El Matador
By Wayne Greenhaw

He stood straight as a fence post. Toes together. Feet anchored. Ankles touching. Not as tall or as slender as most headline matadors he'd seen in the Plaza de Toros on the hillside, Juan Luis drew himself up, squaring his shoulders, stiffening his neck, raising his chin, sucking in the muscles of his stomach. The muscles pulled taut and flat. 

He followed all of the procedures that he remembered as his mind flickered through last winter's corrida. It was not easy to remember every single step, every minute detail of every movement, but Juan Luis tried. 

He'd been building his muscles every afternoon for months in the backyard of Tío Pepe's mechanics shop on Ancha de San Antonio, less than 500 meters from the fancy glass-walled gym on calle Stirling Dickinson, where the wealthy gringos and the vacationers from Mexico City exercised in their color-coordinated outfits and their fancy triple-toned Nike running shoes. Instead of barbells, Juan Luis lifted auto parts-rusted old axles, brake cylinders, even fenders from wrecked vehicles Tío Pepe and his workers tore apart and put back together and made to run again. 

Now, in the morning, he stood in the semicircle of dirt in front of the concrete bench, hidden from the street by a wall of giant green leaves of the plants that grew like a tropical jungle around the border of Parque Benito Juárez. Juan Luis felt the heavy weight of the old cape through his shoulders and in his bulging biceps. He lifted the thick cape up and out, swinging in a circular pattern. His wrists, grown thicker and stronger since the spring, worked like well-oiled pistons in the engines of the automobiles Tío Pepe fixed in his shop. 

Juan Luis swept the cape out, straightening his left arm, keeping his shoulders perfectly balanced. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, moving with the liquid grace of a ballet dancer, his feet not becoming tangled until the pass was almost finished. 

As he stumbled in the finish, a critical growl came from atop the stone house across the cobblestone street. From the rich family's balcony the thick-shouldered dog watched Juan Luis's every movement. The black-masked pit bull sat on his broad haunches, his big head lurking above the terra cotta-capped edge of the rooftop garden where sometimes Juan Luis saw the maid stealing glances at his matador practice. Now and then the woman spoke to the dog, criticizing Juan Luis as a loco. At first glance the dog appeared menacing, then Juan Luis felt a reassurance when he visibly measured the meters from the top of the mansion to the street below. The assurance of distance made the boy flutter his capote grande with more bravado, causing the dog to angrily bear his teeth and growl deep in his throat. 

As Juan Luis moved, dancing quickly to keep from falling over his own feet, waves fluttered across the thick cloth of the old cape he'd found discarded outside the small ring at El Ranchero Adobra off the road to Celaya. It was there that the ranchers held tientas to view the cows who would give birth to the bulls of the future. Juan Luis had watched the experts sitting around drinking tequila and talking about their vast knowledge of the ring, speaking with great authority about the bravery of Don Chucho's bulls, the dominant male genes passed from generation to generation. These men sat around the tables at Olé Olé, the barroom on calle Loreto, beneath the watchful eyes of Toro Grande, the bravest bull in all of El Bajío, the broad central valley of Mexico that stretched from Querétaro north past León. "That bull," the men said, saluting him, "he was the best. He kicked the dirt. He snorted. His thrust was straight and true. He did not try the cunning tricks of a counterfeit champion. No! He was true to his 
breeding. His father had been a champion before him, but even the father did not own the heart that this one had." Juan Luis listened as he swept the floor, sweeping it over and over until it was spotless, all the while taking in every word that was spoken. 

On Sunday afternoons, he traveled with his mother and father to San Felipe. They carried with them a splendid comida of succulent carnitas his mother had spent all day Saturday preparing, tasty salsas, verde y rojo, that his mother made with fresh tomatoes and tomatillos, onions and peppers and garlic. On the patio of his grandfather's house he listened intently to the old man tell the truth about the fighting bulls. "The bravery comes from la madre," the old man stated without exaggeration as he chewed the tender meat. As he spoke to Juan Luis, the old man's small, dark, wrinkle-framed eyes were fixed on his daughter as she piled food generously on each plate. "The mother passes the heart to her youngsters, and it is from the heart that true champions are made." 

As Juan Luis stood under the shade of the giant trees in the park near the place where his own mother washed the clothes of the gringo family for whom she worked, he imagined the broad-shouldered toro, black as the richest dirt, muscles as tense and undulating as the horse Juan Luis had once seen in the last throes of life, after it had been knocked into a ditch by an on-rushing eighteen-wheel transfer truck. The horse had made the most terrible sound Juan Luis had ever heard. Even now, three years later, the boy could still hear the echo of that tortured animal. 

He could see the head rising upward, its eyes bulging, the sinews in its neck tightening, its mouth opening and its teeth biting an invisible enemy as the sound screamed, expressing the torture it felt in that last moment of life, before it collapsed into supreme silence. 

As the cape swept through the thick air of the summer morning, Juan Luis whispered, "Toro! Toro! Eh, toro!" The brush of death was so close, Juan Luis felt its heat under his arms, where the sweat poured as the hoofbeats of the huge bull beat against the hard earth of the urban park. The sound that was so loud and real it reverberated in Juan Luis's ears caused a vibration that tingled up through the patched soles of the hand-me-down loafers his mother had brought home from the mansion on the hill where she scrubbed floors and made beds when she was not washing clothes. 

But to the boy, the shoes he wore were handmade of Spanish leather, crafted especially for him by an artisan who made handtooled saddles in a taller in the village of Mineral de Pozos. 

He twisted his entire body, flexing his knees as he'd seen the great matador Valenzuela perform last November. As he turned, Juan Luis caught the quick whiff of the bull's breath, the fecund flavor of the animal's aroma, filled with fright and fury. He tasted the dry dust kicked up in the animal's aftermath. 

As the broad leaves of the green plants fluttered when he finished his perfect veronica, Juan Luis heard the sound of applause that started as a hushed silence, began as a young senorita's single clap, and grew to a deafening roar, thundering all around as he pirouetted on tiptoe, holding the poised pose just so. He would not bow to them. He held his head high-higher even than it had been moments earlier. Now he was the master of the ring. His stature was that of Valenzuela, the dark one who came down from Chihuahua City and fought in the ring on the hill. With his last bull of the corrida he cut two ears and a tail. In his glittering suit of lights, a black-and-silver picture of perfection, aglow in the last glitter of Sunday afternoon sunlight, he marched proudly around the ring like a gamecock who'd just sliced the heart from his opponent. "Hey, toro!" came the shout from the paved pathway that cut through the center of the park. "Hey, hey, hey!" 

Juan Luis shifted his vision from his imaginary bull to the trio of niñas in their starched blue blouses and thigh-length blue-and-green plaid skirts and white knee-length socks. All three remained half-hidden behind the large green leaves of the elephant-ear plants that separated Juan Luis's circle of packed dirt from the brick path. The girls watched with delighted dark eyes. Covering their mouths with fists, they giggled in unison. 

Rather than turn away or hide his front from them, Juan Luis faced them, shook his cape with a grimacing fury, and growled not unlike the perro on the rooftop. "Ay, ay, ay!" His toes danced in the dirt as their giggles turned to full-fledged laughter. "Juanito," one of the girls shouted. "El matador grande, mucho coraje!" While they doubled with laughter, Juan Luis did not collapse from his frozen stance. 

He gasped, held his cape steady, and watched as the crazed animal jumped, airborne long enough for Juan Luis to run beyond the girls and hold his ragged cape up to block the fall of the dog's body. Juan Luis stumbled and fell onto the cobblestone street while the girls' laughter turned to frightened wails. "Juanito?!" shouted the tallest of the three. 

As Juan Luis scrambled to regain his balance, the dog's teeth bore into the flesh of his left arm, tearing at the skin. At the door of the mansion the maid handled her broom, slamming it between the dog and the boy. An instant later, the dog having retreated into the house, Juan Luis lay on the stones, bleeding, while the girls ran to the chorro where his mother was washing the clothes. Half an hour later he opened his eyes and gazed into his mother's weeping face. Next to her was a doctor who swabbed his wound and predicted he might have limited movement in his left arm. Juan Luis lay very still and stared up at them. He listened to the words he did not believe for a moment. It was as though he were a great matador who had been dragged from the plaza after the most magnificent of all bulls had raked his horn against his arm while in the midst of a paseo natural, passing so close with the bright red muleta that he could touch the curly black hair between the bull's ears, and then, with the downward thrust of 
the animal's head, the pointed horn had sliced into Juan Luis' forearm. "Bravo!"" he heard in the distance. It echoed through the white room of the public hospital where he lay. "Bravo! Bravo!"