Mexico: A Novel Part 3

"Is it true that a crowd of boys no bigger than yourself carried you from the ring shouting Torero! Torero!'?" and he said: 'They did."

The effect of Victoriano's first fight on his father was elec trifying. The old picador reacted as if he had seen a ghost; a sense of terror seemed to overcome him and for three days he brooded in silence, walking the streets of Toledo and allowing his boys to practice by themselves.

Then he went to see Don Eduardo Palafox, who was lounging at the House of Tile, and asked bluntly, "Did you see the fights on Sunday?"

'They were very good," the elderly rancher replied.

Veneno reached forward, grabbed Don Eduardo's hands and gasped pleadingly: "Tell me, sir. Was he as good as I thought?"

'The little one?"

"Who else?"

The rancher looked at his friend, this ancient enemy of all bulls who had mutilated so many Palafox animals for his matadors, and said slowly, "I think that in young Victoriano you have found what you've been looking for."

As if thrown into the air by some powerful bull, the old picador leaped up, stormed about the tables, and cried, "I'm sure of it, Don Eduardo! I watched that boy as if he were a vision. He is already better than his father ever was. When I see him face a bull I have the feeling I'm seeing his grandfather."

The rancher remained seated, watching the white-haired picador, and when the latter's excitement had subsided he observed, "This boy will be far better than his grandfather."

The words were those that Veneno had wanted to hear, yet he was afraid to believe them. Falling into a chair and clutching Don Eduardo's hand, he pleaded: "Did you see this for yourself or are you merely feeding my hopes?"

"I saw it," Don Eduardo a.s.sured him. Then he asked briskly, "Now tell me, where do the boys fight next?"

"Zacatecas, on Sunday."

"I will watch them on that day," Don Eduardo replied, and it was on Sunday, 11 March 1945, in the dusty, mountain town of Zacatecas, where the bullring clings to the side of a hill, that Veneno Leal made his big decision. After the fight he strode, in his heavy picador's costume, to where Don Eduardo Palafox sat and asked the rancher bluntly, "Do you still believe in the boy?"

"Like you," the rancher replied, "I hold to my belief more strongly than before."

"Thank you, Don Eduardo," the powerful old picador replied, wringing his friend's hand. "You have made up my mind."

"Victoriano did it," the rancher said gravely, and the two men separated.

In the barren hotel room in Zacatecas, as the exciting Sunday came to a. close, Veneno a.s.sembled his three sons and said forcefully, "Tonight we begin our campaign."

"For what?" Chucho asked. He'd had a good afternoon and was pleased.

"For wealth. For fame," the old fighter said simply. "For a place like Belmonte's."

A hush fell over the excited boys, who had been jabbering about the day's adventures. Never before had their father spoken of bullfighting in that way. Staring at Chucho, he said: "Son, today you were adequate. I was proud of you. But you will never have a matador's body. Already you show signs of too much fat." With compa.s.sion he watched as these harsh truths paralyzed his older boy, then added: "Starting today you will train yourself to be the best peon bullfighting has ever had. You will master every subtle twist of the art, every trick in running the bull. But, above all, be ready each moment to rush in and save your brother when the bull knocks him down. Save his life with your own if necessary."

Chucho, who could still hear the cheers of the Zacatecas crowd, swallowed his anger, folded his hands resolutely in his lap and looked at his chubby brother Diego, thinking: "I'm twice as good as him. Stand by to protect him? That's crazy."

But then he heard his father saying: "Diego, you're already too stocky. You'll never be a matador. But you have style with the banderillas. That will be your job. Learn to break the sticks across your knee and place the real short ones. The crowds love that."

Now he turned to his youngest son and said: "Victoriano, you shall be the matador, the great figure," and the bleak room fell silent.

It was several years after this crucial night before I came to know Victoriano, but as I queried him in Madrid about this decision in Zacatecas he remembered each moment, each syllable that was said, each look on his brothers' faces: "When my father picked me I thought I might faint. When I was four playing with a pointed stick and a napkin, I dreamed of being a matador. I walked like one, tilted my head like the pictures of Gaona. But I feared that Chucho and maybe even Diego would go ahead of me, so when I heard my father say "You shall be the matador," I was afraid to make a sound. All I could do was look at my brothers. Chucho's shoulders drooped. Diego shrugged as if to say: If I'm to be the banderillero-maybe I knew all along. But I could feel myself standing a little straighter, my chin out just a bit. And in the silence I could hear people cheering-frenzied cheers.

"But it was Father speaking again, in a wild, powerful voice I'd never heard before. 'We will be the Leals!' he shouted as if a spirit possessed him. 'Victoriano will be our matador. Diego will be the stick man like no other. You, Chucho, will be the man who cares for all details. And I will beat the bulls.' A fury came upon him that night. My brothers and me, we'd never before seen him like this, for up to now he'd nursed his dreams in silence, but on this night, he let himself go to reveal his vision."

Fourteen years later Victoriano s.h.i.+vered as he told me what happened next: "Like a madman he raised his powerful right arm, the one he used to hold the pic, and shouted so they could hear him in the hall, 'I will grind the bulls down to the sand. Their knees will buckle and they will fall back. You'll see blood running down their withers and we will destroy them. The four of us, one team! We will destroy them and men shall say of us, 'Those Leals, they know how to fight bulls!' "

Seville, 1959. In 1952 Victoriano Leal had entered the huge plaza in Mexico City to become a full-fledged matador. He was only nineteen at the time, and no boy ever had a less complicated road to the ultimate heights of this difficult art. At twelve he faced his first bull in Toledo. On the following Sunday in Zacatecas three of the most gifted bullfighters in Mexico dedicated their lives to making him preeminent. Two years later, at the age of fourteen, he became a novice with such sensational publicity that he then earned more than many matadors.

He moved from plaza to plaza like a young king, protected in public by Veneno and in the ring by his two skilled brothers. By the time he took his doctorate, in the largest plaza in the world, he was an accomplished fighter, master of all tricks. His particular gift was an excellence with the cape that none of his contemporaries could equal. To watch him unfurl his arabesques before a ma.s.sive black enemy was to see, in the words of the critic Leon Ledesma, "a young G.o.d sculpturing sunlight."

He was also capable with the banderillas, although with markedly difficult beasts he requested his brother Diego to a.s.sume the job; and with the red muleta at the end of the fight he could be exquisite. Again, on bulls that Veneno warned him were apt to be difficult, he forswore exhibitionistic pa.s.ses and went about the business of killing in a workmanlike manner. He was never good with the sword, veering off to one side at the final moment, but he was competent, and his haunting skill in the earlier portions of the fight encouraged his adherents to overlook his defects at the end.

When I first met Victoriano in Spain he surprised me, as I said, by allowing me to ask more questions than he permitted other newsmen, and when I asked about this he explained, "We're both Toledanos, you and me. But you're also an American, big New York magazine. I want North America to know about the Leals, London too, Argentina."

This emboldened me to ask, "Why. Do you always refer to the Leals, never to Victoriano?" and he replied: "Without the others I'd not be here today." And from a desk in the s.p.a.cious room of the house he had purchased for his family he produced a well-thumbed photograph alb.u.m in which he showed me an almost terrifying series of shots taken by bold cameramen who had sometimes dashed into the ring while some ma.s.sive bull was trying to gore Victoriano while he lay flat on his back in the sand. In each photograph his life was clearly being saved by one or another of the Leals.

'Tijuana, last year. That's Chucho leading the bull away while he stands almost on me. Very brave, that time."

Of another shot he said: "Nuevo Laredo, this year. Chucho couldn't get to me, but roly-poly Diego came in. Look at him, the horns right in his belly, but he twirled away and took the bull with him."

At the next photograph I started laughing because it showed a tremendous bull standing right over the matador, horns poised to pin him to the ground, and Veneno, the picador, desperately grabbing the bull by the tail and, with bulging muscles, literally hauling the great beast backward and away from his imperiled son. Gravely Victoriano said: "It does look funny, but if our father had not been so brave and so strong, I wouldn't be showing you these shots. We're the Leals. Look at us in the ring," and he continued to flick the pages, permitting me to stop him now and then to study the way his three family members united to help him and, at times, to keep him alive.

"The early newspaper accounts," I said when he closed the alb.u.m, "all say that at the beginning, even when you were thirteen and fourteen, you killed with skill and courage-one of the things that helped make you famous. Now the same writers say you're only adequate. What happened? Some incident like one of those?" and I pointed to the alb.u.m.

For the first time since I had met him he laughed, and through the following years I would not often see him do this, for he was a young man of gravity. "You're clever, Norman. Yes, it was a photograph, but not one of these. When I look at these, as we just did, I think, 'There I am, flat on the ground. One puncture from those horns and I'm dead. But it's the job of the others to save me, so I lie very still, but with my eyes wide open so that as soon as they lead the bull away, I can jump up and run to safety.' " He laughed again. "But of course, I take my sword and my muleta with me if I can, because it's still my responsibility to kill that d.a.m.ned bull."

"What photograph was it that made the difference?" He left the room, taking the alb.u.m with him, and returned in a moment with a framed photograph taken by Cano, the noted taurine photographer in Madrid. It showed Victoriano in 1953 completing a perfect kill of a huge Miura bull, the most dangerous breed in the world. Right over the horn the matador was reaching, his knuckles touching the hairy skin, a remarkable kill. But the angle at which it was shot focused not on Victoriano but on the immensity of the bull. It was a stupendous animal, the acme of his breed.

For some moments the matador sat staring at the picture, then said softly: "When I got back in my room in Madrid and saw this photograph I said: 'It couldn't be. No man could do that, in that way, to that bull.' " Laughing nervously, he said: "Each year the bulls of the mind grow bigger."

When years later I sent Drummond an evaluation of Victoriano that summarized the above facts, he wired back: "Why use the phrase 'veering off to one side at the final moment'? Why not use the cla.s.sic 'at the moment of truth he chokes'?" I replied in a rather long telegram, which I hoped would settle this and other Drummond inquiries that had begun to irritate: I must make it clear that I will withdraw from this bullfight enterprise if your stylists jazz up my story with scenes in which the matadors quake with fear and pray with parched lips to the Virgin of the Macarena just before entering the plaza. I have studied this thing at close quarters for some time and this heroic fear that American authors love to write about is an o.r.g.a.s.m of their imagination and not what goes on at all. I've spoken to Victoriano about this a couple of times, and here's a man who knows as much about fear as anyone. After all, his father and grandfather were killed by bulls and he was in the arena once himself when another matador was wiped out. This boy knows. He prays. He carries a silver altar wherever he goes. He wears three gold charms, St. Sebastian, St. Teresa, St. Francis, the last because good old Francis loved animals and is needed to intercede for bullfighters on the day of judgment. He is nervous as h.e.l.l before a fight, sweats a lot although he's skinny, and has to urinate more often than any matador I've ever seen, but the quaking fear of the novelists simply ain't there. In the course of discussing fear he used a great phrase that you might lift: "If a matador is left alone from one o'clock to four on Sunday afternoon, the bulls of the mind grow larger." I think that about summarizes it. He tells me that before the first serious goring fear can sometimes be remote, but after that no man can fool himself. He knows a bull can kill. He knows that if he goes out often enough, the bulls are bound to hit him, and seriously. But in these days, with penicillin and the sulfas, very few men are killed in the bullring. It is much safer, statistically, to be a matador than to drive racing cars at Indianapolis, markedly safer than to engage in prizefighting, and has about the same risk as playing American football. In one period of ten years, out of 189 full matadors who fought a total of 150,000 bulls only two were killed. But many were seriously wounded and a few were permanently crippled. From talking at length with Victoriano on this I would say that the pre-fight fear of the matador is about the same as the pre-World Series fear of a man like Mickey Mantle facing Sandy Koufax, with this difference, that if Mantle messes things up all he has to face is the jeers of the crowd and a restless night before the game next day, but if the matador slips he may lose a leg or his life. Now, as to this moment-of-truth bit, I positively refuse to let you use the phrase. I've never heard any real torero use it, and. I understand it isn't much used by anybody else these days, and for one d.a.m.ned good reason. Bear with me and be sure your writers digest this. In the old days when the phrase originated, the early parts of a fight were pretty sickly affairs, frankly. I'm sending you old-time photographs of Mazzantini, Lagartijo, Guerrita and Bombita. I want your crowd to study the distance these heroes kept between themselves and the bull, Look at that dilly of Guerrita about to make a pa.s.s with five-count 'em-five peons ringing him with their capes. If the bull wanted to hurt Guerrita he had to fight his way past that whole gang. Look also at the great Mazzantini make a pa.s.s with the cloth. He was so far away, the bull couldn't even smell him. So it was through all the fight. But now look at that stupendous photograph of Mazzantini killing. On his toes, all his weight on the sword, right over the horns. One chop of that bull's horns, and Mazzantini goes to the hospital, maybe permanently. That was indeed the moment of truth. And it was called that because all that had gone before was exhibition with the bull in one ballpark and the man in another. But at the moment of the actual kill the matador had to lay his life on the line. Today things are exactly reversed. I'm sending you five photographs that our boy Victoriano selected for me to send you as a summary of what he is like. It's a surprisingly frank a.s.sessment and what he said when he explained them was even more so. Number 1: "Look at the size of this beast! Weighs about twelve hundred pounds and he's two inches from my chest." Number 2: "This is cape work when the bull first comes out. This is my version of a pa.s.s made famous by our Mexican hero Gaona. Cape flas.h.i.+ng way over my head. This time the horns, two inches from my back." Number 3: I'm in the faena at the end, working with the little muleta low in the left hand. The pase natural. Sometimes I fail to do even one, with a stubborn bull. On this day, I remember it clearly, I did five." Number 4: "If you publish your story, please use this one. Fourteen hundred pounds, Concha y Sierra in Seville. See if you could wedge a postage stamp between this horn and my chest." Number 5: "But to be honest I suppose you ought to show this one, too. This is that big bull in Seville again, wonderful animal, deserved better. But I kill the way I can, this time off to one side. When Chucho saw this photo he said, 'You were in Puebla and the bull in Guadalajara.' And I asked him, 'Would you have been any closer?' and he said, 'I tell the girls I would have been.' And then we both laughed." I really think he wanted me to use Number 5, bad as it makes him look, because he takes bullfighting seriously. If you do use it, print alongside that stupendous photograph of Mazzantini practically throwing himself right onto the horns and you will understand that in today's fighting there is in the final death of the bull no moment of truth. That is a thing of the past, so I don't want your phrasemakers cluttering up my story with words that simply don't apply anymore.

And yet, in the very moment of sending this telegram, I had to admit to myself that there were occasions when decisions of the gravest moral consequence had to be made in the bullring, and such moments did indeed involve the essence of truth. The fact that they so infrequently involved the incident of killing simply meant that their focus had changed. As I filed the message I remembered the critical afternoon in Seville.

Victoriano, now a matador of dazzling accomplishment, had triumphed throughout Mexico and had come to Spain to certify his reputation, for without excellent performances in Seville and Madrid a Mexican bullfighter always remains in the second category, no matter how big he went over in Monterrey or Tijuana. The time had come for Victoriano to submit himself to the first of these acid tests, and he arrived in Seville with his family on Friday afternoon. Veneno, as usual, decided where the troupe should stay, in what rooms, and what food they would eat. He also engaged a Gypsy from Triana to handle the swords and capes during the fight, and a retired matador to help dress Victoriano in the suit of lights. Then Veneno, who loved this hustle and bustle of bullfighting, led his three sons to the historic Cafe Arena in the Sierpes. They were barely seated when an ancient man in his eighties approached them and said in a high whining voice, "You are Victoriano Leal, the famous Mexican fighter, and you are Veneno, the best of the picadors, but I'll wager you can't guess who I am." He stood back, a thin shadow of a man, and waited for the Leals to speak.

"Somebody I know?" Veneno asked, for he was in a good mood and willing to play games.

"You never saw me before, but your father did."

Veneno leaned forward. "You knew Bernardo?"

"Did he ever tell you about the afternoon he sat at this very table with the great Mazzantini?" the bright-eyed old man cackled.

Veneno dropped his hands into his lap and studied the cafe. "Was it here that Mazzantini engaged my father for his troupe?"

"Of course!" the old man cried with delight. "Now can you guess ..."

Veneno turned away from the visitor and said to his sons, "The books all tell about that afternoon. A wedding. A few drinks in the sun. Then Mazzantini proposed this trip to Mexico. It all happened here." In wonder die old picador studied the plaza from which his father had emigrated to Mexico.

The old man, standing on shaky legs, whispered, "So now can you guess who I am?"

Veneno studied the man and suggested: "In 1886 you must have been ... how old ... sixteen?"

"I was fourteen," the old man replied, bursting with excitement. "I was a lively boy of fourteen. Doesn't that tell you?"

A grin came over Veneno's creased face and he clapped the old Sevillian on the shoulders: "I know very well who you are" Crying "Ready!" Veneno jumped to his feet, grabbed two knives and handed the old man two forks. Then, despite his bulk, he tried to simulate the agility of his father as he had been in the distant past. The old man cackled with joy and, pawing the ground with his broken sandals, charged with feeble steps, puffed past the picador, who stabbed him gently in the shoulder, and ran clumsily into a chair.

"Ole!" shouted the crowd that had gathered with news that the bullfighters had arrived.

With a sweep of his arms, Veneno helped the withered old man to his feet, sat him down at a table, and shouted to the waiters, "Drinks for all!" and a circle of admirers formed around the matador, watching everything he did. Victoriano fell into a kind of trance, blotting out the noise around him, for, as he explained to me later when describing this day that had changed his life and his career, "I was overwhelmed by a kind of vision in which I saw my grandfather fighting his bulls in grand style and my poor father fighting his abominably-- that was before he was killed by the bull in the box--and I swore a silent oath, 'I will fight like my grandfather, bravely, alone. I will not depend upon my family to do the dirty work.' And that boast, which I took seriously, accounted for the disaster that overtook me that Sunday in Seville.

"But even as I was making this promise to fight bulls in my own style, not Veneno's, he was shouting to the cafe crowd that was pressing on me: 'How wonderful it is to be in Sierpes and to know that on Sunday the Leals will bring glory to Seville,' and when the crowd drew even closer so that I was almost smothered, he bellowed: 'Men of Seville, wish us well,' and when they did he embraced the little old man who had awakened these memories and promised, 'On Sunday at half past four, old man, you will meet us at the hotel and you will ride to the plaza with the matador, for in the past you brought our family good luck.' "

When they were in their rooms, free at last of the admirers, Veneno told his sons, "Here it is different. It is in Seville, above all other cities in the world, that a matador has got to prove himself. They tell me the bulls of Guadalquivir are good and big. On Sunday they shall see us triumph." His sons nodded and the family retired, but toward two in the morning Victoriano rose and dressed, and Veneno, who missed little, whispered from his bed, "What is it, son?"

"I'm going to walk in the city," the matador replied.

"I'll dress," Veneno offered.

"No, stay," his son replied, and he slipped from the room to find the freedom he rarely knew in these days of constant adulation. Walking slowly and with no adoring fans at his heels, he roamed the silent streets his grandfather had known before he departed for Mexico. This was the city of Belmonte and Joselito, two of the greatest, the first a suicide in his late years, the second dead in his youth at the horns of a bull. At the immense cathedral, one of the largest in the world, he found an unlocked side door and entered that vast cavern of aisles and altars waiting in silence for the throngs that would gather on Sunday morning. Kneeling at the gate of one of the many side chapels, he prayed: "Virgin Mary, help me to keep the promise I made myself tonight in the cafe. Help me to be a man of honor like my grandfather." Remaining on his knees, he could hear nothing, either within the cathedral or without, but then a bird that had taken refuge there but could not find an exit flew down one of the aisles and the matador said, "Bring me good fortune, little bird," and then he went back to the hotel.

It was therefore with heightened emotion that Victoriano rode to the plaza on Sunday, the old man gabbing at his elbow, and when he saw the austerely beautiful bullring, builder and destroyer of reputations, he crossed himself with extra fervor, kissing the fingernail of his right thumb. "Virgin Mary, help me to succeed," he prayed.

Guadalquivir bulls are, by some accident of breeding, among the most deadly in Spain, and through the years they have killed almost as many matadors as the Miuras; yet they have also been the bulls most likely to provide the matador with dramatic opportunities for triumph, as if the bulls were saying to their human adversaries: "Triumph or die."

That afternoon Victoriano triumphed, but it was a triumph mostly of the spirit and not of the right arm. True, he fought exceptionally well and cut one ear from his first Guadalquivir and one from his second, so that the reputation he had carried from Mexico was confirmed. But his more important victory involved his father, Veneno, as the opponent. Up to this time the old picador had masterminded all his son's fights. While Victoriano was occupied with his opening cape work, Veneno obviously had to remain astride his horse in the corrals, unable either to watch the progress of the fight or to direct his son's next moves, but once the cape work ended and the bugles sounded, the old man would spur his horse into the plaza and from then on instruct his son in tactics. There was, of course, a second brief interlude while the picadors were retiring from the ring, but as soon as Veneno dismounted, he would dash back into the alleyway, from where he called out instructions to his son.

And even during the opening pa.s.sages, when Veneno had to remain in . the corrals, he would exercise his will through the person of his older son, Chucho, who inconspicuously advised Victoriano what to do. So in a very real sense, Victoriano rarely took any action in the ring that was not supervised by other members of his family, and he had become a kind of fighting machine, competent, cool and conditioned. But in Seville this changed.

Before the entrance of the second bull, a typical fierce Guadalquivir, Veneno instructed Chucho, "I size up this bull as dangerous. Keep Victoriano away. He's already cut an ear and the papers will have to say so. Let this bull have its own way."

So while the old picador waited, Chucho advised Victoriano, "Diego and I will handle this one. You stay back."

But the young matador had tasted the thrill of triumph in Seville, and was determined to cap his first performance with an even better display, so after Chucho had run the bull in the preliminary investigations, he, Victoriano, leaped forward with his cape and executed four extremely dangerous pa.s.ses that launched the fight on a high emotional keel.

Veneno, listening astride his horse in the corrals, knew by the gasping oles that his son was disobeying his instructions, and when after the first series of triumphant shouts he heard another series begin, only to end with a collective agonized gasp, he dropped from his horse and ran to an aperture in time to see Victoriano sprawled on the ground, his pants ripped, with a savage Guadalquivir trying to kill him. By some miracle Chucho got hold of the bull's tail and by brute force restrained the animal from further attacks on his brother. Diego lifted Victoriano from the sand and was about to inspect the wound when the matador shoved him aside, grabbed his fallen cape, and dashed forward to meet the bull again. Veneno, transfixed with fear, stayed at his peephole to watch his son launch a second series of superb pa.s.ses. Blood was coming from his right leg, but not in gushes.

'Thank G.o.d!" the old picador whispered as he remounted.

When he rode into the ring he was as lead picador required by custom to ride counterclockwise along the barrier, but he did so at unaccustomed speed in order to reach Victoriano, to whom he cried, "Make no further close pa.s.ses with this bull. He's not reliable. He hooks."

Victoriano, looking up at the austere white-haired figure on the horse, said with unprecedented independence, "I'm the matador. I'll bring you the bull." And with deft, dancing steps he led the wild animal into range of the pic, whereupon Veneno leaned with furious vigor on his lance, driving the steel shaft so deeply into the bull's back that the Seville men began to shout, "Swine, dog, butcher! Are you trying to kill the bull?" One infuriated spectator began to throw something at Veneno, but police rushed up to intercept him. The crowd continued hurling insults at the white-haired picador, who now swung his horse across the bull's path of escape, thus giving himself opportunity for an even deeper thrust of the lance.

"I will kill this bull," he muttered, bearing down with all the* force of his ironlike body. His left foot broke loose from its stirrup, but he pressed on. The bull's left horn, wet with Victoriano's blood, drove against the metal that encased Veneno's right leg, and the picador, seeing his son's blood, drove the lance deeper and deeper. A gush of crimson spurted out along the sides of the pole to which the steel tip was fixed, but still the infuriated old man pressed on.

He was interrupted in his unbridled attack on the bull by his own son. Daringly, Victoriano swept into position between the horse's head and the bull's, and with his cape close to his knees led the bull away until he found a chance to furl the cape spectacularly over his shoulders, teasing the bull away into a series of majestic pa.s.ses, slow, sweet and marvelous to the eye. Veneno, watching the evil manner in which the bull hooked to the left, prayed.

The dazzling pa.s.ses ended, a breathless and perfect creation that brought the audience to its feet with ecstatic cries. A man could attend a dozen fights and not see a series of pa.s.ses like this. One such performance once a season kept a fighter's reputation alive.

The final portion of the fight threatened to be a typical Victoriano retreat from the excellence of his cape work, and Chucho, mindful of how this bull hooked at the man and not the cloth, issued directions, 'Three pa.s.ses and kill him, or he'll kill you." But Victoriano felt that the moment had come when he must declare his independence from his family's domination, so after giving the mandatory three pa.s.ses to prove he was a real matador, he proceeded to try a fourth and a fifth, but a Guadalquivir bull is not like others and this one knocked him down and might have killed him had not the Leal brothers swept in with their whirling capes to lead the bull away.

Veneno, rus.h.i.+ng in from where the horses were kept, tried to prevent his son from attempting to kill, for it was obvious that the bull had brought blood to the matador's other leg and he could be excused if he allowed himself to be carried from the arena, leaving the bull to the other matadors. But on this day Victoriano refused that honorable escape, for he was after a greater honor, the kind for which his grandfather had been distinguished. Grabbing sword and muleta, he ignored the warnings of the three other Leals, marched directly to the bull, and dispatched him with the kind of perfect thrust he had used years ago when starting in his profession.

It was masterly. The bull dropped almost instantly. The crowd cheered and demanded that he march around the arena as they applauded, but when he started to do so, the pain from his wounds caused him to weave, so the three other Leals caught him, lifted him in the air and took him to the infirmary, where his wounds were cauterized.

He was brought home by his two brothers, followed by a crowd of cheering men who stormed into the hotel room where Veneno sat, solemn and silent. As soon as the matador was placed on the bed, smiling and flushed with triumph, Veneno cried to the mob: "Get out!" One man, who hoped to get a photograph of himself and the matador, tarried, and felt the picador's powerful arms close about him, throwing him into the hall. And then Veneno said to Chucho and Diego: "Get out!" He had not spoken to them in this manner for many years, and they hesitated, whereupon their father with frightening deliberation grabbed each in turn and threw him into the hallway. "What are you going to do?" Chucho cried.

"I am going to explain what it means to be a matador," the old man said. He slammed the door shut and locked it.

In the next ten minutes the awed crowd in the hall heard voices and the sound of smas.h.i.+ng furniture. Then there was only Veneno's terrible voice rasping in short sentences: "We created you." . . . "You will not destroy our chances." . . . "You will fight as we direct." After a long time there came a sound of running water. And then silence.

That night Chucho and Diego slept with friends, for it was apparent that the door was not going to be opened. Next morning Victoriano Leal limped down Sierpes to the little plaza of the Cafe Arena. His left leg was stiff from the bull's sharp horn thrust. One of his eyes was closed and black, and his nose was seriously distended as if it might be broken. But he was a matador. He knew at last what discipline meant, but he also knew that he had faced a major test of manhood and failed.

Mexico City, 1960. The Leals returned from Spain the most famous bullfighting family in the world. They worked together with a cohesion that was almost frightening. Veneno handled contracts and struck extortionate deals, but as he pointed out; "When the Leals fight, the crowds come." Chucho and Diego now performed almost automatically in the ring because of their perfection in their respective arts, while the old picador continued to blast the power out of even the most difficult bulls. Victoriano, of course, was the disciplined matador, a poetic evocation of all that the school of Seville stood for. The critic Leon Ledesma, who had traveled to Spain to observe the young man's triumphs in that country, reported back to Mexico: "This golden youth, the creation of a notable taurine family, has gained all the laurels Spain has to offer, and if we seek the reason it is because he is a complete matador: at once the essence of lyric poetry and the soul of harsh self-control." Understandably, his countrymen were excited about his return, and when his inaugural fight was announced one Monday, by noon on Tuesday all the fifty-five thousand tickets for Plaza Mexico had been sold.

I did not see the fight, but I did a good deal of reading about it and talked with many who had seen it. Preliminary publicity, of course, had featured the fact that Victoriano Leal, El Triunfador de Espana, would kill three "n.o.ble and exemplary bulls of Palafox," but no mention was made of who the second man would be, and there was no flurry of excitement when it was subsequently announced that the program was to be completed by the routine Mexican hack Juan Gomez.

Since Gomez had been a matador longer than Victoriano, he was ent.i.tled to fight first, and with his initial enemy accomplished nothing, as usual. Leal, inspired by the huge crowd that had come to greet him as one who had upheld Mexico's reputation throughout Spain, was brilliant with the cape, fine with the banderilla and poetic with the muleta. If he had killed well, he would surely have won ears and tail and possibly a hoof, too, for his performance was emotionally charged, and no one begrudged him the two ears he carried in triumph three times around the ring while the band played the frenzied Mexican music known as the diana.

The trouble started when Victoriano completed his third turn and, accompanied by Chucho and Diego, who picked up the flowers that were thrown at him, moved to the middle of the plaza to acknowledge the continuing cheers. Intoxicated by his magnificent triumph, he succ.u.mbed to an urge to glorify himself. Handing the two ears to his brothers, he raised his index fingers: "I am number one."

The crowd roared its confirmation of his claim, but the effect was dampened by the unexpected intrusion of Juan Gomez, who, in his faded blue suit with its tarnished decorations, left the barrier where he should have stayed and shuffled awkwardly to share the middle of the arena. Stopping three feet from Victoriano as the younger matador started to leave the ring, Gomez waited till his opponent had pa.s.sed, then raised himself on tiptoe, leaned far over imaginary horns, and drove his right palm, as if it were his sword, home. Then, sneering at Victoriano's back, he raised his own forefingers in the air and shouted, "I am the real numero uno!" and when cus.h.i.+ons began to rain down on him, he maintained his position, his wizened face staring up at the mob, his fingers still aloft, his cracked voice still crying, "I'm numero uno!"

A silence fell upon the arena, for this was not an idle gesture. By making it, the bowlegged Indian matador Juan Gomez stripped all the glitter from the afternoon. Victoriano's manipulations of the cape, the dandy's work of placing the banderillas just so, the slow, beautiful movements with the cloth, and the semi-adequate kill at the end-all these were swept away. Juan Gomez, a little Altomec Indian, ignored the triumphant one from Spain and looked across the arena toward the door behind which the four remaining bulls of Palafox hid in darkness. Pointing solemnly to the fateful gate from which his next enemy would soon burst into the arena, he profiled again with his right arm extended forward as if it were a sword, and seemed to be boasting, Thus will I kill my bull! And the crowd waited.

The third Palafox bull of the afternoon weighed thirteen hundred pounds, had a vicious chop to the right, and charged like a fire engine for two thirds of his run, then stopped abruptly to seek his man. With this deadly opponent, Juan Gomez made only four cape pa.s.ses, but they were close, slow, pure and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with emotion. They contained not a single flourish, but they caught at the throats of fifty-five thousand people, and anything Victoriano Leal had accomplished that afternoon was cheapened.

According to his habit, the bowlegged little Indian did not place his own sticks, for he lacked the grace for this part of the fight, but his peons did acceptably, and when the time came for his work with the muleta, he moved slowly, keeping very close to the dangerous bull. With a minimum of pa.s.ses, the st.u.r.dy fighter chopped his huge enemy down to manageable proportions. "His work," wrote Ledesma the next day, "was filled to the brim with cla.s.sic agony. We waited in silence for the bull to kill him."

Close, close to death the ugly little man worked, his eyes staring with deadly antagonism at the huge bull.

Then came the time for the kill. So far there had been no embellishments to delight the eye, no arabesques to tease the brain. There had been only a bandy-legged little Indian with dark skin and hair in his eyes playing with life and death against a bull that was obviously intent on ending the game a winner. Now the aching sense of tragedy was to be heightened, for the man seemed hardly tall enough to reach over the horns to kill this huge bull.

But with his left hand he lowered the red cloth, dangling it before his right knee, and with his right hand he clutched the long, point-dipping sword as if it were an extension of his body. He stood perilously close to the bull, and for an agonizing moment of suspense the two adversaries remained motionless. Then deftly, and with exquisite judgment, Gomez flicked the cloth, lured the bull just slightly to one side, took two quick steps, and almost leaped onto the horns. Slowly the tip of the sword found the true entrance. The desperate brown hand pushed on the sword. Slowly it went in ... in ... in. Bull and man formed a single paralyzed unit. It seemed as if minutes had pa.s.sed, but still the man and the horns were one. And then the brown hand flattened itself against the bull's dying neck, the sword blade completely vanished, and the man's palm came away covered with blood.

The moment pa.s.sed. The bull staggered on a few feet to certain death and the man slipped off the flank in a kind of numb ecstasy. The picture of immortality was broken and from the vast concrete bowl came the sound of breath being released. For two or three seconds there were no oles and no cheers.

His head low toward the sand and not in easy triumph, Juan Gomez mechanically withdrew his sword and slowly marched toward the spot where he must make his traditional report to the president. But before he reached there, the stormy response of the crowd broke over him, cheers such as he had not heard for many years. The music blared and flowers were beginning to cover the sand. Humbly the little Indian bowed to the president, acknowledging his authority. Then, putting his sword in his left hand, he turned to face the crowd and raised his right index finger.

A riot started. The partisans of Victoriano refused to think that one lucky kill ent.i.tled this man with a trivial history to dispute the champions.h.i.+p with an acknowledged master, who had triumphed in Spain. But this time the tough little Indian was not left alone with only a few supporters in the cheap seats on the sunny side. Many spectators, reviewing in their minds what they had seen that afternoon, must have concluded that there was something more to bullfighting than dancing gestures and poetic pa.s.sages. There was, in all honesty, a naked moment when man and bull stood equal, with all nonsense gone. This was a. fight of life and death, a summary of all we know of man's dark pa.s.sage, and it deserved a certain dignity. This dignity could not be observed in a hundred afternoons of Victoriano Leal, but this d.a.m.ned little Indian had somehow reminded the plaza of the very essence of bullfighting and life. And now the cheering was more evenly divided. That night Leon Ledesma wrote for The Bullfight: The gauntlet has been thrown down. Rarely has a matador of Victoriano Leal's proven stature been so frontally insulted as after the third bull, when Juan Gomez made fun of him, suggesting to the crowd that Leal knew nothing of the essence of the fight. And rarely has a boastful gesture such as that of Gomez been so immediately backed up by a performance that must have exceeded even his wildest hopes.

The most graceful fighter of our age has been made to look inconsequential by a man who has. .h.i.therto shown little but bravery. As we saw this afternoon, the insulting actions of Gomez drove Victoriano to prodigies of effort, and he in turn made Gomez extend himself to ridiculous acts with the fifth bull. I frankly do not like to see a matador take the horn of a maddened bull between his teeth, defying the animal to kill him, but apparently the public loved this rococo gesture of Gomez, for tiie plaza exploded with cheers and awarded him two ears, in this critic's opinion one more than he deserved.

Yesterday Juan Gomez triumphed. He stole Leal's reception for himself and made the intended hero of the afternoon look pompous. I am sure that Victoriano will not tolerate this indignity, and thus each man will drive the other to more dangerous exploits, and in the end, unless sanity prevails, we shall see one of these matadors goad the other to a display that must end in death.

It was this impending murder that I had been sent to Mexico to cover, and in the nine weeks that had pa.s.sed since Ledesma's first delineation of the struggle, the two matadors had fought together eight times. The perceived wisdom in Mexico was that Victoriano would be the victor because he would be supported in a crisis by the cunning of his father, Veneno, and the skill of his brothers, whereas Gomez could rely solely on his own courage.

I did not buy this easy generalization. I feared that Victoriano was not a complete man, was allowed no mind of his own, whereas Gomez was ferociously self-directed and a veteran of both triumph and despair. But as twilight fell I realized that I knew Victoriano but not Gomez and would have to find out more about this stubborn little Indian.