Mexico

by James A. Michener

  Striding back to the bull, who stood ready to defend himself again, Juan Gómez whispered, “All right, little bull! You have brought me glory, and now I shall—”

  There were voices behind him. The rancher was shouting, “Gómez! Come back! We want that bull.”

  The Indian did not fully understand and thought that he was being warned not to attempt his third effort on such terrain, for the bull was indeed dangerous. But he felt that he knew bulls better than the senior matadors, better than the rancher and certainly better than the peóns. He would kill this valiant beast where he stood, and he prepared to do so.

  Then strange things happened. One of the senior matadors dashed out from the barrier and with a red cape started swinging the bull away, and two peóns grabbed Gómez from behind. Dazed, he looked up at the improvised stands and shouted, “It’s my bull!”

  The gate to the corral was swinging open and two oxen were crowding into the plaza. Juan interpreted this to mean that the bull was being taken away from him alive because of his bad luck in killing, and he fought to break loose from the men who held him. He was determined to kill the animal before it could return to the corrals, and then he saw Cigarro’s ecstatic face. The wiry peón had lit a big cigar and was smiling like a gargoyle.

  “They are sparing the life of your great bull!” he shouted. “What a superb afternoon!”

  And then Juan Gómez saw the thing happen, the thing that tears at the heart of a bullfighter. The oxen nudged at the perplexed but defiant bull, and at first the brave beast was willing to fight against them, for he was still determined to defend his life against all adversaries. But then he smelled their indifference, tentatively poked at one with his left horn, pawed the earth and looked for the men he had been fighting. Finding no one, he ran in a small circle as if proclaiming his sovereignty over that plaza, and dashed with terrible force at some unknown enemy in the darkness.

  The crowd cheered as the valiant beast disappeared, for they knew that he would be used in later years as stud for the ranch. Gómez, at last realizing what was happening, whispered, “Go off, little bull! You find me a manager.” He then walked slowly and with dignity across the ring to where Cigarro waited by the barrier.

  “Six months, bowlegs,” the peón was assuring him expansively, “you be matador, contracts Plaza de México. But that one you keep away from,” he warned, indicating with a toss of his ugly head the singer, who was watching everything.

  Cigarro kept his promise. In late December of 1950 Juan Gómez took his doctorate with bulls of Palafox in the great ring at Mexico City. When he marched out of the darkness he gasped, for towering above him in the concrete bowl were more than fifty thousand people. In the front row, with a bright shawl over the barrier, as if she were a real Spaniard, sat Lucha González wearing flowers. Cigarro was in the alleyway, reprieved from wearing the suit of lights any longer, now that he was a full-fledged manager, and when the time came for Gómez to dedicate the first bull of the afternoon, the one handed him by the senior matador as a traditional gesture of sponsorship, it was inevitable that he offer this animal to Lucha. His gesture was popular with the crowd, and his kill was good. He gained no ears but he was accorded a turn around the huge plaza while some in the stands bellowed, “¡Olé!” feeling that they were assisting at the birth of a real matador.

  After that nothing happened. Juan Gómez became merely one of thirty-one Mexican matadors. He had no wealthy patron to underwrite stories about him for the major papers or to force him upon the provincial impresarios. His reputation was not sufficient to warrant repeated invitations back to Plaza México, where a matador had to have a name in order to fill the huge arena. He was merely another matador of no great distinction, and the remorseless grind resumed.

  A fight in Torreón in April was followed by another in Orizaba in early June. A hurried phone call from a village of two thousand in remote Jalisco would suffice for July, and in August there might be nothing. He was not important enough to be invited to the Festival of Ixmiq, and the years went by with one more Mexican matador at the near-starvation level. In spite of this he was required by bullfighting convention always to look sharply dressed, to pay bribes to the newspaper critics, and to convey at all hours a sense of success and grandeur. More than some, Juan Gómez was able to accomplish these requisites, for he had three factors operating on his behalf.

  In Cigarro, his manager, he had a solid friend. This peón had experienced a life much like Juan’s, working for matadors who underpaid him and before bulls that had often sent him to the infirmary. He had been far too ugly to marry a wealthy girl and financially unable to marry any other kind, but through all his years of loneliness he had kept alive one vision. In Mexico City, not far from the great plaza of the cathedral, there was a café frequented only by bullfighters, actors and newspapermen. It was called the Tupinamba, and around its white marble tables swirled the gossip of the bullring. During his long apprenticeship Cigarro had been unable to afford the Tupinamba, and had had to content himself with watching its exciting life from the sidewalk, but he had sworn that someday he would be a famous matador with the best table at the Tupi. When that vision faded because of his ineptitude with the bulls, he decided to become a peón in the regular troupe of some successful matador, which would entitle him to sit in the Tupi, but since he was not a first-rate peón he failed to achieve this dream also. He then built his life on the hope that in his fifties he would stumble upon a young fighter of promise who would require a manager, and then he would sit day after day in the Tupinambo, organizing his matador’s professional career. This last dream he had achieved, and he now lounged each day in the Tupi, issuing statements of great gravity. With the little money he had acquired during the preceding thirty years, he played the role of manager, giving his matador an emotional security few fighters enjoyed. He never doubted that someday Mexico would discover what a classic matador it had in Juan Gómez, and until that fateful day he, Cigarro, would continue to wait in the Tupinambo for the best contracts available in the smaller plazas.

  The two other factors that bolstered the ego of Juan Gómez were self-generated. First, it was becoming widely acknowledged that although he was not particularly accomplished with either the cape or the cloth, as a killer of bulls he was the best Mexico could provide. In his fights this small Altomec Indian demonstrated what the culminating moment of the afternoon should be as he stood before the bull, profiled, kicked out his left knee, and threw himself like a man bent on suicide right over the horns.

  The second factor was a towering sense of honor. When he walked into the Tupinamba to speak to Cigarro, he moved with visible dignity, imparting a clear sense of his status as a matador. He was a wiry bundle of aggressions and defenses, and for the slightest slur he would fight anyone. In the bullring he allowed no one, not even Armillita himself, to tell him what to do. For even if a matador of the top category tried to tell him how to behave in the ring, Gómez would say coldly, “When you kill the way I do, I listen.” León Ledesma, the critic, wrote of him: “He is the only man in Mexico, since the death of General Gurza, who can challenge the entire nation to a fist-fight merely by the way he enters a room. He is a man of honor.”

  But there was one area in which Juan’s carefully cultivated sense of honor did not operate, and this lapse caused genuine anguish. He had been picked up by Cigarro in January of 1950, and two weeks later he had stolen the ugly man’s girl. At first, adhering to some kind of code of ethics, Lucha González had tried to suppress her preference for the young bullfighter, for Cigarro had been good to her and had been largely instrumental in getting her started as a singer-dancer. But in the end her passion for the self-possessed young Indian had been too great, and one night in Torreón she had brazenly moved herself and her one bag out of Cigarro’s room and down the hall to Juan’s.

  The hurt to Cigarro’s ego would never heal. On that first miserable night he had tried to kill his matador, but Gómez, bewildered by Lucha’s action,
had first held him off, then beaten him about the face. Cigarro, bleeding badly, had then tried to kill Lucha, but she started screaming and the police were called. The affair got into the newspapers, for bullfighters’ brawls always made good reading, and later on it was largely this highly publicized love affair between Lucha and Gómez that enabled Cigarro to arrange the contracts that Gómez did get.

  And so this curious trio, held together by poverty, ambition and the love of bullfighting, moved back and forth along the lesser highways of Mexico. Cigarro, having at last found himself a matador, stayed with Gómez even though he daily suffered from the indignity of having had his woman stolen. The Indian, having attained for himself a life that was not totally wretched, stayed with his surly manager, for he suspected that he would never find another half as capable. And Lucha González supported both of them with her ersatz flamenco. Pathetically loyal to her two bullfighters in Mexico City, if she ever made it to Seville she could have said good-bye to them without shedding a tear.

  For nine years the trio fought bulls and managers and hotel owners and moving picture directors who refused to give Lucha the singing roles to which she felt entitled. They grew older, and Cigarro definitively passed the age at which he could again don the suit of lights. Lucha grew no prettier and her whiskey-soaked voice became harsh, which made her imitation flamenco sound better. And Juan Gómez scurried back and forth, always seeking the bulls. He was now thirty-two years old, an age when successful matadors in Spain have already retired, and he had never known real success. He still awaited an invitation to fight in Spain or Peru, where there was good money, or at the Festival of Ixmiq. Yet he never grew disconsolate. Cigarro told him: “No man in world kill the way you do.” And that was enough.

  Then, in early 1960, Cigarro was sitting at his usual table in the Tupinamba, flicking cigar ashes and trying to look important, when a flunky from the impresario of Plaza de México drifted by, pretending not to see him because it was important that Cigarro open this particular conversation.

  “Hello, Moreno!” the ugly one called.

  “Oh, it’s you!” the tricky negotiator replied, and the discussion was launched. Moreno intimated that the forthcoming fights were to be the best ever held in Mexico City. “Like the days of Manolete,” Moreno suggested. “This young fellow Victoriano Leal! Ahhhh!”

  “You’ve got him booked?” Cigarro asked warily. In this business nothing could be certified until the day after it had happened and the critics had been paid off.

  “Fight after fight,” Moreno assured him. “When Leal’s through with us he’ll be the richest bullfighter in the world.”

  “High fees, eh?” Cigarro asked evenly.

  “Fantastic. Five thousand, six thousand dollars for one afternoon,” Moreno said, picking his teeth.

  Cigarro looked at him coldly: “And how much you pay my torero?”

  Without changing his blasé expression Moreno said: “Nine hundred dollars and not a penny more.”

  Cigarro stalled for time. “That’s what you pay picadors.”

  “Of course,” Moreno replied.

  “What I thinking”—Cigarro stalled, for much was at stake—“was the people all want to see Victoriano. I admit you frankly my torero not so popular—”

  Moreno suspected that this might be a trap, but he did want to clinch one point, so he quickly said: “Quite honestly, Cigarro, we couldn’t afford two other first-class matadors on the same bill with Victoriano. There isn’t that much money in Mexico.”

  “So you plan get my torero almost nothing,” Cigarro joked.

  Moreno laughed expansively: “In Morelia, where I come from, nine hundred dollars is not called nothing.”

  Cigarro laughed with equal heartiness, then pointed at the negotiator with his cigar. “It also good we show our torero Plaza México again.”

  “My friend,” Moreno agreed warmly, “those were my thoughts exactly. What an afternoon for Gómez! Fifty-five thousand people. How long’s it been since he’s fought before a crowd like that?”

  “What I thinking,” Cigarro suggested slowly, “was everyone want to welcome Victoriano back home his successful tour, why don’t you give public a real thrill? Victoriano, Gómez, mano a mano?”

  At the sound of this phrase, which meant hand to hand as in mortal combat, with only two matadors, instead of three, each fighting three bulls in a deadly duel, Moreno snapped to attention, for he saw the possibility of a series of such duels across Mexico. Abandoning his easy comradely air, he asked cautiously, “How much would Gómez expect? For killing three bulls instead of two?”

  “Only thirteen hundred dollars,” Cigarro replied evenly. He knew that this would prove an alluring offer and was not surprised when Moreno asked abruptly, “Can you wait here?”

  “I’m here all day,” Cigarro replied.

  “Don’t leave,” Moreno snapped.

  When he was gone, Cigarro began to sweat.

  “Virgin the Hills,” he prayed, evoking the patron of his childhood, “let him fall my trap. Let him give us hand to hand, and my torero make great scandal—for fifty-five thousand people to see. Let there be riot, challenge, or maybe something. Dear Virgin … dear Virgin … let there be something furious.”

  That night when Cigarro finally reached Juan Gómez, he found that the impresario had already informed the Indian of the mano-a-mano fight with Victoriano. He said to Gómez: “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 Gómez 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; Gómez 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 Gómez 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 México. 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 Gómez to make much and we probably leave Plaza de México 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, an
d 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.”