Mexico

by James A. Michener

  But before the façade could be erected—it cost four million pieces of silver, what with the renewed carvings and decorations inside—it was necessary for the lay branch of the family to take action, and they did so with spectacular results. In 1737 Ignacio Palafox, of the Spanish branch, was managing the small group of mines. But, like all his ancestors, he still sought the mother lode, which reason told him had to be somewhere in the vicinity.

  On returning empty-handed from his ninety-sixth excursion into the surrounding hills, he came upon a rise of ground from which he could look down upon the valley of Toledo and its pyramid. He turned his donkeys loose to graze and sent his servants home with the horses while he stared down at the mines from which a modest amount of silver had been eked out since their discovery in 1538. Infuriated by his family’s two hundred years of failure to find the bonanza, Ignacio Palafox reasoned, “Why not approach this problem from an entirely different prospect? If, as we’ve always thought, there is a hidden lode, where would it have to be if its inconsequential portions cropped out where our present mines are?” He pointed to each of the mines as it stood on church ground and tried to visualize what the structure of the subterranean areas must be, but no pattern evolved.

  “It’s haphazard,” he concluded.

  He turned from the valley and looked at his donkeys as they grazed the hillside, and they moved about in haphazard fashion, one following another’s tail, the other moving away by himself. “That’s good for donkeys,” he reasoned, “but suppose that the distribution of silver is not haphazard. Suppose that there has got to be a system?” He reviewed all he knew about veins and deposits but could deduce no logical pattern. That night he did not come down from the hills but stayed behind with his donkeys and for three hard days and nights tried to visualize what the interior structure of the known mines must be in relationship to a mother lode, and toward the evening of the last day a new concept came to him and he said firmly, “We’ve always been wrong in assuming that the lode would be in the center of these casuals. Perhaps it’s off to one side and they erupted upward, drifting off in obedience to some internal gravity.” And when he studied the land afresh he saw that at the surface it had a slight but definite slope from west to east. “It’s got to be back there,” he shouted, “where we’ve never looked!” And that was the genesis of the deep shaft going straight down more than nineteen hundred feet that my father and grandfather developed and supported in later years, and which now stood abandoned at the Mineral.

  Ignacio Palafox dug for nearly six hundred feet without striking silver, and his family concluded he was crazy. His uncle, the current bishop, encouraged him to proceed, but before he gave him anything more than moral support he struck a firm bargain with the miner. “If I supply you with the funds,” the bishop proposed, “you must promise that with your first silver you will beautify the cathedral.”

  “I’ll pay for the paint and a little gold leaf,” Ignacio promised.

  “It isn’t a little gold leaf that I have in mind,” the bishop replied. “If I advance the money, and if you find silver, I shall want to tear out the whole interior of the cathedral and rebuild it with silver, and I shall want to tear down the old façade and replace it with marble.”

  The plans were more than Ignacio could digest and he asked weakly, “How much would that cost?”

  “Four million pesos,” the bishop said, “but in the end you and I would have the most beautiful church in the world.”

  “To imagine spending millions when you have nothing is easy,” the miner said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “But I mean to collect,” the bishop warned, and the compact was drawn. In the ensuing years the bishop protected Ignacio from the insults of the family, and his prayers kept the miner hopeful. In 1740 the prayers and the pickaxes bore fruit, and Ignacio Palafox uncovered, at a depth of six hundred feet straight down, the lode of silver that was ultimately to produce $800 million. It was distributed according to the agreed proportions: 60 percent to the king; 30 percent to the Mexican Church; and 10 percent to Ignacio Palafox. Of his share the first four million pesos went to fulfill the pledge to the bishop, who, in accordance with the building mania of his ancestors, ripped out the interior of the cathedral, tore down the façade, and replaced them with the silver and marble of which he had dreamed.

  These were years of fulfillment for the Palafoxes. Ignacio, thanks to his gifts to the king, was created a conde, and the counts of Palafox played an important role in Mexican history, bolstering a colonial regime that was increasingly threatened by other Mexicans who wished to free themselves from the domination of Spain. The bishop who rebuilt the cathedral was made an archbishop and the joke became current in Toledo that from the days of Fray Antonio to the present, the miter had passed directly from father to son.

  Two traditions of the family were maintained: on the count’s side male children married only Spaniards; all able boys, whether Spanish or part Indian, were sent across the Atlantic to the University of Salamanca, where there had been Palafoxes in attendance since before the year 1300. By the 1960s, of course, there were no more counts in Mexico, such titles having lapsed after the death of Maximilian, but in Toledo they were still thought of as nobility and they behaved as such. I’m proud to be a member of their family, although up to now I’ve done little to add to their nobility. But as I finished my review of their gallant record I swore I’d do my best.

  12

  THE BARBERS

  After the death of Paquito de Monterrey in the ring and our nocturnal visit to the catacomb it was two o’clock Saturday morning by the time I returned to my hotel room. As I was preparing to go to bed I chanced to look out the window and was surprised by what I saw. Three men were slipping quietly out of our hotel and heading for the parking lot, and it was the composition of the trio that riveted my attention. Old Veneno Leal was in the lead, with Chucho and Diego trailing, the latter carrying a canvas bag, but Victoriano, the star of their troupe, was missing.

  I had an instant response: “If those three are going alone, it certainly has something to do with bulls, some nefarious business that Victoriano must not be involved in. What could that be?” Then it hit me, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness something that few aficionados could ever see. Pulling on my pants and jamming my feet into shoes, I ran from my room, leaped down the stairs and ran out to the parking lot to intercept them.

  As I had suspected, they did not go directly there but started across the plaza as if heading for the cathedral, looked about to be sure no one was following, then doubled back quickly to the parking lot, where they climbed into their big cream-colored Chrysler, with Chucho at the wheel, Veneno up front beside him and Diego in back. The powerful engine choked, then caught, but before the car could move I jumped out of the shadows and grabbed the open window at the driver’s side.

  “You going to do a little barbering?” I asked. The three toreros looked at one another and Chucho shrugged his shoulders.

  “How did you guess?” Veneno asked.

  “Easy. I saw you leave Victoriano behind, so I knew it must have to do with bulls, something illegal maybe that he couldn’t afford to be involved in. Then I remembered that the corrals here in Toledo have room for only two sets of bulls. So it was clear that Sunday’s animals would have to arrive sometime tonight. And you’re off to intercept them. Right?”

  “For a norteamericano, you’re pretty smart,” Veneno growled.

  “Can I come along? I’ve never seen a barbering job.” Again Chucho shrugged, whereupon Diego released the latch of the rear handle with his foot and kicked the heavy door open for me.

  “Climb in,” he said, and we whirled into the night.

  When we left the parking lot it was two-fifteen in the morning, but mariachi bands still roamed the streets and stragglers followed them, so we had to edge our car down the street that led up from the cathedral. Once we were free of the mob Chucho floored the accelerator and with a giant roar we ripped past the
open-air chapel, where only a few hours before I had been sitting with Mrs. Evans. We threw dust over the last few houses of Toledo, then tore out onto the highway that led west toward Guadalajara, a hundred and forty miles distant. Like all bullfighters, the Leals were aggressive drivers.

  In the right front seat, like the grizzled captain of a ship, sat old Veneno, white-haired and rugged in the flickering light that flashed back into the car from trees or poles. Beside him, at the wheel, sat the peón Chucho, an expensive coat slung over his shoulders like a cape. His thin, handsome face resembled a Renaissance portrait from the brush of Ghirlandaio, its features hard and clean, its subdued colors harmonious.

  Chucho was a skillful driver, one who obviously loved the feel of a surging car as its power spoke back to him through the vibrations of the steering wheel. His sensitive hands adjusted constantly, taking the big car into one curve after another, always at high speed yet with reasonable safely. But when we had left behind us even the villages that clustered at the edges of Toledo and had crossed the hills that rimmed the high valley, we came upon those long straight reaches that characterize Mexico’s rural highways, and Chucho surprised me by stretching himself far back in the driver’s seat, working his shoulders as if they had become stiff, and taking his feet off the pedals that controlled the car.

  “What are you doing?” I asked in Spanish.

  “Cruise control,” he explained, indicating a knob on the steering wheel, which he had activated and which would now keep the heavy Chrysler pounding down the road at a constant speed.

  “How fast are we going?” I asked.

  “Eighty,” Chucho replied; I saw that the speedometer had not been converted to kilometers and that it indicated eighty miles an hour. Occasional farms leaped out of the darkness as we whipped past; occasional cattle looked up to see what was roaring past them. The car sped on automatically, cutting its gas feed back a bit when going downhill, increasing it whenever it felt an uphill pull. Down straightaways we roared at eighty. Around gentle curves we squealed at the same speed, and Chucho kicked out the cruise control to regain command of the car only when we approached corners that were so tight that the speed simply had to be cut. Even then, the banderillero took at sixty-five curves that I would have been afraid to take at forty.

  “Where do you plan to intercept the bulls?” I asked once when we had negotiated such a curve and the car had been handed back to the cruise control.

  “The village of Crucifixión,” Diego, who was sitting beside me, explained.

  “Are you going to do the job there?”. I asked.

  “If the foreman isn’t along,” Diego replied. “If he is, we’ll have to arrange something else.”

  “Who’s Palafox using as his foreman now?” I pursued.

  “As always—Cándido.”

  When Diego said the name I happened to be looking at Veneno, sitting stonily in the front seat, and I saw the old picador’s jaw muscles contract.

  “If Cándido’s along,” I said, “your trip’s wasted.”

  “Maybe,” Diego replied. “But also maybe we can do business with the old bastard.”

  “With Cándido?” I laughed.

  “With somebody,” Veneno growled from his front seat. Without taking his eyes off the road, he said, obviously for my benefit, “After what happened today, we’re going to speak to those bulls.”

  “You mean … Paquito?”

  The three bullfighters crossed themselves and Veneno growled, “Yes. We are going to talk with the bulls of Palafox, and if Cándido tries to stop us—”

  There was an ominous pause, and now I could see Chucho’s jaw muscles tightening. None of the Leals seemed willing to comment further on the subject, so I said, “I ask this as a writer—that is, as one who knows nothing really about bullfighting—don’t you sometimes reflect that what you’re thinking of doing tonight is …” I paused with a show of delicacy.

  “You mean, do we think it’s dishonorable?” Veneno asked.

  “I didn’t use that word,” I countered, “but it’s a good one.”

  “I’ll tell you what honor is,” Veneno said, still keeping his eyes on the road, and it was fortunate that he did so, for we now approached at great speed the cutoff that would take us south from the Guadalajara highway to the Palafox ranch. It was along this road that we would intercept the bulls at the little village of Crucifixión. To get onto the road we had to negotiate a rather sharp turn to the left and it was apparent that Chucho was reluctant to take the Chrysler away from the cruise control. With the slightest flick of his white head, the old picador indicated to his son that the turn was coming up, and with an equally controlled reaction Chucho indicated that he saw it and that he intended taking the turn at his present speed. This knowledge frightened me and I started to lean forward to protest, but I was restrained by the cool reaction of the bullfighters. They just became a little more attentive, their shoulders slightly tensed, as the car hurtled toward the turnoff. It seemed to me that Veneno and Diego were asking, I wonder if Chucho can manage this? But it never occurred to them to interfere with what he was doing.

  Flexing his shoulder muscles and twisting his neck, Chucho adjusted himself in his seat, moved his left foot nearer the brake pedal in case some emergency forced a slowdown, and prepared to swing the surging car into the turn. At a steady eighty miles an hour we roared up to the cutoff point, edged purposefully to the right, started slipping sideways in a skid, then regained control and thundered ahead on the new road. It was a moment of exquisite uncertainty, followed by a sensation of triumph, and once the turn had been negotiated and we were safe on a road that would not be used much at night, Diego advanced the speed of the cruise control so that we roared south at ninety miles an hour.

  “People who follow bullfights,” Veneno resumed, as if nothing had happened, “are much concerned about honor and dishonor, and about the worst word you can use for a matador is to say that he is one without honor. Chucho can tell you sometime how it feels to have that word thrown at you.”

  “A very bad bull in Guadalajara,” Chucho observed simply. With his left hand he massaged his right shoulder.

  “The bull gore you in the shoulder?” I asked.

  “He gored me everywhere.” Chucho laughed. “That is, he should have gored me everywhere, but I jumped over the fence.”

  “In 1912,” Veneno began, staring as if mesmerized at the ribbon of road unrolling in a straight line before us, “I went to Spain as picador for the great Mexican matador Luis Freg, may his fighting soul rest in peace.” The Leals crossed themselves in memory of one of the bravest and most inept men ever to don the bullfighter’s uniform. “Freg was a man of such honor as we see no more. Sixty-seven major horn wounds while I worked for him. In the hospital—out of the hospital—great fight on taped-up legs—back into the hospital.

  “Well, in 1914 he was so badly wounded that he simply couldn’t fight, so he allowed me to hire out with other matadors and I got a good job with Corchaíto, the Little Cork Boy, and, believe it or not, he was even braver than Luis Freg. It’s about his honor that I wish to speak.

  “Corchaíto wasn’t brave because he was stupid or ignorant. You happen to remember how he exploded onto the bullfighting scene? On a day I’ll never forget he was fighting a hand-to-hand with Posada, and on the second bull—they were boxcar Miuras—poor Corchaíto was severely wounded, but he stuffed a rag into the wound and continued to kill his bull. Big ovation and into the infirmary. Then on the third bull Posada, who was a much better fighter, looked at the audience after a fine pass, and the bull took him from behind. With three swift chops the bull killed him, right there in the ring.

  “With the senior matador dead and the junior badly wounded, the authorities wanted to suspend the fight, but Corchaíto came out of the infirmary and said, ‘These people paid to see six bulls die, and they will see it.’ Painfully wounded, he killed Posada’s deadly bull, then the fourth, the fifth and the sixth, after which he collapsed
and was carried back to the infirmary near death.”

  There was a silence as we hurtled southward past sleeping farmhouses, and after a moment I reflected, “I’d say that Corchaíto had honor.”

  “Yes,” Veneno mused. “But that isn’t the story I was going to tell.”

  “You mean there’s more?”

  “With a man of true honor there’s always more,” the old picador said “When I asked Freg for permission to work for a Spanish matador, he leaned up from his hospital bed and asked, ‘Which one?’ and I replied, ‘Corchaíto,’ and he said, ‘Good. The Little Cork Boy’s brave, and I’d hate to see you work for anyone who wasn’t.’

  “So that day in August, we’re fighting in Cartagena with two of the best matadors of the day and Corchaíto says to his troupe, ‘Today we’re going to kill bulls in the grand style.’ On the fifth bull of the afternoon, named Distinguido, he performs magnificently with the cloth—naturals, past the chest, windmills—and he’s sure of at least one ear and more likely two. He delivers a good sword thrust, but it was just a little back and to the side. Nevertheless, the bull falls down, mortally wounded, and it’s only a matter of the last dagger thrust to finish him off.

  “But Corchaíto, as I explained, was a man of honor, and he calls his men together and says in a loud voice so that the people in the sun can hear, ‘Get that bull back on his feet. When my bull dies he dies right.’ We pulled and hauled and got the bull back on his feet, and this time Corchaíto gave what I thought was a magnificent kill, but when the bull was down the Little Cork Boy made a great show of studying the exact point where the tip of the sword went in, after which he yelled at us, ‘Get the bull up again. I’m a matador, and I kill with the sword.’