Mexico (16 page)

Finding no easy answer, I sat on one of the benches that lined the plaza and stared alternately at the cathedral of Bishop Palafox and at the pyramid of the ancient Drunken Builders while struggling to reach some understanding of this stolid Indian matador. Out of the grubby incidents I had heard about his career I recalled one incident in particular that seemed to epitomize the hardships he constantly had to confront. It involved a frantic midnight auto trip from Acapulco to Mexico City.

About three years ago, before his competition with Victoriano Leal had provided him with real money, Juan Gomez was a full-fledged matador, but with a chaotic past, a dismal present and a rather limited future. He had accomplished little, was beset by leeches who kept him poor, and had no logical reason to expect his luck to change. He fought about six times a year and at fees that barely kept him from starvation. He could not afford to maintain a regular troupe of his own, as affluent matadors did, but was forced to rely upon any picadors or peons he could get cheap and sought to ingratiate himself with the unions by accepting whomever they sent.

He had picked up a striking-looking girl named Lucha Gonzalez, a strident singer who also tried to dance and was reasonably good with the castanets. When he managed to find a bullfight, he contributed to their upkeep, but much of the time he was forced to rely upon the modest amounts of money she earned from her engagements. Lucha, whose name was the accepted abbreviation for one of the most popular girl's names in Mexico, Maria de la Luz (Virgin Mary of the Light), was about two inches taller than her matador, a fact that he was never able to forget. One day she saw in an American magazine an advertisement for elevator shoes and the promise "Now you can be taller than she is." She could not read English, of course, but she caught the idea conveyed by the picture and had a friend write a letter to New York, sending the twenty dollars that she had saved. It had not been easy to measure her matador's feet, but one night when he was asleep she had pulled away the covers and made on paper a rough outline of his feet.

When the shoes arrived and she handed them to Gomez he noticed the exaggerated heels, trickily camouflaged, and began to laugh. But, actually, his vanity was wounded and thereafter he never loved Lucha as much as he had before.

At the time I'm speaking of,
Gomez
had been awarded a third-rate contract for a fight in Acapulco, with bulls that were not acceptable for the big ring in Mexico City. He had been offered $750 for the afternoon, but of this amount he had to pay $110 for his troupe, $88 for travel and hotel bills, and a kickback of $150 to the impresario. Laundry, care for his suit, and $44 for bribing the newspaper critics meant that he earned, for an afternoon of fighting dangerous bulls, about $300, most of which he had to spend at the cafes to create an illusion that he was an important matador. It is true that for some of his fights he earned considerably more, but for the past four years he had kept for himself less than two thousand dollars a year, out of which he had had to pay for five months in the hospital.

In fact, his Acapulco engagement would have been financially disastrous had it not been for Lucha, who by persistent phone calls had forced one of the big American hotels to sign her on as an entertainer for a two-week period. As so often before, her earnings enabled the matador to live, and when the fight was over Lucha kept on singing while her matador in his high-heeled shoes strutted aimlessly about the cafes.

His work in the Acapulco bullring had not been impressive, for the animals were atrocious, but he had been at least as good as the other matadors and patently braver, so that during the long week after the fight he won a good deal of favorable comment in the cafes, especially since he was spending what remained of his earnings on drinks for the parasites that clung to him. At midnight on a Saturday, six days after his appearance in the ring, considerable excitement was caused by a man who ran from cafe to cafe crying, "Phone call for the matador! Impresario in Mexico City calling urgently."

Lucha herself had told me about that night in Acapulco. I'd been working on a story about illegal Mexican immigrants in San Antonio, Texas, and chanced to see a newspaper item about a Sunday bullfight across the border in Nuevo Laredo. Since it was only a two-hour drive south, I decided to go because I'd heard that this Mexican matador Juan Gomez was a real bulldog and I was eager to see what he could do.

After the fight, in which he performed well, I sought him out, showed him my credentials and asked if we could talk. His manager, a tough character with a long cigar, grabbed my card, studied it and nodded, whereupon Gomez led me to a cafe overlooking the Rio Grande. The featured entertainer was an ersatz flamenco singer-dancer who joined us at our table. "This is my friend, Lucha Gonzalez," the matador said, but she corrected him: "I'm his manager. Cigarro here thinks he is, but I'm boss." And when we got around to talking about that night in Acapulco she proved that she was boss, for she dominated the conversation.

"I'm singing one of my best songs when this man rushes up shouting 'Telephone for Juan Gomez! Impresario in Mexico City! Needs him for the fight tomorrow!' So I jump off the stage and run to help the man find Juan. I'm thinking: My God! Mexico City! The big plaza!"

As we talked she~looked lovingly at her matador and said: "I find him in that big cafe by the ocean, wearing that checkered suit I got him in Mexico City, a string tie, his Andalusian hat and the polished shoes from New York. A proper-looking matador. When the messenger shouts 'Gomez! The impresario in Mexico City wants you for a fight! Tomorrow! On our phone!' a change comes over Juan."

She paused, smiled at Juan again and said as if recalling a fairy tale: "He was so handsome when he rose, straightened his jacket and walked through the streets to the telephone with men behind us shouting to others: '
Gomez
, called to Mexico City for a big fight tomorrow!' I was proud to be walking with him, and when we reached the phone the news was exciting: 'We' re in trouble, Gomez. All tickets have been sold for tomorrow's fight. We were supposed to have the hero from Venezuela. But his plane was grounded in Bogota, no way he can get here. Can you rush right up here and be ready to fight at four?' "

Now Gomez interrupted: "I told him: 'I'll be there,' and he said: 'Matador, you've saved the honor of Mexico.' "

"But tell him what the pig said when I asked him about the fee," Lucha cried, and Gomez fell silent, so she spoke: "He told Juan, 'We'll arrange that later,' but he was helpful about the trip: 'If you drive out of Acapulco right away, say by one o'clock, you have less than two hundred miles to go. That should put you here by seven, easy. Then you can catch some sleep, Cigarro can select your bulls at noon, you get a little more sleep and you'll be bright-eyed for the fight at four.' "

Lucha, who had been listening in, could not accept this evasion. Grabbing the phone, she said: "Senor Irizaba, how much for Gomez?" and when the suave voice of the impresario assured her: "We'll settle that later," she exploded, and as she talked I had a chance to study this forceful, crudely handsome woman. In her thirties, she had obviously trailed from one nightclub to another through most of Mexico and even in "the American border towns. Now, stuck in Nuevo Laredo in a fifth-rate joint, she recalled that night in Acapulco, and despite the mournful tale she was about to relate her sense of comedy made her chuckle.

"Now it seems funny. Then it was a fight, real bad," and she explained how, when the call from Mexico City ended she had warned Gomez: "That man is a liar. He's using you. For you there will be no fight in the capital tomorrow."

"You heard him, Lucha," Gomez had argued. 'The Venezolano is stranded in Bogota. Irizaba has to find someone--wit
h a
strong reputation."

The proud woman lowered her voice as she told me: "In those days my man here had no reputation, strong or weak. So I knew it was a lie on Irizaba's part. He was calling Juan simply to have him on hand if the matador he really wanted, someone much better known, couldn't come." But again she laughed as she touched my arm: "When Juan left the phone and the men in the cafe asked how much he would be getting for the fight, he told them Three thousand dollars,' but they must have known it would have been more like six hundred, and there he was, likely to get nothing."

At this parading of his shame,
Gomez
winced, and as Lucha continued in her energetic way I caught a glimpse of the bullfighter's life. As a woman who had engineered her own cafe appearances, she knew how unreliable Mexican managers of such places could be, and she'd had a few bad experiences in the States, too, so she had told Juan firmly: "You cannot drive to Mexico City this time of night. For nothing."

He had said: "But there's a chance. If I could have a big day in the capital--"

"You'll have no day--none--not with that worm Irizaba." She told me: "We continued the argument for nearly half an hour, didn't we, Juan?" He nodded: "It was bitter. She knew I had no chance, and maybe I knew it, too. But that's what a matador is, a man who takes chances."

"How did it end?" I asked, and they both spoke at once, each giving the other credit for decent behavior in what had become a brawl, but in the end Gomez had issued an ultimatum: "In fifteen minutes Cigarro and I leave for the capital. Come with us or stay here, you choose."

Realizing that her man meant what he said, she had temporized: "Let me sing my next set. You know we live on my singing and I can't just walk out--"

"I'll wait," he had replied, and that night, at a quarter to two, with Cigarro at the wheel and Lucha and Gomez trying to sleep in the backseat, the Cadillac roared out of the seaside resort, entered the mountains and drove due north toward the capital. From time to time the rear-seat passengers awakened to watch Cigarro speed through some sleeping village at seventy miles an hour or scatter a flock of chickens sleeping on the warm pavement--through Iguala, famous in Mexican history for its role in revolutions; through Taxco, with its old buildings of great beauty; and into Cuernavaca, with its exquisite residences occupied by rich American tourists.

As they finished the treacherous trip through the mountains and reached the plateau on which Mexico City rested, Cigarro had slowed to a halt: "Juan, I'm tired. You like to drive?" but Lucha objected: "He needs sleep." She climbed into the front seat to take the wheel and guided the old car into the outskirts of Mexico City and then along its crowded streets. Passing cafes in which she had sung, she started humming one of her favorite songs and made her way to a cheap hotel. There she argued with the custodian that since it was now seven in the morning, she would expect to pay only for the coming day. At seven-thirty Cigarro and his matador were asleep, so she drove on to an all-night cafe where the patrons remembered her and there she joined in a few songs.

At half after eleven she was back in the hotel, bringing
Gomez
hot water for shaving and at ten to twelve she had both him and Cigarro ready for noontime events at the arena.

Unlike most matadors, who were superstitious to an incapacitating degree and who refused ever to look at their bulls until the animals burst into the arena for the final fight, Juan Gomez insisted upon being present at the midday selection of the beasts. He had felt, even as a boy, that he could never learn enough about the animals and felt there was always the possibility that at the noon choosing he might detect some characteristic in his beast that would enable him to produce a great fight. The only weakness in this theory was that he rarely produced a superb afternoon, while men who never saw their bulls sometimes did.

But when the matador and his entourage entered the corrals where the bulls would be assigned to each matador, Lucha was shocked, for she saw immediately that not only were the representatives of the other two fighters for that day present, but also the men who were to have served the Venezuelan visitor, plus the agents of four other well-known matadors, each with a more glittering reputation than Juan Gomez.

She felt sick. "The bastards!" she muttered. "Oh, those filthy bastards!"

Gomez
, trying to protect the slim hope that he would be chosen for the fight, tried to silence her lest she destroy the chances he never had, but she brushed him aside, elbowed her way through the crowd of men inspecting the six placid bulls in the corrals, located the impresario Irizaba, a tall, corpulent man in his sixties whose left eye twitched, and began screaming at him: "You stinking son-of-a-bitch! Bringing all these men here for no purpose. You swine!"

Her fury was so great and her attempts to claw at Irizaba became so ferocious that he ordered two of his helpers to restrain her while he fled to the security of his upstairs office overlooking the corrals, but he did not escape unscathed, for as he retreated, Lucha, though held firmly in the grip of two strong men, succeeded in giving him a painful kick.

Agents for the other disappointed matadors, thinking to protect whatever chances Gomez might have for fighting in the capital, dragged Lucha away, and when she was safely outside the plaza, they returned to Gomez and said: "If you ever want to fight here, apologize to Irizaba. He'll understand. Just say the woman got out of control." He said: "No one can step on her toes. I learned and so did he," and he pointed to Cigarro standing by the corrals.

Throwing Lucha out of the plaza solved nothing. Still steaming mad over what had been done to Gomez, she found another entrance and rushed up the stairs to Irizaba's office, where she broke open his door and shouted at him: "We drove all night. So did those three others. Are you going to pay us for our trouble?"