Mexico (18 page)

At this point Armillita withdrew and allowed the junior matador to try his luck, and with him, too, the bull was excellent. Then came a surprise, for Armillita motioned to the boy in the stands and said, "Now try a real bull." Nimbly the tense young man leaped down to a part of the ring well away from where the bull was charging the barrier. Taking a cape that hung from an inside wall, he started the traditional march of the matador toward the enemy, his feet moving cautiously, his hands jerking the cape in rhythms to attract the bull, and his husky, fear
-
filled voice calling, "Eh, bull! Eh, come here!"

The young bull charged and Juan saw that the boy froze into position, held his hands low, and somehow took the bull past. The crowd shouted its pleasure and the boy tried again, but this time the wary bull turned too soon and caught the young fighter with the flat of his left horn, tossing him far to one side. Instantly two things happened. The bull, having found his target, wheeled abruptly, reversed his direction and came thundering back at the fallen boy. But the trained matadors, anticipating this, nimbly interposed themselves and with their flashing capes lured the bull away.

This was the first time Juan had seen anybody knocked down by a bull and he was impressed with three things: the power of the bull, whose sudden flick of a horn could send a human being sprawling; the deftness with which the real matadors slipped in to lead the animal where they wanted it; and the courage with which the fallen boy leaped to his feet, recovered his cape and continued fighting the bull as if nothing had happened. This awe-inspiring sequence of events affected Juan
Gomez
so profoundly that, without realizing he had done so, he at that very moment committed himself to bullfighting, inwardly vowing: "I will know bulls. I will be quick. And I will be brave."

But what happened next gave his first experience with the bulls that touch of tragedy which is never far from the bullring. The successful beginner climbed back to his perch in the improvised stands, flushed and joyous. The real matador finished with a few ornamental passes, and the man below with the big books in which the ranch records were kept looked pleased. They had found a new seed bull, and that was always a happy moment, for a fine bull might sire as many as three hundred fighting bulls and bring glory to his ranch. For example, Soldado, the Palafox bull who hid in our cave at the Mineral, had, in the years from 1920 through 1930, fathered 366 splendid bulls, at least eleven of which were remembered in Mexican annals as immortal--that is, they had either killed matadors in the ring or had fought so stupendously that they had been accorded, in death, the adulation of the crowd and two or more turns about the sand they had defended so well. Now it looked as if Palafox had found another in the historic sequence of great sires that reached back through Soldado and Marinero to the ancient bull ranches of Spain.

But when the picadors came out, on big horses and with real barbs, the young bull became frightened. From a distance he looked as if he intended to charge, but each time he drew near the horse and the man he grew cautious. Then, when he did charge halfheartedly, and felt the barb cutting into his shoulder, he leaped, recoiled and retreated.

A silence fell over the plaza, for the spectators were seeing something they wished they were not. They pleaded with the bull to show his courage. "Now, now!" they coaxed as he edged reluctantly toward the next horse. Armillita led the bull repeatedly right into the flanks of the horse, but cautiously the bull drew back, refusing to give battle. In the ring no bullfighter looked anywhere but at the bull. By no trick or gesture did any spectator betray the fact that he recognized a bull as a coward. That was for the rancher to decide. The fighters acted as if they had a bull with spirit, and no one shrugged his shoulders in disgust, although each was inclined to do so.

After the eighth unsuccessful attempt to get the bull to face the horses, Don Eduardo shouted, "Shoot him." The crowd gasped, because sometimes such a bull was returned to the corrals and sold later for beef, or if the rancher really needed the money, secretly sold to some remote plaza. But Don Eduardo turned his back on the bull and repeated, "Shoot him."

Three trained oxen were turned into the plaza and with uncanny cunning surrounded the bull and lured him back to the corrals. A cadaverous man in charro costume carrying a gun left the box near Don Eduardo's. There were a few moments of apprehensive silence, a shot, and a wave of sorrow swept through the little plaza. But before anyone could speak Don Eduardo hurried into the ring shouting merrily, "Let's have one more cow. You, son! Do you want to be a bullfighter?" He pointed directly at Juan Gomez, whom he had not noticed before, and the little Indian boy saw that the big rancher had tears in his eyes. Mesmerized, Juan nodded his head and felt the other boys pushing him into the ring.

He was dizzy with emotion and hardly heard the low, strong voice of Armillita as the big matador whispered, "Hold the cape like this." With uncertain hands the little Indian grabbed at the cape. He dropped one end and the boys laughed. Reaching for that end, he lost the other, then succeeded in getting the entire cape tangled in his feet.

Then something happened. He felt a tremendous hand on his left shoulder, pressing in toward the bone. He looked up and saw that it belonged to Armillita, who was saying: "Keep your feet still. If the cow knocks you over, it won't hurt."

The gate swung open and a feisty black cow, hardly a year old, burst into the arena. She charged at whatever she saw, and the matadors prudently drew Juan back to a safe area, spreading their capes to lure the animal. But she needed no lures. Anything that moved was her enemy, and as she flashed past, Juan thought, Isn't it strange that the bull should have been so cowardly and the cow so brave?

"Watch me," Armillita called as he ran into the ring to give the determined little cow her first passes. The crowd cheered as the animal charged again and again at the tall matador, trying vainly to knock him down, and one could hear in the repeated oles both relief from the tragedy of the bull and the wish that it was not the cow but the bull that had been brave.

Now a firm hand was placed in the middle of Juan's back, and he felt himself pushed awkwardly into the ring. The crowd shouted encouragement, but before the first applause had died, the cow spotted the boy and charged at him with even greater fury than before. Ineptly Juan tried to protect himself with the cape, but his feet became tangled with the cloth, and the cow hit him with full force, her blunt and still unformed horns making a kind of cradle in which she lifted him, throwing him some six feet into the air.

This was the moment of decision, when a human being flying through the air thinks, I am going to be killed. In this instant, if that thought overpowers the boy or the man he can never become a bullfighter; but if, as in the case of little Juan
Gomez
, the imperiled one dismisses that first fear and follows it with the vow "I will conquer this bull," then there is a chance that courage will prevail.

At the moment of crashing down onto the sand Juan laughed: "It's not a bull. It's a cow."

He struggled to regain his footing, but his rear was covered by the red cape, and this attracted the cow, who gave him a second tremendous thrust. The crowd cheered, while the matadors, knowing that the cow could not hurt the boy too badly, stayed off to one side, ready to rescue him if he fell into real danger.

Again he tried to get up and again the little cow knocked him around like a football, but at one point the animal charged well past him, giving him time to straighten himself up. From a distance he heard someone crying, "Stand firm," and he planted his feet in what he considered an advantageous spot and recovered control of the cape. He did not have to cry "Eh, bull!" at this one, for as soon as she saw the cape, she whirled about, charged, and caught Gomez on the side, catapulting him once more into the air.

He got up and stood near the middle of the ring. Flicking the cape as he had seen Armillita do, he shouted at the cow and she came toward him like a locomotive. This time he managed the cape correctly, and or the first time in his life led a wild animal directly past his waist. He could hear Armillita shout, "Ole!" and from that moment his soul belonged to the bullring.

"I hiked home that evening in a daze," he told me. "The stars came out and as I entered my village and saw its meanness, and the ugly mud house in which I lived, I discovered the power that would keep me moving back and forth across Mexico." It was some weeks before he found the courage to tell his mother of his plans, and when he did she started crying, saying that the government had taken his older brother away to school and now Juan wanted to become a bullfighter, and someday he would be brought home dead. He ended the argument by heading down the road toward the city of Toledo and whatever bullrings he could find en route.

With no proper attire, no money, no friends and not even the ability to read and write, he drifted from Toledo to Leon to Torreon to Guadalajara. In the second city he met a friendly, soft-spoken man who told him that in return for certain favors he would guarantee to make Juan Gomez a first-class matador, as he had done for others, and he did actually give Juan an oM suit and two swords and an opportunity to fight in a small ring out in the country. But after three months with the man Juan decided: "This is no way to live," and ran away, taking with him the suit and the swords.

He was now a bullfighter, with one pair of pants, one shirt, worn shoes and a torn cape in which he folded all his belongings as would-be matadors had done for generations. At fifteen he fought seven times in villages few had ever heard of. At sixteen, in the remote town of Rio Grande de Zacatecas, he tried to fight a bull seven years old weighing half a ton. One of the townsmen said, 'This bull has fought so many times that when you come into the ring, he salutes and tells you where to stand. That's so he can kill you better." With this bull Juan had no luck whatever. Four times the huge, wily animal knocked him down, and four times, with that fearlessness which was to mark his career, Juan got up and tried again. But on the fifth try the bull caught him in the right leg and ripped a deep gash thirteen inches long. For a while it looked as if he might lose his leg, but a doctor in Aguascalientes heard of his plight and had him brought to that city, where he was able to save the limb.

At sixteen Juan
Gomez
, limping rather badly, had earned as a bullfighter exactly one hundred and twenty dollars. Most of his fights had paid nothing, for boys were expected to risk their lives for the practice they got from fighting fourth-rate bulls in fifth-rate plazas. And this Juan was willing to do. While the drain tubes were still in the upper part of his leg to keep the wound clean of pus, he had fought two incredible animals that had been hauled from one plaza to another. This was near Aguascalientes, and when he reported with his tubes back in place to the doctor who had saved his leg he had expected a severe lecture, but that man said simply, "If you don't have courage when you're young, you'll never have it."

But when the leg refused to grow strong, and he was generally debilitated, he had to hike penniless back to his mother, who had managed to keep alive in the mysterious ways women do in small villages. She put him to bed and nursed him back to strength, telling him sharply: "You will soon be seventeen, and you must find yourself a decent job." She sent him to a friend in the city of Toledo, and this friend got him work distributing beer. Hefting the heavy cases gave Juan
Gomez
those extraordinary shoulders that were later to enable him to kill bulls with such overpowering skill.

It was arranged between Juan and his boss that whenever an informal bullfight was planned for some village near Toledo, he was free to try his luck, for the man was a bullfight fan and took pride in having one of his force appear before real bulls. But what Juan liked best about his job was that once each year, during the Festival of Ixmiq, he was allowed to manage the brewer's stand at the bullfights. There, as he sold cold beer to the patrons, he could watch the leading matadors for three afternoons in a row, and in order to ensure himself more time to study the fighters he employed at his own expense young boys to sell the beer. It was under such arrangements that he attended the festival in 1945, at the age of seventeen.

There would be great fights that year, with the final gala presenting Armillita, the ace of the Mexicans, Solorzano, the stately gentleman, and Silverio Perez, the darling of the mob and a man who could do wonders if he happened to draw a good bull. Above-average fights on Friday and Saturday had generated excitement, so that on Sunday Juan felt impelled to undertake a move he had been planning for some time. He appeared early at the plaza, arranging his beer as carefully as a housewife arranging her teacups for a party. He coached his boys on the parts of the ring each was to cover, then allocated the bottles. When the crowds began to enter, he was everywhere, encouraging them to buy, and although, true to his Indian heritage, he was never exuberant, there was about him this day an unusual alertness and quickness of action that his helpers noticed.

"What's going on, Juan?" they asked as he rushed beer to all parts of the plaza.

"Sell the beer," he ordered, and by the time the fifth bull out of the six of the afternoon was ready to be killed, most of the bottles were gone. Scooping up his money, he ran to one of the spectators connected with the brewery, a man named Jimenez, and said abruptly: "Hold this." Then he was gone.

What happened next has found its way into the modern annals of bullfighting in Mexico, and if you listen long enough you can hear some pretty wild accounts of that sixth bull of Ixmiq-45, but I prefer to blow away the myths and report what I believe actually happened.