Mexico (12 page)

I tapped on one of the white tables and from the heavily carved doorway of the hotel came a large woman of about sixty wearing a black dress and many combs. When she recognized me she cried, "Senor Clay! I was so happy when I received your cable/'

"Is the room available?"

"Like always," she said, pointing over her shoulder. "With your cameras in place."

I rubbed my hands and asked, "Is the menu the same?"

The ample woman, known as the Widow Palafox now that her husband, one of the less successful Palafoxes, was dead, disappeared into the hotel and returned with a menu that had become a feature of Mexico. For many years at each Festival of Ixmiq Dona Carmen had been accustomed to serving a traditional Spanish menu so as to help her guests be in the proper mood for the bullfights. Visitors who had once tasted her food during the festival would sometimes come from Mexico City during the fair expressly to enjoy her traditional Spanish feast while lounging on the terrace and listening to the mariachis.

Now the Widow Palafox handed me the menu and I saw that it had not changed. For sixteen pesos, about $1.30, the guest was entitled to five huge courses, each to be selected from many options, but by custom visitors to the festival always included the four special dishes: fish soup of Seville, lima beans and ham hocks of Asturias, and the paella of Valencia, followed by a light caramelized vanilla custard known as flan that provided a fine complement to the heavy Spanish dinner.

Looking at the menu made my mouth water, and I realized with some dismay that it was now only seven o'clock and that the tables would not be set for two more hours, since dinner was not served before nine. I was about to go upstairs to my room, which held extraordinary memories, when I was saved by a loud shout from the plaza and I turned to see one of my father's closest friends darting between taxicabs to overtake me. It was Don Eduardo Palafox, a rich relative of the widow who ran the hotel, the present owner of the Palafox bull ranch and a kind of uncle of mine.

Don Eduardo was now in his mid-sixties, a big, round, bald
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headed man with a thin patrician upper lip and a very full lower one, which produced a somewhat puckish appearance. Deep lines radiated from the corners of his eyes while others crisscrossed his ample forehead. He ;yvas a happy man and one who was deceptively agile, for although he must have weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, he now dodged in and out of traffic like an athlete and approached me without being out of breath. "Nephew!" he cried warmly in English. "You made it back to the fair."

"Your bulls fighting?" I asked.

"How would they dare to overlook me?" He laughed, pointing to a bright poster on the opposite side of the hotel: "The Traditional Festival of Ixmiq. Hand to Hand. Victoriano Leal, the Triumphant One from Spain, and Juan Gomez, Both from This State!!!! Bulls of San Mateo, Torrecillas and Palafox." The names of the secondary matadors who would also appear during the festival were listed, along with the names of the pe
o
ns and picadors.

"Tell me, Norman," Don Eduardo suggested in Spanish, pulling me down to sit at one of the white tables, "What do you think is going to happen between Leal and Gomez?"

"Simple," I replied. "One of them will goad the other to his death."

'That's what Ledesma wrote," Don Eduardo mused. "Then you count this a real competition, not just something the newspapers have invented?"

"Haven't you seen them fight together?" I asked.

"No, and that's a pity. My bulls have been appearing in the northern plazas, and, as you know, I like to go along with them whenever possible."

"They been any good?" I asked.

Don Eduardo smiled expansively as he ordered beer. "This year the bulls of Palafox have been superb."

"And those for the fair?" I pressed.

"Wonderful," he assured me.

I have been attending bullfights for about forty years and throughout that time a good 95 percent of the bulls have turned out to be cowardly, dangerous and weak in the knees; nevertheless, before every fight those connected with the business assured the world that the next day's bulls would prove truly splendid. Like all ranchers, Don Eduardo enjoyed being described by the press as scrupulous, which implied that when he tested his young bulls and cows, the cowardly ones were turned into beef and not allowed to contaminate the bullrings.

In money matters he was indeed scrupulous. In all human affairs, as my family had cause to know, he was scrupulous, and in politics he had enjoyed preferential treatment by many different governments because of his scrupulousness; but in the raising of bulls for the plazas of Mexico he was, like everyone else in the business, a common crook. So when he assured me that in the plazas to the north his bulls had been outstanding, I translated this to mean: "Out of every six I sent, perhaps one gave a reasonably decent fight. The other five were cowardly, dangerous and weak in the knees."

Now Don Eduardo began reciting the bull breeder's standard complaint: the matadors who work his bulls are never able to get out of them the great performances of which all Palafox bulls are capable. As I drank his beer I began to ignore his complaints and to think of the powerful family of which he was the present head and I a proud though minor part.

As I turned away from him momentarily to study the plaza, where the evening lights were coming on to make the area a postcard portrait of classical Mexico, I remembered that everything I saw in this stately place had been built by an ancestor of mine, one or another of the five bishops Palafox.

I had never before been much interested in the Palafoxes as a clan, being satisfied to know that my mother had been a member, a fact of which she had been inordinately proud. Because she was such a splendid woman I might have become engrossed in family matters had I not married a Palafox, who divorced me. With her departure I lost interest, but now, in this gray period of indecision when I was trying to restructure my life, I found that I was intensely concerned about my varied inheritances and wanted to pursue questions I had previously ignored.

"Uncle Eduardo, didn't I hear you mention last time I was here that there had been two branches of the Palafoxes?"

And he proceeded to remind me of things I must have known as a boy but had ignored at the time. "Still are. In the 1520s two brothers came to Mexico to help Cortes--one a priest, the other a soldier. Each of them had many children. Their descendants' behavior was strange, for the men in the line started by the priest married only Indian women, the soldier's men married only pure-blooded Spanish wives. So, many of the Palafoxes you see today can be quite dark
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skinned, but the soldier's line look like typical people from Spain. I'm from that line." He obviously took pride in that pure-blooded ancestry and reminded me that my mother and my wife were also from that branch.

Then he waved the open palm of his right hand back and forth across his face to indicate that he was wiping out such distinctions and said happily, "Anyway, in our family a boy calls any Palafox older than himself uncle. You're one of us, Norman, that's what counts."

"Is all this written down somewhere?"

"Only up here," he said, tapping his head, but then he added brightly, "But in the little museum I've put together in one of the old church buildings up the street, there are paintings and things that tell some of the story."

"You ought to write it down, before it's lost."

He laughed and tapped me on the knee. "You're the writer in the family."

I thought, Would anyone have enough time and daring to unravel the complex story of this family that had played such a vital role in the history of Toledo? And images of compelling power flashed through my mind of the murders and burning I myself had seen as a boy, the crises at the Mineral, and I thought, If one boy in a space of ten or fifteen years saw so much, how much did my ancestors witness in this plaza, at the Mineral, the pyramid? and I felt engulfed by the grand sweep of history.

As from a distance 1 heard Don Eduardo's cheerful voice: "Well, what do you say?"

"About what?"

"I asked if you would like to join me."

"Where?"

"You haven't heard a word I've been saying."

"I'm sorry, Uncle."

"I invited you to the Tournament of Flowers."

"Is that being held tonight?"

"Yes. Always on the Wednesday. It opens the fiesta. And I want you to be one of the judges."

I leaned back in my chair with a feeling of distinct pleasure and said, "Father never missed the Tournament. I'd enjoy it and we can dine afterwards."

"Precisely," Don Eduardo agreed, and he and I cut across the plaza to the Imperial Theater, where a distinguished crowd of Toledo citizens, many in evening dress, were gathering for the annual Tournament of Flowers. With the easy grace that comes from years of wielding authority, Don Eduardo introduced me to many who had known my father and then led me backstage past a dozen men dressed in black and so obviously nervous that they had to be the contestants whom I was to help judge. Don Eduardo ignored them and took me to a small room where three judges sat, looking ill at ease. When the head of the Palafox family appeared they rose and bowed stiffly.

"I can never remember your names," Don Eduardo said with the polite contempt wealthy Mexicans have for everyone else. "This is my nephew, the son of John Clay, our author."

The three judges--a dentist, a professor and a self-educated poet--nodded and Don Eduardo announced abruptly, "Senor Clay is going to be one of our judges."

It became apparent that the professor, Dr. Ruiz Melendez, did not intend to allow Don Eduardo to ride roughshod over him this year. Pointedly he asked, "Does the norteamericano know Spanish?"

Don Eduardo was impatient and brushed off the inquiry: "Better than I do."

Professor Ruiz seemed ready to combat every position Don Eduardo took: "For judging pretty girls in the United States no Spanish is necessary, but what we shall be doing this evening ... well, the cultural honor of Toledo is involved."

"Professor," Don Eduardo interrupted bluntly, "my nephew knows more about the cultural honor of Toledo than you will ever know. Now let's get on with the Tournament."

Ruiz Melendez refused to surrender to Don Eduardo. "I am not convinced that your nephew is the kind of man we require for the task at hand," he said coldly and I thought: He's right, but if he had spoken like that in the old days, some Palafox would have shot him. But these were new days and Don Eduardo laughed good-naturedly.

"You're right, Professor," he chuckled. "We Palafoxes are all idiots when it comes to culture, but we'll have you good men to help us out." Then taking me by the hand he headed for the stage with the command, "Come on, you idiot." The dentist and the poet smiled discreetly, but the professor remained irritated.

We filed onto the stage of the blue-and-gold theater and I was moved by the sight of the platform on which Emperor Maximilian had behaved with such gallantry at the end of his life. The audience, filling all seats, applauded genteelly as Don Eduardo raised his hand for silence and said, "We are the judges tonight. Four of us you already know." He took a piece of paper from his pocket and read, "Dr. Beltran, our learned dentist, Luis Solfs the poet, and Professor Ruiz Melendez. I have no right to be here myself, being a rancher, but I came along in case any livestock had to be judged." There was embarrassed laughter at this, and I saw Professor Ruiz wince. "And this stranger," Don Eduardo concluded, "is really no stranger at all. He's John Clay's boy, and we're lucky to have him with us tonight because he's a famous writer himself." I cringed when he said this, for I knew I was at best a journeyman scribbler, at worst a hack. And now he clapped his hands, and shouted gruffly: "Come on. Let's get going."

We judges took our seats on a dais to the side, our feet resting on red carpeting, and when we were settled, from the wings came sixteen charming young ladies, dressed in white evening gowns and carrying floral bouquets. At first I thought: Damn! This year it's degenerated into some local beauty contest; but obviously this was not the case, for from another entrance appeared a gorgeous young woman, tall, stately and with a remarkable grace of movement. An orchestra struck up a coronation march, and she was escorted by the sixteen attendants to a throne that was suddenly revealed at the rear.

There the mayor of Toledo cried: "I crown you Queen Cristina!" and the stage was set.

Lights were lowered, save for a spot that was kept focused on the queen, and from the wings appeared the first contestant, a rather handsome young man in evening dress who seemed very nervous until he found a place to stand half facing the audience, half facing the judges. Then he swallowed, clenched his hands behind his back, and began to recite three of the sonnets he had composed during the past year.

This was Toledo's Tournament of Flowers, the annual competition of poets from all parts of Mexico, and as the first contender recited, the mellifluous sound of his soft Spanish drifting out across the audience, I surrendered myself to a joy I had not known for thirty years. In the United States no one would think of having a competition of poets, for what our best poets write tends to be obscure and difficult, and, moreover, our citizens would be embarrassed to judge or to listen to a group of poets. But in Toledo, where the music of Spanish verse filled the air to the delight of all, poetry was again what it had been throughout history: queen of the verbal arts.