Mexico (92 page)

"Sounds complicated."

"Don't you see the beauty of it? You're representing your matador, I'm protecting mine. If you pull a fast one and make a trio of bulls infinitely easier to fight than the other, you're free to do so. But when the blind draw comes, think a moment. Chance may decide that your man gets the really lousy set and mine gets the good. You and I have to be honest. You really want to go and watch this game of intellectual sparring?"

"I can hardly wait."

"Will you bring Penny?"

"I think not. The poor child moped about last evening and didn't want to get out of bed today. She was so excited about meeting a handsome matador, and I think she had spun all sorts of notions about a vacation romance." Shaking her head, she said: "A young girl can react badly to such disappointments. She spent the last year trying to figure out who she is and what her chances are with men. At seventeen she's ready for action, and to suffer a setback like this is hard on her. So let's leave her with her teenage grief. It's part of growing up."

Then, brightly, she said: "Excuse me for a moment, I don't want to feel totally unwelcome at this all-male affair," and she ran into the hotel kitchen, from which she shortly returned with a small basket of sandwiches and wine. At the corrals I was astonished at the way this gracious lady quickly endeared herself to all the habitues, so that we were soon given favorable positions, with her standing with one foot cocked on the baseboard of the corral, staring at the six Palafox bulls.

The corrals were large roofless holding pens where the six bulls, blood brothers, were kept for two to three days prior to the fight. When the sorteo, or the sorting, was over, at twelve noon on the day of the fight, each bull would be led to a separate darkened stall, where he would wait five hours till it came his turn to be released from his prison and thrown out into the bright sunlight of the arena. By that time he would be confused, perhaps terrified, and so blazing with anger that he would be willing to fight any object in his way in order to bring some kind of sense and control back into his life.

But now as these siblings, all from one year, 1957, on one ranch, remained with familiar friends whose smells and habits they knew, they were so peaceful they seemed almost tame, but I had to explain one curious aspect of this affair: "See that lone bull over there in a corral by himself? He's from San Mateo, a ranch just as famous as Palafox, and he's a fine animal. He's today's substitute."

"Under what circumstances?" she asked, and I was increasingly impressed with the inquisitiveness of this woman.

"If one of the Palafox bulls should break a horn slamming into the wooden wall or, like yesterday, simply refuses to fight. They send in a team of six or seven oxen, real big beasts, to take him out alive, and in his place they bring in the substitute."

"Sounds sensible."

"But the point I'm making is that if right now you brought that San Mateo bull into this corral, the Palafox bulls would know in an instant that he was not one of them and represented a menace. In two or three minutes that San Mateo bull would be dead. And if you walked in there, in the same two minutes or so you'd be dead because they'd know by smell and look that you posed the same menace."

"Do they ever kill one another, the siblings, I mean?"

"No. Well, maybe once in ten years a ranch may lose a bull that way, but I've never heard of it. Mrs. Evans, remember one fact. These bulls are by nature placid animals. They have no evil desire to kill anyone. They do not go hunting for men. No ranch hands who tend them as they grow up are killed. It's only when they're taken from their milieu and feel themselves endangered that they become powerful enemies."

"I suppose you could say the same for a lot of men."

Standing near us that Sunday morning at ten were some three dozen devotees, men who had been following the great bulls since infancy. Don Eduardo, the breeder of these six, passed idly among the watchers, answering questions and freely giving his guesses as to which bulls would do well. Toward eleven, swarthy Juan Gomez, who would have to kill three of the bulls, sidled up to the corral and gazed with impenetrable Indian solemnity at his potential adversaries. Cronies quickly pressed up to him, asking in hushed whispers: "Which one do you like, for your style, matador?" Always he shrugged his shoulders and continued studying the bulls.

It was Mrs. Evans who first voiced what everyone was thinking, and I suppose that only a woman would have dared to make the comment she did: "One bull has horns so much longer than the others."

The conspiracy of silence was broken, and we all stared at the conspicuous animal, No. 47, whose horns had not been shaved by the midnight barbers, and he moved in dark grandeur, as if he knew he was different and an adversary of dreadful potential.

"How would you like to get him in the lottery?" an old man joked with Gomez.

"I'll be disappointed if I don't," Gomez replied, not taking his eyes away from the self-contained beast with the sharp horns. "With that one a man could do something." And as I looked at the proud animal I became fascinated by the difference between him and the others, and I started asking questions of Don Eduardo and Candido, his taciturn foreman, so that during the two hours that we watched I was able to reconstruct for Mrs. Evans the life history of the animal that was attracting so much attention.

In the year 1907, two years before I was born, a favorite cow on the vast ranch lands of the marquis of Guadalquivir, near Seville, gave birth to a male, who was to become favorably known in Mexican bullfighting history as Marinero. For three and a half years this young animal grew strong in the marshes along the river, so that in the summer of 1910, when the future Don Eduardo Palafox, then barely seventeen years old, went with his father to the Guadalquivir ranch to buy a seed bull for the Palafox ranch in Mexico, the only animal the Mexicans seriously considered was Marinero.

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 Candido 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-horned 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 Heman Cortes. 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 Candido taking brief but vital notes.