The Toreador

Clyde, a rubber-limbed Australian pantomimist with the complexion of a milk-starved ghost, invades the sun-scorched plaza de toros of San Lázaro like a mischievous cherub dropped into Goya’s canvas. Between cape and clowning he parodies the sacred ballet of death, turning the corrida into a carnival of elastic gestures: hips swiveling like untethered metronomes, bowler hat devoured and regurgitated by a perplexed heifer, vermilion sash fluttering as if mocking every embroidered traje de luces in sight. The matadors, those marble-jawed apostles of machismo, watch their liturgy implode under the onslaught of pratfalls; señoritas, normally veiled behind lace fans, shriek with scandalized delight, their carnations flung into the dust at the clown’s pigeon-toed feet. When the presidente’s brass bands strike up a triumphal march, Clyde counterpoints with a kazoo, then vaults over the barrera, somersaulting through a maze of wine barrels, priestly processions, and revolutionary slogans chalked on adobe walls—an acrobat rewriting hagiography into farce. In the shadow of the cathedral bells he slips beneath the embroidered train of the Virgen del Carmen float, re-emerges in the habit of a nun, and finally boards a mule-drawn Coca-Cola cart that clatters toward the desert sunset, leaving behind only the echo of a bull’s bewildered snort and the faint scent of orange-blossom petals stuck to his soles.