Mexico: A Novel Part 6

"In the 1810 War of Independence, of course, the Conde de Palafox sided with the Spaniards, so that when relative peace came he was penalized by the victorious Mexicans, who took back half his vast holdings."

In the 1860s the Palafoxes guessed wrong again and supported the Austrian usurper, Emperor Maximilian, as did all decent people, and when the rabble shot him to restore Mexican independence, they also shot the then conde, whereupon the Palafox holdings fell to about two hundred and fifty thousand acres. In the Revolution of 1916, as we have seen, Don Eduardo came out strongly against General Gurza and lost another hundred and fifty thousand. Finally, in 1936, the family guessed wrong again and fought President CSrdenas, who had the land courts legally divest the Palafoxes of most of their remaining acreage.

"As a result of always being on the wrong side," Don Eduardo concluded, "our once-vast Palafox dominion now consists of nine thousand arid acres of bull ranch in a corner of our state, the skeletons of a few haciendas that General Gurza gutted, and the abandoned Mineral."

But if the Palafoxes invariably guessed wrong about the advantageous political affiliation, thereby losing their land, they displayed canny judgment where investments were concerned, thereby maintaining their family security. With the business ac.u.men that had always marked the Spanish branch of the family the Palafoxes had invested in railroads, in French mercantile companies, and more recently in Swiss and American pharmaceutical corporations, so that while their land holdings were steadily diminis.h.i.+ng, their equity in the business wealth of the world rose comfortably. In 1961 the family was at least as wealthy as it had ever been, and with this wealth the members had been able to buy favor with whatever administration was in power, regardless of its politics.

But die princ.i.p.al fame of the family derived from the fact that old Don Eduardo Palafox, who under a better system of government would have inherited the t.i.tle conde, raised the best bulls in Mexico and probably the best anywhere in the world except Spain. It was not unusual for Cardinal Palafox, while on church duty in other parts of Latin America or the United States, to be greeted with the enthusiastic comment "I saw your bulls in Mexico City and they were tremendous."

The young bull Soldado, who had survived for three months in our cave as my responsibility, turned out to be one of the memorable seed bulls of history, and his offspring accounted for much of the glory accruing to the name Palafox. On the last day of the fair we would see his latest descendants, and I looked across to the white wall where the poster blared the news: 'The Traditional Festival of Ixmiq. Bulls of Palafox."

I said, "Don Eduanio, when your first bull comes out on Sunday, I am going to salute him like a grandson. After all, he sprang from my cave."

The big rancher laughed and leaned back, wiping the Valencian rice from his heavy underlip. "Do you know why I like bullfighting so much?" he asked.

"Because you make a fortune on the bad bulls you sell," I suggested.

He chuckled and said: "You know I lose money raising those d.a.m.ned animals. We all do. But I like the essential battle of life. In this city my people have been fighting through four centuries. Not one of the buildings you can see from here was erected except after some shattering fight. No one wanted the cathedral there, or the new f.a.gade, or the expensive theater. No one except some Palafox. What happened to the Miers? Dona Carmen's family? They owned more land than we did, but when General Gurza approached, they quit like chickens of no strain." He paused and picked at a tooth with his little finger. When he had dislodged a bit of clam he said, "We have fought the Altomecs in the hills, and the king in Madrid, and the pope in Rome, and General Gurza in Mexico City. I fought President Cardenas through every court in Mexico, but we still parted good friends. Do you know what Cardenas said when he confirmed the decision of the land courts that confiscated our acres? He said, 'Don Eduardo, I think you are the father of your best bulls.' In a sense, I am."

"I'll bet that on Sunday five of your six animals will be disgraceful."

"Accepted, but remember that if only one is good, he's the one that'll be remembered." He laughed, then grew sober. "Here comes the matador now," he said.

I turned to see what had captured his attention, and watched a beat-up black Cadillac, about six years old, come speeding into the plaza and stop abruptly with protesting brakes before the terrace where we sat. At the wheel was a gnome-like man of about fifty, a black fedora jammed over his eyes and a cigar stuck between his teeth. Sharing the front seat with him were two middle-aged bullfighters who looked like gangsters. Quickly the three jumped out and started untying ropes that had kept bundles secure on top of the Cadillac on its trip from Mexico City. One of the men paused to open the rear door nearest me, and from it stepped a flas.h.i.+ly dressed, attractive young woman, followed by a smallish, tense, very dark man in his early thirties. As soon as he appeared, a crowd gathered while keeping at a respectful distance, and little boys began calling to others, "It's Juan Gomez!"

The crowd increased and some youth who had seen many movies gave a low wolf whistle, at which the girl smiled. Gomez, the matador, with no emotion on his face, forced a pa.s.sageway through the crowd and went into the hotel. As he pa.s.sed my table he looked at Don Eduardo and stopped to embrace him.

"May the bulls be good," the matador said.

"May you have much luck," the rancher replied.

Then Gomez disappeared, while the gnome-like man supervised the unloading of the costumes, the swords, the lances and the odd leather baskets in which the matador's hats were carried. Gomez was now among us, and Don Eduardo observed, as the mariachis paraded about the square, their trumpeters filling the night with the music of Mexico, "Tonight they sleep under one roof, Victoriano and Gomez. Do you think they'll be valiant on Friday?"

"People who saw them fight in Puebla say they almost made you forget Manolete," I replied.

"May their luck be good," the old rancher said. He crossed himself, kissed his thumb, and threw the benediction over his shoulder and into the House of Tile, where the two matadors were resting.

Chapter 4.

THE INDIAN.

I SPENT WEDNESDAY night after the poetry compet.i.tion and all day Thursday in a forced explosion of energy I had not displayed since my all-night cramming for exams at Princeton. Consulting experts, borrowing their newspaper clippings regarding memorable fights, and even conducting hurried interviews with Juan Gomez and his manager, I was able to construct a mental image of the bowlegged Indian. Then, when I had my room organized as a workstation, my typewriter on a table away from the sun, my pile of white paper neatly within reach and fresh carbons at hand, I plunged into the task of grinding out the type of story that New York treasured: good guy versus bad, all-white versus all-black, premonitions of tragedy to come, plus a general breathlessness to keep the story line galloping ahead. As the pages piled up, I was not unhappy with what I was accomplis.h.i.+ng, for I took professional pride in my ability to write quickly and accurately while fitting my data into the patterns that Drummond liked.

What we have in the three-day festival that starts tomorrow, Friday, is a Spanish celebration dating back about two hundred years but based upon Indian rituals almost two thousand years old. It's appropriate, therefore, that our protagonists should represent almost ideally the two historic strains of Mexican history: the ancient Indian, the recent Spanish.

The Spaniard I've already given you in detail: slim, tall, blue-eyed and with exceptional poetry of movement. You have my photos of him that I've caught in other plazas and earlier in Spain and they show the charismatic Victoriano, but use those that emphasize his elegant style. I haven't sent you too much on Gomez yet, but he's different, a grubby little Indian peasant with no elegance whatever, only a brutal determination to get the job done and a willingness to risk his life in doing it. Fortunately for us, he looks like what he is: awkward, a stumpy little guy with a head of dark hair encroaching on his eyebrows, and legs that are decidedly bowed. Taciturn, moody, afraid of the press, he is not a likeable matador.

So I see Ixmiq-61 as a duel between the two faces of Mexico, the Spaniard versus the Indian. Also: sunlight versus shadow, hero versus villain, beauty versus ugliness-and, above all, a young man protected by three extremely canny bullfight operators versus an older fellow a.s.sisted by a beat-up codger who poses as a manager but who really uses Gomez as a last-chance meal ticket, and a bra.s.sy dame who believes Gomez will help her become a flamenco entertainer in Spain but who will drop him instantly if something better comes along.

As I pushed my chair back to stare out the window at the plaza, I was not entirely happy with my facile comparison of the two matadors, for I suspected that in stressing their obvious differences I was missing essentials. A few days earlier I had telegraphed New York a brief report on Gomez and their response proved that the home office had adopted my simplification, because the art editor had cabled me: "Be sure get moody shot Gomez working bull deep in shadows." Drummond himself cabled: "Essential you provide us with numerous incidents that show good guy in peril and bad guy momentarily triumphant." In our shop Victoriano had become certified as the good guy.

Thus, through words and photographs we were prejudging an event that had not yet happened, and I could detect in the communications reaching me from New York evidence that the editors had become emotionally involved in this duel between the matadors. Late Thursday afternoon, a few hours after dropping off my latest dispatch at the cable office, I was startled by a messenger who brought to my room an urgent cable from Drummond that asked: "Highbrow philosophizing aside, which matador do you think is likely to die?"

Sitting at my desk, I stared at my typewriter and grumbled: They're forcing me to make a prediction I'm not capable of making. Then as I blinked and restudied the cable I realized that it did not represent a business query. It was a personal question from Drummond as a man, not an editor, one who had become caught up in the struggle between Victoriano and Gomez and after a long day at work and a c.o.c.ktail at some bar or bistro had shot me an honest inquiry. I was not required to answer, and yet as I sat there, my head resting on my hands as dusk fell and my room grew dark, I found that I wanted to give him an answer.

"It's the Spaniard who will die," I said aloud, and I could see the culmination of this insane contest. Juan Gomez, the relentless little Indian, would continue to fight the bulls with increasing valor, "tickling their tonsils with his elbows," as the bullfighters described it, and he would goad Victoriano into executing more and more arabesques until the final afternoon of the festival when in the lengthening shadows a bull would suddenly hook to the left, and Victoriano would hang suspended for a long forty seconds, after which he would be dead.

And then I must have lost all sense of morality because I found myself praying, "Dear G.o.d, if he has to die, let it be now, at the height of the festival, with the bands playing and not at the end of the fight but at the beginning, while the light is still good, so that the camera can catch the full detail as he dangles from the horn."

I regained my senses. "Jesus Christ!" I gasped. "What am I saying?" But before my self-disgust could drive the grisly prayer from my mind I had to admit that what I had prayed for was what I actually wanted. If Victoriano was doomed, let the swift horn thrust come at the Festival of Ixmiq, early in the afternoon on a sunny day when the light was good-not for the photographers, but for this photographer, me. "If there's to be a story, let it be a good one, a cla.s.sic of the bullring. Let me write a story that cuts right to the heart of the bullring, at the heart of Mexico itself. Purged of all nonsense. Just the bare truth."

But as I s.h.i.+fted my gaze from my desk 1 could see Drummond working at his own desk in New York and thinking exactly the way I had been thinking in Mexico. I could picture him unwilling to leave the office and breaking out a bottle of porter while he arranged imaginary headlines and calculated: If one of them has to die, as Clay claims, let it be the one who makes the best story for us. And he would be juggling the copy and the photographs I'd not yet sent him, because the events had not yet happened, and I could hear him a.s.suring himself: We can't go wrong playing Victoriano as the doomed hero, young and handsome, hounded to his death by the evil little man . . . that's not bad. Pictures here and here. Left page we'll use that great shot of him being carried in glory out of the ring in Mexico City with the girls throwing flowers at him. Facing page the same golden face but this time held aloft by a bull's horn. The black horn coming right out of his chest. Then on the inside pages the eight flashbacks of the family history, with that stupendous thing of his grandfather pinned to the sand by the bull's horn through his head. Those old-time photographs always carry a wallop. It isn't till pages five and six that we get our first shot of the bowlegged little Mexican who caused it all.

As soon as he thinks of the bowlegged little Mexican, he would be faced with a crucial editorial problem, and I could see him brus.h.i.+ng his dummy aside and asking: But how do we play it if it isn't Victoriano who dies but the little Mexican? It was at this point that he would wire me for my opinion. He was now facing up to his problem and I had no doubt he would come up with one of the n.o.ble-sounding phrases for which he was famous: "And thus we see why it is that men fight bulls and sometimes die on their horns."

I could feel myself becoming irritated at all this speculation, but as an obedient field worker I would continue to send him all the instructive information I could find on Gomez, trusting that something I said would illuminate the story-however it came out. But as I brooded about my work so far, I realized that nothing I had said about Gomez had represented the real man. I had been using him simply as if he were the Indian half of Mexico counterpoised against the Spanish component. I had been describing him as darkness opposed to light, as fate imperiling the exquisite. I had set up in my mind a phony preconception of what was going to happen-the death of Victoriano Leal-and this act had determined my observations of Gomez. I had been describing a man only as he functioned in the life and death of another, and this was wrong.

All the books I had ever read about Mexico, and the thesis I had written at Princeton about my homeland, had been flawed by a fatal weakness. Spaniards had spoken of the country as it affected Spain's quest for Catholics and bars of silver. Americans like my father had explained how it looked from the American point of view. In his The Pyramid and the Cathedral he had tried to rea.s.sure the American reader that, after all, Mexico was a reasonably decent place because in many respects it was almost up to American standards. But of Mexico as a unique land, with its own promise and its own problems, no one had written. And least of all the Mexicans themselves. For anyone in this land who took up his pen did so either as a Spanish apologist, or as an Indian, or as an anti-American, or as a pro-Russian. But as a Mexican? Never.

Since truth to a Mexican and to an American almost always differed, I now realized that everything I had so far written about the matador Juan Gomez had been constructed strictly from the point of view of an American writing about an Indian who was about to cause the death of a Spaniard. Now I was wide awake, and as sleep was impossible, on that quiet Thursday evening after I had filed my report, I left the House of Tile to walk in the plaza. There, gazing at the contrasting Spanish and Indian structures in the silvery moonlight, I said to myself: Forget your personal hang-ups, forget your desire for the perfect headline that sells magazines-if you were forced to describe Juan Gomez as he actually is, in relation to no one else, to no symbols, how would you do it?

Finding no easy answer, I sat on one of the benches that lined the plaza and stared alternately at the cathedral of Bishop Palafox and at the pyramid of the ancient Drunken Builders while struggling to reach some understanding of this stolid Indian matador. Out of the grubby incidents I had heard about his career I recalled one incident in particular that seemed to epitomize the hards.h.i.+ps he constantly had to confront. It involved a frantic midnight auto trip from Acapulco to Mexico City.

About three years ago, before his compet.i.tion with Victoriano Leal had provided him with real money, Juan Gomez was a full-fledged matador, but with a chaotic past, a dismal present and a rather limited future. He had accomplished little, was beset by leeches who kept him poor, and had no logical reason to expect his luck to change. He fought about six times a year and at fees that barely kept him from starvation. He could not afford to maintain a regular troupe of his own, as affluent matadors did, but was forced to rely upon any picadors or peons he could get cheap and sought to ingratiate himself with the unions by accepting whomever they sent.

He had picked up a striking-looking girl named Lucha Gonzalez, a strident singer who also tried to dance and was reasonably good with the castanets. When he managed to find a bullfight, he contributed to their upkeep, but much of the time he was forced to rely upon the modest amounts of money she earned from her engagements. Lucha, whose name was the accepted abbreviation for one of the most popular girl's names in Mexico, Maria de la Luz (Virgin Mary of the Light), was about two inches taller than her matador, a fact that he was never able to forget. One day she saw in an American magazine an advertis.e.m.e.nt for elevator shoes and the promise "Now you can be taller than she is." She could not read English, of course, but she caught the idea conveyed by the picture and had a friend write a letter to New York, sending the twenty dollars that she had saved. It had not been easy to measure her matador's feet, but one night when he was asleep she had pulled away the covers and made on paper a rough outline of his feet.

When the shoes arrived and she handed them to Gomez he noticed the exaggerated heels, trickily camouflaged, and began to laugh. But, actually, his vanity was wounded and thereafter he never loved Lucha as much as he had before.

At the time I'm speaking of, Gomez had been awarded a third-rate contract for a fight in Acapulco, with bulls that were not acceptable for the big ring in Mexico City. He had been offered $750 for the afternoon, but of this amount he had to pay $110 for his troupe, $88 for travel and hotel bills, and a kickback of $150 to the impresario. Laundry, care for his suit, and $44 for bribing the newspaper critics meant that he earned, for an afternoon of fighting dangerous bulls, about $300, most of which he had to spend at the cafes to create an illusion that he was an important matador. It is true that for some of his fights he earned considerably more, but for the past four years he had kept for himself less than two thousand dollars a year, out of which he had had to pay for five months in the hospital.

In fact, his Acapulco engagement would have been financially disastrous had it not been for Lucha, who by persistent phone calls had forced one of the big American hotels to sign her on as an entertainer for a two-week period. As so often before, her earnings enabled the matador to live, and when the fight was over Lucha kept on singing while her matador in his high-heeled shoes strutted aimlessly about the cafes.

His work in the Acapulco bullring had not been impressive, for the animals were atrocious, but he had been at least as good as the other matadors and patently braver, so that during the long week after the fight he won a good deal of favorable comment in the cafes, especially since he was spending what remained of his earnings on drinks for the parasites that clung to him. At midnight on a Sat.u.r.day, six days after his appearance in the ring, considerable excitement was caused by a man who ran from cafe to cafe crying, "Phone call for the matador! Impresario in Mexico City calling urgently."

Lucha herself had told me about that night in Acapulco. I'd been working on a story about illegal Mexican immigrants in San Antonio, Texas, and chanced to see a newspaper item about a Sunday bullfight across the border in Nuevo Laredo. Since it was only a two-hour drive south, I decided to go because I'd heard that this Mexican matador Juan Gomez was a real bulldog and I was eager to see what he could do.

After the fight, in which he performed well, I sought him out, showed him my credentials and asked if we could talk. His manager, a tough character with a long cigar, grabbed my card, studied it and nodded, whereupon Gomez led me to a cafe overlooking the Rio Grande. The featured entertainer was an ersatz flamenco singer-dancer who joined us at our table. "This is my friend, Lucha Gonzalez," the matador said, but she corrected him: "I'm his manager. Cigarro here thinks he is, but I'm boss." And when we got around to talking about that night in Acapulco she proved that she was boss, for she dominated the conversation.

"I'm singing one of my best songs when this man rushes up shouting 'Telephone for Juan Gomez! Impresario in Mexico City! Needs him for the fight tomorrow!' So I jump off the stage and run to help the man find Juan. I'm thinking: My G.o.d! Mexico City! The big plaza!"

As we talked she~looked lovingly at her matador and said: "I find him in that big cafe by the ocean, wearing that checkered suit I got him in Mexico City, a string tie, his Andalusian hat and the polished shoes from New York. A proper-looking matador. When the messenger shouts 'Gomez! The impresario in Mexico City wants you for a fight! Tomorrow! On our phone!' a change comes over Juan."

She paused, smiled at Juan again and said as if recalling a fairy tale: "He was so handsome when he rose, straightened his jacket and walked through the streets to the telephone with men behind us shouting to others: 'Gomez, called to Mexico City for a big fight tomorrow!' I was proud to be walking with him, and when we reached the phone the news was exciting: 'We' re in trouble, Gomez. All tickets have been sold for tomorrow's fight. We were supposed to have the hero from Venezuela. But his plane was grounded in Bogota, no way he can get here. Can you rush right up here and be ready to fight at four?' "

Now Gomez interrupted: "I told him: 'I'll be there,' and he said: 'Matador, you've saved the honor of Mexico.' "

"But tell him what the pig said when I asked him about the fee," Lucha cried, and Gomez fell silent, so she spoke: "He told Juan, 'We'll arrange that later,' but he was helpful about the trip: 'If you drive out of Acapulco right away, say by one o'clock, you have less than two hundred miles to go. That should put you here by seven, easy. Then you can catch some sleep, Cigarro can select your bulls at noon, you get a little more sleep and you'll be bright-eyed for the fight at four.' "

Lucha, who had been listening in, could not accept this evasion. Grabbing the phone, she said: "Senor Irizaba, how much for Gomez?" and when the suave voice of the impresario a.s.sured her: "We'll settle that later," she exploded, and as she talked I had a chance to study this forceful, crudely handsome woman. In her thirties, she had obviously trailed from one nightclub to another through most of Mexico and even in "the American border towns. Now, stuck in Nuevo Laredo in a fifth-rate joint, she recalled that night in Acapulco, and despite the mournful tale she was about to relate her sense of comedy made her chuckle.

"Now it seems funny. Then it was a fight, real bad," and she explained how, when the call from Mexico City ended she had warned Gomez: "That man is a liar. He's using you. For you there will be no fight in the capital tomorrow."

"You heard him, Lucha," Gomez had argued. 'The Venezolano is stranded in Bogota. Irizaba has to find someone-with a strong reputation."

The proud woman lowered her voice as she told me: "In those days my man here had no reputation, strong or weak. So I knew it was a lie on Irizaba's part. He was calling Juan simply to have him on hand if the matador he really wanted, someone much better known, couldn't come." But again she laughed as she touched my arm: "When Juan left the phone and the men in the cafe asked how much he would be getting for the fight, he told them Three thousand dollars,' but they must have known it would have been more like six hundred, and there he was, likely to get nothing."

At this parading of his shame, Gomez winced, and as Lucha continued in her energetic way I caught a glimpse of the bullfighter's life. As a woman who had engineered her own cafe appearances, she knew how unreliable Mexican managers of such places could be, and she'd had a few bad experiences in the States, too, so she had told Juan firmly: "You cannot drive to Mexico City this time of night. For nothing."

He had said: "But there's a chance. If I could have a big day in the capital-"

"You'll have no day-none-not with that worm Irizaba." She told me: "We continued the argument for nearly half an hour, didn't we, Juan?" He nodded: "It was bitter. She knew I had no chance, and maybe I knew it, too. But that's what a matador is, a man who takes chances."

"How did it end?" I asked, and they both spoke at once, each giving the other credit for decent behavior in what had become a brawl, but in the end Gomez had issued an ultimatum: "In fifteen minutes Cigarro and I leave for the capital. Come with us or stay here, you choose."

Realizing that her man meant what he said, she had temporized: "Let me sing my next set. You know we live on my singing and I can't just walk out-"

"I'll wait," he had replied, and that night, at a quarter to two, with Cigarro at the wheel and Lucha and Gomez trying to sleep in the backseat, the Cadillac roared out of the seaside resort, entered the mountains and drove due north toward the capital. From time to time the rear-seat pa.s.sengers awakened to watch Cigarro speed through some sleeping village at seventy miles an hour or scatter a flock of chickens sleeping on the warm pavement-through Iguala, famous in Mexican history for its role in revolutions; through Taxco, with its old buildings of great beauty; and into Cuernavaca, with its exquisite residences occupied by rich American tourists.

As they finished the treacherous trip through the mountains and reached the plateau on which Mexico City rested, Cigarro had slowed to a halt: "Juan, I'm tired. You like to drive?" but Lucha objected: "He needs sleep." She climbed into the front seat to take the wheel and guided the old car into the outskirts of Mexico City and then along its crowded streets. Pa.s.sing cafes in which she had sung, she started humming one of her favorite songs and made her way to a cheap hotel. There she argued with the custodian that since it was now seven in the morning, she would expect to pay only for the coming day. At seven-thirty Cigarro and his matador were asleep, so she drove on to an all-night cafe where the patrons remembered her and there she joined in a few songs.

At half after eleven she was back in the hotel, bringing Gomez hot water for shaving and at ten to twelve she had both him and Cigarro ready for noontime events at the arena.

Unlike most matadors, who were superst.i.tious to an incapacitating degree and who refused ever to look at their bulls until the animals burst into the arena for the final fight, Juan Gomez insisted upon being present at the midday selection of the beasts. He had felt, even as a boy, that he could never learn enough about the animals and felt there was always the possibility that at the noon choosing he might detect some characteristic in his beast that would enable him to produce a great fight. The only weakness in this theory was that he rarely produced a superb afternoon, while men who never saw their bulls sometimes did.

But when the matador and his entourage entered the corrals where the bulls would be a.s.signed to each matador, Lucha was shocked, for she saw immediately that not only were the representatives of the other two fighters for that day present, but also the men who were to have served the Venezuelan visitor, plus the agents of four other well-known matadors, each with a more glittering reputation than Juan Gomez.

She felt sick. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" she muttered. "Oh, those filthy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!"

Gomez, trying to protect the slim hope that he would be chosen for the fight, tried to silence her lest she destroy the chances he never had, but she brushed him aside, elbowed her way through the crowd of men inspecting the six placid bulls in the corrals, located the impresario Irizaba, a tall, corpulent man in his sixties whose left eye twitched, and began screaming at him: "You stinking son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h! Bringing all these men here for no purpose. You swine!"

Her fury was so great and her attempts to claw at Irizaba became so ferocious that he ordered two of his helpers to restrain her while he fled to the security of his upstairs office overlooking the corrals, but he did not escape unscathed, for as he retreated, Lucha, though held firmly in the grip of two strong men, succeeded in giving him a painful kick.

Agents for the other disappointed matadors, thinking to protect whatever chances Gomez might have for fighting in the capital, dragged Lucha away, and when she was safely outside the plaza, they returned to Gomez and said: "If you ever want to fight here, apologize to Irizaba. He'll understand. Just say the woman got out of control." He said: "No one can step on her toes. I learned and so did he," and he pointed to Cigarro standing by the corrals.

Throwing Lucha out of the plaza solved nothing. Still steaming mad over what had been done to Gomez, she found another entrance and rushed up the stairs to Irizaba's office, where she broke open his door and shouted at him: "We drove all night. So did those three others. Are you going to pay us for our trouble?"

Irizaba was terrified of her. He kept moving about behind his big desk to protect himself. She would have torn him apart.

"How did it end?" I asked, and Gomez deferred to Lucha, who said: "The fat one told me: 'What I'm willing to do, since the matadors are already here, I'll give each of you two seats-free, you understand-for the fight,' and he pushed two of them at me."

"What did you do?" I asked, and she said bitterly: "Didn't even touch them. Saw the location and flicked them away with my fingernail, told him: 'You would! Cheap seats way up there. For a full matador. How shameful. You give us good seats down there, or-' "

"Did he?" I asked.

"He knew he had to."

"And did you take them? I'd have thought-"

Gomez responded: "Of course we took them. A matador can never see enough bulls. Always something different. That's how he learns." Then he told me something I did not know: "And quite a few times in bullfight history some matador just watching in the stands has stepped in, with no cape, to handle a bull who has leaped in among the crowd. We save lives, because with bulls you can never be sure."

Bullfighting is an ugly business. For a few lucky men it offers a life of brilliance if they are either brave enough or canny enough to dominate it. But for most it is a sad, bitter, dirty existence that lasts only a few years and that leaves men either maimed or emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives. Here is the story, as I heard it from Juan Gomez and his friends, of how he became committed to this dismal world.

Even now I could hear his soft voice with its heavy Indian accent as he spoke reluctantly of his early years: "I was born in a small mud hut near a village beyond the pyramid. Altomec Indians, no land of our own. Father, always white cotton pants, you know the kind, rope for a belt, very thin s.h.i.+rt, front ends tucked over the rope, back ends flapped across skinny bottom." He said that for some years his stolid father had fought in the armies of General Gurza, hoping to win for his family a better life, but all he had gained from this excursion into the revolution was an additional cotton s.h.i.+rt. He had been present at the second sacking of Toledo, but while the more prudent of Gurza's men were stripping the cathedral he had been trying unsuccessfully to rape a nineteen-year-old girl. He had thus missed his one chance to profit from the Revolution, for the other soldiers got the cathedral's rich silver ornaments.

In the month of Juan's birth the Gomez family was overtaken by retribution, for a large group of conservatives, banded together by priests and calling themselves Cristeros-Men of Christ-swept over much of Toledo state sacking villages and murdering everyone suspected of having served with General Gurza. One evening at sunset the Cristeros came roaring in from the plains of central Mexico and in an act of supreme irony shot Juan's father.

I say this was ironic because in those last wild and evil years that plagued Mexico, when good men were driven to murder, the peasant Gomez had taken into his home a Catholic priest who would otherwise have been a.s.sa.s.sinated by the old remnants of Gurza's rebellious army, and for three years the Gomez family had hidden this priest, dressing him as an ordinary workman and allowing him, at great peril to themselves, to conduct Ma.s.s in their mud hut. It was surprising that Gomez had done this, for he had been a vigorous if ineffectual revolutionary who had at one time hated priests, but he explained his action simply: "I am tired of killing. Priests should not be killed."

The matador said of his father: "When he was raping and tearing down churches, G.o.d watched over him. But when he repented and protected a priest in our home, G.o.d killed him. He sent men who shouted, 'Long live Christ the King!' as they murdered and burned, and they shot him."

The Widow Gomez was left with two sons, Raul, aged five, and Juan, aged one month. The priest stayed with them for several months to help till the fields that the dead man had worked for others, and for some time the boys grew up thinking he was their father. But when the Cristeros departed, some old Gurza partisans reported the priest's existence in the village, and government forces, strongly anti-Catholic, came to find him and perhaps shoot him, but by the time they arrived Father Lopez had been warned and had escaped. I can speak with some authority about these particular matters, because when Father Lopez fled from the village in northwest Toledo state, he was taken in by my family at the mine, and I remember that he occupied a room next to mine. Father Lopez said that it was a miracle that he, a hunted priest, should have been saved first by a soldier from General Gurza's armies and next by a Protestant who feared Catholics. My father, who had rescued Padre Lopez after a midnight ride in an old Ford car, growled that there the similarity ended, "because you are not welcome to conduct any Ma.s.ses in this house." Nevertheless, the redoubtable priest did hold secret Ma.s.ses in what was called the bull-cave, and to them came the workmen at the mines, even though some were known to be spies for the revolutionists.

How the Widow Gomez, now left with two sons and no man to help her, survived, the matador never told me, but in those dreadful years it was not uncommon for half the women of a village to be widowed. Husbands who had supported the revolution were killed by the Cristeros, and those good men who were suspected of being Catholics were shot by the revolutionists. Take my own typical case. Before I was fourteen I had seen the city of Toledo occupied four different times and burned twice. I had seen not Jess than twenty men hanged and numerous others shot, and later I had watched some of the most gentle men and women I had ever known rise up in the Cristero movement and strike back with murderous fury. That was the Mcxico of my youth, and it was the Mexico in which Juan Gomez grew up with his widowed mother.

The boy had one year of education. Then the village school was burned by the Cristeros, and he roamed the countryside earning what pennies he could. Of these years he told me: "I could sign my name but I couldn't read. Still have trouble with big words. But a kind neighbor told me: 'Go down to Toledo and find the Palafox ranch. They hire boys.' So I walked south, with one pair of pants and one s.h.i.+rt. Cold day in January when I walked through the big gate. Didn't even know it was a place where they raised fighting bulls. Never seen one."

At the small stone bullring inside the ranch many automobiles were parked and a crowd of ragged boys like himself milled about. "What's happening?" he asked. A boy said: "La tienta," and when he asked "What's that?" the boy said in astonishment: "If you don't know, why are you here?" He said: 'To get a job," and the boy said impatiently: "Armillita is testing the cows."

"Who's Armillita?" he asked.

Staring at him in amazement, they pushed him from the gate, deeming him unworthy of being allowed to enter if he did not even know who Armillita was. A few moments later the gate was opened from inside and a big round man whom he later knew as Don Eduardo Palafox appeared. "Let the boys in," he commanded, and the men who had been keeping the ragam.u.f.fins out now graciously admitted them.

"Sit over there," a gruff man ordered, "and if one of you dares to jump into the ring, his throat will be cut."

At this moment a red gate on the far side of the little ring swung open and for the first time Juan Gomez watched an animal charge into an arena. A flush of excitement swept over him as he saw a tall Indian walk up to the fighting animal and begin to dominate it with his red-and-yellow cape. In his motions there was not only grace but discipline in how he controlled his body as he suspensefully evaded the animal's horns.

"Is that Armillita?" he whispered to the other boys. Their looks of contempt satisfied him that it was, but he still did not know who Armillita was. So he selected an intense-looking boy at his right, older than the rest, and asked: "Who is Armillita?" And the boy replied without taking his eyes off the matador, "The best."

This did not satisfy Juan, who asked further: "Does he always fight bulls?"

The boys almost interrupted the testing of the animals with their wild shouts. 'That's not a bull, you idiot!" one cried. "He can't tell a bull from a cow!"

The interruption had attracted Armillita's attention, and when the time came for a rest he pointed to the boy at Juan's right and asked: "Want to try?" In a flash the boy leaped the low barrier, ran to the matador and grabbed a cape. Then, with the tall professional at his back, he approached the two-year-old cow. The other boys sat silent as their companion walked slowly and with the exaggerated posture adopted by matadors-head back, torso arched-marched toward the waiting animal. Suddenly there was a charge of black fury as the tormented cow sought something she could hook into, but the boy antic.i.p.ated her motion and with some skill led her into his cape.

"Ole!" shouted the crowd that had come to see the testing. This inspired the boy and four more times he led the cow past his belt, leaning into her flanks as she sped by. On the sixth pa.s.s he dropped the end of the cape, which he had been holding in his left hand, gave a pirouette and sent the animal chasing the end of the sculptured cloth as it etched an arc across the sand.

"Ole!" the crowd called again, and the boy was sent back to his perch with a nod of approval from Armillita himself. Obviously, the young man had been practicing for many months and obviously he was intending to be a bullfighter. The other boys treated him with respect. He did not return to sit alongside Juan Gomez, but sat apart, flushed with excitement.

Toward the end of the afternoon Don Eduardo Palafox, whom the boys near Juan identified as the owner of the ranch, announced that he intended testing a three-year-old bull that he was planning to a.s.sign to the cows as a seed bull, and he was requesting the two matadors to try this animal to see if he had the courage required of any bull chosen for this important purpose. The crowd murmured its pleasure, for many testings would go by without the rancher's throwing out a real bull for the matadors. Such an event was equally significant to the owner of the bull, for it represented a substantial gamble. A three-year-old fighting bull worth more than a thousand dollars in an arena was being thrown into the trial ring, and if the animal proved himself inadequate for seed purposes there was no alternative for an honorable rancher but to destroy him, for the bull could never be sold to fight in another ring. At three a bull had such capacity to learn, and could remember so long, that if he were tested today and allowed at some future date to go into a real fight, he would remember what to do and he would almost surely kill the matador.