Mexico

by James A. Michener

  “Back to the good old hospital sheets?” Ledesma asked.

  “Yes,” he said in a very low, controlled voice. “And one month later I fought my first fight with picadors and look—” Like every would-be matador, Ricardo carried in his wallet a set of glossy photographs, which he now produced. It was too dark to see them well, for the electric light was not strong, but we could discern a vast hulk of animal rushing past a slim young man. “Look at those feet,” he cried exultantly. “You ever see feet firmer on the ground than those, Mr. Clay?”

  I replied that in the catacomb I couldn’t see, and he said: “You can take my word for it.”

  Mrs. Evans asked, “Do you get good marks in college?”

  Ricardo relapsed into his former style: “Well … you know how it is … like mostly A’s … blah … blah …”

  “Stop that!” Mrs. Evans cried impatiently. “How can a boy your age talk like that?”

  “Because it is mostly blah,” he replied coldly. “My old man’s a jerk. You saw him tonight at dinner. Like Chester, he thinks he can solve things by getting into a Civil War uniform and belting somebody. He loved Mexico because the peóns are like serfs. He says the strong have got to rule. He was absolutely mad about war, but he wangled a deferment. My mother is one of the most beautifully stupid women on earth. They invented television because she was around. She takes westerns seriously and honest-to-God wonders if the hero will win this week. When horses stumble on the TV she cries, and she dreads Thursday nights because she’s afraid Eliot Ness might get shot.

  “That was my world, Mrs. Evans. So I leave it and go to Korea, and half my buddies are killed in a war that makes no sense at all. You ever hike down from a reservoir in North Korea in mid-winter, just because some colossal jerk wearing stars made a mistake? So I’m back home safe in San Diego trying to con other kids into joining up for future wars and my old man writes me, ‘I hate to think of you.…” I could quote you the whole letter by heart, Mrs. Evans, but he was humiliated at the golf club because the war in Korea was still going on while his son was recruiting in San Diego. You want to hear the end of that letter? And may God knock off the rock above this cave if I miss a word. ‘Richard, it is the duty of every man in uniform constantly to seek out the enemy and destroy him. Your place is back in Korea and I’m going to see the general and get you a transfer back to real duty.’ ”

  He paused to stare at the hanged man, then asked, “Can either of you even imagine what Korea was like in winter?”

  “I was there,” I said.

  “During the retreat from what we called Stream X?”

  “Yes.”

  We looked at each other in the gloom and Mrs. Evans asked, “Was it that bad?”

  Ricardo ignored the question and said with some humor, “You saw me tonight when Chester tried to start a fight. To me it makes no difference what one more jerk in the world does—including my father. That time when he yelled at me, ‘What in hell are you doing with a flute?’ I started laughing, and I laughed so hard that everyone in the coffee house joined in and I jumped around the floor shouting, ‘I am the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river.’ And my old man just stood there. And here I am, among the dead.”

  “And in the future?” Mrs. Evans asked.

  “Oh, no! You don’t trap me on that one. The future is now. This festival. These fights. And nothing more. I’m not going to think about what it all meant when I’m stowed away standing here with these dummies. Nor what I’ll be doing when I’m forty, because the way the world is going I probably won’t be around when I’m forty. I’m here now. That’s enough, and I’m going to fight bulls. No one’s going to stop me. And do you know why I’m willing to risk everything to do it?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Stepping away from the hanged man, he walked a few steps toward the distant exit, then said: “I’m doing it, I think, because I want to bring the world back into focus. In the United States we talk about peace, but actually we love war. Look at the way men like my father idealize the Civil War. They’re hungry to go riding off with the cavalry and always will be. My mother says, ‘Wouldn’t it be horrible if the Russians atom-bombed Detroit someday?’ If it doesn’t happen before she dies she’s going to be disappointed. She’s even drawn a map calculating how many poor Detroiters are going to be killed. Six hundred thousand was her latest guess, but of course Moscow’s bound to lose a lot more. We aren’t at all the way we say we are, or the way newspaper editorials write about us. We’re violent. We love war.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Mrs. Evans snapped.

  “I went back home once and while I was in Boise my mom sat before the television and watched murder, rape, acid throwing, suicide, kidnapping, gunplay and strangling. I don’t know how many people were killed—more than twenty just while I watched with her. And every time a gun went off, she hunched up her shoulders and punched at the screen. Whenever a girl was hauled out of a car to be raped or cut up she moved forward to see better. And after a week, a month, six years of this, she says to me, ‘How can you be mixed up with something so violent as bullfighting?’

  “So I’ve decided,” he said, “to slash through my father’s irrationalism and my mother’s sentimentality and get face-to-face with the essence of the matter. I don’t want to waste my life watching mayhem on television. I don’t want to make my father feel good by fighting on his behalf in Korea. I don’t want to bomb Moscow and I don’t want six hundred thousand people to die in Detroit. I want to be a man standing alone, and I will stake my life in an honorable game of death against an honorable enemy who will kill me if he gets a chance. Like you, Mrs. Evans, like my mother, like my father, like my country, I’m preoccupied with death, and I’ve wrestled with the old bastard several times. I know that in the end he’s got to win, but with me he’ll have a damned good tussle.”

  We had been speaking at the far end of the corridor, so now I turned and walked slowly back toward the entrance, and as I passed along the lifelike figures it was as if they were introducing themselves. “I’m Pablo, the apothecary, in 1726.” This stout fellow was “Miguel, butcher, 1747.” Then came the carpenter, the learned lawyer who argued cases in Mexico City. Then came a crisp voice: “I’m Enrique, the engineer who repaired the aqueduct after the flood in 1759.” The nurse who saved lives during the plague, the seamstress, the nun María de la Luz, who was sainted because of the care with which she brought abandoned infants to Jesus. Then came the deep magisterial voice from a dominant figure in a red cape, “I am the first Bishop Palafox, builder of the plaza.”

  The names, the stories intoxicated me and for a moment I had the feeling that they were calling me to come back to their city, to tell their story. “Your father did a grand job on the historical significance and the battles, but we were the people to whom those things happened. Come back. You knew us. You can see us. You hear our voices. We are still alive, in your mind and heart.”

  Deeply moved, I walked on. Ahead waited the Chinese woman in her resplendent costume. I leaned forward, hungry to hear her words, but the spell was broken by a living woman who took my arm and whispered, “You seem as enchanted by her as I am.” It was Penny Grim, and she asked as she moved closer, “Who was this one?”

  I had no intention of sharing a family secret, but the emotional moment made me recall wounds that I would have preferred to forget: “In our family plantation near Richmond, Virginia, we had a large doll, a copy of this figure. Same stance, same rich fabrics. I never saw it, of course—it was long before my time. But I heard my father describe her. The doll played an important role in getting the Clays down here, from Virginia to Mexico.”

  “Is that all you’re going to tell me?” she asked, and I said, “I’ve already said too much.” I heard others approaching between the ranks of the dead, so, bowing to the China Poblana, I joined them.

  When we reached the steel gate that protected the cave, Ledesma stopped, wrapped his black cape around him and spoke: “Farewel
l, good citizens of Toledo. You, Judge Espinosa in the robes of which you were so proud. You, road-robber García with your neck awry. And you, adorable lass from China. Give us your blessing as we return to our petty festival, aware that far sooner than we think we shall be standing here with you, erect and proud through the centuries.”

  Ledesma switched off the light. The steel gate clanged shut, and then the wooden one. We climbed up the stairs to rejoin the cypress trees, and in the Cadillac as we returned to our hotel there was little talk.

  When we reached the Terrace at two in the morning we found the two main tables occupied, by the Leals and by Gómez and his troupe. Beside them in the front rank were two of the three matadors who were fighting tomorrow, accompanied by their assistants. All rose to greet Ledesma, who gravely acknowledged the gesture of respect. There was not the customary exuberance that one associated with the Festival of Ixmiq, for when a matador has just died in the ring a deep solemnity settles over the bullfighting fraternity, and men sit humbly in silence, reflecting on the fact that tomorrow they too may die. In the distance mariachis sang and, closer at hand, Lucha González shouted her flamenco songs.

  After we had seated ourselves at some of the rear tables and ordered some good Mexican beer, I indicated to the waiter that he must serve Señor Ledesma first, and with my right hand passing low over the floor as if it held a red cloth I said, “Señor Critic, I send you your beer with a pase natural.”

  Ledesma laughed condescendingly and said, “I’m afraid you have it backwards, Clay. You can’t give the pase natural with the right hand.”

  “What’s that?” Veneno called from his front table. He was a classicist who honored the traditions of bullfighting. “Did I hear someone say the pase natural cannot be given with the right hand?”

  “Of course it can’t,” Cigarro broke in from his table. He knew only what he had been taught in Mexico. “Everybody knows it can be given only with the left hand,” and the two main tables were now engaged in battle.

  Victoriano, who felt obligated to support his father, leaped to his feet, grabbed a tablecloth and a knife, which he used as a sword, and showed clearly that the pase natural could also be given with the right hand. Whereupon Juan Gómez jumped up from his table to support Cigarro: “See! It must be with the left hand, always the left.”

  Now Ledesma entered into the debate. “Any fool who claims the natural can be given with the right hand is an idiot.”

  I shouted in Spanish, “Cossío himself says clearly that the natural can be given with the right hand,” and, with a table cover jerked from a nearby table I illustrated what the outstanding authority on bullfighting had said.

  Now there was a flurry of cloths and knives and extended hands, and Ricardo Martín was arguing in excited Spanish with one of the Leals, and old Veneno’s booming voice echoed back and forth, as he bellowed, “The natural can be given either way—left is better but right is also allowed.” At the height of the argument Mrs. Evans tugged my arm. “What’s it all about?” she asked.

  “People take bullfighting seriously.” I laughed.

  All the matadors were now engaged, and many of the bystanders. Table covers and handkerchiefs and bare hands wove patterns through the night air like figures in a ballet, and she said, “It’s refreshing to see men taking a question of aesthetics seriously.”

  “What are you doing?” Cigarro yelled at me in Spanish. “Telling this woman that the pase natural can be given with the right hand?” He shoved me aside and with grandiose gestures, posturing as I had never seen him do before, he showed Mrs. Evans the true natural, according to his training. To my surprise, he was quickly supported by Ledesma, the man he hated, who explained, “Mrs. Evans, only foreigners and damned fools contend that this pass can be given with the right hand.”

  “Then Cossío, the smartest man who ever wrote about bullfighting—”

  “Don’t quote Cossío to me!” Ledesma shouted.

  “Look, Cigarro—” I began to reason with him, but with disdain the gnome-like man pushed me away and growled with deep contempt, “I would rather not speak with a man who claims that pase natural can be given with the right hand.”

  Turning his back on me, he chose to form a partnership with his enemy Ledesma, and shoulder to shoulder this unlikely pair moved off to defend their left-hand-only orthodoxy against misguided men in another part of the Terrace. And so the tension of this night of death was broken by good-natured threats, wild flapping of table linen, loud shouting and impassioned debate.

  10

  SPANISH ANCESTORS: IN SPAIN

  During my college years I frequently found myself in trouble with certain professors, ardent Presbyterians mostly, who promulgated with vigor the notorious Black Legend, which held that Spanish culture, especially as manifested in Spain’s colonies in the New World, was somehow degenerate and certainly less moral than what either England or France exhibited in their territories. The college’s handful of students with Spanish names or backgrounds chafed under this constant denigration because they knew it to be grossly unjust.

  “This is a Presbyterian college,” a boy from Ecuador explained. “There’s a strong influence of John Knox, and he hated Catholics. To be a good Presbyterian you almost have to despise Catholic Spaniards.”

  When I pointed out that although I had a Spanish background I was a Protestant, the group wanted to know how that had happened and I said, “As long as I was under my mother’s domination I was a Catholic, but after they separated my father made me a Protestant, like him.”

  A very wealthy boy from Bolivia whose father owned tin mines voiced an opinion that he believed settled the matter: “The hatred comes from Spain’s introduction of the Inquisition at about the time Columbus discovered the Americas. Protestant textbook writers do love to include in their history books those horrible woodcuts of Catholics burning Jews and Protestants alive.” I remember that when he said this he sighed: “It’s a cross we have to bear, because it did happen,” but the boy from Ecuador was more contentious: “What infuriates me, in England and New England they burned and hanged just as many witches as we did Protestants and Jews, but the professors don’t harp on it. They don’t fill the textbooks with pictures of those infamies. We get the Black Legend thrown at us, but they get praise heaped on them because of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth.”

  The young men from South America elected not to fight back against their professors in an attempt to defend Spain against the infamous charges of the Black Legend, but I was not reluctant to engage in the battle. “I’m proud of what Spain gave to the world. Cervantes, Velázquez, bringing civilization to the New World.” I doubt that I changed any professorial attitudes, for the Black Legend was a convenient cudgel with which to lambaste Catholic Spain, and the Inquisition was an institution easy to hate, but my public defense of Spain did gain me friends among the Hispanic students.

  One evening, after a particularly vigorous attack by one professor and my valiant attempt at refutation, the young fellow from Bolivia asked me: “Sometimes you say you’re an American, sometimes a Mexican. Who are you? And why do you defend Spain so vigorously?”

  “I’m both, American and Mexican Indian, but spiritually I’m heavily Spanish. And I know what I’m talking about, better than any of the professors, because the Inquisition touched my family with a cruel and heavy hand. They talk abstract principles. I talk reality.”

  It was late in the winter of 1524 in Salamanca in western Spain that Mexico became linked to my Spanish heritage. This is how it happened:

  The University of Salamanca, which then stood in premier position, was playing host to a convocation of learned men from Europe’s three other principal universities: Bologna, in Italy; the Sorbonne, in France; and upstart Oxford, from England.

  This particular convocation had been summoned to deal with interpretations of religious matters that were of interest to the Catholic world, particularly the schismatic effect of occurrences in Germany, where the m
onk Martin Luther had been causing trouble. When the more weighty concerns of Church doctrine had been settled, the professors turned their attention to a curious letter that had been sent from Antwerp, then as preeminent in trade as Salamanca was in learning. It had been submitted by a group of merchants who were perplexed by a matter of business morals and who sought guidance from the professors. The letter read, in part:

  What confuses us in Antwerp is this. If the broker Gregorio fears God and wishes to live within His law, but if he also makes his living as a broker and wishes to prosper, how must he deal with the merchant Klaus who comes to him one day and says, “Broker Gregorio, next week begins the Fair of Mid-Lent here in Antwerp and to conduct my business I require one thousand ducats which I don’t have. Do you give them to me in cash and I will repay them three months later at the May Fair at Medina del Campo in Spain.” To this request of the merchant, the broker Gregorio replies, “I will give you the thousand ducats here in Antwerp but when you repay them three months hence in Medina del Campo you must pay me not only the thousand ducats which you owe me but one hundred more to cover my expense in transferring the money, my risk of loss, and my salaries to my assistants.”

  We desire to know, learned doctors, whether the action of the broker Gregorio in supplying the money and charging for the risks he is taking falls under the category of usury, which is forbidden by Holy Writ, or whether it is not, as we merchants hold, a necessary and permissible exercise of business and thus excused from the condemnation which is properly placed on lending money at interest, which we admit is forbidden by the Bible.