Mexico (19 page)

When the final bull of the feria rushed out, the crowd knew that this animal, though on the small side, was bound to give a good fight, and a roar of hopeful encouragement filled the plaza. Although the Festival of Ixmiq usually commanded the best bulls available, this year's lot had not been exceptional, but this last one was excellent with the cape and very powerful against the horses. He took five punishing thrusts of the pic and would have accepted more if the horses had not been ordered from the ring. Silverio, the matador who on his first bull had performed badly, now presented himself to the judge, asked permission to kill the bull, and turned to dedicate the animal to the crowd, always a popular gesture and one likely to win an extra ear or a tail if the bull was superb.

But as Silverio turned to face the center of the ring from which he would dedicate the bull, he groaned and cried: "Oh, hell! Look at that!"

From the barrier in front of the beer stands a young man with a limp in his right leg had dropped into the arena, carrying a stick that could be used as an imitation sword and a length of red cloth draped over a second stick. Juan Gomez had decided to present himself to the people of Toledo, and if he could escape the policemen, peons, matadors and general attendants who were already trying to catch him, he might win two minutes--he would need no more--in which to prove what he could do with a full-grown bull.

"Damn that boy!" Silverio mumbled as he ran across the arena to try to keep the espontaneo (spontaneous volunteer from the audience) from spoiling his fine bull. The matador's third-string pe
o
n, a tall wiry man with the pinched face of a gargoyle, hurried from an opposite direction crying: "I get him, matador." As the pe
o
n neared Gomez he made a wild lunge at the boy's legs, but Gomez anticipated this and escaped.

This motion carried him toward the bull, so while still running he adjusted his cloth, whipping it vigorously with his right hand in order to make it fall free and at the same time attract the bull. The animal, still panting from his encounter with the horses and the pain from the banderillas, caught sight of the fleeing boy and made a quick, unexpected charge. The crowd gasped as bull and boy approached the point of contact, then cheered wildly as the boy planted his feet like a real matador, dropped his right hand close to the sand, and led the bull past in a thundering charge.

"
Ole
!" came the great approval.

Now the boy had to escape the clutches of the dozen or more men bearing down on him while trying to position himself properly for the next charge of the agitated bull, whose confusion and anger were heightened by the large number of people in the ring. Deftly he sidestepped both the wizened peon and Armillita, the senior matador, who half an hour ago had considered his work for the afternoon ended with the killing of the fourth bull, but now was back in the ring to help remove the boy.

A man who tended the horses tackled the boy and succeeded in getting a grip on Juan's left leg, but only for a moment, and for the second time Juan faced the bull. Placing the cloth in his left hand, for the most dangerous of the regular passes, he called to the bull and brought him past in a beautifully executed gesture.

The crowd leaped to its feet with one gigantic "
Ole
!" and began throwing things at the men who were trying to eject the young fighter.

"Let him finish the job!" the men in the sun began shouting.

"To-re-ro!" others cried in mockery of the men who were trying to clear the arena.

But this time the skinny old pe
o
n was not to be denied, for he pinned
Gomez
against the barrier and seemed about to knock him to the ground when the boy gave a violent thrust with his right elbow, knocking the peon backward onto the sand and almost rendering him unconscious. But in falling, the pe
o
n kept hold of the boy's improvised muleta and carried it with him, so that when Juan broke free he faced the bull with only a wooden sword and no cloth for protection. Seeing th
e b
ull about to charge, he hesitated in awful fear. From the stands he heard the unanimous shout of "No, no!"

As the bull hurtled toward him he instinctively dropped his left hand as if it held the protecting cloth, trusting that this motion would deceive the animal. And for a second it did, enough for the tip of the deadly horn to move past the body, but then the lure failed, and the bull turned. The horn caught Juan in the chest and sent him flying through the air, away from the men who were trying to catch him. Quickly the bull wheeled and bore down upon the fallen boy. With one deft drive the left horn passed under the boy and tossed him backward, still away from the men who might have rescued him.

Again the bull wheeled, satisfied that it had at last found a solid enemy and not a fluttering piece of cloth. This time the animal exercised greater care but succeeded only in piercing the boy's right pant leg, making a ripping sound that all could hear and throwing him into the air. He would have fallen directly on the horns had not Armillita at that moment caught the bull by the tail and given it a savage twist. Bellowing with pain, the bull turned to attack his new enemy, and Gomez fell limp on the sand.

The first man to reach him was the third matador's peon, the tall man with the gargoyle face, and instead of helping Gomez to his feet, this peon began beating him in the face. "You son
-
of-a-bitch!" he kept shouting. "You ruined a good bull."

Now a dozen hands clutched at him and started rushing him toward a gate that had been thrown open. When the gate slammed shut a policeman started jabbing his rifle butt into Juan's stomach, whereupon the crowd, awed by Juan's bravery, began hurling beer bottles at the policeman.

At this juncture Silverio, always the calculating showman, realized that although his enviable bull had been ruined by the intrusion, there might be a way to retain his popularity with the crowd. Rushing to the barrier as if on a mission of life and death, he demanded that the burly policeman release the boy. With a grandiose gesture, which the crowd approved with ecstatic shouting, the matador summoned Juan back into the ring, wiped away the blood on his forehead caused by one of the beer bottles, and embraced him. "You can fight," the matador shouted into the boy's ear. "But don't ever fight my bull again." With the hand that embraced the boy he twisted the skin on Juan's neck until the boy winced. But, uncowed, Jua
n s
aid to the matador, as if thanking him for a kindness: "See if you can do as well:' Then, turning abruptly, he walked at a stately pace not to the nearest gate but to a distant one, arching his back like a true matador and throwing insolent glances at the crowd, who rewarded him with an ovation.

That night Juan
Gomez
washed the gash in his forehead, pressed his only shirt, tied the rope around his pants and went out to watch the bullfighters as they lounged in their usual manner before the House of Tile. At the first of the two big tables sat Armillita. At the other was Sol
o
rzano, surrounded by admirers, and Silverio, the idol of this part of Mexico. There was exciting talk as the three afternoons of the festival were reviewed, and waiters hurried about with trays of beer and toasted corn. For some time Juan loitered in the plaza across from the hotel in shadows near the statue of Ixmiq, but finally the allure of bullfighting proved too great and he ventured onto the terrace of the hotel itself.

Unfortunately, the first to spot him was the old peon with whom he had brawled in the arena, and this man called out, in the near-illiterate jargon that bullfighters use: "You not come here. Ruined our best bull entire fair."

Men at various tables turned to inspect the boy and Solorzano asked, "Your face hurt?"

"No," Juan said.

"Have a beer," a big man at another table suggested, and Juan realized with delight that it was Don Eduardo, at whose ranch he had first tasted the thrill of bullfighting. Hoping that Palafox would remember him, he said: "I was the boy you aided at your testing, the day you shot your seed bull."

This unfortunate statement brought Don Eduardo such unpleasant memories that he turned away, indicating the end of the conversation.

Although ill at ease, Juan continued to hover about the matadors' tables, saying to Armillita: "You were very good today, matador," and hoping that the great one would remember what had happened at the testing, but the matador merely grunted: "Regular."

Juan moved on to where six aficionados were explaining to Silverio exactly how it was he had killed the third bull. Not realizing how improper it was for him to speak to Silverio, since he had ruined the matador's final bull, he elbowed his way up to the table and said: "You were very good in your first bull, matador." Looking up in surprise to see the boy standing over him, Silverio, always the gracious showman, smiled and said: "You too were excellent. You intend to follow the bulls?" Before Juan could reply, the hostile peon hauled him away from Silverio.

"I asking you," the skinny peon repeated, "who invite you ruin our bull?"

Juan pushed him away so that he could return to answer Silverio's question, which the matador had by now forgotten.

He tried to escape the pe
o
n, who continued to hound him. In frustration, Juan turned and, lashing out with his fists, knocked the peon down. Immediately some picadors and other peons who had resented the boy's intrusion both now and in the ring closed in on him and began punching him until he collapsed.

"Throw him out!" one of the picadors cried, and police came to haul the inert body off to jail. In the morning the owner of the brewery came to the jail and demanded, "Where's the money from the festival?"

"I gave it to Jimenez," Juan explained.

"He's disappeared," the man snapped. "Fistfighting, jumping into the ring, causing me nothing but embarrassment. You're fired."

But the 1945 Festival of Ixmiq was not an entire loss for Juan Gomez. Three different photographs had caught impressive shots of his action with the last bull, and one had taken a fine photo of Juan passing the bull with his bare hand. It was widely published throughout Mexico with the caption "Thus fights Juan
Gomez
." With the last pennies he had saved from his brewery salary, Juan purchased glossy copies of each of the photographs, and bundling his property once more in his cape, he set out to conquer Mexico in earnest.

He never saw his mother again, for she died while he was in jail in Torreon. Famished, he had robbed a store to get food and had been caught, and if his mother never heard of his disgrace, he did not hear of her death.

He was now an acknowledged apprentice with the right to demand a formal contract for his fights, but he got so few that he was always ready to fight for nothing. If he heard that a village was planning a fiesta, he would hike and steal rides and jump trains for three days to get there in hopes that he might face the bulls. He fought animals that had already killed men, animals that were blind in one eye, animals that had horns whose tips were so badly battered that if they caught a man in the stomach he was sure to be killed by the dirt-stained ends. He lived on beans and tortillas, and sometimes on water. He weighed less than a hundred and twenty pounds, and when he had the fever after a wound he sometimes dropped to a hundred and ten.

It was a pitiful life, from 1945 through 1950, lightened only by a few superb afternoons with the bulls and an occasional meeting with some country girl enchanted by bullfighters from the city. Three times in hunger and desperation he returned to the soft-spoken man in Leon who was always ready to take him back and who forgave him for the things he had stolen on his earlier renunciations of what the easy-living man had to offer. Once the Leon man actually did arrange a major fight for him in Irapuato, and Juan had been extremely good.

"See how easy it would be?" the persuasive man argued. "I can get you fights like that every month." But at the height of his pleasure over the Irapuato success, Juan announced for the last time, "I will never be back. I'll conquer the bulls some other way."

When he was twenty, the mother of a girl he dated in a small town near Monterrey taught him how to read, and he could now follow what was said about him in the sporting sheets. For the most part his life was spent going from one plaza to the next. Although he earned little, he did learn about bulls. At every chance, he would spend weeks at the ranches watching the bulls. He was content to sit all day, studying the animals, and he came to know when they would lift their heads, when they would move. He could tell which neck muscles tensed before the animals lunged. Few men his age knew as much about bulls.

One day in 1950, while lounging in a Guadalajara cafe hoping vaguely that something would turn up regarding a testing that was supposed to take place for a group of American tourists, he heard a stranger shout in English: "Cigarro, you ugly bastard! Remember that night in Tijuana!" and when he turned to see who this Cigarro might be he saw it was Silverio's pe
o
n, the gargoyle-faced one who had chased him around the ring at Ixmiq-45 and had beat him up later at the House of Tile. The ugly one was now seated with a local girl who tried to sing flamenco songs in bars, and as soon as he saw
Gomez
he recognized the espontaneo who had given him so much trouble in Toledo. "Stay away!" he growled. "You not welcome here." Juan ignored the pe
o
n and bowed stiffly to the girl. "I heard you sing the other night. You were fantastic." This was a word much used by bullfighters and meant that the event so described was ordinary.