Mexico (64 page)

A downstairs light flicked on and the door creaked open, displaying a barefoot, suspendered old man who was almost as dirty as his windows. He looked exhausted but he made a decent show of welcoming the Altomecs and their miserable burden.

His office consisted of an earthen floor, a few chairs of unfinished lumber and the inevitable framed photographs of women in black and men with mustaches, all covered with the soot of ages. The inert body of the workman, who looked to be near death, was gently placed upon a rickety uncovered table and Dr. Castaneda began undressing him. Both the thigh bone and the shin of the right leg were broken, so that the leg swung outward like a scimitar, but what was more important, and what the doctor noticed immediately, was that some othe
r b
one had punctured the lower part of the man's belly and now stood forth strangely white and free of blood. Dr. Castaneda shook his head, and the Indians, interpreting this sign, whispered among themselves.

What happened next appalled me. The doctor went to a glass case such as shopkeepers use for penny candies, slid back the door, and started rummaging through a pile of filthy medical instruments covered with flyspecks and dust. Forceps, tongue depressors, scissors and hemostats lay jumbled together, and the doctor took whatever he needed from the pile, blew on it, wiped it on his shirt, and went to work. When the tool was no longer needed, it was pitched unwashed back into the glass case to accumulate more dust.

Veneno whispered to me in his grave voice, "Now you can see why matadors dread being gored outside the big cities. Can you imagine having your guts operated on with those things?" His two sons studied the doctor with fascination, and when I saw Chucho cross himself, I thought: He's probably experienced such medical care in a similar village.

After his initial probing, Dr. Castaneda looked at the Altomecs and said, "There isn't much we can do for this one."

One of the Indians grabbed the doctor's arm and pleaded, "He must live! He has four children."

"Everybody has four children," the old doctor replied. He rummaged in the glass case for another tool and I thought, Years ago this doctor tried to keep his instruments clean--the way he was taught. Now look at him.

Wiping the tool between his arm and his left side, he approached the stricken man to try to force the protruding bone back through the stomach wall, but as he did so the man on the table groaned piteously, jerked his head twice, and died.

"God's blessing," Veneno mumbled. The three Leals crossed themselves, and it seemed to me that in the filthy room at Crucifixi
o
n we had been closer to the reality of death than we had been that afternoon in the bullring of Toledo. A bullfighter may not actually court death, but he knows that he is tempting the Grim Reaper, so that death does not come unexpectedly, but a peasant working in his field has a right to expect continued life, at least into his sixties. When death strikes him arbitrarily, it seems more terrible. One of the peasants broke into soft weeping, as if it were part of him that had died. "His brother," one of the Altomecs explained. "And well he might weep, for now he'll have more children to feed."

Down the street from the plaza hurried two men bringing a priest, who was dressed in an ordinary business suit. "The father's here," one of the Indians announced, but the weeping brother said sternly, "No priest will touch my brother."

When the priest was advised of the brother's stand, he hesitated and then turned to leave, but Dr. Castaneda threw his medical implements into the glass case, slammed the door shut and cried, "Father, when a man dies in my house I want a priest." He elbowed his way through the Indians and took the priest by the arm.

"Not for my brother!" the stubborn relative shouted. There was a scuffle, after which the protesting brother was taken away. Dr. Castaneda went up to the man, who was being held by three of the Altomecs, and snarled, "I'm not going to get paid, so he'll die the way I say. He's no longer your brother. He's a corpse on his way to meet God."

"Not my brother!" the imprisoned Indian shouted. "He's on his way to hell!"

"Oh, shut up!" one of the men cried, clapping his hand over his friend's mouth. The priest, ignoring an unpleasantness with which he was familiar, went about his duty of blessing the dead man and commending his soul to heaven, for which Dr. Castaneda thanked him warmly. But when the priest had gone, the brother broke away from his captors, rushed over to the table and spat upon the dead body.

"He's in hell," the brother shouted. "Where he wants to be and where I want to be. He's dead, and he's left four children, and no pig of a priest can help him now."

Veneno startled me by striding across the dirty room and striking the brother across the mouth, knocking him into a corner. "Don't you speak of death and priests like that," the old picador said menacingly, crossing himself.

We returned to the Chrysler and watched in silence as the Altomecs wrapped the dead body in a sheet and started the long hike back to their village. As Dr. Castaneda had predicted, no one had any money to pay him, so he brushed some of the dust off the top of his instrument case, surveyed his miserable office, and turned out the light.

When the funeral procession had returned to the plaza, leaving us alone, I looked beyond the doctor's office and saw how wretched this Indian village was. A garage displayed its broken tools, its dripping water faucet and its unspeakable toilet. A school, farther down the narrow street, was ramshackle, with broken windows.

This was rural Mexico, almost as impoverished and ignored as the worst of what I had seen when reporting on Haiti. It infuriated me to know that the Mexican political party that had run the nation for most of this century had called itself something like the People's Revolutionary Party and had loudly preached social justice for all, winning election after election on that windy promise, but when installed, had proved itself to be a callous oligarchy. A small group of buddies had passed the presidency from one to another, each coming into office with modest means and leaving after six years with hundreds of millions, usually hidden in Swiss banks. The so-called revolutionaries stole the country blind, allowing or even forcing the peasants to sink deeper and deeper into abject poverty. Few nations had been ruled so cynically, which was why so many peasants wanted to escape to the good jobs, houses and food in the United States. I was not proud of what my country had accomplished during my lifetime.

And yet I loved this country, its color, its music, its warm friendships, its handsome cities so much older than those in the United States. I have often thought as I watched my wealthy friends enjoy their privileges that there was no country on earth where a young man of good family whose father had a government job from which he could steal a large amount of money could live better. Of course, he would have to blind himself to the gnawing poverty about him, but apparently that was easy, since so many did it.

I had witnessed this phenomenon in Cuba in the 1950s, when the idle rich were cruelly indifferent to poverty, and it had not surprised me when Fidel Castro had been able to organize his revolution. I had ample reason to despise that same Castro of recent years, for on major matters he had lied to me, encouraging me to make a fool of myself in my reports from Cuba, but I had to admit his drawing power and feared that much of Latin America, always hungry for a savior, would imitate Cuba--even Mexico.

Certainly, looking at this Altomec village of Crucifixion, I had to admit that my gallant Indian ancestors had been pitifully shortchanged by the twentieth century. The material rewards of industrialism had been slow to filter down to the Indians, and whereas Mexico City was lovely and Toledo unique in its charm, beyond them lay a thousand Crucifixions where the Indians were denied almost everything that was required for decent living. Even the names of the villages--Crucifixion, Encarnacion, Santiago de Campostela, Trinidad--bespoke the betrayal the Altomecs had suffered, and when I compared the civilization they had built for themselves in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with what they had today, I felt they had a right to revolt.

"Why do you suppose villages like this are so poor?" I asked.

"Why?" Veneno snorted in Spanish contempt for anything Indian. "They prefer to live like pigs." He spat out the window.

"I will say this, though," Chucho mused, pointing across the plaza to the towers of a church large enough to serve a population eight times as large as Crucifixion's. "Beyond the church they have a fine country bullring."

"They do!" Veneno cried enthusiastically. "Remember the great afternoon you had here in Crucifixion, Chucho? Bulls of San Mateo."

"La Punta," Chucho corrected quiedy. "I'll never forget."

There was a moment of awkward silence, during which I remembered that this notable fight had taken place when it was still uncertain whether Chucho or Victoriano was to become the matador. "You were very strong that day," old Veneno reflected, and I wondered what Chucho was thinking, whether he resented the fact that his father had converted him into the peon, whether he ever experienced the pangs I sometimes suffered because I had wanted to be a novelist but had been sidetracked into journalism.

Our cases were by no means identical. He had been ordered into secondary status; I had carelessly slipped into the security of a field I had not consciously elected. So my fault rested on my own shoulders, and yet... and yet, there had been my father's unvoiced assumption that I could not do what he had done. It wasn't a clear case at all. Chucho's father had yelled at him; mine had smiled at me, indulgently.

"Chucho, do you ever regret--" I began, for as a reporter I had stedjed myself to ask any question, however intrusive, but before I could finish, Veneno said bluntly, "Here comes Diego."

Running across the plaza with the easy grace that marks bullfighters, Diego looked about to be sure he wasn't being followed, then ducked into our side street and whispered, "The bulls are here."

"Candido, too?" Veneno asked.

"Candido," Diego said with finality. "He's at the saloon now."

In the darkness Veneno sucked in his breath, then snapped his fingers and asked, "Clay, you used to know Candido, didn't you?"

"He worked for my father," I replied.

"Would you proposition him?"

"About barbering?" I asked.

"Yes," Veneno said sharply.

"He won't listen," I warned.

"He's got to listen," Veneno insisted.

"I'll speak to him," I said. "But he loves bulls the way you love your sons."

Veneno and I left the Chrysler and started walking toward the plaza, but we had gone only a few steps when the old picador halted and called for Chucho. "Candido hates me," Veneno reflected. "I killed one of his bulls once, an ugly beast. As a picador I had no right to do this, and he's never forgiven me. You go, Chucho. To you he might listen."

We went up to the dismal little saloon, where a gang of late
-
night loafers had gathered to talk with the bull men, and I was approaching the ring of tables when I saw parked along the edge of the plaza a sturdy truck loaded with six Rectangular boxes strapped with steel bands. Almost against my will I left the saloon and walked toward the truck, aware that I was being used in an illegal operation of which I did not approve. I knew that shaving horns was a nasty business, and I had come along only to see how it was done, but now I was being conscripted as an active participant, and I was ashamed of myself for being so compliant. When I went up to the boxes I could feel the terrible strength of the imprisoned bulls as they pressed against the sides, or snorted, or kicked the planks. In the darkness I sensed their overwhelming power as they must have sensed my fear. They grew restless and one of the six issued a low bellow that was additionally terrifying.

I was about to move away when I was startled by a firm hand that grasped my shoulder and a familiar, rasping voice, which warned, "Don't bother the bulls!"

I jumped away and looked around to see a tall, thin man dressed in leather pants, shirt tied about his middle, bandanna knotted at his throat and a large sombrero. He now had white hair that he wore in bangs, dark eyes, a seamed face and a large mustache. He must have been past seventy but he had the austere correct manner I had known as a boy. He had once been my closest friend, my most trusted adviser, and he looked now almost exactly as he had in those hectic days at the Mineral.

"C
a
ndido!" I cried. "It's Norman."

He limped toward me just as he had done the first time I had seen him and embraced me. "What brings you here?" he asked soberly.

"Let's go over to the saloon," I suggested, taking him by the arm, but as soon as he saw Chucho he pushed my hand away and asked, "Have you come to this little village at night to talk with me about the bulls?"

"Let's sit down," I pleaded, but he refused.

"Where is he?" Candido demanded. "Where's the real one? Is he afraid to come out and face me like a man?"

"Wait a minute, Candido," I begged. "We just wanted to--"

"Ho, Veneno, you evil old man!" Candido shouted into the darkened plaza. "Where are you hiding?"

"Old friend," I pleaded, as people began to fill the plaza to find out what the noise was about. "Veneno has an idea--"