Mexico

by James A. Michener

  This unfortunate statement brought Don Eduardo such unpleasant memories that he turned away, indicating the end of the conversation.

  Although ill at ease, Juan continued to hover about the matadors’ tables, saying to Armillita: “You were very good today, matador,” and hoping that the great one would remember what had happened at the testing, but the matador merely grunted: “Regular.”

  Juan moved on to where six aficionados were explaining to Silverio exactly how it was he had killed the third bull. Not realizing how improper it was for him to speak to Silverio, since he had ruined the matador’s final bull, he elbowed his way up to the table and said: “You were very good in your first bull, matador.” Looking up in surprise to see the boy standing over him, Silverio, always the gracious showman, smiled and said: “You too were excellent. You intend to follow the bulls?” Before Juan could reply, the hostile peón hauled him away from Silverio.

  “I asking you,” the skinny peón repeated, “who invite you ruin our bull?”

  Juan pushed him away so that he could return to answer Silverio’s question, which the matador had by now forgotten.

  He tried to escape the peón, who continued to hound him. In frustration, Juan turned and, lashing out with his fists, knocked the peón down. Immediately some picadors and other peóns who had resented the boy’s intrusion both now and in the ring closed in on him and began punching him until he collapsed.

  “Throw him out!” one of the picadors cried, and police came to haul the inert body off to jail. In the morning the owner of the brewery came to the jail and demanded, “Where’s the money from the festival?”

  “I gave it to Jiménez,” Juan explained.

  “He’s disappeared,” the man snapped. “Fistfighting, jumping into the ring, causing me nothing but embarrassment. You’re fired.”

  But the 1945 Festival of Ixmiq was not an entire loss for Juan Gómez. Three different photographs had caught impressive shots of his action with the last bull, and one had taken a fine photo of Juan passing the bull with his bare hand. It was widely published throughout Mexico with the caption “Thus fights Juan Gómez.” With the last pennies he had saved from his brewery salary, Juan purchased glossy copies of each of the photographs, and bundling his property once more in his cape, he set out to conquer Mexico in earnest.

  He never saw his mother again, for she died while he was in jail in Torreón. Famished, he had robbed a store to get food and had been caught, and if his mother never heard of his disgrace, he did not hear of her death.

  He was now an acknowledged apprentice with the right to demand a formal contract for his fights, but he got so few that he was always ready to fight for nothing. If he heard that a village was planning a fiesta, he would hike and steal rides and jump trains for three days to get there in hopes that he might face the bulls. He fought animals that had already killed men, animals that were blind in one eye, animals that had horns whose tips were so badly battered that if they caught a man in the stomach he was sure to be killed by the dirt-stained ends. He lived on beans and tortillas, and sometimes on water. He weighed less than a hundred and twenty pounds, and when he had the fever after a wound he sometimes dropped to a hundred and ten.

  It was a pitiful life, from 1945 through 1950, lightened only by a few superb afternoons with the bulls and an occasional meeting with some country girl enchanted by bullfighters from the city. Three times in hunger and desperation he returned to the soft-spoken man in León who was always ready to take him back and who forgave him for the things he had stolen on his earlier renunciations of what the easy-living man had to offer. Once the León man actually did arrange a major fight for him in Irapuato, and Juan had been extremely good.

  “See how easy it would be?” the persuasive man argued. “I can get you fights like that every month.” But at the height of his pleasure over the Irapuato success, Juan announced for the last time, “I will never be back. I’ll conquer the bulls some other way.”

  When he was twenty, the mother of a girl he dated in a small town near Monterrey taught him how to read, and he could now follow what was said about him in the sporting sheets. For the most part his life was spent going from one plaza to the next. Although he earned little, he did learn about bulls. At every chance, he would spend weeks at the ranches watching the bulls. He was content to sit all day, studying the animals, and he came to know when they would lift their heads, when they would move. He could tell which neck muscles tensed before the animals lunged. Few men his age knew as much about bulls.

  One day in 1950, while lounging in a Guadalajara café hoping vaguely that something would turn up regarding a testing that was supposed to take place for a group of American tourists, he heard a stranger shout in English: “Cigarro, you ugly bastard! Remember that night in Tijuana!” and when he turned to see who this Cigarro might be he saw it was Silverio’s peón, the gargoyle-faced one who had chased him around the ring at Ixmiq-45 and had beat him up later at the House of Tile. The ugly one was now seated with a local girl who tried to sing flamenco songs in bars, and as soon as he saw Gómez he recognized the espontáneo who had given him so much trouble in Toledo. “Stay away!” he growled. “You not welcome here.” Juan ignored the peón and bowed stiffly to the girl. “I heard you sing the other night. You were fantastic.” This was a word much used by bullfighters and meant that the event so described was ordinary.

  The singer smiled graciously and asked, “Will you be at the testing tomorrow?”

  “Oh, it’s tomorrow?” Juan replied, betraying the fact that he had not been invited.

  “I say you not welcome,” Cigarro grumbled, showing obvious displeasure with the singer for having betrayed the secret of the testing.

  “Could I ride up to the ranch with you?” Juan asked bluntly.

  “No,” Cigarro snapped.

  Next day at the testing, to which Juan had hiked during the night, Cigarro went so far as to suggest to the owner that Gómez be prevented from participating. “I didn’t invite him,” he explained.

  The rancher shrugged and said, “Well, he’s here. Let him make one or two passes.”

  Cigarro was leaning against the improvised stands, talking with the singer, when Juan’s first cow came out and the peón warned the girl, “This one not a matador. He know nothing. Rancher being polite to him.”

  Here I must interrupt my narrative to mention Drummond’s reaction to my rendition of Cigarro’s speech, which was a rough translation of the peón’s Spanish. Drummond wanted to know: “What is this guy speaking, Chinese?” and I had to explain my problem:

  Toreros of the second category often use a verbal shorthand consisting of grunts, abbreviated words, sentences with no verbs and an arcane lingo. Some years ago a matador enjoying a season of unbroken triumphs wanted a bumper sticker for his Cadillac that proclaimed “The whole world is wonderful,” and this could be expressed in good Spanish as “Todo el mundo es maravilloso,” but in his argot the sentence came out “To er mundo e ueno,” with the last two words being pronounced “ā waaaay-no.” That’s the problem I have with translating Cigarro’s speech into English.

  Drummond wired back: “Appreciate your difficulties but make him sound less Mongolian.”

  Cigarro’s near-illiteracy was explained by his birth to a landless peasant family in southern Mexico. His militant father, prepared to die in his fight to gain a little field of his own, had named his son Emiliano Gutiérrez, proclaiming at his baptism: “He will be a revolutionary leader of the peasants like Emiliano Zapata,” but when the boy turned bullfighter instead he threw him out of the Gutiérrez shack: “No son of mine will fight bulls instead of landlords,” and the boy started his frustrating chase after the bulls.

  Emiliano’s life followed the torero’s time-honored course of action: as an impoverished boy walking from one village feria to another, as an impoverished man serving as peón to a full-fledged matador. One night in a small village he saw a motion picture in which the hero smoked long Cuba
n cigars that made him look important, and he was so impressed that he instantly adopted the habit, buying cigars whenever he had a few pesos to spare. With Cigarro as his professional name he became a competent peón, never of the top category but so brave and trustworthy that he found constant employment and his gargoyle face became familiar in Mexican plazas.

  Now, in 1950, at the testing for the American tourists, since Cigarro had not seen Gómez for some years he was unprepared for what the young apprentice had learned in the interim and was impressed by what he saw. Juan kept the cape low, his feet solidly rooted in the sand but spread apart. He had an emotional style, in the pure tradition of fighting, and he cut a reasonably good if small figure.

  Cigarro leaned forward, and when the testing passed on to the work with the cloth and the make-believe sword, he began chomping nervously on his long cigar. What he saw moved him profoundly, and when the cow was about to be returned to the corrals he called, “Gómez, suppose you got to kill that one? How?”

  Juan did not comprehend the importance of the question, and thought that the peón was trying to humiliate him because of the long-forgotten fight at Ixmiq-45, but the young Indian so loved the bulls that any chance to work with them struck fire in his heart. “Eh!” he shouted to the men working the gates. “Bring that one back.”

  He was too late. The cow kicked savagely at the swinging gate, lunged at something inside the corral and vanished. She was a stalwart beast and had attacked the horses eight times, as if with her still-unformed horns she would destroy them. “I could have shown you how to kill with that one,” Juan cried with some disappointment.

  The rancher interrupted. “Later we plan to throw out a four-year-old bull with one horn broken off. We’ll fight that one to the death—for the Americans.”

  “How does a bull lose a horn?” one of the tourists asked.

  “Fighting with other bulls,” the rancher explained. “This one charged a tree on the range.”

  “Is the animal useless then?” the tourist asked.

  “He’s a glorious bull,” the rancher said sadly. “But he cannot be sold.”

  The testing continued, and at the appearance of Juan’s second cow, Cigarro left his singer and went down into the ring with the young apprentice. “Let me see you work with cape in back,” he suggested, and Gómez unfurled four handsome passes with the cape behind his shoulders and his exposed body facing the horns.

  “You make passes on knees?” Cigarro queried.

  Instantly, Juan dropped onto the sand and showed the small crowd six daring passes, with the little cow almost on top of him each time. “With real bull not so brave?” the peón asked, chomping his cigar.

  “When the real bull comes, you’ll see,” Gómez snapped. Cigarro returned to where the rancher was sitting and asked, “What you plan for fighting one-horned one?”

  “I thought I’d let the matadors figure it out for themselves,” the rancher replied.

  “Maybe better he do killing,” Cigarro suggested, pointing to Juan Gómez, who was playing the cow with great skill. Then Cigarro, who appreciated the politics of bullfighting, added, “Your bulls so fine, Don Wiliulfo, any matador looks good such bull. I like see this boy fight fine bull.”

  “All right,” the rancher agreed. “If the others don’t object.”

  Quietly, in his best political manner, Cigarro moved among the matadors and convinced them that the apprentice Juan Gómez should be allowed to kill the one-homed bull. Although at first each of the professionals protested, as if to defend his honor, each accorded the privilege to the young Indian, for with a one-horned bull you could never entirely predict the reactions.

  So when the four-year-old exploded from the corrals, a lithe, excellent beast that would have graced Plaza Mexico itself were it not for the missing horn, the senior matadors took a few passes with the cape and demonstrated their mastery. One, retiring to the barrier after a fine series, thought, Let the boy have this one. They won’t pic it enough and the killing will be very difficult.

  In the cape work Gómez was able to show little of his skill, for the professionals monopolized the fine animal, but when it came time to lead the powerful bull to the horses, the apprentice seemed to establish a personal harmony with the animal, and by deft twists of the cape led the angry beast directly onto the horses, where a picador from Guadalajara—certainly not one of the best—did a rather bad job of lancing. As the senior matadors had foreseen, this fine animal was going to enter the last part of the fight improperly prepared, and whoever had to kill him would have much work to do.

  “Take out the horse!” the rancher shouted, and the picador ingloriously retreated. The regular matadors now each took two or three passes with the muleta and the real sword, and the small crowd cheered dutifully. The bull, more agitated than hurt by the picador, was proving difficult.

  Then Cigarro shouted, “You, Gómez,” and by common consent the professional matadors withdrew, holding positions by the barrier from which they could dash out to save the boy if it became necessary to do so.

  Slowly, with the matador’s time-honored posturing of placing one foot directly before the other and the back arched in a handsome line, Juan Gómez approached the one-horned bull. It was the right horn that was missing, but the left was a deadly instrument, straight and extremely sharp. All the bull’s defenses had been built around this solitary weapon, and with it he attacked vigorously.

  In one respect, Gómez was lucky that the bull had only one horn and that one his left, because this made it obligatory that the fighter use the greatest pass in bullfighting, the one in which the man stands with the bull to his right, with the sword in his right hand but placed behind his back, and with the red muleta in his left, a dramatically small target when not spread out by the sword. What gives this pass, called simply the natural, its extraordinary weight of emotion, is that the man offers first to the enraged bull not the sword, nor the cloth, but his own unprotected body, which the bull must pass before it can hit the muleta. When the bull charges, if the man has miscalculated by even one inch, the animal’s left horn will pierce unopposed the man’s right stomach. But if the man has judged wisely, and if he knows his animal, the bull, while seeking the cloth, will thunder past the immobilized sword, past the exposed body of the man, and into the cloth held only by the left hand. In such a pass, perfectly performed, the bull’s left horn will graze the man and the bull’s forward hump, wounded by the banderillas, will leave flecks of blood upon the suit of lights.

  So now Juan Gómez slowly approached the one-horned bull, crying softly, “Eh, bull! Eh, my brave friend! Come here and taste the cloth!”

  The bull, confused by the poor quality of his fight against the horse, pawed the earth and tested the air with his powerful left horn. He saw something moving toward him, a thin vertical line and an inviting square of red movement. Then his small black eyes focused perfectly, and he charged.

  With a stupendous rush of power the bull drove for the cloth, his left horn ripping past Gómez’s body, and even as he lunged into the unresisting cloth he sensed that he had been diverted to the wrong target. Where his error lay he obviously did not know, but if he was allowed to charge as often as he wished, sooner or later he would piece together the mystery, and on some final charge he would follow not the lure but the man, and he would drive that lethal left horn completely through whatever he hit.

  Leaning against the stands, Cigarro gasped. To the singer he whispered, “This boy, he learned.”

  Four more times the Indian gave the bull the natural pass, and each time the searching horn seemed to come closer. The rancher put his hands over his face and moaned, “Why does a bull like this have to be killed in secret? Look at him charge!”

  But what the crowd looked at was not the bull’s superb charge but at the brown-skinned apprentice who had now dropped to his knees in the middle of the ring. One of the senior matadors advised, “Not there, son. Over by the barrier.” But Gómez stayed where he was
and from this position passed the bull three times, leaning far backward on the third pass to escape the probing horn.

  The crowd was overcome by his bravery and everyone, even the matadors, shouted, “¡Olé! ¡Olé!” The singer shouted: “To-re-ro!” the cry that needs a thousand voices in unison to make it truly effective. Nervously the others laughed at her, grateful for this release from tension.

  The time had now come for Juan to kill the one-horned bull, and Cigarro leaned forward anxiously to see what would happen, for he felt that if the Indian boy could really go in over the horns.… Then he relaxed. The bull had no right horn, and at the moment of death it is only the right horn that can kill the matador, for it is over this dreadful weapon that the man must reach, his full chest exposed.

  “This is not anything,” Cigarro explained to the singer. “Anybody kill a bull with no right horn.”

  But as he spoke, Gómez profiled before the animal, threw his left knee forward to provoke the charge, then lunged with perfect timing so that his body and the bull’s great hulk formed for a moment a perfect union of man and beast. The slim sword flashed in the air and plunged toward the bull’s exposed shoulder, through which it would have to find its way in order to cause a lethal wound.

  The kill was so perfectly executed that the crowd burst into cheers, but, just as suddenly, fell silent when the sword, which had struck bone, flexed nearly double, snapped back into a straight line, and arched serenely through the air, falling point down into the sand, where it quivered for a singing moment before slowly dropping.

  Gómez, cursing his bad luck at hitting bone on an otherwise superb kill, recovered the sword and made ready to try again. The rancher called reassuringly, “That last was a perfect kill. Good luck.”

  Again Gómez postured before the animal in solitude. Again his body leaped forward to meet the bull’s deadly charge. And again the sword struck bone. This time it zinged musically as it flashed through its high arc, which carried it toward the spot where Cigarro and the singer sat. As Gómez, cursing, stopped to recover his weapon, he saw two faces. Cigarro’s pinched and ugly countenance was nodding gravely and he was throwing the apprentice an imaginary kiss. It was apparent that after many years of searching Cigarro had found himself a real bull-fighter, and as his scarred face continued nodding he was negotiating a contract. The second face belonged to Lucha González, and from the manner in which her dark eyes flashed it was apparent that she too had found her matador. Of course, he wasn’t yet a matador, but she was convinced that he soon would be.