Mexico

by James A. Michener

  When the vandals reached the robing area where the priests stored their gold-ornamented festive robes, three young priests who had not fled Toledo after previous raids tried to protect these treasures. Enraged, the soldiers knocked the young men down and then, dragging them through the gaping front entrance, they shouted to those on guard in the plaza: “What shall we do with these?” and General Gurza gave the answer: “Shoot them!” so within a few minutes of their capture they were lined up against one of the walls of the church, and shot by a firing squad.

  Then the rioting began in various parts of the city. Old buildings were set on fire. Others were ravaged. Stores were smashed. Women were raped in the street; at the height of the fury a man who had once worked for old Don Alipio, the bull breeder, shouted: “Let’s get those damned bulls!” and he led a large gang of men waiting in the second train out to the Palafox ranch, where they methodically slaughtered by gunfire those proud black bulls that Don Alipio had imported from Spain. When they were finished, the leader of the gang cried: “Let the people eat the good meat!” and frightened Indians who had been watching were told they could butcher the carcasses if they wished, and the herd vanished under the knife.

  When the grisly day ended, Toledo had been taught the grim lesson that it must never waver in its support of General Gurza. Its mission accomplished, the train backed away, turned at the edge of town and headed north.

  The departure of General Gurza left Toledo in a stupor. Dazed people wandered about trying to assess the damage, and at the Mineral we heard reports of all the terrible things that had happened. My parents were gloomy: “This may be the end of our world. Can Toledo survive such a disaster?” and I could see that Mother felt that there was no future here, but Father reminded her that our family still had its home at the mine and its good health. There were also two surprising survivors of the destruction; against all odds they had kept alive by keeping themselves hidden.

  The first was Father López, the scrawny Indian priest at the cathedral. When the fury was at its height, he managed to hide in the small room allotted to Indian priests who served the peóns. They belonged to the cathedral, but were never a true part of it, as their fellow priests refused to acknowledge them. For two days he was afraid to let anyone know he was alive, afraid that Gurza’s men might be waiting for him. Unaware that he was the only member of the cathedral priesthood alive, he finally slipped out of his hiding place and tried to mix in unobserved with the people in the plaza. But as soon as he was recognized his appearance was treated as a kind of miracle: “We were sure you were dead. How did you escape?” He deemed it best not to share his secret, and after a while they left him alone, but there was no place for him to go. He knew that the surviving women at the convent had fled, as they were doing over much of Mexico, and he supposed that most of the priests in the Toledo area had been slain in the savage attacks that had been pursued with the hope of driving all Catholic clergy out of Mexico.

  Afraid to remain in Toledo lest Gurza and his madmen return, he walked slowly north until he came to the Mineral. I was first to see him and recognized him by his furtive manner: “Dad! It’s Father López!” and when my parents joined me they saw it was indeed the priest, but since they had never had anything to do with him they felt no personal responsibility. But Grandmother Caridad said: “He’s one of the good ones,” and prevailed upon my parents to take him in. Thus the Clay family became the protectors of the last Catholic priest in the region, and, even though they knew the risk they were taking, they gave him a hiding place among the mine buildings and instructed the workmen to tell no one of his presence.

  The other survivor of the attack on Toledo involved a more complicated rescue mission. One night Don Eduardo Palafox, accompanied by a foreman from his bull ranch southwest of town, sneaked up past the ruined convent and around the pyramid and, like Father López, came to our door. They had a remarkable story to tell: “They killed all our bulls, wiped out the bloodline. But one male calf has survived. He was with his mother and although Gurza’s men killed her, they missed the calf. If we can save him, we can restore the line, if peace ever comes.”

  “It will,” Father said and forthwith took steps to save the valuable animal. That was the year he had introduced automobiles at the Mineral. So it was in a truck that Don Eduardo, his foreman, Father and I rode out to the Guadalajara Road and started for the ranch, but when we reached the cutoff to the left, the one that would have taken us to the main gate, the foreman said: “No, straight ahead six kilometers,” and at the designated point he directed Father to turn sharp left over untended ground. After a bumpy ride we reached a spot where two foremen with shaded lanterns were holding the ropes that kept a spirited young calf under control. Deftly they worked the animal into the truck and with this precious cargo the five of us drove back into town.

  During the trip to and from the ranch, Father had conversed with Don Eduardo in a low voice that I had trouble hearing. As we reached the western entrance to Toledo they did a daring thing, one so improbable that we laughed about it years later. They drove out to the Mineral, followed Father’s directions to a cave hidden behind a pile of slag, and eased the little bull into a neat sanctuary, where fodder was awaiting him. With a snort and a chop of horns that had not yet fully sprouted he ran about his new home. “His name,” said the foreman, “is Soldado, the little soldier. Protect him. He’s precious.”

  So at age nine I became custodian of one of Spain’s best fighting bulls—a young fellow, true, and with only budding horns—and a more exciting pet no boy ever had. He was stubborn and was becoming so powerful that sometimes I was unable to make him go where he didn’t want to, no matter how I pushed or pulled. But he obviously liked me and was pleased whenever I rejoined him after an absence. I think he understood that he had to hide in our cave, and although I grew tired of cleaning up after him, I came to think of him as my bull and watched with the satisfaction of a father as he grew more powerful and bull-like.

  Occasionally, being careful not to arouse suspicion, the ranch foreman sneaked in to see how Soldado was doing, and when he saw the magnificent promise of the young bull’s physique, especially his big chest and slim hindquarters, he told Father: “Time we got him out of here. We think we have a place to hide him in a far corner of the ranch. We’ll have a herd reassembled one of these days,” and it was that conversation which spurred me to an action that I look back upon with amazement. Aware that I had under my care a fighting bull of pure Spanish caste—for the men reminded me of that repeatedly—I felt a nagging desire to see if he would know how to fight the way the big Palafox bulls had done during the spring festivals in the Toledo bullring.

  In time that inquisitiveness became a driving compulsion, so I stole one of Mother’s checkered red tablecloths, took it out to the cave, which provided enough light for my experiment, and tried to do the things I’d seen the great matadors do. I held the cloth with two hands, stamped my left foot, and waited for the bull to charge. He did, and with the flat part of his forehead he knocked me flat against the wall so that I fell in a heap. I had seen matadors take knocks like that and get up again, so once more I had my cloth out, held firmly with both hands, and stalked toward the bull. He charged and tossed me right back against the wall. This time the two smacks hurt, both his little horns in my stomach and the stone wall as I smashed into it. But a matador is a man who fights bulls, no matter how they knock him about, so once more I approached my bull, and this time I kept my left hand far out, my right close to my leg, and the bull dove straight for the extended cloth, passing me by a matter of inches.

  With no audience to applaud what I knew was a decent pass, I shouted “¡Olé!” to cheer myself, but this attracted the bull’s attention before I was ready, and at me he came. Since the tablecloth was now wrapped around me, the bull hit my legs with full force and not only knocked me flat but stomped on me and butted me again with his horns, which if they had been full grown would have killed me for certain. A
s it was, they were big enough to leave a small scar across my chest.

  When my father, Don Eduardo and the foreman came to take the bull back to the ranch and saw that I had been giving passes to Soldado, they were furious. “Don’t you know that ruins a fighting bull?” the foreman shouted as he gave me a sharp blow to the head. “You’ve done a terrible thing,” and again he clobbered me.

  “¡Basta!” my father cried, pulling me away from further blows, and I have rarely heard that wonderful Spanish word for “Enough!” when I appreciated it more, for the rancher had a heavy hand.

  As they herded Soldado back into the truck and allowed me to ride with them out to the ranch the foreman explained that a Spanish fighting bull had unusual intelligence: “Once he fights a man with a cape and makes three or four passes hitting nothing but cloth, he learns that he will not find his enemy that way. And pretty soon he’s smart enough to leave the cape alone and drive his horn not at it but for the bundle, the man.” The foreman astounded me by what he said next: “So you may have ruined the bull. You’ve taught him to go for the bundle, and he’ll never forget. Three years from now when he goes into the ring, one more dead matador,” and I felt sick at having in a sense destroyed my friend.

  But Father saved me with a thoughtful observation: “Pedro, think a minute. Soldado will be your seed bull. A jewel of great value. He’ll never get into the arena,” and when Pedro agreed: “That bull could be sensational as our breeder,” I felt better.

  As before, we drove past the road leading to the main gate to the ranch until we came to where men waited on horseback, and when we pushed Soldado out of the truck, he rushed about, smelled the horses, recognized them as fellow animals and fell in with them as if he were a docile lamb. As he trotted off to the safety of a far field, his black against the horses’ roan, I cried: “Soldado!” but he did not look back at his friend.

  Later, as the aficionados of Mexico know, Soldado became the most famous seed bull in their taurine history, sire of bulls that brought glory to the Palafox name. In those years I used to astound men by casually saying: “When I fought Soldado, he knocked me down three times,” and they would look at me. I would add: “But I gave him one magnificent veronica,” and they would treat me with respect.

  While I was at the Mineral protecting my bull from General Gurza, our family’s other secret guest, Father López, was endangering both himself and us by resuming his priestly duties even though the countryside was full of people who approved of the government’s persecution of priests in what it called “a drive to rid Mexico of the tyranny of Catholicism.” On this point, which seemed to tear the nation apart, our family was split three ways. Mother, as a conservative Palafox, was strongly pro-Catholic. Father, as a Virginia Baptist, was pretty firmly against the Catholic Church. And I, who knew little of religion, approved of men like Father López who did good work among his people and disapproved of other priests who ranted at me when I accompanied my mother to Mass. To put it simply, I didn’t know what I thought.

  What Father López did that endangered us was to move about the rural areas north of the Mineral, quietly assemble small groups of the faithful, and conduct mass in some barn or kitchen. He wore no clerical garb, of course, and was so scrawny that he sometimes had difficulty convincing the peóns that he really was a priest, and once when I accompanied him I saw tears come into his eyes as he tried to assure the half-dozen people in a small kitchen that he was qualified to bring them the Mass: “Tell them, Norman, tell them who I am,” and in my fluent Spanish, which reassured them, I told of his miraculous escape from the murders at the cathedral. Then they clustered about him and he prayed.

  Fortunately, he and I were absent on another missionary trip when General Gurza’s men made a visit to the Palafox silver mine, and when Father López and I approached the place, he suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me back. From a vantage point on a hillside we watched what happened.

  Eleven soldiers, led by a young officer, stormed into the Mineral and began searching for Father and Mother. Finally locating them, they dragged them out, lined them up against the wall and were about to shoot them as agents of the Palafoxes when Grandmother Caridad came running out screaming “No! No!” One of the firing squad was a local man who had worked with her in the mine and he shouted: “She is one of us!” so the execution was stayed.

  Trembling as I hid behind low shrubs on the hill, I watched as Gurza’s men tied my parents and my grandmother to a tree to prevent them from interfering with the mission they had been sent to carry out. They took from the backs of three heavily laden mules large bundles of something, and although I couldn’t guess what they were, Father López whispered “Dynamite!” and when the bundles were opened I saw the sticks, which were taken to the mouth of the shaft and thrown in. Then a long rope was produced and individual sticks were tied to it, after which it was lowered in the shaft so that the dynamite was evenly distributed down the sides. When all was secure, Gurza’s men lit a fuse that ran down beside the rope and at the same time threw four sticks of sputtering dynamite down the shaft. For a moment nothing happened, then came a titanic explosion as the mine blew itself apart.

  The blast started fires in the various caverns and now Gurza’s men threw into the smoking shaft the pieces of valuable machinery that either Grandfather and his Confederate engineers had constructed or Father had bought from companies in England. The entire apparatus of the Mineral crashed down to the raging fires below. Finally the men cut the wire that operated the cage Father had built, and it went smashing itself to pieces as it careened down the rocky shaft, after which the men hacked the superstructure from which the cage was suspended, and it too went echoing down the hole that would never be mined again.

  Their work done, the soldiers released their three prisoners, and from what I saw I could deduce they told my parents they were lucky that old Caridad had been in the house, for as they departed, one of the men kissed her.

  When Father López and I crept back to the Mineral, we joined the family members in surveying the ruins, and I think all of us realized that a way of life had ended—at the mine, in the plaza, and in Toledo generally. Father López said: “Whatever priests come back to reopen the cathedral, they’ll no longer be able to tell the people what to do and how to think.” When Father and I peered down the shaft he told me: “It can never be revived. Look at the steps,” and when I said: “But there’s still silver down there,” he corrected me: “The vein had already begun to peter out. With the cage and the donkey engine gone, we’ll never go down there again.” And I knew that our famed Veta Madre (the Mother Lode) had expired.

  Mother, who had seen so many of her family murdered by Gurza’s men, knew that the remaining Palafoxes would be forced to live in vastly different ways, and as a strong woman she was prepared to make the effort. And even I would have to accept changed conditions. Now that the mine no longer functioned, I might have to leave the Mineral. I knew that the school I attended had been destroyed by the rebels, and that the parents of many of my schoolmates had been murdered and their big homes burned, so I could not guess what new arrangements would be made for me. Each of us had a personal reason for despair, but we agreed on one thing: General Gurza was a monster who had ravaged Toledo as if he were some invading barbarian from Central Asia come to reduce the rest of the world to ashes. Father López thought that it was God’s responsibility to strike down the murdering infidel. Father growled: “He should be hanged.” Mother wept over the murder of her relatives and repeated grimly: “An avenger will come.” I spent the hours in bed before falling asleep dreaming of coming upon Gurza in some village, he bloated with pride over his latest outrage, I with two revolvers moving in on him, step by step, remorselessly, and growling in a voice lower than I then possessed: “This is for slaughtering our bulls, you vile animal!” and I had the satisfaction of hearing him beg for mercy as I pulled my forefingers against the triggers.

  Gurza must have heard my threat, for he responde
d by horribly sacking three villages and roaring off toward Sinaloa in his death-dealing train. His continued success, even against the Americans sent against him, was a frustration to the northerners and, dishearteningly, a cause of joy and pride among our own peóns. Father would cry: “Someone must strike him down!” and the family would cheer the idea. But not quite all of us. I noticed that whenever our family and Father López cursed Gurza for his brutality, Grandmother Caridad kept silent, but one day when reports reached us of three more instances of Gurza’s besting General Pershing and his Americans, she cried jubilantly: “He’s doing the job for all of us!” When we looked at her with mouths agape, she realized that she could continue her deception no longer. We were assembled on a patio with only three enclosing walls, the fourth side left open so that Father or whoever was in charge of the mine could watch its operation, and I shall never forget the astonishment we felt when she pointed to the handsome stone fringes Grandfather had built around the top of the shaft and said: “Gurza did a grand thing for Mexico when he destroyed that place of hell.”