We have forgotten more than we remember. We have forgotten the swooping flight of birds which are no longer named, the thoughts of the Barbarian Visigoths as they swept through Iberia. We have forgotten why callused hands pushed at the stoic monoliths of Easter Island, the first steps of pilgrims as they trekked the globe. We have forgotten the terror and cunning of those who paced the Medici Corridor, the words spoken at Ararat. We have forgotten more than we remember.

  But there is something I remember; something. A summer. A moment. I pace this room, raging, trying to forget more than I wish to recall.

  There are seven stories in this world and this one is mine.

*

  Santiago de Compostela has many near-forgotten, narrow streets. It is a dark city, darker even than Venice; it breathes more deeply. At this summer's end the city appears to be falling in on itself with a long-drawn-out sigh. I sit in a cafe in the Praza da Quintana, camera on my lap, Herald Tribune open on the zinc-topped table. The arcades of the rúa Nova had blinded me as I walked from sheets of white light to rhomboids of deepest shadow, but here, in the square, the light is kinder as it reflects from stone buildings mellowed by centuries. Surrounded by gesticulating, stocky Galician men, sipping Ribeiro from small ceramic cups, their hands signalling the state of their hearts and minds, I sip my sherry, dry as packed ice, and bite into a manzanilla olive. Turning back to the paper but the text dances in the sunlight. Closing my eyes I lean back, out of the shadow of the umbrella, to feel the sun on my skin. I don't know what impulse makes me open my eyes and look across the square towards the vía Sacra, squinting in the glare.

  At first she is a silhouette, a black mannequin against flat light, walking down the steps into the square. The shadow of the clock tower falls across her and she swims into colours and dimensions, broad shouldered and narrow-hipped, her walk easy, almost a lope. I try to look away but find I can't. She walks towards the cafe, scanning the packed tables for a vacant chair. She looks at me. Still I watch her, touching the camera on my lap. I want to slip it from beneath the table and capture each moment of this woman walking across the cobbled square, slipping from light to shade. There is something indefinable ... what is it? Then I have it - she is perfectly alone. Not simply on her own but essentially alone and unconcerned. Around me I am aware of the tenor of the conversation changing. Hands are stilled and throats cleared as she walks towards me. I look down, unseeing, at the Tribune, embarrassed by my own fascination.

  I hear a chair scrape across the cobbles, and look up to see her unsmiling face.

  '¿Puedo sentarme con Ud?'

  'Sí, sí.' I half-rise out of my seat, compelled to acknowledge her presence in some way.

  She sits and crosses her legs, taking off her sun glasses. I fold the Tribune as she watches.

  'You are American?'

  I look at her directly, only to be shocked by cobalt eyes in a tanned face. 'No, inglés.'

  '¿Habla castellano?'

  'No, I'm sorry.'

  She shrugs and beckons for the waiter, gives her order and sits back to light a cigarette. 'Do you mind?' she asks.

  'No.'

  I wish I had not put the newspaper away, wish I could pretend to read it so I might stay here, at this table, with her. When the waiter returns I order another, unwanted sherry, surreptitiously watching her eat. She eats like a man, unmindful of niceties, wiping her plate with bread, drinking white wine with her mouth full of food. First she tears navajas, razor-fish like etiolated asparagus, from their shells, having doused them with fresh lemon. Then she turns to a plate of small, fried fish. Dextrously she holds them by their tiny tails and strips the flesh from the bones, washes the white meat down with wine, and pushes the plates away. She lights another cigarette and begins to examine a deep, ragged wound on the palm of her hand.

  'Why are you in Santiago?' she asks in heavily accented English, not looking at me.

  'Me?'

  She nods, tugging gently at a snagged crust of the scab.

  I pat the Hasselblad on my lap, safe in the shade of the table. 'I'm taking photographs.'

  'Of what?'

  'The Pilgrim Route to Santiago. I started in Jaca a couple of months ago and worked my way west.'

  'Why?'

  I look at her and smile. Why indeed? 'For money. I'm a freelance travel photographer. I'm on assignment.'

  She nods emphatically, as if something has been confirmed, still picking at her damaged skin. 'You have been to Venecia? To Venice?'

  'Yes - a few months ago. I covered the carnival there for a Sunday magazine.'

  'I saw you there.' She looks at me and smiles, her eyes a magnet. 'You were on a water taxi. You travelled from the Rialto to the Arsenale.' Her voice rasps, as if it has been dipped in sand.

  'I did?'

  'Yes.' She beckons the waiter with her glass and asks for more drinks. 'You photographed the bald lion, the lion with runes. Over and over. I watched you from the café in the corner of the plaza.'

  A cloud passes silently in front of the sun and the colours of the Galician praza leach away. I find I can now remember the afternoon in Venice with shocking clarity, can remember spending hours at the gates of the Arsenale, waiting for the light to change, waiting for the fish-scale wake of a vaporetto in the lagoon of the Arsenale Vecchio. Waiting, as ever, for the elusive to present itself, my stomach tight with the fear of failure. I can picture Gambello's arch, can see the lions of Piraeus, the small square in front of the arch. But in the corner of the square, where the tables of the café should spill, there is a darkness, a smear of images.

  The drinks arrive as the cloud clears and the glasses begin to sweat in the heat.

   'When I came into the square, here, today, I am thinking that I know you. Then I remember I see you in Venice.'

  'Do you remember everyone you see?'

  'No.' She shakes her head and looks away.

  I am aware once more of the changed atmosphere in the café. I notice that people at other tables are whispering, bending towards each other, elbows splayed on the table tops, searching each other's faces for some kind of truth as they glance over to the two of us, raising their chins slightly in our direction as they speak. She is oblivious of the interest she has aroused in others, and I sense again that carapace of solitude wrapped around her. Even so, I want to protect her from their glances, want to distract her.

  'Me llamo Alfred.' I hold out my hand and she takes it in hers. I can feel the abrasions in her skin graze the soft centre of my palm.

  'Alfred?' In her mouth, on her tongue, my name changes from the absurd to something other. 'Alfredo?'

  'Sí.'

  'My name is Cristina.' She smiles.

  'I know it's very bad that I haven't learnt to speak Spanish.' I rummage in my bag and pull out a small book. 'Here - when I was in Burgos I found this in a second-hand book shop. It's not been very useful.' I hold out the phrase book.

  Cristina opens it at random and reads, '"El cuerpo humano tiene huesos, sangre y piel."' I lean close to her to follow what she is reading. 'The human body has bones, blood and skin.' She frowns. '"Este ciruelo ha crecido mucho." This plum tree has grown very much.' She looks up at me and I feel I'm too close. '"La corteza de algunos árboles es muy útil al hombre."' A snicker escapes her. 'The bark of some trees is very useful to man.' Giggling, she searches through the book. "De quién es este pepino?" Whose cucumber is this? "Buscan un sombrero pequeño." They are looking for a small hat.' Now she is laughing aloud, her eyes tearing. The whisperers at the other tables are whispering still.

  Turning a page she reads, '"Debería haber amado."'

  'What's that mean?' I ask.

  ' "I should have loved." Tiempos del verbo, conjugados solamente en primera persona.' She falls silent and puts the book on the dazzling zinc table.

  We have finished our drinks and the sun has soared even higher, moving beyond the umbrella's shade. My skin is burning but I don't want to move away from her to another place. She is staring at the steps in the corner of the square, unseeing, lost to me.

  'Will you come with me?' she asks suddenly.

  'Where?'

  'To my hotel. I do not want to be alone today.' She turns to look at me. 'I do not wish to be alone today.' I am undone by her desire, by her directness.

  As we walk away from the café I hear someone mutter as we pass, their tone sharp as a stiletto, '¡sinvergüenza!' I glance at her but her face has closed.

  After the light of midday in the praza, a light as sharp as broken glass, her hotel room is dim, seems to waver in shuttered gloom. In the corner is a vast, black trunk, padlocked and seemingly immovable. The room is small and cluttered, dominated by a rumpled bed. Cristina slams the shutters and closes a torn velvet curtain across the window. She pulls me down on the creased sheets and begins to push at my clothes. I have slipped from one world to another, from one state of being to another. I can see nothing. I am a photographer without sight and my world is reduced to the sense of scent and touch. It is as if I am moving in a black velvet sack, at once luxurious and sybaritic.

  I must have slept, for when I wake she is leaning against the headboard, smoking silently, the glow of the cigarette lighting the angles of her face. I begin to stroke her, stunned by the hardness of her body. Her muscles seem cured, they are so hard and yet flexible. It is like touching blood-warm marble. I run my hand down her back and beneath my fingertips a deep, ragged dent opens, a break in the smoothness.

  'What's this?' I ask the darkness.

  Cristina stubs out the cigarette and switches on the small bedside lamp. She twists her torso until the scar moves into the pool of light.

  'Jesus Christ!' I have never seen a wound like it, even in this, its healed state. I'm surprised not to see a splintered tooth of bone rearing through the skin. 'How did you get that?'

  She says nothing but leaves the bed and crosses the room to the trunk, which she unlocks and pushes open. It stands on its end and when it opens I can see it is a travelling wardrobe. She climbs back in bed and lights another cigarette. As my eyes grew accustomed to the faint light, I can make out a costume hanging there, glinting like star dust as it sways a little.

  She is staring at it, smiling. 'This is my traje de luces. My suit of lights. I am a matador. I fight bulls. It was a bull that tore out my rib.' She does not look at me as she speaks but gazes at the suit.

  I slip from the bed and find my camera by touch alone in the dark. I photograph her in the half-light, the lamp beside her throwing a shadow across the wall behind her. Her suit of lights shimmers in the background as she tells me in a whisper that she has never forgotten my face since that afternoon in Venice.

*

  I look at those photographs now, during this empty afternoon, and the suit dominates the image, unfocused yet phosphorescent, even in monochrome. Cristina's face is in shadow in all of these pictures, as if she had shuttered a part of herself that I would never see. When I lower the photographs the only image which burns on my retina is of the suit; I cannot conjure her face. The dark smear in the corner of the Venetian square by the Arsenale - where Cristina sat watching me - has spread across the contact paper.

*

  When I finish capturing her on film Cristina pulls on her jeans and says, 'I am hungry.'.

  We eat outside a small restaurant on the rúa Nova as clouds gather over the cathedral and the temperature rises, the sky becoming a smudge of angry ochre. We eat plates of calamares, mejillones, truchas a la Navarra and fabada, oiled by local Albariño wines, listening to thunder echoing through the drowning valleys of the Rías Baixas in the distance, rolling back and forth between the hills. Already, I love to watch her eat, in the masculine way she has. When she eats, in her deliberate, concentrated, Mediterranean manner she is unmasked. Her face is open and visible in a way that it never is at other times. Tossing black mussel shells into a pot, she talks through mouthfuls in her abrasive, mesmeric voice about la corrida.

  'I know how the English are about this. La corrida, los toros. You have something about animals, I do not understand it. We are human beings, not animals. It is not the same thing.'

  'But you must see that ...'

  'You must not tell me what I must see. I see what I do, as an Andalusian, as a Spaniard. As a woman. Do not tell me what I must see. I see other things, I see things you do not, I see in a different way. You look through the lens of your camera and that is how ... I do not know how to say in English ... maybe that is how the world talks to you. Through the lens of your camera.' Cristina swallows a mouthful of trout and washes it down with chilled, white Albariño. The wound on her hand has opened and a smear of blood appears on the sweating glass. I want to photograph the moment. 'My world, my lens, is the bull ring. I walk into the sun in my traje de luces, and I walk into the centre of the world.'

  'But I don't understand ...'

  'No you do not and you never will.'

  'Why do you have to kill it? Why such a ritual of death?'

  'I say again you do not understand and you never will. Ah,' and she smiles a crooked smile, 'I have said these things so many times to the English. You with your puppy dogs and gatos.'

  I feel my anger surge as the clouds lower and fill with shadows. 'It's got nothing to do with fucking puppy dogs. I just think it's barbaric.'

  'Barbaric?' She frowns. 'I do not see how you can say it is on one side a ritual and on the other barbaric.'

  'I think it's inhumane.'

  'But the bull is not human.' She lights a cigarette and blows smoke up to the smoking tumbrel of clouds. 'What do you know of los toros? What do you understand of the fighting?'

  'Enough to know it's wrong.'

  Cristina shrugs. 'In that case you know not enough. ¡Oiga!' She calls over a waiter and ordered a bottle of pacharán and two glasses. Again she shrugs and smiles at me. 'Sometimes I drink too much. Not often but tonight I think, yes. I have so much to tell you that I must liquid my throat.' She pours the drinks from the boxy, dimpled bottle and settles back in her chair.

  'This is, I think, about something English do not have. It is about casa - the home, the family, the love you feel for what you know. For what is ... intimate. But beyond that there is calle - this is life. Calle is life. It is everything that is not the casa. It is everything we know. It is everything that cannot be controlled. It is the wild, the space that was here before humans, before us. It is love but perhaps more than that it is sex. This afternoon you and I walked the road of calle. It is life. It is everything outside the cocina, the kitchen, where we find easy love. The bull, el toro is calle.

  'I have not tried to tell before, like this. I have not tried to tell of these things in English. I have never cared enough. I find there are not words. I cannot say anything but casa and calle because I do not think that there are English words. It is about hunting, about finding space. About making space in life, in calle. The men who are matadors think it is about sex. They think it is erotic. It is not. It is a dance, a dance together.' She turns to me. 'Have you been close to el toro?'

  I watch her face, animated, made lively, made of life itself. 'No.'

  'Then you do not know what it is like. What the bull is like, what being near it is like. It is so big, so ... dangerous. I cannot say what I mean. It is the wild. It is so black, like night. It is so un ... untamed. It is the opposite, the opposite - what do I mean?' She places her scabbed hand on mine as she asks and I feel her blood on my skin.

  'Antithesis?'

  'Yes - the antithesis of humanity. It does not think. It is violent.'

  'We can be those things too.'

  'But we have choice.' She sits back and drinks deeply of the aniseed liquor, as if the point is settled. There is a blinding flare as electricity jumped from the earth and fat, buttery rain begins to fall. Thunder resonates in the bells hanging in the campanile. '¡Jesús!'

  We watch people scattering for cover beneath the colonnades, shielding their heads with damp newspaper, laughing and brushing at their shoulders. Soon our table is surrounded, as pedestrians pack under the canopy. Cristina does not notice them, not that she pays them no attention but she does not sense them.

  'Also there is the feel of the centre of my world. That you will never understand because you will never stand there in the same way. It is always hot, with much sun and there is no wind. Days like these are the best for la corrida. The traje is very heavy and inside you sweat but you must not show it. There is silence for a moment, a moment so short that many do not notice it. Just before the gate is open and the bull comes into the ring. Then there is the smell. There is the smell of dust and blood, but more than that. It is said that dogs can smell fear. When I stand, muleta at my side, as tall as I am able, I smell the bull before I see it. It is not the smell of fear, it is the opposite, the anti- ... the antithesis. It is the smell of rage.'

  A waiter pushes through the crowd around us, carrying a broom. He holds it in one hand and pushes at the fabric canopy over the road. A cascade of rain water bellies out, smashes on the cobbles. The crowd around us jumps back, shouting at him, jostling our table. Thunderous roars break out above our heads as lightning sizzles into a nearby hillside. A young woman screams. The static in the air tastes of copper; the atmosphere is singed. The crowd is becoming restless, sensing danger, and laughter has stopped. They shift uneasily, leaning into each other.

  'The matador has fifteen minutes to kill the bull, that is all. Fifteen minutes to hunt the beast. To bring it so, cuadrado.' She stretches out her arms and brings her hands together. 'You see? Legs like this. This opens up the back.' She runs a hand across my spine.

  'The shoulder blades?'

  'Yes. Then el estoque, the sword, will cut here.' Her fingers brush the back of my neck and I feel the short, fine hairs quiver to attention. 'The bull dies a good death.'

  Leaving the restaurant to run through the sheets of rain, I glance back at the restaurant and the crowd there looked penned, bovine. As far removed from the casa as they can bear to be.

  As we lie in the hotel bed, our movements slow and hot, the suit glimmering in the half-light, thunder breaks again and again over Santiago, shuddering the Baroque façade of the cathedral, rolling around the immense Praza do Obradoiro. The tongues of the bells shift and begin to sing as a hundred car alarms echo through the narrow streets. Against this cacophony we crawl back into our seductive black velvet sack.

  In the morning she throws open the shutters at dawn, to look over a sound-shattered, storm-cleansed city. The rain has washed away the heat of the past day and is lying in drying puddles. She lights a cigarette and sits on the ledge of the window, dressed only in a shirt. As I reach for my camera she tells me of the fight she lost. The bull - toro bravo - had turned her as she was blinded by sun blazing above the fluted, delicate pillars of the Plaza de Toros at Ronda. In the dust her muleta swirled and had maddened the bull. She tells me of its numbing weight crashing into her hip, its razor-coarse, greasy hide grazing her face. And she tells me of the moment when she knew - before the bull had turned and slammed into her - she would be gored. The horn entered her side below her rib and she was thrown across the table of the bull's shoulders as the picadores thundered in on their horses, thrusting at the bull with their lances. Her last memory before she landed in the blood-soaked dust was of a horse's glaring, accusing eye rolling in its socket, her traje de luces torn by bone. Again, as I photograph her she does not look at the camera but only at the square below.

  'When we left the café yesterday a man say something as I passed.' She smiles crookedly.

  'I know. I wanted to ask but, well, I didn't really want to know.'

  'He say "sinvergüenza". Without shame. Shameless one. They say this of a bad matador, a matador with fear. I think he say it because we left together. But the only time I have felt vergüenza was that afternoon as I lay in the blood.'

  We leave the next morning for Fuengirola on the coast of Andalucia, dragging the black trunk to the train station, through the crowds making their pilgrimage to the cathedral, its bells now silent. We travel to Madrid and change trains. I have known Cristina for a day and cannot now imagine my life without this harsh, often silent, foreign woman, driven by desires alien to me. As we rumble south, into a fiery, relentless, flat heat I know that she is dreaming of holding aloft in bloodied hands the severed ears of a bull, whilst lapping the ring of the Plaza de Toros de la Maestranza in Seville.

  We hardly speak during the hours we spend on the train. I send e-mails via my lap top, trying to persuade my agent that a portrait of a female matador will sell. At first Cristina is fascinated by the idea that I can instantly send messages across the world but her interest soon fades and she smiles indulgently and moves away. I feel foolish as I play with the trappings of my life - mobile phones, lap tops, lenses, tripods, filters - whilst she imagines Lorca's 'authentic religious drama' in the plaza de toros as it had been acted out for centuries. Her life revolves around blood and heat, and mine around the micro-chip and circles of fine ground glass. I pack my toys away and watch her reflection in the window of the carriage, shadowed as ever. As I photograph her she begins to speak in a murmur.

  'The why, the reason I have told you all I have told you ... can you guess?' Her voice scrapes gently, her words like flakes of ash falling through air.

  'No.'

  'Because as a man you have never talked of me as a woman doing this. Doing what I do. You have not said I should not do it because I am a woman.'

  I know now that her telling me of her fighting is more important to her than the laughter, the sex, the food we have shared. 'No, but I have said that it shouldn't be done at all. I've said that there is no reasonable motive. Whether it's a man or a woman who severs the bull's spinal cord is immaterial.'

  The reflection in the window smiles faintly, a ghostly smile which fades against the passing scrub and desert land of the interior. 'That is not what I meant. I am talking of the fact that me being a woman is of no matter to you. To be a female matador is to be a female man for the people in Spain. You do not understand what it is like. There is no calle for women. There is only casa. When I dress in my traje de luces I undress every man I have ever known.'

*

  These photographs of her reflection in the train carriage window are the images that haunt me - the matador before the fight, staring, ghost-like. She is a phantom looking at the infinite, ruined heart of Spain. Her face is calm, ephemeral in the glaring light and already she seems insubstantial, a chimera fading before the fight.

*

  Los ganaderos, the ranch owners, in the hills behind Mijas are known for their arrogance, for their secrecy, for their almost tribal isolation. They believe they breed the best bulls, los toros bravos without equal, and for this reason the dates of their tentaderos are shrouded in mystery, in speculation. The tentadero, Cristina has told me, is the time of testing, of testing young bulls and matadors before the season, temporada, begins. No ranch owner may turn away a matador on these days and so the voice of the calendar falls silent. Yet she has heard that there is a tentadero in the hills before her next fight. She tells me this as we lie in a boxy, soulless apartment in the town of Fuengirola, the last stop on the rail line leading south.

  A few days later we hire a four-wheeler and drive up through Mijas before dawn, into the scrub-blasted, water-fractured foothills, passing through small, contained villages, shuttered against the rising heat. We see groups of hunters, long-barrelled guns slung casually over their crooked arms, eyes glinting in the shock of the rising sun. They lock far-distant looks on Cristina as she drives, their eyes accustomed to tracking moving, unpredictable prey from a distance. She drives as she eats - like a man, aggressively, too fast on the tight, joint-squeezing curves, one arm casually slung over the open window. And she chain-smokes for the entire journey, dropping one cigarette and lighting another. She does not speak, she only smokes and drives us deeper and deeper into the hills, and in the ever sparser villages people watch us as we speed through, their eyes never settling on me, following only her. Old men with glasses of cerveza, slices of tortilla poised between plate and mouth, seem posed for eternity as they watch us pass, clouds of white silica dust billowing behind the jeep. I ache to ask her to stop so that I can photograph them but this journey, this summer, belongs to her.

  Cristina shifts into second as we begin to drop into a valley and she speaks for the first time. 'When we get to the ranch you say nothing. OK? This is an agreement. You say nothing. It will not be easy.' She sighs, lights yet another Fortuna. 'It will not be easy.'

  'Why not? They can't turn you away. You said so.'

  'Because I am a woman. You will see.'

  We reach the gates of the ranch ten minutes later and I gather together my cameras and lenses as she hauls an old, faded traje de luces from the back of the jeep, the suit she wears for practice. There are three muscle-bound men waiting at the large wrought-iron gates, calling guttural, meaningless, friendly insults to each other, the sibilance in their voices clouded by the spade-like tongue of Andalucia as cigarettes pass between them. Their calls fall away as she walks to the gate, her ancient suit flashing in the light. My poor grasp of Spanish means I cannot understand what is said at the gates but language isn't necessary. The bodies of these three gorillas speak. They move towards her in the same way as the hunters in the hills would have done, jostling for attention yet faintly mocking. I stand by the jeep and take pictures as they close in. Language is not necessary because when men move towards women in a certain way it is for the same reason across the world. I know this and hold my breath as tightly as I hold the Hasselblad, knowing Cristina does not want me to speak. She stands in the heat and dust, as silent, as inflexible as a statue, until the ranch-owner is called and - reluctantly - opens the gate to admit her. She gestures to me to follow and as I move the three guards drift towards me. I stop, camera in hand, covered in dust, the dust mingling with sweat. She calls out in her heavy, abrasive voice, and I am allowed to walk through the gates.

  I am unmanned, emasculated. I have been undressed by her.

  Yet as I capture the tentadero, lashing the day to film, I know I am framing and composing the best photographs I have ever taken. Cristina looks over to me again and again as she moves around the corrals and small, rustic arena, her eyes flaring. The elusive has finally presented itself to me.

  The light is flat, unforgiving. Each person's face is as ugly as it might be; it is, after all, a time for honesty. The rough-hewn planks of the pens look diseased as they wrap around each other. The sun shifts shadows in the grain of that world and I begin to appreciate what she has said about the smell of the ring as the young bulls, novillos, redolent of faeces and testosterone, barrel around the constrained calle whilst she swirls her muleta, disciplined as a ballerina, graceful and artful as a dancer. The young matadors, the novilleros who had turned their backs as she entered the pens gather to watch her, grudgingly applauding her style, her finesse, her aggression, as she sweats and laughs, unconcerned and complete in the oven of the sun, dressed in an old suit of lights.

  As that same sun drops to meet the Azores she joins me, perching on the splintered rails of a fence enclosing the ranch. Her face is flushed, sweat running in runnels down her face as she gulps from a bottle of Casera. She lights a Fortuna and leans against me and for this I love her. Because I know that the men who watch her want her. I know that the men who had jostled her, laughed at her, goaded her only hours before now want her.

  'Fue bien,' she says, her suit hard and ungiving, digging into my skin. 'It was good. I am good.' She laughs. 'I am the best I have ever been. I feel it here.' And she puts my hand on her shoulder, ball and socket, gristle and muscle sliding beneath the fine skin. 'And here.' She touches her ankle, brushes the tendons there. 'That is where the dance begins. I am moving like water.' My hand rests on her shoulder and the black eyes of the novilleros watch me. 'Drive me home. I am tired.'

  I drive timidly through the passes of the foothills, headlights swooping over trees and gorse, firing wild eyes, as she tells me what she plans. Next Sunday she will fight once more at Ronda, the only place she has felt shame. Then, and only then, can she fight at the Plaza de Toros de la Mastranza in Seville. As we drop down towards the coast, the garish lights of Puerto Banus confusing me after the darkness of the interior, she explains what she intends at Ronda. Her voice grows sleepy, as if she is speaking in a dream, her cigarette smoke filling the jeep.

  'There is a ...a move? a gesture? we can make in the ring. It is called the estocada recibiendo. Do you know it?'

  I am tired, sun-baked and sleepy, the on-coming head-lights dazzling me as I turn onto the carretera. I shake my head.

  'It means that instead of making the bull like so, cuadrado,' and she holds out her arms, wrists together, as she had in Santiago, 'you wait for the bull to come to you. To run for you and then you lean over like so,' and she leans over the wheel, 'and then you place the sword. As it runs for you. Receiving the kill.'

  The car travelling behind flashes and careens out around us on the curve by the lighthouse where the road hangs over the ocean. I swerve violently, mesmerised by the flimsy steel barricades at the side of the road. The jeep fishtails and then straightens. 'Fuck! Did you see that? I mean, did you see that?'

  'Yes,' Cristina says, and falls asleep, her head resting against the hard glass of the window.

*

  Everyone pauses at some time in their life - in a field, in a diner, in a bank, in a lover's bed - to wonder how they might have acted differently, to wonder how a moment may have changed events. Perhaps a look, a silence, a grimace which might have meant nothing, could change the course of our lives. So I pause now in my pacing and I wonder. That night an anonymous car swooped around us on the murderous highway that runs along the Mediterranean and I didn't listen to what she was saying. Or, rather, I listened but I didn't hear.

*

  Cristina wakes me the morning of her fight in Ronda and asks me in her sand-blasted voice if I will help her.

  'Help? What d'you mean?'

  'Today I want you to be with me until I ask you not to be. When I ask you to go.'

  'To go where?'

  'To go to your place.'

  'You know I'll help you. What d'you want me to do?'

  She pulls herself up, rests against the headboard of the bed and lights another of her endless cigarettes. I reach for my camera but she shakes her head slightly.

   'When you wish to be a matador there are things you must do. Ways you must behave. But these ways,' and here she opens her hands, turns her palms to the blistered ceiling, 'they are for men. You must get apoderado, you must have money. The novilleros, the young men, they travel together. They play frontón, they drink in the squares, they train and run together. The young women follow them. They help each other. They know the dates of the tentaderos. But if you are a woman?' She makes a sound I cannot make, by sucking her teeth as if she has eaten soft chocolate nougat. This sound means many things. 'Ah - if you are a woman? There are no apoderados, there is no money. I practise alone, I do not go with them in packs, in groups. I am alone. It is much harder. You can be good, as a woman matador, and it means nothing. You can do the same as the men, perhaps even better, with more ... more style, and it means nothing.

  'There is a matador, Cristina Sànchez. She was one of the first woman to be a torero. She is among the best but still they would not allow her to become a matador in Spain. She had to have an alternativa in Nîmes. A year ago they did the same for me. She went to the academy of bullfighting in Madrid, one woman with a hundred men. She came out third but still Spain said she could not fight as a matador. I came out seventh. In there, in the academy I learnt what it is to be alone. Last week Cristina walked away from la corrida. Corta la coleta because of the men. Because she couldn't be alone any more. Now I am the only one.'

  She sighs and turns away from me, curling into a tight ball of misery. 'I have no friends because the women I knew think I am crazy, they think I want to be a man. I have not seen my family for twelve years. I have not seen my mamá for twelve years.' And her voice is like slow-moving glue as she tries not to cry. 'The men, when they dress for los toros in their trajes de luces, they have friends to watch them. I must always dress alone. I hear them laughing and shouting and I must dress alone. Even my mamá is not there.' She cries then, my matador without shame, because her mother has not helped her dress for twelve years.

  As we drive to Ronda I tell Cristina that I have already seen the Plaza de Toros in Ronda when it was empty of people, seen the tendidos, the stalls, tilt towards the sky in ordered harmony, seen the pillars supporting the sculpted roof of the arena, stretching to heaven. I tell her I have stood at the vast wooden dog-leg gate, arrastre de toros, where the bull bursts into the ring, and she smiles faintly. I have even walked to the centre of that dusty bowl and turned full circle, trying to people the seats, conjure the sounds, feel the burning heat, imagine the bull. Trying to turn the kaleidoscope of images, of smells, of sounds and tastes in my hands until they form a pattern I can understand, and now she laughs aloud. But I do not tell her that I failed. For nothing in my imagination could conjure the bedlam, the sensory coruscation that is la corrida.

  Later, in a small, dark room in the bowels of the bullring in Ronda, I watch her open the black trunk and prepare to fight. I photograph her as she pulls on spangled breeches, thick and jewelled, hugging the thick, coarse tights beneath. Her shirt, even in the gloom of the tiny cell is dazzling white against the limp, black knot at her throat. Her movements, as she slips the seemingly delicate black zapatillas on her feet are sure and practiced. She has, after all, been rehearsing for twelve years, waiting for an audience. Cristina turns to the long mirror on the wall and knots her coletà, her blonde, tight pigtail. Her face is set and empty. Even as I photograph her doing this she does not look at the camera.

  Finally she takes the chaquetilla from its hanger and stands, perfectly balanced, poised, detached, the jacket in her hand, imagining the scent of rage as my shutter closes again and again. With a liquid movement she shrugs the jacket over her shoulders and snaps it around her, brushing at the thick, armoured epaulettes. She picks her montera from the trunk - an object redolent of the ridiculous and the religious; I could imagine it worn in the hushed, cold corridors of the Vatican - and dangles it in her loose, callused hand. She says, 'It is time for you to go. This is your first corrida. Do not miss anything.'

  'What? Now?'

  'Yes.' She sees my disappointment and smiles. 'OK. Maybe. You want to come with me now? I must have a cigarette.'

  We walk through the labyrinth of white-washed tunnels beneath the ring and come to a ramp leading to a square of blinding Andalusian sunlight. Shading our eyes we walk through the doors to find a mess of trucks and dollies, men running back and forth, calling to each other. Loops of chains clank overhead, strung from pulleys. The chrome and steel of the vermilion trucks burn and the white walls, scarred with strange, dark markings, dance on my retinas.

  'Where are we? I mean, who are all these people?' I ask, view-finder snapped to my eye, my fingers adjusting shutter speed.

  'Monsabios. The butchers' boys.'

  'Butcher's boys?' I drop my camera and turn to her, only to see her frowning, sweating in the heavy suit.

  'Viento. There is too much wind.' She blows cigarette smoke and watches it whip away. 'There is too much. Look.' She points to a flag flapping in the car park.

  'Does that matter?'

  'Maybe.'

  Suddenly I feel oppressed by the heat, by the sound of chains, by the vastness of the blood-red trucks. 'Listen - you don't have to do this.'

  'But I do. I must ... I must cumplir. I must do what I have to do. I have ...' she shrugs '... pundonor. It is my duty.' Her rough hand reaches out to touch my cheek. 'There is something Cristina Sanchez' padrino said that I never forgot. "Women caress better and as you know, bullfighting is all about caresses." I must go and caress el toro.' She has been seen, now, by the men unloading crates. They begin to point and talk behind hands, smiling and leering. 'Now you must go. Go to your place and it will begin.' She kisses my cheek, then turns and walks back down the night-dark tunnel to join her cuadrilla, her team of killers.

  My place, when I find it, is not a seat, it is in a standing area in front of the contrabarrera, on the shadowed side, not far from the gate where the bulls will thunder into the ring. Sol y sombra - sun and shade. Where should the camera be? I tried to photograph her walking into the tunnel, from white light into shadows but it wasn't successful. Here, in the ring, the players in this drama will move from light to shade in a moment. The smell of sweat and beer and stale blood hangs on the air, as the sun hammers overhead. Around me people are calling to each other, arguing, shouting and cajoling. The areneros are sweeping and smoothing the sand as mobile phones chirrup, as fans flap and hands wave. I imagine Cristina emerging into the semi-light of the callejón, the corridor where the matadors wait behind the barriers. She will be standing alone.

  Eventually a ragged, almost reluctant silence falls as the president waves his handkerchief and the ritual begins. My hands are sweating and I find it difficult to change the oil-slick-fine lenses and filters. I rummage in my bag for a red filter to enhance the contrasts between black and white, searching for converters, and so it is that I miss Cristina entering the ring. I look up and squint at the sun-slammed dust and she is there, taller than I remember and so still. I juggle films and cameras, trying to snare the elements of ritual as the picadores and banderilleros move into place, leaving her, the matador who that morning had cried for her mother, alone in the centre of the arena.

  To my right I hear a door slam back, feel a rumble in my feet. I swivel the camera and zoom in on the bull, blinking in the sudden day. My camera falls from my eye. This is beyond all my imaginings. The toros at the tentadero had been young, lean and unformed. But this is a toro bravo, el catedral, this is the brother of the animal that had torn out her rib. It could tear out her heart with a shake of its head. I look at my hands, tanned and trembling, and manage somehow to slot a converter between the lens and the body of the camera. I refocus on the bull. I can see every bristle, every wart on its snout. I pull up a little and zoom in on its eye, its blood-black-red, unthinking eye, without dimension in the midday sun. A smell distracts me as I snap the shutter over and over. At first I cannot place it and then realise that this is the smell of rage. Again I drop the camera, which thuds on my chest. I look blindly for Cristina, and see her finally, searching for me with her eyes, turning to me and bowing low, her cap sweeping before her. A paper fan, dropped by a careless spectator bowls across the ring, kicking up small puffs of dust as Cristina prepares herself and it is then that I hear, or, rather, sense the moment of silence.

  Perhaps it is the fan that causes the bull to bellow and charge. Perhaps it is the heat and the scent of thousands of humans, their muttering and their merely mild interest. Perhaps it is the sight of a tall, cobalt-eyed woman in a phosphorescent suit standing only feet away, playing with a ruby cloth, ignoring him. The bull runs at her, bawling, incandescent, and she steps aside, draws it left with a twitch of her muleta. I remember the feel of her shoulder. I hear Cristina's voice: 'I am good. I am good.' She is in the centre of her world and it is talking to her, roaring at her. I pick up my camera once more. I have fewer than fifteen minutes to capture this savage dance. I am only dimly aware of the silence falling like leaves in the arena as the crowd begins to admire her, admire her style, is won over by her finesse.

  Through the convex fish-eye of my lens I watch the tercio de varas, watch the picadores goading the bull, as if that is needed, with their lances, tearing ragged holes in the bull's shoulders. Then comes the tercio de banderillas, when the swivelling, glittering banderilleros thrust darts into the wounds, Cristina directing the animal with her cape, making this appear languid, effortless. She is playing with, dancing with, the bull.

  I fight the urge to focus only on Cristina, try to capture the sense of sound, heat and fury, the feel of the sun, the dust swirling, the immensity of the bull. But I do zoom in on her for a moment, as the tercio de muleta begins, fumbling with my tripod as the bull gathers itself for another charge, the banderillas waving gaudily from its bloodied, weakened shoulders. I watch Cristina through the lens as she draws herself together. Her face is streaming with sweat, her sapphire eyes narrowed, and she stands rigid and poised, blinking furiously to throw the sweat from her eyes. Her arms strain to hold the muleta still in the wind as the beast snorts and curvets obscenely against the fence nearby. I hear planks creak, feel the smack of vast hooves against the wood. It charges, bellowing with pain, the undulating muscles in its flanks catching the light. As beast and woman meet in a cloud of dust, she is obscured for a too-long moment, her suit of lights dimmed. Yet again I move away from the camera only to see her flourish the cape in a figure of eight, quiquiriquí, and swivel on her heels, curving her fine, beautiful body away from the bulk of the bull. I glance at my watch. She has four minutes.

  Again and again the animal charges, blinded by fury, driven by pride, and each time she arches away from it, leans over it, dances a sympathetic step. The crowds roar as she performs the more difficult of the matador's moves - the mariposa, the pase por alto, de rodillas, revolera, estatuario; roar again as she stands desplante, daring the bull to gore her, her hand reaching out gently to brush the bull's forehead as it passes. As she does this I know she is seeking the beast's forgiveness. El catedral comes to a slow, stuttering halt beyond her, and staggers, swaying a little. He drops his head and lows a call of such empty misery that I feel tears gathering. Through my fractured sight I look once more through the zoom.

  Cristina is walking slowly, with the same lonely near-lope I saw in the square at Santiago, away from the bull, her back turned. She stops in the centre of the arena. La hora de la verdad has arrived - the moment of truth, and a pall of silence descends on the crowd. She is not walking towards this maddened, stinking, ebony animal, streaked with the blood pouring from its massive neck; she is waiting for the beast to come to her, armed only with a short sword. Ariadne and the Minotaur are locked in combat. Cristina drops the glorious, dusty muleta to her side and turns to face el toro. The bull's legs buckle for a moment and then recover as it gazes at her. I catch its eye in the lens once more and still see the uncomprehending black-blood-red rage there. I focus on one of the horns - asta - and see that it is as sharp as intolerance. El catedral gathers himself like a wave breaking and charges for the last time, scattering a trail of blood.

  Cristina is smiling as she grips the curving estoque, smiling in a way I have never seen. The crowd around me know what should follow and they are frenzied with expectation. It is then that I remember what she said in the Jeep as it hung for a moment over the Mediterranean, another car speeding past. La estocada recibiendo - receiving the kill, the most dangerous finale. I try to swallow as my forefinger slams the shutter closed again and again, the autodrive chattering.

  As the wounded bull thunders toward the beautiful, enigmatic, always lonely matador, a blast of wind kicks up the shimmering ruby tail of the muleta at her side and whips it in a flurry around her. She reels backwards, tries to readjust, tries to save herself, but I know that she is miscalculating the path of the dying animal. As calle slams into casa, as toro bravo smashes into Cristina, I keep photographing the moment because my world is talking to me. I cannot think or breathe as I see her carried on the spike of the bull's horn through the bloodied clouds of dust.

  The crowds leap to their feet baying for blood - as if there is not enough. My gorge rises, my throat closes, but still my finger slams the shutter. The picadores ride out, lances poised by the horses' sides, and still I photograph the moment. The moment.

  The screams and shouts of the crowd around me become desperate as they watch her skewered body being thrown from side to side as the bull dances its stuttering, dying fall. Eventually the picadores bring el catedral to his knees, and he sinks slowly, lowering Cristina with some grace to the ground. I find I am crying, that I have been for a long time.

  The wind at Ronda escalates, swirls uncertainly around the Plaza de Toros as the crowds subside, their eyes blank. But they lean towards each other, some whispering, some crying, some sitting with their heads bowed. They remind me of the penned mob which had surrounded our table under the colonnades of Santiago.

  The mulillas, the team of servile mules, are led into the ring by the costumed monsabios. The butcher's boys have arrived. For a shocked moment I think they have come for her but then they begin to heave the toro bravo across the ground, chains straining, leaving a bloody smear in the sand.

*

  Aristotle argued that time is unitary, that it does not flow but passes before us like a film, frame by frame. Yet, he said, there are an infinite number of frames between each pair and that is why our lives do not judder as these frames flick past. I can only think that I believed Aristotle that afternoon; that the reason I tried to capture some of the frames of our lives is because I believed there would always be an infinite number of other moments for Cristina.

  I spend my days now in this empty room, empty but for photographs. I look again and again at the pictures of that afternoon, frozen moments, startling in their clarity, dynamic in their composition, unerring in their choice of frame, of content. I won many awards for these images, saw them published across the globe. All but one - Cristina's ghostly reflection in the train's window as she looked into Spain's ruined heart. That picture I have kept for myself alone.

  I hold up the last photograph I have taken. It is of Cristina - of her limp, broken body being taken away from me, her suit dulled by blood. As always when I look at her face, words I first heard in a classroom years ago echo within me: 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light'. I rage, I rage.

*

  There are seven stories in this world and this one is mine.

Back to top

Copyright 1999 AZX LLC