The knife was out now and he sat on the floor in the widening warm pool.
“Put the napkin over it. Hold it!” said Enrique. “Hold it tight. I will run for the doctor. You must hold in the hemorrhage.”
“There should be a rubber cup,” said Paco. He had seen that used in the ring.
“I came straight,” said Enrique, crying. “All I wanted was to show the danger.”
“Don’t worry,” said Paco, his voice sounding far away. “But bring the doctor.”
In the ring they lifted you and carried you, running with you, to the operating room. If the femoral artery emptied itself before you reached there they called the priest.
“Advise one of the priests,” said Paco, holding the napkin tight against his lower abdomen. He could not believe that this had happened to him.
But Enrique was running down the Calle San Jerónimo to the all-night first-aid station and Paco was alone, first sitting up, then huddled over, then slumped on the floor, until it was over, feeling his life go out of him as dirty water empties from a bathtub when the plug is drawn. He was frightened and he felt faint and he tried to say an act of contrition and he remembered how it started but before he had said, as fast as he could, “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee who art worthy of all my love and I firmly resolve …,” he felt too faint and he was lying face down on the floor and it was over very quickly. A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.
As the doctor from the first-aid station came up the stairs accompanied by a policeman who held on to Enrique by the arm, the two sisters of Paco were still in the moving-picture palace of the Gran Via, where they were intensely disappointed in the Garbo film, which showed the great star in miserable low surroundings when they had been accustomed to see her surrounded by great luxury and brilliance. The audience disliked the film thoroughly and were protesting by whistling and stamping their feet. All the other people from the hotel were doing almost what they had been doing when the accident happened, except that the two priests had finished their devotions and were preparing for sleep, and the gray-haired picador had moved his drink over to the table with the two houseworn prostitutes. A little later he went out of the café with one of them.
It was the one for whom the matador who had lost his nerve had been buying drinks.
The boy Paco had never known about any of this nor about what all these people would be doing on the next day and on other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not even realize they ended. He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. He had not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngàje Naài,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
“THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT IT’S painless,” he said. “That’s how you know when it starts.”
“Is it really?”
“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.”
“Don’t! Please don’t.”
“Look at them,” he said. “Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?”
The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.
“They’ve been there since the day the truck broke down,” he said. “Today’s the first time any have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted to use them in a story. That’s funny now.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.
“I’m only talking,” he said. “It’s much easier if I talk. But I don’t want to bother you.”
“You know it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “It’s that I’ve gotten so very nervous not being able to do anything. I think we might make it as easy as we can until the plane comes.”
“Or until the plane doesn’t come.”
“Please tell me what I can do. There must be something I can do.”
“You can take the leg off and that might stop it, though I doubt it. Or you can shoot me. You’re a good shot now. I taught you to shoot, didn’t I?”
“Please don’t talk that way. Couldn’t I read to you?”
“Read what?”
“Anything in the book bag that we haven’t read.”
“I can’t listen to it,” he said. “Talking is the easiest. We quarrel and that makes the time pass.”
“I don’t quarrel. I never want to quarrel. Let’s not quarrel any more. No matter how nervous we get. Maybe they will be back with another truck today. Maybe the plane will come.”
“I don’t want to move,” the man said. “There is no sense in moving now except to make it easier for you.”
“That’s cowardly.”
“Can’t you let a man die as comfortably as he can without calling him names? What’s the use of slanging me?”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m dying now. Ask those bastards.” He looked over to where the huge, filthy birds sat, their naked heads sunk in the hunched feathers. A fourth planed down, to run quick-legged and then waddle slowly toward the others.
“They are around every camp. You never notice them. You can’t die if you don’t give up.”
“Where did you read that? You’re such a bloody fool.”
“You might think about some one else.”
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “that’s been my trade.”
He lay then and was quiet for a while and looked across the heat shimmer of the plain to the edge of the bush. There were a few Tommies that showed minute and white against the yellow and, far off, he saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This was a pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.
“Wouldn’t you like me to read?” she asked. She was sitting on a canvas chair beside his cot. “There’s a breeze coming up.”
“No thanks.”
“Maybe the truck will come.”
“I don’t give a damn about the truck.”
“I do.”
“You give a damn about so many things that I don’t.”
“Not so many, Harry.”
“What about a drink?”
“It’s supposed to be bad for you. It said in Black’s to avoid all alcohol. You shouldn’t drink.”
“Molo!” he shouted.
“Yes Bwana.”
“Bring whiskey-soda.”
“Yes Bwana.”
“You shouldn’t,” she said. “That’s what I mean by giving up. It says it’s bad for you. I know it’s bad for you.”
“No,” he said. “It’s good for me.”
So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a chance to finish it. So this was the way it ended, in a bickering over a drink. Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.
Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.
“I wish we’d never come,” the woman said. She was looking at him, holding the glass and biting her lip. “You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone anywhere. I said I’d go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable.”
“Your bloody money,” he said.
“That’s not fair,” she said. “It was always yours as much as
