Mexico (36 page)

'Then you'll understand what I thought when I say that one day in a fish market 1 saw this perfect boy, Ignacio Molina, fourteen years old, with a small cloth in his hands giving passes to another boy playing the bull. He was a dream-- arched back, marvelous profile, head of black hair, hands that wove magic and, most important of all, no fat bottom."

"Any parents?" Mrs. Haggard asked, and Ledesma said, "I suppose so, but they never mattered."

"And you took him under your control?" she asked.

"Understand, there aren't many would-be matadors a critic in my position would care to risk his reputation on. Nacho, that's what they called him, was the one."

"Tell them what happened in Torre
o
n," I said, mentioning the city in northern Mexico.

For almost a minute Ledesma sat staring at his thumbs, there against the perfect jaguars. Finally he began to talk about that disastrous Sunday afternoon a las cinco de la tarde: "My boy Nacho was head of the cartel. Boy from Saltillo fighting second, no talent whatever. And a nothing Altomec Indian boy, Juan Gomez, as the junior. All the boys seventeen or eighteen. All in the years when they had to prove themselves or quit."

"Let me get it straight," Ed Grim said. "These are not the matadors we'll be seeing today and the next two afternoons?"

"You'll see Juan Gomez. Neither of the others."

"So what happened?"

"Painful to relate. When we're all in the waiting area before the opening parade, I try to organize the fight to protect Nacho. I give instructions, who's to do what, how the expert peons I've hired are to see he doesn't get into trouble. Then the devil must have warned me that I had a potential enemy in Gomez, because I warned him, 'You stay away from our bull when Nacho takes him away from the picadors.' And what do you suppose that insolent Indian does? He comes slowly up to Nacho, studies him carefully like he's buying a horse, and spits on his shoes. Then he whips around like a hawk, glares at me and says, Tat boy, tell your torero to do his own protecting.' Then he takes his position in the middle for the opening parade."

"You mean," Haggard asked, "that he challenged you before others, and you a major critic? He must have been insane."

"At times he is."

"What did you do?"

"They tell me I grew black in the face. I wanted to strangle that damned Indian, but the music started and the three young would-be matadors marched out into the sunlight. And as I watched the Indian strut into the arena I swore, I'll handle that Altomec later."

"Did you?"

"He handled me. Most grievously he handled me."

"Would you care to tell us?" Mrs. Evans asked, and he nodded, drew himself baek against the jaguars and said: "It happened on the last bull of the day. Gomez had the gall to come to where I was and dedicate his bull to me: "Protector of the public, lover of bulls and master of the matadors." Men around me started laughing, so I told Nacho, "Make him look foolish," and Nacho did. Moving in on Gomez, he did a series o
f s
plendid passes, cape behind his back, but on the last one the bull turned back too quickly, caught him in the middle of the chest and heaved him in the air, catching him again on the way down."

"Dead?" Grim asked and Ledesma nodded, and we fell silent.

Finally Mrs. Haggard asked, "Did you ever find another boy?" and he said, "Mine died at Torreon."

I had never before seen Le
o
n so willing to talk about his disasters, so I probed: "But if you hate Gomez so much-- despise him, really--why have you gone out of your way to promote and even sponsor these hand-to-hand fights?"

"Because, miraculously, we have two fighters who represent the best of their competing styles. And if the world is to be kept in balance, it requires one like Gomez to underline the brilliance of one like Victoriano. So even though Gomez pays me nothing, I'm forced by the respect I have for bullfighting to speak the truth, and the truth is he's a courageous fighter. One of the bravest."

"Did I hear you say that the matadors pay you for good notices?" Haggard asked.

"That's how I earn my living."

"Does your paper know that?"

'They encourage it. Allows them to pay me less."

Haggard was shocked by this inside view of Mexican criticism, but young Penny Grim was proving rather sharper than I had supposed, and would not be sidetracked, for she asked, "Hating him as you do, are you able to be unprejudiced?"

He reached out to pat her hand. "I go to each hand-to-hand praying that the next bull will throw that damned Indian in the air eleven times and puncture his heart on each descent."

"Do you think that's the way it will end?" I asked, and he said, "I'm sure of it. Victoriano has style, but
Gomez
has only raw courage. And in real life, style beats courage every time. So the better Victoriano becomes, the more Gomez will have to take risks. Until one day he brings on his own death." He ground his fat knuckles into the table as if he were crushing the bowlegged little Altomec.

After our delicious luncheon we thanked Ledesma for his thoughtfulness in arranging for it. Mrs. Evans spoke for all of us when she said: "Senor Ledesma, you've been so kind to u
s h
ere at the pyramid that we wonder if you'd spare a few more minutes and accompany us to the cathedral" He started to reply that he wanted to be at the ring at noon to watch the sorting of the bulls, but he stopped and reconsidered. "A visit there would help all of you understand the fights better, but
I'm
afraid Brother Clay won't appreciate it because I shall have to point out again that his sainted father had it all wrong."

"I can take it," I said. "I associate with you, Leon, to learn things I was not clever enough to see for myself. And I'm not teasing." Indeed 1 was not. In my efforts to sort out my priorities, specifically what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I kept thinking about Mexico, and to attempt to understand this tangled, magnificent land with its constant revolutions would require all the brainpower I had. And it occurred to me that Leon and I were curiously similar, each of us an alien--he a Spaniard, I an American--so that we saw the nation from the perspective of an outsider. I needed to know what he knew, and was eager to hear what he had to say about the cathedral, which had been so important to my father.

"I'll take you!" he decided abruptly. "Thus I will complete my own preparation, and you, Mrs. Evans, shall again ride with me, if you are not a coward."

The sprightly widow jumped into the Mercedes, and with a roar she and the critic started back to town, but after a few hundred yards he spun the car perilously in a circle, roared back and shouted while negotiating a second circle, "We'll convene in the plaza facing the front of the cathedral." Then dust flew from beneath his tires, and he disappeared toward town.

We reached the plaza before he did, for apparently he and Mrs. Evans had stopped somewhere in town to make a purchase. When he did arrive he carried a rather bulky package under his arm, and when he joined us he made up for lost time, for he exploded into almost frenzied praise of the ornate fa?ade that graced the cathedral. "Unique in the world, I mean the beautiful item and the ugly word that names it. Churrigueresque. That's the name of the architectural style you see, but what it means I do not know, except that it denotes a twisting, dancing, flaming creation, as you can see."

Allowing us some minutes to appreciate the glorious fa9ade, he resumed with an observation I will never forget: "But we must not allow ourselves to be seduced by this lovely facade, for it hides an ugly secret, precisely the way our ugly pyramid hid a beautiful secret, the Terrace of the Jaguars. John Clay, not having been permitted to see either of the secrets, fell into understandable error, the brutal Indian pyramid competing with the delicate, lovely cathedral, each a false description."

"What do you mean?" Mrs. Evans asked. He said: "Come with me, children," and led us to the south side of the cathedral where he stopped us before a very old fountain, which sent its water leaping into the sunlight. "For decades scholars have wondered why this statue of the first Bishop Palafox, our city's builder, had been stuck in this out-of-the-way place rather than in the spacious plaza we just left, for to tell you the truth our Palafoxes are not a reticent breed. At the bullfights, watch their present leader, Don Eduardo, breeder of bulls. If one of his bulls does especially well, and the crowd demands that he take a bow, he's allowed to enter the ring and garner the applause, but he'll jump in whether there's any real applause or not. I've heard two handclaps bring him in for bows. So if our first Palafox chose this inconspicuous corner for his fountain, there must have been a reason."

After giving us time to think about this, he explained, "In 1953, again well after the death of John Clay--so what I'm about to say does not reflect on his leadership--archaeologists pulled down the stucco facing of the old fortress-church opposite and laid bare one of the rude, rough statements of the earliest Spanish architecture. Over there you see the outdoor pulpit built in 1527 from which Fray Antonio converted the Altomecs."

Leaving the fountain, we crossed over to the old chapel, where Ledesma marched about indicating its features. "Look at the brutal form of this sanctuary. Its grand low arches are as profound as the pyramid and not a bit different, for the Spaniards used Indian architects. It has no ornament, no single extraneous line of beauty. The consecrated rock from which the friar first preached stands just as it was stolen from the ruined temple of the Mother Goddess. This crude holy place is the heart of the Catholic Church in the plateau region. Our church did not conquer and convert the Indians because we had the delicate churrigueresque architecture that John Clay held to be the essence of Catholicism in Mexico. We triumphed because we spoke from the solid rock of the land we had invaded. Our first chapels were low and powerful, like the temples from whose flanks the stones were stolen. We did not introduce completely new gods to our Altomec Indians; we adopted those we found and gave them the names of Spanish saints. Nor did we indulge in any sentimental piety." He paused. "If we had been Indian peasants in those early days, we'd have gathered here to listen to some Spanish priest shout theology at us in words we could barely understand. Spanish soldiers with their guns at the ready would have lined those battlements up there, and if a strong-minded Indian like Mr. Haggard even so much as opened his mouth in protest--bang, bang! You, Mr. Haggard, were dead."

He laughed, then said gravely, "I've grown to love this rude chapel that lay so long hidden beneath the stucco of respectability. It reminds me that the conquest of Mexico, my adopted home, was a harsh and often cynical affair. Here I see the nonsense of history ripped away, the soft words and the guileful lies and the distortions of the truth. We Spaniards were a hard people, and if when we had the land properly subdued we did find time to build a marble facade that dances for joy, we were cautious enough first to kill and subjugate."

When we finished inspecting the remnants of Toledo's earliest Spanish structure, Ledesma surprised me by leading us into the interior of the cathedral, because ever since that day in 1911 when General Gurza's troops had sacked Toledo and ravaged the cathedral few guides bothered to take their American tourists inside. Prior to that vandalism, the church had been famous for its three high altars of pure silver, its Virgins with faces of gold and rubies, and its ornate swaying lanterns sixty feet above the aisles. These too were of pure silver. It was a cathedral known throughout the Catholic world as the ideal example of a rich man's devotion to God, and it had been brought into being by the fifth Bishop Palafox, who had badgered his wealthy cousin to pay the bill.

The sacking had been started by an Altomec Indian from Chihuahua State who had learned to read and who had shouted from the main entrance: "Soldiers! Look at the silver in here! Our grandfathers mined that silver and it belongs to us." Three hours later there was no silver, and the looters, as they left with the marvelous lanterns, paused to fire several hundred volleys into the stone statues that helped support the walls.

In subsequent years no effort was made to rebuild the interior, and the once-great cathedral of Toledo had remained a glittering shell containing nothing of importance. In 1935 my father, a Protestant, had proposed that the citizens of the city contribute toward the reconstruction, but his proposal was made during the presidency of General Cardenas, a powerful anti-cleric who would later expropriate the oil wells, and his government would not permit even voluntary contributions to be used for such purposes.

So now, as we entered the church of the Palafoxes, we saw barren walls pockmarked with bullets. The three main altars each had cheap wooden constructions showing ghastly Christs and even more ghastly saints; the wings of the angels were painted with cheap gilt and the garments were gray with dust. The church was kept viable only because of the inherent sanctity of the altars.

I could not at first understand why Ledesma had brought us into this gloomy memorial, repellent with its dirt and tawdriness, but obviously he had some plan in mind, for he led us directly to a spot between two ribs of the vaulting, and there he pointed to the Eleventh Station of the Cross. It was a carving I had not bothered to look at before, but at first glance it fitted in well with the rest of the interior; it was gray and dusty.