While Cordobés was in the ring I forgot Sally and marvelled with Miriam and Lykiard at this handsome street fighter, part gangster and part film star. As Lykiard pointed out to us through the hoots and applause, however close the bull charged, the boy never moved his feet. For all his theatrical strutting and open insults to the decorum of the bullring, he took immense risks with his own life. After exhausting his second bull he began to play the fool, humiliating the gasping beast that staggered towards him, drenched in blood. As it stood on its shaky forelegs, Cordobés knelt with his back to the bull, its horns only inches from his shoulder blades, arms outstretched to catch the approving roars of the arena, which the older Spaniards were already leaving in disgust.

When he retired from the ring, through the delirium of the European and American tourists, I saw Sally clambering between the seats, her dress half-torn from her back. An hour later we found her in the melee around the bullfighter’s black Mercedes, her makeup bruised, being pushed about by the jeering chauffeurs and bodyguards. Lykiard and I carried her to my car, watched by a shocked little Henry, who offered her his bull. When we lifted her into the back seat she struck at us with her hard fists, still gripped by her unsatisfied need for some kind of violent climax to the afternoon. Miriam managed to calm her, holding her hands and wiping the streaks of mascara from her chin. The two women sat side by side, like sisters returning from a deranged funeral.

In the traffic back to Gerona I watched the flush in Sally’s cheeks fading through the rearview mirror. She sat in her torn silk dress, a delinquent schoolgirl caressing the coarse hide of Henry’s plastic bull, forcing her lips together as she swallowed the aftertaste of some toxic emotion.

*   *   *

“I like her American spunk,” Miriam decided when we returned to the apartment. “She knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. Of course, she’s completely mad.”

“Maybe she’s completely sane—for people like Sally that amounts to the same thing.”

“Jim, she wanted to fuck those bulls! Never mind Cordobés and the chauffeurs. I bet they caught her trying to cut off the testicles. What do they do with them, anyway?”

“They’re some kind of delicacy. Why don’t you try a pair? We’ll find a good restaurant in Gerona.”

“I might…” Miriam stared in a determined way from the balcony. “Sex is a branch of gastronomy—the best cooks make the best lovers. Every woman soon discovers that.”

I could see the 2CV trundling across the sand dunes of Ampuriabrava. Sally was standing in the open roof behind Lykiard, the tatters of her silk dress floating like pennants between the poles of the property developers, an eager fury touring a field of gibbets.