One of the early bulls, disoriented by the jeers and shouts of the tourist crowd, jumped the barricade and ran past, spraying us with his saliva, ragged horns inches from our hands. Henry clutched his model bull, awestruck by the inflamed eyes of this violent and terrified creature, but Sally sprang to her feet and slapped its dung-smeared haunches. She was wearing a pale silk dress, and her excited sweat stained the bodice and armpits. She gripped Henry’s hand, whistling and shouting as she worked herself up, while the band blared and the crowd screamed at every pass of the cape. When the banderilleros savaged the bull’s shoulders with their ribboned darts she rose to her feet with a strange throaty cry, like a madwoman in an abattoir.

Embarrassed by herself, she fell quiet when a handsome torera, in elegant black jacket and flared breeches, fought a bull on horseback in the Portuguese manner. A commanding, strong-nosed woman with the maquillage of a glamorous bank manager, she glared threateningly at the audience and noticed Sally standing at the barrera. The two women gazed at each other across the noise and the smell of blood and the reek of fundador. Time and again the torera was about to be caught by the veering bull, but always accelerated away as the horns brushed the flanks of her horse. During one standoff, while the bull choked on its tongue, bathed in blood and rage, she sat ramrod straight in her saddle a dozen feet from us. Sally and I could hear the stream of obscenities, the insults to the bull’s testicles and paternity, spitting from the mouth of this imposing horsewoman.

When she dismounted to kill the exhausted beast, she first fed saliva from her scarlet lips onto the tip of her sword, making plain that she was advancing on the bull as more than a mere man and that her saliva was the semen with which she would impregnate the creature as she struck it dead at her feet.

Dazed by the fundador and the screams of the crowd, I was trying to visualise how one would even dare to approach this terrifying figure, let alone have sex with her. But Sally had already decided. Sweat soaking her armpits, she gripped the wooden rail and stared at the horsewoman as if she recognised all the headmistresses of her New England childhood. I expected her to rip away her silk dress, leap the barricade, and mount the horse with her white legs, arms clasping the torera’s waist as they galloped out of the arena.