“What shall we play for you, señor?” I heard the bass drummer ask in Spanish.
“We don’t know,” the husband replied in English.
The leader shrugged his shoulders, consulted with his companions, and told them in Spanish: “ ‘Cielito Lindo’ and ‘San Antonio Rose’ for the norteamericanos,” and I thought: This is going to be pretty bad, so I said to Don Eduardo, “I’d better speak to them.”
I went to the other table and asked in English, “Excuse me, but could I be of help with the mariachis?”
“You might tell them to play some real Mexican music.”
“If you would permit me.”
“Oh, please do!” the wife pleaded. “We don’t want to hear American music on our first visit in Toledo.”
“I thought you wouldn’t,” I said. I then turned to the mariachis and said in Spanish: “These visitors love the music of Mexico. Please play only the real songs of your country.”
“Like what?” the leader asked suspiciously.
I gave some examples of wonderful songs rarely heard, ending with: “And you might give them a battle cry like ‘The Ballad of General Gurza.’ ”
The men’s eyes lighted up with pleasure—all, that is, except those of the tall, sad trumpeter, who merely fingered the valves on his instrument, as if warming up. I bowed to the tourists and returned to Don Eduardo.
With two quick waves of his drumstick, the leader started the music, but I was not prepared for what followed, for in the first blaring passages of a robust folk dance the lean trumpeter unloosed a cascade of purity such as I have rarely heard matched in any orchestra. He played passionately, his hollow cheeks distended with air, his thin lips wedged against the mouthpiece, and his tongue ripping out triple and sextuple passages. He was truly a heavenly trumpeter, lost in some Durango village, and whenever he rested it was to gain fresh strength for some new display of virtuosity. He never smiled, and always seemed removed from the simple realities. Throughout the time of the Festival of Ixmiq I saw him only as a disembodied talent who mysteriously produced music of the angels. In the nights to come I would often hear his tongue-splitting rhythms echoing in various parts of the plaza, and no one could confuse him with the other mariachis. His companions seemed to recognize this, for when during a song the time came for him to rest, they merely limped through their part of the music, waiting till his liquid trumpet sound exploded once more behind them, and then they would play with added spirit. Now, as they wound through the final passages of the vigorous dance, I sat back contented.
“I’ve never heard a better trumpeter,” I told Don Eduardo.
“I’ve often thought,” the old rancher mused as we waited for our soup, “that a lot of people from other parts of the world are going to be surprised when they enter heaven and find that God entertains himself with mariachi music.” But then he suddenly scowled, as the new selection began. He asked abruptly: “Did you tell them to play that?”
“I did,” I confessed.
“You have a curious taste. To sing of General Gurza in this place.” And he pointed to the broken tiles on the wall in back of where the mariachis stood, the tiles against which I had been measured as a boy. Having rebuked me, Don Eduardo fell silent and I could tell that he was recalling his encounters with the murderous general who had been the scourge of Toledo. And I recalled my own experiences.
General Gurza had come roaring into Toledo on one of his periodic raids to rob the city’s citizens. I was at the Mineral when Gurza led a detachment to the mines in a search for silver, and I was sure they were going to shoot us. Father whispered: “Stay very still. Say nothing,” and we watched as Gurza and his men overlooked several tons of black ore from which silver could be extracted. They ransacked our quarters, and had the calf been sequestered there according to the original plan, both he and we would have been shot.
At the end of the search, General Gurza assembled our family and I remember standing in front of my mother, hoping to protect her, and I could feel her legs trembling. The general was not my idea of a general at all, for he certainly did not look like any of my tin soldiers, with brightly colored uniforms and colored bands across their chests. General Gurza was a big man, both taller and heavier than my father. He had a round face with a black mustache, and wore a huge sombrero and silver-studded chaps. He carried a shotgun. And on his hips were two pistols, while crossing his chest was a bandolier, with here and there a cartridge missing.
He nudged me in the stomach with his rifle and asked: “When you grow up will you fight for the Revolution?” I said, “I don’t know what a revolution is. But I’m going to fight against you and help my mother.”
General Gurza laughed, poked the gun deeper into my stomach, and said, “When you grow up you’ll know better.” He then made a short speech in which he said that he had found what he had come for. He whistled sharply without moving his lips, and from our stables four of his men approached leading one of our miners with his hands tied and a rope around his neck. “This is what we are going to do with all our enemies,” he said. And without further ado the four soldiers threw the rope over a beam projecting from the cloisters and hanged the man. Because our cloisters were not high, the man’s feet were never far from the ground, and he seemed to dance in our faces. I could feel my mother’s knees start to give way behind me and I cried: “Mother’s going to fall down.” My father leaped to catch her, but General Gurza got there first and, dropping his gun, he carried her to a table. When she opened her eyes she expected to see my father but instead looked directly into the eyes of the general. His black mustache must have been only a few inches from her face, and she began to scream.
This angered the general particularly because he thought that she must be an American, since she was married to one. He slapped her, then laughed and said: “We don’t hurt norteamericanos—if they remain neutral.” He then directed my father to come to him, and with the dead miner’s body swinging between them, the two men discussed how the silver from the Mineral was to be delivered to the general’s forces and what records were to be kept. I remember how the interview ended. General Gurza said: “You understand, Mr. Clay, that if any of this silver falls into the hands of Carranza we shall have to shoot you?”
My father replied: “But I thought you were fighting for Carranza”
General Gurza scowled and said, “That was last month. Now he’s our enemy. No silver to him.”
“I understand,” my father said, and the two men shook hands as if they were bankers. But when the time came to leave, some of Gurza’s men saw the dangling body and were apparently infuriated by the sight, for they began shooting at it from horseback, and many of the shots went wild, ricocheting down our cloisters. All the way back to the gate the men kept up their wild shooting, and when they had ridden safely down the hill, my father systematically inspected all the workers to be sure none were hurt, then gave orders to cut down the dead man and bury him. When the others were busy with this task, he and I went cautiously to the cave below the slag heap and satisfied ourselves that Soldado was safe. Father directed me to give the calf some hay, and we left the animal content and eating.
Well, I thought now, sitting on the terrace of the House of Tile, that was a rare peaceful moment in a turbulent past.
“Where were you in those years?” I asked Don Eduardo, who was attacking his soup.
“What do you mean, ‘those years’?” he asked without looking up. He loved food.
“I was thinking of the years when we hid Soldado from the Gurza troops,” I explained.
He put his spoon down, thought a moment, and said, “That would have been 1916 to about 1919, I guess. I was hiding out in Mexico City, working like the devil with Carranza to keep control of my lands. I didn’t succeed.”
Laughing at his own incompetence, he said, “In 1536 we Palafoxes were granted a quarter of a million choice acres and by 1580 this had grown, by thefts from Church and state, to a third of a million. By 1740, due
to shrewd management and further thefts from everyone in sight, our holdings had increased to over a million acres and the labor of nearly a hundred and twenty thousand Indians, who were for all practical purposes our slaves.” At this point in the narration he sighed.
“In the 1810 War of Independence, of course, the Conde de Palafox sided with the Spaniards, so that when relative peace came he was penalized by the victorious Mexicans, who took back half his vast holdings.”
In the 1860s the Palafoxes guessed wrong again and supported the Austrian usurper, Emperor Maximilian, as did all decent people, and when the rabble shot him to restore Mexican independence, they also shot the then conde, whereupon the Palafox holdings fell to about two hundred and fifty thousand acres. In the Revolution of 1916, as we have seen, Don Eduardo came out strongly against General Gurza and lost another hundred and fifty thousand. Finally, in 1936, the family guessed wrong again and fought President Cárdenas, who had the land courts legally divest the Palafoxes of most of their remaining acreage.
“As a result of always being on the wrong side,” Don Eduardo concluded, “our once-vast Palafox dominion now consists of nine thousand arid acres of bull ranch in a corner of our state, the skeletons of a few haciendas that General Gurza gutted, and the abandoned Mineral.”
But if the Palafoxes invariably guessed wrong about the advantageous political affiliation, thereby losing their land, they displayed canny judgment where investments were concerned, thereby maintaining their family security. With the business acumen that had always marked the Spanish branch of the family the Palafoxes had invested in railroads, in French mercantile companies, and more recently in Swiss and American pharmaceutical corporations, so that while their land holdings were steadily diminishing, their equity in the business wealth of the world rose comfortably. In 1961 the family was at least as wealthy as it had ever been, and with this wealth the members had been able to buy favor with whatever administration was in power, regardless of its politics.
But the principal fame of the family derived from the fact that old Don Eduardo Palafox, who under a better system of government would have inherited the title conde, raised the best bulls in Mexico and probably the best anywhere in the world except Spain. It was not unusual for Cardinal Palafox, while on church duty in other parts of Latin America or the United States, to be greeted with the enthusiastic comment “I saw your bulls in Mexico City and they were tremendous.”
The young bull Soldado, who had survived for three months in our cave as my responsibility, turned out to be one of the memorable seed bulls of history, and his offspring accounted for much of the glory accruing to the name Palafox. On the last day of the fair we would see his latest descendants, and I looked across to the white wall where the poster blared the news: “The Traditional Festival of Ixmiq. Bulls of Palafox.”
I said, “Don Eduardo, when your first bull comes out on Sunday, I am going to salute him like a grandson. After all, he sprang from my cave.”
The big rancher laughed and leaned back, wiping the Valencian rice from his heavy underlip. “Do you know why I like bullfighting so much?” he asked.
“Because you make a fortune on the bad bulls you sell,” I suggested.
He chuckled and said: “You know I lose money raising those damned animals. We all do. But I like the essential battle of life. In this city my people have been fighting through four centuries. Not one of the buildings you can see from here was erected except after some shattering fight. No one wanted the cathedral there, or the new façade, or the expensive theater. No one except some Palafox. What happened to the Miers? Doña Carmen’s family? They owned more land than we did, but when General Gurza approached, they quit like chickens of no strain.” He paused and picked at a tooth with his little finger. When he had dislodged a bit of clam he said, “We have fought the Altomecs in the hills, and the king in Madrid, and the pope in Rome, and General Gurza in Mexico City. I fought President Cárdenas through every court in Mexico, but we still parted good friends. Do you know what Cárdenas said when he confirmed the decision of the land courts that confiscated our acres? He said, ‘Don Eduardo, I think you are the father of your best bulls.’ In a sense, I am.”
“I’ll bet that on Sunday five of your six animals will be disgraceful.”
“Accepted, but remember that if only one is good, he’s the one that’ll be remembered.” He laughed, then grew sober. “Here comes the matador now,” he said.
I turned to see what had captured his attention, and watched a beat-up black Cadillac, about six years old, come speeding into the plaza and stop abruptly with protesting brakes before the terrace where we sat. At the wheel was a gnome-like man of about fifty, a black fedora jammed over his eyes and a cigar stuck between his teeth. Sharing the front seat with him were two middle-aged bullfighters who looked like gangsters. Quickly the three jumped out and started untying ropes that had kept bundles secure on top of the Cadillac on its trip from Mexico City. One of the men paused to open the rear door nearest me, and from it stepped a flashily dressed, attractive young woman, followed by a smallish, tense, very dark man in his early thirties. As soon as he appeared, a crowd gathered while keeping at a respectful distance, and little boys began calling to others, “It’s Juan Gómez!”
The crowd increased and some youth who had seen many movies gave a low wolf whistle, at which the girl smiled. Gómez, the matador, with no emotion on his face, forced a passageway through the crowd and went into the hotel. As he passed my table he looked at Don Eduardo and stopped to embrace him.
“May the bulls be good,” the matador said.
“May you have much luck,” the rancher replied.
Then Gómez disappeared, while the gnome-like man supervised the unloading of the costumes, the swords, the lances and the odd leather baskets in which the matador’s hats were carried. Gómez was now among us, and Don Eduardo observed, as the mariachis paraded about the square, their trumpeters filling the night with the music of Mexico, “Tonight they sleep under one roof, Victoriano and Gómez. Do you think they’ll be valiant on Friday?”
“People who saw them fight in Puebla say they almost made you forget Manolete,” I replied.
“May their luck be good,” the old rancher said. He crossed himself, kissed his thumb, and threw the benediction over his shoulder and into the House of Tile, where the two matadors were resting.
4
THE INDIAN
I spent Wednesday night after the poetry competition and all day Thursday in a forced explosion of energy I had not displayed since my all-night cramming for exams at Princeton. Consulting experts, borrowing their newspaper clippings regarding memorable fights, and even conducting hurried interviews with Juan Gómez and his manager, I was able to construct a mental image of the bowlegged Indian. Then, when I had my room organized as a workstation, my typewriter on a table away from the sun, my pile of white paper neatly within reach and fresh carbons at hand, I plunged into the task of grinding out the type of story that New York treasured: good guy versus bad, all-white versus all-black, premonitions of tragedy to come, plus a general breathlessness to keep the story line galloping ahead. As the pages piled up, I was not unhappy with what I was accomplishing, for I took professional pride in my ability to write quickly and accurately while fitting my data into the patterns that Drummond liked.
What we have in the three-day festival that starts tomorrow, Friday, is a Spanish celebration dating back about two hundred years but based upon Indian rituals almost two thousand years old. It’s appropriate, therefore, that our protagonists should represent almost ideally the two historic strains of Mexican history: the ancient Indian, the recent Spanish.
The Spaniard I’ve already given you in detail: slim, tall, blue-eyed and with exceptional poetry of movement. You have my photos of him that I’ve caught in other plazas and earlier in Spain and they show the charismatic Victoriano, but use those that emphasize his elegant style. I haven’t sent you too much on Gómez yet, but he’s different
, a grubby little Indian peasant with no elegance whatever, only a brutal determination to get the job done and a willingness to risk his life in doing it. Fortunately for us, he looks like what he is: awkward, a stumpy little guy with a head of dark hair encroaching on his eyebrows, and legs that are decidedly bowed. Taciturn, moody, afraid of the press, he is not a likeable matador.
So I see Ixmiq-61 as a duel between the two faces of Mexico, the Spaniard versus the Indian. Also: sunlight versus shadow, hero versus villain, beauty versus ugliness—and, above all, a young man protected by three extremely canny bullfight operators versus an older fellow assisted by a beat-up codger who poses as a manager but who really uses Gómez as a last-chance meal ticket, and a brassy dame who believes Gómez will help her become a flamenco entertainer in Spain but who will drop him instantly if something better comes along.
As I pushed my chair back to stare out the window at the plaza, I was not entirely happy with my facile comparison of the two matadors, for I suspected that in stressing their obvious differences I was missing essentials. A few days earlier I had telegraphed New York a brief report on Gómez and their response proved that the home office had adopted my simplification, because the art editor had cabled me: “Be sure get moody shot Gómez working bull deep in shadows.” Drummond himself cabled: “Essential you provide us with numerous incidents that show good guy in peril and bad guy momentarily triumphant.” In our shop Victoriano had become certified as the good guy.
Thus, through words and photographs we were prejudging an event that had not yet happened, and I could detect in the communications reaching me from New York evidence that the editors had become emotionally involved in this duel between the matadors. Late Thursday afternoon, a few hours after dropping off my latest dispatch at the cable office, I was startled by a messenger who brought to my room an urgent cable from Drummond that asked: “Highbrow philosophizing aside, which matador do you think is likely to die?”