Mexico

by James A. Michener

  “So although the bull was legally dead, we prodded him until he staggered to his feet to face the matador for the third time. But you know how fast bulls learn in the last few minutes of the fight. So when Corchaíto came in for the third time with what would have been the perfect kill, this weary, tormented, dying bull neatly hooked him in the groin, twirled him three times on the horn, and threw him against the boards, where he caught him with both horns, tossing him in the air twice more. When we carried Corchaíto to the infirmary, I put my picador’s hat over the gaping hole in his chest so that people in the stands would not faint, but black blood gushed out from the edges of the brim, and before we reached the infirmary he was dead. His heart had been ripped completely in half. That’s what honor does for a man.”

  We thundered down the dark road, carried along by a force that seemed wholly outside ourselves and quite beyond our control. Once we came upon a flock of chickens sleeping on the warm macadam, and for a moment I thought that Chucho would kick out the cruise control and try to lead the Chrysler past the frightened and bewildered fowl, but he apparently decided against this because, gripping the wheel a little tighter, he held the car on its course. There was a wild flutter of chickens, a slamming of feathered bodies against the windshield, but the car sped implacably on. I was reminded of the time Benito Mussolini, in his early days, was being driven at top speed through the Italian countryside with an American newsman—Ralph Ingersoll, I seem to remember. The car struck and killed a village boy, but Il Duce commanded the driver to drive on. To the American he said, “Never look back,” and I realized that if Chucho had struck a child and not a chicken he, too, might have driven on without bothering to look back.

  “How many men have you seen die in the ring?” I asked the old picador, who was brushing feathers from his coat.

  “First my father. And then Corchaíto. Ignacio Sánchez Mejía. Balderas. Three beginners whose names you wouldn’t know, three banderilleros, two picadors and a cushion salesman. Today, Paquito.”

  We said no more on this subject and for some minutes we tore along the empty road. Whenever we approached a farming village I thought, We ought to slow down for places like this, but Chucho kept the cruise control set at seventy, and as we sped along we sometimes caught sight of astonished peasants who had been sleeping alongside the road until awakened by the thunder of our approach. With sleepy, unbelieving eyes they watched us flash by.

  It was about two miles north of such a village that the critical moment of our ride occurred. We were going down a straight stretch of road, completely empty and safe, when from our left just a little distance ahead appeared a lumbering cow about to cross the highway at a point where, if we maintained our speed, we would have to smash into her. In the split second that we four saw the cow, I was the only one who cried out. In English I shouted, “Watch out!”

  If we struck this animal at seventy the car would be destroyed and we would be killed, and if we swerved to avoid her we would be thrown on the pebbled shoulder of the road, where we would die in a smashup.

  None of the Leals spoke. They did not even move. With eyes straight ahead, they watched tensely as we careened down on the doomed cow, which now occupied most of the roadway. I could not guess what Chucho would do, but at the last moment he calculated precisely where the cow would be, and with a sudden deft turn of the wheel he elected to take us to the right, past the cow’s nose. With exquisite skill he kept our left wheels on the macadam, which prevented the car from skidding, and threw our right wheels far out onto the shoulder, which allowed us to squeeze past safely. Even so, the body of the Chrysler struck the cow in the head, breaking her neck instantly and throwing her wildly back across the highway.

  The big Chrysler stopped weaving and settled down. Chucho checked the cruise control and satisfied himself that it was delivering its required power. Diego rolled down his window to study the left side of the car, after which he rolled it back up and reported, “Dented.” Old Veneno continued to stare straight ahead.

  The Leals had the delicacy of not referring to my outcry at the moment of crisis, and as I studied them I realized that as bullfighters, who faced catastrophe every working day, they had not been much concerned by the near accident. Chucho Leal was driving a high-powered Chrysler at night, and it was his responsibility to negotiate whatever dangers might arise. If he had not long since proved himself equal to the job, Diego would have been at the wheel, and he would have slid past the cow in exactly the same way. Bullfighters were men who lived with danger and had a fine sense of its limits. I did not enjoy such driving nor approve of it, but if one elected to travel with bullfighters, that was the kind of driving one got.

  “Are you claiming, Veneno,” I finally asked, “that a man like Corchaíto should not have behaved with such honor?”

  “That’s not the point at all,” the old picador said “Men like Luis Freg and Corchaíto could not have behaved dishonorably if they wanted to. They had no choice. You ever see Freg fight? Sometimes when we got to the ring we had to lift him out of the carriage, his legs were so stiff from bandaging.”

  It was obvious that we had exhausted this subject for the present, so in silence we approached the little Altomec village of Crucifixión, where the Leals hoped to intercept the bulls of Palafox. From the outskirts it looked like any other grubby little place inhabited by several hundred people, and as our car entered the central area I saw that Crucifixión had the usual plaza with a gloomy saloon lit by a naked bulb. To my surprise we did not stay in this area but rolled quietly down a side street until we reached an inconspicuous spot from which we could survey the deserted plaza.

  “We’ll wait here,” Chucho said.

  “Diego,” Veneno commanded. “See if the bulls have arrived.” From his rear seat the young bullfighter slipped out of the car, carefully closing the door so as to make no noise. As he moved forward he studied the spot where the cow’s head had struck. Then he casually sauntered into the plaza.

  “What I was trying to say,” Veneno abruptly resumed, “is that we should always keep in mind what the end of honor is. My father thrilled Mexico, but the bulls killed him. Freg had honor, and the bulls used him as a pincushion. Corchaíto—he had honor and it broke his heart. That boy today had lots of honor and tonight they’re singing songs about it, but he can’t hear.”

  The practical view of honor, so similar to Falstaff’s and just as reasonable, made me speculate on what my interpretation of the principle was. I suspected that a defining characteristic of my life was that I had always shied away from the crucial responsibilities—my marriage, the challenge of writing important work or trying to, even the decision as to which country I belonged to. I was no Corchaíto willing to die to prove a principle. I wasn’t even a Juan Gómez fighting his relatively little battles with a dignity I had never had. Reflecting on all this, I was not proud of myself, but I pursued the matter no further, for in the square a commotion arose. I assumed that the bulls of Palafox had arrived, but I was mistaken. From a village even smaller than Crucifixión, as I later learned, a group of Altomecs had carried a workman who had fallen from the roof of a church and nearly killed himself. They had been hiking since sundown and twice the injured man had fainted. Now it was near three in the morning and he was unconscious, probably near death.

  “It’s somewhere over here!” the bearers shouted, pointing toward the plaza exit that led to our street, and the crowd surged our way. One man broke away from the others and ran up to our car asking, “Is this where the doctor lives?” Before we could answer, the others had caught up with him and we saw the pale face of the wounded man.

  “I’m a stranger here,” old Veneno said gravely, “but I’ll ask.” He slowly opened the car door and got down onto the sandy roadway. His austere demeanor impressed the Altomecs and they followed him like dutiful servants.

  “Halloooo there!” Veneno cried in a deep voice. “Where does the doctor live?”

  There was no reply, and he shoute
d again. A light came on and a woman screamed, “Stop that noise!”

  “Where’s the doctor?” Veneno cried again, this time in an imperious tone.

  “You’re in front of his door,” the woman bellowed. “Dr. Castañeda.”

  The Indians banged on the doctor’s door and a light went on upstairs. While we waited for the doctor to appear, I studied his office. It was a low adobe building with windows filthy from the flyspecks of nearly half a century. Above the door, bullet scars showed that General Gurza’s men had once rampaged through the nearby plaza firing their revolutionary shots at random, and nearly a fourth of the tiles that had once framed the doorway had been broken or stolen.

  A downstairs light flicked on and the door creaked open, displaying a barefoot, suspendered old man who was almost as dirty as his windows. He looked exhausted but he made a decent show of welcoming the Altomecs and their miserable burden.

  His office consisted of an earthen floor, a few chairs of unfinished lumber and the inevitable framed photographs of women in black and men with mustaches, all covered with the soot of ages. The inert body of the workman, who looked to be near death, was gently placed upon a rickety uncovered table and Dr. Castañeda began undressing him. Both the thigh bone and the shin of the right leg were broken, so that the leg swung outward like a scimitar, but what was more important, and what the doctor noticed immediately, was that some other bone had punctured the lower part of the man’s belly and now stood forth strangely white and free of blood. Dr. Castañeda shook his head, and the Indians, interpreting this sign, whispered among themselves.

  What happened next appalled me. The doctor went to a glass case such as shopkeepers use for penny candies, slid back the door, and started rummaging through a pile of filthy medical instruments covered with flyspecks and dust. Forceps, tongue depressors, scissors and hemostats lay jumbled together, and the doctor took whatever he needed from the pile, blew on it, wiped it on his shirt, and went to work. When the tool was no longer needed, it was pitched unwashed back into the glass case to accumulate more dust.

  Veneno whispered to me in his grave voice, “Now you can see why matadors dread being gored outside the big cities. Can you imagine having your guts operated on with those things?” His two sons studied the doctor with fascination, and when I saw Chucho cross himself, I thought: He’s probably experienced such medical care in a similar village.

  After his initial probing, Dr. Castañeda looked at the Altomecs and said, “There isn’t much we can do for this one.”

  One of the Indians grabbed the doctor’s arm and pleaded, “He must live! He has four children.”

  “Everybody has four children,” the old doctor replied. He rummaged in the glass case for another tool and I thought, Years ago this doctor tried to keep his instruments clean—the way he was taught. Now look at him.

  Wiping the tool between his arm and his left side, he approached the stricken man to try to force the protruding bone back through the stomach wall, but as he did so the man on the table groaned piteously, jerked his head twice, and died.

  “God’s blessing,” Veneno mumbled. The three Leals crossed themselves, and it seemed to me that in the filthy room at Crucifixión we had been closer to the reality of death than we had been that afternoon in the bullring of Toledo. A bullfighter may not actually court death, but he knows that he is tempting the Grim Reaper, so that death does not come unexpectedly, but a peasant working in his field has a right to expect continued life, at least into his sixties. When death strikes him arbitrarily, it seems more terrible. One of the peasants broke into soft weeping, as if it were part of him that had died. “His brother,” one of the Altomecs explained. “And well he might weep, for now he’ll have more children to feed.”

  Down the street from the plaza hurried two men bringing a priest, who was dressed in an ordinary business suit. “The father’s here,” one of the Indians announced, but the weeping brother said sternly, “No priest will touch my brother.”

  When the priest was advised of the brother’s stand, he hesitated and then turned to leave, but Dr. Castañeda threw his medical implements into the glass case, slammed the door shut and cried, “Father, when a man dies in my house I want a priest.” He elbowed his way through the Indians and took the priest by the arm.

  “Not for my brother!” the stubborn relative shouted. There was a scuffle, after which the protesting brother was taken away. Dr. Castañeda went up to the man, who was being held by three of the Altomecs, and snarled, “I’m not going to get paid, so he’ll die the way I say. He’s no longer your brother. He’s a corpse on his way to meet God.”

  “Not my brother!” the imprisoned Indian shouted. “He’s on his way to hell!”

  “Oh, shut up!” one of the men cried, clapping his hand over his friend’s mouth. The priest, ignoring an unpleasantness with which he was familiar, went about his duty of blessing the dead man and commending his soul to heaven, for which Dr. Castañeda thanked him warmly. But when the priest had gone, the brother broke away from his captors, rushed over to the table and spat upon the dead body.

  “He’s in hell,” the brother shouted. “Where he wants to be and where I want to be. He’s dead, and he’s left four children, and no pig of a priest can help him now.”

  Veneno startled me by striding across the dirty room and striking the brother across the mouth, knocking him into a corner. “Don’t you speak of death and priests like that,” the old picador said menacingly, crossing himself.

  We returned to the Chrysler and watched in silence as the Altomecs wrapped the dead body in a sheet and started the long hike back to their village. As Dr. Castañeda had predicted, no one had any money to pay him, so he brushed some of the dust off the top of his instrument case, surveyed his miserable office, and turned out the light.

  When the funeral procession had returned to the plaza, leaving us alone, I looked beyond the doctor’s office and saw how wretched this Indian village was. A garage displayed its broken tools, its dripping water faucet and its unspeakable toilet. A school, farther down the narrow street, was ramshackle, with broken windows.

  This was rural Mexico, almost as impoverished and ignored as the worst of what I had seen when reporting on Haiti. It infuriated me to know that the Mexican political party that had run the nation for most of this century had called itself something like the People’s Revolutionary Party and had loudly preached social justice for all, winning election after election on that windy promise, but when installed, had proved itself to be a callous oligarchy. A small group of buddies had passed the presidency from one to another, each coming into office with modest means and leaving after six years with hundreds of millions, usually hidden in Swiss banks. The so-called revolutionaries stole the country blind, allowing or even forcing the peasants to sink deeper and deeper into abject poverty. Few nations had been ruled so cynically, which was why so many peasants wanted to escape to the good jobs, houses and food in the United States. I was not proud of what my country had accomplished during my lifetime.

  And yet I loved this country, its color, its music, its warm friendships, its handsome cities so much older than those in the United States. I have often thought as I watched my wealthy friends enjoy their privileges that there was no country on earth where a young man of good family whose father had a government job from which he could steal a large amount of money could live better. Of course, he would have to blind himself to the gnawing poverty about him, but apparently that was easy, since so many did it.

  I had witnessed this phenomenon in Cuba in the 1950s, when the idle rich were cruelly indifferent to poverty, and it had not surprised me when Fidel Castro had been able to organize his revolution. I had ample reason to despise that same Castro of recent years, for on major matters he had lied to me, encouraging me to make a fool of myself in my reports from Cuba, but I had to admit his drawing power and feared that much of Latin America, always hungry for a savior, would imitate Cuba—even Mexico.

  Certain
ly, looking at this Altomec village of Crucifixión, I had to admit that my gallant Indian ancestors had been pitifully shortchanged by the twentieth century. The material rewards of industrialism had been slow to filter down to the Indians, and whereas Mexico City was lovely and Toledo unique in its charm, beyond them lay a thousand Crucifixións where the Indians were denied almost everything that was required for decent living. Even the names of the villages—Crucifixión, Encarnación, Santiago de Campostela, Trinidad—bespoke the betrayal the Altomecs had suffered, and when I compared the civilization they had built for themselves in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with what they had today, I felt they had a right to revolt.

  “Why do you suppose villages like this are so poor?” I asked.

  “Why?” Veneno snorted in Spanish contempt for anything Indian. “They prefer to live like pigs.” He spat out the window.

  “I will say this, though,” Chucho mused, pointing across the plaza to the towers of a church large enough to serve a population eight times as large as Crucifixión’s. “Beyond the church they have a fine country bullring.”

  “They do!” Veneno cried enthusiastically. “Remember the great afternoon you had here in Crucifixión, Chucho? Bulls of San Mateo.”

  “La Punta,” Chucho corrected quietly. “I’ll never forget.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence, during which I remembered that this notable fight had taken place when it was still uncertain whether Chucho or Victoriano was to become the matador. “You were very strong that day,” old Veneno reflected, and I wondered what Chucho was thinking, whether he resented the fact that his father had converted him into the peón, whether he ever experienced the pangs I sometimes suffered because I had wanted to be a novelist but had been sidetracked into journalism.

  Our cases were by no means identical. He had been ordered into secondary status; I had carelessly slipped into the security of a field I had not consciously elected. So my fault rested on my own shoulders, and yet … and yet, there had been my father’s unvoiced assumption that I could not do what he had done. It wasn’t a clear case at all. Chucho’s father had yelled at him; mine had smiled at me, indulgently.