Mexico (21 page)

Striding back to the bull, who stood ready to defend himself again, Juan
Go
mez whispered, "All right, little bull! You have brought me glory, and now I shall--"

There were voices behind him. The rancher was shouting, "Gomez! Come back! We want that bull."

The Indian did not fully understand and thought that he was being warned not to attempt his third effort on such terrain, for the bull was indeed dangerous. But he felt that he knew bulls better than the senior matadors, better than the rancher and certainly better than the peons. He would kill this valiant beast where he stood, and he prepared to do so.

Then strange things happened. One of the senior matadors dashed out from the barrier and with a red cape started swinging the bull away, and two peons grabbed Gomez from behind. Dazed, he looked up at the improvised stands and shouted, "It's my bull!"

The gate to the corral was swinging open and two oxen were crowding into the plaza. Juan interpreted this to mean that the bull was being taken away from him alive because of his bad luck in killing, and he fought to break loose from the men who held him. He was determined to kill the animal before it could return to the corrals, and then he saw Cigarro's ecstatic face. The wiry peon had lit a big cigar and was smiling like a gargoyle.

'They are sparing the life of your great bull!" he shouted. "What a superb afternoon!"

And then Juan
Gomez
saw the thing happen, the thing that tears at the heart of a bullfighter. The oxen nudged at the perplexed but defiant bull, and at first the brave beast was willing to fight against them, for he was still determined to defend his life against all adversaries. But then he smelled their indifference, tentatively poked at one with his left horn, pawed the earth and looked for the men he had been fighting. Finding no one, he ran in a small circle as if proclaiming his sovereignty over that plaza, and dashed with terrible force at some unknown enemy in the darkness.

The crowd cheered as the valiant beast disappeared, for they knew that he would be used in later years as stud for the ranch. Gomez, at last realizing what was happening, whispered, "Go off, little bull! You find me a manager." He then walked slowly and with dignity across the ring to where Cigarro waited by the barrier.

"Six months, bowlegs," the peon was assuring him expansively, "you be matador, contracts Plaza de Mexico. But that one you keep away from," he warned, indicating with a toss of his ugly head the singer, who was watching everything.

Cigarro kept his promise. In late December of 1950 Juan Gomez took his doctorate with bulls of Palafox in the great ring at Mexico City. When he marched out of the darkness he gasped, for towering above him in the concrete bowl were more than fifty thousand people. In the front row, with a bright shawl over the barrier, as if she were a real Spaniard, sat Lucha Gonzalez wearing flowers. Cigarro was in the alleyway, reprieved from wearing the suit of lights any longer, now that he was a full-fledged manager, and when the time came for
Gomez
to dedicate the first bull of the afternoon, the one handed him by the senior matador as a traditional gesture of sponsorship, it was inevitable that he offer this animal to Lucha. His gesture was popular with the crowd, and his kill was good. He gained no ears but he was accorded a turn around the huge plaza while some in the stands bellowed, "
Ole
!" feeling that they were assisting at the birth of a real matador.

After that nothing happened. Juan
Gomez
became merely one of thirty-one Mexican matadors. He had no wealthy patron to underwrite stories about him for the major papers or to force him upon the provincial impresarios. His reputation was not sufficient to warrant repeated invitations back to Plaza Mexico, where a matador had to have a name in order to fill the huge arena. He was merely another matador of no great distinction, and the remorseless grind resumed.

A fight in Torre
o
n in April was followed by another in Orizaba in early June. A hurried phone call from a village of two thousand in remote Jalisco would suffice for July, and in August there might be nothing. He was not important enough to be invited to the Festival of Ixmiq, and the years went by with one more Mexican matador at the near-starvation level. In spite of this he was required by bullfighting convention alway
s t
o look sharply dressed, to pay bribes to the newspaper critics, and to convey at all hours a sense of success and grandeur. More than some, Juan Gomez was able to accomplish these requisites, for he had three factors operating on his behalf.

In Cigarro, his manager, he had a solid friend. This peon had experienced a life much like Juan's, working for matadors who underpaid him and before bulls that had often sent him to the infirmary. He had been far too ugly to marry a wealthy girl and financially unable to marry any other kind, but through all his years of loneliness he had kept alive one vision. In Mexico City, not far from the great plaza of the cathedral, there was a cafe frequented only by bullfighters, actors and newspapermen. It was called the Tupinamba, and around its white marble tables swirled the gossip of the bullring. During his long apprenticeship Cigarro had been unable to afford the Tupinamba, and had had to content himself with watching its exciting life from the sidewalk, but he had sworn that someday he would be a famous matador with the best table at the Tupi. When that vision faded because of his ineptitude with the bulls, he decided to become a peon in the regular troupe of some successful matador, which would entitle him to sit in the Tupi, but since he was not a first-rate peon he failed to achieve this dream also. He then built his life on the hope that in his fifties he would stumble upon a young fighter of promise who would require a manager, and then he would sit day after day in the Tupinambo, organizing his matador's professional career. This last dream he had achieved, and he now lounged each day in the Tupi, issuing statements of great gravity. With the little money he had acquired during the preceding thirty years, he played the role of manager, giving his matador an emotional security few fighters enjoyed. He never doubted that someday Mexico would discover what a classic matador it had in Juan Gomez, and until that fateful day he, Cigarro, would continue to wait in the Tupinambo for the best contracts available in the smaller plazas.

The two other factors that bolstered the ego of Juan
Gomez
were self-generated. First, it was becoming widely acknowledged that although he was not particularly accomplished with either the cape or the cloth, as a killer of bulls he was the best Mexico could provide. In his fights this small Altomec Indian demonstrated what the culminating moment of the afternoon should be as he stood before the bull, profiled, kicked out his left knee, and threw himself like a man bent on suicide right over the horns.

The second factor was a towering sense of honor. When he walked into the Tupinamba to speak to Cigarro, he moved with visible dignity, imparting a clear sense of his status as a matador. He was a wiry bundle of aggressions and defenses, and for the slightest slur he would fight anyone. In the bullring he allowed no one, not even Armillita himself, to tell him what to do. For even if a matador of the top category tried to tell him how to behave in the ring,
Gomez
would say coldly, "When you kill the way I do, I listen." Leon Ledesma, the critic, wrote of him: "He is the only man in Mexico, since the death of General Gurza, who can challenge the entire nation to a fistfight merely by the way he enters a room. He is a man of honor."

But there was one area in which Juan's carefully cultivated sense of honor did not operate, and this lapse caused genuine anguish. He had been picked up by Cigarro in January of 1950, and two weeks later he had stolen the ugly man's girl. At first, adhering to some kind of code of ethics, Lucha Gonzalez had tried to suppress her preference for the young bullfighter, for Cigarro had been good to her and had been largely instrumental in getting her started as a singer-dancer. But in the end her passion for the self-possessed young Indian had been too great, and one night in Torreon she had brazenly moved herself and her one bag out of Cigarro's room and down the hall to Juan's.

The hurt to Cigarro's ego would never heal. On that first miserable night he had tried to kill his matador, but Gomez, bewildered by Lucha's action, had first held him off, then beaten him about the face. Cigarro, bleeding badly, had then tried to kill Lucha, but she started screaming and the police were called. The affair got into the newspapers, for bullfighters' brawls always made good reading, and later on it was largely this highly publicized love affair between Lucha and Gomez that enabled Cigarro to arrange the contracts that
Gomez
did get.

And so this curious trio, held together by poverty, ambition and the love of bullfighting, mdved back and forth along the lesser highways of Mexico. Cigarro, having at last found himself a matador, stayed with
Gomez
even though he daily suffered from the indignity of having had his woman stolen. The
Indian, having attained for himself a life that was not totally wretched, stayed with his surly manager, for he suspected that he would never find another half as capable. And Lucha Gonzalez supported both of them with her ersatz flamenco. Pathetically loyal to her two bullfighters in Mexico City, if she ever made it to Seville she could have said good-bye to them without shedding a tear.

For nine years the trio fought bulls and managers and hotel owners and moving picture directors who refused to give Lucha the singing roles to which she felt entitled. They grew older, and Cigarro definitively passed the age at which he could again don the suit of lights. Lucha grew no prettier and her whiskey-soaked voice became harsh, which made her imitation flamenco sound better. And Juan Gomez scurried back and forth, always seeking the bulls. He was now thirty-two years old, an age when successful matadors in Spain have already retired, and he had never known real success. He still awaited an invitation to fight in Spain or Peru, where there was good money, or at the Festival of Ixmiq. Yet he never grew disconsolate. Cigarro told him: "No man in world kill the way you do." And that was enough.

Then, in early 1960, Cigarro was sitting at his usual table in the Tupinamba, flicking cigar ashes and trying to look important, when a flunky from the impresario of Plaza de Mexico drifted by, pretending not to see him because it was important that Cigarro open this particular conversation.

"Hello, Moreno!" the ugly one called.

"Oh, it's you!" the tricky negotiator replied, and the discussion was launched. Moreno intimated that the forthcoming fights were to be the best ever held in Mexico City. "Like the days of Manolete," Moreno suggested. "This young fellow Victoriano Leal! Ahhhh!"

"You've got him booked?" Cigarro asked warily. In this business nothing could be certified until the day after it had happened and the critics had been paid off.

"Fight after fight," Moreno assured him. "When Leal's through with us he'll be the richest bullfighter in the world."

"High fees, eh?" Cigarro asked evenly.

"Fantastic. Five thousand, six thousand dollars for one afternoon," Moreno said, picking his teeth.

Cigarro looked at him coldly: "And how much you pay my torero?"

Without changing his blas
o
expression Moreno said: "Nine hundred dollars and not a penny more."

Cigarro stalled for time. "That's what you pay picadors."

"Of course," Moreno replied.

"What I thinking"--Cigarro stalled, for much was at stake--"was the people all want to see Victoriano. I admit you frankly my torero not so popular--"

Moreno suspected that this might be a trap, but he did want to clinch one point, so he quickly said: "Quite honestly, Cigarro, we couldn't afford two other first-class matadors on the same bill with Victoriano. There isn't that much money in Mexico."

"So you plan get my torero almost nothing," Cigarro joked.

Moreno laughed expansively: "In Morelia, where I come from, nine hundred dollars is not called nothing."

Cigarro laughed with equal heartiness, then pointed at the negotiator with his cigar. "It also good we show our torero Plaza Mexico again."

"My friend," Moreno agreed warmly, "those were my thoughts exactly. What an afternoon for Gomez! Fifty-five thousand people. How long's it been since he's fought before a crowd like that?"

"What I thinking," Cigarro suggested slowly, "was everyone want to welcome Victoriano back home his successful tour, why don't you give public a real thrill? Victoriano, Gomez, mano a mano?"

At the sound of this phrase, which meant hand to hand as in mortal combat, with only two matadors, instead of three, each fighting three bulls in a deadly duel, Moreno snapped to attention, for he saw the possibility of a series of such duels across Mexico. Abandoning his easy comradely air, he asked cautiously, "How much would Gomez expect? For killing three bulls instead of two?"

"Only thirteen hundred dollars," Cigarro replied evenly. He knew that this would prove an alluring offer and was not surprised when Moreno asked abruptly, "Can you wait here?"

"I'm here all day," Cigarro replied.

"Don't leave," Moreno snapped.

When he was gone, Cigarro began to sweat.

"Virgin the Hills," he prayed, evoking the patron of his childhood, "let him fall my trap. Let him give us hand to hand, and my torero make great scandal--for fifty-five thousand people to see. Let there be riot, challenge, or maybe something. Dear Virgin ... dear Virgin ... let there be something furious."