Mexico (7 page)

"Oh my God!" moaned Dona Raquel.

At last the bull flung the matador far away and onto the sand, whereupon the pe
o
ns rushed toward him, but their movement enraged the bull and he charged madly for them. When they fled, his ugly little eyes saw not their swirling capes but the red-stained body on the sand, and with horrifying accuracy he drove his left horn at the inert matador. When the bull's horn first penetrated Bernardo Leal's throat, his wife fainted, and she was spared the ultimate horror of that day, but the boy Justo kept his eyes grimly fixed upon each motion of the bull and its effect on the man.

The Palafox ranch, 1933. Bernardo Leal left two sons, Justo, born in 1892, and Anselmo, born nine years later in 1901. The boys grew up with their mother in the Spanish house in Toledo. They had blue eyes like their parents and fair skin, and throughout their lives the lesson that would live with them longest was not one acquired in school but the one that their old grandfather Don Alfonso had taught them. Often he would grab them by the back of the neck and thrust them before a mirror: "Look at your eyes! Remember that you are Spanish. When it comes time to marry, find some Spanish girl like your mother."

On the streets of Toledo, of course, the boys were Mexican, but once inside the walled garden, whose doors were studded with metal from Spain, they were inheritors of a Spanish tradition. But they were also inheritors of another, more terrible memory, and for this there was no cure, nor has there ever been. In their playroom hung the poster of their father's last fight: PONCIANO DIAZ AND BERNARDO LEAL WITH BULLS OF PALAFOX! In their mother's room hung a replica of the matador's last suit of lights, slim-waisted and elegant, while in another room known as the chapel because of the silver retable, at which Leal had worshiped before his fights, hung suspended the head of the great Palafox bull that had killed their father.

It was from such memories and mementos that the Leal boys, Justo and Anselmo, derived their obsession with the bulls, but if the Revolution of 1910 had not erupted to break the peaceful passage of days in Toledo, it is hardly likely that either boy would have followed the bulls as a profession. In 1911 General Gurza, the scourge of the north, led his undisciplined rabble into the fair old city, and for three days there was terror. Priests were shot, young girls ravished, and buildings burned. On the evening of the second day four wild-riding pistoleros from Durango rattled the gate at Don Alfonso's big Spanish house, broke their way in, and informed him, "General Gurza will use this house as his headquarters."

"Get out, you rotten Mexican rabble!" the would-be grandee thundered, his muttonchops bristling. These were the last words he spoke, for the invaders instantly shot him, and prepared the way for their general. When Don Alfonso's old horse-faced Spanish wife, screaming, attacked the intruders, they shot her, too. Then they raped the dead couple's daughter and cut the throat of Dona Raquel, the matador's widow. When General Gurza and his men were finally driven from the city, the old Spanish palace was a ruin, its walls knocked down and its tapestries burned by Gurza's drunken lieutenants.

Don Alfonso's business had been failing, and when he died the boys Justo and Anselmo were virtually destitute. But instead of surrendering to despair, Justo, who was a husky nineteen at the time, looked upon his unexpected freedom as a deliverance and at the invitation of the Palafoxes moved himself and his brother to the bull ranch, southwest of Toledo. There he surprised everyone by becoming a master picador. Astride a horse he had natural courage, and with his broad shoulders and powerful arms he had no difficulty driving the long iron-tipped pics deep into the bull's neck muscles. He was a fierce opponent of the bulls and one day a rancher warned, "If you drive the pic so deeply, you may kill the bull."

"I want to," Justo growled.

"You fight that bull as if you hated him like some evil poison," the watcher observed.

'To me all bulls are poison," Justo replied, and from that day his name was Veneno, Poison. As Veneno he appeared in the new plaza in Mexico City, and as Veneno, one of the most famous picadors of his era, he accompanied the Mexican matador Luis Freg to Spain, where he enhanced his reputation.

In Spain Veneno became known as the fearless picador. He would drive his blindfolded horse anywhere to encounter the bull and worked from terrains that a lesser man would not have dared to approach. He exhibited demonic hatred for the bull, and on the days when four or five of his horses were killed under him and he would be prone on the sand, with the infuriated bull trampling him while trying to gore him, it sometimes appeared as if Veneno wanted to fight the bull with his bare hands. That he was not killed before the end of his first season in Spain was a miracle.

All matadors breathed easier when Veneno was in their troupe, for with his cruel, probing lance he punished a bull more severely than any other picador. So during those years, now termed the golden age of bullfighting, Veneno fought repeatedly for most of the giants: Joselito, Belmonte, Gaona.

And he came to know as much about bulls as any man who ever fought. The bullfight fans, knowing this, were apt to shout when he rode into the plaza on some pathetic nag whose right eye had been blindfolded so he could not see the bull about to attack and shy away: "Ole! Veneno! Kill him with your pic." And this he tried to do. Twice in his career he succeeded in so damaging a bull, his lance driving toward the vulnerable backbone itself, that the animal had to be returned to the corrals, where it died. Normally such an act would have been condemned, but with Veneno it was different, for everyone knew that he wanted to kill bulls to avenge his father.

His brother, Anselmo, never acquired the reputation that Veneno enjoyed. Perhaps because he had been left at home in Toledo on that dreadful afternoon when the bull tore away most of his father's head, he lacked the consuming compulsion of Veneno and failed to attain that mastery of bulls that characterized his brother. He became a minor matador, without class, and moved inconspicuously from one Mexican plaza to the next, brave perhaps but lacking fire. He also tried his luck in Spain but was promptly identified by critics as one who should leave the fighting of bulls to others. But he knew no other occupation, so he continued, one of those semitragic men who waste their lives on the periphery of an art that is cruel to horses, bulls and people alike.

Anselmo's only distinction arose from the fact that while on his Spanish tour he contracted marriage with a beautiful girl called Alicia from Seville, in the south. Her father took one look at his son-in-law in the classic ring of Seville and advised: "Son, leave the bulls. They are not for you."

"It is my profession," Anselmo argued.

"I have a meat-packing plant near Cadiz," the girl's father argued. "Work with me."

"My brother and I follow the bulls," Anselmo insisted proudly. "It's in our blood."

"Is your brother married?" the meat-packer asked.

"No."

"Why don't you introduce him to Alicia's cousin?"

When Veneno came south with Belmonte to fight at Seville, the introductions were made, a marriage was arranged, and Veneno promptly had two sons in quick succession. In 1933 Anselmo also had a son, whom he named Victoriano Leal, hoping that the boy would achieve more victories than he had accomplished.

Victoriano was less than a month old when the senior Leals were invited to the Palafox ranch to participate in the testing of some new cows that the ranch had recently purchased in an effort to strengthen the bloodlines and make the offspring bulls more fierce in the fight. Anselmo did not relish these trips to the ranch, for after the sack of their grandfather's Spanish house in Toledo, one of General Gurza's soldiers had turned up with the head of the bull that had killed Bernardo Leal, and Don Eduardo had purchased this grisly souvenir. Now it hung prominently on a wall of the entertainment room at the ranch, marked by a silver plaque that read: "Terremoto of Palafox. This bull of 529 kilos killed the matador Bernardo Leal in Mexico City 13 December 1903." After more than half a century the horns were still sharp as daggers and they terrified Anselmo, but robust Veneno was in no way dismayed. Unlike his brother, he appreciated every opportunity to fight Palafox bulls, and even though on this day he would be limited to cows, he would nevertheless have many chances to wound real bulls, to assail them with an abbreviated pic and to feel them recoil. If he could not deal with the grown bulls of Palafox with a heavy pic he would not setde for punishing the young cows with a light one.

So the brothers went by train from Mexico City to Toledo, where Don Eduardo Palafox met them for the long drive to the ranch quarters southwest of town. On the way he confided, "The reason I wanted you to attend this testing is that in addition to the new cows, I want you to see the new seed bull from Spain. He is being delivered after the testing tomorrow."

"Guadalquivir blood?" Veneno asked.

"Naturally," Don Eduardo replied, and he proposed that they join him in a copa at the long mahogany bar in the entertainment room, but as the three men were about to sit down in chairs built of bulls' horns highly polished, interlocked to form seats and backs, and then made comfortable by cushions of tanned but uncut sheepskins, Anselmo found that the chair he had chosen was one facing the great bull Terremoto, so that whenever he looked up he found the bull that had killed his father glaring at him as if the animal was about to charge an
d k
ill the son, too.

"I'll take this seat^Anselmo said, changing chairs, but
Veneno noticed that even when his brother was safe with his back to the wall, he kept turning fearfully to look at the bull. When Don Eduardo left the brothers to greet a movie actor from Hollywood who had come to see the testing, Anselmo reached for his brother's hand and said hesitantly: "Veneno, if anything should happen to me, promise that--"

"What can happen to either of us?" the valiant picador asked contemptuously.

"He's always in the ring." The frightened man pointed over his shoulder to Terremoto. "Always waiting."

"I think only of live bulls," Veneno replied with some savagery. "You should too."

"But if anything does happen, swear you'll raise my son as if he were a Spaniard."

"What could that mean?" Veneno laughed. "What in the world do you do to a boy--"

"Make him dress neatly, speak properly . . ." Anselmo's voice trailed off. "And when the time comes for him to marry ..." Again he faltered, and then with a rush he said: "Brother, we are strangers in an alien land. To me all Mexicans are General Gurza."

"You talk like a fool, brother."

The testing that day was joyous, with the corral lined with beautiful women, and the hot Toledo sun making the dust golden as the furious cows kicked it aloft as they attacked the horse bearing their tormentor Veneno. When he finished testing the bravery of the cows with his sharp pic--for it was through their mother's line, not the seed bull's, that fighting bulls gained courage--he passed them along to the matadors, who played them with capes, and as each animal left the corral, bleeding a little from the shoulders, where Veneno had stabbed them, the foreman cried, "Number 131. Very brave!" or "Number 132. Cautious, frightened of the horse." The latter would be raised for beef, for she would not be allowed to serve as the mother of a Palafox bull.

When the testing was completed, Don Eduardo stepped into the middle of the little ring and announced, "We are now going to show you our new seed bull from the ranch of Guadalquivir, in Spain."

The crowd applauded and from the cab of a truck a man called, "You ready?"

"Bring him in!" Don Eduardo replied.

The truck backed slowly toward a gate leading to the corral. Dust rose from the wheels to envelop an enormous iron
-
banded cage whose sides were solid oak. None of the spectators could see into the cage, yet all were fascinated by it and looked at nothing else as it slowly approached the corral entrance.

The dust must have irritated the great seed bull inside, for he was at the end of a journey that had started in distant Andalucia and had included trucks, boats, barges, trains and now trucks again. With demonic force the unseen bull attacked his prison, and the huge oaken box shivered and its iron bands seemed to stretch. Everyone could hear the massive horns stabbing at the sides, and terror was palpable even in the sun. Men who knew bulls looked at each other in apprehension, for no matter how long one worked with these animals, one remained awestruck by their raw power. Again the maddened bull lunged at his cage, and again the huge box shook with his fury. Inside was an animal that could lift a horse on his horns, rush across the diameter of a plaza, and toss the horse over the barrier. An accidental flick of those horns as they passed a matador could throw a man fifteen feet into the air, or gash his leg from knee to thigh.

The unseen bull now started kicking the rear boards of the cage and it became apparent why the cage was banded with iron straps.

"We'll need some men up there," Don Eduardo cried, and the Leal brothers leaped onto the platform that the truck was approaching. The oaken cage would have to be edged over the side of the truck lest there remain a gap between cage and corral in which the costly animal might break a leg. Timbers were called for, and the edging process began, but when it was well under way, and the cage was tipped ever so slightly to permit movement, the bull inside became even more enraged at the unexpected motion, and charged anew at his prison.