Mexico

by James A. Michener

  The voices gave way to trumpeters who blared out the basic rhythm. Abruptly the trumpets stopped and the troupe sang with unabashed sentimentality, “ ‘Wath-a-la-cara!’ ” In close harmony four voices sobbed in conclusion: “How beautiful was that spring in Wath-a-la-cara.” A series of minor chords leaped from the strings, while the trumpets danced in furious arabesques above the melodic line, and the song ended in a bath of Mexican emotion. From the terrace of the hotel across the street two travelers from Guadalajara cheered.

  The mariachis gathered about me, asking for their fee, but I deferred payment: “You didn’t finish ‘San Antonio Rose,’ so you owe me one more song. I’d like to hear ‘The Ballad of General Gurza.’ ”

  The mariachis stopped smiling, and the leader stepped forward deferentially: “Does the señor norteamericano really wish to hear this song?”

  “I asked for it.”

  “Does the señor know—well—perhaps the words—”

  “I know the words,” I said firmly. “Because I’m also a Mexican. Years ago I used to sing this song up at the mines.”

  The mariachis relaxed and one asked, “Didn’t your American father spank you for singing such a song?”

  “He did.”

  The mariachis made a place for me within their circle, and the strings ripped out seven quick chords, followed by campfire trumpet calls, whereupon three voices, and mine, began the galloping chant:

  “In the year 1916

  President Wilson sent his Yankees

  Into the state of Chihuahua

  To punish our valiant General Gurza.

  “Valiant, valiant General Gurza!

  Let me ride with you.

  I am young,

  But I can fight the americanos.

  “Up and down the highways of Durango

  The americanos sought our valiant leader.

  Never did they catch him,

  But in the evenings he assaulted them.

  “Valiant, valiant General Gurza!

  Let me fight with you.

  I am young,

  But I can shoot the americanos.”

  The ballad had many verses detailing the courage of General Gurza as he evaded the troops of President Wilson—pronounced Veel-son in our song—and ended with a typical Mexican conclusion, involving muted trumpet calls and the promise that whenever Mexico was in danger from the Yankees, valiant General Gurza would rise from his grave in the mountains of Chihuahua and lead his ghostly armies to defeat the enemy. Solemnly we chanted the last chorus:

  “Valiant, valiant General Gurza!

  Let me die with you.

  I am young,

  But my heart aches for Mexico.”

  The song died away in a crash of trumpet flourishes that would have stopped dead any of President Wilson’s Yankees, and I shook hands with the leader of the mariachis. “Those days are gone.” I laughed. They bowed and would accept no money, even though I explained that another man had given me some for them.

  “No,” the leader insisted. “This time we have welcomed you home. Next time we charge you double.”

  I bowed and said, “Valiant, valiant General Gurza. Always a valiant bandit.”

  The mariachis laughed at my insult to their national hero and cried, “A valiant bandit,” and they resumed their counterclockwise march around the square, leaving me with my memories of the brutal General Gurza. I felt shivery, as I had as a boy when I heard that name mentioned with terror by my mother, who had seen her relatives slain by Gurza. Seeking companionship, I crossed the paved street that separated the statue of Ixmiq from the House of Tile, whose blue-and-yellow façade reflected the last light of day.

  In Mexico some buildings are faced with blue tile and they seem cold. Others are fronted with brown-and-yellow tile, and these are garish. But a few, like this hotel, are covered with tile of flowered design in which the leaves are blue and the petals yellow, and that combination yields both warmth and dignity. My hotel had such decoration, and it warmed the heart and extended a welcome to all travelers.

  The first Bishop Palafox, who erected the building, did it, he said, as a tribute to his Indian wife, “as fine a helper as any man ever had.” It was a lovely building, rather small and intimate in style, and we Palafoxes felt that it was a worthy symbol of both his love and the remarkable qualities of his wife. For almost four hundred years it had served as a kind of rural hotel and in this century it had become the prestigious place for visitors to stay. During the bullfight season, it was obligatory housing for matadors and their troupes.

  A classic building of two low stories, it was decorated with bas-reliefs of the saints who protected Toledo. Its façade had originally been of dark stone, but one of the later Bishop Palafoxes had imported blue-and-yellow tile from Spain and redone the face with style. Now the original brownstone saints looked out through frames of colorful tile.

  For some happy reason the first Bishop Palafox had made the front of his convent not flat but concave, thus producing at the north end of the square an extended open terrace, which for the last fifty years had been filled with white restaurant tables and wire-backed chairs. During mealtime the tables were covered with red checkered cloths; the rest of the time they stood bare, inviting all who wished to drink.

  When I entered the terrace I looked to the left flanking wall and saw, with some satisfaction, that the broken tiles along that side had not been repaired. As a boy I had been stood against those broken tiles week after week to measure my growth, and I remember the day when my head finally reached the line of holes that had caused the tiles to crack. Looking at the tiles now, it seemed impossible that I could ever have been so small. To see these broken tiles was an assurance that things were not going to change in Toledo.

  I tapped on one of the white tables and from the heavily carved doorway of the hotel came a large woman of about sixty wearing a black dress and many combs. When she recognized me she cried, “Señor Clay! I was so happy when I received your cable.”

  “Is the room available?”

  “Like always,” she said, pointing over her shoulder. “With your cameras in place.”

  I rubbed my hands and asked, “Is the menu the same?”

  The ample woman, known as the Widow Palafox now that her husband, one of the less successful Palafoxes, was dead, disappeared into the hotel and returned with a menu that had become a feature of Mexico. For many years at each Festival of Ixmiq Doña Carmen had been accustomed to serving a traditional Spanish menu so as to help her guests be in the proper mood for the bullfights. Visitors who had once tasted her food during the festival would sometimes come from Mexico City during the fair expressly to enjoy her traditional Spanish feast while lounging on the terrace and listening to the mariachis.

  Now the Widow Palafox handed me the menu and I saw that it had not changed. For sixteen pesos, about $1.30, the guest was entitled to five huge courses, each to be selected from many options, but by custom visitors to the festival always included the four special dishes: fish soup of Seville, lima beans and ham hocks of Asturias, and the paella of Valencia, followed by a light caramelized vanilla custard known as flan that provided a fine complement to the heavy Spanish dinner.

  Looking at the menu made my mouth water, and I realized with some dismay that it was now only seven o’clock and that the tables would not be set for two more hours, since dinner was not served before nine. I was about to go upstairs to my room, which held extraordinary memories, when I was saved by a loud shout from the plaza and I turned to see one of my father’s closest friends darting between taxicabs to overtake me. It was Don Eduardo Palafox, a rich relative of the widow who ran the hotel, the present owner of the Palafox bull ranch and a kind of uncle of mine.

  Don Eduardo was now in his mid-sixties, a big, round, baldheaded man with a thin patrician upper lip and a very full lower one, which produced a somewhat puckish appearance. Deep lines radiated from the corners of his eyes while others crisscrossed his ample forehead. He was a h
appy man and one who was deceptively agile, for although he must have weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, he now dodged in and out of traffic like an athlete and approached me without being out of breath. “Nephew!” he cried warmly in English. “You made it back to the fair.”

  “Your bulls fighting?” I asked.

  “How would they dare to overlook me?” He laughed, pointing to a bright poster on the opposite side of the hotel: “The Traditional Festival of Ixmiq. Hand to Hand. Victoriano Leal, the Triumphant One from Spain, and Juan Gómez, Both from This State!!!! Bulls of San Mateo, Torrecillas and Palafox.” The names of the secondary matadors who would also appear during the festival were listed, along with the names of the peóns and picadors.

  “Tell me, Norman,” Don Eduardo suggested in Spanish, pulling me down to sit at one of the white tables, “What do you think is going to happen between Leal and Gómez?”

  “Simple,” I replied. “One of them will goad the other to his death.”

  “That’s what Ledesma wrote,” Don Eduardo mused. “Then you count this a real competition, not just something the newspapers have invented?”

  “Haven’t you seen them fight together?” I asked.

  “No, and that’s a pity. My bulls have been appearing in the northern plazas, and, as you know, I like to go along with them whenever possible.”

  “They been any good?” I asked.

  Don Eduardo smiled expansively as he ordered beer. “This year the bulls of Palafox have been superb.”

  “And those for the fair?” I pressed.

  “Wonderful,” he assured me.

  I have been attending bullfights for about forty years and throughout that time a good 95 percent of the bulls have turned out to be cowardly, dangerous and weak in the knees; nevertheless, before every fight those connected with the business assured the world that the next day’s bulls would prove truly splendid. Like all ranchers, Don Eduardo enjoyed being described by the press as scrupulous, which implied that when he tested his young bulls and cows, the cowardly ones were turned into beef and not allowed to contaminate the bullrings.

  In money matters he was indeed scrupulous. In all human affairs, as my family had cause to know, he was scrupulous, and in politics he had enjoyed preferential treatment by many different governments because of his scrupulousness; but in the raising of bulls for the plazas of Mexico he was, like everyone else in the business, a common crook. So when he assured me that in the plazas to the north his bulls had been outstanding, I translated this to mean: “Out of every six I sent, perhaps one gave a reasonably decent fight. The other five were cowardly, dangerous and weak in the knees.”

  Now Don Eduardo began reciting the bull breeder’s standard complaint: the matadors who work his bulls are never able to get out of them the great performances of which all Palafox bulls are capable. As I drank his beer I began to ignore his complaints and to think of the powerful family of which he was the present head and I a proud though minor part.

  As I turned away from him momentarily to study the plaza, where the evening lights were coming on to make the area a postcard portrait of classical Mexico, I remembered that everything I saw in this stately place had been built by an ancestor of mine, one or another of the five bishops Palafox.

  I had never before been much interested in the Palafoxes as a clan, being satisfied to know that my mother had been a member, a fact of which she had been inordinately proud. Because she was such a splendid woman I might have become engrossed in family matters had I not married a Palafox, who divorced me. With her departure I lost interest, but now, in this gray period of indecision when I was trying to restructure my life, I found that I was intensely concerned about my varied inheritances and wanted to pursue questions I had previously ignored.

  “Uncle Eduardo, didn’t I hear you mention last time I was here that there had been two branches of the Palafoxes?”

  And he proceeded to remind me of things I must have known as a boy but had ignored at the time. “Still are. In the 1520s two brothers came to Mexico to help Cortés—one a priest, the other a soldier. Each of them had many children. Their descendants’ behavior was strange, for the men in the line started by the priest married only Indian women, the soldier’s men married only pure-blooded Spanish wives. So, many of the Palafoxes you see today can be quite dark-skinned, but the soldier’s line look like typical people from Spain. I’m from that line.” He obviously took pride in that pure-blooded ancestry and reminded me that my mother and my wife were also from that branch.

  Then he waved the open palm of his right hand back and forth across his face to indicate that he was wiping out such distinctions and said happily, “Anyway, in our family a boy calls any Palafox older than himself uncle. You’re one of us, Norman, that’s what counts.”

  “Is all this written down somewhere?”

  “Only up here,” he said, tapping his head, but then he added brightly, “But in the little museum I’ve put together in one of the old church buildings up the street, there are paintings and things that tell some of the story.”

  “You ought to write it down, before it’s lost.”

  He laughed and tapped me on the knee. “You’re the writer in the family.”

  I thought, Would anyone have enough time and daring to unravel the complex story of this family that had played such a vital role in the history of Toledo? And images of compelling power flashed through my mind of the murders and burning I myself had seen as a boy, the crises at the Mineral, and I thought, If one boy in a space of ten or fifteen years saw so much, how much did my ancestors witness in this plaza, at the Mineral, the pyramid? and I felt engulfed by the grand sweep of history.

  As from a distance I heard Don Eduardo’s cheerful voice: “Well, what do you say?”

  “About what?”

  “I asked if you would like to join me.”

  “Where?”

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle.”

  “I invited you to the Tournament of Flowers.”

  “Is that being held tonight?”

  “Yes. Always on the Wednesday. It opens the fiesta. And I want you to be one of the judges.”

  I leaned back in my chair with a feeling of distinct pleasure and said, “Father never missed the Tournament. I’d enjoy it and we can dine afterwards.”

  “Precisely,” Don Eduardo agreed, and he and I cut across the plaza to the Imperial Theater, where a distinguished crowd of Toledo citizens, many in evening dress, were gathering for the annual Tournament of Flowers. With the easy grace that comes from years of wielding authority, Don Eduardo introduced me to many who had known my father and then led me backstage past a dozen men dressed in black and so obviously nervous that they had to be the contestants whom I was to help judge. Don Eduardo ignored them and took me to a small room where three judges sat, looking ill at ease. When the head of the Palafox family appeared they rose and bowed stiffly.

  “I can never remember your names,” Don Eduardo said with the polite contempt wealthy Mexicans have for everyone else. “This is my nephew, the son of John Clay, our author.”

  The three judges—a dentist, a professor and a self-educated poet—nodded and Don Eduardo announced abruptly, “Señor Clay is going to be one of our judges.”

  It became apparent that the professor, Dr. Ruiz Meléndez, did not intend to allow Don Eduardo to ride roughshod over him this year. Pointedly he asked, “Does the norteamericano know Spanish?”

  Don Eduardo was impatient and brushed off the inquiry: “Better than I do.”

  Professor Ruiz seemed ready to combat every position Don Eduardo took: “For judging pretty girls in the United States no Spanish is necessary, but what we shall be doing this evening … well, the cultural honor of Toledo is involved.”

  “Professor,” Don Eduardo interrupted bluntly, “my nephew knows more about the cultural honor of Toledo than you will ever know. Now let’s get on with the Tournament.”
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  Ruiz Meléndez refused to surrender to Don Eduardo. “I am not convinced that your nephew is the kind of man we require for the task at hand,” he said coldly and I thought: He’s right, but if he had spoken like that in the old days, some Palafox would have shot him. But these were new days and Don Eduardo laughed good-naturedly.

  “You’re right, Professor,” he chuckled. “We Palafoxes are all idiots when it comes to culture, but we’ll have you good men to help us out.” Then taking me by the hand he headed for the stage with the command, “Come on, you idiot.” The dentist and the poet smiled discreetly, but the professor remained irritated.

  We filed onto the stage of the blue-and-gold theater and I was moved by the sight of the platform on which Emperor Maximilian had behaved with such gallantry at the end of his life. The audience, filling all seats, applauded genteelly as Don Eduardo raised his hand for silence and said, “We are the judges tonight. Four of us you already know.” He took a piece of paper from his pocket and read, “Dr. Beltrán, our learned dentist, Luis Solís the poet, and Professor Ruiz Meléndez. I have no right to be here myself, being a rancher, but I came along in case any livestock had to be judged.” There was embarrassed laughter at this, and I saw Professor Ruiz wince. “And this stranger,” Don Eduardo concluded, “is really no stranger at all. He’s John Clay’s boy, and we’re lucky to have him with us tonight because he’s a famous writer himself.” I cringed when he said this, for I knew I was at best a journeyman scribbler, at worst a hack. And now he clapped his hands, and shouted gruffly: “Come on. Let’s get going.”

  We judges took our seats on a dais to the side, our feet resting on red carpeting, and when we were settled, from the wings came sixteen charming young ladies, dressed in white evening gowns and carrying floral bouquets. At first I thought: Damn! This year it’s degenerated into some local beauty contest; but obviously this was not the case, for from another entrance appeared a gorgeous young woman, tall, stately and with a remarkable grace of movement. An orchestra struck up a coronation march, and she was escorted by the sixteen attendants to a throne that was suddenly revealed at the rear. There the mayor of Toledo cried: “I crown you Queen Cristina!” and the stage was set.