Mexico

by James A. Michener

  Late that year he arrived in a cage aboard ship at Veracruz and was hauled by railroad to the city of Toledo, from which he was taken, still in his cage, by oxen to the Palafox ranch. Set loose among the Mexican cows, this outstanding bull quickly produced those brilliant animals, bulls and cows alike, that were to add distinguished chapters to the history of Mexican bullfighting. Carnicero, Sanluque, Terremoto, Rayito—they were the Palafox bulls that took innumerable thrusts of the lance and killed many horses, and each was famed as the son of Marinero.

  “And this is where I come in,” I told Mrs. Evans, “and not as a minor character, I make bold to say. In 1918, when I was nine years old, yet another sacking of Toledo occurred and this time General Gurza’s rowdies fusilladed the Palafox herd for beef and during the firing Marinero was killed. Only one of his sons escaped, the calf Soldado who grew up with me in a cave at my father’s mine.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “Yes, one of the most famous bulls in Mexican history and I sort of roomed together in a cave. My parents hid him there till Gurza’s men retreated north on the train.”

  “Those must have been dreadful days.”

  “They were wonderful days. Me and the bull, hiding against the world.”

  “I meant the Revolution, when Mexico was in such terrible shape. I read about it, and some Oklahoma men marched with General Pershing. But tell me more about you and your buddy.”

  “It’s understandable that I would always feel a sense of identification with this great, dark beast who grew to power at my home, and through him I came to understand the significance of the wild bull who goes forth to fight men on Sunday afternoons. It was Soldado with whom I played while he was still a calf, and later on it was he, growing always bigger, who gave me such a pummeling. I used to take consolation, at bullfights either in Mexico or Spain, in thinking, I’m the only man in the world who can say ‘I fought the great daddy of them all.’ Of course, I wouldn’t have to tell them when I fought him or where.

  “Yes,” I told Mrs. Evans, “that animal who inhabited my cave survived the Revolution to become the celebrated father of the Palafox line. His first son was born in 1920, and after that he sired an impressive line of bulls and cows, whose sons in turn terrorized the bullrings of Mexico. Three of his offspring killed toreros, and many won a place in the chronicles by bravery beyond the average. By 1923 the first grandson of Soldado was born, and ten years later the Palafox ranch was able to provide as many descendants of the original Marinero and his son Soldado as the bullrings of Mexico required.”

  “When I look at those bulls out there, am I seeing the offspring of your Soldado?”

  “Maybe technically, but hereditary strains in animals are like those in human beings. They do run thin. At Palafox, inbreeding was producing big animals with little hearts, and crowds gasped with anticipation when some powerful Palafox bull burst into the ring, but then threw cushions when he proved a coward. The disappointment was greater with Palafox bulls because more was expected of them. So after a year or two of debacles the Palafoxes realized that the Marinero-Soldado strain had run itself out. A new seed bull from Spain was required.

  “In the spring of 1933 Don Eduardo’s elder brother, Don Fausto, was sent to Seville to purchase another bull from the marquis of Guadalquivir, and since I was his nephew—”

  “You’re a Palafox?”

  “Of course. I was born a Mexican citizen—in this city.”

  “What are you now?”

  “American. Earned it for military duty I did in World War II. As I was explaining, my uncle Fausto took me to Spain with him, and I helped in the selection of an unusually fine seed bull who rejuvenated the line. And now it gets interesting, because when the imported bull lunged against its restraining cage while being unloaded at the Palafox ranch, it crushed Anselmo Leal so that later he died. So this afternoon, Victoriano will be fighting three bulls of the line that killed his father. You will find that Victoriano will do his best work today. Whenever he fights a Palafox bull, he seems obligated to revenge his father.”

  “What we have to be careful about,” Don Eduardo interrupted, “is that the wild man, Veneno, doesn’t kill our bulls before the matador gets to them.”

  I explained to Mrs. Evans that Veneno had lost both his father and his brother to Palafox bulls and that she would see picador’s work this afternoon that she might never see again. She asked Don Eduardo, “Do you mean that the man on horseback can kill a bull?”

  “A bull? He’d kill them all if we didn’t watch him.”

  “And now the ladies come into the picture,” I said to hold her interest before the sorting began. “Tell her about la Reina, Don Eduardo.”

  After taking a bite of a sandwich Mrs. Evans had given him from her basket, he said: “In 1942 our bulls were again showing signs of decadence, and normally I’d have gone to Spain for another seed bull, but the war was now on and it was impossible to get a bull across the Atlantic. So we purchased thirty cows from the Piedras Negras ranch, a Mexican ranch, and these scrawny, ferocious Mexican cows brought new life to the Palafox breed.”

  “The cows were important,” I explained, “because it’s from them the bulls get their courage.”

  “But you’ve been talking about all these bulls—Marinero, Soldado, the one you selected at the Guadalquivir ranch. I thought it was the bulls that were important.”

  “They are,” Don Eduardo interrupted. “For build and horn structure and stamina—yes, we look to the bulls for that. But Norman just told you about the period around 1933 when we produced enormous bulls. Some of the best-looking ever seen in Mexico. And they weren’t worth a damn. Because what a fighting bull needs more than anything else is courage. And that he gets only from his mother.”

  Mrs. Evans pointed at the bull with the unshaved horns and asked incredulously: “You mean to say that his sons—”

  “He’ll never have any sons,” Don Eduardo interposed. “He’s a fighting bull.”

  “Hasn’t he ever …” Mrs. Evans began hesitantly.

  “Of course not. That bull’s never seen a cow or been near a man on foot or done anything but spar with other bulls on the range.” Don Eduardo said these words in a rather loud voice, and as he did so his foreman Cándido quietly looked about to see if anyone had overheard. Satisfying himself that his employer’s words had done no harm, the solemn foreman looked reproachfully at Don Eduardo, who caught the message and looked quickly about to see if there had been any Mexican eavesdroppers. In a much lower voice he said: “Nothing has been allowed to detract the attention of that bull from his job.”

  “But his courage comes from his mother?” Mrs. Evans persisted.

  “Always,” Don Eduardo assured her, and it seemed to me that with this information Mrs. Evans straightened her shoulders slightly, as if she had long suspected that with humans, too, it was the mothers who determined the nature of their sons’ courage.

  “In January of 1947,” Don Eduardo said enthusiastically, “one of the great cows of Palafox history was born, a mean, scrawny, knock-kneed, sharp-homed female named la Reina, the Queen. Her ancestry included Marinero, the great original bull of Guadalquivir; and Soldado, who grew up in Clay’s cave; but from her Mexican mother she reached back to those fierce, ugly animals from the days of Hernán Cortés. Reina was a notable cow, one of the bravest ever to breed in Mexico.”

  It was now approaching twelve, when the actual sorting would begin, so I told hastily of how the Palafoxes discovered they had a great cow on their ranch. When this scrawny little lady was two years old, Don Eduardo gave a sumptuous party at the ranch. It was the year 1949 and peace had returned to the world and money was easy. The actor John Wayne was present, as were the American and British ambassadors, and the festivities covered three days, on the last of which the guests assembled at the ranch’s bullring for a testing of the year’s cows. In charge was white-haired Veneno, who appeared on horseback with an oaken lance that contained a short steel
barb. He was attended by his son Victoriano and by the senior matador Armillita, while in a silent box under the improvised stand sat Don Eduardo and his foreman Cándido taking brief but vital notes.

  At a sign from Don Eduardo the rough gate leading to the corral was opened and a spindly-legged little heifer of two called Flora was let into the ring, across which she could spy a man on horseback. There was an anxious moment of silence, when everyone asked, “Will she be brave?” for this first moment was the most decisive. If the cow hesitated too long before charging, or if when she did charge she moved haltingly, it was obligatory to mark her down as cowardly and to prevent her from being bred to the ranch’s best sires. Her sons, inevitably, would be cowardly and of no use in the ring.

  As this first cow came into the sunlight, she saw the mysterious figure in the distance and charged like a thunderbolt. No one cheered but all sighed. The fiery little animal struck at the horse and felt Veneno’s barb rip at her shoulder. Stunned, she drew back.

  There had been no cheering for her initial bravery because her second test was now at hand, and this must be conducted in silence, without the frenzied encouragement that voices might provide. The little cow had been hurt and blood trickled from her shoulder. She pawed the earth with her left foot and Don Eduardo thought: “Looks bad. Looks like she’s a dust-thrower.” He looked apprehensively at Cándido, who stared straight ahead, praying that the cow would prove brave.

  Tentatively the young cow moved toward the horse, then stopped as she felt the twinge of pain in her shoulder. Then, before the audience was ready, she exploded at the horse and drove with breathless fury at the animal and at the lance, which again jabbed into her shoulders. Some of the Hollywood people cheered and were promptly admonished by the Mexicans, who saw what the Americans had not: as soon as the second prod of steel struck home the little cow leaped about and then moved away. She wanted no more of the contest and nothing that Veneno could do would lure her back. She was not a brave cow and her sons would never bring glory to themselves and the ranch. In fact, she would have no Palafox sons.

  “Nothing,” Cándido scratched in his book, and the cow’s destiny was settled.

  This irrevocable decision did not, of course, terminate the testing of the cow. Veneno, in disgust, spurred his horse from the ring and dismounted outside while Armillita and Victoriano, the two matadors, practiced their cape work on the little animal. It was a sunny morning, and the flourishing of the capes as they flashed in the brilliant light was poetic and explained why the matadors were so accomplished when facing real bulls. Fifteen, twenty times they practiced the same pass, with the little cow charging back and forth with pleasing animation, for as she had shown in her first wild charge across the ring, she was essentially a brave little animal and she fought the capes with distinction, so that some of the Americans cried: “What a wonderful animal!” But Cándido and Don Eduardo knew that she had shied away from the punishing lance, which proved that her courage extended only to a point beyond which she was a coward.

  At this moment Don Eduardo interrupted my history lesson to explain: “The reason meticulous testing of the cow is essential, Señora Evans, is that there is no way to test a bull.”

  “Aren’t they taken into the ring at two years old, too?” she asked.

  “Oh, no!” Don Eduardo replied. “If a two-year-old bull was fought with a cape for even two minutes, he’d remember that trying to gore the cape got him nowhere. Deep in his little brain he’d hoard that discovery, and two years later, when he faced a man in a formal fight, he’d know instinctively that if he struck the cape he’d still find nothing. So after one or two futile passes, he’d leave the cape and head right for the man. He’d kill the matador every time.”

  “You mean that none of those bulls”—she indicated the six who were to be fought that afternoon—“has been tested?”

  “Good God, no!”

  “If it were discovered that Don Eduardo had tested his bulls with a cape,” I explained, “the matadors would refuse to fight them.”

  “Tested bulls would kill matadors every afternoon,” Don Eduardo agreed.

  “Then all you know about those bulls—” Mrs. Evans began.

  “Is what their mothers told us,” Don Eduardo replied.

  “Well,” I said, “when the bull’s two years old we sometimes tease him from horseback and try to upset him with poles.”

  “Why?” Mrs. Evans asked.

  “To see if he’ll fight back. But this is out on the open range, and he probably never realizes that there’s a man on the horse. He’s not hurt, and the only memory he retains is of a four-legged enemy. That’s why, in the real fight, he’s usually so ready to charge at the horse.”

  “But all that we really know,” Don Eduardo repeated, “is what we find at the testing of his mother.”

  “The cow Reina that you were telling me about,” Mrs. Evans suggested. “How did she test?”

  Don Eduardo became expansive. “John Wayne came down to sit with me before this cow came out and I had to say, ‘We haven’t shown you a brave one yet, but in this business we always have hope,’ and when the door to the corral opened and this skinny little cow came bursting in I thought, Maybe this one! and when the testing was over I had tears in my eyes. It was like …” He stopped and blew his nose. “Cándido, tell the American lady about Reina.”

  The dour foreman looked at Mrs. Evans as if to say: You couldn’t possibly understand, and said nothing, so Don Eduardo blew his nose again and said: “Mrs. Evans, if you ever had a son who proved himself to be brave—”

  I saw that this was becoming too emotional and said dryly: “Mrs. Evans had a son—very brave. He died in the war.”

  Instead of halting Don Eduardo, this information had quite the opposite effect. Clutching Mrs. Evans’s hands he cried, “You did! Then you know what I’m talking about. It’s a terrible thing, Mrs. Evans, a terrible and moving thing to see courage and to know that it can be transmitted from mother to son. This cow Reina, she was maybe the skinniest of the lot, but when she saw that horse on the other side of the ring … dust didn’t bother her, nor sunlight nor the long lance. She broke into a gallop and struck the horse seven times. Her shoulders were a mass of blood but she kept coming back again and again. Veneno knocked her over, smacked her in the tail with the lance, charged the horse at her, did everything indecent, but she kept driving at him. I finally had to yell, ‘Get that goddamned horse out of there,’ but we couldn’t get the horse out because she followed him wherever he went and we couldn’t open the gate.

  “So we called Armillita into the ring to take her away with his cape, thinking to sneak the horse out when she was engaged elsewhere, but on the first pass she knocked Armillita aside and went right back to the horse. So we put another matador into the ring and when the two of them kept the little cow off to one side we finally got the horse out.

  “She was bleeding a lot, but now she settled down to fight the capes, and she was like a dream. Cándido, tell them!”

  The lanky foreman waved his right hand back and forth several times and repeated, “Like a dream.”

  “What impressed us most, however, was the way this cow began to learn. She had hit Armillita on her first charge, and now she started to gain ground with each charge. Soon she was coming very close and Armillita laughed and said: “I’ve had enough,” and he tried to walk away, but she kept after him. So I called in some of the aspirants who haunt these testings, and one after another they fought the cow, and she knocked them over like cups tumbling down from a stall in the market. Her horns weren’t long enough to do much damage, but her heart—”

  “Is she still living?” Mrs. Evans asked in the pause.

  “She’s famous in Mexico,” I said. “I don’t remember the details. Her first bull was immortalized by Armillita—just about the fanciest show in the last twenty years. What happened with the others?”

  Don Eduardo was eager to talk: “Her first two throws were cows, just a
s brave as she was. Her first bull was Relampaguito, Little Lightning Bolt. As Norman said, immortalized. Her second bull, her third bull—immortalized. Her fourth bull was born in 1957, the best of the lot. Sangre Azul, Blue Blood.”

  “Was he immortalized, too?” Mrs. Evans asked.

  I was looking at Don Eduardo when she asked this, and he winced in a way that showed his reluctance to discuss the matter, and I could not guess what had happened to Sangre Azul, for although I was Palafox through my mother and a member of the family because of my marriage to one of Don Eduardo’s nieces, I was not privy to the secrets of the bull ranch. I was eager to hear about the great bull, but Don Eduardo was reprieved from having to explain by the noisy arrival of León Ledesma, who appeared flourishing his black cape.

  Coming immediately to Mrs. Evans he said: “You’ve been here for hours, I can see it. Those in the know appear only at twelve, when the action begins.”

  “Those of us really in the know,” I said jokingly, “want to study the bulls to see how we would sort them out—to check our guesswork against the later facts.”

  “And what have you wizards with the key to the animal kingdom seen that excites you?”

  From my pocket I brought out a small card on which I’d written down the various scraps of information I’d either deduced for myself or been told by others more knowledgeable. “These seem to be the facts,” I said and reminded Mrs. Evans that she could see the number of each bull branded clearly on its flank.

  No. 29. 448 kilos/986 pounds. Shaved. Overage. 4 years, 3 months. Sluggish.

  No. 32. 450 kilos/990 pounds. Shaved. Skittish. Favors left eye. Quick reaction.

  No. 33. 433 kilos/953 pounds. Shaved. Placid, allows others to shove. Explosive???

  No. 38. 463 kilos/1019 pounds. Shaved. Heavy, slow. More ox than bull. Powerful.