Mexico

by James A. Michener

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

  Gómez, 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 Gómez might have for fighting in the capital, dragged Lucha away, and when she was safely outside the plaza, they returned to Gómez 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 Gómez, 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?”

  Irizaba was terrified of her. He kept moving about behind his big desk to protect himself. She would have torn him apart.

  “How did it end?” I asked, and Gómez deferred to Lucha, who said: “The fat one told me: ‘What I’m willing to do, since the matadors are already here, I’ll give each of you two seats—free, you understand—for the fight,’ and he pushed two of them at me.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, and she said bitterly: “Didn’t even touch them. Saw the location and flicked them away with my fingernail, told him: ‘You would! Cheap seats way up there. For a full matador. How shameful. You give us good seats down there, or—’ ”

  “Did he?” I asked.

  “He knew he had to.”

  “And did you take them? I’d have thought—”

  Gómez responded: “Of course we took them. A matador can never see enough bulls. Always something different. That’s how he learns.” Then he told me something I did not know: “And quite a few times in bullfight history some matador just watching in the stands has stepped in, with no cape, to handle a bull who has leaped in among the crowd. We save lives, because with bulls you can never be sure.”

  Bullfighting is an ugly business. For a few lucky men it offers a life of brilliance if they are either brave enough or canny enough to dominate it. But for most it is a sad, bitter, dirty existence that lasts only a few years and that leaves men either maimed or emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives. Here is the story, as I heard it from Juan Gómez and his friends, of how he became committed to this dismal world.

  Even now I could hear his soft voice with its heavy Indian accent as he spoke reluctantly of his early years: “I was born in a small mud but near a village beyond the pyramid. Altomec Indians, no land of our own. Father, always white cotton pants, you know the kind, rope for a belt, very thin shirt, front ends tucked over the rope, back ends flapped across skinny bottom.” He said that for some years his stolid father had fought in the armies of General Gurza, hoping to win for his family a better life, but all he had gained from this excursion into the revolution was an additional cotton shirt. He had been present at the second sacking of Toledo, but while the more prudent of Gurza’s men were stripping the cathedral he had been trying unsuccessfully to rape a nineteen-year-old girl. He had thus missed his one chance to profit from the Revolution, for the other soldiers got the cathedral’s rich silver ornaments.

  In the month of Juan’s birth the Gómez family was overtaken by retribution, for a large group of conservatives, banded together by priests and calling themselves Cristeros—Men of Christ—swept over much of Toledo state sacking villages and murdering everyone suspected of having served with General Gurza. One evening at sunset the Cristeros came roaring in from the plains of central Mexico and in an act of supreme irony shot Juan’s father.

  I say this was ironic because in those last wild and evil years that plagued Mexico, when good men were driven to murder, the peasant Gómez had taken into his home a Catholic priest who would otherwise have been assassinated by the old remnants of Gurza’s rebellious army, and for three years the Gómez family had hidden this priest, dressing him as an ordinary workman and allowing him, at great peril to themselves, to conduct Mass in their mud hut. It was surprising that Gómez had done this, for he had been a vigorous if ineffectual revolutionary who had at one time hated priests, but he explained his action simply: “I am tired of killing. Priests should not be killed.”

  The matador said of his father: “When he was raping and tearing down churches, God watched over him. But when he repented and protected a priest in our home, God killed him. He sent men who shouted, ‘Long live Christ the King!’ as they murdered and burned, and they shot him.”

  The Widow Gómez was left with two sons, Raúl, aged five, and Juan, aged one month. The priest stayed with them for several months to help till the fields that the dead man had worked for others, and for some time the boys grew up thinking he was their father. But when the Cristeros departed, some old Gurza partisans reported the priest’s existence in the village, and government forces, strongly anti-Catholic, came to find him and perhaps shoot him, but by the time they arrived Father López had been warned and had escaped. I can speak with some authority about these particular matters, because when Father López fled from the village in northwest Toledo state, he was taken in by my family at the mine, and I remember that he occupied a room next to mine. Father López said that it was a miracle that he, a hunted priest, should have been saved first by a soldier from General Gurza’s armies and next by a Protestant who feared Catholics. My father, who had rescued Padre López after a midnight ride in an old Ford car, growled that there the similarity ended, “because you are not welcome to conduct any Masses in this house.” Nevertheless, the redoubtable priest did hold secret Masses in what was called the bull-cave, and to them came the workmen at the mines, even though some were known to be spies for the revolutionists.

  How the Widow Gómez, now left with two sons and no man to help her, survived, the matador never told me, but in those dreadful years it was not uncommon for half the women of a village to be widowed. Husbands who had supported the revolution were killed by the Cristeros, and those good men who were suspected of being Catholics were shot by the revolutionists. Take my own typical case. Before I was fourteen I had seen the city of Toledo occupied four different times and burned twice. I had seen not less than twenty men hanged and numerous others shot, and later I had watched some of the most gentle men and women I had ever known rise up in the Cristero movement and strike back with murderous fury. That was the Mexico of my youth, and it was the Mexico in which Juan Gómez grew up with his widowed mother.

  The boy had one year of education. Then the village school was burned by the Cristeros, and he roamed the countryside earning what pennies he could. Of these years he told me: “I could sign my name but I couldn’t read. Still have trouble with big words. But a kind neighbor told me: ‘Go down to Toledo and find the Palafox ranch. They hire boys.’ So I walked south, with one pair of pants and one shirt. Cold day in January when I walked through the big gate. Didn’t even know it was a place where they raised fighting bulls. Never seen one.”

  At the small stone bullring inside the ranch many automobiles were parked and a crowd of ragged boys like himself milled about. “What’s happening?” he asked. A boy said: “La tienta,” and when he asked “What�
�s that?” the boy said in astonishment: “If you don’t know, why are you here?” He said: “To get a job,” and the boy said impatiently: “Armillita is testing the cows.”

  “Who’s Armillita?” he asked.

  Staring at him in amazement, they pushed him from the gate, deeming him unworthy of being allowed to enter if he did not even know who Armillita was. A few moments later the gate was opened from inside and a big round man whom he later knew as Don Eduardo Palafox appeared. “Let the boys in,” he commanded, and the men who had been keeping the ragamuffins out now graciously admitted them.

  “Sit over there,” a gruff man ordered, “and if one of you dares to jump into the ring, his throat will be cut.”

  At this moment a red gate on the far side of the little ring swung open and for the first time Juan Gómez watched an animal charge into an arena. A flush of excitement swept over him as he saw a tall Indian walk up to the fighting animal and begin to dominate it with his red-and-yellow cape. In his motions there was not only grace but discipline in how he controlled his body as he suspensefully evaded the animal’s horns.

  “Is that Armillita?” he whispered to the other boys. Their looks of contempt satisfied him that it was, but he still did not know who Armillita was. So he selected an intense-looking boy at his right, older than the rest, and asked: “Who is Armillita?” And the boy replied without taking his eyes off the matador, “The best.”

  This did not satisfy Juan, who asked further: “Does he always fight bulls?”

  The boys almost interrupted the testing of the animals with their wild shouts. “That’s not a bull, you idiot!” one cried. “He can’t tell a bull from a cow!”

  The interruption had attracted Armillita’s attention, and when the time came for a rest he pointed to the boy at Juan’s right and asked: “Want to try?” In a flash the boy leaped the low barrier, ran to the matador and grabbed a cape. Then, with the tall professional at his back, he approached the two-year-old cow. The other boys sat silent as their companion walked slowly and with the exaggerated posture adopted by matadors—head back, torso arched—marched toward the waiting animal. Suddenly there was a charge of black fury as the tormented cow sought something she could hook into, but the boy anticipated her motion and with some skill led her into his cape.

  “¡Olé!” shouted the crowd that had come to see the testing. This inspired the boy and four more times he led the cow past his belt, leaning into her flanks as she sped by. On the sixth pass he dropped the end of the cape, which he had been holding in his left hand, gave a pirouette and sent the animal chasing the end of the sculptured cloth as it etched an arc across the sand.

  “¡Olé!” the crowd called again, and the boy was sent back to his perch with a nod of approval from Armillita himself. Obviously, the young man had been practicing for many months and obviously he was intending to be a bullfighter. The other boys treated him with respect. He did not return to sit alongside Juan Gómez, but sat apart, flushed with excitement.

  Toward the end of the afternoon Don Eduardo Palafox, whom the boys near Juan identified as the owner of the ranch, announced that he intended testing a three-year-old bull that he was planning to assign to the cows as a seed bull, and he was requesting the two matadors to try this animal to see if he had the courage required of any bull chosen for this important purpose. The crowd murmured its pleasure, for many testings would go by without the rancher’s throwing out a real bull for the matadors. Such an event was equally significant to the owner of the bull, for it represented a substantial gamble. A three-year-old fighting bull worth more than a thousand dollars in an arena was being thrown into the trial ring, and if the animal proved himself inadequate for seed purposes there was no alternative for an honorable rancher but to destroy him, for the bull could never be sold to fight in another ring. At three a bull had such capacity to learn, and could remember so long, that if he were tested today and allowed at some future date to go into a real fight, he would remember what to do and he would almost surely kill the matador.

  There was, of course, one alternative that a disappointed rancher could adopt if he was wholly unscrupulous: he could lie about the bull, deny that it had ever been tested, and sell it to one of the inconsequential plazas, where third- and fourth-rate matadors would have to battle it, at enormous risk. No ranchers were completely honest—Don Eduardo, for example, repeatedly lied about the ages of his bulls and was often guilty, just before the weighing in, of feeding them salted grain so they would drink an abnormal amount of water, which would illegally inflate their weight—but those ranchers with scruples refused to send out once-fought bulls, and Don Eduardo had never done so. Furthermore, even if he had been so inclined he could hardly risk it now, for to throw out a real bull in the presence of Armillita and the other matador meant that the testing had to be honest; too many informed people were present to watch the progress of the bull and what happened to him in the event he proved cowardly. Therefore, when Don Eduardo announced the testing of a potential seed bull there was honest excitement, for he was gambling a thousand dollars.

  The pleasant informality that had marked the testing of the young cows was now gone. Serious men on larger horses tested their pics against the stonework. Those with capes moved into carefully studied positions and Armillita stood well behind a barrier, biting the edge of his cape with his teeth. The cows were dismissed. A bull was about to appear.

  “It was at this point,” Gómez told me, “I realized the bull had been led into a cage directly beneath where I was sitting. I could feel the force of the bull as it charged against its prison. The wood I was sitting on trembled, and the other boys pressed their eyes to cracks to see the animal that had such power. I didn’t. I allowed the messages sent by the horns as they smashed into the timbers to pass into my body. I felt a new, strange power. The world was shaking. Then from a spot just below me the bull thundered into the plaza.”

  He was a handsome young animal of about six hundred pounds. His black horns were wide and sharp. His tail was sleek, with a tangle of brambles at the tip, and his flanks were marked with blood from minor scratches he had inflicted on himself while fighting the sides of his cage. He was a real bull, and with a mighty rush he charged at the various bits of cloth that the fighters flashed at him in planned sequence from one safe spot after another, so that all could inspect his qualities.

  After he had made six such charges, throwing his left foot in the air as he tried to trample and hook at the same time, Armillita moved into the arena and with his cape began a series of exquisite passes that showed the bull off to great advantage. It looked as if the animal would be as good as everyone had hoped.

  At this point Armillita withdrew and allowed the junior matador to try his luck, and with him, too, the bull was excellent. Then came a surprise, for Armillita motioned to the boy in the stands and said, “Now try a real bull.” Nimbly the tense young man leaped down to a part of the ring well away from where the bull was charging the barrier. Taking a cape that hung from an inside wall, he started the traditional march of the matador toward the enemy, his feet moving cautiously, his hands jerking the cape in rhythms to attract the bull, and his husky, fear-filled voice calling, “Eh, bull! Eh, come here!”

  The young bull charged and Juan saw that the boy froze into position, held his hands low, and somehow took the bull past. The crowd shouted its pleasure and the boy tried again, but this time the wary bull turned too soon and caught the young fighter with the flat of his left horn, tossing him far to one side. Instantly two things happened. The bull, having found his target, wheeled abruptly, reversed his direction and came thundering back at the fallen boy. But the trained matadors, anticipating this, nimbly interposed themselves and with their flashing capes lured the bull away.

  This was the first time Juan had seen anybody knocked down by a bull and he was impressed with three things: the power of the bull, whose sudden flick of a horn could send a human being sprawling; the deftness with which the real matador
s slipped in to lead the animal where they wanted it; and the courage with which the fallen boy leaped to his feet, recovered his cape and continued fighting the bull as if nothing had happened. This awe-inspiring sequence of events affected Juan Gómez so profoundly that, without realizing he had done so, he at that very moment committed himself to bullfighting, inwardly vowing: “I will know bulls. I will be quick. And I will be brave.”

  But what happened next gave his first experience with the bulls that touch of tragedy which is never far from the bullring. The successful beginner climbed back to his perch in the improvised stands, flushed and joyous. The real matador finished with a few ornamental passes, and the man below with the big books in which the ranch records were kept looked pleased. They had found a new seed bull, and that was always a happy moment, for a fine bull might sire as many as three hundred fighting bulls and bring glory to his ranch. For example, Soldado, the Palafox bull who hid in our cave at the Mineral, had, in the years from 1920 through 1930, fathered 366 splendid bulls, at least eleven of which were remembered in Mexican annals as immortal—that is, they had either killed matadors in the ring or had fought so stupendously that they had been accorded, in death, the adulation of the crowd and two or more turns about the sand they had defended so well. Now it looked as if Palafox had found another in the historic sequence of great sires that reached back through Soldado and Marinero to the ancient bull ranches of Spain.

  But when the picadors came out, on big horses and with real barbs, the young bull became frightened. From a distance he looked as if he intended to charge, but each time he drew near the horse and the man he grew cautious. Then, when he did charge halfheartedly, and felt the barb cutting into his shoulder, he leaped, recoiled and retreated.

  A silence fell over the plaza, for the spectators were seeing something they wished they were not. They pleaded with the bull to show his courage. “Now, now!” they coaxed as he edged reluctantly toward the next horse. Armillita led the bull repeatedly right into the flanks of the horse, but cautiously the bull drew back, refusing to give battle. In the ring no bullfighter looked anywhere but at the bull. By no trick or gesture did any spectator betray the fact that he recognized a bull as a coward. That was for the rancher to decide. The fighters acted as if they had a bull with spirit, and no one shrugged his shoulders in disgust, although each was inclined to do so.