Mexico by James A. Michener
In this chaotic warfare, now further confused by six frantic policemen running about, Ricardo had one important factor in his favor: The others were terrified by those long, unshaved horns. Courageous though they might normally be, they would chase this deadly bull just so far; when they saw those horns turning in their direction they backed off. In this harum-scarum situation Ricardo managed three sets of two passes each, enough to throw the stands into a frenzy.
After the third pair, which left the bull standing rigid amid the confusion, Ricardo reached forward, patted the bull between the horns and strode away in the affected posturing of a matador. In this moment of carelessness two policemen grabbed him, and off he was dragged to a holding pen from which he would be taken to jail after the festival ended. He left to cheers. Both valiant and knowing, he had not been a reckless, feckless espontáneo but an aspiring torero, and the crowd knew the difference.
When quiet was restored, once again Pepe Huerta started toward the agitated bull. But once more he was interrupted, for through the red gate on the far side used by matadors hobbled Victoriano, his leg tightly bandaged so blood did not flow, his torn trouser leg awkwardly pinned together, his walk steady though limping, his hands empty and his bullfighter’s cap long gone, moving purposefully to intercept Chucho and Diego, who rushed to meet him. Reaching for his sword and with the red muleta draped over his left arm, he started for the waiting bull. On the way I heard him tell Pepe Huerta: “It’s my responsibility.” When the younger man could not hide his disappointment, Leal assured him: “I’ll help you get a fight, but this one is mine,” and the young man had to retreat, surrender his sword, and resume his cape.
When Veneno saw what his son was about to attempt, to kill this dangerous bull, he became frantic: “No! Your leg won’t be steady. No, Victoriano!” for he knew that any bull that had knocked down two horses and two men would remember those victories and try to kill any man who approached. Victoriano must be protected from self-destruction.
But his son had found new courage, and I heard him dismiss his father: “It’s my bull, and I’ll finish him.” Turning his back on Veneno, he limped out to certify his independence.
Alone in the middle of the ring he was no longer a pirouetting marionette manipulated by others but a lone man facing a deadly task. The fight was between a gallant beast who had been mistreated by forces he could not comprehend and a new man who had found himself. Four times the bull had gained victories over horses and men, and twice the matador had garnered laurels for his stylish fights against his first two bulls, only to be wounded by his third. It would be an even fight.
Then came the moment in Ixmiq-61 that I will always remember, even though my camera was unable to catch it, for its significance was not aesthetic but moral. When Victoriano came to face his enemy, he found him exactly where he wanted, before the Sombra seats, a spot from which he had launched most of his memorable faenas. But when he approached No. 47, the great bull slowly turned and started hunting for that fortunate spot which he dimly remembered as the one from which he had sent both Gómez and Victoriano to the infirmary. It seemed incredible that a dumb animal could identify in this strange arena those spots where he’d had minor triumphs and those others where he’d suffered, but in fight after fight, Spanish bulls exhibited that uncanny sense. If No. 47 could take refuge in his chosen spot, he had a chance for victory.
Slowly, as the sun disappeared, he started a plodding march across the full diameter of the arena, attacked by a dreadful pain he could not understand and trailed by a determined matador who suffered from his own wounds. As the shadows lengthened in the arena the two adversaries, beast and man, limped to their destiny.
This time the bull’s chosen refuge was in the Sol, where he took a position with his aching rear jammed against the wooden barrier. From here he would not be easily dislodged, and all of us who had been allowed to watch from the passageway in Sombra now scurried to be near the bull as he prepared to defend himself in Sol. Of this tense crowd, only Ledesma and I knew how the bull had been damaged, and I, at least, was praying: “Protect yourself, old fellow. You’ve won your fight.” Ledesma, seeing moisture glistening in my eyes, said: “It can get rather emotional, no?” and he directed me to watch closely the way in which Victoriano proposed to solve his deadly riddle: how to lure that bull out of his defensive stance.
When I saw Victoriano, a man who had befriended me, approach the bull, I thought: Let him do well, but I realized that I was cheering both the bull and the man, and understood that what I meant was: Let this fight end honorably.
Slowly, as in the old days, Victoriano walked toward the bull, not running from the side as in his recent cowardly days, and he moved with such authority that the bull tried to decipher what kind of threat this adversary posed, and in doing so moved his hindquarters slightly away from the defensive barrier. His inquisitiveness doomed him, because once he deserted his haven he was vulnerable, and now had to twist and turn to keep facing his enemy. This allowed Victoriano to tease him into an acceptable stance, and in that moment the matador went in boldly, bravely for a masterly kill, but the wily animal was waiting, and with a toss of his powerful head he used the smooth side of his left horn to hammer Victoriano in the chest, knocking him flat.
From old Veneno’s vantage it looked as if the bull had gored his son, so with a frenzied leap, and followed immediately by his other sons, he ran to save his fallen matador with flashing capes. When the Leals had Victoriano upright but unsteady, they insisted that he quit the fight and allow them to carry him back to the infirmary, but he brushed them aside, asked for his fallen sword, and said simply: “Now I know his tricks. This fight is over,” and he went back to face the bull.
Anticipating the animal’s weakening attempts at self-defense, the elegant matador exuded an aura of invincibility, for he did everything right to lure the bull out of his refuge, then to profile in the face of the deadly right horn and go over it to lodge the sword deep and true. The bull staggered, looked around frantically and searched on trembling feet for his attacker.
Technically the bull was dead, for the steel went through one lung and close to the heart, but his terrifying determination to fight on was so great that he refused to obey the message of death coursing through his sorely damaged body: “Lie down, brave bull. You defended yourself. Don’t breathe so deep. Lie down.”
He refused. Staggering about in a grotesque dance of death, he tried with his damaged rump to relocate that comforting fence but failed. So, as if his three good legs were oak trees in some meadow, he dug in where he was and refused to surrender.
It was a sight that those of us who saw it from the passageway will never forget. We could reach out across the fence and touch him. Victoriano, in an act of compassion and respect for his great bull, went up to him, placed his hand on the bull’s forehead between the horns, and gently pushed him down. The legs crumpled, the knees buckled and, with a final attempt at lunging forward, the bull died.
Slowly, painfully, his face ashen from loss of blood, all energy drained, Victoriano hobbled back across the arena to present himself to the president high in his box. Sword in his left hand, muleta draped across his left forearm, he raised his right like some ancient gladiator reporting to his emperor: “I have complied,” whereupon Veneno and his sons gathered him in their arms and started for the infirmary. As they carried him past the mob in Sol cheers began.
Soon the entire plaza was demanding that he be awarded a turn of the ring, so with dianas playing, he freed himself from the men who were carrying him and started the triumphal parade, but he turned not to his cheering supporters in Sombra but back to where No. 47 was about to be hauled away. Halting the mules, he indicated that this tremendous bull who had defended himself so nobly must share the honors, and these two wounded warriors toured the ring in glory.
As they passed the breeder’s box, Victoriano saw Don Eduardo Palafox, afraid that he might not be called out to join the triumph, jumping up a
As they approached the exit gate on their turn, Victoriano remembered when he was a lad starting his career. Hobbling to where the police watched approvingly, he called: “Bring out the boy!” When his demand was augmented by shouts from the crowd, Ricardo Martín was produced in handcuffs and, with Victoriano sponsoring him, he made a turn of the ring in which he had performed so intelligently and so well. Manacled hands raised above his head, he acknowledged the cheers, but when he came to Mrs. Evans he stopped and blew her a kiss, for in his mind he had dedicated the bull to her.
Long after others had left the ring, I remained inside the passageway, leaning with my arms on the barrier that had protected me from the horns, and as I stared at the gate through which Victoriano and No. 47 had made their exit, I wondered what force in their lives had driven them to perform so heroically. Man and beast were incomparable, a pair of adversaries whom destiny had ordained for this festival, and I mumbled: “They performed for you, Clay, to remind you of the principles by which a life should be led.”
20
THE HOUSE OF TILE
If Saturday night was, as I said earlier, the happiest night of a festival because looming obligations could be ignored, Sunday night after the close of the last fight was clearly the most depressing, for now a return to normal life and its tensions became inescapable. This was particularly true of Ixmiq-61, because the last fight had been such an emotional affair that a letdown was inevitable, and as participants in the festival gathered in desultory manner at the various tables on the Terrace, one could detect a certain vacancy in their eyes, as if the fires of the last three nights had left only smoldering embers.
It was a night of bittersweet experiences, none more intense and complex than the one I became involved with when I took my seat at a table at which Penny Grim was talking agitatedly with León Ledesma, who was apparently telling her things she did not want to hear. “Tell her, Norman, what these American girls who cluster about the matadors like bees seeking honey are called.”
“You said it in the car this afternoon, they’re camp followers.”
“There’s a harsher, more accurate word. In Spanish we say putas. Translate it for her.”
“Whores.” When I saw her blush I added: “But I’d not use that word myself.”
“What would you use?” Ledesma asked with a touch of his familiar acid.
“I think ‘giddy young girls away from the restraints of home’ would cover it.”
“I’ll accept that, if you insist on being old-womanish. But this young girl is not giddy, and with Mrs. Evans and you and me on hand, she’s certainly not free from the restraints of home.”
“You talk as if you were my guardians,” Penny broke in. “I sent my father home, and I do not care to take directions from you—none of you. I have a date with him tonight, and I intend keeping it.”
Now I understood. In some clever way during the testing at Don Eduardo’s, Pepe Huerta, while holding the cape with Penny or standing beside her at the barrier, had arranged to take her out after the fight, and she was waiting for him to come down from the room the Widow Palafox had allowed him to move into for a few pesos. Ledesma was determined that she not join, symbolically, the tawdry collection of young women waiting to grab hold of any torero they could land. Matadors were preferred, peóns acceptable if they were young, picadors too old and fat. A young would-be matador like Pepe Huerta might be the top prize, for he would carry with him a sense of drama and romance, the young man aspiring to greatness.
“I sympathize with you, Penny,” I said, to Ledesma’s disgust. “He’s a handsome young fellow, and that pair he placed, that whirling dervish bit—you might spend a lifetime at the plazas and never see the likes of that.”
“Did you get it on film?” she asked, and the intensity in her voice betrayed how keenly interested in Huerta she was.
“I must have caught more than a dozen shots, rapid fire, in color. I promise to make you an enlargement of the two best.”
“I would like that,” and she touched my arm with such vibrancy that for an instant I wished she were interested in me and not in the young bullfighter. “Send them to me. Don’t just promise.”
“I will.” As I said this I saw Pepe Huerta come onto the terrace freshly showered and with the neat dress and narrow black tie that toreros favor as one of the marks of their profession. When he bent to kiss Penny’s hand, I saw that at the nape of his neck he had a long tuft of hair carefully dressed in the little knot known as the coleta. One of the saddest days in a matador’s life comes when, to the accompaniment of “Las Golondrinas,” that incredibly lovely song of farewell, he marches to the middle of the arena during his last fight to allow the next senior matador to take a long pair of shears and cut his coleta, signifying that his life as a matador has ended. I’ve seen the ceremony twice and wept each time with no embarrassment, for everyone else was weeping, too. So when I saw that young Pepe was already wearing the coleta, I knew he took his profession seriously and that Penny was in the presence of a real torero.
It was fascinating to watch how perfectly these two young people meshed, the excited girl, the hesitant but proud young man in the first stages of his profession. As they sat beside me they seemed once more to lean toward each other, as they had at the testing. It was as if some supernatural force was acting upon them, and I found myself wishing that Mrs. Evans were here to dampen the ardor, for it was clear to me that this mutual attraction was getting way out of hand, with me powerless to control it.
Ledesma was equal to the task. “I’m so glad you decided to stop by, Pepe. That was a tremendous pair you placed today.”
“I hope the photographers caught it.”
“They couldn’t miss. It’ll be in all the papers.” The two men were speaking in Spanish, but since Penny had studied that language in school, and Ledesma had excellent English and Huerta a respectable smattering, the conversation flowed easily. Penny said: “Mr. Clay told me he had more than a dozen shots, in color.” Shyly she added: “He promised to send me a pair—for my room.”
“It’s too bad the espontáneo spoiled that last bull,” Ledesma said. “You might have done something with that one—before he became unruly because of the crowd in the ring.”
Huerta instantly transferred his interest to a dissection of the fight: “I’m sure I could have handled that bull. Did you notice how he had slowed down in pushing off with his hind feet when he started his charge? Veneno had really punished him with the lancing. Slowed down like that, I could have managed him.”
Ledesma looked at me and nodded. Then, turning to Pepe, he asked: “And what brings you to our table?”
“At the tienta, Señorita Penny—” He pronounced her name with a delightful, musical accent.
“Don’t you know her last name?” Ledesma asked coldly.
“She told me, Penny,” the young man said hesitantly.
“You don’t know her last name, but you come here—”
“Señor Ledesma, she invited me.”
“If her father were here, you’d ask his permission, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes … yes. I would look for him, but she said he’d gone home.”
“And left her in my care. I am—what you might call—her sobresaliente father.”
With his adroit use of this bullfight term, which specifically identified the young would-be matador, the critic warned the aspirant that he must not pursue this matter of escorting Penny Grim, but the Oklahoma girl did not feel herself bound by this threat from the critic.
“I asked him to take me to see the celebrations,” she told us, pointing to the plaza and the carousel.
Suddenly everyone’s attention was deflected by the appearance of the two Leal brothers,
“Is he still in the hospital?” a blonde asked.
“Is he badly wounded?” cried another girl.
“Will he be able to fight again?” Their questions tumbled out in a mix of Spanish and English, and after some minutes of confusion, the two Leals allowed the girls to drag them off into the heart of the plaza. From the hotel doorway, their father, white-haired Veneno, watched his sons coping with a situation that occurred frequently: surrounded by adoring young women, mostly from the States.
“That is what you must not be,” Ledesma said coldly as the obstreperous girls disappeared beyond the statue of Ixmiq. And to the young torero he said with even more coldness: “You have no engagement tonight, Pepe. I am this girl’s father, and she is too young to accompany you unattended.” As I listened to this astonishing performance I realized that he was speaking like the dutiful son of a Spanish family of good breeding. He was protecting his younger sister, who could not be allowed to wander off without a dueña, and if Mrs. Evans had been thoughtless enough to leave the girl without proper chaperoning, he, Ledesma would have to correct that social error.
Penny, of course, did not see it that way. She had taken a strong liking to this highly acceptable young man. She had been thrilled by his magical performance with the sticks, and since she had for some time in Tulsa been accustomed to going out at night with her various youthful suitors, she expected to do so here. So despite what Señor Ledesma said, she proposed to keep her date with the sobresaliente, but when she rose to do so, she came up against twin stone walls: Spanish custom and bullfight tradition.