Mexico

by James A. Michener

  “Chucho, do you ever regret—” I began, for as a reporter I had steeled myself to ask any question, however intrusive, but before I could finish, Veneno said bluntly, “Here comes Diego.”

  Running across the plaza with the easy grace that marks bullfighters, Diego looked about to be sure he wasn’t being followed, then ducked into our side street and whispered, “The bulls are here.”

  “Cándido, too?” Veneno asked.

  “Cándido,” Diego said with finality. “He’s at the saloon now.”

  In the darkness Veneno sucked in his breath, then snapped his fingers and asked, “Clay, you used to know Cándido, didn’t you?”

  “He worked for my father,” I replied.

  “Would you proposition him?”

  “About barbering?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Veneno said sharply.

  “He won’t listen,” I warned.

  “He’s got to listen,” Veneno insisted.

  “I’ll speak to him,” I said. “But he loves bulls the way you love your sons.”

  Veneno and I left the Chrysler and started walking toward the plaza, but we had gone only a few steps when the old picador halted and called for Chucho. “Cándido hates me,” Veneno reflected. “I killed one of his bulls once, an ugly beast. As a picador I had no right to do this, and he’s never forgiven me. You go, Chucho. To you he might listen.”

  We went up to the dismal little saloon, where a gang of late-night loafers had gathered to talk with the bull men, and I was approaching the ring of tables when I saw parked along the edge of the plaza a sturdy truck loaded with six rectangular boxes strapped with steel bands. Almost against my will I left the saloon and walked toward the truck, aware that I was being used in an illegal operation of which I did not approve. I knew that shaving horns was a nasty business, and I had come along only to see how it was done, but now I was being conscripted as an active participant, and I was ashamed of myself for being so compliant. When I went up to the boxes I could feel the terrible strength of the imprisoned bulls as they pressed against the sides, or snorted, or kicked the planks. In the darkness I sensed their overwhelming power as they must have sensed my fear. They grew restless and one of the six issued a low bellow that was additionally terrifying.

  I was about to move away when I was startled by a firm hand that grasped my shoulder and a familiar, rasping voice, which warned, “Don’t bother the bulls!”

  I jumped away and looked around to see a tall, thin man dressed in leather pants, shirt tied about his middle, bandanna knotted at his throat and a large sombrero. He now had white hair that he wore in bangs, dark eyes, a seamed face and a large mustache. He must have been past seventy but he had the austere correct manner I had known as a boy. He had once been my closest friend, my most trusted adviser, and he looked now almost exactly as he had in those hectic days at the Mineral.

  “Cándido!” I cried. “It’s Norman.”

  He limped toward me just as he had done the first time I had seen him and embraced me. “What brings you here?” he asked soberly.

  “Let’s go over to the saloon,” I suggested, taking him by the arm, but as soon as he saw Chucho he pushed my hand away and asked, “Have you come to this little village at night to talk with me about the bulls?”

  “Let’s sit down,” I pleaded, but he refused.

  “Where is he?” Cándido demanded. “Where’s the real one? Is he afraid to come out and face me like a man?”

  “Wait a minute, Cándido,” I begged. “We just wanted to—”

  “Ho, Veneno, you evil old man!” Cándido shouted into the darkened plaza. “Where are you hiding?”

  “Old friend,” I pleaded, as people began to fill the plaza to find out what the noise was about. “Veneno has an idea—”

  “I know Veneno’s idea,” the foreman of the Palafox ranch interrupted. “Pepe!” he bellowed to one of the men drinking at the saloon. “Pepe! Get out your gun and shoot anyone who tries to get near our bulls.”

  A slim, rangy lad left the saloon, hurried to the truck, and hefted his rifle to stand guard.

  “Now damn you, Veneno, have the courage to come out.”

  There was a long silence, after which a sound was heard of a car door banging. Then white-haired Veneno strode into the plaza, almost as old as Cándido, almost as erect in carriage. He walked across the stones to where Cándido stood and asked bluntly, “Can we work on the bulls?”

  Old Cándido looked at him with hatred and cried, “You dare to ask me—?”

  Veneno interrupted to say, “There will be money for you.”

  “You pig!” the foreman cried. “Pepe! Shoot him.” The slim boy on the truck made no movement and someone in the crowd laughed. This infuriated Cándido and he said slowly, “Laugh! But do you know why our friend Veneno has hustled through the night to intercept the bulls? Because he is sick with fear.”

  The crowd drew closer and I watched the picador, who stood erect without a sign of embarrassment. Cándido continued, “Yesterday a man died in the ring in Toledo and Veneno is sick with fear, because on Sunday his son has to face these bulls.” He indicated the six beasts of Palafox in the boxes behind him. “And he has come here to bribe me into allowing him to barber these bulls.” He allowed the news to sink in, then added contemptuously, “My own bulls.”

  Veneno still said nothing, whereupon old Cándido did an unexpected thing. He moved close to me but pointed to the picador and said, “And this evil one has been afraid to approach me himself. He sends an American.” He pointed at me with disgust, and with a quick twist of his hand pulled out my shirt so that my stomach was exposed, showing a long white scar.

  “In the old days,” Cándido said, his long mustache bristling with emotion, “this American was a man of honor. Look at that scar! I know he earned it fighting the greatest bull that Palafox ever produced, Soldado.”

  In the crowd there were some who knew the history of bullfighting, and the unlikely information that an American had once fought Soldado caused real excitement. Stragglers pressed up to see the scar that the legendary bull had left across my stomach more than forty years before.

  “You never fought Soldado,” a man from the saloon protested.

  “I did,” I said, tucking in my shirt.

  “As a man of honor, Norman Clay,” Cándido said to me quietly, “gather your thieves together and go back home.”

  “It’s a simple matter—” I began, but before I could finish my sentence old Cándido, as he had often done when training me, struck me across the face and shouted, “No more!”

  The crowd separated, making a path for us, and we retreated to the Chrysler with the sound of Cándido’s voice in our ears: “Pepe, keep that gun ready and shoot them if they try to touch the bulls.”

  We resumed our places as before: Chucho driving, Veneno beside him, Diego in the left rear seat, me in the right. Nobody said anything, then Chucho muttered a prayer, crossed himself and kissed his thumb, as bullfighters always did before starting to drive a car. It occurred to me that earlier, when Chucho had climbed into the Chrysler behind the hotel, he had no doubt said his prayer and crossed himself, so that when he approached the wandering cow at high speed he did not panic as I would have done, but thought: I am in the hands of the Virgin, and if it is fated that I die, I’ll die. This might seem incredible to the average American, who has been taught at least the rudiments of highway safety, but not to someone like me who has worked in the Arab countries. Truckers at the start of a long haul will mutter a one-word prayer, “Inshallah,” and then roar down the highway with a sign painted across the front of their vehicle that says “Inshallah,” the message being “If you get hit by this truck it was Allah’s will, not my bad driving.”

  After preparing his soul for the journey, Chucho edged the big Chrysler into the plaza and past the truck of bulls, where Pepe sat guard with his rifle. Soon we were on the highway back to Toledo, and soon the cruise control was again set at seventy. Before long we r
oared past the area where the cow had been killed, and her body still lay beside the road. At some villages we dropped down to sixty. At others where the road was straight we kept the control at a steady ninety, and once, when a man seemed about to start across the road ahead of us to encounter instant death, I gasped, after which I too said a little prayer and committed myself to the mercy of the Virgin. The Chrysler roared through the night as if to emphasize the saying “Bullfighting will never be completely safe until matadors stop driving to the plazas.”

  “Did you really fight Soldado?” Veneno finally asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I could feel respect building.

  “What kind of bull was he?” asked Veneno, who was fascinated by the history of this great animal who had sired so many of the good bulls of Mexican history.

  “We hid him in a cave at the Mineral,” I explained.

  “I know that part,” Veneno said. “Was he a quick animal?”

  “Very,” I said.

  “And he gave you the wound?”

  “Yes,” I laughed. “My mother thought I was going to die.”

  “Did he turn quickly?” Veneno pursued.

  “That’s how he caught me,” I explained.

  “You fought Soldado!” Veneno repeated. “Incredible. I suppose you know that no Mexican can say as much?”

  “It’s one of the reasons why I love bullfighting,” I said. “It’s why I wanted to come along tonight. You know, I’ve never seen the barbering.”

  “When Cándido struck you—”

  “Why didn’t I knock him down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cándido was like a father to me,” I said.

  “But your father lived for a long time, I believe.”

  “Yes, but Cándido taught me many of the things that counted.”

  “He’s a man of great honor,” Veneno said, “and as you heard, I despise such men.”

  The Leals spent the rest of the trip devising ways to circumvent old Cándido’s honor. When at four in the morning we roared into Toledo they hastened to a side street where they found a veterinary, and after coaching him in what he must do—and paying him well—they hurried to the stockyards at the edge of town, where they borrowed a movable chute and many lengths of rope. Then they went to the bullring, where they slipped into the first corral, which was empty, so as to hide Diego near the shack where the guardian of the bulls was housed while his animals were waiting for their fight. It was from this spot that old Cándido would protect the bulls of Palafox, as he had done for nearly fifty years.

  Veneno then led Chucho and me back to the Chrysler, which we hid far down a side street. From beneath the rear seat Chucho took out a sizable canvas bag, and we walked quietly back to a spot across from the bullring, hiding ourselves so that we could oversee the gate to the first corral. I was still reluctant to be an active part of this shady business, but as a writer on assignment to cover a complex story I was not only willing but eager to tag along to see how the dirty work was done. Not an honorable position to be in, but a practical one when Drummond kept demanding “more inside stuff, a more intimate account, proving to the reader that you’d been there.”

  We were close to the open space in which the amusements of the festival were clustered, and although it was now almost four in the morning, the visitors to Toledo were enjoying themselves in noisy fashion. Above us spun the Ferris wheel. Around us were the greasy restaurants and beyond lay the shooting galleries, the games, the carousels and the peddlers of spun candy. But the dominant note of the festival continued to be the mariachi bands who strolled back and forth through the festival area, each playing its own tune until dawn.

  I had barely become adjusted to the noise when the speedy Palafox truck, with Pepe holding his gun, drove up to the corral gate. Adeptly old Cándido maneuvered the gates of the cages, and one by one the big bulls for the Sunday fight scrambled down the ramp and into the corral where food and water waited. From our hiding place we could hear the muted conversation of the animals as they tried their horns, muscled one another away from the best drinking spot, and settled down.

  At this point two things happened. The veterinary appeared out of the darkness to advise Cándido that he must come to the office to certify the health of the animals, and as soon as Cándido left, Diego hit young Pepe over the head with a club. The Leals were now free to proceed with their barbering, and moment by moment I was more deeply involved in their criminal behavior, but I must admit that by now any moral compunctions were dulled. This was exciting business.

  Using the trained plaza oxen, who were practiced in maneuvering wild bulls into required positions, the Leals alternately goaded and lured the first bull into the borrowed chute, where they promptly lassoed him about the head and legs, drawing the ropes so tight that the huge head became at last immovable. The Leals then produced their canvas bag, from which they took a set of specialized saws and files. Chucho, taking the saw and working first on the right horn, sawed off three inches of the tip, leaving a blunt cross section the size of a half-dollar.

  As soon as the right horn had been trimmed, Chucho moved with his saw to the left horn, and old Veneno took over the principal part of the job. With a big, rough file and a skill that bespoke years of training, he proceeded to rasp away all the outside portion of the blunted horn, producing at last a new tip barely distinguishable from the original except that it was three inches shorter with its point about half an inch closer to the inside. It was this latter insignificant alteration that would make the once-powerful bull pliable and ineffective.

  If the horn had been merely shortened with the new tip remaining in the same axis, the bull would quickly condition himself to the change, since a straight charge would merely require three more inches of thrust in the same direction, and with only a few preliminary charges the beast would learn to accommodate himself. But with the horn shortened and the tip moved inward as well, the bewildered animal would be unable to adjust, for he was now required both to lengthen his charge and to point his horn tip slightly outward, and these two things he could not do together. In Spanish this indecent process, which as a fair-minded sportsman I deplored, but in which as a writer I was interested, quite destroyed the natural balance between bull and man, giving all the advantage to the latter, and was known as shaving; those who performed the act were barbers, the greatest of whom was Veneno Leal.

  When the picador had finished the rough work on the right horn, he turned it over to Diego, who with an ultrafine emery paper smoothed the new tip until only the most practiced eye could detect that a rasp had been at work. A few drops of oil applied with a cloth restored the sheen, and a handful of earth well rubbed in gave the tip its proper age. By this time Veneno had altered the left horn and Diego switched to it, after which the bull was turned loose to make way for another.

  The Leals worked with silent speed, for they had to barber all six bulls if Victoriano was to be protected, since no one could be sure which bulls a matador would draw in a lottery. The pairings being picked blind out of a hat, the system had to be kept honest. Occasionally the agent of a top matador would try to dictate how the bulls would be allocated, and to a degree Veneno had tried to pull that trick against Paquito de Monterrey in the pairings for the first fight, but the young fighter’s agent was too smart to permit any such shenanigans. The bull that had killed his young matador had been properly paired and honestly chosen. And when Veneno was faced by a canny manager like Cigarro and a tested matador like Juan Gómez who personally supervised the choosing of his bulls, there was no chance for Veneno to dictate anything. The three bulls his son must face on Sunday would be determined by pure chance, so it was imperative that all six be shaved. None could enter the ring with their horns unbarbered. Silently the men sawed off the horn tips of the second bull, and the third, and the fourth. They had some trouble getting the trained oxen to lure the fifth bull into the chute, but when they finally got him there, they worked with unusual speed and Veneno was n
ot pleased with the result. “Get him out!” he cried nevertheless, and the mutilated bull stormed off to test his new horns. They could hear him chopping away at a board, sometimes missing it by inches, again striking it later than he thought he should. In the thirty-six hours remaining before the fight he would not learn to control his horns, and whichever matador got him in the draw would encounter a relatively easy enemy.

  But while the Leals were attempting to corral the sixth bull I heard a commotion in the street and Veneno rasped, “It’s Cándido!”

  “Police!” the foreman started shouting. “Someone’s meddling with the bulls!”

  A great cry was raised in the street and people were summoned from the festival. Soon there was a rattling of the gates and it became obvious that if we wanted to escape arrest we had better flee. Abandoning the sixth bull, we gathered our barber tools and ran from the corral, down the alleyway used by the oxen and to the fence over which we jumped to mingle with the noisy crowds still attending the festival. As we ran, we had to leap over the still-unconscious body of Pepe, whose gun lay useless in the dust.

  Dodging down streets where the police would not be, we reached the Chrysler and slumped breathless into our seats, fully aware of the unlawful things we had done but pleased that we had done them so well. Then Veneno brought us back to the real world. “There’s one in there we didn’t get,” and I could foresee that in the thirty-two hours before the drawing for the Sunday fight he would torment himself over the chance that his son might draw the bull with the untrimmed horns.

  “Hide the canvas bag,” he commanded, and Diego lifted the rear seat and stuffed the barber tools into a prepared hideaway. Then to my surprise the old picador growled, “Chucho, drive us to the bullring.”