Mexico

by James A. Michener

  Stranger: When I listen to them I become so angry that sometimes I hate Spain.

  Gray Eyes: You mustn’t do that, Stranger. The probability is that it’ll be a Spaniard you’ll marry.

  Stranger: How can you say that? When you just told me to stay away from the lieutenant?

  Gray Eyes: Because I think it will be your task to bring the Cactus People and the Spaniards together. And to accomplish that you shall have to marry a Spaniard of some importance, one who is powerful enough to make a difference. But when you do, remember me and make me proud. Carry yourself like a princess. Keep your eyes fixed straight ahead and move regally. Walk like a princess, for you are descended from a great general, a good king, and the fairest young man our city could produce. You were born in wisdom, for it was with her own mind that your grandmother discovered the new God. You are the daughter of a people that was never humiliated.

  7

  THE CRITIC

  On Friday morning I was awakened by something that formed the most distasteful part of any assignment overseas. It was a telegram that read:

  Big boss has assured O. J. Haggard of Tulsa that you will get his party tickets to the festival and explain bullfighting. Haggard very big in oil. Good guy. Helped finance our purchase paper mills. Commiserations but this a must. Drummond.

  I had barely digested this unwelcome message when the Widow Palafox was banging on my door with the news that Haggard and his party had arrived and where could she put them? I didn’t know Haggard but I could be sure he was a jerk. However, I also knew that if he were a minor jerk Drummond would have got him off my neck, so I told the widow, “If these people don’t get rooms, I get fired.”

  “They’re very important?” she asked.

  “Sí, muy importantes. How many in the party?”

  “Five. One couple. Man and daughter. One widow.”

  “Oh my God,” I groaned. “We’ll never be able to find five tickets.”

  I shaved, climbed into my festival clothes—baggy white Mexican pants with a rope for a belt, white shirt, red bandanna—and started apprehensively down to the lobby. When I got there the Widow Palafox pointed to the big table out on the terrace at which sat my Tulsa visitors, five expensively dressed, solid-looking Americans who were now my responsibility. Gritting my teeth, I went out to meet them and was pleasantly surprised by the urbane manner in which O. J. Haggard, a sixty-year-old suntanned oilman, did his best to put me at ease.

  “You’re Clay, I’m sure,” he said with abundant charm. His white teeth gleamed and he pressed my elbow. “Let’s get one thing straight. We’re imposing on you and I know it. But we did want to see the fights and your—” He was going to say “your boss,” but he was delicate: “and your office said they’d ask you to help.”

  “My—” I also paused. “My office doesn’t know how tough it is to get tickets.”

  Mr. Haggard led me to one side and whispered, “Look, Clay, these characters are loaded. Do them good to spend some of it. You get the tickets, no matter the cost, and add a healthy commission for yourself. I mean it when I say I’m embarrassed about barging in this way. Now let me introduce my friends,” he said more loudly. “This is my wife, Helen Haggard. This is my disreputable redneck partner, Ed Grim, and his pretty daughter, Penny. With no wife, Ed has to serve as both parents. And this is the queen of our gang, Mrs. Elsie Evans. When her husband was alive he was the rainmaker for our team. We miss him.”

  I was beginning to like the oilman, so I said frankly, “With enough money we can get tickets, but rooms—”

  “Son!” he cried expansively, although I was a man over fifty, “you’re talking to a gang of dirty-neck Oklahoma oil people. You think characters like us worry about beds? We’re used to sleeping on rigging platforms. And our wives are just as tough. Half of them never wore shoes till they were sixteen. They’ll sleep where I tell ’em to sleep. But, seriously, could you square us away on this bullfight business?”

  “I can explain some of it,” I said gingerly.

  “The big boss told me you used to live in Mexico,” Haggard probed.

  “Until I went to Lawrenceville.”

  “Hey, gang!” Haggard said. “Clay here says he can explain bullfighting.”

  “Hooray for the bull!” redneck Grim shouted, whereupon his daughter said rather bluntly: “Daddy, don’t make a fool of yourself.”

  The authority with which she said this and the way in which her father accepted her rebuke made me pay closer attention to this young heiress from Tulsa. First of all, she had a wealth of red hair, not the fire-engine red of which my roommate at college once said: “I wouldn’t allow hair like that to be near an open can of gasoline.” Hers was more like what my wife used to call burnt orange, real red but with a touch of amber. She wore it with a line of bangs straight across her forehead, the rest pulled back, with a darker red ribbon disciplining a ponytail in back. She was about five feet six, slim, attractively formed and dressed, and with a puckish smile that seemed to proclaim: “I don’t take myself too seriously.”

  In my reporting I had always had difficulty describing females. If they were under sixteen they were girls, if older than eighteen, young women. In my four days with Penny Grim I found that she followed the same categories. When talking of frivolous subjects that might interest high school kids she referred to herself and her friends as girls, but if the topic contained even a shred of mature substance, she became in her own words a young woman. She had come to participate in a gaudy Mexican festival, hoping no doubt to encounter experiences that would justify the long trip south. I wished the redhead well, but I did not want to teach either her or her elders the mysteries of bullfighting.

  From dismal experience I had learned what every other American stationed in Mexico learns: that yokels from the home office don’t really want to know anything serious about bullfighting and that a man can waste a lot of time and money proving it. But at that moment I saw coming at us from across the plaza a man who once seen could never be forgotten, the one in all Mexico who could best explain the aesthetic, historical and moral significance of the bullfight.

  “Here comes our expert!” I cried with enthusiasm, for the newcomer could relieve me of the onerous task of trying to explain and defend what we would be seeing the next three afternoons. He was a huge man, taller than most Mexicans and much more rotund. Indeed, his enormous girth caused him to waddle from side to side like a duck, but it was his costume that riveted attention. Even on this relatively warm day he wore a large, flowing black cape that came down to his ankles. On his head was an expensive caballero’s broad-rimmed hat, also black. When he was a few feet from the steps leading to the terrace he spotted me and cried: “Señor Clay! You’ve come down from New York to lie about us again. Greetings, and watch your step.”

  With that he bounded up the three steps with surprising agility, took me in his bearlike arms and embraced me. Then he saw the Widow Palafox, and with another leap grabbed her in his arms, crying in his penetrating voice: “Still poisoning the public, you Borgia?” Then, facing us all, he said with no hint of jollity: “It would not be Ixmiq if one could not sit on this terrace and catch a breath of old Mexico. Widow Palafox, allow them to change nothing.”

  Breaking in to make introductions, I said to my table: “We’re unbelievably lucky. This is León Ledesma, born in Spain, thrown out by the Fascists, now a citizen of Mexico and our foremost bullfight critic. He has arrived just in time to answer your questions.” Reaching for a chair, I invited him to sit at our table, and he took his place between Mrs. Evans and Penny Grim, saying as he did so, “I may be a big hulk, but I’m not stupid,” and to the delight of the two women, he kissed their wrists.

  “I’ve known Señor Ledesma, during my various writing stints in Mexico, for many years. He’s younger than me, but he’s taught me much of what I know about bullfighting. Maestro, let us have your classic spiel about the eighteen bulls in a typical three-day festival.”

  “That’
s as good an introduction as anyone could make to our national art form. Yes, bullfighting is not a sport. It’s an art, ancient, unique and difficult to comprehend. During the next three days you’ll have the rare opportunity, for such festivals don’t happen too often, of seeing eighteen bulls in action.”

  He smiled at the Oklahomans and ticked off on his fat fingers: “You’ll have Friday, Saturday, Sunday, three fights, six bulls each day, eighteen in all. Forget the matadors and the picadors and the peóns.”

  “But I came to see the matadors,” Penny said, twisting her head to look at him. “Now you tell me to forget them.”

  “I guess that’s the real reason we came,” her father said. “She badgered me. Said she’d seen all the American football players she needed. She was a cheerleader in high school, you know, one of the best baton twirlers in the state. Finished second in the big competition. Told me that now she wanted to see the real thing, a matador.”

  “Properly so,” Ledesma said. “But for now the important thing is the bull. Focus on him and you’ll penetrate the secret of the fight.”

  “Where did you learn such excellent English?” Mr. Haggard asked, and Ledesma said offhandedly: “Also French, German and Italian. When you’re a fugitive from your homeland, you know you must learn the languages of your future countries.”

  “Are these special bulls?” Mrs. Haggard asked.

  “Yes,” Ledesma snapped, growing somewhat impatient at these interruptions of a set speech he had been using for years. “Now the way to attend a bullfight is this. Admit before you go that you’re not going to enjoy a single thing you see. Of your eighteen bulls, three are bound to be complete catastrophes. They will be mean, uncontrollable and cowardly. You have no idea how horrible their deaths will be. The matador will be scared green and he will stand way over here like this.…” Nimbly, Ledesma leaped to his feet and grabbed a butter knife. Burlesquing a matador with a bad bull, he stabbed futilely at the imaginary animal. “Once, twice, nine times, ten times. You count. The poor matador will try to kill that damned animal until the beast looks like a pincushion. You, madam, will get very sick and you will want to vomit. You, madam, will vomit. It will be horrible, disgraceful, without a single bit of art or beauty.”

  “Does this always happen?” Haggard asked.

  “Always. Inevitably, some bulls are bad,” Ledesma replied with finality. “The only way to avoid such catastrophes is to stay home.”

  He returned to his seat. “So three of the eighteen will be total catastrophes, and anything bad you want to say about bullfighting will be justified. It will be worse than disgraceful. It will be revolting. The next six bulls won’t be much better. They’ll refuse to fight. They’ll hook to one side or the other. They won’t run true and they won’t show much action of any kind. The matadors will sweat and curse and try all manner of tricks. But to no avail. These six fights will be so dull that you, sir, will say, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” And if I happen to overhear, I may join you, because you’ve never seen anything more dull than these six bad fights will be. If you were allowed to carry a gun I would not blame you if you tried to shoot the matador. He will deserve it.”

  He laughed and ordered a bottle of beer. “We’ve now seen half the bulls and not one has been worth watching. The next six will be what they call regular, more or less acceptable. (In Spanish, regulahr.) That is, they’ll be cowardly and inept, but from time to time they will charge with terrifying force, so each bull will cause one or two incidents that may please you. But since each will also cause a hundred incidents that are downright boring, I can’t promise you much excitement. The horses won’t be in the right places, the banderillas won’t go in properly. And on each of these so-called regular bulls the matadors will mess up the first two or three attempts to kill. Frankly, you’re going to find these fights rather tedious and I wouldn’t blame you if you all leave after the second. I’m warning you that bullfighting can be very miserable indeed.

  “That leaves three bulls—on the average one for each afternoon, but they could all appear on one program, say this afternoon. Now they won’t be great bulls, but they might be good. And here’s the tragedy. By the time these reasonably good bulls appear, the matadors will have been so unnerved by the bad ones that in all probability they’ll accomplish nothing. Properly handled, these good bulls would charge, but the matadors will not be able to make them do it. The bulls will also be capable of dying bravely, but the men will no longer be brave. We have an old saying in this business that is lamentably true: ‘When there are bulls there are no men, and when there are men there are no bulls.’ And that’s the way it will be.” He threw his hands on the table palms down.

  “You don’t paint a very exciting prospect,” Haggard said with some interest.

  “In the eighteen bulls,” Ledesma warned, “there will occur perhaps three details that could honestly be called thrilling. But they’ll happen so fast, and so unexpectedly, that you won’t really understand what it was you saw. There will be a blur, a moment of exquisite suspense, and then the blur again. You’ll probably miss it.”

  O. J. Haggard was apparently not satisfied with this answer. “If that’s true, Señor Ledesma, why do people bother to go?”

  Ledesma thought for a moment, put his fat hands together, and stared directly at the Oklahoman, “Because, Señor Visitor, out of two hundred bulls there will ultimately come one that shows extraordinary bravery. And on that day the old parable will not apply, for there will be a bull and there will also be a man. And for twelve minutes out there on the sand you will see something that occurs nowhere else on this earth, the perfect duel between life and death. You will see sunlight sculptured by a flaming cape. You will see stark power ripping at a defended horse. You will see men on their toes daintily throwing their lives upon the horns, and at the end you will watch a man with a frail piece of cloth play a bull to death. People will scream with insanity from the tension. Horses far from the scene will neigh, and when it is all over you will sit limp as death yourself.”

  The fat critic relaxed his hands and sat silent. No one spoke, so he added quietly, “Of course, this happens only once in every two hundred bulls, or three hundred, or perhaps a thousand. When it does, all Mexico remembers the name of that bull and it’s inscribed on plaques and written down in books. We won’t see such a bull in Toledo. Chances are all against it. But if you ever do see such a bull, my dear visitors, you will realize that this is the most profound experience a man can have, except for his first success with love.” He said laughingly, “That’s what keeps us coming back to the bullrings. We know that the six bulls for today will be bad, but we hope against hope that tomorrow one will be good. Now I must wash.”

  “Señor Ledesma!” Mrs. Evans interrupted. “We’re about to visit the pyramid. Won’t you please join us.”

  “I really can’t,” the critic apologized. “Long trip.”

  “We’ll wait till you wash up,” Mrs. Evans insisted, placing her hand on the fat man’s arm. “You speak so eloquently.”

  I was glad she said this, for I was never with Ledesma when I didn’t learn something. He was a clown but he was also an Aristotle. The woman’s obvious goodwill charmed him and he said: “All right! Let me wash my face, and you, madam, shall ride to the pyramids with me in that red Mercedes over there. These peasants can ride in their Cadillacs.” In a few minutes he was back with us, and we started for the ancient center of the Altomecs.

  When we reassembled before the pyramid, Ledesma said, “I have never had any desire to be a guide, for you spend your life showing people things they don’t want to see, but whether a man wants to or not, he ought to see this pyramid.”

  “Did they hold human sacrifices here?” Grim asked, and Ledesma explained how every fifty-two years, when the Cactus People feared the world might be coming to end, they conducted a cruel number of human sacrifices to lure the sun back.

  “What do you mean by ‘cruel number’?” Grim asked, and Le
desma snapped; “In the thousands. But even in normal years they killed regularly, to keep their people frightened of their power.”

  “Could we climb up and see where it happened?” Mrs. Evans asked, and he replied, “Years ago I grew too fat to climb this pile of rocks, but if any of you want to imagine that you’re human sacrifices trying to lure the sun back on the fifty-second year, go ahead. I’ll wait here and be the priest that catches your bodies as the boys topside roll them down.”

  Mrs. Evans said, “I’m going. Anyone else?” Four of us finally climbed to the top and the first thing I did was point eastward to the gaunt smokestacks and say, “That’s the Mineral, where I grew up.”

  We surveyed the countryside and Mr. Haggard asked, “Is that shimmering white thing over there the cathedral?” I looked toward Toledo and saw the resplendent church.

  “That’s it.”

  “Where’s the bullring?”

  “Behind the cathedral,” I explained. “Can’t seem to see it from here.”

  “But it’s in that area?” Haggard asked. “I always orient myself to the topography,” he explained. “These old Indians certainly picked themselves a site, didn’t they?” He turned around several times, admiring the valley that the pyramid commanded, but constantly his eyes were drawn back to that distant white façade. “Come to think of it,” he added, “those Catholics didn’t do so bad, either, did they?”