The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (35 page)

Then she started getting ready to kill him. She walked over to her sword boy and traded him for her longest, sharpest blade. The band was toodling away on some brassy song, and after a moment she glowered and thrust her hand up to stop it. She drew the bull toward and past her a few more times. On one pass, she lost her grip on her cape and her father shot up from his seat and the crew raced in to help her, but without even looking up she waved them away. Then the bull squared up and she squared up. His fat beige tongue was now hanging out, and a saddle blanket of blood was spreading from the cuts that the picadors and the banderilleros had made. Cristina’s eyes were fixed with a look of concentration and command, and her arm was outstretched, and she lined up the bull, her arm, and her sword. She and the bull had not seen each other before the fight—matadors and bulls never do, the way grooms avoid brides on their wedding day—but she now stared so hard at him and he at her that it looked as if each was examining the other through and through.

WHEN IT WAS OVER
, she got flowers, wineskins, berets, bags of olives, loafers, crutches, more wineskins, hundreds of things shoved at her to autograph, and both of the bull’s black ears. The bull got two recumbent laps of the ring, hauled around by a team of donkeys, and there was a butcher with a five o’clock shadow and black rubber hip boots waiting for him as soon as the team dragged him through the door. When the whole corrida was finally over, a leftover bull was let loose in the ring, and anyone with nerve could hop in with him and fool around. Most people passed on that and instead filed out of the stands, beaming and chatting and slapping backs and shaking hands. Just outside the front gate was a clean white Peugeot van with
CRISTINA SÁNCHEZ
stenciled in script on the front and the back, and in it were a driver and Cristina and Cristina’s father and her crew, still dressed in their sumptuous fight clothes, still damp and pink-faced from the fight. Cristina looked tremendously happy. The van couldn’t move, because the crowd had closed in around it, and everyone was waving and throwing kisses and pushing papers to autograph through the van’s windows, and for ten minutes or so Cristina signed stuff and waved at people and smiled genuinely and touched scores of outstretched hands. It was such a familiar picture of success and adoration and fame, but it had a scramble of contradictory details: Here was an ancient village with a brand-new bullring, and here was a modern new car filled with young and able people wearing the uniforms of a sport so unchanging and so ritualized that except for the fresh concrete and the new car and the flushed blond face of Cristina it all could have been taking place a hundred years in the future or a hundred years ago.

At last Cristina whispered “no más” to the driver, and he began inching the van down the driveway and then out toward the highway, and soon you could see only a speck in the shape of the van. The town of Nava then returned to normal. Cristina was going on to fight and fight and fight until the end of the European season, and then she planned to fly to South America and fight and then to Mexico and fight and then to return to Spain and start the season again. Once someone suggested that she try to get a Nike contract, and once she told me that she would love to bring bullfighting to America. But it seems that bullfighting is such a strange pursuit and the life bullfighters lead is so peculiar and the sight and the sound and the smell of the whole thing is so powerful and so deadly that it could only exist where strangeness is expected and treasured and long-standing and even a familiar part of every day.

It was now deep evening in Nava, and the road out had not a single streetlight. Outside town the road cut through huge unlit pastures, so everything in all directions was pure black. No one was on the road, so it felt even more spooky. Then a car pulled up behind me, and after a moment it sped up and passed. It was a medium-size station wagon driven by a harried-looking man, and there was a shaggy dappled gray pony standing in the back. The man had the interior lamp turned on, maybe for the pony, and it made a trail of light I could follow the whole way back to Madrid.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

Except for minor corrections, the stories in this collection are printed as they originally appeared in the following magazines:

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is literally and figuratively a collective effort, so there are many people to acknowledge. First of all,
The New Yorker, Outside, Esquire,
and
Rolling Stone
were kind enough to have originally published these stories and to have granted permission to reprint them. I am especially grateful to my editors: Robert Gottlieb, Chip McGrath, Tina Brown, David Remnick, and Lee Aitken at
The New Yorker;
Mark Bryant, Susan Casey, John Tayman, and Laura Hohnhold at
Outside;
Terry McDonell and Bill Tonelli at
Esquire;
and Bob Wallace and Jim Henke at
Rolling Stone
. I also tip my hat to the copy editors and fact checkers who worked long hours to make sure everything came out right.

A million thanks to Ann Godoff, my publisher, and a million more to Jon Karp, my absolutely great editor, who is the person who made this book come true. I am indebted to all the people at Random House, and especially Sheryl Stebbins, Alexa Cassanos, Robbin Schiff, and Dennis Ambrose. Richard Pine, agent deluxe, has given me years of wisdom and friendship and has my everlasting loyalty and respect. And speaking of wisdom and friendship, thank you Arthur and Edith Orlean, David and Stephanie Orlean, Debra Orlean and David Gross, Jeff Conti, Sally Sampson, Amy Godine, Celia McGee, Janet Ungless, Diana Silver, Jamie Kitman, Marjorie Galen, Gail Gregg, Lisa Klausner, Patty Marx, Alison Rose, Karen Brooks, Stephen and Rebecca Schiff, Sally Willcox, Ravi Mirchandani, and Tim McHenry. Also, Tshering Wangchuk, who took on the vexing task of actually gathering these stories together. An extra thanks to my boss, without whom I couldn’t have written any of this, and who has been my mentor and friend always.

My ultimate gratitude, of course, goes to the subjects of these pieces, who generously and unconditionally gave me so much of their time and their lives.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S
USAN
O
RLEAN
has been a staff writer for
The New Yorker
since 1992 and has also written for
Outside, Esquire, Vogue,
and
Rolling Stone.
She graduated from the University of Michigan and has worked as a reporter in Portland, Oregon, and Boston, Massachusetts. She now lives in New York City.

Copyright © 2001 by Susan Orlean

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All of the essays in this work have been previously published. For previous publication information, please see the Author’s Note.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Music Sales Corporation for permission to reprint the following: excerpt from “Things I Wonder” by Dorothy Mae Wiggin, copyright © 1967 by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) and Hi Varieties Music (ASCAP); excerpt from “Who Are Parents?” by Dorothy Mae Wiggin, copyright © 1968 by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) and Hi Varieties Music (ASCAP); excerpt from “Philosophy of the World” by Dorothy Mae Wiggin, copyright © 1969 by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) and Hi Varieties Music (ASCAP). All rights administered worldwide by Music Sales Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-0-375-50678-9

v3.0