Elementals by A.S. Byatt Read Free Book Online Page A

bulls.’
    The young couple laughed again, easily.
    ‘The culture is different in the Mediterranean,’ said the barman. He saw Patricia listening, and changed the subject, easily, deftly, to the beauty of the night, the brilliance of the moon, the prevalence of shooting stars in this season.
    Patricia made no attempt to find out what had happened to Nils Isaksen. She did not see him again until the Fiesta was over, and the toreadors had ceremoniously driven away in their polished old limousines, with their acolytes, their strapped trunks, their bright capes and swords.
    When she saw him it was in the street, in the Rue de l’Aspic. He was looking into a shop window, his hat pushed forward over his knobbed brow, his skin spangled with unshaven gold bristles. Before she reached him, he loped away, ungainly and hurried. She followed. She followed even when he crossed to the entrance of the Arènes, bought a ticket, and went in. She waited a little, and then bought a ticket herself, and stepped into the circle.
    The Arènes is not a labyrinth. It is an orderly structure of tunnels, colonnades, staircases, rising, diminishing rings of stone seats, open to the sky. At first, having gone in, Patricia walked round in the cavernous arched dark of the ground-level circuit. It smelled of musty stone, and stale urine, the urine of frightened beasts, partly masked with eau de Javel. The silence in it is numb and dumb. There were Coca-Cola machines and bins of empty champagne bottles. She made one and a half circuits in the gloom and then plunged at random under an archway and up a stair, coming out suddenly perhaps four tiers up from the sanded circular arena, with its intricate raked pattern, its red-painted wooden screens behind which men sprang or scrambled out of the way of the plunging horns. The bottom tier was very close to the ground. She had read in the guidebook that it was not thought that there had been wild-beast fighting, because the barrier was too low for safety. Only men ingeniously slaughtering men, and men ingeniously, elegantly, dancing the great beasts on their delicate hoofs, to standstill, shuddering, and the knife. Over all those centuries, people had come there to sit together, festive, and watch death.
    She found it hard to see, in the light. She looked around and could see neither Nils Isaksen nor anyone else. She ducked back under her archway, made another segmented progress, climbed another stone stair, reached an upper open gallery and walked round. From the height of the heavy stone cylinder she looked down, and saw a straw hat, and a patch of innocent Norse blue-green, across the great space of the circle. So she went on, round and down, and sat on the warm stone, shaped roughly to hold her, beside him. The silence was at the same time the stony silence of monuments and the airy hot silence of midday in open spaces. It was hot, very hot, the stone was hot to touch. Below, the patterns in the swept sand were pretty and sinister. She sat still for a time, and he sat, his head in his hands, and did not move. Black birds wheeled over, high up, in their own circles.
    ‘Nils.’
    ‘I have nothing to say to you.’
    ‘Are you in trouble?’
    ‘Why should you think I am in trouble? Yes, I am in trouble. Now leave me alone, please, Mrs Nimmo.’
    ‘I saw you fighting.’
    ‘I was berserk.’ With a certain gloomy self-approbation.
    ‘I saw. Why?’
    ‘Because of what you told me. And because I came here, to see the bull-fighting.’
    Patricia was silent, not understanding. She stared round the white rim of the circle. He said, into his hands, ‘I thought it would be a mystery. And it was simply disgusting.’
    ‘I could have told you that, without needing to come,’ she said, taut and English.
    He said something in Norwegian.
    ‘What was that?’
    ‘ “Jeg er redd jeg var død longe førenn jeg døde.” I was a dead man long before I died. Peer Gynt. The great liar. The great Norwegian folk-hero. A