The Fata Morgana Books by Jonathan Littell, Charlotte Mandell

arched, using his voice and his cape to encourage the animal to charge, which it always ended up doing; then, motionless, feet together and chest proudly flung out, the man would calmly make the animal flow around him, like a current eddying around a rock. I had, of course, had the rules of the game explained to me: nothing required the man to remain in place, to offer his belly or his loins to the horn, so close sometimes that it snagged the gilt decorations on his costume; it was a question of etiquette, which in this affair was everything; wounds or death weren’t taken into consideration. And now the man was getting ready to kill the bull; drawn up onto the tips of his toes, turned sideways, he was aiming his long curved sword at the back of the bull’s neck, straight between the horns of the exhausted animal, doomed but still raging; his left hand with its piece of red flannel crossed in front of his body, he dove straight in; a moment later, he was bouncing on the horns, a limp puppet, a rag doll, grotesque in his beautiful gilt costume, as if he were to remain caught up there forever, while his assistants rushed in shouting and vainly waving their capes. Finally he fell to the ground, the men drove the animal back, others tried to carry away the wounded man; “It’s nothing,” he seemed to say as he got up and grasped the sword held out to him, “it’s nothing.” He returned to stand facing the bull. His face, his hands, his shining outfit were coated in blood; arched back, in profile, he held his sword up with his fingertips, in a perfect triangle with his arm, as if to salute his adversary, and he stared at it with two round, black eyes, empty of all thought except the perfection of the gesture to be repeated, eyes that gazed at the animal to be killed the same way they would have gazed at a mirror. Then he made one swift gesture, and already he was turning his back on the staggering bull, dragged into the ballet of capes thrown under its muzzle, the sword planted to the hilt in its neck; he walked away without turning back, toward the red barrier, as the animal collapsed heavily behind him, its four hooves in the air, pointed at the sky.
* * *
That night, I found myself in a cellar; on a stage in the back, some men dressed in black, sitting on simple wooden chairs, their feet flat on the stage, were playing music. It was very beautiful; but to tell the truth, what I especially liked was the curtain drawn behind them, a long curtain with folds of garnet velvet, illumined with a bright light. Someone had handed me a drink, red also, in a tall, straight glass, I didn’t really know what it was, wine perhaps; I was sitting at a little round table, in the company of many people, I didn’t quite know who they were; my friend must have been there, but maybe he had gone away. After a while, a few young women came out onto the stage, wearing long black dresses spangled with red dots, like fat blood-red moons scattered across a night sky; they danced with stiff movements, yet their stiffness was strangely supple, forming and then unmaking squares and circles; when they twirled, upright and proud, their ample skirts flew around their fine muscular legs, opening up into large fluid circlets, like the wheel of a cape spun out behind his back by a haughty matador ending a series of passes by bringing his bull to its knees. The women stood out from the red curtain like shadows, they whirled round clicking their heels; they were made even more present by these rhythmic sounds and the figures they formed, static, almost clumsily linked figures, like the poorly connected passes of a novice still unsure of his animal, than by their bodies eclipsed behind the cloth of the moon-dresses; only the sweat soaking their armpits, visible when they raised their arms to snake their wrists around and snap their fingers, reminded one from time to time of their materiality. I was slowly getting drunk, and this drunkenness made me