Mexico (4 page)

I remember interrupting my father and asking, "When you say 'our settlers,' which country do you mean?"

He replied, "It's possible for a man to belong to two countries."

"At the same time?" I asked incredulously.

"Spiritually, yes," he answered. "I've always considered the old Hall of Government"--he pointed to it--"as the capital of my second nation, just as Richmond has been the tragic capital of my first."

"But you never lived in Richmond. You told me you've never seen it."

"Any spot for which a man's forebears have bled and died will forever be his homeland. Remember that."

Then, as I looked westward from the Hall, I noticed something that held my interest. On the wooden billboards outside the local bullring had been pasted three copies of the flamboyant poster announcing the fights that would take place this weekend, THE FESTIVAL OF IXMIQ-61 shouted the bold black letters, but what mesmerized me were the portraits of the two contenders I had come to photograph and write about. "Mano a Mano!" the words said, meaning a deadly contest involving two matadors. To the left was Victoriano, classically aloof; to the right, Juan Gomez, the stocky Indian, hair hanging down close to his eyes. Victoriano looked down at me as he had when I interviewed him in Spain, and
Gomez
could have stepped out of the posters and introduced himself: "I'm Juan Gomez. You spoke to me once when I fought in Tijuana." And in that instant I realized that I was on an assignment that was likely to become more complicated than I had supposed when I lightly accepted it. This was Wednesday afternoon, almost evening, and the three fights began on Friday, so I had tonight and Thursday to clarify my thoughts on the matter.

I looked about for some secure point of reference, and at the far opposite end of the plaza, standing near the House of Tile, I saw the guardian spirit of my city, the Indian Ixmiq, who lived in the sixth century after Christ, whom the travelers to Toledo came to honor. Benign, swarthy in burnished bronze, the wiry Indian gazed down upon me, and I felt content. As I approached to tell him "Old man, I've come home," a voice called me from the terrace of tables at the House of Tile. It was the stranger who had carried my cameras to the hotel and he said, "Senor Clay, the bag is safe with the Widow Mier y Palafox."

'Thank you, my good friend," I called back.

"Would you like a beer?" he shouted jovially.

"Later," I replied, for I wanted to be alone.

In English he cried: "I'll give you a rain check." Then he laughed and added: 'The statue you're looking for is at the opposite corner."

How well I remembered! It had been a sunny spring day in 1927 and the dedication of the statue had been delayed till I could return from my interview at Princeton, where I would be enrolling in the autumn. Father and I were the only Clays in attendance; the rest of the notables--including all who would be making speeches--were Palafoxes, and since Father and I were members of that extensive clan, the celebration was a family affair. There was music, the firing of a salute, and a boisterous tea afterward on the hotel veranda. The committee that had paid for the statue wanted Father to make a short speech of acknowledgment, but he refused: "If they want to risk a statue while I'm still living, let them go ahead. But I'll have no part of it. Suppose next year I commit a murder. Do they tear it down?"

Now as I approached the statue 1 gasped, for my father, who had been dead since 1945, was standing before me on that pedestal. His stern gaze was turned away from the cathedral-- which was only proper, in view of his attitude toward Catholics--and he looked across the plaza toward the Mineral de Toledo. As I had seen him do so often in life, he held a book in his left hand, with fingers thrust between its pages. His clean-shaven face looked exactly as I remembered it, and it seemed to me that if I were to call him, he would undoubtedly reply.

The carving on the east face said simply JOHN CLAY 1882-1945. Momentarily bewildered by what seemed like the dead come to life, I moved cautiously around the statue. On its northern face it carried in Spanish the title of Father's book: The Pyramid and the Cathedral. On the western side, also in Spanish, was the well-known quotation "Where the cactus and the maguey meet, my heart is entwined in the tangle of Mexico." Feeling my own heart equally entwined, I slumped onto one of the exquisite blue-tile benches that lined the plaza and studied this representation of my father as memories haunted me.

In 1943, after I had spent a tour bombing Japanese-held islands in the far Pacific, I was granted leave for home rest in Alabama, where I found that my father had rigged a darkroom where he kept a white sheet hanging on the wall. Day after day he projected his color slides onto this sheet and sat and conversed with his old friends long dead. I must confess that when I heard about this I suspected that his mind was faltering, but when I first sat with him and saw the big, superhuman-sized photograph of the rancher Don Eduardo Palafox staring down at me, his full lips almost bursting into speech, it seemed entirely natural to greet him, so when Father cried: "Hey there, Don Eduardo! Good times in the fighting days, eh?" I was not surprised. Indeed, I almost expected Palafox to reply: "We fooled Gurza and his bandits, didn't we?" But when I watched my father talking to his old friends who were no longer here, I felt deep sorrow for a man who had gone into exile twice, each time from a land he loved. The first was when he spiritually cut himself off from Virginia, the Clay homeland, and from Richmond, the noble city he had never seen. The second was when he fled Mexico and his legion of friends there. During that brief respite from war I vowed that I would never allow myself to be exiled from any culture that had nourished me, but now in Toledo, as I saluted my father, I felt as deeply isolated as he had ever been. And I could visualize myself in my late sixties as forlorn and bereft as he had been.

My father's exile from Mexico was self-imposed, of course, and he knew he would always have been welcomed among the Mexicans, but after what he called "that dark and evil day of March 18, 1938," he felt that no honest man could possibly live in Mexico, so he left.

I was twenty-nine at the time, visiting him in Toledo on vacation from the magazine. I remember his coming into our home at the Mineral, gasping for breath, and slumping into a chair. "It can result only in war," he mumbled in Spanish. "Only in war."

"What happened?" I asked.

'That madman, President C
a
rdenas," he gasped.

"What's he done now?"

"He's expropriated the oil wells. We'd better pack."

"You think ..."

"Think?" he roared at me from his chair. "Of course there'll be war. How else can President Roosevelt react?" Then, seeing my unwillingness to believe that the United States would declare war over some oil wells, he jumped up and cried, "Even a damned fool like Roosevelt will recognize the necessity."

My father had been reared in Southern traditions and was a determined Democrat, but like most of his acquaintances from the South--those gentle and confused people who frequented our Mexican home in the winters--he despised his American president, Roosevelt, almost as much as he did his Mexican president, Cardenas. "How could two glorious nations like the United States and Mexico get such utter incompetents at the same time?" he would wail.

He waited vainly for Roosevelt to declare war or for some patriot to assassinate Cdrdenas, and when neither of these events occurred he fell into a deep depression from which he was never to recover. After giving the two errant presidents eight months to come to their senses, he abruptly shut down the mine, packed all his personal belongings, and gave the Mexico City newspapers a tempestuous interview in which he said that as an honorable man he could not tolerate a nation that expropriated personal property and, moreover, he predicted the decline and fall of Mexico.

He never saw the country again, and when rumors reached him that Mexico, instead of perishing, was yearly better off than it had been the year before, he muttered ominously, "Just wait!"

But his hatred was mainly directed at President Roosevelt, possibly because there were in Alabama other old-timers who enjoyed venting their anger against "that man" in Washington. When in 1940 President Cardenas was required by the Mexican constitution to retire, my father gave a small banquet at which he said, "My good friends here in Alabama cannot appreciate what a monster of red revolution we have had to suffer in Mexico, but that monster is finished. Now we must bend all our energies to the election of Mr. Willkie."

When Roosevelt won, my father took to his bed for eight days. Thereafter he never spoke the president's name, calling him simply him or that evil man. Frequently he would write to me, "I cannot understand why God has not punished an evil man who refused to protect the private property of this nation."

When President Roosevelt called me to the White House to decorate me for my work over Japan my father wrote: "It would be highly appreciated in these quarters if you saw fit to leave that medal elsewhere. Your picture naturally appeared in the Alabama papers, from which I got some pleasure, but I saved none of them because you were standing next to him. I noticed with some satisfaction that he
. A
ppears much older and doubtless God will punish him for his iniquities."

My father's birthday occurred on April 12, and on that day in 1945 I was again home in Alabama recuperating from the banging up I'd suffered when we had to ditch at Iwo Jima, and I was listening to the radio in my room when news came that President Roosevelt had died. I ran down to my father's room and said, "Did you hear? Roosevelt just died!"

He stared at me reproachfully and said, "You're just saying that because it's my birthday."

Recalling his irascible nature, I had to smile, and his presence was so real that I began speaking to his statue: "How strange it is, Father, that you who ignored English in college and read none of the great novels, who concentrated solely on your engineering work, should have written a book of such merit that they put up a statue of you. I, on the other hand, studied all the great novels and always wanted to write but have been able to accomplish nothing of value."

A woman in the plaza, hearing me talking to myself, asked if I was all right, and I said, "No, no es nada, gracias." Then rising and slowly picking my way through the winding, flower
-
bordered paths of the plaza, I returned to my hotel.

But as I was passing the statue of Ixmiq I saw a long, cream-colored Chrysler speed up and grind its tires to a screeching halt. It was driven by a tall young man wearing an expensive vicuna coat about his shoulders as if it were a cape. Something about his manner made me think that I had seen him before, but his face was masked, and he was soon engulfed by strollers who shouted the magic word "Matador!"

Immediately a crowd swarmed about the Chrysler, but those in front were rudely tossed aside by a man with a firm jaw, blue eyes and a shock of white hair. His arms must have been powerful, for with ease he elbowed his way through the crowd.

"Veneno!" I shouted, for I had known him in Spain. In English his name meant poison, and he had proved himself to be certainly that for any fighting bulls he encountered in the rings of the world.

My use of his name startled him, and he turned in my direction. Recognizing me, he bellowed in the voice he had used to help him dominate the bulls, "Senor Clay! As always, you bring us good fortune."

Just then the slim driver from the front seat and two athletic fellows from the rear seat sprang from the car. All were in their late twenties and all were obviously bullfighters recognized by the crowd, which started shouting their names: "Victoriano! Chucho! Diego!" The four fighting Leals, coldblooded terrors of the bullrings, had arrived two days early to rest up for the crucial fights that lay ahead.

I cried: "Victoriano! Over here for a press photo." Turning to see who had spoken, he saw his trusted acquaintance from Madrid and gave me a friendly abrazo.

"Don Norman! You've come to see the fights!"

"And to write about you. To photograph you in your triumph."

Always alert to the value of publicity, he called: "Father!

Chucho! Diego! Over here to assist Don Norman," and with a practiced eye he directed his father, white-haired Veneno, to stand to his left, his brother Chucho slightly to the right, and handsome Diego on a somewhat lower level in front between him and his father. It was a more effective tableau than I could have arranged, and the four men kept their poses, even improving on them as I finished a roll of film with my high-speed camera.

At the conclusion I yelled: "Hey, Chucho! Make like you're emptying the car."

Obediently Chucho took the keys from the driver and whipped open the trunk. The other three came around him and I got a fine shot of the men and the car. Then I shouted, "Chucho, we need a little action. Can you be handing him something?"

Immediately Chucho grabbed a bag and started to hand it to Victoriano, but the matador, obviously the star of the troupe, had had enough. Turning suddenly on his heel, he strode toward me, his lithe body almost snakelike in its grace. Grabbing me by the shoulder, he said, 'Take no more pictures, Clay! It's pointless. I'm not going to have a disaster in Toledo!"

"Victoriano!" shouted the white-haired old man, leaping around the car to grab the younger man, and hissed: "Son, never rough up a newspaperman!"