Mexico (22 page)

That night when Cigarro finally reached Juan Gomez, he found that the impresario had already informed the Indian of the mano-a-mano fight with Victoriano. He said to Gomez: "This got to be day of decision, matador. Something got to happen in that ring that--explode. You got to insult Victoriano, or take away one of his bulls, or knock Veneno from horse. Matador! The Virgin herself gonna smile on this day, but the scandal we got to fix ourselves."

They plotted long into the night, trying to devise something that would justify outrageous behavior and electrify the vast crowd into demanding a rematch between the two matadors. "What we got to lose?" Cigarro asked, his palms up. "Suppose we go to jail? Long time ago Lorenzo Garza go to jail every year and each time more popular. Juan, on Sunday some fantastic thing got to happen."

The plan they agreed upon was this: on his first bull Juan Gomez would make the supreme effort of his career and if successful would win the adulation of the, crowd; since Victoriano would be pressing to do well, he would undoubtedly be nervous with his first animal; Gomez would work even harder with his second bull and capitalize on the crowd's sympathy for a fighter who was Mexican to the core; then on Leal's second animal Gomez would intrude on the passes as the bull came away from the horses, would insist upon more than his share of turns, and would do everything he could to humiliate his opponent.

"Old Veneno not gonna like it," Cigarro said confidently. "That one never gonna let you insult his torero. But Veneno not too popular with public. They think he boss his boy. So you got to make your fight with Veneno, and maybe ..." The skinny one chomped on his cigar and whispered with diabolic satisfaction, "Juanito, little matador, on Sunday there will be riot in Plaza Mexico. Every man will want you fight Victoriano again next Sunday and next after that." Then he grew sober: "But it all depend on your first bull. You got to be fantastic."

I've explained what happened. The first Palafox bull was unmanageable, and Juan accomplished little with it, whereas
Victoriano's first bull was what they called "a boxcar on rails," charging back and forth with power and insistence. With this bull Leal performed brilliantly, and Cigarro had a sickening suspicion that the day was lost. While Victoriano was running around the arena, holding the two ears aloft in the traditional gesture of triumph, Cigarro was sweating and trying to reassure his matador.

Then salvation came. Cigarro told me how it had happened: "When Victoriano running with the two ears, everybody cheering and music, my stomach knocking with my knees, I see no chance for Gomez to make much and we probably leave Plaza de Mexico no fame, no contracts. But then Victoriano raise two fingers to say he number one. My fighter his honor been offended, he raised his finger to tell public he number one. So the big riot come, and after that, contracts come all the time."

It was now late Thursday evening. As I sat with my uncle at a big table on the House of Tile terrace, I thought of the two matadors asleep in their rooms above and said to Don Eduardo: "I'll wager they're nervous up there. Could be their biggest fight of the year." But before my uncle could respond we were surprised by the sight of Veneno and his three sons at the entrance to the hotel. They had probably come down for a midnight drink of seltzer and a look at the festival crowds that still followed mariachi bands around the plaza. Waiters cleared the big round table that dominated the center of the dining area, and there the four Leals ensconced themselves like royalty, the way leading toreros had been doing for the past half century. Immediately a crowd gathered to gape at the bullfighters while Veneno, savoring the adulation, bowed condescendingly to the aficionados.

Whispering to my uncle, I said: "He's intolerable, the way he poses as a great torero. But you have to admit, he's built Victoriano into a masterpiece," and when Don Eduardo turned to study the young man, so relaxed, so gracious in accepting adoration from his fans, he had to agree: "He is a credit to the profession. And we can be proud that he's a Mexican." I thought, but had not the courage to say: "A Mexican trying to behave like a Spaniard."

At this moment Victoriano, realizing that the breeder of the bulls he would be fighting was at our table, rose, lifted his glass of seltzer and said loud enough for all on the Terrace to hear: "I drink to your Festival of Ixmiq."

We were prevented from joining the toast by the nervous intrusion of a waiter who hurried to our table whispering breathlessly: "Gentlemen, I'm mortified, but the matador Juan Gomez and his party are coming down, and by right they ought to occupy this table."

"Naturally." Don Eduardo nodded, although by any kind of seniority he was entitled to it. But he appreciated the restaurant's difficulty should one matador enjoy a better table than his adversary. Consequently we rose and moved to a smaller table, and we were sitting there when Gomez, Cigarro and the singer Lucha Gonzalez appeared. To my surprise, she did not stop at the table but with a brief nod toward the Leals passed them and went alone to the cafe-bar, where she was greeted by the manager. In a moment she was singing. Now that her matador was winning contracts that paid three or four thousand dollars a fight, she was no longer responsible for the support of her entourage, but peasant wisdom was strong in Lucha Gonzalez and she knew that in the life of a matador disaster was always close at hand. Tonight Juan Gomez had money; next week he might be dead; so she would capitalize on his transitory fame and earn as much money for herself as possible. Gazing across the public square between numbers, she was probably thinking, If I earn enough, perhaps I'll get to Spain whether my matador gets there or not.

And so we sat in the late hours before the first bullfight of the Festival of Ixmiq-61. Don Eduardo Palafox, inheritor of so much that characterized the best in Toledo--the cathedral, the arches, the governor's palace and the bull ranch--sat like any breeder assuring himself that his bulls were bound to be good. Dona Carmen Mier y Palafox occupied a rear table, supervising her waiters. At their table the Leals basked in the adulation of the crowd and pretended not to know that sitting close at hand were Cigarro and Juan Gomez, whose attention was focused on the singer in the nearby cafe.

From the opposite side of the public square came the golden notes of the five barefoot mariachis and their sad-eyed soloist with his trumpet borrowed from the angels, and as they approached the soaring trumpet obliterated all other impressions of the night--and all thoughts of the possibility of death for the next day.

Guadalajara, Guadalajara!

You taste like rain-soaked earth

And distant little springs....

O, unforgettable little springs
,
Unforgettable like that afternoon

When rain from the hill

Kept us from going to Tlaquepaque....

The trumpeter played a coda that would have melted any Mexican heart that heard it, and I wondered what had happened on that day long ago when sudden rain prevented someone from having a picnic at Tlaquepaque.

The mariachis passed, and from the cafe we could hear the rough voice of Lucha Gonzalez improvising flamenco songs and clicking her heels. As the various sounds blended with the hum of conversation at the tables I found myself staring at the benign statue of the long-forgotten Altomec Indian Ixmiq, whose stony smile was eternal and granted us benediction.

Chapter
5.

INDIAN ANCESTORS: THE BUILDERS

TOWARD MIDNIGHT, WHILE there was still noisy activity in the plaza, the Widow Palafox came to my table, tapped me on the arm and whispered, "Your package of manuscript reached the airport and will be in New York at just about this time. You owe the messenger but we paid and will put it on your bill."

She led me through the ancient doorway and onto a small patio that I had loved as a child. There was the stone fountain on which I had played and the mass of brightly colored flowers that had always bloomed in such profusion. We climbed a series of stone steps to the second floor of the hotel, where a broad cloister ran completely around the upper section of the patio, into which it dropped tendrils of flowering plants. The heart of the hotel had always been this quiet patio of weathered stone, echoing cloister and abundant flowers.

The widow took me along the cloister until she reached a door on the plaza side, and pushing this open she led me into a room famous in the history of Mexico. It was no ordinary room: its sides were extremely irregular, since they had to follow the wandering walls of the hotel front, and its haphazardly placed windows had always looked down upon the cathedral and for the last century upon the statue of Ixmiq as well.

When the widow moved the door, a faint creaking that dated back to 1575, when the structure was built, told me that I was home, for it was in this room that my mother and I had hidden in 1918 during the second sacking of Toledo, when to continue living at the Mineral was impossible. It was from the largest of the windows that at the age of nine I had looked down on th
e r
apists and the firing squads. I remember standing there and announcing matter-of-factly to my mother: "They're going to shoot some more." She had hurried over and when she saw who the victims were to be--the seven good people from the very building in which we had found refuge--she had screamed, "Oh God! No!" One of General Gurza's men who commanded the firing squad turned momentarily from his duties and pumped a couple of revolver bullets at us, which had missed the window but splattered the surrounding stones, where the chips they tore away left shallow pockmarks that were still visible in the light from the terrace below.

"I was standing here when the executions took place," I remarked to the widow.

"They were crazy days," she mumbled.

"After the captain shot at us, my mother hid on the floor but I crept back and peeked out to watch the squad do its work."

"That hole in the wall," the widow explained, pointing to a prepared space over the bed, "is for a plaque that one of the historical societies is going to put here."

"Let's make it a little larger and add, 'Norman Clay slept here, too.' "

"May your sleep be good," the widow said, closing the squeaking door.

The room held such vivid memories that it even evoked the history of my powerful Indian ancestors.

When I was about ten years old and living once more at the Mineral, my father who, as an engineer and a scientist, was interested in speculating on historical might-have-beens, said: "At breakfast when we were talking about the choices that men sometimes have to make, you told me: 'It doesn't matter.' Well, making the proper choice can matter, Norman, and I want you to remember an excellent example of how a decision that must at the time have seemed of no consequence turned out to be vitally significant." To demonstrate this, he reached for a stick with which he drew in the sand a Y, saying:

"This will stand for a decision that had to be made about four thousand years ago by some people from eastern Asia, probably from Siberia, who crossed over the Bering Strait and hiked southward through Alaska and the western United States." (In later years I often wondered how my father could have known about this migration of our Indian ancestors, because during his time the relics of this Siberian trek had not ye
t b
een uncovered in Alaska; perhaps he was merely guessing. Of course, on one point he was quite wrong; we now know that the migrations from Asia took place not four thousand years ago but more like twenty thousand or possibly forty.)

'These Indians wandering south from Alaska came at last to San Diego," my father explained, "and they held a council to discuss what to do next. Some said, 'Let's continue down the coastline, because we've been doing that for three hundred years and it's familiar territory,' but others argued, 'Let's leave the coastline and strike out inland.' The upshot was that each group went its own way. No one could have foretold that one group had made a brilliant choice and that the other had chosen disaster."

I remember looking at the two arms of the Y and asking, "Which one did right?"

"Visualize the map of California," he said, "and think."

I tried to do this, but all I could remember was the map in my Mexican schoolbook, and it showed California merely as one of the lands stolen from Mexico by the United States, so I could not deduce the point my father was trying to make.

"Was the arm pointing to the sea the good one?" I asked.

"It led to California Baja," my father said grimly, and I instantly recalled what I had learned about that brutal, barren peninsula of heat and waterless sand. "Centuries later, when the Spaniards explored that desolate land, they found that the Indians who had gone there had degenerated close to the animal level. They lived almost without what we call a culture--no houses, not even clothing. They had no decent food and almost no water, and although the ocean about them was full of fish, they had never learned how to catch them. They were as pathetic as human beings can be and still live."

My father continued: "The other Indians chose the arm leading inland, and ultimately they reached the rich and fertile lands and, later, gold. They built three of the greatest civilizations of ancient times--the Aztecs of Mexico, the Maya of Yucatan and Guatemala and the Incas of Peru."

We stood for some minutes in silence. Then my father concluded his lecture with a statement that haunts me still, forty years after it was uttered: "You say choice means nothing? Norman, if your Indian ancestors had gone west you might now be an idiot. Thank your stars they came down through Toledo, for with the courage and the intelligence you inherited from that crowd you can become anything you wish."