The Fête

The village had hung its flags across the main street in the middle of July and left them there to fade. Red and yellow, the Occitan colours, strung from balcony to balcony on lengths of wire, and under them, for four days and four nights, the whole place turned itself inside out: the bars carried their tables into the road, the bakery sold fougasse by the metre, a stage went up in the square for a band that played covers of songs that had been old when Yassine was a boy, and every afternoon at five, in the little arena at the end of the plane-tree avenue, the bulls.

The Plantier trucks went in on the Saturday with six emboulés in the back. They were young bulls, three and four years old, not yet good enough for a real course and perhaps never going to be, and for the fête their horns had been capped with leather balls the size of fists, so that the boys of the village could go into the ring with them and be knocked down and get up again without anyone needing to call the doctor. It was a game. Everyone said it was a game. Yassine had seen boys come out of that game with broken collarbones and once, at seventeen, with a punctured lung, and he had seen the same boys back in the ring the following summer.

"You'll go in," Timéo said, at the trucks.

"I won't."

"You will. Gaëtan says you will."

"Gaëtan doesn't decide what I do."

Timéo looked at him with the same pity he had shown at the stables, the pity of someone who knows how the world is arranged explaining it to someone who does not. "Gaëtan decides what everybody does," he said. "He just lets you think you thought of it."

• • •

The arena was full by half past four.

It was a village arena, which meant concrete steps on three sides and a grandstand of iron and planks on the fourth, under a roof of corrugated plastic gone yellow with age, and it held perhaps eight hundred people if they sat close, which they did. Families with cool boxes. Old men in caps who had been coming to this arena on this day for sixty years and sat in the same places, at the top of the steps where the breeze came over, and did not move for anyone. Girls in sundresses with their phones held up. Boys in white jeans and white shirts, the costume of the ring, who stood in clumps at the barrier and pretended not to be nervous. The smell of it was sun cream and cigarettes and fried onions from the stall behind the grandstand and, under everything, the dust of the ring itself, raked smooth, the colour of biscuit, waiting.

Yassine sat with the Plantiers in the front row of the grandstand, above the toril. Fredo at one end, his hat on his knee, saying nothing. Magali beside him, her arms folded, her eyes going over the crowd and the ring and the gates as if counting them. Gaëtan at the barrier below them, leaning on it with his elbows, talking to everyone who passed, laughing, shaking hands, kissing the cheeks of old women and the cheeks of their granddaughters, as if he were the one the fête was for.

Manolo had come too. He sat on the steps a little to their left with the other old men, in a clean shirt buttoned to the collar, and when Yassine looked across at him he did not wave or nod but simply looked back, steadily, the way he had looked at him over the newspaper under the plane tree.

The crochet was in the pocket of Yassine's jeans. He had not decided to bring it. He had found it in his hand that morning when he dressed, the strap curled round his fingers, and had put it in his pocket because there was nowhere else to put it, and had not taken it out since. He could feel it now against his thigh, the four small teeth of the claw through the denim.

• • •

The real course came first, for an hour, with licensed raseteurs from Nîmes and Lunel and bulls from another manade, and Yassine watched it with the part of him that was still a policeman, noticing who was where, who talked to whom, whether anyone looked twice at the Plantiers. Nobody did. Or rather, everyone did, but in the way that people look at the family whose bulls are on the poster, with a nod, a lifted hand, a word to Fredo in passing. A man in a pale linen jacket stopped to speak to Gaëtan at the barrier for a few minutes and then moved on, and Yassine noted him and could not have said why, except that his jacket was too good for the arena and his shoes had never been in a field.

Then the music changed, and the loudspeaker crackled, and a voice announced, with the particular weariness of a man who had announced it every year for thirty years, that the course was over and the young people of the village were invited into the ring for the emboulés of the Manade Plantier, and would they please remember that the management accepted no responsibility for anything at all.

The crowd laughed. The boys in white came over the barrier in a rush.

The first emboulé came out of the toril like something fired from a gun. It was a black three-year-old with a white splash on its belly, and it stopped dead in the middle of the ring with the dust going up round it and looked at the forty boys scattered across the sand, and the boys looked back, and for a moment nobody moved. Then one of them ran, and the bull went for him, and he went over the barrier with a yell, and the crowd roared, and the game began.

Yassine watched it. He watched the way the boys ran, mostly wrong, mostly straight at the bull or straight away from it, all fear and no line. He watched the bull learn them. He watched Timéo, who had gone over the barrier with the rest of them in his clean white shirt, run three times in a curve that was almost right and was saved each time not by his line but by his legs, which were exactly as fast as Gaëtan had said they were. He felt something tighten and tighten in his chest and could not have said whether it was fear for the boy or something else.

On the fourth emboulé, the café put up a cocarde.

That was the tradition, Gaëtan had told him on the drive in: on the last bulls of the afternoon the bars of the village each put a prize on a ribbon between the capped horns, a few banknotes folded into a red rosette, and whoever took it home bought drinks for the bar that night. The loudspeaker announced it. Fifty euros, from the Café du Commerce. The crowd made the noise that crowds make for money. The fourth bull came out with the red rosette fixed to its forehead, a dark little thing, quick and mean, and in the first two minutes it put four boys over the barrier and one on his back in the sand, where he lay for a moment looking at the sky before he got up and limped away to applause.

"Go on," Gaëtan said.

He had come up the steps without Yassine noticing, again, and was crouched beside him at the front of the grandstand, his forearms on his knees. He was not smiling.

"I'm not licensed," Yassine said.

"Nobody's licensed. It's the fête. Look at them." Gaëtan nodded at the ring. "Babies. Forty babies and a bull that's worked them all out. You know what he's going to do next? He's going to stand in the middle and wait for one of them to get brave, and then he's going to break his ribs."

"Then somebody should stop it."

"Somebody should," Gaëtan agreed. He looked sideways at Yassine. "You've got your hook in your pocket. I can see it from here."

Yassine did not look at Magali. He could feel her not looking at him.

"Twelve years," he said.

"Then it's been twelve years. Bulls don't count."

Down in the ring the little dark bull had stopped in the centre exactly as Gaëtan had said it would, its head low, its flanks heaving, the red rosette on its forehead like a wound. The boys had drawn back to the barrier in a ragged ring. One of them was edging out from the rest, a tall thin boy of fifteen or sixteen with his jaw set, and Yassine could see from the way he was standing, his weight forward on his toes and his shoulders up, that he was going to go straight at it, and that the bull could see it too.

He was over the barrier before he had decided.

• • •

The sand was hot through his boots. That was the first thing. Then the noise, which was enormous and came from everywhere, and then, as he crossed the first few metres towards the middle of the ring, the noise falling away. Not because the crowd had gone quiet. Because he had stopped hearing it.

He had forgotten this. The ring narrowing. Everything outside the barrier going flat and grey and far away, like a painting of a crowd, and everything inside it becoming very large and very slow and very clear: the dust hanging in the air, the shine of sweat on the bull's shoulder, the small red rosette, the white of the bull's eye rolling towards him.

He put his hand in his pocket and took out the crochet. Strap under, round, over. The claw settled across his knuckles. His hand closed on it.

The bull turned to face him.

He did not run at it. That was what the boys did wrong; they ran at the bull as though the bull were the point. He walked. Out to the side, away from the barrier, in a long slow arc that took him round the bull's right flank, and the bull turned with him, and turned, keeping its head to him, and he felt the thing he had felt beside the canal, the weight going back onto his heels, his whole body listening.

Then he stopped, and stood, and waited.

The bull came.

There is a line. Manolo had told him so when he was fourteen, sitting on the barrier at the school with his hands on his knees. There is a line between you and the bull, and the bull will follow it, and if you draw it right, it will bring him to you and take you past him, and if you draw it wrong, it will bring him through you. The line is a curve. The curve is everything. You do not run away from the bull and you do not run towards him. You run across him, and you let him come, and at the last moment, at the moment when he is sure, you cut across his face.

Yassine ran.

He went across the bull's line in a long curve towards the barrier, and the bull came at him, and the sound of its hooves on the sand was the only sound in the world, and he felt it coming at his right shoulder, closer, closer, the heat of it, and at the very last moment, when his whole body was screaming at him to keep running, he turned in towards it instead, and reached across the capped horns with his right hand, and the claw of the crochet went into the ribbon, and caught, and tore, and he was past, and the barrier was there, and he went up and over it in a single movement that his body had not made in twelve years and had not forgotten at all, and came down on the far side in the dust of the passage with the red rosette in his fist.

The noise came back.

It came back all at once, as if someone had opened a door on it. Eight hundred people on their feet. Boys hammering on the boards of the barrier. The loudspeaker saying something he could not make out. He sat in the passage with his back against the wood and his chest heaving and the crochet still on his hand and the cocarde crumpled in his fingers, and he looked up, and the first face he saw at the top of the barrier was Timéo's, upside down and shining, and the second was Magali's.

She was standing at the front of the grandstand. She had unfolded her arms. She was looking down at him with an expression he had not seen on her before and could not read at all, as though she were looking at a horse she had been sure she knew and had just seen it do something it should not have been able to do.

Then she sat down again, and folded her arms, and looked at the ring.

• • •

He gave the fifty euros to the Café du Commerce, as the tradition required, and the café gave them back to him in pastis, as the tradition also required, and by nine o'clock the square was full of music and he was standing at the bar under the flags with a glass in his hand that someone kept refilling and half the village slapping him on the back.

Manolo found him there. He did not slap his back. He stood beside him at the bar and drank a small beer and looked at the crochet, which Yassine had not taken off.

"Your line was wide," he said.

"I know."

"Two metres wide. You came in late. You were lucky."

"I know."

"Your feet are still wrong." The old man drank. "But your hand was right. Your hand was always right." He looked at the crochet a moment longer, and then at Timéo, who was dancing in the middle of the square with three girls and no apparent idea how to dance. "That boy's been asking me for it."

"For what?"

"That." Manolo nodded at the claw. "Since Easter. Every week. Whose is it, Manolo, can I have it, Manolo, nobody uses it." He shrugged. "I told him it belongs to an idiot who might come back."

"And now?"

"Now the idiot came back." The old man put his glass down on the bar and turned it a quarter turn. "A crochet goes to whoever runs next. That's the rule. It's not yours. It's not mine. You keep it until you know who runs next, and then you give it to him, and you don't make a speech about it." He looked at Yassine. "You'll know."

Before Yassine could answer, the band stopped in the middle of a song.

He looked round. Somebody had climbed up onto the stage, a boy, one of the ones in white from the ring, and taken the microphone from the singer, and was shouting something into it that was lost in feedback. Then the old men at the tables along the front of the bar began to bang their glasses on the zinc, slowly, together, and the boy on the stage caught the rhythm and shouted it again, and this time Yassine heard it, and so, it seemed, did everyone else, because the square took it up, first the old men and then the young ones and then all of them, the whole village under its fading flags, a single word, over and over, the name they had given him in the small arenas the year he was eighteen, the name nobody had called him since the night before he left for the academy, and that he had been quite certain no one out here could possibly still remember.

"Pailladin," they were shouting. "Pailladin. Pailladin."