Mexico (85 page)

With no audience to applaud what I knew was a decent pass, I shouted "
Ole
!" to cheer myself, but this attracted the bull's attention before I was ready, and at me he came. Since the tablecloth was now wrapped around me, the bull hit my legs with full force and not only knocked me flat but stomped on me and butted me again with his horns, which if they had been full grown would have killed me for certain. As it was, they were big enough to leave a small scar across my chest.

When my father, Don Eduardo and the foreman came to take the bull back to the ranch and saw that I had been giving passes to Soldado, they were furious. "Don't you know that ruins a fighting bull?" the foreman shouted as he gave me a sharp blow to the head. "You've done a terrible thing," and again he clobbered me.

"
Basta!" my father cried, pulling me away from further blows, and I have rarely heard that wonderful Spanish word for "Enough!" when I appreciated it more, for the rancher had a heavy hand.

As they herded Soldado back into the truck and allowed me to ride with them out to the ranch the foreman explained that a Spanish fighting bull had unusual intelligence: "Once he fights a man with a cape and makes three or four passes hitting nothing but cloth, he learns that he will not find his enemy that way. And pretty soon he's smart enough to leave the cape alone and drive his horn not at it but for the bundle, the man." The foreman astounded me by what he said next: "So you may have ruined the bull. You've taught him to go for the bundle, and he'll never forget. Three years from now when he goes into the ring, one more dead matador " and I felt sfck at having in a sense destroyed my friend.

But Father saved me with a thoughtful observation: "Pedro, think a minute. Soldado will be your seed bull. A jewel of great value. He'll never get into the arena," and when Pedro agreed: "That bull could be sensational as our breeder," I felt better.

As before, we drove past the road leading to the main gate to the ranch until we came to where men waited on horseback, and when we pushed Soldado out of the truck, he rushed about, smelled the horses, recognized them as fellow animals and fell in with them as if he were a docile lamb. As he trotted off to the safety of a far field, his black against the horses' roan, I cried: "Soldado!" but he did not look back at his friend.

Later, as the aficionados of Mexico know, Soldado became the most famous seed bull in their taurine history, sire of bulls that brought glory to the Palafox name. In those years I used to astound men by casually saying: "When I fought Soldado, he knocked me down three times," and they would look at me. I would add: "But I gave him one magnificent veronica," and they would treat me with respect.

While I was at the Mineral protecting my bull from General Gurza, our family's other secret guest, Father L
o
pez, was endangering both himself and us by resuming his priestly duties even though the countryside was full of people who approved of the government's persecution of priests in what it called "a drive to rid Mexico of the tyranny of Catholicism." On this point, which seemed to tear the nation apart, our family was split three ways. Mother, as a conservative Palafox, was strongly pro-Catholic. Father, as a Virginia Baptist, was pretty firmly against the Catholic Church. And I, who knew little of religion, approved of men like Father L
o
pez who did good work among his people and disapproved of other priests who ranted at me when I accompanied my mother to Mass. To put it simply, I didn't know what I thought.

What Father Lopez did that endangered us was to move about the rural areas north of the Mineral, quietly assemble small groups of the faithful, and conduct mass in some barn or kitchen. He wore no clerical garb, of course, and was so scrawny that he sometimes had difficulty convincing the peons that he really was a priest, and once when I accompanied him I saw tears come into his eyes as he tried to assure the half
-
dozen people in a small kitchen that he was qualified to bring them the Mass: "Tell them, Norman, tell them who I am," and in my fluent Spanish, which reassured them, I told of his miraculous escape from the murders at the cathedral. Then they clustered about him and he prayed.

Fortunately, he and I were absent on another missionary trip when General Gurza's men made a visit to the Palafox silver mine, and when Father L
o
pez and I approached the place, he suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me back. From a vantage point on a hillside we watched what happened.

Eleven soldiers, led by a young officer, stormed into the
Mineral and began searching for Father and Mother. Finally locating them, they dragged them out, lined them up against the wall and were about to shoot them as agents of the Palafoxes when Grandmother Caridad came running out screaming "No! No!" One of the firing squad was a local man who had worked with her in the mine and he shouted: "She is one of us!" so the execution was stayed.

Trembling as I hid behind low shrubs on the hill, I watched as Gurza's men tied my parents and my grandmother to a tree to prevent them from interfering with the mission they had been sent to carry out. They took from the backs of three heavily laden mules large bundles of something, and although I couldn't guess what they were, Father Lopez whispered "Dynamite!" and when the bundles were opened I saw the sticks, which were taken to the mouth of the shaft and thrown in. Then a long rope was produced and individual sticks were tied to it, after which it was lowered in the shaft so that the dynamite was evenly distributed down the sides. When all was secure, Gurza's men lit a fuse that ran down beside the rope and at the same time threw four sticks of sputtering dynamite down the shaft. For a moment nothing happened, then came a titanic explosion as the mine blew itself apart.

The blast started fires in the various caverns and now Gurza's men threw into the smoking shaft the pieces of valuable machinery that either Grandfather and his Confederate engineers had constructed or Father had bought from companies in England. The entire apparatus of the Mineral crashed down to the raging fires below. Finally the men cut the wire that operated the cage Father had built, and it went smashing itself to pieces as it careened down the rocky shaft, after which the men hacked the superstructure from which the cage was suspended, and it too went echoing down the hole that would never be mined again.

Their work done, the soldiers released their three prisoners, and from what I saw I could deduce they told my parents they were lucky that old Caridad had been in the house, for as they departed, one of the men kissed her.

When Father Lopez and I crept back to the Mineral, we joined the family members in surveying the ruins, and I think all of us realized that a way of life had ended--at the mine, in the plaza, and in Toledo generally. Father Lopez said: "Whatever priests come back to reopen the cathedral, they'll no longer be able to tell the people what to do and how to think." When Father and I peered down the shaft he told me: "It can never be revived. Look at the steps," and when I said: "But there's still silver down there," he corrected me: 'The vein had already begun to peter out. With the cage and the donkey engine gone, we'll never go down there again." And I knew that our famed Veta Madre (the Mother Lode) had expired.

Mother, who had seen so many of her family murdered by Gurza's men, knew that the remaining Palafoxes would be forced to live in vastly different ways, and as a strong woman she was prepared to make the effort. And even I would have to accept changed conditions. Now that the mine no longer functioned, I might have to leave the Mineral. I knew that the school I attended had been destroyed by the rebels, and that the parents of many of my schoolmates had been murdered and their big homes burned, so I could not guess what new arrangements would be made for me. Each of us had a personal reason for despair, but we agreed on one thing: General Gurza was a monster who had ravaged Toledo as if he were some invading barbarian from Central Asia come to reduce the rest of the world to ashes. Father Lopez thought that it was God's responsibility to strike down the murdering infidel. Father growled: "He should be hanged." Mother wept over the murder of her relatives and repeated grimly: "An avenger will come." I spent the hours in bed before falling asleep dreaming of coming upon Gurza in some village, he bloated with pride over his latest outrage, I with two revolvers moving in on him, step by step, remorselessly, and growling in a voice lower than I then possessed: "This is for slaughtering our bulls, you vile animal!" and I had the satisfaction of hearing him beg for mercy as I pulled my forefingers against the triggers.

Gurza must have heard my threat, for he responded by horribly sacking three villages and roaring off toward Sinaloa in his death-dealing train. His continued success, even against the Americans sent against him, was a frustration to the northerners and, dishearteningly, a cause of joy and pride among our own peons. Father would cry: "Someone must strike him down!" and the family would cheer the idea. But not quite all of us. I noticed that whenever our family and Father Lopez cursed Gurza for his brutality, Grandmother Caridad kept silent, but one day when reports reached us of three more instances of Gurza's besting General Pershing and his
Americans, she cried jubilantly: "He's doing the job for all of us!" When we looked at her with mouths agape, she realized that she could continue her deception no longer. We were assembled on a patio with only three enclosing walls, the fourth side left open so that Father or whoever was in charge of the mine could watch its operation, and I shall never forget the astonishment we felt when she pointed to the handsome stone fringes Grandfather had built around the top of the shaft and said: "Gurza did a grand thing for Mexico when he destroyed that place of hell:'

Father was so astounded at his mother's words that he could not speak, but Mother, who was a Palafox and an important one now that her uncles and cousins were dead, said: "What a horrible thing to say!" but Caridad continued pointing at the shaft, now forever silent, and said in the kind of resolute voice her ancestor Lady Gray Eyes must have used when she decreed the destruction of the Mother Goddess: "It was an evil place and it had to be destroyed."

Now Father regained control of himself: "What are you saying, Mother?" and she told him plainly: "I was conceived in what was then the lowest cavern--the only place my father and mother could be together. The workers called it Caridad's Cavern. With the donkeys that would never see the sun I lived down there, and I came up those dreadful steps only to carry silver ore on my head."

"But we built the cage," Father protested. "Those ugly days are gone."

"And why wasn't it built years ago? A hundred lives ago?"

'These things take time," Father Lopez said. With a fury that surprised us, she turned on the priest and said with teeth clenching at times and her hands formed into fists: "You were worse than the managers. Where do you suppose they found their endless supply of Indians? Where did Jubal get the little girls who worked with me? From you priests in the villages, who sent them to the mines, told them that's their work."

"Indians always worked in the mines," Father Lopez said, and for the first time I became aware that he was not backing down when she stormed at him because he was protecting his Church against accusations he had heard before. I was ten years old when these conversations at the Mineral occurred, and although I could not understand fully the complicated arguments of the four adults, I did see that Father defended anything that had happened at the mine, Father L
o
pez championed his Church, Mother saw the Palafoxes as the people who had always known what was best for Toledo, while Grandmother Caridad said repeatedly that General Gurza was a far better man than they thought he was. At times I had the feeling that they were arguing to convince me, as the only uncommitted person in the group, and I listened with equal attention to whoever was speaking.

Father L
o
pez, whom no one had ever taken seriously, was especially careful to see that I understood what he was saying, for after participating in some general discussion about Indian rights or landownership, he would take me aside and say: "Can't you see, Norman, that it's the big landowners who give us the money to keep the cathedral working? They have a right to large fields because they know how to use them. An Indian? What does he do with his milpa?" That was the word for a little plot of land owned by one family, and I was hearing it a lot. "On his milpa he grows just enough corn for his wife to make her tortillas. But the big man grows more than his wife can use, and with the money he earns he supports the Church."

When Grandmother caught him talking with me she would drag me away: "Never believe a priest when he talks about anything but Jesus Christ. Everything else, he looks out only for his Church. And it's the priests that threw us into the shaft."

As the discussions continued I saw that Father was listening attentively to both sides, trying to understand what forced Lopez and Grandmother to see recent events in Mexico so differently. One afternoon as we had lunch outdoors at a spot from which we could see the beautiful aqueduct that one of the bishops Palafox had caused to be built almost two hundred years before, he said slowly, as if each word came separately to his mind: "How lovely they are, the old stone arches of our aqueduct. Carrying life-giving water from the pyramid to the cathedral--from you, Mother, to you, Father L
o
pez," and for a moment he held the two disputants by their hands. It was in that quiet instant, I can see now, that die idea for his powerful book was born--The Pyramid and the Cathedral, the two forces that had accounted for Mexican history up to this point: the ancient religion and the new; the Indian heritage and the importation from Europe.