Mexico (38 page)

But if he persisted: "I do not want to see how you look. I want to see how you are," then I would have to lead him to that smaller, darker room where the canvases of El Greco hang, luminous as if lit with a green flame. And there, as we studied the attenuated tortured figures with faces expressing pure anguish, I would say, "Here you sec the Spanish soul."

In attempting to understand Spain, one confronts both the solidity of Velazquez and the spirituality of El Greco, and we have now identified the true dichotomy that inspires the duel between Juan Gomez and Victoriano Leal. It does not spring from a surface difference between Indians and Spaniards, nor between the paganism of the pyramid and the idealism of the cathedral, nor even between the harshness of the cactus and the soaring beauty of the maguey. It is not an either-or disjunction. It springs from the conflict that exists in Spanish life itself. It is the battle between earth and flame. It is a dichotomy in which all men are imprisoned, but which the Spaniard alone is willing to exhibit as an open fact.

(At this point in his reading Ed Grim threw down the mimeographed sheets and said, "I came here to see a bullfight, not get an art lecture. Where's the bullring?" I pointed down the Avenue Gral. Gurza and said: "Walk one block beyond the cathedral, it'll be on the right." He jammed on his panama hat and asked: "Will I be able to recognize it when I see it?" I said: "Possibly not. It's crowded in among other buildings." Turning to his daughter, he asked, "You coming with me?" She tapped the essay: "Nope. This is beginning to make sense, and I want to see how it comes out." Ignoring her and speaking to me, he said: "I'll find it. I'll be able to smell the horses." And he left. The rest of us continued reading.)

It would be an error to assume airily that Velazquez and Juan Gomez represent the brutal earthly body of man, while El Greco and Victoriano Leal represent the ethereal flame of man's spirit. I think the difference is much subtler than that. Veldzquez's people are humanity, with all their limitations and powers. His kings are vain, foolish people who reign for a little while, then pass their authority on to others who are no less stupid than themselves. His peasants sweat a while in the sun, grow old and die, their places being taken by others exactly the same. This is how the world revolves. This is how men actually live, and there is in his paintings a sense of down-to-earth dignity that men like El Greco can never achieve, just as in the pyramid of which we have been speaking there is an inescapable, foursquare lightness that the ornate cathedral can simply never challenge. It is not that Velazquez restricts himself to the corporeal world and El Greco to the spiritual. That is too easy a disjunction. What has happened is that Velazquez has depicted the ultimate meaning of life by approaching it through the earthly body, whereas El Greco has reached for the same goal by denying the body, by contorting it and abusing it, and by concentrating on the deepest psychological forces that animate man. But the goal of each is exactly the same.

I said earlier that the men who built the pyramids were driven also to build the Terrace of the Jaguars, whereas the priests who built the cathedral were also motivated to build the squat, brutish open-air chapel. Similarly, Velazquez often gives us glimpses of the most exquisite poetry, while El Greco is not loath occasionally to portray people who are distinctly earthbound. The dichotomy of which we are speaking thus lies within each man, and forms two parts of his being. As a Spaniard, I am at once part Velazquez and part El Greco. As a Mexican going to the bullfights at Toledo I am at the same time part Juan Gomez, brutal and stupid, and part Victoriano Leal, the lyric poet; and the greatness of this series of fights we have been witnessing since the first of the year is that these two men disclose to us aspects of our own secret life, and each contains an essential part of the other.

These conflicting aspects of man are also exhibited in the great writers' of Spain, for a man who writes cannot escape spreading out on paper a major proportion of what he thinks, whereas artists in other categories can sometimes avoid this, or obscure it. In order to investigate the ideas I have in mind, I am going to discuss the two most representative writers Spain has so far produced.

(O. J. Haggard asked cautiously: "In Mexico do they call stuff like this sports writing?" I replied: "In Mexico they don't regard bullfighting as a sport. It's an art." Mrs. Evans put a finger on a line to mark where she stopped and asked: "But do other writers about bullfighting go on like this?" I answered: "I bought a book the other day that was supposed to be about bullfighting, but the outsider would have thought it was an essay on religion" Mrs. Evans shook her head ruefully and observed: "To me it seems very pretentious. In Tulsa I'm afraid this young man wouldn't get very far reporting on football.")

I should first like to discuss Federico Garcia Lorca, for he epitomizes physically, intellectually, spiritually and artistically one part of the Spanish nature. His life was his principal work of art. No people that I know hold poetry in such high esteem as the speakers of Spanish, and it is not unusual to see in either Madrid or Mexico City a man and his wife strolling down a street, he reciting from Garcia Lorca while she holds the prompt book. Exactly why Garcia Lorca should have captured the Hispanic mind is difficult to say. His awkwardness in playwriting often leaves me embarrassed. For example, the plotting of Blood Wedding is quite pedestrian, while his House of Bernardo, Alba comes straight from eighteenth-century Gothic. To appreciate how deficient the Spaniard was, you must compare his plot devices and characterizations with those of Goethe and Eugene O'Neill.

But when I get to the words of Lorca and forget his silly plots, I conclude that in his poetry he stands second to none, and it is for this that we prize and praise him. I wonder if there has ever been another Spanish writer who could compress into so few words the agony of life, as when in Blood Wedding the bridegroom's mother confesses: "Always in my breast there's a shriek standing tiptoe that I have to fight back and keep hidden under my shawls." How brilliantly he compresses the action of Yerma into a single song sung by the ghostly offstage voice:

"When you were fancy-free, You and I could never see. But now that you're a wife. You have become my life."

Little wonder that Lorca, who wrote so emotionally about bullfighting, has become the acknowledged poet laureate of the plaza, for in its intense and compressed drama he found the summation of the tragedy he sought. The literary counterpart of El Greco, he exhibits the same leaping flame o
f p
assion, and also like El Greco, his artistic ambitions override his technical skills--he thus becomes the patron of matadors like Victoriano Leal, whose artistic aspirations are greater than their basic skills. Yet with Garcia Lorca there is always something more. He speaks to us Spaniards with a fury that no other poet commands, and we instantly recognize the authority of his speech.

But let us now turn to a writer from a much earlier age, one whom I consider the greatest Spaniard who has ever lived, and that includes the painters, the musicians, the philosophers and the kings. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, born in 4 B
. C
., that year in which historians believe Jesus too was born, began his life in Spain. But, like the sensible lad he was, he quickly moved to Rome, where his wit, his stalwart character and his skill at playwriting attracted such favorable attention that in time he became chief counselor to Emperor Nero, and as long as Seneca remained in control, Nero was an exemplary ruler. Seneca was also a notable administrator, Rome's leading dramatist, the conscience of the empire, and one of the capital's most brilliant intellects. In Spain we cherish his memory because he was the first man of any intellectual substance to become a Christian and is thus the spiritual father of Catholicism in Spain. At his death he was the most distinguished man in the world who had so far embraced the new religion, and his advice to the Roman world was as profound as Saint Paul's to the world at large. Seneca's dealt with more immediate problems: "God is not to be worshiped with sacrifices and blood; for what pleasure can He have in the slaughter of the innocent? He is to be worshiped only with a pure mind, a good and honest purpose. Temples need not be built for Him with stones piled high upon high; He is to be consecrated in the breast of each."

The impact of Seneca upon the Spanish mind is felt daily, and the contradictions that plagued him continue to plague Spain. He was subject to keen passions, yet he preached a calm and even cautious adjustment to conflicting forces. He was the supreme stoic, taking nothing too seriously, yet he feared death. In literary style he was ornate, but in the essentials of life austere. I have always considered myself a disciple of Seneca's, and I would rather talk with him fo
r h
alf an hour than with any other Spaniard who has ever lived; yet often his down-to-earth realism irritates me because it can be so prosaic. He is par excellence the Velazquez of the written word: the glowing man of earth.

And so we have the intellectual battle lines drawn for our visit to Toledo: there is the earth of Velazquez and Seneca directly opposed to the flame of El Greco and Lorca. There is the earthy style of the bowlegged Altomec Indian Juan
Gomez
directly opposed to the fiery arabesques of Sevillian Victoriano Leal. And the Festival of Ixmiq will show us a classic confrontation of these two concepts.

(Here O. J. Haggard interrupted with "I never heard of Seneca. How come--if he's as good as this fellow says?" His wife added, "And I never heard of Lorca. Is he any good?" Mrs. Evans observed: "After John's death I went to New York, as you know, and I saw a group of actors do Blood Wedding in a little theater off-Broadway." Haggard asked: "Was it any good?" And Mrs. Evans replied: "It was terribly intense," at which Haggard pressed: "But was it any good?" and she said bluntly: "Yes. At the time I didn't think so, but it occurred to me later after seeing it I thought about Blood Wedding five times for every once that I recalled the usual Broadway play." Haggard grunted and said, 'Then it was good." They resumed reading and came to the first major point of Ledesma's essay.)

But it is not the differences between Seneca and Garcia Lorca that bind them together in our minds as the supreme examples of Spanish thought. It is their similarity, and when I say what this is each reader will understand why these two writers now serve as the apostles of bullfighting. Seneca and Lorca are concerned primarily with death, and every Spaniard, whether he lives in Pamplona or Peru, is similarly preoccupied with this ultimate mystery. It was not by accident that in the long history of Spain no two Spaniards ever died more appropriately than Seneca and Garcia Lorca. At the height of his fame, when his plays commanded the Rome theater and his shafts of wit monopolized Roman conversation, Seneca was ordered by an insane Nero to commit suicide. And now what at times had seemed to be weakness in Seneca's character, especially his tendency to shift with eac
h n
ew wind that blew from the Roman Forum, was seen to be the Stoic's honest adjustment to the necessities of life. When it came time for Seneca to die, he lifted the poisoned cup fearlessly to his lips, and Rome saw a Spaniard die a noble death. Not even Socrates, in similar circumstances, met his end with greater dignity.

It would have been unforgivable had his final act been flawed, for in life Seneca was preoccupied with death, and his philosophy could be summed up in his statement that "the whole of life is nothing but a preparation for death."

In my studies I have had to read a great deal of English literature, and I never found an author who seemed honestly convinced that man is inescapably mortal, that one day he is going to die. There is something infuriating about the English writers' assumptions about immortality, and the Spanish reader soon tires of such writing because he is accustomed to a literature that lives each day with death. If Spaniards are preoccupied with death, it is because our greatest men have taught us to be so. If we love bullfights it is because we subconsciously know that this is the world's only art form that depicts our preoccupation. That is why the reflections of Seneca are so important to all who follow the bulls. He is our philosopher and guide, and the death that he contemplated so sublimely is the death we watch being acted out each afternoon.

And a fascinating aspect of this inescapable denouement is that we cannot predict how death will strike, or at whom. Nero proved that, for sometimes when a fight between the lions and the Christians in his arena proved dull, or when the lions killed everyone too soon, he instructed his guards to grab at random a score of spectators and toss them into the ring to feed the beasts. Thus a man who had paid that morning to watch Christians being eaten suddenly found himself being part of the feast. Decade after decade, in the various bullrings of the world an enraged animal occasionally will not only leap the barrier that defines the ring in which he is supposed to fight but will vault into the rows of spectators in the stands and kill one or two. Like Nero's Romans, those who paid to watch a fight become the fight.

(O. J. Haggard asked quietly, "Have you found the Mexicans preoccupied with death?" and I replied, "When I was a little boy living at the Mineral, General Gurza came by and hanged one of our men from a pole that stuck out from the kitchen, and the man's legs dangled above the place where we prepared food. I asked my father why we did not cut him down, and my father pointed out that General Gurza had left a soldier in the patio with instructions to keep the man's body hanging there, so that, in the general's words, 'We would all remember what death was.' " Haggard concluded: "I prefer the English preoccupation with life. I say, 'Let's kid ourselves as long as possible that the old bastard is going to pass us by.' ") At long last, this was the conclusion of Ledesma's piece: