Mexico

by James A. Michener

  “Why are they making such a fuss over her?”

  “Like her father, she loved horses and she became skilled in handling them, even as a little girl.”

  “Does she ride in a circus or something?”

  “No, she does something far more remarkable. With the help of experts in Chile and Peru, where her father served, she made herself into a first-class rejoneadora.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She fights bulls from horseback.” When I heard her gasp in disbelief, I said, “Yes, this afternoon that woman who looks almost frail will sit astride her white horse, use no hands, only her knees, to guide him, and fight a mad bull. Believe me, Penny, she does just that, and when you see her this afternoon you’ll be amazed.”

  “You mean she’s fighting today?”

  “She’s the star.”

  “I didn’t see her name on any of the big posters. Conchita Cintrón?”

  “You can see it on the new little ones. Real big. She’s on a farewell tour of the Mexican rings, and at the last minute Don Eduardo persuaded her to include Toledo. His big arguing point? ‘Conchita, we’ll give you a despedida so grand you’ll never forget it.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “A Mexican-style leave-taking. Going-away party for a matador who will never be back. You’ll weep, I guarantee.”

  “Why would I? I don’t know her.”

  “The band playing ‘Las Golondrinas.’ The embraces of old friends. I’m choking up just thinking of it.”

  “It sounds so unlikely, a Puerto Rican woman fighting a bull here in Mexico.”

  “Look at me,” I told her. “Born and bred in Mexico but making my living in New York and Europe. Or Don León here. Born in Spain, now stuck in Mexico. We never knew where we’d land.” Looking at her fixedly, as Ledesma did too, I asked: “Who can guess where a handsome girl like you, with so many privileges, will make her home? Or with whom?”

  To deflect attention from herself, she asked: “Is she really that good?”

  “Like Babe Ruth in baseball, the best. Número Uno.”

  “Could I meet her?”

  “Sure. We’re old friends. I’ve interviewed her several times for magazines.” But I shuddered: “Me try to break through that crowd? I’m not that brave.” But she was so insistent on meeting this strange, compelling woman that with some trepidation I took her by the hand and started toward the seemingly hopeless task of breaking through the ring of admirers. When Conchita saw me, she jumped up, crying: “Norman! God bless you, you bring me luck!” and rushed over to embrace me and plant a kiss on my cheek.

  “And who’s this child? Don’t tell me it’s your new bride—you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Daughter of a friend from Oklahoma. She insisted on paying her respects.”

  For several minutes my starry-eyed ward stared at Conchita, but finally she gathered courage and said: “I love horses. Always had my own.”

  “Then you ride?”

  “In rodeos, yes.”

  “Oh, I love rodeos! The clowns, the big steers, the noise. What do you do in your rodeo?”

  “The barrel race.”

  “I know it well. Beautiful girls on beautiful horses, dashing about in mad circles.” Suddenly grasping Penny by her wrists, she said, “For such riding you must have strong hands,” and Penny said, “I don’t. I’m not so hot,” at which point the conversation was ended by the intrusion of groupies who had learned who Conchita was and were now demanding autographs.

  When we returned to our table, Ledesma said to Penny soberly, as if he were her uncle: “In the brief time I’ve known you, Penny—here on the Terrace, at the corrida yesterday, and especially watching the way you reacted to the catacombs, I could see that you were far too intelligent to be chasing around after Mexican matadors.”

  “But she’s not a matador. She’s a—what did you call her, Norman?”

  “Rejoneadora,” I said and León snapped: “Almost as bad. She’s part of the scene, and potentially damaging to a girl like you.”

  “You don’t like women bullfighters?” Penny asked, and he growled: “I deplore them.” Then smiling warmly, he nodded across the tables to Conchita, who saluted. “She’s not a woman,” he said. “She’s an angel.” Then he resumed his lecture: “Bullfight people lead a rough life. Girls in every town pester them. American girls on vacation can’t leave them alone. You can do yourself no good by leaping at them and you might do yourself immeasurable harm.” He dropped his avuncular tone and said harshly, “Stay away from the toreros! They’re no good for you.”

  She received this admonition gracefully and with a touch of humor: “A girl can look, can’t she?” and he said, “Even looking sometimes gets your eyebrows singed.” She seemed so crestfallen that I had to come to her rescue.

  “I have napping in my room a matador—well, almost a matador—who might prove acceptable. I’ll send him down,” and I left her wondering what I might have meant by that.

  When I reached my room I rousted Ricardo out of bed: “Get downstairs. Penny Grim wants to talk with you about your experiences as a would-be fighter.” He was hesitant at first, and understandably so. “Her father would bash me over the head if I stepped near her,” he said, but I reassured him: “Her father tied one on last night and won’t become airborne for hours.” This brought him no comfort, for he said, “I know from experience that drunks can recover instantaneously.” But when I added that she’d be easy to find because she was sitting with León Ledesma, he leaped out of bed, dashed into the bathroom, used my shaving brush, my razor and I suspect my toothbrush, and zoomed back to whip on his trousers—as an aspiring torero he could hardly miss an opportunity to talk again with Mexico’s foremost critic. Smoothing his hair with my brush, he dashed downstairs while I fell into bed and dropped off almost instantly.

  It was about three when I woke up and went down to the Terrace for some light lunch and found that Ledesma had left my table but that Ricardo Martín and Penny were in vigorous conversation. They made an attractive pair, each leaning forward to catch the point the other was making, and I was about to leave them alone, when Penny saw me and invited me to join them. “After all, it is your table. He’s been telling me the most fascinating story about how he got into bullfighting.” I was about to ask her for details when I saw Mrs. Evans coming in alone, and I asked her to join our table. As the four of us sat there toying with our lunch, because we did not care to eat heavily before the fight, Penny, with an occasional correction from Ricardo, started telling Mrs. Evans and me, with an excitement in her voice that betrayed the fact that she had found Martín a delightful companion, what she had learned from him.

  “After Ricardo won his second Purple Heart in Korea, the Marines said: ‘With that cluster of ribbons he’d make an ideal recruiter in high schools,’ and they brought him back to San Diego.”

  Ricardo broke in, “I found the work repulsive and started drifting down to Tijuana, and at the age of nineteen I saw my first bullfight, and it provided everything I was looking for. Courage, drama, spectacle, and something as far away from my stupid father and my dipsy-doodle mother as I could get. In 1957 some friends told me: ‘The real scene is the April festival in Toledo,’ and when they decided to drive down I hooked a ride with them, and when I saw the real thing, three great fights in one weekend, I decided right then, in that plaza out there by the statue of the Indian, that I was going to stay, and come hell or another draft I was going to be a bullfighter.”

  “How did you live?” Mrs. Evans asked. “What I mean is, how do you live?”

  At this point the narrative was broken by the arrival at our table of Penny’s father, Ed Grim, whose bloodshot eyes announced that he was in a foul mood and ready for battle. It took him a few minutes to figure out that his daughter was somehow involved with the miserable fellow who had quit the United States Marines to become a bullfighter in Mexico, and when this became clear he heard his sensible Tulsa neighbor, Mrs. Evans
, widow of his former partner, explaining, “I’ve just asked Señor Martín—”

  “What’s this Señor business? Where’d he get the name Martín? I thought it was honest Martín, from Iowa.”

  “It’s Señor Martín,” she insisted, “because he wants to be accepted as a young man who respects Mexican ways. And he’s from Idaho, not Iowa.” When the oilman grunted, she continued. “I asked him how he earned his living while traipsing around the countryside, trying to be a matador.”

  “I’d be fascinated to hear,” Grim said, and with obvious embarrassment Ricardo explained, “I’m ashamed to say that five months after I made my big resolve to stay here forever, I was back home begging my mother to let me have the small inheritance my grandmother had left for me in her care. When she learned what I wanted to spend the money on, she asked my father if he thought it was a practical idea for me to become a Mexican bullfighter, and when he heard the question he exploded. I listened to him rant and rave, then I said I knew what I wanted to do and he screamed: ‘You’re no son of mine,’ and I snarled back: ‘I never was,’ and that day I changed my name to Ricardo Martín, partly out of respect and a kind of love for Mother, but also because I couldn’t see making my way in Mexico with a name like Caldwell. How are you going to put that on a billboard? But Martín easily becomes Martín, heavy accent on the last syllable, or even Martínez.

  “Mom turned out to be a lot smarter than I thought, because she said: ‘I’ll not allow you to touch that money my mother left for you, but I’ll mail you fifty dollars a month.’ ”

  “Glad to hear someone in your family has good sense,” Grim said, and I saw Penny kick him.

  Ricardo, ignoring the interruption, said, “You’d be surprised how much extra change a guy can pick up down here just by keeping his ears open.”

  “And his hand outstretched,” Grim said.

  “Are you making headway?” Mrs. Evans asked, and Ricardo said: “Anyone here know the word pachanga? I’m not sure it’s in the dictionary, but I’m king of the pachangas.”

  “What are they?” Mrs. Evans asked, always curious.

  “A brawl. A village brawl in which everyone can participate. It’s really a village bullfight without a barricaded ring, without picadors, and without formal costumes. What they do have is some seven- or eight-year-old bull with very big horns but the sharp tips sawed off. Weighs about fifteen hundred pounds, half again the size of a proper bull. If he doesn’t get you with his horns he tramples you to death.”

  “Sounds rather disorganized,” Mrs. Evans said, following the account closely.

  “It’s a riot, really, not a bullfight,” the young man said. “There’re two kinds of riots: those organized like the attack on the Bastille: ‘Let’s get those prisoners outta there’; and those that are totally disorganized, like a real pachanga.”

  “Then why do you bother with them?”

  Ricardo stopped, looked at her in disbelief and said: “Because the job of a would-be matador is to fight bulls. Any bull, anywhere. In a pachanga, you learn whether you have the courage to get within range of those horns and then stand there with your feet planted and make him drive past you. To take part in the next pachanga I would walk to Oaxaca.” The sincerity with which he spoke, this young man who had fought as a Marine in Frozen Chosen and then run away from the security of home again to attempt this dangerous profession, impressed his listeners.

  “Is yours a special case, or are there a lot of young men like you?” Penny asked.

  “There’ve always been wandering hopefuls like me. Some of the greatest came up my way, Juan Belmonte in Spain, Juan Gómez here in Mexico. I guess we’re universal.”

  “I mean, Americans?”

  “Sidney Franklin made it, a kid from Brooklyn. And Patricia McCormick, a girl.”

  At this startling information, Grim exploded. “You mean a decent American girl came down here, did the pachanga business you spoke of and became a matador?”

  “She did,” Ricardo said matter-of-factly. “Fought real corridas and was pretty good.”

  “The world is going to hell,” Ed grumbled. “And you, young lady, stay away from matadors.”

  She smiled and said, “Señor Ledesma told me the same thing,” and Grim said, “That critic gets smarter every minute.”

  Mrs. Evans wanted to get back to her main interest. Smiling at Martín, she asked, “You use such good English when you want to. Where did you learn it?”

  “Idaho has good schools. Mom made me read.”

  Mrs. Evans now spoke like a mother: “And you’re giving up your education to be a matador?”

  “It wasn’t much, really. I would never have been a scholar. In the Marines I’d never have become an officer.” Looking down at his hands he said: “I wasn’t losing much. But I could not risk blowing this one chance to do the big thing.”

  “If you dreamed of doing something big, why didn’t you grab at the G.I. Bill? It helps pay for a veteran’s education toward a new job or profession.”

  “I told you I did.”

  This was too much for Ed. “You mean you’re just pretending to go to college so you can be a bullfighter? What kind of kid are you?”

  “We settled that yesterday. An ex-Marine who will knock you flat on your ass if you make one false move.”

  “Penny, let’s get out of here. This dump is no place for a decent young girl.”

  “I’m staying,” she said. “I like these people. They’re my friends.”

  “I told you to come with me,” Grim repeated, but Ricardo said quietly, “And she said she was staying. Good-bye, Mr. Grim,” and the daughter stayed as the father stormed off.

  When he was gone, Mrs. Evans said, “I don’t want you people to underestimate Ed Grim. He’s a terrific oilman.”

  “That doesn’t give him the right to order everyone around,” Ricardo said, and she replied, “Young man. Ed Grim fought the battle to give oil-field workers medical insurance, fair wages, and the right, if they wanted to, to join unions.”

  “But, of course,” Penny said, “having made that grandstand play, he did all he could to bust the union.”

  “Even so,” Mrs. Evans said, “what you see with Ed is basically what you get.” Then, turning exclusively to Ricardo, she asked: “So you still dream of doing the big thing?” and he replied, “Yes, because I’ve watched so many settle for the little thing.”

  “So what do you do next?” she asked, and he said: “Sneak in the fight tomorrow to see how Victoriano and Gómez handle it. You can always learn if you study the best.”

  “And in the cold morning-after?”

  His face broke into a big smile as he patted Mrs. Evans on the hand. “You really understand bullfighting. Every day is a cold morning-after. Well, on tomorrow morning after the big fight I hurry back to Mexico City to seek out news about the next pachanga. I’ll work my way to some village, and one of these days something big will happen.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Mrs. Evans bored in.

  “I’ll have to make it happen.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “I have a plan!”

  We sat silent for some minutes—the widow of a Tulsa oilman with ample funds and a fifty-two-year-old journalist with a comfortable income—and we were both struck by the precariousness of Ricardo’s financial condition.

  Mrs. Evans asked Ricardo: “You said you were going to sneak in to see the fight tomorrow. How?”

  “You learn the ways.”

  I think she was going to lend him some money, but just at that moment Ed Grim came to our table lugging two heavy suitcases and bringing Mr. and Mrs. Haggard behind him with their luggage.

  “We’re heading north,” he announced almost fiercely as if to say “And what are you going to do about it?” He placed one suitcase beside Penny’s chair. “We decided that bullfighting is barbaric. We want no more of it. You’re coming with us, Penny. And, Elsie, you’d come home, too, if you had any sense.”

&n
bsp; Without hesitation Penny said quite calmly, “I’m not going.” Drawing her suitcase closer to her, she said, “For a long time I’ve wanted to spend a day at a Mexican ranch, and Mr. Clay told me he could arrange it. I’m staying.”

  “Now wait a minute!” I protested, “I said that before I knew you were leaving your father and staying behind. Believe me, the Festival of Ixmiq is no place for a seventeen-year-old high school girl on her own.”

  “I’m almost a college girl and old enough to know my own mind.”

  Penny was adamant. She would not ride back to Tulsa with her father and the Haggards. She was determined to stay with the matadors, and when her father seemed ready to carry her off to his Cadillac, Mrs. Evans felt she had to intervene. “Chester! I’m staying and Penny can stay with me. She’s a big girl now. Come autumn, she’ll be away from you anyway.”

  “But at a decent college. Not in some Mexican pachanga or whatever it’s called.”

  Seeing that he could not budge Penny and that we seemed to be encouraging her to resist him, he became furious, almost tearing his coat pocket to get at his fight tickets for the remaining bullfights. Throwing them on the table, he cried in fury, “Take them, and as for you, Elsie Evans, your husband must be turning in his grave.”

  “I think he might be,” she said, and then she became the conciliator. “Chester, your little girl is growing up. If Millicent were alive she’d tell you to let her go. And you can do it with the assurance that I’ll look after her.”

  As Ed got in the car, he realized he could not leave his daughter as if he were dismissing her in a fit of temper. Hastily climbing out, he came to where she stood beside me, clasped her in his arms and mumbled: “You’re a champion, kid. Don’t screw it up.” He kissed her, then turned to Mrs. Evans and me and said fiercely: “Keep an eye on her. She’s Oklahoma gold.”

  When Ed and the Haggards were gone Mrs. Evans asked, “Now, how am I going to get my car home? I don’t drive anymore.” Before waiting for an answer, she pushed the eight valuable tickets into the center of the table, where Penny reached out to grab her pair and tuck them into her small purse. The other six Mrs. Evans turned over to Ricardo, saying, “Since they pertain to bullfighting, they’re yours.” Leaving them on the table, he arranged them in a neat line. “Six tickets. Two tourists were here about an hour ago begging people on the Terrace to sell them tickets. Fifty bucks for today’s fight. A hundred bucks for tomorrow’s.” When the women gasped, he explained, “After a death in the ring, interest goes way up.” Moving the tickets about in patterns, he said, “Four hundred and fifty bucks. Enough to keep me chasing pachangas for a year.” Rising abruptly, he went to Mrs. Evans and kissed her. “Mom would approve of you, and so do I,” but she said, “Thank Ed Grim, not me.”