piedra blanca

My mother is from a rural town in the south of Spain. Not many people from the outside pass it, so it lies open underneath the burning sun, stuck in time. Its name translates to “white stone,” coming from the abundance of limestone carved out of its mountains. As a child, when I used to visit the summer festivities, men with red-burnt humpbacks and beer bellies came out and barricaded the streets with steel cages. I was standing within the shaky constructions, peeking onto the plaza. In the morning, they had run the bulls down the streets, yelling and hollering. Big steel cages and barrages cut through the streets. People were squeezing towards the front, gawking at the scene. When the bulls pass, people slip in and out between the bars. “Antes, les pegaban y les pinchaban hasta los huebos. Me volvia loca gritandole a los hombres por la calle,” my mother recited from her childhood, telling me they used to hit them with sticks, sticking needles through their scrotums until the animals were left bleeding in the streets, her running and screaming at these men. Imagining the scenes, my stomach turned. Walking up the podium constructions, hundreds of people were banging the steel barrages. Deep into the nightly festivities, colorful decorative flags hung above the plaza. It was hot in August. The bang of a firecracker ends the round of the brown cow that had been trying to get to the runners, panting and shivering, with confusion in its eyes over the crowd crying and grabbing for its attention. The steel doors to a side street that functions as a temporary enclosure opens. In goes the brown cow. A rumbling moves through the crowd. “Quando sacan al toro del fuego?” I asked my grandmother over and over again when the bull of fire would come out, tired from all the spectacle, feeling small among the crowd of man-beasts. “Ya están sacando la querda.” A crowd formed, getting ahold of a rope leading from inside the bull’s passage. Forming a long line, several men grabbed onto the rope. Inside its cage, the bull is raging. Steel banging. The rope tenses. The door is opened, and the bull jolts forward. Ten men pull in line, and the rope is used to strip the bulky animal onto a pole. Two steel contraptions are shoehorned over its headdress. The now steel-caged horns held torches. The crowd was chanting, forming a cluster around the animal. Shakily, a man sets fire to the torches, almost burning himself. They call it: El Toro Enbolado. The bull of fire. The show starts, the crowd jumps apart as the rope is cut. The bull charges at them. From my time in Spain, I remember endless fields of orange trees stretching over the mountains. Grabbing them right from the trees, their flesh looks like the surface of the sun. I spent my time walking up and down the mountains, disappearing from the face of the earth. Completely alone, I’d stroll the tiny passages like a street cat. Jumping over the “acequia,” irrigation ditches lining the fields near the river. The water was peacefully gurgling. The sun looking down on me from above. My bright skin separated me from the other children that I never managed to form a bond with. And so I spent my days alone in the fields. Alone in the attic of my grandmother’s garage, I squeezed into tiny spaces where I stayed out of sight. Playing alone with toys my brother had left behind. Green toy soldiers. Indians and cowboys he had grown out of playing with a long time ago. Adults would ask me if I was okay, and I would always say yes.