Mexico

by James A. Michener

  When the Mass ended near midnight I approached the poet Aguilar, who had been writing in the shadows, and said in Spanish, “Excuse me, sir, but I heard that you work in Don Eduardo’s museum. I’m taking some visitors from the States around Toledo. Could we one day …?”

  “Of course!” the tall, angular man said with the enthusiasm that amateurs have for a field in which they have done some work. When we were all outside the cathedral he said, in English, “It’s a museum Don Eduardo has supported for years. Not very good, but it’ll show you what bullfighting’s all about.”

  “Where did you learn such good English?” O. J. Haggard asked.

  “Worked as a druggist in Texas,” the poet replied.

  “You Mexicans put us to shame,” Haggard said.

  “We like to talk,” the poet laughed. “To think of being locked up in Texas without being able to talk the language would drive a Mexican crazy.” Impulsively he stopped us under a streetlight and asked, “Would you like to hear the poem I have just completed about the death of Paquito?”

  “Oh, yes!” Mrs. Evans cried.

  “We’ll go into the bar,” Haggard suggested, pointing to the cantina where Lucha González sang.

  “Poems are not for bars,” Aguilar said stiffly. “At least not this poem.” He spoke quickly, switching back and forth between English and Spanish, which I didn’t bother to translate.

  “Make a circle for the poet,” Ed Grim cried, and something in his voice betrayed the contempt he felt for both Mexicans and poets. We all sensed this, so Mrs. Evans quickly said, “Stand here by me, where the light’s better,” and I said, “Señor Aguilar won first prize last night in the big poetry contest.”

  “He did!” Mrs. Evans repeated. “Señor, may I congratulate you?” She said this so simply, with such exquisite rightness, that the poet had to forget the earlier insult. “It was an ode,” he explained, “to our local beauty queen. She was the prettiest girl I saw yesterday. You are the prettiest tonight.” The other women clapped.

  “And now the poem,” Mrs. Evans said.

  “It’s in Spanish, of course,” Aguilar explained. “I’ll read it in that language first, because Spanish is the language of poetry, and then I’ll give a rough translation in English, which is the language for making money.” Forthwith he launched into an impassioned recitation of his reactions to the death of a young bullfighter, and as his voice rose in the quiet night air, a crowd began to gather under the streetlight. When the poem reached its climax, I saw that from the terrace of the House of Tile had come the blond young American in the Pachuca sweater, and he listened intently as the agitated poet declaimed his threnody. When the last words had died away the young man pushed his way through the crowd, came up to the poet and said in hesitant Spanish, “Maestro, you have spoken for all of us.” Without waiting for comment, he abruptly left us.

  “In English,” Aguilar explained, “the ideas in the poem are more restrained, and of course they won’t rhyme.” As he started to improvise, it was natural that those in the crowd who could not understand English should start to drift away, but I was surprised at the number who remained to hear the awkward words:

  “Death, who lives near the aqueduct,

  Called for him a little sooner than for us.

  There was dancing and sweet candies and festival

  And death did a little jig with a red cape.”

  I could see Grim trying to figure this one out, and even Mr. Haggard was looking a little speculative, apparently of the opinion that whereas it might be pretty good in Spanish, in English it was pretty bad.

  “This next part gets rather difficult,” Aguilar apologized. He tried twice to put his words into an alien tongue, then crumpled up the paper and cried, “Damn English.” He sighed, unfolded the poem and tried again:

  “Water from the aqueduct where death lives

  Cools my sorrow. And the pyramid

  Is able to accommodate itself to one more loss.

  In the cathedral I try to weep, but there is dancing.

  Paquito is no more, but the bull’s head will be mounted.”

  He ended with a flourish and once more assured us, “In Spanish it’s better.”

  “I don’t get it,” Grim exploded. “I just don’t get it. What’s this about the aqueduct?”

  Señor Aguilar was not the least embarrassed by the question. “What I’m trying to do,” he explained patiently, “is to indicate that this young man from Monterrey was killed in Toledo.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so?” the oilman asked.

  “It’s got to be done with symbols,” the poet expounded. “You don’t just say, ‘Paquito was killed in Toledo.’ ”

  “I would,” the oilman snapped.

  “That’s because you’re not a poet,” Aguilar said in Spanish. The crowd laughed.

  Aguilar translated his comment and, to show that he had enjoyed the oilman’s reactions, threw his arm about Grim’s shoulder and said, “Off we go to the Terrace for a goodnight copa,” and the poetry reading ended in harmony.

  To my surprise, Mrs. Evans, agitated by the afternoon tragedy, wanted to escape any frivolity at the hotel. “Could we,” she asked tentatively, “go back to that chapel?”

  “It’s midnight, but if you wish …”

  “I do.” She told the others, “I’ve asked Mr. Clay to show me the outdoor chapel again,” and the manner in which she spoke indicated that she intended going alone with me. At this Ed Grim cried, “Laura! He’s young enough to be your son!” She replied, “I wish I had a son like him.” And off we went.

  When we were seated on a tile bench in the small plaza that faced the outdoor chapel Mrs. Evans said, “That was an amusing remark Ed made about your being young enough to be my son. We’ve just come from Cuernavaca, as you probably know, and what impressed me there—throughout all Mexico for that matter—is the astonishing number of American widows who live in Mexico and who are invariably attended by handsome young American men from Yale and Princeton. Nobody ever told me this was going on.”

  “Were you envious?” I asked.

  The sixty-four-year-old widow laughed and said, “I might have been. Even a sensible woman might have been. It’s most flattering to be attended by an attractive young man. But one evening in the hotel I saw a particularly good-looking widow in her sixties, silver-gray hair and all that, who was accompanied by a broad-shouldered young god, probably in his late twenties, and I was thinking, how handsome they both are, when I realized that this young blond god was the son of a poor Oklahoma druggist. I had represented my husband on the committee that had selected him for a scholarship to Yale, where he had played football and done very well in his studies. It was the same boy, a boy of really outstanding talent, and here he was in Mexico, working as a paid escort.”

  “Good work, if you can get it,” I observed.

  “But not for a young boy with promise. I was so distressed that one morning I introduced myself to the young man, telling him of my past interest in his career, and he wasn’t the least embarrassed. ‘Who’d want to go back to Oklahoma?’ he asked. I pointed out that people of accomplishment lived there and he replied, ‘It’s all right if you like oil and heifers.’ He said that one week of Yale had convinced him that Oklahoma wasn’t for him. When I asked him why he hadn’t taken a job in New York or somewhere he said, ‘I may marry Ethel and then I’ll have a job in New York, just as you suggest.’ When I asked what, he said, ‘Managing her money—on Wall Street.’ I felt like telling him that Oklahoma was glad to be rid of him, but instead I started to cry, and do you know why? Not for him and for his lack of principle, but because the first substantial check I wrote after my husband’s death was my contribution to the scholarship fund for Yale. And this pathetic creature had won that scholarship. I had intended helping some deserving boy start in the world, and my good money …”

  She blew her nose and, regaining her composure, she said, “My visit to Mexico has had some rather emotional ove
rtones, as you can guess, but none equal to this day’s. I’d like to talk with that Ledesma man for hours. So many people you meet say nothing.” She pointed to the low arches of the outdoor chapel and said, “I lived with my husband for forty-two years, and until I heard Señor Ledesma chattering this morning I never even dimly understood what marriage was all about.”

  “I don’t recall his saying anything about marriage,” I replied, “although if you’re around him long enough you’re bound to hear him say something about everything.”

  “It was while he was talking about the cathedral. He said there were two entrances to any edifice. And of course there are, but in sixty-four years of life I didn’t discover this for myself.”

  “In what particular?” I asked.

  The widow sat staring at the strong low entrance to the fortress-church. She tapped her fingers against the tile bench and watched the night shadows play back and forth across the carved stones. At another bench a young couple were kissing and from the corner bar up the street we could hear the faint echo of Lucha González’s singing. It was a beautiful night and for a long time we said nothing. Then she observed, “There are two entrances to any marriage, the low, brutal, honest one down the side street and the highly ornamented, delicate one up front. And I never realized that his entrance was just as valid as the one I preferred.”

  I decided to let this comment stand by itself, for with my record I was certainly no one to comment on marriage, but Mrs. Evans followed up by observing, “In ten years—think of it, only five hundred weeks—I will probably be dead and this cathedral will still be here and this plaza and the ghosts of the Spanish soldiers who stood on those ramparts to fire at the Indians. I was fascinated by the bullfight today and by that gaunt poet, and the matadors. I think I shall die a sounder woman for having experienced today.”

  This was getting too deep for me, so I said, “We’d better get back to the hotel and have some supper.”

  When we reached the Terrace we found that the other Oklahomans had collared Ledesma, who sprawled in his chair explaining the day’s fight and any other topic that came up.

  Ed Grim cried, “Ah, the lovers back from the cemetery. Remember what the old man said to his wife, ‘When I think of our beautiful daughter laying out there in the cemetery, I almost wish she was dead.’ ”

  “Not funny,” Haggard said, making a place for us at the table that the Widow Palafox was about to cover with food.

  “I enjoyed your observations so much this morning,” Mrs. Evans told the critic, “that I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you started tonight.”

  “I’ve said nothing so far,” Ledesma assured her. “But later on I’ll be brilliant.”

  “He’s lying,” Haggard interrupted. “He’s been giving us a fascinating comparison of payola in Mexico and in the United States.”

  Delighted to be able to repeat himself, Ledesma said, “All I said was that I never write a word about bullfighting until I have been amply paid by the fighters I’m discussing. I feel that the men involved are better paymasters than some impersonal cash register in a newspaper office. When a bullfighter pays me, I’ve got to write interestingly.”

  “Don’t you ever wish,” Haggard asked, “that you could avoid all this … this …”

  “Sycophancy?” Ledesma asked.

  “I was thinking of back-scratching.” Haggard laughed. “Your word’s better.”

  “And yours more colorful.”

  “Thank you. But wouldn’t you prefer being paid a decent wage by your paper, instead of being bribed, so that you could write only the truth?”

  “There’s the problem,” Ledesma cried, spreading his hands. “In Mexico we feel that the simplest way to ensure relative truth is to pass around ample payola. The government does it, the Church, the businessmen, the movie actresses. For example, this morning Mrs. Evans here forced me into admitting that I preferred Juan Gómez’s style of fighting, but believe me I would never say so in public unless he paid me to do so. To me, payment sanctifies my judgment.”

  “We Americans find all this very disagreeable,” Haggard said.

  “But do you?” Ledesma countered. “I’ve watched businessmen of sixteen different countries come down here to Mexico in search of markets. And which ones, do you suppose, adapted themselves most quickly and easily to our system of handing out graft for everything? You norteamericanos. Invariably your people make the best crooks. For clever fraud I’d have to put the British first, because fraud requires finesse, but for downright thievery and corruption of public officials, I’d take a typical norteamericano every time. Ask Clay. He’s a Mexican.”

  The Oklahomans turned to me and I said, “I’d like to object to the bad character Ledesma gives us North Americans, but I can’t. I’ve recently come back from a long trip through Latin America and practically every aspect of daily living is controlled by blatant graft. For example, tonight when I tried to get my films off to New York I had to bribe the owner of the shipping office who claimed to have lost the key, the maid who said the electricity couldn’t be turned on, and the official who took it to Mexico City. So there is constant bribery. But the people who accommodate themselves most easily to it, and who become experts in the art, are, as Ledesma says, the Americans.”

  “Let me cite a case,” Ledesma began to expatiate. “This afternoon in the bullring a young man was killed.” He crossed himself. “Now every single act of that tragedy was manured in graft. The suit the young man wore had cost him double because of a crooked valet. The sword he used had been stolen from a richer matador. His salary had been manipulated by his thieving manager, and what I shall say about him in the paper tomorrow was paid for in advance. Could you find a more completely dishonest event?” He paused dramatically and looked at the Oklahomans. “Yes,” he said. “Not long ago in the United States a college with a good reputation went to a high school with an equally good reputation and said, ‘You have this fine basketball player. We need him to attract large crowds to pay for our posh arena. But his high school marks are low. Will you make them high enough so that we can admit him?’ The school raised the marks. The college lowered its standards. The coach paid the boy as if he were a professional. The boy took almost no classes but was nevertheless declared eligible. Everybody—how you say it—winked at everybody else, so what did the boy do? He entered into a compact with gamblers to throw important games. The gamblers paid off the police so they could bet freely and make a lot of money. And writers like me in your papers said nothing about the whole dirty business, although they knew what was happening. Do you know why such behavior is so much worse than bullfighting?” He stared at Mr. Haggard.

  “How do you know so much about basketball?” Haggard asked evasively.

  “Because I’m a philosopher, and it’s my business to know,” Ledesma replied. “And I also know this. Bullfighting corrupts only the fringes of society, the unimportant make-believe element. But your basketball scandals corrupt the very heart of your nation—the universities, the young men of promise, the police. And there is also this significant difference. In basketball nothing is honest. Everything has been corrupted from the university president down to the home of the high school player. In bullfighting every human element has been corrupted. Difference is, the bull remains honest, and since the lottery that determines which matador draws which pair of bulls might mean the difference between life and death, it too has remained incorruptible.”

  There was a long silence, and then Haggard, who was looking past my shoulder, cried, “There’s the young man!” and I looked around to see the blond American in the shaggy Pachuca sweater. Haggard rose and drew the young fellow into the circle, finding a chair for him and saying, “We owe you a real debt, young man. The Widow Palafox told us you gave up your room for us.”

  “She paid me double what I was paying to give it up,” the young man replied. Noticing the critic, he jumped to his feet and bowed. “You’re León Ledesma,” he said in Spanish.

&
nbsp; “I am,” the critic replied.

  “I’m Ricardo Martín,” the boy said, giving his last name the Spanish pronunciation by accenting the last syllable.

  “Is that an American name?” Haggard asked.

  “I was …” Once more the young man became inarticulate, and then, finally, he said, “Name’s Richard Martin Caldwell.”

  “Where you from?” Ed Grim asked.

  “Boise, Idaho.”

  “Marvelous country,” the Oklahoman said.

  “Good hunting, fishing, all that.”

  “What you doing in Mexico?” the red-necked man persisted.

  The young fellow thought for a moment and started to speak. No words came and he hunched sideways in his chair, as if he had decided not to reply. Then he saw Ledesma and said in a rush, “Came down here to be a bullfighter.”

  “You what?” Grim exclaimed.

  “I… well …” he fumbled, longer than usual, as if the explanation he had at the end of his tongue were too preposterous to throw out into a public discussion. “There was this G.I. Bill.”

  “What war were you in?” Grim asked with open contempt.

  “Korean,” the boy replied. Then staring forcefully at his questioner he added, “Marine.”

  “You were a Marine?” the Oklahoman shouted. “I was a Marine. Shake, buddy.” The two shook hands awkwardly.