Mexico (15 page)

But die principal fame of the family derived from the fact that old Don Eduardo Palafox, who under a better system of government would have inherited the title 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 damned 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 fagade, 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 flashily 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 passageway through the crowd and went into the hotel. As he passed 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 competition 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 accomplishing, 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 assisted by a beat-up codger who poses as a manager but who really uses Gomez as a last-chance meal ticket, and a brassy 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 cocktail 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 God, 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 classic 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 shifted 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: I
f o
ne 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 assuring 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 brushing 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 noble-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 reassure 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?