Mexico (67 page)

Penny, who was proving more adult than I had imagined, answered for me: "You saved the right word till last, Senor Ledesma. Romance. You clever Mexicans have constructed a myth about your country as the home of adventure, starlit nights and guitars." To my surprise she broke into song: " 'South of the border, down Mexico way,' " and he joined in, in Spanish.

The duet broke whatever ice there may have been, for he snapped his fingers and, saying "Penny, I simply cannot allow those vultures over there to prevent me from taking you to see
Matador Sotelo," he rose, flourished his cape and told Penny: "Follow me!" Pushing his huge bulk through the cluster of girls, he elbowed them aside with a curt "I have business with the matador, if you please."

When the girls were scattered, he said to young Sotelo: "Maestro, I bring a friend of mine from Oklahoma, dreadful place, suburb of Texas, which is pretty bad, too. Miss Penny Grim speaks Spanish, saw the fights yesterday and understands the art you practice. May we join you?"

Sotelo, who would have been out of his mind to refuse, jumped up, held a chair for Penny and indicated another for Ledesma, who declined graciously: "No, this is a meeting of young people," and he waddled back to my table.

I could not overhear what the young people were talking about, in Spanish, but they made an enviable pair, he at the beginning of what could prove to be a solid career, she on the verge of achieving the full-blown perfection of a champion rose. Soon their conversation became animated, with Sotelo showing her the various passes he made in the ring and then grabbing a tablecloth to allow her to imitate his hand movements. In doing this he had to place his arms around her, an act that brought no protest from her.

When the demonstration ended, she rose and, bowing with charming dignity, allowed him to kiss her hand. On her way back to our table I noticed that she protected that hand as if the kiss might blow away.

When she was seated, the first thing she did was thank Ledesma: "You were so kind--to move those other girls away."

He bowed, then coughed and said: "What I'm about to look into is heavy material before breakfast, but it's a proper subject for speculation. I've thought," he said in his best pontifical manner, "that the United States is unusually blessed. It has a perfectly dreadful society, dull as a fog over a swamp, but in every direction off its shores it has enticing places to visit. In the east the Caribbean. In the west Hawaii, in the north Alaska and Arctic Canada. And to the south, best of all, Mejico!" He pronounced the name of his new homeland in the Spanish manner, without the x, even though a law had been passed in 1927 making "Mexico," with an x, the official name of the country. "And I can boast because you know, I'm not a Mejican, I'm pure espanol, which entitles me to a superior attitude." He said this last with a pompous smirk to betray the fact that he realized how preposterous it was.

When he asked Penny what she would be studying, and she replied, "History," he exploded: "What a great thing you've done for me, Don Norman! Allowing me to meet this splendid young woman. She can tell me whether my thesis is correct or not. Is it the historical dullness of American life that makes Hawaii and Mejico so attractive?"

Determined not to allow Leon to overpower her with his exhibitionism, she said: "If you take pride in pronouncing your Mejico properly you must do the same with our island. It isn't How-wah-yah, it's Huh-vah-ee."

"All right, I stand corrected. Now, tell me why there is this constant exodus of young women from your country to ours."

"There aren't many matadors in Tulsa, Oklahoma."

"And not too many here in Toledo."

"What brings us down, and we drove nearly a thousand miles to get here, is the attraction of a different way of life. To have a taste of it before we marry and settle down."

Her last words were drowned by a noisy commotion caused by the arrival in a gray limousine of a woman remarkable in the history of Mexican bullfighting. "Here she is!" shouted the crowd in the plaza.
"
Conchita! [Arriba! jViva!" And up the few steps to the Terrace came a tall, slim woman in her thirties dressed in the costume that a country-woman whose husband owned vast estates would favor: boots, gray whipcord skirt, embroidered white blouse, covered by a military-style jacket adorned with silver buttons, and on her . head one of those broad-brimmed black hats fancied by Spanish horsemen. She presented a commanding figure, and knew it.

Accepting a chair hurriedly offered her at the big central table, she was immediately surrounded by men associated with bullfighting and by others who remained standing nearby. "Who's that?" Penny asked, and I enlightened her about one of the minor glories of the Mexican scene.

"Sometime around 1930 a young Puerto Rican scholar named Cintron, member of the well-known family that also produced the actor Jose Ferrer, received an appointment to West Point. While in the United States Army he married an American girl. They had a daughter, named her Conchita. That's her, over there."

"Why are they piaking such a fuss over her?"

"Like her father, she loved horses and she became skilled in handling them, even as a little girl."

"Does she ride in a circus or something?"

"No, she does something far more remarkable. With the help of experts in Chile and Peru, where her father served, she made herself into a first-class rejoneadora."

"What's that?"

"She fights bulls from horseback." When I heard her gasp in disbelief, I said, "Yes, this afternoon that woman who looks almost frail will sit astride her white horse, use no hands, only her knees, to guide him, and fight a mad bull. Believe me, Penny, she does just that, and when you see her this afternoon you'll be amazed."

"You mean she's fighting today?"

"She's the star."

"I didn't see her name on any of the big posters. Conchita Cintron?"

"You can see it on the new little ones. Real big. She's on a farewell tour of the Mexican rings, and at the last minute Don Eduardo persuaded her to include Toledo. His big arguing point? 'Conchita, we'll give you a despedida so grand you'll never forget it.' "

"What's that?"

"A Mexican-style leave-taking. Going-away party for a matador who will never be back. You'll weep, I guarantee."

"Why would I? I don't know her."

'The band playing 'Las Golondrinas.' The embraces of old friends. I'm choking up just thinking of it."

"It sounds so unlikely, a Puerto Rican woman fighting a bull here in Mexico."

"Look at me," I told her. "Born and bred in Mexico but making my living in New York and Europe. Or Don Leon here. Born in Spain, now stuck in Mexico. We never knew where we'd land." Looking at her fixedly, as Ledesma did too, I asked: "Who can guess where a handsome girl like you, with so many privileges, will make her home? Or with whom?"

To deflect attention from herself, she asked: "Is she really that good?"

"Like Babe Ruth in baseball, the best. Numero Uno."

"Could I meet her?"

"Sure. We're old friends. I've interviewed her several times for magazines." But I shuddered: "Me try to break through tha
t c
rowd? I'm not that brave." But she was so insistent on meeting this strange, compelling woman that with some trepidation I took her by the hand and started toward the seemingly hopeless task of breaking through the ring of admirers. When Conchita saw me, she jumped up, crying: "Norman! God bless you, you bring me luck!" and rushed over to embrace me and plant a kiss on my cheek.

"And who's this child? Don't tell me it's your new bride-- you should be ashamed of yourself."

"Daughter of a friend from Oklahoma. She insisted on paying her respects."

For several minutes my starry-eyed ward stared at Conchita, but finally she gathered courage and said: "I love horses. Always had my own."

'Then you ride?"

"In rodeos, yes."

"Oh, I love rodeos! The clowns, the big steers, the noise. What do you do in your rodeo?"

"The barrel race."

"I know it well. Beautiful girls on beautiful horses, dashing about in mad circles." Suddenly grasping Penny by her wrists, she said, "For such riding you must have strong hands," and Penny said, "I don't. I'm not so hot," at which point the conversation was ended by the intrusion of groupies who had learned who Conchita was and were now demanding autographs.

When we returned to our table, Ledesma said to Penny soberly, as if he were her uncle: "In the brief time I've known you, Penny--here on the Terrace, at the corrida yesterday, and especially watching the way you reacted to the catacombs, I could see that you were far too intelligent to be chasing around after Mexican matadors."

"But she's not a matador. She's a--what did you call her, Norman?"

"Rejoneadora," I said and Le
o
n snapped: "Almost as bad. She's part of the scene, and potentially damaging to a girl like you."

"You don't like women bullfighters?" Penny asked, and he growled: "I deplore them." Then smiling warmly, he nodded across the tables to Conchita, who saluted. "She's not a woman," he said. "She's an angel." Then he resumed his lecture: "Bullfight people lead a rough life. Girls in every town pester them. American girls on vacation can't leave them alone. You can do yourself no good by leaping at them and you might do yourself immeasurable harm." He dropped his avuncular tone and said harshly, "Stay away from the toreros! They're no good for you."

She received this admonition gracefully and with a touch of humor: "A girl can look, can't she?" and he said, "Even looking sometimes gets your eyebrows singed." She seemed so crestfallen that I had to come to her rescue.

"I have napping in my room a matador--well, almost a matador--who might prove acceptable. I'll send him down," and I left her wondering what I might have meant by that.

When I reached my room I rousted Ricardo out of bed: "Get downstairs. Penny Grim wants to talk with you about your experiences as a would-be fighter." He was hesitant at first, and understandably so. "Her father would bash me over the head if I stepped near her," he said, but I reassured him: "Her father tied one on last night and won't become airborne for hours." This brought him no comfort, for he said, "I know from experience that drunks can recover instantaneously." But when I added that she'd be easy to find because she was sitting with Le
o
n Ledesma, he leaped out of bed, dashed into the bathroom, used my shaving brush, my razor and I suspect my toothbrush, and zoomed back to whip on his trousers--as an aspiring torero he could hardly miss an opportunity to talk again with Mexico's foremost critic. Smoothing his hair with my brush, he dashed downstairs while I fell into bed and dropped off almost instantly.

It was about three when I woke up and went down to the Terrace for some light lunch and found that Ledesma had left my table but that Ricardo Martin and Penny were in vigorous conversation. They made an attractive pair, each leaning forward to catch the point the other was making, and I was about to leave them alone, when Penny saw me and invited me to join them. "After all, it is your table. He's been telling me the most fascinating story about how he got into bullfighting." I was about to ask her for details when I saw Mrs. Evans coming in alone, and I asked her to join our table. As the four of us sat there toying with our lunch, because we did not care to eat heavily before the fight, Penny, with an occasional correction from Ricardo, started telling Mrs. Evans and me, with an excitement in her voice that betrayed the fact that she had found Martin a delightful companion, what she had learned from him.

"After Ricardo won his second Purple Heart in Korea, the Marines said: 'With that cluster of ribbons he'd make an ideal recruiter in high schools,' and they brought him back to San Diego."

Ricardo broke in, "I found the work repulsive and started drifting down to Tijuana, and at the age of nineteen I saw my first bullfight, and it provided everything I was looking for. Courage, drama, spectacle, and something as far away from my stupid father and my dipsy-doodle mother as I could get. In 1957 some friends told me: 'The real scene is the April festival in Toledo,' and when they decided to drive down I hooked a ride with them, and when I saw the real thing, three great fights in one weekend, I decided right then, in that plaza out there by the statue of the Indian, that I was going to stay, and come hell or another draft I was going to be a bullfighter."

"How did you live?" Mrs. Evans asked. "What I mean is, how do you live?"

At this point the narrative was broken by the arrival at our table of Penny's father, Ed Grim, whose bloodshot eyes announced that he was in a foul mood and ready for battle. It took him a few minutes to figure out that his daughter was somehow involved with the miserable fellow who had quit the United States Marines to become a bullfighter in Mexico, and when this became clear he heard his sensible Tulsa neighbor, Mrs. Evans, widow of his former partner, explaining, "I've just asked Senor Martin--"

"What's this Senor business? Where'd he get the name Martin? I thought it was honest Martin, from Iowa."

"It's Senor Martin," she insisted, "because he wants to be accepted as a young man who respects Mexican ways. And he's from Idaho, not Iowa." When the oilman grunted, she continued. "I asked him how he earned his living while traipsing around the countryside, trying to be a matador."