Bodega

The bodega was in a wine cellar under a house on the old street behind the arena, and you went down to it by eleven stone steps worn into dips by four hundred years of feet. At the bottom the air was ten degrees cooler and smelled of sour wine and spilled beer and the cold mineral breath of the walls. Someone had hung strings of coloured bulbs from the vaulted ceiling. Someone else had pushed three trestle tables together into a bar and stacked behind it more bottles than there were people in the village. In the far corner, under an arch black with old candle smoke, a peña of eight men in red neckerchiefs was playing a pasodoble so loud and so badly that it had gone all the way through badness and come out the other side into something like joy.

It was the second week of the feria. Yassine had been at the mas for three. He had stopped counting the falls from Mistrau, because there had not been one in four days. He had begun to know the names of the cows. He had learned, from Timéo, the nicknames of every raseteur in the Trophée and the reasons each of them was overrated. He had learned, from Magali, how to tell from the set of a bull's ears whether it was thinking about you. He had written two more reports to Granier from the toilet with the tap running, and they had both been accurate, and both short, and in neither of them had he found anything to say about the trucks, because the trucks had not moved at night since the first time.

He had been, for three weeks, almost nothing but tired. Tonight, for the first time, he was not.

"Here," Gaëtan said, and put a glass in his hand. It was the colour of rust and tasted of oranges and cheap red wine and something stronger underneath. "Don't ask what's in it. Nobody knows. It's made by a man called Jojo who keeps the recipe in his head and his head in a bucket of ice."

"It's terrible."

"It's the best thing you'll ever drink. Wait half an hour." Gaëtan leaned on the bar beside him, his back to it, his elbows on the wood, surveying the cellar like a man surveying his own land. Everyone who came down the steps looked for him. You could see it. They came down out of the heat and the noise of the street, and paused at the bottom of the steps while their eyes adjusted, and their eyes went round the cellar and found Gaëtan and stopped, and then they came over, or raised a hand, or simply smiled, as if to say, ah good, he's here, the night is going to be all right. Yassine had seen the same thing happen to men in a dozen rooms in his working life. Most of them had been dangerous. It had not been the danger that made people look for them.

"You know what Papa said?" Gaëtan said. "After the fête?"

"I don't."

"He said, he runs like Manolo's old boys. That's all. Il court comme les petits de Manolo. Then he went out to smoke." Gaëtan laughed. "From my father that's a medal. That's the Légion d'honneur. I've been running for him for fifteen years and he's never once said I run like anybody."

"You told Timéo he had the legs."

"Timéo has got the legs. Timéo also has the brain of a sparrow and the luck of a drunk. You saw him." Gaëtan drank. "You were the only one in that ring who knew what he was doing, and you hadn't done it in twelve years. That's what I can't work out." He turned his head and looked at Yassine, and the look was friendly and amused and also, under that, entirely steady. "What do you do in Lyon, for twelve years, that you come back and do that?"

"Nothing," Yassine said. "That's why."

Gaëtan considered this for a moment and then laughed again, delighted, as if it were the best answer he had heard all week, and clapped him on the shoulder, and turned to greet someone coming down the steps.

• • •

Magali came at midnight.

He saw her before she saw him. She stood at the bottom of the steps in the coloured light the way the others had, letting her eyes adjust, but her eyes did not go looking for her brother. They went round the cellar slowly, the way they went round a pen of cattle, taking in the corners, and when they came to Yassine they stopped, briefly, and then moved on, and he felt the place where they had stopped as if she had touched it.

She had changed. That was all; she had only changed her shirt, a white one instead of the man's shirt with the sleeves cut off, and taken her hair down, and it fell to her shoulders dark and heavy and changed the shape of her face entirely. She looked, for a moment, like someone he had never met.

Then she came over to the bar and said, "You're drinking Jojo's," in exactly the voice she used to tell him he had left a gate open, and she was Magali again.

"Your brother made me."

"My brother makes everyone. It's his only talent." She took the glass out of his hand, drank half of it, made a face, and gave it back. "God. It gets worse every year."

"He says it gets better after half an hour."

"It does. That's the danger." She looked at him over the rim of her own glass, which someone had put in her hand without her asking. "You know why Jojo puts the brandy in last?"

"Why?"

"So you can't taste it until it's too late." She almost smiled. "Like most things here."

• • •

At two in the morning they were sitting on the tailgate of a pickup in the lane behind the cellar, where the noise of the peña came up through a grating in the pavement like heat. It was not cooler outside; the night was thick and still and smelled of hot stone and jasmine from someone's courtyard and, faintly, of the sea, because everything here smelled faintly of the sea. Gaëtan was sitting on the bonnet with his boots on the bumper, telling a story to three young men from the village and a girl with a nose ring who were standing round him in the lane. Yassine and Magali sat on the tailgate with their legs hanging and their shoulders not quite touching, and listened.

"—so he's on the wrong side," Gaëtan was saying. "He's on the Saintes-Maries side, with the girl, and it's one in the morning, and the girl's father is waiting up for her in Aigues-Mortes, and the bac is shut."

"The Sauvage?" said one of the young men.

"The Sauvage. Eight cars, a cable and a man in a hut. Stops at night like a shop. And there's no bridge, not there, not anywhere near. The nearest bridge is at Saint-Gilles, an hour round, or he goes all the way up through Arles, and he's had a few. So he stands on the bank looking at the river." Gaëtan spread his hands. "And the river's two hundred metres wide and black as your hat and full of God knows what, and on the other side is her father with a shotgun, and on this side is his car. And he looks at the girl, and the girl looks at him."

"And?"

"And he swam it." Gaëtan grinned. "Took his clothes off, put them in a plastic bag, tied the bag round his neck, and swam it, and the girl drove the long way round in his car, and her father met him on the far bank in his underpants with a torch, and he married her the following spring."

"Who was it?" said the girl with the nose ring.

"My father," said Gaëtan, "according to my father," and the lane laughed, and Magali, beside Yassine, shook her head slowly.

"It wasn't him," she said quietly. "It was his cousin. And the cousin nearly drowned and was sick for a week and the girl married someone else."

"Does Gaëtan know that?"

"Of course he knows." She looked at her brother on the bonnet of the pickup, telling the next story already, his hands moving. "He just prefers his version. He always prefers his version." She was quiet a moment. "So does Papa. That's why they fight."

"Do they fight?"

She did not answer that. She looked down at her boots, swinging over the lane, and then sideways at him, and he saw her deciding something.

"You don't talk like a man from Lyon," she said.

He kept his face still. It was the easiest thing in the world to keep his face still; he had done it for a living for ten years. "How does a man from Lyon talk?"

"I don't know. Not like that. You talk like someone from round here who's been away and forgot to change back." She shrugged. "Your vowels. When you're tired. When you were talking to the cows that night, I could hear you, you know. I was on the other side, but sound carries. You sounded like Montpellier."

"I'm from Montpellier. Before Lyon."

"I know. Manolo said." She looked at him steadily. "You didn't talk about Lyon at all, to the cows. Three hours, I heard you. You talked about trams and football and some bus. Never Lyon."

"The cows didn't ask about Lyon."

"No," she said. "Nobody does. Have you noticed? Nobody asks you about Lyon, and you never say."

The peña under the pavement finished a song and started another one, the same one, or one so similar that it made no difference. Gaëtan's audience had grown. The girl with the nose ring had sat down on the bonnet beside him. Magali's shoulder was touching Yassine's now; he could not have said which of them had moved. Her hair smelled of woodsmoke and some cheap shampoo and, under that, of horses. He was aware of the exact place where her arm lay against his, a line of warmth from shoulder to elbow, as precisely as he had been aware of the bull's line across the sand.

"Lyon was nothing," he said. "That's why I don't talk about it."

She turned her head and looked at him from very close. He could see the fine white sun creases at the corners of her eyes and a small scar he had not noticed before, at the edge of her jaw, white against the brown. Her eyes were very dark in the bad light from the lane.

"That's the second time you've said that tonight," she said. "I heard you say it to Gaëtan."

He did not know what he would have said next. He did not know what she would have done. There was a moment, a long one, in which neither of them moved, and the noise of the peña came up through the grating and the jasmine hung in the air, and he felt the moment lean towards something like a bull leaning into a turn.

Then a man said, "Bonsoir, Gaëtan," from the mouth of the lane, and the moment went, and Magali turned her head away.

• • •

He was standing just where the lane met the street, under the last of the coloured bulbs, a man of fifty or so in a pale linen jacket despite the heat. The same jacket. Yassine knew it at once, the way he would have known a car he had followed. The man from the barrier at the fête, the one whose shoes had never been in a field. He had a narrow, pleasant, forgettable face, the kind of face you would describe to a colleague afterwards and hear yourself describe as ordinary, and he held a glass of something clear with ice in it as if he had brought it from a much better bar than this one.

"I won't disturb you," he said. His voice was soft, and his accent was Marseille, not strong, rubbed smooth at the edges the way an old coin is rubbed smooth, but there. "I only wanted to say well done for the fête. The young bulls are looking well. Your father must be proud."

"My father is never proud," said Gaëtan pleasantly, from the bonnet. He had not got down. "It's against his religion."

"Then I'm proud on his behalf." The man smiled. His eyes went past Gaëtan, briefly, to the tailgate, to Magali, and rested on her a moment, and then on Yassine, and rested on him a little longer, without any expression at all, the way you might glance at a dog to see whether it was the kind that bites. Then they went back to Gaëtan. "We'll talk," the man said. "Next week. Give my regards to Fredo."

"I'll give him your regards."

"Do." He lifted the glass an inch, as a kind of salute, and turned, and went back out into the noise of the street, and was gone.

Nobody in the lane said anything for a moment. Then one of the young men said something Yassine did not catch, and someone laughed, and the conversation started up again where it had stopped, the way water closes over a stone.

Magali had got down off the tailgate. She stood in the lane with her arms folded, looking at the place where the man had been, and her face had gone blank and hard in a way he had not seen before, not even at five in the morning with the broom.

"Who was that?" Yassine said.

"Nobody," said Magali. "A buyer." She did not look at him. "I'm going home. I'm up at five. So are you." And she walked away down the lane towards the square without saying goodnight to anyone, her hair swinging, and was gone too.

Gaëtan watched her go. Then he slid down off the bonnet of the pickup, said something to the girl with the nose ring that made her laugh and shake her head, and came over to the tailgate and sat down where his sister had been, heavily, as if he were suddenly tired.

He did not say anything for a while. He looked up at the strip of sky between the roofs, where there were no stars because of the lights of the feria, and turned his empty glass in his hands.

"You did all right," he said finally. "On Mistrau. On the night we took the cows."

"He did all right. I just sat there."

"Nobody just sits on Mistrau." Gaëtan was still looking at the sky. His voice had changed. It had lost its story-telling lift and gone flat and quiet, the voice he had used in the yard before the herd moved, the church voice. "I watched you, you know. In the dark. You kept him straight the whole way. Kept him quiet. He didn't make a sound."

Yassine waited.

Gaëtan looked down from the sky at last, and turned his head, and in the bad light from the lane his face was not laughing at all.

"Can you do it again?" he said. "Can you keep a horse quiet in the dark?"