Manolo

It was Timéo who told them, and he told them by not being able to.

The scooter came up the track at a quarter to eight on the Thursday, three days after the grey car, screaming as it always screamed, and the dogs ran out barking as they always ran, and Yassine, who was in the yard with a bucket in each hand, looked up and saw at once that something was wrong, because the boy had not taken his helmet off. He came off the scooter and let it fall on its side in the gravel with the engine still running and the back wheel turning in the air, and stood there in the yard with the helmet on and the visor up and his face inside it gone a colour Yassine had seen before, in other places, on other faces, and had hoped not to see out here.

Magali came out of the stables. Fredo came to the door of the house.

Timéo opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it. He shut it again, and opened it, and his hands came up and took hold of the helmet on either side as if to take it off, and stayed there, holding it, holding his own head, and then he said, in a voice like a much younger boy's, "Manolo," and then nothing else at all, and that was how they knew.

• • •

The gendarmes had closed the track to the school with a car across it and a length of tape between the car and a poplar. Yassine stopped the Peugeot on the verge behind Fredo's truck, a long way back, where he had stopped it the first evening, and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel.

He could see the gate from here. He could see the plane tree, and under it, at the edge of the shade, the white plastic chair.

It was empty. Somebody had moved it, or it had been moved: it stood at an angle to where it always stood, half turned towards the track, one of its legs sunk into the soft earth, as if whoever had been sitting in it had got up suddenly to see who was coming. The newspaper lay on the ground beside it. The pages had come apart and the morning wind off the marsh was turning them over, one at a time, slowly, the way you turn the pages of a book you are not really reading.

There were people in white suits by the arena. There were the two blue vans of the brigade and a third car, unmarked, and beside the unmarked car, his gloves in one hand, talking to a uniformed gendarme, a man Yassine knew.

The captain from Vauvert. The one from the canal. The one who had shaken his hand once, briefly, as if checking it for something, and said, You're a long way from home.

He did not move. He did not get out of the car. He sat with his hands on the wheel and watched the captain through the windscreen at a distance of perhaps eighty metres and felt the blood go out of his face and down into somewhere under his ribs, and the part of him that kept the notebook said, quite calmly, If he sees you, it's over. If he sees you and says one word, if he only lifts his hand, it's over, and not only for you.

Fredo had got out of the truck. Magali had got out. Gaëtan, who had come in his own car, a battered pickup, was standing at the tape with his hands in his pockets and his head down. Timéo was still sitting in the cab of Fredo's truck with the door open, his helmet in his lap now, staring at nothing.

The captain from Vauvert turned his head. He looked along the track at the little crowd gathered at the tape, the manadier and his family, two or three of the boys from the school in their white trousers who had come at seven for training and found what they had found, an old woman from one of the houses on the road with her hand over her mouth. His eyes went over them all, one by one, in the way of a man who has done this a hundred times, and then they lifted past the tape and went along the verge, past Fredo's truck, to the grey Peugeot with the Lyon plates.

Yassine reached down beside his seat as if looking for something on the floor, and stayed there, bent over, his face against his knee, his heart going so hard he could feel it in his teeth, and counted. At thirty he lifted his head an inch. The captain had turned back to the uniformed man. He was pointing at something by the arena.

Yassine sat up slowly. He did not get out of the car again until the captain had gone into the arena and out of sight, and when he did get out he kept Fredo's truck between himself and the gate, and stood at the back of the little crowd with his hat pulled down, and that was how he spent the morning Manolo Segura died: hiding from the only other policeman there.

• • •

Nobody told them anything, and everybody knew.

The boys from the school had found him. One of them, a lanky kid of sixteen with a bad complexion and his white shirt buttoned wrong, kept telling it to anyone who stood near him, over and over, the same words in the same order, as if saying it enough times would wear it down to something he could hold. He had come at seven. The gate had been open. The old man was in his chair. He had thought he was asleep. He had called out to him, Manolo, ho, wake up, you'll get sunstroke, the way they always did, and gone over, and put a hand on his shoulder. Then he stopped telling it. He stopped at the same place every time and started again from the beginning.

Shot. That was what the old woman from the house on the road said, low, to Magali. She had heard it in the night and thought it was a car. Twice. Then a car, a real one, going away fast towards the road.

Shot, in his chair, under his plane tree, with his newspaper on his knee, at the gate of his own school, at night, at seventy-two.

Fredo stood at the tape the whole morning and said nothing. He did not ask the gendarmes anything. He did not go up to the captain. He stood there with his big hands hanging at his sides the way they had hung in the doorway of the mas when the grey car came, and his face was the face of a man watching a building burn that he had built himself, and once, only once, when they brought the stretcher out of the arena and across the yard to the van, with the sheet over it and the shape under the sheet so much smaller than the man had been, Yassine saw his lips move. He did not hear what he said. He did not need to. It was the same two words Manolo had said on the doorstep three weeks before, the words that meant if he is wrong about you, it is on me.

I answer.

Yassine looked away. He looked at the newspaper, which had blown against the foot of the gate and stuck there, flattened by the wind. He looked at the plane tree. He looked at anything but the old man's face, and he did not let himself think the thing that was standing just behind him in the bright morning waiting for him to turn round. He did not let himself think it all that day, or that night, or the next, and he got quite good at it.

• • •

They buried him on the Monday from the church in Saint-Laurent.

Yassine had not known there were so many of them. He had known it, perhaps, the way you know a fact: that the bull world was small and old and close, that everyone in it knew everyone, that Manolo Segura had been training boys to run for fifty years. He had not known what it would look like when all of them came at once. They came from every village between the Rhône and the Vidourle. They came from Nîmes and Lunel and Arles and Saintes-Maries and places Yassine had never heard of, in pickups and old cars and vans with the names of manades on the side, and they filled the church and the square outside the church and the street beyond the square, and they stood in the heat in their good clothes, men in suits that had been bought for weddings twenty years ago and let out since, women in black with fans, and very old men in the black hats and velvet jackets of the gardians, which Yassine had seen only in photographs and on the posters in the tourist shops at Saintes-Maries and which on these men did not look like costume at all.

And the boys. Manolo's boys. Not only the ones from the school now, the lanky sixteen-year-old and the others, but the ones from before, from every year of the fifty: men of thirty and forty and sixty, some of them famous, most of them not, every one of them in white. White trousers and white shirts, the costume of the ring, ironed for the morning, standing in a long double line on the church steps with their hands clasped in front of them and their faces turned to the street, waiting for the hearse.

Yassine stood among them. Nobody had told him to. A man of fifty with a raseteur's broken nose had looked at him as he came into the square, and looked at his white shirt, which he had bought on Saturday in Vauvert, and nodded once, and moved up a place on the step to make room, and Yassine had gone and stood in it.

The hearse came up the street at walking pace, and in front of it, two by two, the gardians.

Twenty of them. Thirty. On grey horses with their manes combed and their tails tied up, and the riders in black hats and black velvet and the tridents held upright beside the stirrup like lances, the three iron points shining. Gaëtan was among them on Tambour. Magali was among them on her mare. They rode up the street between the crowds with the slow clatter of the hooves on the stones the only sound, and the horses, who had done this before or had been told about it, walked with their heads low and their ears soft, and at the steps of the church they stopped and turned their horses in a single movement to face the door, and lowered the tridents, all of them together, until the points touched the ground.

The men in white on the steps did not move. Yassine did not move. He stood with his hands clasped in front of him and his face turned to the street like the others, and felt the heat on the back of his neck and the sweat running down his spine under the new white shirt, and kept his face very still, and found that keeping his face still, which he had done for a living for ten years, which he had done in Nîmes for eleven days with men who would have killed him, was the hardest thing he had ever done.

• • •

The cemetery was outside the town on the road towards the marsh, a walled square of cypress and white gravel and marble with a view across the flat land to the edge of the world. They carried him there on their shoulders, the old boys taking it in turns, six at a time, the coffin passing from shoulder to shoulder down the long white road without ever once being set down, and the gardians rode behind.

At the graveside the priest said what priests say. Yassine did not hear it. He stood at the back of the crowd among the white shirts and looked at the hole in the ground, which was very neat, with a green cloth laid round its edges as if to hide from the dead what it was they were going into.

The crochet was in his pocket.

He had not decided to bring it. He had not decided anything since Thursday. He had found it in his hand that morning when he dressed, as he had found it in his hand the morning of the fête, and he had put it in his pocket because there was nowhere else to put it. He could feel it now against his thigh through the cheap cotton of the trousers, the four small teeth of the claw.

A crochet goes to whoever runs next. You'll know.

He did not know. He stood at the grave and did not know anything at all except that the old man had been wrong about him, and had answered for him anyway, and was dead.

They began to lower the coffin. The ropes creaked. Someone in the crowd, an old woman, began to cry in a high thin wail that was not quite a sound, more like a wind starting up somewhere far off, and others took it up, softly, under their breath, and among the men in white a few of the old boys had begun to weep openly, without shame, their faces running and their hands still clasped in front of them. Yassine did not weep. He found that he could not. Something in him had been holding its breath since Thursday morning in the yard, since Timéo had stood there in his helmet holding his own head and not been able to say it, and the something would not let go.

Then there was a hand in his.

He did not look down at first. He felt it: a small hand, rough, hard across the palm and scored on the back with old scratches, the fingers closing round his own and holding them. He knew whose it was without looking. He knew it the way he had known the bulls were bulls before he could see them.

He looked down. Then he looked sideways.

Magali was standing beside him. He did not know when she had come. She was still in her black velvet from the procession, her hair tied back, her hat in her other hand, and she was not looking at him. She was looking at the grave. Her face was quite dry and quite still and entirely white under the sunburn, and her jaw was set, and only her hand, the one in his, was shaking, very slightly, a fine continuous tremor that he could feel all the way up his arm.

He tightened his fingers. She tightened hers.

The coffin went down. The ropes came up. The priest threw the first earth, and then Fredo, and then Gaëtan, and then the old boys one by one, each of them stepping forward to the edge of the green cloth and stooping and throwing a handful and stepping back. The crowd began, very slowly, to move. People turned away from the grave and began to walk back along the white gravel towards the gate, in twos and threes, talking now in low voices, lighting cigarettes, the women opening their fans again, the gardians gathering their horses.

Magali did not move. Yassine did not move. They stood together at the back of the thinning crowd with the sun on them and the cypresses throwing their long narrow shadows across the graves, and the earth going down into the hole in soft dull handfuls, and her hand in his, and it went on being in his long after the last of the old boys had thrown his earth and turned away, long after there was any reason for it to be there, and she did not let go.