Mexico

by James A. Michener

  It was the Tupinamba part of Ledesma’s life that cast an ugly shadow upon his character, for in his actions in the café he was not a likable man. But he was honest about his behavior. In the afternoons when he planted himself at his favorite table it was customary for people connected with bullfighting to stop by and pay homage to the emperor. A tradition had grown up, now observed with the iron force of custom, that Ledesma was never to pay for anything. He made a decent salary, if you counted his radio and television contracts, but even the poorest aspirant knew that it was he, and not Ledesma, who had to pay for the hot chocolate and the sandwiches.

  This, of course, was petty graft, which the bullfight industry willingly paid in hopes of winning favorable comment from Ledesma. But the additional tribute this powerful man exacted was not petty, and after the minor actors of the day had paid for his drinks and had disappeared, the major ones came on. I once saw old Veneno himself, when his son Victoriano was already at the height of his fame, sidle up to the imperial table, sit down and ask bluntly, “How much do you want this week, León, for a strong article in favor of my son?”

  “How much will he be getting at Plaza México?” Ledesma countered.

  “Four thousand, five hundred dollars,” Veneno replied honestly, for he could be sure that Ledesma would have the accurate figures.

  “Under those circumstances, four hundred and fifty dollars would be about right,” Ledesma replied. The money was paid, and next Monday morning Ledesma’s column carried a poetic review in which Victoriano was compared to Michelangelo.

  Almost no one could hope to make his way in the bullfight world without paying tribute to this influential critic. From leading matadors he took as much as 10 percent of their earnings for especially fine essays. From a beginner, who could scarcely pay for his rented suit, he would content himself with a few dollars, but they had to be paid. If any aspirant dared ignore Ledesma, the latter poured scorn upon him and sometimes hounded him out of Mexico City. Even established matadors felt the fury of his pen if they thoughtlessly failed to pay him the tribute he felt himself entitled to.

  His salary from the newspaper was two thousand dollars a year. In outright graft paid down for favorable notices, he earned upward of twenty-five thousand. He took from the bullfight racket not only his chocolate at the Tupinamba and hard cash, but also most of his meals, his Mercedes-Benz, many of his hand-tailored suits, his shirts, his shoes, and even flowers for his hundred-pound actresses. Almost every month he praised the stoic Seneca, yet in the same week he lived like the Roman sybarite Seneca. In fact, in Mexico City the Spanish critic Ledesma accepted just about the same amount of graft that in imperial Rome the Spanish politician Seneca had taken, which was probably why Ledesma considered Seneca the greatest Spaniard who had ever lived.

  Still, I would never claim that Ledesma was corrupt. Some years ago he told me, as we sat in the Tupinamba, with me paying for his chocolate, “In bullfighting there is no score. The uninitiated cannot possibly tell who won. Of the fifty-five thousand people who will see the fight tomorrow, not fifty will know what they actually saw until they read the paper and satisfy themselves as to what I say they saw. I am the mind of bullfighting, the eyes, and the conscience.”

  “The conscience?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Yes, the conscience,” he repeated. “Don’t allow the fact that you have just seen Veneno pay me nearly five hundred dollars for a good report on his son to obscure your judgment. If his son proves to be very bad tomorrow I won’t say that he was perfect. I’ll just refrain from saying he was stinking.” He sipped his Spanish chocolate, a bitter, dark drink, and continued. “Everyone who reads the paper knows that I get paid large sums for my opinions, but they also know that fundamentally I tell the truth. I allow no man to buy my vision of the truth. What they buy is my exuberance, and if they pay, I deliver.”

  I thought of those remarkable statements as I studied Ledesma now, lounging there among the poetic jaguars, and I was about to pass unfavorable judgment on him when a surprising thing happened. To the Terrace of the Jaguars came two waiters from the House of Tile riding a three-wheeled motorcycle, towing behind them a small cart, from which they produced a folding table, a cloth, napkins, knives, forks and spoons, and a delicious picnic that he had ordered from the Widow Palafox and paid for with his own funds.

  “For my friends from Tulsa. When I visit you there I shall expect much more expensive treatment,” and he ordered “Dos Equis for everyone.”

  “What’s that?” Ed Grim asked and the critic explained: “Best beer in the world. In English Two Exes from the trademark XX.” As we enjoyed our pre-fight luncheon I felt that Ledesma should clarify the curious relationship that existed among the three principals in today’s fight: Victoriano the Spaniard, Gómez the Indian and León Ledesma, who had practically engineered the series of mano a manos that had been conducted throughout Mexico.

  “León,” I asked, “why did you spend so much effort initiating this series? You get no salary from the impresarios, not directly, that is.”

  “I love bullfighting. I cherish seeing two good matadors with different styles duel with each other.”

  “But the real reason,” I goaded.

  “He knows damned well the real reason,” he said to the Oklahomans. “Because I love the way Victoriano conducts himself. And I despise Juan Gómez.”

  “Do you want to tell us why you hate Gómez?”

  “I don’t want to, but the seven of us may never be together again, and if I do tell, it’ll be a story you’ll take home with you as almost the soul of Mexico—certainly the soul of Mexican bullfighting.”

  “Please share it with us,” Mrs. Evans begged. He took a lingering drink of his Dos Equis, wiped his lips and told us: “I think everyone connected with bullfighting hopes that one day he will see a lad of thirteen or fourteen who has all the movements of a natural-born matador. All of us. I’m told that in the United States there are men like me who dream of finding in the ghetto a black boy who has the skills to become a great basketball player. Don’t your men adopt that boy, give him every opportunity, and don’t you even arrange for the boy to get free education at a university?”

  Mr. Haggard laughed and pointed at Ed Grim: “He’s paying the costs of two boys like that at Oklahoma State right now.”

  “Then you’ll understand what I thought when I say that one day in a fish market I saw this perfect boy, Ignacio Molina, fourteen years old, with a small cloth in his hands giving passes to another boy playing the bull. He was a dream—arched back, marvelous profile, head of black hair, hands that wove magic and, most important of all, no fat bottom.”

  “Any parents?” Mrs. Haggard asked, and Ledesma said, “I suppose so, but they never mattered.”

  “And you took him under your control?” she asked.

  “Understand, there aren’t many would-be matadors a critic in my position would care to risk his reputation on. Nacho, that’s what they called him, was the one.”

  “Tell them what happened in Torreón,” I said, mentioning the city in northern Mexico.

  For almost a minute Ledesma sat staring at his thumbs, there against the perfect jaguars. Finally he began to talk about that disastrous Sunday afternoon a las cinco de la tarde: “My boy Nacho was head of the cartel. Boy from Saltillo fighting second, no talent whatever. And a nothing Altomec Indian boy, Juan Gómez, as the junior. All the boys seventeen or eighteen. All in the years when they had to prove themselves or quit.”

  “Let me get it straight,” Ed Grim said. “These are not the matadors we’ll be seeing today and the next two afternoons?”

  “You’ll see Juan Gómez. Neither of the others.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Painful to relate. When we’re all in the waiting area before the opening parade, I try to organize the fight to protect Nacho. I give instructions, who’s to do what, how the expert peóns I’ve hired are to see he doesn’t get into trouble. Then the devil must have wa
rned me that I had a potential enemy in Gómez, because I warned him, ‘You stay away from our bull when Nacho takes him away from the picadors.’ And what do you suppose that insolent Indian does? He comes slowly up to Nacho, studies him carefully like he’s buying a horse, and spits on his shoes. Then he whips around like a hawk, glares at me and says, ‘Fat boy, tell your torero to do his own protecting.’ Then he takes his position in the middle for the opening parade.”

  “You mean,” Haggard asked, “that he challenged you before others, and you a major critic? He must have been insane.”

  “At times he is.”

  “What did you do?”

  “They tell me I grew black in the face. I wanted to strangle that damned Indian, but the music started and the three young would-be matadors marched out into the sunlight. And as I watched the Indian strut into the arena I swore, I’ll handle that Altomec later.”

  “Did you?”

  “He handled me. Most grievously he handled me.”

  “Would you care to tell us?” Mrs. Evans asked, and he nodded, drew himself back against the jaguars and said: “It happened on the last bull of the day. Gómez had the gall to come to where I was and dedicate his bull to me: “Protector of the public, lover of bulls and master of the matadors.” Men around me started laughing, so I told Nacho, “Make him look foolish,” and Nacho did. Moving in on Gómez, he did a series of splendid passes, cape behind his back, but on the last one the bull turned back too quickly, caught him in the middle of the chest and heaved him in the air, catching him again on the way down.”

  “Dead?” Grim asked and Ledesma nodded, and we fell silent.

  Finally Mrs. Haggard asked, “Did you ever find another boy?” and he said, “Mine died at Torreón.”

  I had never before seen León so willing to talk about his disasters, so I probed: “But if you hate Gómez so much—despise him, really—why have you gone out of your way to promote and even sponsor these hand-to-hand fights?”

  “Because, miraculously, we have two fighters who represent the best of their competing styles. And if the world is to be kept in balance, it requires one like Gómez to underline the brilliance of one like Victoriano. So even though Gómez pays me nothing, I’m forced by the respect I have for bullfighting to speak the truth, and the truth is he’s a courageous fighter. One of the bravest.”

  “Did I hear you say that the matadors pay you for good notices?” Haggard asked.

  “That’s how I earn my living.”

  “Does your paper know that?”

  “They encourage it. Allows them to pay me less.”

  Haggard was shocked by this inside view of Mexican criticism, but young Penny Grim was proving rather sharper than I had supposed, and would not be sidetracked, for she asked, “Hating him as you do, are you able to be unprejudiced?”

  He reached out to pat her hand. “I go to each hand-to-hand praying that the next bull will throw that damned Indian in the air eleven times and puncture his heart on each descent.”

  “Do you think that’s the way it will end?” I asked, and he said, “I’m sure of it. Victoriano has style, but Gómez has only raw courage. And in real life, style beats courage every time. So the better Victoriano becomes, the more Gómez will have to take risks. Until one day he brings on his own death.” He ground his fat knuckles into the table as if he were crushing the bowlegged little Altomec.

  After our delicious luncheon we thanked Ledesma for his thoughtfulness in arranging for it. Mrs. Evans spoke for all of us when she said: “Señor Ledesma, you’ve been so kind to us here at the pyramid that we wonder if you’d spare a few more minutes and accompany us to the cathedral.” He started to reply that he wanted to be at the ring at noon to watch the sorting of the bulls, but he stopped and reconsidered. “A visit there would help all of you understand the fights better, but I’m afraid Brother Clay won’t appreciate it because I shall have to point out again that his sainted father had it all wrong.”

  “I can take it,” I said. “I associate with you, León, to learn things I was not clever enough to see for myself. And I’m not teasing.” Indeed I was not. In my efforts to sort out my priorities, specifically what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I kept thinking about Mexico, and to attempt to understand this tangled, magnificent land with its constant revolutions would require all the brainpower I had. And it occurred to me that León and I were curiously similar, each of us an alien—he a Spaniard, I an American—so that we saw the nation from the perspective of an outsider. I needed to know what he knew, and was eager to hear what he had to say about the cathedral, which had been so important to my father.

  “I’ll take you!” he decided abruptly. “Thus I will complete my own preparation, and you, Mrs. Evans, shall again ride with me, if you are not a coward.”

  The sprightly widow jumped into the Mercedes, and with a roar she and the critic started back to town, but after a few hundred yards he spun the car perilously in a circle, roared back and shouted while negotiating a second circle, “We’ll convene in the plaza facing the front of the cathedral.” Then dust flew from beneath his tires, and he disappeared toward town.

  We reached the plaza before he did, for apparently he and Mrs. Evans had stopped somewhere in town to make a purchase. When he did arrive he carried a rather bulky package under his arm, and when he joined us he made up for lost time, for he exploded into almost frenzied praise of the ornate façade that graced the cathedral. “Unique in the world, I mean the beautiful item and the ugly word that names it. Churrigueresque. That’s the name of the architectural style you see, but what it means I do not know, except that it denotes a twisting, dancing, flaming creation, as you can see.”

  Allowing us some minutes to appreciate the glorious façade, he resumed with an observation I will never forget: “But we must not allow ourselves to be seduced by this lovely façade, for it hides an ugly secret, precisely the way our ugly pyramid hid a beautiful secret, the Terrace of the Jaguars. John Clay, not having been permitted to see either of the secrets, fell into understandable error, the brutal Indian pyramid competing with the delicate, lovely cathedral, each a false description.”

  “What do you mean?” Mrs. Evans asked. He said: “Come with me, children,” and led us to the south side of the cathedral where he stopped us before a very old fountain, which sent its water leaping into the sunlight. “For decades scholars have wondered why this statue of the first Bishop Palafox, our city’s builder, had been stuck in this out-of-the-way place rather than in the spacious plaza we just left, for to tell you the truth our Palafoxes are not a reticent breed. At the bullfights, watch their present leader, Don Eduardo, breeder of bulls. If one of his bulls does especially well, and the crowd demands that he take a bow, he’s allowed to enter the ring and garner the applause, but he’ll jump in whether there’s any real applause or not. I’ve heard two handclaps bring him in for bows. So if our first Palafox chose this inconspicuous corner for his fountain, there must have been a reason.”

  After giving us time to think about this, he explained, “In 1953, again well after the death of John Clay—so what I’m about to say does not reflect on his leadership—archaeologists pulled down the stucco facing of the old fortress-church opposite and laid bare one of the rude, rough statements of the earliest Spanish architecture. Over there you see the outdoor pulpit built in 1527 from which Fray Antonio converted the Altomecs.”

  Leaving the fountain, we crossed over to the old chapel, where Ledesma marched about indicating its features. “Look at the brutal form of this sanctuary. Its grand low arches are as profound as the pyramid and not a bit different, for the Spaniards used Indian architects. It has no ornament, no single extraneous line of beauty. The consecrated rock from which the friar first preached stands just as it was stolen from the ruined temple of the Mother Goddess. This crude holy place is the heart of the Catholic Church in the plateau region. Our church did not conquer and convert the Indians because we had the delicate churrigueresque arc
hitecture that John Clay held to be the essence of Catholicism in Mexico. We triumphed because we spoke from the solid rock of the land we had invaded. Our first chapels were low and powerful, like the temples from whose flanks the stones were stolen. We did not introduce completely new gods to our Altomec Indians; we adopted those we found and gave them the names of Spanish saints. Nor did we indulge in any sentimental piety.” He paused. “If we had been Indian peasants in those early days, we’d have gathered here to listen to some Spanish priest shout theology at us in words we could barely understand. Spanish soldiers with their guns at the ready would have lined those battlements up there, and if a strong-minded Indian like Mr. Haggard even so much as opened his mouth in protest—bang, bang! You, Mr. Haggard, were dead.”

  He laughed, then said gravely, “I’ve grown to love this rude chapel that lay so long hidden beneath the stucco of respectability. It reminds me that the conquest of Mexico, my adopted home, was a harsh and often cynical affair. Here I see the nonsense of history ripped away, the soft words and the guileful lies and the distortions of the truth. We Spaniards were a hard people, and if when we had the land properly subdued we did find time to build a marble façade that dances for joy, we were cautious enough first to kill and subjugate.”

  When we finished inspecting the remnants of Toledo’s earliest Spanish structure, Ledesma surprised me by leading us into the interior of the cathedral, because ever since that day in 1911 when General Gurza’s troops had sacked Toledo and ravaged the cathedral few guides bothered to take their American tourists inside. Prior to that vandalism, the church had been famous for its three high altars of pure silver, its Virgins with faces of gold and rubies, and its ornate swaying lanterns sixty feet above the aisles. These too were of pure silver. It was a cathedral known throughout the Catholic world as the ideal example of a rich man’s devotion to God, and it had been brought into being by the fifth Bishop Palafox, who had badgered his wealthy cousin to pay the bill.