Short fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Bullfighter's Daughter, Or, Ariadne's Alchemy.
From the archives: Originally published in The Vanity Papers Issue 01. SPACE
THE BULLFIGHTER’S DAUGHTER, OR, ARIADNE’S ALCHEMY
GEORGIE CARROLL
I’m not proud of what I do, go to Blanca’s room every night, sit on the edge of the bed, but that’s all I do. She’s plump and white as a scallop, except her hair, urchin black and everywhere, knotted in the silver threads of the pillow. I’m not proud, but I don’t do it with a conscious mind. I’m a somnambulist, though people won’t take that for an excuse. You know he never gave that paper in the end, Freud, “Dreams and Telepathy” (1922), probably because he didn’t know what to believe one way or the other, but he considered it possible that the sleeping milieu had special properties for telepathy, which I aim to show in my work, it does.
To step out of the night for a moment. This morning I went to El Minotaurio. Sat in my usual table in the corner where there’s more space for me to spread out with my books and articles. I come here on sabbatical every seven years to research my own project into the unconscious mind at the University libraries. I say good morning to the waiter when he brings me one of those horns stuffed with cream, and he never replies. I’ve usually been half-awake all night so the mornings are still weird and shapeless. The August air is so fraught here it makes you want to do something to break out of it. Something bad. Anything.
I leave the bar and walk along the dark wrinkle of the Darro River, across a small bridge and go up, to where you’re trapped in the emerald breaths of trees and the palace water flows on either side of you in gutters, cool and clean as silver rings. It’s difficult to be sure of reality. The city is so beautiful it makes you nauseous. Once, after looking up at the palace for too long, I threw up in one of the fountains in a square. The Alhambra, “The Red One,” haunts you even when she is, as she is rarely, out of sight, her forest green skirts, her labyrinths above and below, the garden maze and subterranean cells. I find it tiring that I can’t see all of her at once, that it’s impossible to take her in. I sit up there, with the bronze verdigris lions and spewing green men in the walls, and draw. The same things usually come out, devils and lots of strange symbols whose meaning one day I’ll look into.
She’s strikingly changed now in every way, Blanca, except for how she studies me sometimes, skeptically, with lizard-green eyes. She has taken to sleeping a lot, to pushing expensive cuts of meat around her plate. Often, in the daytimes, she is made to suffer the infernal heat of the bullring in a mantilla of white pom poms like eggs spread over her head, with all of the other girls, Candelaria, Asunción, Inmaculada, in their black lace dresses, black gloves, black eyeliner. In the evenings, now she is older, we smoke cigarettes together. The smoke rises and joins that heavy, white summer sky, mixes with the white houses in the Jewish quarter, the whitewashed caves, the white villages in the distant mountains. As it gets dark, our smoke joins the coal smoke from the streets, the sugary stars, the sickle moon. She eats black pudding on charred bread and tells me things, in her teenage, saturnine way, as if she’s purging herself of them, such as, as I take a piece of the burnt bread from her, how she wants to hold a rifle like her brother, wear his black boots; how she collects dead spiders in a glass jar because it is the only way she can punish her mother for frightening her by being unhappy. She tells me, for example, how she sometimes sees her mother pick the flowers off of the three trees on the terrace, after being in a particularly black mood, and how, the next time she goes down to the street, throws the white petals into the gutter, comes back and the colour is restored in her face. She either trusts me or forgets that I’m there. One evening she talked about Javi who asked her what she liked, attacking her frantically behind the right ear with his aniseed breath, and how it’d felt like a trick question: You, she’d said.
Sometimes I give her one of my cigarettes, which I make with the oleander plant, actually, which has a flower like a rose, and the root is red and fat. The cigarettes give off the smell of wine. It makes the mood more cheerful, as well as making dreams more pronounced.
I know what she dreams, and you’ll have to take my word for that.
She’s always so gloomy that it brings out that feeling in me too. (I’m prone to dark moods, much darker than hers.) I’ve tried to cheer her up by showing her the asterisms, telling her about stars as a form of handwriting, star names and the astronomers of Al-Andalus, showing her pictures of their celestial maps and quadrants; told her how the Greco-Roman gods were reduced to demons in the post-classical age, to stars and metals. One night I even revealed an original medieval book of fixed stars I stole that is now considered lost forever (one of my finest achievements), but even that didn’t brighten her. After a while she goes off to bed, and so do I, and then I go to her, I suppose. It’s only a short walk down the hill from Sacromonte, the gitano quarter where I’ve been staying (since the “incident”) but it’s a miracle I make it there every night along the dark, snaking road, through the gate, in through the kitchen, up the stairs, all the time asleep.
A few days ago, I came back from my walk at four, or thereabouts, having made some excuse to go to the house rather than to my place where I usually have a nap around that time. I’d decided I’d say something about wanting to borrow One Thousand and One Nights translated into Spanish by Navarro Pardo (I’ve always been more interested in the idea of The Nights than the stories themselves, but it was the first thing that popped into my head). By some incredible luck, Blanca was in the dim of the family ‘library’ (generous if you ask me), the soft undersides of her feet propped up pink and succulent. She was fast asleep in an armchair under the staircase, in squarish black clothes, her arms and the tops of her legs smooth and creamy as chess pieces.
I can’t say Blanca hasn’t influenced my last two visits to Granada. There’s something that fascinates me about the dreams of young women. They are a matter of social importance, though there isn’t space to go into all of that, and anyway, my concern is with the psychological and philosophical questions.
I found myself spellbound by a taurine dream of Blanca’s from when she was a child, that, over the last seven years, has somehow infected my own unconscious mind. Ever since I encountered the white bull in her dreams there’s been a whiteness that’s run through my own, as if a glass of milk has been spilt inside my mind. Every now and then I’ll dream of the bull, and somehow know it’s because she is dreaming of him, too.
It’s funny, the way you experience someone else’s dream because you orbit it and yet you feel it, as if you were the original dreamer. She never experienced any fear of the bull at all. In fact, it was only when the bull came in, snorting and scraping its hooves in the dark, and sat at the foot of the bed (like the moon) that she would drift off to sleep within the dream, into what is considered by dream scholars to be the darkest, most delphic dreamscape, a pocket within a pocket of the unconscious, if you like. That part of a dream, by the way, is almost impossible for anyone else to access. I was introduced to a man at a sleep and dreaming convention in Venice, who’d been working on the deep dream state, had entered it and become ‘trapped’. He was a youngish man, in a wheelchair, who dribbled long diamond strands of what he thought were words into medieval books of dreams. He tried to point at things but, not being able to make himself understood, got frustrated, and launched himself screaming out of the chair. I’ve been deeply affected by that image, both afraid and fascinated. It’s partly the reason I’ve come back.
And so there I was, that afternoon watching her sleep, Volume IV of The Nights on my lap, so I could account for my presence if I had to, fingering the shining peacock on the cover. You have to take every opportunity. Leafing through the contents I had already seen there was one story I wanted to read, “The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream.” She was fast asleep, her head resting on the cinnabar pink of her warm chest. I remembered her face, the last time, ten I suppose she must have been, seven whole years ago, a different creature. She was silvery pink then, like ice-cream, and though she was called Blanca I told her that she could be all of the colours, like a unicorn, if we called her Rita, which means pearl. It happens to have been my mother’s name. We made daisy chains too, and I taught her dirty words. She liked the dirty words best, and she’d laugh and laugh and then suddenly stop, as if she could hear a storm far off in the distance, and go inside. It was surprisingly easy to get into her dreams then, because the edges of a child’s sleep state, of females of any age, are especially soft. The best analogy I can give you is poached egg-white.
As I sat watching Blanca sleep, sculpture-perfect, I closed my eyes, fell into a microsleep, and was able to see into her dreams... dots and lines running into absurd shapes, like silvery jelly. I sat there a while, watching these shapes, until they formed the head of a bull, a white bull, close, sad, almost kind. Behind the bull were a series of concentric rings that orbited the two of them, girl and bull. I realised then that we, or they, were inside a bullring, a dark, silent one; but it didn’t look like a bullring exactly because you couldn’t see the structure: the rings multiplied and multiplied, into nothingness. Is it a funny thing to say that I recognised him; that he seemed to have the same... what am I saying, personality? I don’t know what you’d call it, maybe spirit? I knew it was him because of the smell, which maybe I haven’t mentioned but it accompanies the bull dreams and is what I now know to be the perfume of a moonflower. The flowers themselves are like miniature twisted bedsheets, if you don’t know, and at night they smell a bit like orange blossom. She dangled a hand over his eyeball then, and watched it disappear into his breath. You can dream in me, she said, in the dream. And then, something strange happens: I am shut out, in the way I used to be when she went to sleep inside the dream, as if the dark, impenetrable part of the dreamscape had spread, and I was only able to teeter on the edge of the abyss. That was disappointing. I was thinking about the potential and limitations of her being able to ‘lock me out’, as I stared again into black, aware only of the sound of her breath, staccato, and of a strange feeling of pleasure that became more intense, a bruised blue piquant storm. I had sometimes experienced this pleasure, over the past couple of years, and was confused by it, knowing it not to be my own, in the syrupy tipping point between being sleep and awake that I know all too well. But then a voice sliced through this pleasurable feeling, and everything stopped.
Blanca was still asleep, dribbling a word that sounded like “Izar” (?) (I’ll look it up), in a stream like a white bull’s tail. Her mother was calling to say sugared oil cakes were going to be had with coffee. I hoped they would be the orange-flavoured ones, a smell I still associate with the pleasure of the dream. I sloped off in the direction of the kitchen, book in hand, while Blanca was waking up. She was so innocent-looking in that moment, that if someone had grazed her with their tongue she’d have tasted like pure sugar.
The same thing happened again and again. Other times, something would be different, like, the sand in the bullring would be waist-high. But the formula, the same: Bull and girl, face to face, the invitation to dream in her and then, bang! The door shuts in my face.
I tried to tell myself that her dreams were her own private business. But I do feel I have a certain responsibility to the psychological world to know what those dreams are, because, in theory (a theory yet to be developed), I can. I had suspicions that as she’d grown older something was going on between her and the bull that was possibly taboo. Since then, I’ve become obsessed with what she dreams in the darkest part of her mind, whether it’s possible for a relationship to be sustained between dreamer and dreamt of across time, the extent to which it could be considered ‘physical’?
I spent some time at the house, smoking cigars with her father, surrounded by his gold-framed portraits in the ring, as if the real him were an apparition summoned from them. Every now and then I’d pop out of the room to see if I could find Blanca sleeping, as she sometimes did during the day. But she was always out, with friends that her mother (on another occasion when I tried my luck in the morning) screwed up her beak-like nose at the mention of, and I then had to stay to listen about uncle so-and-so, or the famous singer’s ugly mother, or the bad ham that had been gifted lately, and what a shameful thing that was from such a wealthy family!
Once I walked into the bathroom that guests didn’t use, by accident, looking to see where else she might be. I startled her mother who was smoking by the peach-coloured bidet. I don’t smoke, she said. And then after a moment, Don’t say anything. She was looking out of the lace curtains towards the mountains. What are you doing in here? she asked, suddenly nudged out of her reverie, but before I could answer said, Do you ever feel that you’ve wasted it? Life, everything? She got embarrassed then and left me to use the bathroom, which I had to pretend to do. I found three boxes of cigarettes in the cupboards under the mirror, a plastic bottle of body lotion with a matching lid like a rose, some talc, and ammonia. I like to take things. It’s another condition I have. I was heading down the hall when she pulled at my sleeve. Talk to her, she said, will you? Tell her we’re her parents, we love her. Tell her, she can’t... I don’t know what you can say to her, but... and then she said, I’m starting to hate this.
One evening, a few days ago, I managed to catch Blanca for a smoke. I asked her how she was feeling, and she said there was no language to communicate it. I repeated to her more or less what her mother had asked me to say to her (which by the way was because of the stunt she and two of her friends had pulled in the bullring last week, the red paint). When she started to walk away from me, I asked her about her dreams. I managed to put the question fairly offhandedly. When she asked me cautiously what I thought a dream about a bull, for example, might mean, a dream you had all the time, it was clear I had patronised her by talking about the Minoans! The next day, she told me how the bull dream reduces to the number II, which she said was the number of magic. With a chipped black painted nail, she pushed Le Pape towards me from a deck of old French cards, reserving its opposite, and said something about Egypt.
I’d been invited to lunch at the house and all she did was stare down blackly into a rabbit stew. I was delighted when, having eaten nothing, she stormed out just after we’d finished the coffee, the natural time for me to leave. She’s a good girl, Fradegundia said as I went, as if, perhaps, I could believe it on her behalf. I remembered how only the other day, while dusting before the cleaner came with her silent, white-hot anger, her mother had shown me a photograph of Blanca as a very small girl: Look at her, look at her, look how sweet she is! she said.
I followed Blanca in the naive hope she might go to the plaza de toros, slip through the gates as it was turning dark, seek out a real, white bull... but found nothing more than a brief, dull meeting with Javier, that average boy, outside a doorway in the new part of town. They seemed to be arguing, and she stormed off in tears. This was followed by a lone trip to a stationer’s, of all places. Then she was home, slopping sulkily around the place, twizzling a compass on paper to make lots of lazy, overlapping circles pointlessly on a page, as if she were doing something profound.
The image made something click. I remembered something the bullfighters call the querencia, the space inside the ring in which the bull is almost undefeatable. What if there were an invisible, impenetrable circle inside the bullring in the dream that belonged to the two of them, the dark part of the dream that only the dreamer can access, which was at one with their relationship somehow? It was certainly getting wider, and I didn’t even entertain the thought that eventually I might be shut out altogether. I’d already been looking forward to watching this relationship unfold, seven years from now, seeing whether there really could be anything like a chronological oneiric narrative, a dream that is almost another life you live parallel to your own, for example, but now I would never know. This seemed to unsettle and yet provide new opportunity for a theory of the impenetrable dreamscape I have now formally termed the querencia. But it also deprived me of the very heart of a thing that, really, had come to belong to me too. I felt very much like a third wheel. Worse than that. I felt worthless, and it stirred up a lot of my old anguish.
After the incident with the red paint, the atmosphere in the house became hostile. It would be better, they’d said, if I found other accommodation. I would have happily suffered the slamming of doors and the fights. In a way, they fired me up. But I feel comfortable up in the caves. In the late afternoons, I sit outside and play cards and watch the children play with stones. Sometimes I walk up to where there’s no sound at all, and the cave houses are encrusted with blue painted plates like barnacles. The road curves up at a certain point, where the grass is the colour of liver, and then it’s all dust and monastery. At night the caves are gold and coldly perfumed like a whale’s belly. Sometimes I read books on other things apart from dreams, like Greek daimons. I smoke and draw symbols. Later, when I can’t sleep at all, I sit out, and this is where I really like to be, high up the hill with the silvery haunting, with the deep back-of-the-throat songs on the air, with all of the things you can imagine up here, all of the dreams you can have awake.
Blanca’s sulking seemed to turn over the next couple of days to a depression. She refused to eat or come out of her room during the day. After that, something changed in me too, probably brought on by a retrograde planet or accumulated lack of deep sleep. I fell into one of my depressions, sleep-filled mornings and sleepless nights that meant entering Blanca’s dreams became impossible. Even the dream herbs that bring on my microsleeps had no effect. So I asked her to write down her dreams in a black book that we’d keep hidden. I relied on the fact that young women, somehow sensing in their future an ancient oppression, considered dreams powerful. I talked about dreams as magic circles, which seemed to get her interest. I said I could interpret their meaning (remembering my copy of Ibn Umayl’s book on symbols) so she could gain a deeper understanding of herself. It seemed, after that, she began sleeping with even greater enthusiasm.
I kept asking her for the dream book, and she kept saying she’d give it to me tomorrow, every day, tomorrow, tomorrow. I had somehow begun to feel fooled by the querencia, even strung along. The days were getting hotter and I’ve never gone so long without sleep, never got that far down to the bone, never so rawly unknown to myself. She had done this, somehow, without even knowing it, put this spell on me. She had locked me out of her sleep, and now out of my own sleep too, leaving me pathetic.
Yesterday I went into town. The jewellery shops are expensive but down a little street beside the knife shop, there’s one where the prices are more reasonable. I couldn’t have been luckier. It was the first thing I saw. And touching it all the way along the Darro, through the amethyst shade of the Jewish streets, I went up, thinking how it would brighten her, how she would know then that I understood her, that there would be a physical symbol of whatever there was between us. But when I arrived she wasn’t there. I said I had a book for her, and could I leave it. Her bedroom was white as a wedding and full of all kinds of gorgeous crap. Frankincense sticks I took one of for myself, a black mask decorated with red glitter, a dreamcatcher made with peacock feathers. I put the little bag down, folded in its midnight envelope, the little silver bull inside with horns of moonstone, and opened a book to leave a note. It was a diary, which delighted me, until beneath a series of lines written about Javier’s style of lovemaking, which she seemed to be both thrilled and bored by, she had written: “lbn” is SUCH a creep.
It’s funny because I write my name that way in published material. Not quite the tetragrammaton I was aiming for but it’s more mysterious than boring old ‘Albano’. I was struck by that, as well as by the humiliation anyone would have felt in my shoes. Creep?
Her father called down the hall for me to come for a whiskey, so it was a split decision, leaving it there with a brief note to say it was from me, that I hoped it cheered her up, but as I walked away I knew I had left it less as a gift than a warning.
Walking back along the narrow hilltop roads, I remember looking at a tuberose escaping over a high white wall, and hating this city for the first time. All of these walls are so high that you can’t see the Alhambra, high and closed, with their black gates, their hidden gardens, all the way along, an obsession with boundaries, and it made me sick. White, everything fucking white. I remembered the story of the gitano I’d heard in an absinthe bar once, who, when he finally tracked down the bull that had killed his brother years before, had plucked out the animal’s eyeball and eaten it.
I saw Zujenia on my way up the hill, and we fucked against the steep hillside that’s sharp with agave. She’s one of the prettier ones, and I usually get away from her quick, go back the long way, and for a few days take the other route, up and around. When I got into my cave, I lit the stove, lay down, and longed to enter Blanca’s dreams, longed for that strange sensation of pleasure that had become my own, and for the smell of oranges. It maddened me that while I was awake, she would be asleep, with him, Izar!, doing whatever they did together.
I toyed with the idea of mixing a stronger dose, for us both, going back and... but it was no good, I’d taken all of the drugs I had left and even those, even those hadn’t knocked me out.
I’m not about to be dramatic, but I have started to feel afraid... of what I can’t say. It’s a creeping feeling and it comes over me in spells. On the white roads a darkness would appear, a horned darkness, a shadow, that would pass and disappear, as if following me. I stopped going out in the daytime after that. Except one afternoon when I received a sign to go to her, and there she was, at the entrance to the house, by the wall I had stuck to, closely, keeping my head down, so as not to see the shadow. It was just right, the two of us on the road. I said: did you get the necklace?, already the blood hot in my face because I could see she was scared. I touched her, only lightly, on the arm, and pulled her towards my face. She was wearing a ring through her nose, and a top that showed off her shoulders. I was disappointed that she smelt ordinary, the way whores do, and that she spat on me. I held onto her on that white road, under the petticoat blue sky. Would you like me better, if I was a white bull? I said, and she managed to wriggle away and go inside the gate.
I had occasion to rough him up a bit, the boy she goes out with, Javier. Only, though, because he had come looking for me. I was washing up a plate, and smoking when he appeared. I had answered the door, all bubbles, a tea towel strewn over my arm, and there he was. I recognised him from the bullfighting poster (her father had pointed him out: He’s no miracle, he said, but he should survive the summer.)
Without his sword the boy looked silly. He was also pink, even in the night, which was black as a horseshoe, and his eyeballs were pink too. I was tempted to make my fingers into two horns and charge at him playfully as a welcome or something else, but I was snapped out of my sudden, lightish mood by a blow to the head. The plate had smashed into a few big horrible pieces on the black stone, one of which I cut my face on as I went down, so all in all it was quite an attack. Fortunately, I had the thought to pick up one of these pieces, sharper than you’d think, and bring it right up to the boy’s eyeball. He was really not very strong at all, just brought up to think he was. I shit on all of your dead! he said to me, which only made me laugh at him, because his face was squashed against the wall and he sounded fat. I’ll fuck your girlfriend, I said to him, and then wondered where those words had come from, why I had put on a deeper voice, like God’s. And then all kinds of obscenities slipped from him, and then he burst into fits of tears which made me hate him where before I had only found him irritating.
I wasn’t going to mention it but I carved a symbol into his palm with a short vegetable knife. It was one of the symbols I’d drawn in my book and I had decided it was a bad one.
They called this morning. Fortunately Blanca isn’t talking to her parents, and anyway wouldn’t tell them a thing even if she were. They said for me to be at the bullring at four: the boy, Javier, was fighting, all of the family were going to watch. This I needed to see! I put on my lucky suit. I couldn’t see Blanca among the bodies piling into the ring. I was looking out for a mantilla with her pretty head beneath it. I would barely have recognised her had it not been for the fact that her image has become one with my very consciousness these last few days, that every bone in her face I felt I knew more intimately than my own, the essence of her written into me like the symbol I carved into that imbecile’s hand. She didn’t see me. She was wearing all black, a pair of black boots, and her head was completely shaved, which made her frighteningly more beautiful and at the same time like a kind of mistake. She was turning, talking to someone dressed the same as her. I looked forward, shuffling with the crowd, noticing a guardia civil by the contorted, sharp gates. I put my hand in my pocket and felt its sweet edge, the skin and blood of the boy still on it. I had only brought it, really, as a charm of sorts. But also for another reason I hadn’t decided on.
I stopped, just as we got through the gates, drenched in sweat and the smell of the animals and a storm of colognes, the rapture of the people who’d come in their finery to taste the ecstasy of near-death, the pomp of the pasodoble, and just then she walked past me, as laughter and cooing erupted somewhere nearby, and looked straight into my eyes. I got hold of her wrist. She opened her jacket and something metallic gleamed out, twice the size as the knife in my pocket. She pulled her hand free, hard, and glared at me for what felt like a long time, the ring through her nose catching the afternoon sun. She turned and walked through the arch into the ring, and I had to laugh, which afterwards turned into a half-cry I’m still swallowing down as we wait, because in the centre of the back of her white bald head she’d had shaven the black tail of a bull.
