Mexico (34 page)

"Senor Ledesma!" Mrs. Evans interrupted. "We're about to visit the pyramid. Won't you please join us."

"I really can't," the critic apologized. "Long trip."

"We'll wait till you wash up," Mrs. Evans insisted, placing her hand on the fat man's arm. "You speak so eloquently."

I was glad she said this, for I was never with Ledesma when I didn't learn something. He was a clown but he was also an Aristotle. The woman's obvious goodwill charmed him and he said: "All right! Let me wash my face, and you, madam, shall ride to the pyramids with me in that red Mercedes over there. These peasants can ride in their Cadillacs." In a few minutes he was back with us, and we started for the ancient center of the Altomecs.

When we reassembled before the pyramid, Ledesma said, "I have never had any desire to be a guide, for you spend your life showing people things they don't want to see, but whether a man wants to or not, he ought to see this pyramid."

"Did they hold human sacrifices here?' Grim asked, and Ledesma explained how every fifty-two years, when the Cactus People feared the world might be coming to end, they conducted a cruel number of human sacrifices to lure the sun back.

"What do you mean by 'cruel number'?" Grim asked, and Ledesma snapped; "In the thousands. But even in normal years they killed regularly, to keep their people frightened of their power."

"Could we climb up and see where it happened?" Mrs. Evans asked, and he replied, "Years ago I grew too fat to climb this pile of rocks, but if any of you want to imagine that you're human sacrifices trying to lure the sun back on the fifty-second year, go ahead. I'll wait here and be the priest that catches your bodies as the boys topside roll them down."

Mrs. Evans said, "I'm going. Anyone else?" Four of us finally climbed to the top and the first thing I did was point eastward to the gaunt smokestacks and say, 'That's the Mineral, where I grew up."

We surveyed the countryside and Mr. Haggard asked, "Is that shimmering white thing over there the cathedral?" I looked toward Toledo and saw the resplendent church.

"That's it."

"Where's the bullring?"

"Behind the cathedral," I explained. "Can't seem to see it from here."

"But it's in that area?" Haggard asked. "I always orient myself to the topography," he explained. 'These old Indians certainly picked themselves a site, didn't they?" He turned around several times, admiring the valley that the pyramid commanded, but constantly his eyes were drawn back to that distant white fa?ade. "Come to think of it," he added, "those Catholics didn't do so bad, either, did they?"

But my eyes were on the Mineral, set empty and forlorn against the hills that it had robbed of such stupendous treasure. I could see the Indians toiling up the deep hole in the earth, each lugging his burden of ore, and I could imagine the secret cave where we had hidden the prize bull and my room in which we had saved the life of Father L
o
pez. My mother and father had been an important part 'of that old mine and I was proud of their contribution.

While I was describing the Mineral to the men, Mrs. Evans had discovered the frieze of eagle warriors and, calling me over, said: "There's something about these figures, half-man, half-eagle, that seems the perfect exemplification of force, predatory and fearful."

I told her: "I remember the first time I saw them. I said to Father, 'But they don't have beards!' and he asked, 'Why should they wear beards?' and I explained, 'In my book the bad men always have beards,' and he told me that these eagle warriors were neither bad nor good, just soldiers with the characteristics of eagles."

When Mr. Grim joined us he took one look at the eagles and said: "I want to get down. This place specializes in cruelty. Too scary." He jumped from the top platform to the first step and his weight dislodged a heavy stone, which went careening down the face of the pyramid. "My God!" Mrs. Evans screamed. "Do be careful!" and from below came the calm, even voice of Ledesma: "I don't care if you kill yourself up there, but don't kill us down here."

When we joined him at the foot of the steps he astounded me by taking both my hands and saying apologetically, "You must excuse me, Norman, but now I have to speak poorly of your sainted father, for almost every glib conclusion he reached in his famous book The Pyramid and the Cathedral was wrong."

Mrs. Evans spoke for me. "The librarian in Tulsa told us, when she heard we were coming here for the festival, that we had to read that book. We did, all of us, I think." She looked at Penny, who said eagerly, "Yes, I read it. A super book. It was so neat in explaining things."

"What did it say that impressed me so much?" Mrs. Evans asked. "That this pyramid, big and brutal, symbolized the Indian heritage of Mexico? That the cathedral down there, so heavenly beautiful in its fa?ade, represented the lyrical grace of the Spanish inheritance?" We all agreed, especially me, for that had been Father's thesis, but I have to insist that he did not take sides--he claimed not that one was better than the other, but just that they were fundamentally different. Ledesma took me by the arm and led me along a path that led westward from the bottom of the steps we had just descended, and as we walked he said: "Forgive me for what I just said about your father. No fault of his. When he wrote he couldn't have known that what we're about to see existed, deep down under this pile of rubble." And he led us to another triumph of pre-Columbian Mexican art.

"About ten years ago, long after Norman's father had written his book and left Mexico, archaeologists excavated at this site along the base of the pyramid a mound that had for some years tantalized their imaginations, and look what they uncovered!"

He showed us a miracle, a terrace some hundred and fifty yards long and twenty wide, its surface composed of delicately tinted red paving blocks laid down in gently swaying patterns that led the eye toward the distant hills that rim the plateau. Along three of its sides run benches, built of a darker red stone and providing a resting area for several hundred people. But the wonder of the terrace, and the feature from which it takes its name, is the procession of bas-relief jaguars that march above the backs of the benches. In all there are a hundred and nineteen animals, each about three feet long and each completely different from its companions. Some of the jaguars are laughing, some are snarling, some scratch themselves, one feeds her young, and others chase deer. But there they are, a hundred and nineteen beasts, the joy of the jungle, the soft counterpoint to the eagle-studded pyramid.

"We call this the Terrace of the Jaguars," Ledesma said reverently. "How exquisite it is, how lyrical, how soft and gentle. How did these beasts get here? In Mexico they live only inland of the ocean shore. What are they doing on this terrace in Toledo? They were brought here, I think, not as living animals but as ideas in the imagination of artists whom the Altomecs, the Cactus People as they are called, captured during raids in the vicinity of Veracruz or maybe even distant Yucatan. And here, in stone, they were brought to life, a procession of the most beautiful animals ever carved in Mexico."

After we had had a chance to study the animals, each almost springing to life, he continued: 'These supple jaguars, hiding at the very foot of the pyramid, deny every generalization made by John Clay. He said this was a cruel place, but the jaguars are depicted as gentle. He said this was a haunt of eagles, but the jaguars bring us down to earth. He pointed out that the hill of the pyramid was lonely and treeless and forsaken, but our jaguars live on in their lush jungle. He said he could find in the pyramid only harshness. Yet all the while, under his very feet as he wrote, existed this superb Terrace of the Jaguars, which represents all the virtues whose absence he mourned.

"I have no way of knowing, but I like to think that this terrace was erected so that after the grisly ceremonies of the pyramid were completed, the kings and the townspeople and even the weary, bloodstained priests could congregate here in the late afternoon to watch the sun, whose rising had been so cruel and punctuated with the screams of those sacrificed, sink among the western mountains. I'm sure that here musicians played, and women danced, and men recited epics of the race. Much of what John Clay told us about the pyramid is wrong, for he spoke only of its brutal force. The poetry that existed beside it, and which must always exist if men are to survive, was momentarily hidden from his view."

Since he had spoken harshly of my father's book, I wanted him to know that I bore no grudge, for he was right. If Father had known of the jaguars, he'd have said everything Ledesma had just pointed out. So I was about to speak when Mrs. Evans said: "Senor Ledesma, leaning back in that corner among your jaguars, you do indeed look like an Altomec priest."

"Nothing sweeter will be said to me this day," he replied graciously, "but frankly I have always judged myself better fitted for managing the tribe's finances than conducting the religious sacrifices. You will find me here daily, counting the bags of silver."

He relaxed as priests must have done long ago and Haggard resumed a conversation that had been under way while we were atop the pyramid: "So what can we expect of today's matadors?"

"Nothing. Today will be very bad," Ledesma replied.

"Why?" Haggard pressed.

Ledesma reached over and rapped the oilman on the knuckles. "You haven't learned your lesson. Don't start with the matadors. Always start with the bulls."

"But I like the matadors," Penny broke in. "That's why we came. Or at least I did."

"And so you should, at your age, Senorita Penny, but your father's a grown man. He should know better."

"What do we know about the bulls?" Haggard asked.

"This is a very expensive festival," Ledesma explained. "And with all the money going to the matadors, the bulls for the first two fights are the cheapest you can get. Those for tomorrow are horrible, and those for today pretty bad. They save the expensive Palafox bulls for last so that we can go home with a good taste in our mouths."

"Now can we get to the matadors?"

"All right. Now then--Victoriano, goaded by the pressures from
Gomez
, will try to show off, but he will be nervous and incapable of doing much.
Gomez
will as usual be very brave, but with these bulls he will accomplish little."

"How about the third man?"

"Paquito de Monterrey? Nothing. Nothing."

"Then why is he fighting at such an important fair?"

"Because, like the bulls, he comes cheap, and that's the honest fact."

As I relaxed below the jaguars and looked out across the sleeping valley whose riches had attracted the ancient Altomecs, I listened to Ledesma's cynical comments about bullfighting and modern Mexico and reflected on the things he had told me on my previous visits to Mexico, when we had knocked around in bullfight circles. He had been born forty
-
four years ago in Valencia, the seaport east of Madrid, and as a boy had wanted to be a bullfighter. Lacking physical grace, he had become a critic, and was now Mexico's best, primarily because he had failed so completely as a torero; now, whenever he judged a matador, it was with a coldness of heart, for he muttered to himself: "All right, matador, prove you're as brave as I was."

As a boy torero Leon had been both skillful and unusually brave. Unfortunately, he had also been fat, and this the Spanish public would not tolerate. In the old days there had been half a dozen toreros named Gordito--the little fat guy--and one had been the premier fighter of his age, but just as older musical audiences had tolerated obese sopranos like Tetrazzini whereas modern audiences would not, so the more sophisticated aficionados of Ledesma's day refused to accept any fat boy as a serious matador, and Ledesma's lasting memory of his adventures in the ring were the echoes of a laughter that still haunted him. The debacle had occurred in a rural village near Valencia called Burriana, whose name for no known reason was thought to be comical in itself There he had gone at the age of eighteen to help kill a set of vicious old animals that had often been fought before.

Now as we stood with the Americans on the beautiful terrace I asked: "Could you tell us about that day in Burriana?" and he shrugged, saying somewhat bitterly, "If you have a taste for tragedy, I have one for comedy." When he started his account it was obvious that he took a perverse delight in the recitation of his woes.

'Those bulls of Burriana had developed into wily adversaries, and the two would-be matadors who were fighting with me--they later became moderately well known--showed themselves to be scared to death of the treacherous beasts. Not me. Biting my lip I swore, i will not run from my bull.' So I was foolishly brave, committing myself to acts of heroism quite beyond what my two wiser companions would dare, and for a few delicious moments there in Burriana I knew what it felt like to be a true torero, for I was discovering that although I was afraid of death, I was even more afraid of behaving dishonorably. Also, I hoped that after the disgraceful performances of my companions, I would be applauded so loudly that reports of my triumph would get into the Valencia papers and no doubt into those of Madrid, as well, and my career would be launched.

"But when I attempted a heroic pass that should have been used only with an honest bull, my tricky animal turned swiftly, bumped me with his forehead, and rolled me in the sand unhurt. The crowd began to laugh. At first I did not hear the laughter, for I was experiencing the instinctive fear that overwhelms a matador when he has been tossed. I rose, faced the dangerous animal again, and attempted another pass. Again the bull tossed me, rolling me over and over in the sand like a ball of butter. The audience howled. This time I heard the laughter the minute it began, and swore: Til show them how a Valenciano fights.' And with real bravery I attacked the bull, but the hilarity had reached a point at which even the other aspirants along the barrier had to join in.