Mexico

  “I am known as Don Alfonso,” the man said, fixing his penetrating eyes on Leal’s, “but the name is a courtesy. Like you, I am a simple peasant who has prospered in Mexico.” He laughed, then drew himself erect so that he was almost as tall as the matador. “But also like you, I am a Spaniard.” He hammered his fist into his palm and repeated, “I am a Spaniard.”

  “What have you to do with me?” Leal pressed.

  “I have come to introduce you to your future wife,” Don Alfonso replied.

  Bernardo Leal did not laugh. Something in his visitor’s grave manner inhibited him and he asked, “Where is the girl?”

  And Don Alfonso replied with dignity, “In my house, for she is my daughter.” He paused, then added with intensity: “You are a Spaniard, matador, and you must not allow your precious blood to be lost among Mexicans.”

  “Mexico is now my home,” Leal began, but whatever he was about to say was cut off when his visitor grabbed him by the back of the neck and thrust him toward the frameless mirror that graced the barren hotel wall.

  “Look at your eyes, son!” the determined old man cried. “Look at your skin! Matador, you are a Spaniard. You are too precious to be lost.”

  He led Leal from the hotel and through the crowds that had come to pay him homage. The girls who had accompanied him from Mexico City fell back and the hangers-on that pursue all matadors stood aside. Through the narrow cobbled streets of Toledo, most gracious of the Mexican cities and the most Spanish, went the two Spaniards until they came to a white stone wall sixteen feet high on which had been pasted, some days before, a garish red-and-yellow poster proclaiming the arrival in Toledo of the famed Spanish matador Bernardo Leal.

  “I tell them they must not place posters on my wall,” Don Alfonso complained. “But with Mexicans what can you do?”

  He led the way to a huge wooden gate studded with bronze fittings, and after he had jangled the rope for a while, muttering as he did so, “These damned Mexicans!” a barefoot servant swung the heavy portal aside and Bernardo Leal entered for the first time the spacious entrance chambers of his future father-in-law.

  He found himself in a corner of Spain. There were the solid wooden trunks carved in Salamanca. Above them were crossed Spanish swords from Seville. And in the patio beyond played a handsomely carved stone fountain copied from one in the ancient city of Ronda. When Don Alfonso’s wife appeared the young matador saw she was one of those large-boned, horsey women so common in Spain, and he thought, It was she who sent her husband to fetch me. But the tall Spanish woman had the graciousness of her native land and immediately made Bernardo feel at home.

  “This is a most unusual meeting,” she said softly, “but I saw you twice in Mexico City and I thought, We Spaniards must stick together.”

  Quietly, Bernardo repeated what he had told her husband: “I think of myself now as a Mexican.”

  With equal control, but with much greater force, Don Alfonso’s wife replied, “As you grow older, matador, believe me, the heritage of your Spanish blood will come to the fore.” She smiled, took Leal by the arm, and said, “Raquel is waiting for us in there. You can appreciate that for her this is a difficult moment.”

  When the studded doors were swung back, the matador saw standing by a heavy refectory table a girl of twenty-five or so, tall like her mother, big-boned, possibly awkward, but obviously eager to be charming. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, but when she left the massive leather chair upon which she had been leaning, she moved forward with vigor and grace. “I saw you at the bullfight today, matador,” she said quietly, “and you were superb.”

  “If I had seen you there, señorita, I should have dedicated the first bull to you.”

  “If I wear my best Spanish gown next Sunday, will you do so?”

  “I shall be unable to do otherwise,” the matador replied.

  It was a delightful dinner, candle-lit and opulent. In the course of it Don Alfonso explained that he had come to Mexico thirty-eight years ago and had made his fortune importing goods from Liverpool. At first he had tried living in Mexico City, but had found it oppressive and lacking in culture: “It’s so damned Mexican!” Then he had come to Toledo and had stumbled upon this old house that had been built by one of the Palafox men. “Here I have been happy.”

  “May I visit you during the coming week?” Leal asked.

  “We would be desolate if you did not,” Don Alfonso replied.

  “On Friday I must visit the Palafox bull ranch to supervise the testing of some cows,” Leal explained. Then, turning to Raquel, he said, “I would be flattered beyond words if you could accompany our party.”

  “We will be most happy to accept,” the girl’s mother quickly replied, having no intention of leaving her daughter alone with any man prior to marriage. And after the pleasant visit to the ranch the young matador dallied in our city and it became apparent that Raquel would marry him and that he would move to Toledo and live in the big Spanish house.

  Mexico City, 13 December 1903. As a matador’s wife, Doña Raquel was unusual in that she was willing to attend her husband’s fights, and she was sitting in the old plaza in Mexico City on the day in 1903 when Bernardo Leal gave a gallant performance. Her eldest son, Justo, eleven at the time, was with her in the seats by the barrier when her husband took the second bull of the afternoon, a wiry, quick Palafox animal, and dominated the beast pretty much as he wished.

  Doña Raquel feared all bulls and appreciated their lethal power, but she was also fascinated by her husband’s poetic grace, which no other fighter could match. There was something in the manner in which Bernardo worked that projected a sensation of grave danger linked to exquisite art, and the capacity to accomplish this was rare. She thought proudly, Not even Mazzantini displayed a finer grace than my husband, but when Bernardo finally killed the Palafox beast she closed her eyes and covered her ears as if in surrender to her hitherto repressed fears.

  Little Justo, a serious child dedicated to protecting his father’s reputation, did not cover his ears at such moments but stayed alert to catch the shouts of “Leal! Leal!” But on this afternoon some of the rowdies seated in the sunny section expressed contempt for the size of the Palafox bull that Bernardo had killed and instead of cheering the matador they jeered him and continued to do so even when the other matador, a famous Mexican, had started to fight the third bull. “Show him how a real Mexican fights real bulls,” someone in the crowd shouted.

  “Spaniards are always brave with little bulls,” another added.

  “Liar!” Justo screamed in a high childish treble. Bernardo, leaning against the barrier, looked up at his son and laughed.

  Señora Leal did not consider the incident amusing. “Justo!” she whispered.

  “I could cut their throats,” the boy muttered, not bothering to watch the fight of the second matador.

  Doña Raquel slapped her son’s hand sharply and said, “No more of that.”

  “But Father can do it with big bulls, too,” her son protested, and breaking from his mother’s grasp he dashed to the iron grillwork that separated the good seats from the inexpensive and shouted: “Swine! My father can fight bulls as big as boxcars.”

  With much embarrassment Doña Raquel recovered her son and the incident might have ended there except that one of Bernardo Leal’s partisans in the sunny section bellowed, “The boy’s right! Leal is better than any Mexican!”

  This challenge was calculated to launch a riot, and it did. Soon the sunny section was a melee with men flying through the air as they dived from the higher tiers to revenge themselves upon enemies seated below. Then, as quickly as it had started, the riot ended, for from the caverns beneath the plaza burst into sunlight the fourth bull of the afternoon, a huge black Palafox animal that weighed more than half a ton. It was intended for the Spaniard Leal.

  From the sunny side a voice cried ominously, “Now we’ll see what he can do with a real bull.”

  “You watch!” young Justo shouted ba
ck. His mother did not try to silence him, for she was struck with terror at the sight of this monstrous animal.

  As if he had vowed to support his son’s claims, Bernardo fought the large bull with special grace and skill. He turned and danced with the big cape used at the start of each fight until the crowd sensed that with this big adversary he might even surpass what he had accomplished with his first bull.

  And then, at the height of Leal’s mastery, the bull suddenly whipped upward with his saberlike left horn, caught Leal in the groin, and threw him into the air. Even before he fell to earth, men were already running into the ring to carry him to the infirmary. But with devilish cunning the maddened bull chopped upward at his victim, and before Leal could drop, the bull’s powerful horns threw him back into the air four times, revolving his body upon the horn tips as if he were a rag doll.

  “Oh my God!” moaned Doña Raquel.

  At last the bull flung the matador far away and onto the sand, whereupon the peóns rushed toward him, but their movement enraged the bull and he charged madly for them. When they fled, his ugly little eyes saw not their swirling capes but the red-stained body on the sand, and with horrifying accuracy he drove his left horn at the inert matador. When the bull’s horn first penetrated Bernardo Leal’s throat, his wife fainted, and she was spared the ultimate horror of that day, but the boy Justo kept his eyes grimly fixed upon each motion of the bull and its effect on the man.

  The Palafox ranch, 1933. Bernardo Leal left two sons, Justo, born in 1892, and Anselmo, born nine years later in 1901. The boys grew up with their mother in the Spanish house in Toledo. They had blue eyes like their parents and fair skin, and throughout their lives the lesson that would live with them longest was not one acquired in school but the one that their old grandfather Don Alfonso had taught them. Often he would grab them by the back of the neck and thrust them before a mirror: “Look at your eyes! Remember that you are Spanish. When it comes time to marry, find some Spanish girl like your mother.”

  On the streets of Toledo, of course, the boys were Mexican, but once inside the walled garden, whose doors were studded with metal from Spain, they were inheritors of a Spanish tradition. But they were also inheritors of another, more terrible memory, and for this there was no cure, nor has there ever been. In their playroom hung the poster of their father’s last fight: ¡PONCIANO DÍAZ AND BERNARDO LEAL WITH BULLS OF PALAFOX! In their mother’s room hung a replica of the matador’s last suit of lights, slim-waisted and elegant, while in another room known as the chapel because of the silver retable, at which Leal had worshiped before his fights, hung suspended the head of the great Palafox bull that had killed their father.

  It was from such memories and mementos that the Leal boys, Justo and Anselmo, derived their obsession with the bulls, but if the Revolution of 1910 had not erupted to break the peaceful passage of days in Toledo, it is hardly likely that either boy would have followed the bulls as a profession. In 1911 General Gurza, the scourge of the north, led his undisciplined rabble into the fair old city, and for three days there was terror. Priests were shot, young girls ravished, and buildings burned. On the evening of the second day four wild-riding pistoleros from Durango rattled the gate at Don Alfonso’s big Spanish house, broke their way in, and informed him, “General Gurza will use this house as his headquarters.”

  “Get out, you rotten Mexican rabble!” the would-be grandee thundered, his muttonchops bristling. These were the last words he spoke, for the invaders instantly shot him, and prepared the way for their general. When Don Alfonso’s old horse-faced Spanish wife, screaming, attacked the intruders, they shot her, too. Then they raped the dead couple’s daughter and cut the throat of Doña Raquel, the matador’s widow. When General Gurza and his men were finally driven from the city, the old Spanish palace was a ruin, its walls knocked down and its tapestries burned by Gurza’s drunken lieutenants.

  Don Alfonso’s business had been failing, and when he died the boys Justo and Anselmo were virtually destitute. But instead of surrendering to despair, Justo, who was a husky nineteen at the time, looked upon his unexpected freedom as a deliverance and at the invitation of the Palafoxes moved himself and his brother to the bull ranch, southwest of Toledo. There he surprised everyone by becoming a master picador. Astride a horse he had natural courage, and with his broad shoulders and powerful arms he had no difficulty driving the long iron-tipped pics deep into the bull’s neck muscles. He was a fierce opponent of the bulls and one day a rancher warned, “If you drive the pic so deeply, you may kill the bull.”

  “I want to,” Justo growled.

  “You fight that bull as if you hated him like some evil poison,” the watcher observed.

  “To me all bulls are poison,” Justo replied, and from that day his name was Veneno, Poison. As Veneno he appeared in the new plaza in Mexico City, and as Veneno, one of the most famous picadors of his era, he accompanied the Mexican matador Luis Freg to Spain, where he enhanced his reputation.

  In Spain Veneno became known as the fearless picador. He would drive his blindfolded horse anywhere to encounter the bull and worked from terrains that a lesser man would not have dared to approach. He exhibited demonic hatred for the bull, and on the days when four or five of his horses were killed under him and he would be prone on the sand, with the infuriated bull trampling him while trying to gore him, it sometimes appeared as if Veneno wanted to fight the bull with his bare hands. That he was not killed before the end of his first season in Spain was a miracle.

  All matadors breathed easier when Veneno was in their troupe, for with his cruel, probing lance he punished a bull more severely than any other picador. So during those years, now termed the golden age of bullfighting, Veneno fought repeatedly for most of the giants: Joselito, Belmonte, Gaona. And he came to know as much about bulls as any man who ever fought. The bullfight fans, knowing this, were apt to shout when he rode into the plaza on some pathetic nag whose right eye had been blindfolded so he could not see the bull about to attack and shy away: “¡Olé! Veneno! Kill him with your pic.” And this he tried to do. Twice in his career he succeeded in so damaging a bull, his lance driving toward the vulnerable backbone itself, that the animal had to be returned to the corrals, where it died. Normally such an act would have been condemned, but with Veneno it was different, for everyone knew that he wanted to kill bulls to avenge his father.

  His brother, Anselmo, never acquired the reputation that Veneno enjoyed. Perhaps because he had been left at home in Toledo on that dreadful afternoon when the bull tore away most of his father’s head, he lacked the consuming compulsion of Veneno and failed to attain that mastery of bulls that characterized his brother. He became a minor matador, without class, and moved inconspicuously from one Mexican plaza to the next, brave perhaps but lacking fire. He also tried his luck in Spain but was promptly identified by critics as one who should leave the fighting of bulls to others. But he knew no other occupation, so he continued, one of those semitragic men who waste their lives on the periphery of an art that is cruel to horses, bulls and people alike.

  Anselmo’s only distinction arose from the fact that while on his Spanish tour he contracted marriage with a beautiful girl called Alicia from Seville, in the south. Her father took one look at his son-in-law in the classic ring of Seville and advised: “Son, leave the bulls. They are not for you.”

  “It is my profession,” Anselmo argued.

  “I have a meat-packing plant near Cádiz,” the girl’s father argued. “Work with me.”

  “My brother and I follow the bulls,” Anselmo insisted proudly. “It’s in our blood.”

  “Is your brother married?” the meat-packer asked.

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you introduce him to Alicia’s cousin?”

  When Veneno came south with Belmonte to fight at Seville, the introductions were made, a marriage was arranged, and Veneno promptly had two sons in quick succession. In 1933 Anselmo also had a son, whom he named Victoriano Leal, hopin
g that the boy would achieve more victories than he had accomplished.

  Victoriano was less than a month old when the senior Leals were invited to the Palafox ranch to participate in the testing of some new cows that the ranch had recently purchased in an effort to strengthen the bloodlines and make the offspring bulls more fierce in the fight. Anselmo did not relish these trips to the ranch, for after the sack of their grandfather’s Spanish house in Toledo, one of General Gurza’s soldiers had turned up with the head of the bull that had killed Bernardo Leal, and Don Eduardo had purchased this grisly souvenir. Now it hung prominently on a wall of the entertainment room at the ranch, marked by a silver plaque that read: “Terremoto of Palafox. This bull of 529 kilos killed the matador Bernardo Leal in Mexico City 13 December 1903.” After more than half a century the horns were still sharp as daggers and they terrified Anselmo, but robust Veneno was in no way dismayed. Unlike his brother, he appreciated every opportunity to fight Palafox bulls, and even though on this day he would be limited to cows, he would nevertheless have many chances to wound real bulls, to assail them with an abbreviated pic and to feel them recoil. If he could not deal with the grown bulls of Palafox with a heavy pic he would not settle for punishing the young cows with a light one.

  So the brothers went by train from Mexico City to Toledo, where Don Eduardo Palafox met them for the long drive to the ranch quarters southwest of town. On the way he confided, “The reason I wanted you to attend this testing is that in addition to the new cows, I want you to see the new seed bull from Spain. He is being delivered after the testing tomorrow.”

  “Guadalquivir blood?” Veneno asked.

  “Naturally,” Don Eduardo replied, and he proposed that they join him in a copa at the long mahogany bar in the entertainment room, but as the three men were about to sit down in chairs built of bulls’ horns highly polished, interlocked to form seats and backs, and then made comfortable by cushions of tanned but uncut sheepskins, Anselmo found that the chair he had chosen was one facing the great bull Terremoto, so that whenever he looked up he found the bull that had killed his father glaring at him as if the animal was about to charge and kill the son, too.