visa risk incurred. She didn’t answer, but
also didn’t run away. We continued to wile away the evening as usual, as if
there were no oxymorons whatsoever.
The following day, over drinks,
Miguel told me what I’d intuited: Beatriz was the ‘rescue’ of the burly man and
his apparatus. She was young when her father had died (she had told me that)
and her mother hit the streets for their sustenance (she hadn’t that). Those
streets came into the apartment, of course. While an indisputably bright
student, Beatriz dropped out before matriculation: she waitressed two shifts at
different cafés in order to rent her own room. Her mother argued constantly
against that and things were coming to a head. One café fired her for a repulsive black eye
she couldn’t disguise with make-up. The other café sympathized yet also raised
concern—it’s bad for business, you know. That manager knew a few people who
could help her out, and one of them led to her present patronage. She was
granted a small room for easy rent, kept the one café (I liked meeting her
there), and was explicitly not the
paramour of every torero—
“Yours, Miguel?”
“Forgive me, Bogdan. Before I ever
knew you, yes.”
“Now that you know me?”
“No.”
“And others who know me?”
“I don’t know. But she is…remarkably…different
around you.”
“You evidently know her better than
I do.”
Miguel paused before saying, “don’t,
Bogdan, don’t sadden yourself because of me. I don’t know what friendships you
have here or at home. But I regard you as a true friend. And I regard Beatriz
that way, too—that’s why I tell you what I did.”
I didn’t exactly say ‘gracias’ to
this, but sent up a prayer for Miguel. He was due to face his first estocada
the next afternoon, and, as much as I felt he had shown valor as a
banderillero, I imagined a gory scene that hadn’t been witnessed since, well,
Bernarda Alba.
He was slated for the second fight,
and I the third. His passes were very good and all bade well for a clean
finish. Beatriz watched near the president’s box, I from the shadows of the
gate. The bull was dappled as most our stock was—the purer black toros were
expensive and not dispensed for rookie fighters. Miguel was clumsy in each of
his final remates, getting hooked on
his left arm and running away too often for the crowd’s satisfaction. The
suerte de muleta was formulaic, non-artistic, and I saw in Miguel all reasons
to abandon this trade as banal, atavistic, unworthy to follow. He killed his
bull. And in the scheduled next tercios I’d need to do the same.
I hadn’t forgotten to step into the
chapel below the stands, yet I didn’t pray as much as contemplate St Luke, the
physician, and why his symbol was a winged bull. No picture of one hung here—it
was like a monk’s cell, with a plank altar propping up a couple candles and a
crucifix—but my mind meandered back to the icons in Orhei, at the church in
town or the monastery closer to our farm. A winged bull, yes, but I remembered
another depiction of a yoked ox. Which rendition did Luke have in mind, if either
of them? A bull was an offering of sacrifice, like a lamb in that way. An ox
worked the field—a sacrifice of sorts—and for all that labor he’d still get
knifed for provender. Did the yoked animal also have wings? That would add
mockery to fate! And seriously Luke couldn’t be aiming for that….
Of course I suspended those musings
while in the ring, but I knew by my second verónica this bull required more
concentration than I was giving. He aimed for his own territory—what we call
his ‘querencia’, not playing by our rules—and so I’d need to lure passes to
draw him gradually to the center, at the risk of wearing myself out more than
him. Exacerbating this, his querencia was to my left side, so I imagined the
ultimate estocada would be particularly complicated, horns lancing at odds with
natural turns. I didn’t have to say so to the picador, but advised him anyway,
asking for deep jabs and a little extra fatigue time. The banderillos also took
twice as many runs for the quirky thrashes of this bull’s head, and I could see
the crowd becoming shiftless for any number of reasons. It was hot, but that
fact hardly mattered. Gusts of wind tempered that heat a little bit but adversely
whipped up dust and made the capework harder. Aficionados knew this bull was
more dangerous than most; naïve spectators felt the show needed to move on.
Everyone could see what the bull was doing, but few could appreciate how
unpredictable he still was. I looked for Beatriz in the stands and couldn’t see
her, and wondered about that. I thought about Luke and the wings and the yoke,
and only after the right horn lifted me up by my midriff did I realize I was
caught off guard and this instantaneous goring was deep. I couldn’t scream—that
surprised me too—and as the crowd blurred in the spiral of the bull’s hoist, I
couldn’t hear anything but a rhythm of enraged snorts. I clung stupidly to the
blood-swamped morrillo, vaguely aware that in so doing the horn was sliding
deeper into my gut. The bull was charging toward his querencia, and the wall
would certainly be my coffin lid. By instinct, then, I clasped both hands
around the horn and thrust myself outward, and just before I hit the ground, the
bull crashed full speed and weight against the wall, and all consciousness was
gone.
The
Gospel of Luke is synoptic with Matthew’s and Mark’s—not as eccentric as
John’s—yet unique all the same. Who is this Theophilus fellow he’s writing to,
for instance, and why all the parables of lost things? Jesus himself gets
lost—not exactly foreshadowing the prodigal son, but maybe…just a trace—when
Mary and Joseph search three days before logically finding their pre-teen in
the temple: “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” he mystically
reminds them, and then obediently returns to Nazareth to be a carpenter’s
apprentice (which only Matthew and Mark acknowledge—Luke had more a physician’s
field in mind). The Good Samaritan happens in Luke. Lazarus the beggar is
Luke’s, by which the message is confusingly clear: “even if someone rises from
the dead”, the hard-hearted will not repent and believe. Hadn’t Jesus resurrected
the son of the widow from Nain? Lazarus the brother of Martha and Mary is only
found in the Gospel of John, and he embodies that ‘someone’ rising from the
dead, though we never hear that risen man’s account. Luke loves accounts, from
Zechariah to the Virgin Mary to shepherds and Simeon and Anna, to rich fools
and shrewd managers, to cripples and lepers and another widow who would not
relent in appealing to a fearless judge. Zacchaeus is only met in the Gospel of
Luke. “I must stay at your house today,” Jesus says to the wee tax collector,
and, overwhelmed, Zacheaus promises half his wealth to the poor and four times
the amount he’s cheated anybody. Four times infinity, perhaps, but such
farcical calculations couldn’t matter that night. How “I must stay” must have
hummed in his ears!...
I woke up in hospital with such wonder
in my dreams (if they were indeed dreams) and despite being groggy from all
that they did, I thanked God for physicians—Luke, for one, and Dr Morales, for
another. “You were nigh a goner,” the latter said. “You lost at least two litres
of blood and reacted badly to anesthesia, when we could even come to that
point.”
“What point?” I wisped.
“The point of natural or induced
coma. You properly knocked yourself out at the initial trauma, but where you’d
go from there was sheer guesswork. Your heart is strong, so there seemed no
threat of cardiac arrest. But all that blood lost—perhaps I shouldn’t tell you
so much—“
“No, please… do. I remember… the
hit…”
“And anything else?”
“I was… thinking… about the Gospel…
of Luke.”
“In the ring?”
“Maybe. Surely before… and just now,
like… a dream.”
“Who else?”
I didn’t know what to call her in
relation to myself, and was struggling to speak anyway, so only in a whisper I
uttered “Beatriz.”
Dr Morales pursed a smile then
returned it straight. “She was here the first three days, once overnight. Then
there was quite a row when other visitors came in, so we had to suspend that.
Now that you’re awake, perhaps we can have a more civil situation.”
“Doctor,” I questioned with compressed
lungs. “Wha’d’I got?”
He called a nurse over to rub my
forehead, take my pulse, whatever else she’d do. He measured his speech and bid
me not to worry—of all places, this was manageable, surgery after surgery (and
he didn’t say how many). My urinary tract was obliterated, he said, nothing now
held that organ together. A catheter had done its work after some re-routing,
and another week or so would have me out and about, with catheter, of
course—that would have to stay. The question of a kidney now, to pay for this
or any sunset clause, was beyond my asking. I assumed my kidneys could still do
their quotidian job, if now to funnel into plastic tubes and a pantaloon pouch.
Dr Morales spoke at some length, and the nurse even demonstrated how I’d need
to remove the receptacle and sanitize, and reattach, so seemingly easy. “It
won’t be easy, Bogdan,” he consigned. “But in the scheme of things…”
“In the scheme of things…,” I
echoed, and closed my eyes to sleep.
And, in the scheme of my
convalescence the burly man came to visit. “Where’s Beatriz?” I asked him point
blank.
“She sends her ‘adios’—you know that
was always the deal.”
“I have no idea of any deal. You’ve
never come clear on a contract level—”
“True. The only contract that
mattered, you must agree, was to sponsor your legal presence here, and, let me
remind, you lived well indeed.”
“With nothing to send home? That was
my whole purpose, as I told you time and again.”
The burly man walked around my bed
and noticed my rigging and shook his head. “That was a bad hit, to be sure.” I
closed my eyes and wanted the nurse to intercede. The catheter business was
still embarrassing, but her caresses to my forehead were soulful. “Even so, I
understand that in a week you can be dispatched.” He waddled to the other side
of my bed and reached into his coat pocket. “You earned your billing on that
final fight—it’s a fair amount of cash. The air ticket to Chisnau is valid for
the remainder of this month—I suggest you use it because there won’t be
another. Your passport’s in here, too.” He put the envelope beside my ear, and
turned to leave. “Gracias, El Virgin.”
My mind raced to tackle him and
plunge a sword into his ample morrillo or plead for another position or demand
more compensation (no matter what the envelope contained) or compel a last
visit with Beatriz or Miguel…
As if reading that thought, he
pulled a single folded sheet from his pants pocket and dropped it between my
covered ankles. “That’s from Miguel, who also gives his adios. He said you were
a literary sort. So, enjoy.”
The nurse came in a half hour after
he left, and she handed me what I would just as soon leave at the foot of the
bed. It had nothing of Miguel’s writing on it, only a strange, lyrical exposition
by Carolyn Forché, entitled “The Colonel”. I read it four or five times before
throwing it out the open window. It was enough to make the escapade complete:
What you have heard is
true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter
filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet
dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord
over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken
bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from
a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like
those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was
on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type
of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial
in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how
difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The
colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said
to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to
bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried
peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his
hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive
there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell
your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with
his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry,
no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some
of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
I would have preferred something
like “That is no country for old men”, for I was now that “tattered coat upon a
stick,” and “sick with desire to finally go home.” As God might restore a
modicum of youth, my viejo país—no, my stara zemlya (as I needed to abandon this Byzantium venture)—awaited
as it always would: Moldova had exactly nowhere to go. I said goodbye to no one
in Spain, except the nurse and Dr Morales, who kindly drove me to the airport
and alerted the Aeroflot staff that I was flightworthy, if still getting used
to the catheter.
Which I wasn’t, exactly. A doctor in
Chisinau shook his head in disgust, sure that something inside me could have
been better stitched up. I was surprised that he’d let me stay a few nights
without a normal insurance clearance, on the virtue of my story and sincerity
alone. David came to see me, then my parents, and I gave them the envelope,
which they didn’t open in my presence. The doctor did some procedural things,
but after three days of needed rest, I exited the hospital with simply a tune
up to a catheter that I’d require for the rest of my life, he resigned. There
are worse realities, I reasoned.
Meanwhile, in Chisinau’s main
square, a new feature brightened up the already beautiful spring breeze: the ‘Birth
of God’ belfry had been renovated to include dozens of bells that catered to an
organist who played them to sublimity every top-of-the-hour. By design they
couldn’t handle complex fugues, but also by design, they were far more
harmonious than chimes. Were they a clarion call? That was the question I posed
to David, who admitted he hadn’t thought much of them, studies at Agrara being
what they were. “A clarion call for what?” he asked without cynicism. And that
question broached another about institutional motivations, why anyone big would
call out for anyone small. ‘Big’, in the context of our conversation, meant
Moldavan influence (oxymoron notwithstanding). I described to David as
thoroughly as I could: the burly man and my ignoble exit, the attested last
visits of Beatriz and Miguel, my resignation of ever seeing them again. “Maybe
they’re just as land-locked as we are,” David imagined. We listened to fullness
of the bells before our slow walk to the bus depot, where he saw me off before slogging
back to Agrara.
The letters for me that my mother
stacked on my nightstand were mostly summons to military service and
application rejections I already knew about. Mother didn’t want to admit the
trouble they were facing as a family due to my abandonment of national duty.
The money I handed over to them was likely spent: depleted for fines and bribes
to make my case disappear. My father was even more inscrutable on this topic,
though I asked them to be forthright. “No one’s going to prison,” he murmured,
and slunk to the toolshed or his trusty armchair. I was prepared to turn myself
in, explain what I could, appeal for mercy, accept the opposite…; instead, I
decided any of that could still happen from an institutional initiative with no
clearer sense of outcome.
Nothing more of the harvest to sell roadside,
and stick brooms not yet in demand, I tried to help my cousin with the cattle. Things
that hadn’t been arduous before, like bending down to milk cows or branding
yearlings or inseminating heifers, now were well beyond my agility. I couldn’t
keep up with the herd or ride a horse—the bladder bag leaked and the catheter
itself threatened to pop out, the key concern Dr Morales had about leaving me
to my own maintenance. My cousin growled that I added to his troubles and
accused me of faking my fate to avoid forking over the royalties. My riposte
that “I died trying” he took as literally untrue, and believed nothing of the Mafioso
that couldn’t possibly exist there—no
way! He worked himself into such a tirade that I had to hedgehog myself to
avoid his whaps and shin kicks. As nasty as he often was with me, he hadn’t before
dared pick a fight. And now, of all times, I could scarcely run away.
So I walked east and south, along
the curves of the Raut River that I’d fished as a kid, all the way to the Vechi
Cliffs, where a handful of monks lived for centuries, off and on. I remember,
when I was five, stopping here in our little white Lada en route to Dubasari,
now under Transnistrian jurisdiction. Dad’s brother, my uncle Timor, still
lived there in his curtain-tight apartment, done up with technicolor pictures
of military brass on his walls. I had last crossed the bridge to his city when
I was sixteen, the rifles of conscripted soldiers young and middle-aged trained
on our bus as it rolled warily through checkpoints and shivered to a stop for
an hour-long search. Timor had invited me to consider life on his side of the
Nistru, taking me to the rather run-down high school in town and introducing me
to his friends, including a pretty philology teacher who assured me of her
connections to Tiraspol University, named for Shevschenko. “Why not a Moldovan
poet?” I asked her when the men were out of earshot. She pursed her lips and
nodded, as if it were a yes-no question. She then inquired what I had been
studying this year, and I told her we had just finished The Tempest.
“Oh, Caliban—is it so necessary for
Moldovans to study?”
“Well,…he, Miranda, they’re stuck on
the same island.”
“But surely, Ferdinand will come—”
“For one of them, yes. However, what
do you think Shakespeare—”
My uncle jumped in, pleased to see
me interested in the day he designed. “Shakespeare,” he belted, “of course! And
the national theatre puts on his plays, isn’t that true, Nadezhda?” She pursed
her lips and nodded. “But come, Bogdan, we’re due at the sports hall to meet
the gymnastics coach. He’s been indispensible for the fitness training of my
troops….”
I stopped my long walk at the base
of the Vechi Cliffs, thankful for a respite in the new interpretive center of
the geology and history of the region. My gut was sharply sore, and I needed to
lie down, which the curator kindly allowed me to do in a back office. I must
have slept a couple of hours—my bladder bag upon waking was full to near
bursting. The curator, interested in my little story, shared tea and open-face
sandwiches before I’d move on. He asked if I were going to visit the monastery.
I told him I was en route to Dubasari, but yes, the monastery would be good to
see. I was ten when they opened their doors to the public—as they had done
sparingly over eight centuries. The Golden Horde, Ottomans, Don Cossacks all
made an imprint on the need for these caves, sanctuaries and hiding places they
alternatively were. The Transnistrian conflict could have added to an eventual
obliteration—the cliffs were barely strategic in a modern sense, but still:
they overlooked a flat and fertile frontier, and machine guns from the grotto
windows would logically work better than prayers.
The curator must have called ahead,
because I was greeted three-quarters up the steep path by a Brother Grigor, who
spoke little beyond giving me his name. I was self-conscious that the day was
already fading into dusk; there were no tourists here and I could scarcely be
called one of them, so I clarified, “I’ve visited the church before.” Grigor
acknowledged that fact tacitly and continued a steady motion towards the gate
and the steps to the narthex where a few others assembled. It was the eve of the
Annunciation, he whispered, and vespers were about to commence. I went in,
found what closeted space there was in the back, and warmed gratefully in the
candle heat. I thought of Beatriz a little, but then of Moldova and myriad things upon my return,
which now included the small choir who sang their Gospodés and the slow rotation of the laity and the protocol of
priests. One of them read out:
In
the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to
a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David.
The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, ‘Greetings, you who
are highly favored! The Lord is with you.’
Mary
was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might
be. But the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor
with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give
him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most
High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will
reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.’
‘How
will this be,’ Mary asked the angel, since I am a virgin?’
The
angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most
High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of
God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and
she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible
with God.’
‘I
am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered, ‘May it be to me as you have said.’ Then
the angel left her.
The service
was sublime; still, I timed my departure right before the benediction. It was
dark now and hard to descend the promontory to the bank below, where I found a
soft spot to sleep. The monks of centuries past had limestone to sleep upon,
and stony darkness. I thanked God for them, for Grigor and the curator, as I
blinked my eyes to a million stars and the steady shush of river Raut.
At dawn, on a nearby dock, Grigor
gibed that even the fish had a more suitable bed. I forced a smile at that despite
aching all over, hoping at least for a diffusion of pain in my gut. “Come,
rest, for real,” he bid me, and with his left arm crooked with a basket of
netted trout, he led me with his right arm up the steep path to the house
beside the chapel, where monks’ cells were fitted with electricity and
cushions, if still in the spirit of their cause. He pointed me to a washroom,
cognizant my bag would need flushing, and left to prepare the rest of his day.
I tried to do likewise, wandering around the plateau, introducing myself to Calugarul
Efimie, who held watch at the bell tower for the trickle of tourists who’d
visit the cave, the chapel within, the nine cells where monks had lived, their
few windows framing the horizon. Efimie mostly read from a little missal while
I looked at every image in the oaken iconostasis. He spoke meekly through his
gray beard when I asked him questions, and as I thanked him for his time he
beckoned me to join him up to the belfry where, instead of iron bells, there were
hanging planks of wood that Efimie resounded with mallets. He continued this gonging
for a while, then pointed at the path where a line of worshippers now made
their way to the chapel. Wordlessly, we descended and joined that line.
Grigor gave me candles to light and
encouraged me to stay through the service and lunch afterwards. It was easy to
say yes, as destination Dubasari was starting to fade away. Grigor introduced
me to Staretul Vladimir, the head priest, and whatever the latter knew of my
evening and morning, he wanted to hear about my experience in Spain: “We don’t
get many tourists from there—more Italians and Germans and English speakers—but
once in a while they travel all this way. What did you make of the people
there?”
It wasn’t a trick question and so I
didn’t expose the burly man as any kind of representative. I didn’t refer to
Beatriz or Miguel by name, but honored the fact that friends had visited me in
hospital (I trusted they had) and the
nurse and Dr Morales were key reasons why I survived the whole ordeal.
Vladimir nodded and now wanted to
know why I had come back.
“I woke from my coma thinking of St
Luke.”
“Luke?”
“Yes, I don’t exactly know why.”
“Maybe ‘physician, heal thyself’,”
Grigor opined, “Not to take the Lord’s words in vain.”
“Indeed, Brother Grigor,” Vladimir
added, “yet there’s something to it.”
“I must have been thinking about a
bull with wings and a bull yoked—I know those variants were on my mind before the
goring.”
“Really.”
“Yes, as kind of an ongoing reflection.
Which symbol of Luke do you support?”
“Well, Luke’s bull always has
wings,” Vladimir replied without hesitation, “and I suppose that yoke you’re
thinking of is a cross all of us must bear.”
“Do you have an icon of the yoke?”
“I don’t think we do. Do you,
Brother Grigor?” The latter shrugged. “But your question shouldn’t require
physical evidence. What bulls have wings? You wouldn’t want to seek that out.
What bulls have yokes? Well, evidence is left and right—there’s nothing then to
seek. So today, as we celebrate Annuciation, we marvel at what cannot be
(immaculate, indeed!) and operate on what clearly stands to reason (the child
will be born, live among us, carry a cross unimaginably made to kill him off).
The first thief on the cross tempts Christ to fly off, and take with him all
those unworthy like him; the second thief says the yoke is on us all, and no
one can do otherwise but to plow on and hope for eventual heavenly days to
come. Jesus, of course, affirms that latter thief. Now I ask you, Bogdan, because
you have sought answers: beyond the spectrum of those thieves, and icons
affecting us this way and that, who essentially are you?”
I was prone to say, over the
following days of reading and contemplation, that I was Malchus, the servant of
the high priest referred to in all gospels, named only in John’s, healed of his
severed ear only in Luke’s. Efimie, Grigor, and I debated whether this healing
was the last recorded miracle of Jesus; Grigor insisted that Jesus own dying
and resurrection were quintessential miracles, no bones about it, but Efimie
seemed to agree with me, smiling though his gray beard. Vladimir said, “You can
stay with us, Bogdan—a name you needn’t change at all for our nuanced thoughts
on Malchus—and if there are duties to be had here, please help us with our
fluency, for whatever pilgrims come this way.”
I did so, and by Palm Sunday the
following spring, I was the liturgical reader in Moldovan, Russian and English
(no Spaniards assembled among us). My gut had healed sufficiently, even if the
catheter would remain like a scar, and so I worked with the fishery and garden
and general maintenance of the place. David, my parents and sisters, and our
silver-headed neighbors came to visit regularly enough; the fishing alone was
reason enough to wile away an idyllic afternoon.
When the second winter was upon us,
and tourists slowed to maybe one a day, a strange event gripped our placid
promontory. It should have been my cousin but instead it was a relative of
Grigor’s who stormed into our compound and demanded we fork over everything of
value. Grigor tried to talk the drunk man down, saying there was nothing here
of any worth to him, but the latter brandished a handgun and said he’d leave us
all corpses unless one of us had the guts to open up the coffers. Grigor
quickly contextualized that he had been a permanent sentry on the Transnistrian
front—he couldn’t tell us from which side, nor could we conjecture one way or
another, not at this point. “He’s fit to kill, God knows,” was all Grigor could
say before being taken hostage to the steepest edge beyond the bell tower.
There was at that edge an upright, chiseled cross about a slouching man’s
height, and the bandit with Grigor in headlock leaned against it, screaming for
us to “empty out the coffers!” One of the monks hastened into the church to
find something that might satisfy him, but the rest of us sensed he’d pull the
trigger regardless.
I didn’t think twice in the blitz of
logic and whatever else spurred me. I grabbed a shovel and used the spade to
shield my head, then ran at the limestone cross as two bullets ricocheted
against the spade. Another hit my forearm just as I lowered the shield to leap
in estocada style, with nothing in hand to actually penetrate the beast.
Rather what I aimed for was Grigor’s morrillo, so to speak—the scruff of his
monk’s cowl and the hope that we’d tumble favorably, God help whatever tumble
else. The marauder was nonplussed and threw himself at me, and all of us
avalanched five or six meters to a thin path below, and Grigor (his morrillo
now let go) tumbled twice that descent. I righted myself, sickly aware that my
catheter was dislodged, yet prepared to face fury, in spite of no need: the
enemy had been knocked out by the cliff itself. Grigor, wailing for all,
recovered himself and threw the displaced handgun further down the slope. His
bloodied face met mine in strange relief, and then, for only the second time in
my life, I lost consciousness.
Who knows what happened to Malchus,
or any stray innocent along the extended Via Dolorosa. If anything I realized,
home is not where troubles cease or begin, but where the Great Physician can
find you.
