The Tri

On Saturday there was a course at Lunel, and the bulls had to be sorted before the heat.

Yassine had been at the mas two days by then and had stopped counting how often Mistrau put him down, partly because the number had begun to fall and partly because Timéo counted for him, loudly, at every meal. His hip had gone from red to purple to a kind of yellow that Magali said made him look like a melon. His hands had blistered, burst, and begun, very slightly, to harden. He slept at night the way he had not slept since he was a boy, all at once and all the way down, and woke at five without the broom.

He had not heard the trucks come back. They had been in the yard on Friday morning when he came down, side by side under the plane tree as if they had never moved, and nobody had mentioned them, and he had not asked.

The pens behind the mas were an old system of wooden rails and gates and narrow passages, patched with iron where the wood had failed, laid out according to a logic that had made sense to someone's grandfather and had never been revised. By half past five Fredo was standing on the rail of the central pen with a cigarette in his mouth and his trident across his shoulders like a yoke, watching the herd come in. Magali and Timéo brought them in from the near pasture at a slow walk, riding behind and to either side, and the black cattle came through the outer gate in a single shouldering mass with their heads low and the dust going up off them gold in the first sun.

"Sit on the rail," Fredo told Yassine. "Watch. Don't help."

He sat on the rail and watched.

They had done this, he understood, a thousand times. The gate into the central pen opened and closed like a mouth. The cattle went through it in twos and threes, and as each animal came through, Fredo looked at it once and said a word, and Magali or Timéo, mounted, moved their horses half a length this way or that, and the animal went either left, into the passage that led to the loading ramp, or right, back out to the pasture. There was no shouting. The tridents moved in small precise touches, a tap on the shoulder, a press on the flank, the three iron points never quite breaking the hide. The horses did most of it. They leaned into the cattle and away from them with their ears pricked and their weight shifting under their riders, and they seemed to know the word Fredo would say before he said it.

"That one," Fredo said. "And that one. Not him. Him."

Yassine watched the bulls go left. Five of them, six. Black, narrow-flanked, quick on their feet, with the high lyre horns that turned up and out from the skull like the arms of a man raised in surprise. They were not large. People who had never seen them always expected them to be large. They were the size of a big pony, a quarter the weight of a Spanish fighting bull, built for the turn and the burst rather than the charge, and every line of them was attention.

And then the seventh came through the gate, and the whole pen changed.

He was older than the others; you saw it in the way he moved, not slower but more economical, wasting nothing. His coat had a dull rust in it along the spine where the sun had worked on it for years. His horns were scarred, the left one notched near the tip where some barrier or some other horn had taken a bite out of it long ago. He came through the gate and stopped, and did not look at the horses or the tridents or the men. He looked at the rail, at Yassine sitting on it, with a dark eye that had nothing in it that Yassine could name, and Yassine felt the hair rise on his arms.

"Fangas," said Fredo, and his voice had changed too. "Left."

Nobody moved a horse. Nobody touched him with a trident. The bull stood a moment longer, considering the rail, and then turned of his own accord and walked into the passage towards the ramp as if he had always meant to.

"That's Fangas de Plantier," said a voice behind Yassine. "And he's decided he doesn't like you. Don't take it personally. He doesn't like anybody."

• • •

He had not heard the horse come up. That was the first thing he would remember about Gaëtan Plantier afterwards, when he came to go back over it: that a man on a grey horse had ridden up across the hard dry yard behind him close enough to speak in a normal voice, and Yassine, who was trained to notice exactly this, had not noticed at all.

He turned on the rail.

Gaëtan was tall, taller than his father, and long in the bone, and he sat his horse the way the rider at the canal had sat his, so far down into it that horse and man seemed to have been cast in a single piece. He had his father's ears and his sister's sun-creased eyes and a mouth that looked as though it was about to laugh at something and had been about to laugh at something for thirty years. He was the young man in the magazine photograph, the one looking off the edge of the frame. He wore a black shirt open at the throat, a hat pushed back, and no expression of tiredness at all, though Yassine was fairly sure he had not been to bed.

"Yassine," he said, as if confirming it. "Manolo's boy."

"Not a boy."

"Everybody's Manolo's boy. I was Manolo's boy for two seasons until he told me I had the feet of a postman." Gaëtan leaned down from the saddle and held out his hand, and Yassine shook it, and the hand was hard and warm and held his a fraction longer than it needed to, the way some men do when they are taking a reading. "He says you were the real thing. He says you ran at the Biòu d'Or bulls when you were eighteen and didn't even look scared."

"I was scared."

"Of course you were. That's what I said to him. Nobody who isn't scared is any good." He straightened in the saddle. His horse, a big quiet grey with a dark mane, blew out through its nose and shifted its weight. "Tambour," Gaëtan said, laying a hand on the horse's neck. "My better half. Don't tell my sister."

"I heard," said Magali from inside the pen.

"She hears everything. It's a curse." He grinned down at Yassine. "So. They've given you Mistrau."

"They've given me Mistrau."

"And you're still alive. That's something." He looked past Yassine into the pen, where Fangas had gone up the ramp into the waiting truck and was standing in the dimness of its box with his head turned towards the yard, watching them all. Something passed over Gaëtan's face then, too quick to read: not the laugh, something under it, older and heavier. "He's eleven," he said. "Fangas. Eleven this spring. Two more seasons, maybe three if his legs hold. And then what?"

"Then he retires," Yassine said. "They retire them. To the field."

"They do." Gaëtan was still looking at the truck. "You know what he earns? A good afternoon, a big arena, him at the top of the bill? He earns more in one afternoon than this whole place earns in a month of everything else. He's the only one that does. The rest of them—" He made a small gesture with his free hand that took in the pen, the cattle, the sagging roof of the mas, the whole flat shining distance of the land. "The rest of them eat."

"Gaëtan," said Fredo from the rail.

"I'm only saying."

"Say it later."

Gaëtan touched the brim of his hat to his father, not quite mockingly, and turned Tambour with his knees, and rode down the outside of the pen to take his place at the gate, and the sorting went on.

• • •

In the afternoon they drove the bulls to Lunel.

Fredo drove the truck. Magali went with him. Gaëtan stayed behind, saying he would come later, and went into the house and closed the door of his room, and the mas was silent. Timéo went home to Vauvert on his scooter to change into a clean shirt for the arena, because he did not go anywhere near an arena, he said, in anything but a clean shirt.

Yassine had been told to stay and mend the rails of the far passage, where Fangas had leaned his weight that morning and split a board. He did it. Then, because there was nobody to tell him to do something else, he went into the kitchen for water, and stood for a moment in the cool dimness with the shutters closed against the glare, drinking from a glass, and looked at the table.

The table was the one place in the house where paper accumulated. Everything else had been put away by someone, probably Magali, with a fierceness that left no surface unclaimed; but the kitchen table at the end nearest the window had become, over years perhaps, the place where the outside world was allowed to land. A heap of it. Feed bills in blue envelopes. A vet's invoice with a red stamp across one corner. A circular from the bull breeders' federation about the vaccination campaign, its second page covered in pencil arithmetic in a square, careful hand that he thought was probably Magali's, columns of figures that added up and were subtracted and added up again and ended, at the bottom, in a number circled twice.

He did not touch any of it. He did not need to. On top of the heap, held down by a jar of honey, was a letter from an insurance company, the logo printed in a cheerful blue, and he could read the first paragraph upside down from where he stood. It thanked the Manade Plantier for its many years of fidelity. It regretted to inform them that, following a review of claims in the region and the tragic events of the past summer, the company would no longer be in a position to offer cover for the following activities, effective the thirty-first of December: and there was a list, short and final, abrivado, bandido, encierro, the words in their neat sans serif looking like the names of the dead.

Under it, the corner of another envelope. The bank. He could see the name. He could not see the rest.

He drank his water and put the glass in the sink and went out again into the heat, and the shame he felt was so unexpected and so precise that he stood in the yard for a moment not knowing what to do with it. It was the same shame he would have felt reading his mother's letters. He had read worse things than this in the course of his work. He had read dead men's diaries and the text messages of children. He told himself so, and went back to the far passage, and found another board that needed mending, and mended that too.

• • •

Gaëtan came out at six, when the light had begun to soften. He had showered and changed into a clean white shirt and his hair was wet, and he stood on the step of the mas with a bottle of beer in each hand and looked across the yard to where Yassine was putting the tools back in the shed.

"They'll be back by nine," he said. "Fangas took two cocardes and they gave him the music. My father will be unbearable. Want to ride?"

"Now?"

"The light's good now. In an hour it'll be better." He came across the yard and gave Yassine one of the bottles. "You've been mending fences all afternoon like a convict. Come and see the land."

Yassine looked at the beer, and then at the stables, where Mistrau was standing in his stall with his ears back as if he had heard every word.

"Not that one," Gaëtan said, following his look. "Not tonight. Take Grisette, the old mare. She's a sofa. I want to see how you sit when you're not fighting."

They rode out along the dike as the sun went down. The mare was everything Gaëtan had said, broad and slow and kind, and after the last two days on Mistrau it was like being let out of a fist. The land opened in front of them, flat to the end of the world, the pastures going gold and the water in the ditches turning to copper, and the egrets coming in to roost in a line of tamarisks like scraps of paper caught on a fence. A long way off, the herd moved at the edge of the marsh, black against the brightness. The air smelled of salt and hot grass and, as they went further, of something else, cleaner and colder, that was the sea.

Gaëtan did not talk much. He rode a little ahead, glancing back now and then, and once he pointed with his chin at a pair of bulls fighting idly at the edge of a reedbed, horns locked, shoving, more out of boredom than anger. Once he stopped Tambour on a rise in the dike and sat looking south for a long time at nothing Yassine could see. When they came to a place where the dike widened into a sandy track between two lagoons, he looked back over his shoulder with the laugh already on his face and said, "Can she still canter?" and did not wait for an answer.

The mare could still canter. Yassine had forgotten what it was like, or had made himself forget: the gathering of the horse under him, the long rocking push of it, the wind of their own going in his face and the ground blurring and the sky not moving at all. He sat it. He let his weight go down and back and his hands go soft and his hips follow, and the mare lengthened under him as if grateful, and for perhaps a minute there was nothing in him but the movement and the light.

Then he caught himself. He did not decide to. Some part of him that had been sitting very upright in the back of his mind for twelve years, in offices and cars and the flat in Nîmes, reached forward and took hold of the reins, and he felt his shoulders come up and his back stiffen and his hands close, and the mare felt it too, and broke back to a trot, and then a walk, puzzled, blowing.

Gaëtan had stopped ahead of him on the track. He had turned Tambour round to watch them come.

"You ride," he said, when Yassine came up level with him, and he said it slowly, as if trying the words for size, "like someone who stopped."