The Drifters (72 page)

With his
pochas
he also had a green salad made from the crisp vegetables then coming onto the market in northern Spain and a small helping of bull stew made,
when possible, from the bulls that had been fought in the arena the day before. For dessert, vanilla flan; for drink, a strong red wine which Raquel bought from a farm in the Rioja region to the west.

I had reached an age when white beans cooked with ham hocks were more than I could digest, so I contented myself with green salad and bull stew, and this I had twice a day through the feria. It was as good food as I get anywhere in the world, the rough, tough fare of the north, and to have Raquel sitting at your table, sharing the gossip of the past year, while a couple of woodchoppers sing in a corner is an experience I cherish. As I intimated before, the bar was Holt’s cathedral.

From the bar, Raquel now called, ‘Señor Fairbanks,
los jóvenes
you sent me arrived early this afternoon. They’re upstairs.’

‘I didn’t send you anyone.’

‘They said you did. From Algarve.’

‘Oh, splendid!’ I was pleased to think that I would see my friends again, pleased that they had remembered Bar Vasca. I started upstairs to greet them, but the big woman shouted, ‘Finish your supper. Eh, Manolo. Fetch the young Americans,’ and soon there was a clatter on the stairs as the six young people rushed down to greet me.

‘Didn’t you see our car?’ Monica cried as she leaned over the table to give me a kiss. They pointed out the window, and there, in the plaza not far from where we had parked, stood the yellow pop-top.

‘We were tired of sleeping so cooped up and decided to do the fair in style,’ Gretchen explained, and I guessed that she was paying for the rooms.

‘I want you to meet my long-time friend,’ I said. ‘He knows more about Pamplona than anyone you’ll meet—Harvey Holt, Afghanistan.’

They moved forward to introduce themselves and shake Holt’s hand, and I could see that he was perplexed by the presence of Cato. He didn’t actually ask, ‘Are you traveling with the group?’ but he might just as well have.

‘How often have you been to Pamplona?’ Monica asked.

‘This is my seventeenth year.’

‘Groovy!’

Holt looked at the English girl as if asking her to translate, but before he could say anything, the others
pressed in with questions, and he alternately stuffed his mouth with bull stew and explained Pamplona.

After dinner they volunteered to show us to our rooms, and Cato took Holt’s bag while Joe grabbed mine. They led us to the third floor, where we had stayed for many years, and kicked the doors open for us. There were the dark, small cubicles which had become home to us, the balconies from which we could watch the running of the bulls, the miserable toilet down the hall, the dingy bathroom that never had hot water, the nostalgic odor of bedbug juice, the noise drifting up from the plaza where someone was tuning a guitar.

‘We’re on this hall too,’ Gretchen said, and she led us to a room even smaller than ours in which she and Britta had their gear. Beside it was a room with no window in which Joe and Yigal stayed. That left a third room, extremely small, for Monica and Cato. Their gear was on the bed and it was apparent that they were living together. This was confirmed when Monica said, ‘Cato and I use this one.’

When Holt and I were alone in my room, he asked in a whisper, ‘Did she mean that she and the black boy were sleeping together?’

‘They have been for some months,’ I said.

‘I should think her mother’s heart would break,’ Holt said with great intensity.

‘Her mother’s dead.’

‘She must be turning over in her grave.’

In recent years Holt and I had developed an affectionate ritual which for us had become as much a part of Pamplona as the halt at Puerto del Perdón and the
pochas
at Bar Vasca, so we asked the young people if they would like to join us.

We walked to the plaza in which the bullring stood, bought a large red handkerchief, and went solemnly to a granite base on which rested a good bronze statue of Ernest Hemingway, bearded and wearing a turtleneck. I made a stirrup of my hands so that Holt could climb up to the neck of the statue, around which he tied the red scarf of Pamplona. When he dropped down we applauded, for now Don Ernesto looked very much a part of the scene.
No one thought of anything appropriate to say, so we walked back to the central square and found seats at the Bar Txoco, where habitués from all over Europe came to greet Holt and to talk of past ferias.

One German girl had a set of the famous postcards for Holt to autograph, and Joe asked, ‘What are they?’ In delightful English the German girl asked, ‘You are sitting with this man and you don’t know who he is?’ She spread the pictures before my young friends, and I watched their jaws drop as they followed the course of the bulls that morning in 1953.

‘You mean you did this?’ Yigal asked. Holt nodded, and the boy said, ‘You must have been out of your mind.’

Monica pointed to the shot in which Holt was landing on his head, and joked, ‘You can see that after this he had no brains.’

Britta was fascinated by the picture that showed the bull’s horn penetrating Holt’s chest, and she asked, ‘Did the horn really go in? As deep as it looks here?’

Holt showed no intention of answering, so I said yes and took Britta’s hand and placed it over his shirt so that her fingers could feel the ridges of scar tissue left by the wound. She held her hand there for some moments, staring at Holt’s rugged face, then said, ‘You must have been near death.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said quietly, ‘the horn never came within inches of a vital area. Like saber scars in German dueling. Look like hell, but no danger.’

Gretchen picked up the analogy with university dueling and asked, ‘Are men like you compelled to run with bulls … because of the pressure of your society?’

Holt stared at her. ‘What do you mean, men like me?’

‘Well,’ she said, pointing to the hordes of men shown in the photographs, ‘there are a lot of you who do this thing. I meant …’

‘Lady’—this was a word of contempt Holt saved for such occasions—‘there are several thousand men in that street and each one probably had his good reason for being there. Me, I was there because I enjoy it.’

‘What she means,’ Cato broke in, ‘something’s bugging you and you feel driven to get down there and do vour thing.’

Holt looked from one face to another and said, ‘You kids may be driven by the force of your society. I’m
having fun. I work my tail off eleven months a year and on the twelfth I come to Pamplona to have fun. You know, even God worked only six days and on the seventh he had fun.’

‘You call this fun?’ Yigal asked, pointing to the photo in which Holt was standing on his head with the blood gushing from his chest.

Before the tech rep could answer, the German girl gathered up her photos and said, ‘You’re making it too complicated. Can’t you see from the expression on his face in this second photograph that he is experiencing a moment of joy?’ She leaned across the table and kissed Holt on the cheek. ‘He is the bravest, and if you keep your eye on him the next few days, you’ll find out what it means to be a man … all of you.’

This did not satisfy Gretchen. ‘You mean, Mr. Holt, that so far as you know, you are not driven by any inner compulsion? Any sense of insufficiency?’

Holt shook his head and said, ‘Lady, are you here in Pamplona because of any inner sense of insufficiency?’

‘Yes.’

The reply startled him and he fumbled for a moment, then said, ‘You came to a damned good place to get it satisfied.’ He rose, but Gretchen grabbed his arm and pulled him back to his chair. ‘Mr. Holt, this is all new to us and we’re trying to find out. Please.’

‘All right. If you want to understand Pamplona, get up early on the morning of the seventh, go out on your balcony, listen to the noise, wait for the rocket to fire down at the end of our street, then watch as six bulls and ten steers gallop by so fast you’ll scarcely see them. Nothing will happen, and when it’s done you’ll turn to one another and say, “So what’s so big about that?” And maybe one of you, maybe this pretty girl’—he put his hand on Britta’s for a moment, then quickly took it away—‘maybe in that flashing moment when the bulls go past she’ll catch a glimpse of one face—of a man running in sheer terror a few inches ahead of a bull who has no intention of touching him—and of you all, she’ll be the one who’ll remotely understand what has happened.’

This was a long speech for Holt, but he felt the subject deeply, and after a moment’s pause he added, ‘Of course, if this happens to be a day when some bull goes crazy and
pegs a guy right under your balcony, you’ll understand a hell of a lot more.’

Yigal moved forward and asked, ‘But you do it as compensation for something, don’t you?’

I could see that Holt had taken a dislike to Yigal, probably classifying him as a smart-aleck Jew, and now he turned on the wiry fellow. ‘Son, I don’t know what’s eating you—from the worry in your face I’d say plenty—but I’m okay. Now if you’ll excuse me …’

But he was not to get off so quickly, for Britta asked, ‘You said you worked eleven months a year. At what?’

Holt was standing, but as he looked down into the lovely Scandinavian face, he could see that its owner was not trying to badger him. She wanted to know, so he resumed his seat and said, ‘I work in places you’ve never heard of … Kemajoran, Don Muang, Mingaladon, Dum-Dum … a different place every two years.’

‘And when Pamplona is over … where?’

‘Another place you’ve never heard of. We start a Big Rally II at Ratmalana … and I’ll be there two or three years … then some other place you wouldn’t know where to find.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I just told you. Installing Big Rallies.’

‘Communications centers for airports,’ I explained.

‘It must be wonderful,’ Britta said, ‘traveling from place to place like that.’ She paused as if savoring the life, then added impulsively, ‘Tell me, are these places in the sun?’

‘Sure there’s sun.’

‘I mean, are they hot?’

Holt looked at me and laughed. ‘Young lady’—this time it was not a word of contempt—‘if you consider thirty-eight degrees centigrade week after week hot, the places I work are hot.’

‘What’s that in real temperature?’ Cato asked.

The question infuriated Holt and he answered it by shrugging his shoulders, as if to say that anyone who mattered these days used centigrade. ‘About one hundred,’ I told Cato on the side. He whistled. ‘That’s hot.’

Up to this point Joe had said nothing. Now he leaned across the table and did an extraordinary thing. He slowly unbuttoned Holt’s shirt until the scar was exposed. Staring at it, he said, ‘You were there.’

Britta, who was sitting beside Holt, turned so that she could see the jagged edges of the wound. She merely looked and said nothing, but Monica ran her fingers along one branch, then stood and bowed. ‘You have my respect,’ she said.

Holt, astonished by this casual familiarity, rebuttoned his shirt and said, ‘If you’re really interested, there’s also a beauty on the left cheek of my ass.’ He started to unbuckle his belt, but Gretchen said, ‘We’ll take your word for it.’ Britta turned to me and asked, ‘Is that true?’

‘Three others,’ I said.

She looked Holt straight in the face and said, ‘Now that we’ve seen, tell us why you do it.’

Holt stared back and said, ‘Now that I’ve seen you young people—Mr. Fairbanks told me about you—you tell me, why do you do it?’

‘Do what?’ Britta asked.

‘Run away from home … knock around Europe … smoke marijuana … sleep with each other.’ At this last observation, he stared at Monica.

‘It’s very simple,’ Monica replied. ‘We do it because life at home is unutterably boring.’

‘And you?’ Holt asked Yigal.

‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe,’ the young Jew replied.

‘I’ll bet I wouldn’t.’ His gaze now fell on Joe, who ignored it, so he turned to Gretchen. ‘You look intelligent.’

‘Police and people,’ Gretchen said. ‘The police in Patrick Henry. The people in my own family.’

‘What does she mean?’ Holt asked me.

‘The police gave her a bad time.’

‘She probably deserved it.’

‘And the people,’ Gretchen said evenly, ‘were the slobs in my own family.’

Holt flushed, as if she had made an attack on him personally. ‘A good-looking, well-bred girl like you oughtn’t to speak of her parents that way,’ he said.

Cato did not wait to be interrogated. He said, ‘I’m here, Mr. Holt, because men like you in Philadelphia drove me here.’

Holt nodded, said nothing, then looked at Britta, who said, ‘I’m the one who’s really escaping. I’m escaping the darkness … the cold … the beauty of northern Norway.’

‘It’s pretty cold here right now,’ he replied, noticing her flimsy dress.

‘But in the daytime there’s sun. And if you can see the sun for only an instant each day, that excuses everything.’ Her lilting voice with its ingratiating Norwegian accent sounded just right for Pamplona, and Holt smiled. Then he turned back to Joe and said, ‘You didn’t answer.’

‘I’m here to avoid the draft,’ Joe said, brushing the end of his beard with his right hand.

Holt froze, stared at the young man, coughed twice, then said, ‘Did I understand? You’re of draft age?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they called you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you ran away?’

‘Yes.’

Holt rose, took three steps away from the table, then turned and said with finality, ‘I don’t drink with draft dodgers. If you want to, Fairbanks, you can, but I’ll be goddamned if I will,’ and he stalked off across the central square.

Some hours later, after I led the others on the shortcut to Bar Vasca and we had climbed the stairs to the third floor, we found thumbtacked to Holt’s door the Pamplona version of his traditional sign: