Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (15 page)

 
          
 
The hot sun shone in golden explosions from
the high church tower in Guadalajara, and in blasts from the high, swaying
crucifix. In the street below, if Christ looked down with mellow warm eyes, and
he did so now in this moment, he saw two thousand upturned faces: the
spectators like so many melons scattered about the market, so many.hands
raised
to shield the uptilted and curious eyes. A little wind
blew and the tower cross sighed very gently and pressed forward under it.

 
          
 
Christ waved his hand. Those in the market
below waved back. A small shout trickled through the crowd. Traffic did not
move in the street. It was eleven of a hot green Sunday morning. You could
smell the fresh clipped grass from the plaza, and the incense from the church
doors.

 
          
 
Christ took his other hand down also and waved
it and suddenly jerked away from the cross and hung by his feet, face down, a
small silver medallion jingling in his face, suspended from about his dark
neck.

 
          
 
“Ole! Ole!" cried one small boy far
below, pointing up at him and then at himself. "You see him, you see? That
is Gomez, my brother! Gomez who is my brother!" And the small boy walked
through the crowd with a hat, collecting money.

 
          
 
Movement. Raimundo, in the street, covered his
eyes and screamed. Darkness again.

 
          
 
The tourists from the boats moved in the dream
of the island of Janitzio at midnight. In the dim street the great nets hung
like fog from the lake, and rivers of today's silver minnows lay glittering in
cascades upon the slopes. Moonlight struck them like a cymbal striking another
cymbal; they gave off a silent reverberation.

 
          
 
In the crumbling church at the top of the
rough hill is a Christ much drilled by termites, but the blood still congeals
thickly from his artistic wounds and it will be years before the agony is
insect-eaten from his suffering mask.

 
          
 
Outside the church, a woman with Tarascan
blood lifting and falling in her throat sits fluttering ripped morning-glories
through the flames of six candles. The flowers, passing through the flames like
moths, give off a gentle sexual odor. Already the moving tourists come and
stand about her, looking down, wanting to ask, but not asking, what she is
doing, seated there upon her husband's grave.

 
          
 
In the church, like resin from a great
beautiful tree, the limbs of Christ, themselves hewn from beautiful limbs of
imported trees, give off a sweet sacred resin in little raining droplets that
hang but never fall, blood that gives a garment for his nakedness.

 
          
 
''Ole!" roared the crowd.

 
          
 
Bright sunlight again. A pressure on
Raimundo's flung body. The car, the daylight, the pain!

 
          
 
The picador jousted his horse forward, the horse
with thick mattresses tied to it, and kicked the bull in the shoulder with his
boot and at the same time penetrated that shoulder with the long stick and the
nail on the end of it. The picador withdrew. Music played. The matador moved
slowly forward.

 
          
 
The bull stood with one foot forward in the
center of the sun-held ring, his organs nervous. The eyes were dull glazed
hypnotic eyes of fear-hate. He kept eliminating nervously, nervously, until he
was streaked and foul with a nervous casting out. The greenish matter pulsed
from his buttocks and the blood pulsed from his gored shoulder and the six
banderillas bindled and clattered on his spine.

 
          
 
The matador took time to rearrange his red
cloth over his blade, just so carefully, while the crowd and the pulsing bull
waited.

 
          
 
The bull can see nothing, know nothing. The
bull desires not to see of this or that. The world is pain and shadows and
light and weariness. The bull stands only to be dispatched. It will welcome an
end to confusion, to the racing shapes, the traitorous capes, the lying
flourishes and false fronts. The bull plants out its feet in feeble stances and
remains in one position, slowly moving its head back and forth, eyes glazed,
the excrement still unfelt rivuleting from its flanks, the blood tiredly
pumping from the neck. Somewhere off in the glazed distance a man holds out a
bright sword. The bull does not move. The sword, held by the smiling man, now
cuts three short gashes down the nose of the empty-eyed bull— sol

 
          
 
The crowd shouts.

 
          
 
The bull takes the cutting and does not even
flinch. Blood flushes from the snuffling, cut nostrils.

 
          
 
The matador stamps his foot.

 
          
 
The bull runs with feeble obedience toward the
enemy. The sword pierces his neck. The bull falls, thuds, kicks, is silent.

           
 
“Ole!" shouts the crowd. The band blows
out a brass finale!

 
          
 
Raimundo felt the car hit. There were swift
intervals of light and darkness.

 
          
 
In the Janitzio churchyard two hundred candles
bumed atop two hundred rocky graves, men sang, tourists watched, fog poured up
from the lake.

 
          
 
In Guanajuato, sunlightl Striking down through
a slot in the catacomb, sunlight showed the brown eyes of a woman, mouth wide
in rictus, cross-armed. Tourists touched and thumped her like a drum.

 
          
 
"Ole!" The matador circled the ring,
his small black biretta in his fingers, high. It rained. Centavo pieces,
purses, shoes, hats. The matador stood in this rain with his tiny biretta
raised for an umbrella!

 
          
 
A man ran up with a cut-off ear of the slain
bull. The matador held it up to the crowd. Everywhere he walked the crowd threw
up their hats and money. But thumbs jerked down and though the shouts were glad
they were not so glad that he keep the cut-off ear. Thumbs went down. Without a
look behind him, shrugging, the matador gave the ear a cracking toss. The
bloody ear lay on the sand, while the crowd, glad that he had thrown it away,
because he was not that good, cheered. The bucklers came out, chained the
slumped bull to a team of high-stamping horses, who whistled fearful sirens in
their nostrils at the hot blood odor and bolted like white explosions across
the arena when released, yanking, bounding the dead slumped bull behind,
leaving a harrowing of the horns in sand and amulets of blood.

 
          
 
Raimundo felt the sugar skull jolt from his
fingers. The funeral on the wooden slat was torn from his other wide-flung
hand.

 
          
 
Bang! The bull hit, rebounded from the barrera
wall as the horses vanished, jangling, screaming, in the tunnel.

 
          
 
A man ran to the barrera of Senor Villalta,
poking upward the banderillas, their sharp prongs choked with bull blood and
flesh. ''Gracias!" Villalta threw down a peso and took the banderillas
proudly, the Uttle orange and blue crepe papers fluttering, to hand about like
musical instruments to his wife, to cigar-smoking friends.

 
          
 
Christ moved.

 
          
 
The crowd looked up at the swaying cross on
the cathedral.

 
          
 
Christ balanced on two hands, legs up in the
sky!

           
 
The small boy ran through the crowd. "You
see my brother? Pay! My brother! Pay!"

 
          
 
Christ now hung by one hand on the swaying
cross. Below him was all the city of Guadalajara, very sweet and very quiet
with Sunday. I will make much money today, he thought.

 
          
 
The cross jolted. His hand slipped. The crowd
screamed.

 
          
 
Christ fell.

 
          
 
Christ dies each hour. You see him in carven
postures in ten thousand agonized places, eyes lifted to high dusty heavens of
ten thousand small churches, and always there is much blood, ah, much blood.

 
          
 
"See!" said Senor Villaita.
"See!" He wagged the banderillas in the face of his friends, red and
wet.

 
          
 
With children chasing, snatching at him,
laughing, the matador circles the ring again to the ever-increasing shower of
hats, running and not stopping.

 
          
 
And now the tourist boats cross the dawn-pale
lake of Ptzcuaro, leaving Janitzio behind, the candles snuffed, the graveyard
deserted, the torn flowers strewn and shriveling. The boats pull up and the
tourists step out in the new light, and in the hotel on the mainland shore a
great silver urn waits, bubbling with fresh coffee; a little whisper of steam,
like the last part of the fog from the lake, goes up into the warm air of the
hotel dining room, and there is a good sound of chattered plates and tining
forks and low converse, and a gentle lidding of eyes and a mouthing of coffee
in dreams already begun before the pillow. Doors close. The tourists sleep on
fog-damp pillows, in fog-damp sheets, like earth-spittled winding clothes. The
coffee smell is as rich as the skin of a Tarascan.

 
          
 
In Guanajuato the gates close, the rigid
nightmares are turned from. The spiral stair is taken up in hot November light.
A dog barks. A wind stirs the dead morning-glories on the pastry-cake
monuments. The big door whams down on the catacomb opening. The withered people
are hidden.

 
          
 
The band hoots out its last triumphant hooting
and the barreras are empty. Outside, the people walk away between ranks of
phlegm-eyed beggers who sing high high songs, and the blood spoor of the last
bull is raked and wiped and raked and wiped by the men with the rakes down in
the wide shadowed ring. In the shower, the matador is slapped upon his wet
buttocks by a man who has won money because of him this day.

 
          
 
Raimundo fell, Christ fell, in glaring light.
A bull rushed, a car rushed, opening a great vault of blackness in the air
which slammed, thundered shut and said nothing but sleep. Raimundo touched the
earth, Christ touched the earth but did not know.

 
          
 
The cardboard funeral was shattered to bits.
The sugar skull broke in the far gutter in three dozen fragments of blind snow.

 
          
 
The boy, the Christ, lay quiet.

 
          
 
The night bull went away to give other people
darkness, to teach other people sleep.

 
          
 
Ah, said the crowd.

 
          
 
RAIMUNDO, said the bits of the sugar skull
strewn on the earth.

 
          
 
People ran to surround the silence. They
looked at the sleep.

 
          
 
And the sugar skull with the letters R and a
and i and m and u and n and d and o was snatched up and eaten by children who
fought over the name.

 
          
 
When a new patient wanders into the office and
stretches out to stutter forth a compendious ticker tape of free association,
it is up to the psychiatrist immediately beyond, behind and above to decide at
just which points of the anatomy the client is in touch with the couch.

 
          
 
In other words, where does the patient make
contact with reality?

 
          
 
Some people seem to float half an inch above
any surface whatsoever. They have not seen earth in so long, they have become
somewhat airsick.

 
          
 
Still others so firmly weight themselves down,
clutch, thrust, heave their bodies toward reality, that long after they are
gone you find their tiger shapes and claw marks in the upholstery.

 
          
 
In the case of Emma Fleet, Dr. George C.
George was a long time deciding which was furniture and which was woman and
where what touched which.

 
          
 
For, to begin with, Emma Fleet resembled a
couch.

 
          
 
"Mrs. Emma Fleet, Doctor," announced
his receptionist

 
          
 
Dr. George C. George gasped.

 
          
 
For it was a traumatic experience, seeing this
woman shunt herself through the door without benefit of railroad switchman or
the ground crews who rush about under Macy's Easter balloons, heaving on lines,
guiding the massive images to some eternal hangar off beyond.

 
          
 
In came Emma Fleet, as quick as her name, the
floor shifting like a huge scales under her weight.

 
          
 
Dr. George must have gasped again, guessing
her at four hundred on the hoof, for Emma Fleet smiled as if reading his mind.

 
          
 
"Four hundred two and a half pounds, to
be exact," she said.

 
          
 
He found himself staring at his furniture.

           
 
"Oh, itni hold all right," said Mrs.
Fleet intuitively.

 
          
 
She sat down.

 
          
 
The couch yelped like a cur.

 
          
 
Dr. George cleared his throat. "Before
you make yourself comfortable," he said. "I feel I should say
immediately and honestly that we in the psychiatrical field have had little
success in inhibiting appetites. The whole problem of weight and food has so
far eluded our ability for coping. A strange admission, perhaps, but unless we
put our frailties forth, we might be in danger of fooling ourselves and thus
taking money under false pretenses. So, if you are here seeking help for your
figure, I must list myself among the nonplussed."

 
          
 
"Thank you for your honesty.
Doctor," said Emma Fleet. "However, I don't wish to lose. I'd prefer
your helping me gain another one hundred or two hundred pounds."

 
          
 
"Oh, no!" Dr. George exclaimed.

 
          
 
"Oh, yes. But my heart will not allow
what my deep dear soul would most gladly endure. My physical heart might fail
at what my loving heart and mind would ask of it."

 
          
 
She sighed. The couch sighed.

 
          
 
"Well, let me brief you. I'm married to
Willy Fleet. We work for the Dillbeck-Horsemann Traveling Shows. I'm known as
Lady Bountiful. And Willy . . ."

 
          
 
She swooned up out of the couch and glided or
rather escorted her shadow across the floor. She opened the door.

 
          
 
Beyond, in the waiting room, a cane in one
hand, a straw hat in the other, seated rigidly, staring at the wall, was a tiny
man with tiny feet and tiny hands and tiny bright-blue eyes in a tiny head. He
was, at the most, one would guess, three feet high, and probably weighed sixty
pounds in the rain. But there was a proud, gloomy, almost violent look of
genius blazing in that small but craggy face.

 
          
 
"That's Willy Fleet," said Emma
lovingly, and shut the door.

 
          
 
The couch, sat on, cried again.

 
          
 
Emma beamed at the psychiatrist, who was still
staring, in shock, at the door.

 
          
 
"No children, of course," he heard
himself say.

 
          
 
"No children." Her smile lingered.
"But that's not my problem, either. Willy, in a way, is my child. And I,
in a way, besides being his wife, am his mother. It all has to do with size, I
imagine, and we're happy with the way we've balanced things off."

 
          
 
"Well, if your problem isn't children, or
your size or his, or controlling weight, then what... ?"

 
          
 
Emma Fleet laughed lightly, tolerantly. It was
a nice laugh, like a girl's somehow caught in that great body and throat.

 
          
 
"Patience, Doctor. Mustn't we go back
down the road to where Willy and I first met?"

 
          
 
The doctor shrugged, laughed quietly himself
and relaxed, nodding. "You must."

 
          
 
"During high school," said Emma
Fleet. "I weighed one-eighty and tipped the scales at two-fifty when I was
twenty-one. Needless to say, I went on few summer excursions. Most of the time
I was left in drydock. I had many girl friends, however, who liked to be seen
with me. They weighed one-fifty, most of them, and I made them feel svelte. But
that's a long time ago. I don't worry over it any more. Willy changed all
that."

 
          
 
"Willy sounds hke a remarkable man,"
Dr. George found himself saying, against all the rules.

 
          
 
"Oh, he is, he is! He smoulders —with
ability, with talent as yet undiscovered, untapped!" she said, quickening
warmly. "God bless him, he leaped into my life like summer lightning!
Eight years ago I went with my girl friends to the visiting Labor Day carnival.
By the end of the evening, the girls had all been seized away from me by the
running boys who, rushing by, grabbed and took them off into the night. There I
was done with three Kewpie Dolls, a fake alligator handbag and nothing to do
but make the Guess Your Weight man nervous by looking at him every time I went
by and pretending like at any moment I might pay my money and dare him to
guess.

 
          
 
"But the Guess Your Weight man wasn't
nervous! After I had passed three times I saw him staring at me. With awe, yes,
with admiration! And who was this Guess Your Weight man? Willy Fleet, of
course. The fourth tune I passed he called to me and said I could get a prize
free if only I'd let him guess my weight. He was all feverish and excited. He
danced around. I'd never been made over so much in my life. I blushed. I felt
good. So I sat m the scales chair. I heard the pointer whizz up around and I
heard Willy whistle with honest delight

           
 
" Two hundred and eighty-nine pounds!' he
cried. 'Oh boy oh boy, you're lovely!'

 
          
 
" 'I'm what?' I said.

 
          
 
" 'You're the loveliest woman in the
whole world,' said Willy, looking me right in the eye.

 
          
 
"I blushed again. I laughed. We both
laughed. Then I must have cried, for the next thing, sitting there, I felt him
touch my elbow with concern. He was gazing into my face, faintly alarmed.

 
          
 
" 'I haven't said the wrong thing?' he
asked.

 
          
 
" 'No,' I sobbed, and then grew quiet.
'The right thing, only the right thing. It's the first time anyone ever . . .'

 
          
 
" 'What?' he said.

 
          
 
" 'Ever put up with my fat,' I said.

 
          
 
" 'You're not fat,' he said. 'You're
large, you're big, you're wonderful. Michelangelo would have loved you. Titian
would have loved you. Da Vinci would have loved you. They knew what they were
doing in those days. Size. Size is everything. I should know. Look at me. I
traveled with Singer's Midgets for six seasons, known as Jack Thimble. And oh
my God, dear lady, you're right out of the most glorious part of the
Renaissance. Bernini, who built those colonnades around the front of St.
Peter's and inside at the altar, would have lost his everlasting soul just to
know someone like you.*

 
          
 
" 'Don't!' I cried. 'I wasn't meant to
feel this happy. It'll hurt so much when you stop.'

 
          
 
" 'I won't stop, then,' he said. 'Miss .
. . ?'

 
          
 
" 'Emma Gertz.'

 
          
 
“ 'Emma,' he said, 'are you married?”

 
          
 
“ 'Are you kidding?' I said.

 
          
 
" 'Emma, do you like to travel?’”

 
          
 
" 'I've never traveled.'

 
          
 
" 'Emma,' he said, 'this old carnival's
going to be in your town one more week. Come down every night, every day, why
not? Talk to me, know me. At the end of the week, who can tell, maybe you'll
travel with me.'

 
          
 
" 'What are you suggesting?' I said, not
really angry or irritated or anything, but fascinated and intrigued that anyone
would offer anything to Moby Dick's daughter.

 
          
 
" 'I mean marriage!' Willy Fleet looked
at me, breathing hard, and I had the feeling that he was dressed in a
mountaineer's rig, alpine hat, climbing boots, spikes, and a rope slung over
his baby shoulder. And if I should ask him, 'Why are you saying this?’ he might
well answer, 'Because you're there:

 
          
 
"But I didn't ask, so he didn't answer.
We stood there in the night, at the center of the carnival, until at last I
started off down the midway, swaying. I'm drunk I' I cried. 'Oh, so very drunk,
and I've had nothing to drink.'

 
          
 
" 'Now that I've found you,' called Willy
Fleet after me, ‘you'll never escape me, remember!'

 
          
 
"Stunned and reeling, blinded by his
large man's words sung out in his soprano voice, I somehow blundered from the
carnival grounds and trekked home.

 
          
 
"The next week we were married.”

 
          
 
Emma Fleet paused and looked at her hands.

 
          
 
"Would it bother you if I told about the
honeymoon?" she asked shyly.

 
          
 
"No," said the doctor, then lowered
his voice, for he was responding all too quickly to the details. "Please
do go on."

 
          
 
"The honeymoon." Emma sounded her
vox humana. The response from all the chambers of her body vibrated the touch,
the room, the doctor, the dear bones within the doctor.

 
          
 
"The honeymoon ... was not usual."

 
          
 
The doctor's eyebrows lifted the faintest
touch. He looked from the woman to the door beyond which, in miniature, sat the
image of Edmund Hillary, he of Everest.

 
          
 
"You have never seen such a rush as Willy
spirited me off to his home, a lovely dollhouse, really, with one large
normal-sized room that was to be mine, or, rather, ours. There, very politely,
always the kind, the thoughtful, the quiet gentleman, he asked for my blouse,
which I gave him, my skirt, which I gave him. Right down the list, I handed him
the garments that he named, until at last . . . Can one blush from head to
foot? One can. One did. I stood like a veritable hearthfire stoked by a blush
of all-encompassing and ever-moving color that surged and resurged up and down
my body in tints of pink and rose and then pink again.