Her lips moved, repeating the supplications with automatic haste, but her thoughts fled away from prayer, as if drawn by the noises of the multitude that reached her.
Ah! that intermittent volcano-like bellowing, that roar of distant waves, broken from time to time by pauses of tragic silence! Carmen imagined herself witnessing the invisible bull-fight. She divined by the variations in the sounds from the plaza the progress of the tragedy that was taking place within the ring. Sometimes there was an explosion of angry shouts with accompaniment of hisses; again thousands and thousands of voices uttered unintelligible words. Suddenly rose a shriek of terror, prolonged, shrill, that seemed to rise to heaven; a fearful and halting exclamation that brought to mind thousands of heads in a row, blanched by emotion, following the swift race of a bull in pursuit of a man—until it was suddenly broken by a shout, re-establishing calm. The danger had passed.
There were long intervals of silence; a silence absolute; the silence of the void, in which the buzzing of the flies hovering around the horses was magnified, as though the immense amphitheatre were deserted, as though the fourteen thousand persons seated on its surrounding seats had become motionless and breathless, and Carmen were the only living being that existed within its heart.
Suddenly this silence was animated by a loud and indescribable shock as though every brick in the plaza were loosened from its place and all were dashing against one another. It was the prolonged applause that made the ring tremble. In the nearby courtyard sounded blows of the rod on the hide of the wretched horses, blasphemy, clatter of hoofs, and voices. "Whose turn?" New lancers were called into the plaza.
To these noises others nearer were added. Footsteps sounded in the adjoining rooms, doors opened suddenly, voices and labored breathing of several men were heard, as if they walked burdened by great weight.
"It is nothing—a bruise. Thou'rt not bleeding. Before the corrida is over thou'lt be lancing again."
A hoarse voice, weakened by pain, groaned between gasps with an accent that reminded Carmen of home:
"Virgin of Solitude! I must have broken something. Look well, doctor. Alas, my children!"
Carmen shuddered with horror. She raised her eyes that had wandered in fear to the Virgin. Her nose seemed drawn out by her emotion to a sharp point between sunken and pallid cheeks. She felt sick; she feared that she would fall to the floor in a faint from terror. She tried to pray again, to isolate herself in prayer; to not hear the noises from without, transmitted through the walls with a tone of despair. But in spite of her a dismal sound reached her ear of sponges being wet in water and voices of men who must be doctors and nurses stimulating the picador, who complained with the energy of a mountaineer, at the same time striving to hide the pain of his broken bones through manly pride.
"Virgin of Solitude! My children! What will the poor babes have to eat if their father cannot use the lance?"