The Horse Nobody Wants

The room over the tack smelled of leather and mice and the heat of yesterday, which had soaked into the roof tiles and was coming out of them now, slowly, like breath. There was a bed with a horsehair mattress, a chair, a hook on the back of the door, a window the size of a newspaper with a mosquito net nailed over it that had been mended so many times with thread and tape that it looked like a map of somewhere. Through it, at five in the morning, the sky was the colour of ash, and the frogs had stopped, and something was hitting the floor under his feet.

He lay listening to it. Three blows, a pause, three more. A broom handle, he decided, against the ceiling of the tack room. Patient. Prepared to go on all day.

"I'm up," he said to the floor.

The blows stopped. A woman's voice said, not loudly, "No, you're not," and a door banged, and boots crossed the yard.

• • •

Magali Plantier was waiting for him by the water trough with her arms folded. She was smaller than he had imagined from the way Manolo had spoken of her, and older than she looked from a distance, because the sun had done to her what it did to everyone out here, burned the skin at the corners of the eyes into fine white creases that showed when she squinted, which was always. Her hair was pulled back so tightly it looked painted on. She wore a man's shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder and jeans gone white at the knees, and her forearms were scored all over with old scratches, as if she had spent her life reaching into thorn bushes for things.

She looked at his trainers.

"You'll want boots," she said.

"I've got boots in the car."

"Then why are you wearing those?"

He did not have an answer to that, so he went and changed, and when he came back she had already begun. She did not wait for him and she did not explain. She handed him a fork and pointed with her chin at the stables, a long low building of breeze block and corrugated iron with eight stalls along one side, and went into the first stall herself and started to work, and after a moment he understood that the lesson was to watch her and do the same.

He did the same. It was not difficult. It was only relentless, in the particular way that work with animals is relentless, because the animals do not care that you did it yesterday. The light came up while they worked, grey and then gold and then white, and the heat came with it, and the flies, and the smell of the dung warming. His hands, which had been soft for twelve years without his noticing, began to complain within the first half-hour, and he let them.

Halfway down the row, she spoke again.

"Manolo says you used to run."

"Years ago."

"He says you were good."

"He says that about everybody."

"No," she said, "he doesn't," and threw a forkful of straw into the barrow with a flick of the wrists that sent it exactly where she wanted it and not a stalk further. "He says most of them were idiots."

• • •

At half past six a scooter came up the track from the road with its engine screaming like a wasp in a bottle, and a boy got off it and pulled off his helmet and shook out a quantity of black hair that seemed to have been waiting inside the helmet to escape.

"That's Timéo," Magali said, without looking round. "Don't encourage him."

Timéo Navarro was seventeen and moved as if he had been assembled that morning from parts that did not yet quite fit. He was all elbows and knees and an enormous grin, and within ten minutes of arriving he had told Yassine his age, his mother's name, the name of the café in Vauvert where his mother worked, the names of the four best raseteurs of the season and what was wrong with each of them, and that he, Timéo, was going to be a raseteur himself next year, or the year after, as soon as he had filled out, which his mother said would be any day now.

He asked nothing about Yassine at all. Yassine found this restful.

"Gaëtan says I've got the legs," Timéo said. He was leaning on his fork in the doorway of a stall, doing no work whatsoever. "Gaëtan says you can't teach the legs. You can teach the hook, you can teach the line, but the legs you've got or you haven't."

"Gaëtan's right."

"Gaëtan's always right." The boy said it with total seriousness, as though stating a law of physics. "Gaëtan rode Tambour into the sea last winter, in a storm, to bring back a bull calf that had gone through the fence on the beach. In February. The water was this high." He held his hand flat at the level of his own chest. "Everybody said he'd drown. He didn't even get a cold."

"Where is he?"

"Who?"

"Gaëtan."

Timéo looked at him with something like pity. "Asleep," he said. "Or out. He's never here in the day. He works nights."

"Doing what?"

"Timéo," said Magali from three stalls away, without raising her voice, "if you want to tell stories, go and tell them to the horses in the far field. They've got nothing to do either."

The boy grinned, unrepentant, and went.

• • •

At eight she took him to the horses.

They kept the working horses in a paddock behind the stables: a dozen of them, all grey, all the same breed and yet as different from each other as faces, standing nose to tail in the shade of a single row of poplars, swishing at the flies. Magali leaned on the gate and looked at them for a while, and Yassine leaned beside her and looked too, and understood that he was being given time to choose, and that whatever he chose would be the wrong answer.

"Which one's mine?" he said finally.

"Which one do you want?"

"I want the one that won't kill me."

"They won't kill you," she said. "They'll only try." She lifted the rope halter from the gatepost and went in among them, and they parted for her the way water parts round a stone, unhurried, a few of them lifting their heads to look at her and then dropping them again. She walked past the nearest, a broad quiet mare who reached out to lip at her shirt, and past a pair of geldings who stood shoulder to shoulder like old men at a bar, and stopped at the far end of the row, where one horse stood a little apart from the others with its tail to the poplars and its ears flat back.

He was big for a Camargue horse, and pale, almost white, with a darker mane and a mottled muzzle, and he had a way of standing with his weight shifted onto his hindquarters, as if always about to leave. His eye, when he turned his head to look at Magali, showed a rim of white all the way round.

"Mistrau," she said. "Like the wind."

"Why's he called that?"

"Because nobody can stop him and nobody wants him." She slipped the halter on in one movement before the horse could decide to object. "Seven years old. Cold in the back. Bites if you let him, kicks if you don't watch, and when he's had enough of you he puts you on the ground and goes home without you. Papa wanted to sell him last year. Nobody would buy." She led him out of the row towards the gate, and the horse came, but he came the way a prisoner comes, every line of him protesting. "Gaëtan won't ride him. Timéo's been on the ground off him six times since Easter."

"So you're giving him to me."

"You're the new one." She held out the rope. "The new one gets Mistrau. It's a tradition."

"Since when?"

"Since now."

• • •

The first time, he lasted perhaps four seconds.

The gardian saddle had come back to him, at least: the deep seat and the high wooden cantle that held you in at the back, the broad stirrups like little cages for the feet, the way you sat down into it rather than on it. He had mounted carefully, with Magali at the horse's head, and settled, and gathered the reins, and thought, absurdly, that it was going to be all right. Then Magali let go and stepped back, and Mistrau bunched himself like a fist and went straight up in the air with all four feet off the ground and came down stiff-legged, and Yassine went on going up for a little while after the horse had stopped, and then came down too, sideways, onto the hard dry earth of the yard.

The sky was very blue above him. Timéo's face appeared in it, upside down, delighted.

"Seven," Timéo said. "That's seven."

"That's him," said Magali's voice. "Not you. You're one."

He got up. His hip had taken most of it and was letting him know. Mistrau stood in the middle of the yard with his reins trailing and his ears back, looking at him with that white-rimmed eye, and Yassine had the strong and unprofessional sense that the horse was enjoying himself.

He walked over. He did not hurry. He picked up the reins and stood at the horse's shoulder and waited until the ears came forward, which took a long time, and then he got back on.

The second time, he lasted until the gate. The third time he lasted through the gate and out onto the track and halfway to the first ditch, where Mistrau stopped dead, dropped a shoulder, and put him in the reeds. The fourth time, he did not fall off at all, though there was a moment, on the dike above the near pasture, when the horse shied at a heron and spun and Yassine's whole body did something he had not told it to do, a sinking and a gripping and a turning of the hips into the turn, and he was still in the saddle afterwards and could not have said how.

He looked round. Magali was sitting on the broad quiet mare twenty metres behind him, watching. She did not say anything. She turned the mare and rode on ahead of him along the dike towards the herd, and he followed, and Mistrau followed her mare, and after a while Yassine realised that this had been the plan all along.

• • •

The herd was in the far pasture, two kilometres from the mas across land that was half water: black bulls and black cows and their calves, perhaps sixty head, grazing knee-deep in a marsh of glasswort and rush with egrets standing on their backs. The heat by ten was already immense, a white weight that pressed down on the land and made it shimmer at the edges, so that the far tamarisks seemed to float. The mosquitoes found him. They found the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck and the soft skin under his eyes, and he slapped at them until Magali told him without turning round to stop, it only made them angry, and he stopped, and they went on biting him anyway.

They counted the cattle. They checked the troughs and the fences. She showed him a place where the wire was down and they mended it, and a calf with a cut leg, which she looked at and decided to leave. She spoke perhaps twenty words in two hours. He did not mind. He found that he liked her silence, that it was not empty but busy, full of her looking at things, and he found himself trying to look at things in the same way, and failing, and trying again.

At noon they rode back with the sun directly overhead and no shadows anywhere, and ate bread and tomatoes and cold sausage in the kitchen with the shutters closed, and then Magali went to her room and Fredo went to his, and the whole mas lay down and died until four, as everything out here did in the middle of the day, the dogs under the trucks, the horses under the poplars, even the flies.

Yassine lay on the horsehair mattress in the room over the tack with the heat coming out of the roof and his hip throbbing and every muscle in his thighs and back on fire, and did not sleep. He thought about the boy in the canal. He thought, for some reason, about his mother's washing on the balcony. He thought about the phone in the bottom of his bag, the cheap one with the dog in it, and about the fact that it was Thursday and that on Sunday he would have to write to Granier, and that he had nothing to tell him yet except that a horse called Mistrau had put him on the ground three times.

• • •

At dinner Fredo spoke for the first time that day.

They ate at the long table in the kitchen, the three of them and Timéo, who had stayed, and who seemed to stay most nights. A stew of bull meat cooked so long in red wine that it fell apart at the touch of the spoon, with rice, and bread, and a bottle of wine with no label. The television on the dresser showed the weather with the sound down. The windows were open now on the dark and the frogs and the moths battering at the lamp.

Fredo watched Yassine's hands while he ate. Yassine had wrapped the worst of the blisters in tape, but the tape had come loose, and his fingers were stiff on the spoon.

"How many times?" Fredo said.

"Three."

"Four," said Timéo. "The reeds counts."

"The reeds counts," Magali agreed.

Fredo grunted. He tore a piece of bread in half and wiped his plate with it in one long stroke. "He'll put you down again tomorrow," he said.

"Probably."

"And the day after."

"Probably."

The old man nodded, as if this confirmed something, and went on eating, and said nothing else for the rest of the meal, and when he got up he put his hand for a moment on the back of Yassine's chair as he passed, heavily, the way you might lean on a gate.

"Where's Gaëtan?" Yassine asked, when Fredo had gone out to smoke.

Magali looked at him across the table, a long level look.

"Working," she said.

• • •

He woke in the dark, not knowing why.

The heat had not lifted. The net over the window hung motionless. The frogs had gone quiet, the way they did when something moved near the water. Then he heard it again: an engine turning over in the yard below, a big diesel, coughing and catching and settling into a low thudding idle. Then a second.

He got up and went to the window. Through the mended net the yard was all black and grey, the plane tree a darker mass against the dark, the cypresses invisible. But he could make out the shapes of the two trucks where they had stood all day, side by side, and he could see that their lights were off. Their engines were running and their lights were off. A figure crossed between them, tall, quick, a cigarette coal swinging at the end of an arm, and climbed into the cab of the first. A door slammed softly, the way you slam a door when you do not want to wake a house.

The phone was in the bottom of his bag. He did not reach for it. He looked at the luminous face of his watch instead, because that was something he could do without moving from the window, and it said four minutes past three, and below him, still without lights, the first truck began to roll forward out of the yard onto the track, slow, heavy, its tyres crunching on the gravel, and then the second behind it, and he stood there in the dark of the room over the tack until he could no longer hear them, and then for some time after that.