To the Fiesta

"Where's Dick?" I asked when I got up from my midday nap.

"I don't know.  He and Linda took off in the car somewhere."

"What?  He told me he had to get something out of the trunk.  Sonofabitch."

They wouldn't be back.  They'd seen enough of Pamplona, and now they had absconded with one of the four cars we had rented.  I still had a bag in the trunk.

It was late afternoon and people were coming in and out making plans for the evening.  I hooked up with some of my friends to wander back into town to find something to eat.  Only three days into the festival, we were already beginning to look ragged.  But it wasn't just us.  In town, you could tell who had been here since the first day and who had only just arrived.  The tired staleness was being constantly renewed as fresh revelers came to take part.  It would be impossible, I thought, to stay with this for eight days.  No one could do it and not be eternally ruined.

And so we walked in the ever more crowded lanes and streets jostled by Europeans whose sense of personal space was much different than mine.  I had a sort of cowboy's idea, I guess, about how close a stranger ought to get to you, and before I knew it, the lack of sleep and the constant press of humanity had gotten to me.  A fellow we were walking near kept bumping me over and over again, and thinking it was some sort of domination thing, I went . . American. . . on him, but the look on his face was of pure astonishment.  "What's wrong?" he said in English though I could tell from his accent he was German or Dutch.  I just gritted my teeth and looked away feeling stupid.  Energies were ebbing and flowing, the madness beginning to creep in.

After dinner in a crowded little tapas bar where we ate jambon and cheese and little fried octopus and squid chased down with glasses of beer, we went back into the street.  And nothing had changed.  It was exactly as we had left it, crowded with yelling people running here and there, music pumping from open doors, festival performers wandering all around.  It was dark now, and as we wandered looking, I guess, for the next bar, I sensed a little danger creeping into the dynamics of our group.  Brando was with a Spanish woman who lived in the states, a woman who had met up with us a few days before.  She was a cute brunette whose relationship with Brando had somehow gotten weird, and just now walking through the drunken carnival streets, she was flirting with a long-time nemesis of Brando's a bit too openly.  I didn't want to watch this particular tragedy unfold, I knew, and so I said I was going back to the room.  Nobody seemed to notice.  And so I dropped behind and watched them disappear into the crowd and the night glad now to be alone.  I was near a park where people were camping and decided to wander over there for a bit just to see.  All about were people in sleeping bags and tents or just lying in their clothes upon the ground fitfully sleeping or simply passed out.  I sat on a little bench that was surprisingly free and looked out over the city and the carnage thinking, "I've seen it, seen what Hemingway had written."   But I knew it was not true.  When Hemingway came, it was a smaller event, a local religious festival that attracted many fewer people.  Hemingway was notable for being an American, then, and he wanted to be taken as someone who got it, someone "who knew," an aficionado."  This thing that I was partaking of was nothing like that but a parody of the fiasco that Hemingway had written, more of a college spring break than religious festival.  It was a grand display of human foibles on a large and hideous scale.

And having sat and thought for a long while, I got up and walked back to the dorm room alone.  There were a few people there when I arrived, some, like me, ready for sleep.  I lay down on a mattress with one of the girls in the group, a single, and we turned our backs to one another in hopes of getting some rest.

I was woken by a scream.  Then a bump and a thump.

"Help, help. . . he's trying to kill me!"  I looked at the girl next to me and there was nothing to do but to go and see, though I didn't really want to.

It was the Spanish girl's voice, the one that was there with Brando.  When I opened the door into the hallway, my big friend who had grabbed the bull by the horns was stepping out from another room, too.  We looked at one another and with simultaneous shrugs, we walked to where the screams were coming.  It was a closet.  And when we opened the door, there was Brando on top of the Spanish woman, his hands around her throat.  He looked back at us with a startled mania in his eyes and spittle on his lips.  We were all too shocked to really move, but then Brando let her go, jumped up, and ran out into the night.  We looked at the woman lying there crumpled upon the clothing that had fallen from the hangers and wracks.

"What happened?"

"He got pissed off," she sobbed.  "He said I was flirting with Heath all night.  He hates Heath and he took it out on me."

Just then I noticed that Heath was standing behind us.  I looked at him as if with question.

"Fuck him," he said.  "He's flirted with every girlfriend I've ever had.  He deserves anything he gets."

And I knew it was true.  Brando had tried, occasionally with success, to screw every girlfriend or wife he'd ever met.  It was supposed to be part of his charmingly roguish character, I guess, because he had never really had to take a beating for it.  Now Heath stood looking downright satisfied.  And in a little while, having gotten the Spanish woman settled down, we all wandered back off to try to get some sleep.

Yes, I thought, this is it.  The is the fiesta I have so long desired.