Mexico

by James A. Michener

  Penny, feeling exalted because Conchita and her horse had bowed to her, expected the excitement to continue at that high level. Turning to me, she asked almost petulantly: “When do the fireworks begin?” and Ledesma answered for me: “Young lady, with your personal interest in the matadors, maybe you had better hope they never begin. On many days, ladies, a matador is perfectly content to see the afternoon drift past. Get it over with and hope for a better day.” He smiled at Penny, adjusted his cape and asked: “Isn’t it often that way on a date? Get the damned thing over with and hope for someone more exciting next week?”

  “How about the ticket price?” Penny asked. “When we’re fleeced, aren’t we entitled to at least some professionalism?”

  “Ah hah! Now you introduce the economic factor. You did, not me, so I’m allowed to look at those unsatisfactory data from the man’s point of view. He’s taken you out, spent a bundle and the evening is totally blah. Is he entitled to a refund because he chose poorly? Not at all, and neither are you. But in the next three fights something good might happen, like maybe your matador Fermín will oblige us by getting a horn through his esophagus.”

  “Ugh! Ugh!” Penny cried, bringing her hands over her eyes, but Ledesma was remorseless: “Those are the answers you’re entitled to when you bring up these questions. Let’s hope none of you young women marry unsatisfactory husbands and discover in your sixties that’s how the ball game is going to end.” There was silence.

  Then Penny asked tentatively: “Conchita? Was she also as bad as you claim?” and Ledesma replied airily: “In this business rejoneadoras don’t count. But if you ask me how her horse did, I’d say passable, verging on acceptable.” Then he added: “Of course, if you asked me, ‘Are you in love with Conchita?’ I’d have to confess, ‘Since the first day I saw her perform in Guadalajara.’ ”

  Calesero on his second bull provided one series of his elegant passes in which bull and cape and man seemed to be moving as one about the arena. It was stunning, worth the price of the ticket, but when he sought to duplicate it when his bull came off the picador, he was unable to bring the bull back under control, and the fight ran its allotted twenty minutes having provided nothing else worth remembering.

  Pepe Luis Vásquez, his leg bandage now invisible beneath his damaged suit, returned stubbornly to the spot where the first bull had gored him. As the audience leaned forward, he waited till the bull was almost upon him, then dropped to his knees and delivered a farol, swirling the cape up over his head and the bull’s. The horn came within inches of his skull but he remained on his knees, pivoted about, brought the bull back in the opposite direction, then flicked the far end of the cape to perplex the bull and keep him fixed till he regained his footing.

  This daring act brought well-deserved cheers. He had proved he had courage, and I applauded longer than the others because I could guess what this acknowledgment from the crowd meant to him. Unfortunately he was not able to follow up, for the bull was so intractable that Pepe Luis could give him only the routine passes that led from one part of the fight to the next. But it did not progress rapidly enough and Pepe Luis heard an aviso. This spurred him to make a frenzied effort to accelerate, and this led only to further confusion. If someone who hated bullfights had wanted to make a motion picture that would damn the sport, this afternoon would have been ideal. Pepe Luis did not suffer the indignity of seeing his bull go out alive, to be slaughtered in the corrals for beef distributed to the poor, but he did end his fight in the silence with which aficionados demonstrate their boredom.

  We’d had five bulls that had looked rather good on the hoof, and three quite acceptable matadors, but there had not been one demand that the matador take a circuit of the ring to garner applause, nor a single handkerchief waved at the judge to demand that the matador receive an ear as a badge of triumph.

  As Pepe’s gloomy display ended, I watched Fermín Sotelo from my seat with the Oklahomans and could see that he was gritting his teeth in a determination to save the day, especially since Penny would be watching him so intently. Before he left the passageway she called down to him in Spanish: “Buena suerte, matador!” but he stared straight ahead as if he had not heard her. Deflated, Penny turned to ask Mrs. Evans: “Who does he think he is, a performance as rotten as his last one, he has no right—”

  “Penny!” I protested. “Think a minute. He’s a Mexican in Mexico. His job is to keep his Mexican fans happy, not you. It would look bad for a beginning matador to pay too much attention to a Yankee.”

  “I saw on television where a famous matador in Spain dedicated a bull to Ava Gardner and people cheered,” and I said: “When you come back next year as well known as Ava, you’ll get your bull, too.”

  My attempt at humor did not mollify her, but just before his bull came roaring out, Fermín glanced quickly at Penny, slipping her a wink and a slight nod. When he moved inside the ring to study the bull as it thundered into the center, I heard Penny whisper to Mrs. Evans: “Help me pray for him. Let him be spectacular!” and two Oklahoman hearts accompanied the young man as he went out to redeem himself.

  With a bravery equaling that shown by Vásquez when he knelt in the sand, Fermín allowed his peóns only two running passes to test the bull, then stepped in boldly to launch a series of veronicas, the exquisite pass named after the saint who had used her veil to wipe the sweat from the face of Jesus as he carried his heavy cross to Calvary. The passes were so beautifully executed that I joined the hundreds who were cheering. “See, Penny!” I cried. “He’s going to show us a masterpiece. The kid knows what he doing.”

  “He’s a man,” Penny said. “Look!”

  He was in the midst of delivering three perfect chicuelinas, wrapping his cape about himself as the bull approached, so that the animal caught only the last flick of the cape as it disappeared behind the man. These were superlative passes, and I cheered. If I overemphasize work with the big magenta cape at the beginning of a fight and with the little red muleta at the end, it’s because I’ve known bullfighting since I was a boy of eight and have seen all the notable Mexican artists and most of the Spanish masters who came over during our winters. So for me the art of the fight is what the man can do with the cloth, big or little, especially when he unites the bull to him as they move back and forth across the sand. Those are moments of excruciating beauty, which I find in no other sport, and I’ve seen a lot of them.

  But in the cloth work the part I treasure most comes when the bull has charged at the horse and been pushed away by the picador. Confused and for the first time in his life really hurt, the bull breaks free, searching wildly for any enemy he can find, and there stands the matador, waiting and knowing that now he faces an entirely different animal. Up to now the bull has been curious, and passes could be based upon that curiosity, but now he is enraged, his power multiplied, his horns more deadly. It is now that a matador can best display both his artistry and his courage as he lures the maddened bull to six inches from his body. With magic in his wrists and supreme control of his feet, he launches one incredible pass after another until the crowd has to cry “¡Olé!” Sometimes the cape is in front, sometimes at the side, sometimes behind his back, sometimes fluttering like a butterfly, and sometimes dipped with a low chopping motion not lovely in itself but necessary to tire the bull’s neck muscles and make him lower his head for the final act.

  I love to watch such work and now, as I shared my delight with the Oklahomans, Penny asked almost deliriously in her happiness over Fermín’s fine performance: “Could you do that, Clay? You seem to know so much about what other people do,” and I replied: “I gave passes like that to Soldado, best bull of them all, and no other bullfighter in the world can claim that,” and she was impressed.

  I was glad for her that when Fermín began his final work he managed a breathtaking pass that proved him to be a serious matador. Drawing the bull not far from where we sat and keeping the sword behind him in his right hand, with his left he held the cloth very
low and led the bull slowly past, flicked the end of the cloth to fix him and pivoted to face him again. Satisfied that he had the animal under control, he raised the cloth almost to his chin, stood erect, and gave one of the great passes of bullfighting, el pase de pecho (the pass of the chest, called by some the pass of death). Under any conditions this pass is spectacular, for there is only a hair’s breadth between the bull’s horns and the matador’s head. But in this instance Fermin, convinced that he had a safe bull, attempted the astonishing variation known as “counting the house,” that is, ignoring the bull as he thundered past but staring into the stands as if he were indeed checking on the number of paying customers. His luck held. The bull came right at him, head high, and rode past by inches, while Fermín stood his ground, head turned to the side, a detached look on his face that was almost a sneer as he looked directly into the eyes of Penny Grim. I snapped a shot of him as the bull brushed past his studiedly world-weary face. When I look at that face now in the photo, it still astounds me.

  With that noble pass I knew that Fermín had clinched the championship of the Saturday fight and perhaps of the entire festival, until I heard Penny cry “Oh, no!” While everyone was lost in admiration of Fermín’s impeccable pass of death, the bull, standing alone some distance from us, saw a flutter of cloth in the stands, and drove at it in a fury caused by his earlier frustrations when hitting the cloth rather than the man. Again he found no man, but his right horn did smash into the heavy board barrier and with a sickening snap broke completely off, right at the point where it had been attached to the skull. A sigh rose from the crowd, for it was obvious that he had been ruined for the final act of the fight, the breathtaking moment when the matador must reach directly over the deadly right horn in order to place the sword. With no horn there to create emotional tension, any chance for either danger or art vanished.

  In wealthy arenas, where impresarios can afford to keep a spare bull in the corrals for just such emergencies, the bugles would blow, the oxen would come in and the matador’s one-horned bull would be led back to his pen and the substitute bull brought in. But the Toledo plaza had no spare, and so this culminating fight of the second day must end in a pathetic display: a skilled matador dispatching an unarmed bull.

  “What happens now?” Penny asked, and I said: “Your boy makes the best of a bad business. He kills the bull, but it means nothing—not a contest—no honors here.”

  “How rotten!” and I saw tears forming in her eyes.

  But she had no concept of just how rotten it was going to be, for this apparently impotent bull was about to remind the aficionados of Toledo just how cantankerous a fighting bull of pure Spanish blood can be. This one, his horn gone, knew that he must now defend himself with special vigor, so whenever Sotelo lined up for what ought to have been the easiest kill possible, the bull also lined up, as it were, protecting his vulnerable neck by brushing the sword sideways with his muzzled face or suddenly lifting his bony forehead and knocking the sword up in the air.

  In desperation, Fermín tried a few passes to make the bull drop his defenses, but he accomplished nothing. The bull’s head remained high and moving in various directions to ward off any attack. “Dispatch him—any way you can,” counseled his manager from the passageway, and the crowd began to chant: “Get rid of him! The bugler’s getting ready to warn you.” But there was also self-controlled Calesero whispering unhysterical encouragement: “Fermín, you can do it. Careful with that other horn, he’ll toss it twice as wild.” In giving this counsel the older man was obedient to the tradition: “If he doesn’t do it, I’ll have to.” This Calesero was both prepared and willing to do; it was an assignment of honor, but it was also a miserable way to end a fight, so as the younger man approached the bull, Calesero shouted: “Steady, Fermín, you can do it.”

  I was watching Penny as the promising efforts of her matador turned to ashes, and I could see with what intense participation she followed each disastrous attempt by Fermín to bring some order to this deplorable affair. It was as if she were in the ring with him. But with time pressing down on him and the bull becoming more fractious each moment, the matador’s chances of salvaging the afternoon diminished. Even his peóns started yelling: “Don’t try passes. Kill the damn thing,” but in maddening frustration Fermín felt honor-bound to give a respectable performance. Aware that he was slipping from hero of the afternoon to goat, he became so desperate that whatever he attempted misfired. I could see Penny with her fists clenched as she kept muttering: “It shouldn’t end this way, it shouldn’t,” and when Mrs. Evans reached forward to console her, Penny snapped: “Pray, please. Pray!”

  Fortunately for Penny, the bull had taken a stance about as far away, on the sunny side, as he could get, but now, as bulls often did in such disasters, he began a long, slow, plodding march across the arena to where we sat. He seemed to be telling Penny: “You wanted to see me die. Well, here I am,” and he stopped right in front of our seats, so everything that followed occurred practically in Penny’s lap. The anxious young woman could almost reach out and touch Fermín as he swore and sweated in his frantic effort to terminate this fiasco, but he was able to accomplish so little that we heard the wailing bugle sound, the first aviso. “Oh, no! That’s so unfair!” She was right. Her matador had been in no way responsible for this calamity. The damned bull itself was responsible, but now the shame of trumpet calls in the fading light of a dying day fell on him, and she sat close enough to him to see each mark of anguish on his face.

  The bull was backed against the barrier just below us, with his head and horns pointing out into the arena so that when Fermín tried to attack he was looking straight at Penny, and I was proud of the way she handled herself, not looking away to escape the humiliation of her man but sharing it. Keeping her gaze full upon him, she called repeatedly in Spanish: ¡Coraje, muchacho!” (Courage, little fellow) and groaned when each of his efforts failed.

  Fermín’s task was brutally difficult, for the bull, settled in a spot where he felt confident, still fended off any sword thrust by jerking up his head or swinging his horns to knock the sword away. He was, I thought, much like a skilled baseball player who stands feet apart, bat held short, and successfully fouls off any ball thrown at him, or like a skilled duelist who parries every thrust with what my teacher called “a twist of the wrist.”

  But now a second disaster occurred, because it was entirely possible for a matador to make a perfect attack on the bull only to have his sword, by sheer bad luck, strike bone. Then the flexible sword would double back, acquire great tension, and spring out of the matador’s hand, making a graceful curve over his head and falling into the sand, point down. On certain tragic occasions this flying sword lands not in the sand but in the body of some spectator in the first rows, and death is instantaneous.

  When the second aviso sounded, Fermín’s face grew ashen. Calesero called out: “One sword will do it,” and the young fighter, who had never before had such an experience, stopped the trembling in his right arm, planted his feet firmly, twisting his ankles as if digging himself into the sand, rose on his toes, and made three attacks that were flawless, except that each time he hit bone.

  Calesero, hoping that Fermín might avoid the indignity of a third aviso, told the younger man firmly: “Time left for one more try. Make it good.” Fermín decided that his only chance to outwit this knowing bull would be a running pass away from the left horn and a swift sword thrust as he reached a spot between where the horns should have been. Though extremely dangerous and even foolhardy, it might work, he thought, moving off to the bull’s right so that his powerful arm would be free to thrust downward. His movements revealed his strategy and unanimously the other toreros shouted: “Over the horn!” and “From the front!”

  As the trumpeter brought his mouthpiece to his lips, Fermín started his run. The third aviso ended the fight. In a last gasp of heroism and folly, Fermín attempted the impossible. The bull anticipated his approach and with a wild
toss of his head, caught the sword and tossed it in the air. It fell point down in the sand as the trumpeter finished his mournful announcement that the matador had lost his bull and that the oxen would now be brought in to lead it to slaughter in the corrals.

  Like many a matador before him who had heard that third aviso, which sealed his shame, Fermín wanted to chase after the bull and finish him before he left the arena, but was restrained by Calesero and Pepe Luis. His own banderillero said: “Let him go, Fermín. You did your part. It was that damned wall.” So, head down, the young matador returned to the passageway where he had left his brocaded cape and his other swords. As he reached for his gear he heard a voice from the stands and looked up to see Penny. “You were heroic, matador,” she said. “Fate stole your bull from you.” Her voice wavered as tears choked it, but Fermín’s sense of shame was so great he could not look at her.

  Turning his back on her as if he wished to be rid of these intrusive Americans, he hurried out of the arena, through the patio de caballos where the horses were kept, and into his waiting limousine. Speeding to the House of Tile, he jumped out, rushed upstairs to his room unwilling to look at anyone, and packed for his escape from this distasteful town and for his long drive north to Torreón, where he would fight tomorrow.

  And so the German tourist’s aptly named Saturnine Saturday ended, with little having been accomplished and no honors won. The band did not play to signal the end of day, nor did people congregate to discuss the interesting events of the afternoon, for there had been only the few passes of Calesero, the bravery of Pepe Luis and Fermín’s pase de pecho, thin reward for a long afternoon. In silence the crowd dispersed, not because they were frustrated or disgusted but because the day had never sprung to life.

  Ledesma, in bidding us good-bye, said: “Now I have a job harder than any of yours. I’ve got to report what happened.” He smiled at Mrs. Evans and said: “As your talkative American friend, Señor Clay, has no doubt told you, Don Eduardo’s paying me to tell the world that today was a four-part triumph.”