Mexico

by James A. Michener

  “Thank God!” the old picador whispered as he remounted.

  When he rode into the ring he was as lead picador required by custom to ride counterclockwise along the barrier, but he did so at unaccustomed speed in order to reach Victoriano, to whom he cried, “Make no further close passes with this bull. He’s not reliable. He hooks.”

  Victoriano, looking up at the austere white-haired figure on the horse, said with unprecedented independence, “I’m the matador. I’ll bring you the bull.” And with deft, dancing steps he led the wild animal into range of the pic, whereupon Veneno leaned with furious vigor on his lance, driving the steel shaft so deeply into the bull’s back that the Seville men began to shout, “Swine, dog, butcher! Are you trying to kill the bull?” One infuriated spectator began to throw something at Veneno, but police rushed up to intercept him. The crowd continued hurling insults at the white-haired picador, who now swung his horse across the bull’s path of escape, thus giving himself opportunity for an even deeper thrust of the lance.

  “I will kill this bull,” he muttered, bearing down with all the force of his ironlike body. His left foot broke loose from its stirrup, but he pressed on. The bull’s left horn, wet with Victoriano’s blood, drove against the metal that encased Veneno’s right leg, and the picador, seeing his son’s blood, drove the lance deeper and deeper. A gush of crimson spurted out along the sides of the pole to which the steel tip was fixed, but still the infuriated old man pressed on.

  He was interrupted in his unbridled attack on the bull by his own son. Daringly, Victoriano swept into position between the horse’s head and the bull’s, and with his cape close to his knees led the bull away until he found a chance to furl the cape spectacularly over his shoulders, teasing the bull away into a series of majestic passes, slow, sweet and marvelous to the eye. Veneno, watching the evil manner in which the bull hooked to the left, prayed.

  The dazzling passes ended, a breathless and perfect creation that brought the audience to its feet with ecstatic cries. A man could attend a dozen fights and not see a series of passes like this. One such performance once a season kept a fighter’s reputation alive.

  The final portion of the fight threatened to be a typical Victoriano retreat from the excellence of his cape work, and Chucho, mindful of how this bull hooked at the man and not the cloth, issued directions, “Three passes and kill him, or he’ll kill you.” But Victoriano felt that the moment had come when he must declare his independence from his family’s domination, so after giving the mandatory three passes to prove he was a real matador, he proceeded to try a fourth and a fifth, but a Guadalquivir bull is not like others and this one knocked him down and might have killed him had not the Leal brothers swept in with their whirling capes to lead the bull away.

  Veneno, rushing in from where the horses were kept, tried to prevent his son from attempting to kill, for it was obvious that the bull had brought blood to the matador’s other leg and he could be excused if he allowed himself to be carried from the arena, leaving the bull to the other matadors. But on this day Victoriano refused that honorable escape, for he was after a greater honor, the kind for which his grandfather had been distinguished. Grabbing sword and muleta, he ignored the warnings of the three other Leals, marched directly to the bull, and dispatched him with the kind of perfect thrust he had used years ago when starting in his profession.

  It was masterly. The bull dropped almost instantly. The crowd cheered and demanded that he march around the arena as they applauded, but when he started to do so, the pain from his wounds caused him to weave, so the three other Leals caught him, lifted him in the air and took him to the infirmary, where his wounds were cauterized.

  He was brought home by his two brothers, followed by a crowd of cheering men who stormed into the hotel room where Veneno sat, solemn and silent. As soon as the matador was placed on the bed, smiling and flushed with triumph, Veneno cried to the mob: “Get out!” One man, who hoped to get a photograph of himself and the matador, tarried, and felt the picador’s powerful arms close about him, throwing him into the hall. And then Veneno said to Chucho and Diego: “Get out!” He had not spoken to them in this manner for many years, and they hesitated, whereupon their father with frightening deliberation grabbed each in turn and threw him into the hallway. “What are you going to do?” Chucho cried.

  “I am going to explain what it means to be a matador,” the old man said. He slammed the door shut and locked it.

  In the next ten minutes the awed crowd in the hall heard voices and the sound of smashing furniture. Then there was only Veneno’s terrible voice rasping in short sentences: “We created you.” … “You will not destroy our chances.” … “You will fight as we direct.” After a long time there came a sound of running water. And then silence.

  That night Chucho and Diego slept with friends, for it was apparent that the door was not going to be opened. Next morning Victoriano Leal limped down Sierpes to the little plaza of the Café Arena. His left leg was stiff from the bull’s sharp horn thrust. One of his eyes was closed and black, and his nose was seriously distended as if it might be broken. But he was a matador. He knew at last what discipline meant, but he also knew that he had faced a major test of manhood and failed.

  Mexico City, 1960. The Leals returned from Spain the most famous bullfighting family in the world. They worked together with a cohesion that was almost frightening. Veneno handled contracts and struck extortionate deals, but as he pointed out; “When the Leals fight, the crowds come.” Chucho and Diego now performed almost automatically in the ring because of their perfection in their respective arts, while the old picador continued to blast the power out of even the most difficult bulls. Victoriano, of course, was the disciplined matador, a poetic evocation of all that the school of Seville stood for. The critic León Ledesma, who had traveled to Spain to observe the young man’s triumphs in that country, reported back to Mexico: “This golden youth, the creation of a notable taurine family, has gained all the laurels Spain has to offer, and if we seek the reason it is because he is a complete matador: at once the essence of lyric poetry and the soul of harsh self-control.” Understandably, his countrymen were excited about his return, and when his inaugural fight was announced one Monday, by noon on Tuesday all the fifty-five thousand tickets for Plaza México had been sold.

  I did not see the fight, but I did a good deal of reading about it and talked with many who had seen it. Preliminary publicity, of course, had featured the fact that Victoriano Leal, El Triunfador de España, would kill three “noble and exemplary bulls of Palafox,” but no mention was made of who the second man would be, and there was no flurry of excitement when it was subsequently announced that the program was to be completed by the routine Mexican hack Juan Gómez.

  Since Gómez had been a matador longer than Victoriano, he was entitled to fight first, and with his initial enemy accomplished nothing, as usual. Leal, inspired by the huge crowd that had come to greet him as one who had upheld Mexico’s reputation throughout Spain, was brilliant with the cape, fine with the banderilla and poetic with the muleta. If he had killed well, he would surely have won ears and tail and possibly a hoof, too, for his performance was emotionally charged, and no one begrudged him the two ears he carried in triumph three times around the ring while the band played the frenzied Mexican music known as the diana.

  The trouble started when Victoriano completed his third turn and, accompanied by Chucho and Diego, who picked up the flowers that were thrown at him, moved to the middle of the plaza to acknowledge the continuing cheers. Intoxicated by his magnificent triumph, he succumbed to an urge to glorify himself. Handing the two ears to his brothers, he raised his index fingers: “I am number one.”

  The crowd roared its confirmation of his claim, but the effect was dampened by the unexpected intrusion of Juan Gómez, who, in his faded blue suit with its tarnished decorations, left the barrier where he should have stayed and shuffled awkwardly to share the middle of the arena. Stopping three
feet from Victoriano as the younger matador started to leave the ring, Gómez waited till his opponent had passed, then raised himself on tiptoe, leaned far over imaginary horns, and drove his right palm, as if it were his sword, home. Then, sneering at Victoriano’s back, he raised his own forefingers in the air and shouted, “I am the real número uno!” and when cushions began to rain down on him, he maintained his position, his wizened face staring up at the mob, his fingers still aloft, his cracked voice still crying, “I’m número uno!”

  A silence fell upon the arena, for this was not an idle gesture. By making it, the bowlegged Indian matador Juan Gómez stripped all the glitter from the afternoon. Victoriano’s manipulations of the cape, the dandy’s work of placing the banderillas just so, the slow, beautiful movements with the cloth, and the semi-adequate kill at the end—all these were swept away. Juan Gómez, a little Altomec Indian, ignored the triumphant one from Spain and looked across the arena toward the door behind which the four remaining bulls of Palafox hid in darkness. Pointing solemnly to the fateful gate from which his next enemy would soon burst into the arena, he profiled again with his right arm extended forward as if it were a sword, and seemed to be boasting, Thus will I kill my bull! And the crowd waited.

  The third Palafox bull of the afternoon weighed thirteen hundred pounds, had a vicious chop to the right, and charged like a fire engine for two thirds of his run, then stopped abruptly to seek his man. With this deadly opponent, Juan Gómez made only four cape passes, but they were close, slow, pure and brimming with emotion. They contained not a single flourish, but they caught at the throats of fifty-five thousand people, and anything Victoriano Leal had accomplished that afternoon was cheapened.

  According to his habit, the bowlegged little Indian did not place his own sticks, for he lacked the grace for this part of the fight, but his peóns did acceptably, and when the time came for his work with the muleta, he moved slowly, keeping very close to the dangerous bull. With a minimum of passes, the sturdy fighter chopped his huge enemy down to manageable proportions. “His work,” wrote Ledesma the next day, “was filled to the brim with classic agony. We waited in silence for the bull to kill him.”

  Close, close to death the ugly little man worked, his eyes staring with deadly antagonism at the huge bull.

  Then came the time for the kill. So far there had been no embellishments to delight the eye, no arabesques to tease the brain. There had been only a bandy-legged little Indian with dark skin and hair in his eyes playing with life and death against a bull that was obviously intent on ending the game a winner. Now the aching sense of tragedy was to be heightened, for the man seemed hardly tall enough to reach over the horns to kill this huge bull.

  But with his left hand he lowered the red cloth, dangling it before his right knee, and with his right hand he clutched the long, point-dipping sword as if it were an extension of his body. He stood perilously close to the bull, and for an agonizing moment of suspense the two adversaries remained motionless. Then deftly, and with exquisite judgment, Gómez flicked the cloth, lured the bull just slightly to one side, took two quick steps, and almost leaped onto the horns. Slowly the tip of the sword found the true entrance. The desperate brown hand pushed on the sword. Slowly it went in … in … in. Bull and man formed a single paralyzed unit. It seemed as if minutes had passed, but still the man and the horns were one. And then the brown hand flattened itself against the bull’s dying neck, the sword blade completely vanished, and the man’s palm came away covered with blood.

  The moment passed. The bull staggered on a few feet to certain death and the man slipped off the flank in a kind of numb ecstasy. The picture of immortality was broken and from the vast concrete bowl came the sound of breath being released. For two or three seconds there were no olés and no cheers.

  His head low toward the sand and not in easy triumph, Juan Gómez mechanically withdrew his sword and slowly marched toward the spot where he must make his traditional report to the president. But before he reached there, the stormy response of the crowd broke over him, cheers such as he had not heard for many years. The music blared and flowers were beginning to cover the sand. Humbly the little Indian bowed to the president, acknowledging his authority. Then, putting his sword in his left hand, he turned to face the crowd and raised his right index finger.

  A riot started. The partisans of Victoriano refused to think that one lucky kill entitled this man with a trivial history to dispute the championship with an acknowledged master, who had triumphed in Spain. But this time the tough little Indian was not left alone with only a few supporters in the cheap seats on the sunny side. Many spectators, reviewing in their minds what they had seen that afternoon, must have concluded that there was something more to bullfighting than dancing gestures and poetic passages. There was, in all honesty, a naked moment when man and bull stood equal, with all nonsense gone. This was a fight of life and death, a summary of all we know of man’s dark passage, and it deserved a certain dignity. This dignity could not be observed in a hundred afternoons of Victoriano Leal, but this damned little Indian had somehow reminded the plaza of the very essence of bullfighting and life. And now the cheering was more evenly divided.

  That night León Ledesma wrote for The Bullfight:

  The gauntlet has been thrown down. Rarely has a matador of Victoriano Leal’s proven stature been so frontally insulted as after the third bull, when Juan Gómez made fun of him, suggesting to the crowd that Leal knew nothing of the essence of the fight. And rarely has a boastful gesture such as that of Gómez been so immediately backed up by a performance that must have exceeded even his wildest hopes.

  The most graceful fighter of our age has been made to look inconsequential by a man who has hitherto shown little but bravery. As we saw this afternoon, the insulting actions of Gómez drove Victoriano to prodigies of effort, and he in turn made Gómez extend himself to ridiculous acts with the fifth bull. I frankly do not like to see a matador take the horn of a maddened bull between his teeth, defying the animal to kill him, but apparently the public loved this rococo gesture of Gómez, for the plaza exploded with cheers and awarded him two ears, in this critic’s opinion one more than he deserved.

  Yesterday Juan Gómez triumphed. He stole Leal’s reception for himself and made the intended hero of the afternoon look pompous. I am sure that Victoriano will not tolerate this indignity, and thus each man will drive the other to more dangerous exploits, and in the end, unless sanity prevails, we shall see one of these matadors goad the other to a display that must end in death.

  It was this impending murder that I had been sent to Mexico to cover, and in the nine weeks that had passed since Ledesma’s first delineation of the struggle, the two matadors had fought together eight times. The perceived wisdom in Mexico was that Victoriano would be the victor because he would be supported in a crisis by the cunning of his father, Veneno, and the skill of his brothers, whereas Gómez could rely solely on his own courage.

  I did not buy this easy generalization. I feared that Victoriano was not a complete man, was allowed no mind of his own, whereas Gómez was ferociously self-directed and a veteran of both triumph and despair. But as twilight fell I realized that I knew Victoriano but not Gómez and would have to find out more about this stubborn little Indian.

  3

  THE RANCHER

  Before I could get to my typewriter to start my report on the background of Juan Gómez, I was distracted by the noisy approach of men whose appearances reminded me that I had come not only to observe a series of bullfights but also to attend a festival honoring Ixmiq, the founder of Toledo. They were a group of nine musicians dressed in brown suede suits with silver ornaments and flowing green ties, oversized tan sombreros and high-heeled cowboy boots. All were grave of face, especially the three who wore long mustaches, and as they marched slowly toward me they played a rhythmic Mexican music that from the days of my childhood had always evoked visions of festival. They were a band of mariachis from Guadalajara, the h
ome of this uniquely Mexican art, and they had come to earn money at the Festival of Ixmiq.

  What lively music the mariachis played! The tempo was always fast, and when they sang, the words were full of anguish over love or lost dreams. Besides conventional instruments like guitars, violins and a deep-voiced mandolin, which looked like a bass fiddle, there was also a gourdlike rasp and castanets. They produced a pleasant sound marked by a heavy unbroken beat that gave the music an identifiable Mexican cast. When the leader saw me he stopped his men abruptly, came over, bowed low, and announced in English, “For our American friend, ‘Cielito Lindo,’ ” and before I could stop them, the mariachis galloped mechanically into this song that I was sure they could not like. It was music for tourists, hammered out in tourist fashion.

  At the noisy conclusion the leader tucked his violin under his arm, bowed again and announced, “Another fine song for the norteamericano, ‘San Antonio Rose,’ ” by this flattery hoping to win a few dollars from me. Again the mariachis ground out what they thought I wanted, but before they had reached the first chorus I raised my hand and shouted in rapid Spanish, “Stop that garbage! I want ‘Guadalajara’!”

  The stolid-faced musicians gaped and the leader asked in Spanish, “You know ‘Guadalajara’?”

  “Why not?” I snapped. “I’m one of you.”

  The mariachis grinned and the leader apologized: “We thought you were only a norteamericano.” I winced at this pejorative term but said nothing, because I knew that proud Mexicans liked to remind visitors from the north, “Everyone on this continent is an americano, you’re a norteamericano. Don’t rob us of our name by stealing it for yourselves.”

  He beat the air twice with his violin bow and the mariachis began to sing, “ ‘Guadalajara, Guadalajara!’ ” They pronounced the name Mexican style, which lent the cry an added poignancy: “Wath-a-la-cara.” Into this name the singers poured their love of land that was so powerful a force in Mexico, and children who had not yet seen that city of the west paused to hear the sweet song.