Mexico (88 page)

Our family did not have to leave Toledo for Father to do the work they wanted, and this allowed him time to write the book that made him famous and caused the statue, The Pyramid and the Cathedral, to be erected in his honor at the far corner of the plaza. From our front porch we could see both edifices, and their history was in our bloodstream. It was a noble book, still is, a glimpse into the heart of Mexico, and one of the passages I've cherished is his portrait of Jubal Clay with his Confederate brothers in his final years:

Each year on the ninth of April those Confederate soldiers who had refused to live under the domination of the North and General Grant, finding refuge here in the salubrious climate of Toledo, would convene in fellowship to mark, not celebrate, the day on which Robert E. Lee surrendered to Butcher Grant at Appomattox Court House.

Someone would propose a toast: "To the day the world ended!" and they would drink in silence, but always someone else proposed: "To the day Canada invades the North and we rush there to help her." This toast they drank with cheers and cries of "We'll be there!" At the first reunion after the election of Grant as president, Jubal proposed his own toast: "We can take heart from the election of Butcher Grant, because it proves there is a God in heaven. He's giving those bastards what they deserve. Let's watch how he messes up the nation as he did his army at Cold Harbor."

But as the years passed, and the exiles aged, Jubal noted a phenomenon: "Every man who recalled his battle experiences claimed he had fought with either Stonewall Jackson or Jeb Stuart or Massa Robert himself. Since not one of us admitted he had fought under a losing general, I often wondered how we had managed to lose the war."

As time went on, Father proved so invaluable to American Petroleum that the company offered him yearly bonuses in stock, until we became a family with a solid if not spectacular financial footing. As the president of the company once said when delivering the bonus at a staff gathering: "The best thing John Clay ever did for this company was write that book. It proved to the Mexicans that we were not only good people but also a cultured group who appreciated Mexican patterns of life. Clay is our resident Mexican, and we treasure him."

Under Father's guidance mining affairs proved so profitable in central Mexico that American Petroleum decided to probe deeper into our Mineral to see if perhaps some major vein lay hidden far below what was now known as Caridad's Cavern at the thirteen-hundred-foot mark. So the Nevada engineers who had probed in the 1930s returned with new equipment that enabled them to speed down below the nineteen-hundred-foot level, but they found nothing. However, Father's other projects earned the company rich rewards.

You can imagine his dismay when the radical liberal Lazaro Cardenas became president in 1934 and began threatening to expropriate all foreign petroleum holdings. He told me in the letters he sent me at college--I was a graduate student in those years--that Mexico was plunging headlong into another revolution. That same year he sent me news that Grandmother Caridad had died, "a wonderful fighting woman to the end." He said that she left a cryptic message for me: "Tell Norman to guard that photograph. Each year it becomes more valuable." It was clear that as Mexico became more nationalistic, and more particularly because of its willingness to stand up to the United States on the oil business, Saturnino Gurza was being slowly but surely converted into one of the great national heroes. Those pusillanimous leaders who had opposed him, such as Carranza and Huerta and Obreg
o
n, were seen as men to be forgotten, while Gurza grew yearly in stature. Grandmother had been right in her assessment of Mexican history; Father L
o
pez had been wrong.

But Grandmother's death posed a difficult problem for me, for with her gone I was the only person alive who knew that Father Juan had died a martyr's death, and the knowledge of that truth hung heavily upon me. In those tumultuous days after the assassination of Gurza it was prudent to preserve the secret, for to reveal it might have caused danger not only to our family for having harbored the assassin but to the Catholic Church as a whole for having encouraged, it might seem, this blow against a revered leader. Now the burden of truth lay on me alone, and often as I looked at that remarkable photo, the last ever taken of Gurza, as Caridad had suspected, I watched it become transformed under my very eyes. General Gurza, the man holding me on his knee, had become the father of the new Mexico, and I resolved that sometime, when the occasion was proper, I would reveal both the photograph and the history of the rifle. In the meantime I had six excellent copies made and kept them in various places.

In 1938 Cardenas did expropriate the oil wells; American Petroleum was expelled from Mexico, its enormous wealth wiped out by a mere scratching of a presidential pen; and soon thereafter my father, author of the fine book about Mexico, left that country for good. My mother, always a loyal Palafox, refused to join him, but in due course I followed his example, even to the extent of leaving a Palafox wife behind me. Father wanted to bring my mother with us, but she refused to leave the ancestral home of the Palafoxes; an equally weighty consideration was her religion. At her marriage to my father, there had been a mutual understanding that she would remain Catholic but he would be free to elect at some future time whether he wanted to join her church or not. He delayed his decision, and neither he nor Grandmother Caridad applied any pressure on me to join any religion, Mother's Catholicism or Father's Protestantism. Caridad told me when I was eleven: "I've been a good Catholic like all before me, but the only thing it ever did for me was put me down in the mines."

There was no bitterness in our departure, that is, personally. Mother and Father had regard for each other, but Father said he simply could not live in a nation that stole private property with inadequate compensation, and Mother said it was unthinkable that she could ever live in a country like the United States that had stolen not property but the entire northern state of Mexico. When I asked what this meant she said: "I mean the parts you call Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Stole them all and someday we'll march north to gain them back."

Father was not alone in these days of anguished decisions about future lives. I had married a lovely Palafox girl, from the Spanish branch, and she too found it incomprehensible that she would accept exile in America, abandoning all that had made Toledo such a splendid home, with the advantages that accrued to the name Palafox. She refused to join me, so that when Father and I left Toledo for a new home in Alabama, all of us knew that reconciliations were improbable. In those days a man decided where his family should live, so there was not one moment's consideration of the fact that I might want to stay with Mother in Toledo.

Father had chosen Montgomery because it was a fine Southern city populated by reliable people who still believed that the South should have won the War Between the States, as they called it, since they viewed the war as having been fought between two equal national entities--one pro-slavery, one anti. "There was no rebellion, young man," a distant cousin lectured me when I arrived: "It was a war between equals, except that we had all the education and moral training, they had the railroads and the factories."

I was happy in Alabama until I found out that another reason Father had wanted to settle there was that he would be close to Mexico when war started. He was convinced that President Roosevelt would soon march south of the border to take back the oil wells and he wanted to be in on the kill. When it was apparent that the crippled president was indeed planning a war, not against Mexico but against Germany, he told the members of his Confederate Club: "My God! He's fighting the wrong war!" and once more Clay felt betrayed by Northern leadership.

In Montgomery he suffered many regrets, not because of his treatment there, but because he felt it was indecent for him to live on his pension and stock from American Petroleum when he had failed them so signally: 'They hired me to help them maintain good relations with the Mexican government, and I had to sit by in impotence when Cardenas stole our entire operation and hundreds of years of oil reserves. I'm a total failure." And when his New York publishers wanted him to write a foreword for a special edition of The Pyramid and the Cathedral, explaining the new Mexico, he told them: "The new
Mexico can go to hell." They replied with an urgent letter: "Don't say that in public," and he didn't.

So there you have my family tree. Indian builders back to A
. D
. 600. Spanish scholars back to 1498. Virginia patriots only to 1823, but you have seen my undefeated grandfather Jubal and my philosopher father, John, in proper detail. As for myself, I was born in Toledo in 1909 to a Palafox mother and a son of a Confederate emigre, lived through the heat of the revolution, and emigrated back to the United States in time to growl: "If Hitler and Tojo think they can destroy our pattern of life, we'd better do something about it." In 1942 I saw duty in the Pacific as an aviator, and in 1950 as a combat correspondent in Korea.

When I felt that I had to abandon my wife in Toledo, a decision that she made, not I, she sensibly had our marriage annulled on grounds that I had refused to live with her, which was technically correct. I regretted my losing her, even mourned it, but there was nothing I could do.

Like the offspring of those other Confederate soldiers who fled to Mexico in 1866, I have never been able to determine whether I'm a Mexican or a norteamericano. I was born a Mexican citizen and in my formative years led a wildly exciting life there; as an adult I gained American citizenship by virtue of my volunteering for World War II; but I return to Mexico whenever I get a chance, for to visit the plaza of Toledo in moonlight and see that rim of handsome buildings built by members of my Spanish family, or that fabulous Mineral rejuvenated by my grandfather, or the brooding pyramid begun in 650 by restless Ixmiq moves me more deeply than anything I see elsewhere. Even if I went back to Cold Harbor to see where Grandfather Jubal masterminded his half hour of horror, I doubt it would affect me as deeply as a Visit to that plaza in which General Gurza committed his crimes and then gave me my gun.

Chapter
17.

BY TORCHLIGHT

IT IS THE second night of a three-day bullfight festival that is often the most rewarding. Friendships have been made. Visitors have learned where to find the fashionable places to dine. The spectators now have six different matadors to compare. There is not the pang of regret that sometimes overwhelms the final night. But as day quickly fades after the death of the last bull on Saturday, night arrives with its mystical powers, and nowhere in Mexico or Spain is there a finer plaza in which to celebrate the ending of a festival day than the one in Toledo.

The plaza itself is of such careful proportions, large enough to accommodate big crowds but not so spacious as to prevent intimacy, that it makes being there a pleasure. I know a dozen plazas in the cities of the world, and many, like that of Salamanca, are larger than Toledo's and some, like the one at Cartagena, have more imposing single buildings; others, like the big one in Madrid, played major roles in Spanish and world history, and certainly the majestic Zocalo of Mexico City with its cathedral dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe is perhaps the best of all. I do not include the area before St. Peter's in Rome in that comparison, because it has none of the intimacy of a plaza; indeed, it isn't even enclosed on all four sides.

But the plaza in Toledo has one overwhelming mark of superiority: it is scaled with almost magical precision to the human experience, the size and capacities of the human being. You can stand at the statue of Ixmiq at the north end and still keep in touch with what's happening at the statue of my father, John Clay, at the southern end, and if you spot a pretty gir
l t
aking her evening stroll at the far end, you have only to wait where you are, for she will soon be passing you.

For many Toledanos the plaza has one serious drawback. The broad avenue that runs down the western length in front of the cathedral has in recent years been rechristened by politicians Avenida Gral. Gurza in honor of the famous bandit who, in other parts of Mexico, is revered as a hero, but who in Toledo is rejected with shudders because of the terror he brought our city.

The word Gral has always fascinated me, for as one travels in Mexico one comes upon one avenue after another named Avenida Gral. Gomez or the like, and this perplexed me until I learned that Gral is an abbreviation of the word General Mexico adores its generals, and any sizable city that does not have an Avenida Gral. This or That is poor indeed. Because my grandmother, a fervent partisan of Gral. Gurza, taught me to respect what the man had been trying to do, I accepted the name of the avenue.

On this lovely night under the stars a wooden theatrical platform, a kind of rustic stage, had been erected on Gral. Gurza where it passed in front of the cathedral, but at the southern end near the statue of my father. On this stage Hector Sepulveda, the one-handed poet who had conducted himself so convincingly in the Tournament of Flowers Thursday night, was to direct a pageant he had written entitled Here in This Plaza, and from the posters Yd seen I supposed it would be a Mexican version of a show I had seen one dark night at the Bastille in Paris. It was most effective, an artistic mix ,of previously recorded fiery orations, music and the sounds of a mob storming the prison gates, all emphasized by brilliantly synchronized lighting effects. I thought: The Mexicans are great at such displays, and I had bought my ticket.