Mexico: A Novel Part 1

Mexico.

a_novel.

Michener, James A.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

This is a novel, and the Mexican city of Toledo, its citizens, its Festival of Ixmiq-61 and the three bullfights described in the book are all fictional. The Altomecs, who play a vital part in the narrative, are a fictional composite of several ancient Indian peoples. However, the three toreros who partic.i.p.ate in the Sat.u.r.day fight-- matadors Calesero and Pepe Luis Vdsquez, and the rejoneadora Conchita Cintron--are real persons in the history of Mexican bullfighting; I wanted to pay my respects to three friends who helped teach me about their profession. I must add, however, that the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning these toreros are products of my imagination and are not intended to depict any actual events or to change the entirely fictional character of this book.

CHRONOLOGY:.

INDIANS.

500 Drunken Builders.

600 Ixmiq begins career.

650 Pyramid built 900 Nopiltzin discovers pulque 1000 Altomecs acquire new G.o.d.

1130 War G.o.d empowered 1151 Altomecs take Toledo; Xolal slain 1171 Pyramid enlarged.

1350 Mock battle, Altomecs vs. Aztecs 1470 Tezozomoc becomes leader 1477 Gray Eyes born.

1497 Gray Eyes sees hideous G.o.ddess 1600-1700 4 Altomec girls marry Palafox bishops 2,3,4,5 and have 23 children 1864 Caridad in mines.

1874 Caridad marries Clay.

PALAFOXES.

900 Palafoxes in Salamanca.

1498 Antonio Palafox born 1504 Alicia de.

1575 House of Tile built.

1600-1700 Palafox bishops 2,3,4,5 marry Altomec girls 1860s Palafox holdings reduced from 500,000 to 250,000 acres 1867 Maximilian executed.

1928 Peace in Mexico 1933 Palafox girl marries Norman Clay.

1938 Mexico.

CLAYS.

1000 Clays are peasants in England.

1503 X6chitl born, Guadalquivir born 1507 Tezozomoc's widow sacrificed 1519 Ixmiq sacrificed 1520 Stranger born; G.o.ddess destroyed.

1527 City surrenders 1524 Antonio Palafox to Mexico 1527 Antonio invades Toledo.

1529 Professor Palafox burned at stake 1531 Building of cathedral at Toledo begun 1536 Palafoxes granted 250,000 acres 1524 Clays become landowners in England.

1538 Gray Eyes lectures 1540 Stranger baptized and marries Antonio, first bishop 1540 Antonio marries Stranger 1544 Hall of Government built.

1600-1606 Clays contemplate emigrating to America 1726 Aqueduct built 1740 A major lode struck at 600 ft. at Mineral 1760 Cathedral facade is completed 1613 Clays arrive in Virginia.

1726 Clays acquire Newlands 1776 Clays fight in Revolution 1810 Palafox land cut from over a million to 500,000 acres 1823 Jubal Clay born 1830 Bulls come from Guadalquivir 1847 Alicia in a China Poblano meets Jubal Clay 1846 Jubal at war in Mexico 1847 Jubal at Mineral 1850 Caridad born.

1864 Jubal at Cold Harbor 1864 Clay plantation burned 1866 Clay leaves Virginia 1867 Clay in exile in Toledo 1874 Clay marries Caridad 1881 Graziela Palafox born 1882 John Clay born in Toledo 1897 Eduardo Palafox born 1906 Graziela marries Clay 1910-1914 Revolution takes 150,000 acres of Palafox land 1911 Gral. Gurza storms Toledo 1919 Gral. Gurza a.s.sa.s.sinated 1906 John Clay marries Graziela 1909 Norman Clay born in Toledo 1917 John with AEF in France 1920 Pyramid and Cathedral published; Bull Soldado at Mineral 1928 John Clay working for oil company 1933 Norman marries Palafox girl 1938 U. S. loses oil wells; John and Norman exiles in Alabama 1942 Norman on duty in Pacific 1945 Juan Gomez, 17, leaps into ring at Ixmiq-45 1961 Juan Gomez at Ixmiq-61 1961 Don Eduardo at Ixmiq-61.

1950 Norman on duty in Korea.

1961 Norman at Ixmiq-61.

Chapter 1.

THE CACTUS AND THE MAGUEY.

I HAD BEEN sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind. And since it had not yet happened, I had been ordered to get photographs, too.

I was therefore burdened with unfamiliar gear-a large carrying case of j.a.panese cameras, some of which could photograph swift action occurring at a distance-and as my rickety bus trundled across central Mexico I wondered what I could do to protect these cameras if I followed my inclination to walk into the city from Kilometer 303.

I knew no one in the crowded bus and the cameras were far too valuable to entrust to strangers, so I resigned myself to staying on the bus and guarding them the seven remaining kilometers into the city. But as we approached Kilometer 303 the inchoate longing that had always possessed me at this curious spot in the highway surged over me with terrible force, and I was tempted to jump out and leave my cameras to chance.

Fighting back this childish impulse, I slumped in my seat and tried not to look at the road that had always haunted me, but I was powerless to keep my eyes away from it. Like many Mexican boys of good family, at thirteen I had been packed off to Lawrenceville School near Princeton, "to learn some English," my father had grumbled, and sometimes on the green lawn of that excellent school I had stopped and gasped for breath, choked by nostalgia for the road I was now on. Later at Princeton, where there were also many young men from Mexico, I would sometimes seek out boys who had known this area and I would ask haltingly, "Have you ever seen anything lovelier than the view of Toledo from that gash in the hills where the road winds down from Kilometer 303?" And if my friends had ever seen this miraculous spot for themselves we would indulge our homesickness and think of our city of Toledo, the fairest in Mexico, as it displayed its golden iridescence in the late afternoon sun.

As a matter of fact, I think I became a writer because of this scintillating view. It had always been a.s.sumed by my parents that I would graduate from Princeton as my ancestors from Virginia had been doing since 1764, and that I would then take one year of graduate work in mining at Colorado and return to the silver mines of Toledo, which my family had been operating for many years. But all this changed in my junior year at college, when I wrote a prize-winning essay that occasioned much favorable comment among the English faculty. It described the view of Toledo from a point just beyond Kilometer 303 as it might have been seen in sequence by an Aztec district governor in 1500, by Cortes in 1524, by a Spanish priest in 1530, by a German traveler in 1660, by an American mining engineer in 1866-that would be my grandfather-and by General Gurza in the revolutionary battles of 1918.

Actually, it is not correct to say that I wrote this essay that was to have such influence in my life. I started it, and the visions came to me so vividly, so directly from the heart of Mexico and from my own memories, that I merely recorded them. In a sense, this prize was a d.a.m.nable thing, for long after I had become a professional writer I remembered the ease with which I had composed the essay. And I was never again to experience that facility. But the visions I conjured up that day have lived with me forever.

Now they possessed me, and I surrendered myself to them, my glowing memories of Toledo, and I was reacting to them in my sentimental way when I saw through the window of the bus a sight that captured my imagination. Two young Indian women wearing leather sandals, rough-cloth skirts and bright shawls, and with their hair in swaying braids, were walking along the road toward Toledo. Obviously, they were heading for the Festival of Ixmiq, the site of my a.s.signment, and the soft rhythm of their movement, from the undulating braids down to their slim ankles, reminded me of all the Indians I had ever seen walking home from my father's mines, and I wanted to be with them as I had been forty years ago, and I found myself impulsively shouting in Spanish, "Halt the bus! Halt the bus! I'll walk in from here."

As the surprised driver ground down on his ancient brakes and as they squealed back in protest, I looked hurriedly about the bus in search of someone to whom I could entrust my bag of cameras, and* it may seem curious to a typical American who might have a prejudiced view of Mexico, but I could hear my Mexican mother saying: "In other parts of Mexico evil men may steal now and then, but in Toledo we have only honest people." Deciding to rely on her judgment, I quickly studied my fellow pa.s.sengers to identify someone I could trust.

I saw in the rear an unusual-looking fellow who was watching me with aloof but sardonic amus.e.m.e.nt. He was about twenty-five years old, blond, quite handsome and dressed in what young people called a Pachuca sweater, that is, a huge, woolly, loose-woven affair that looked more like a s.h.a.ggy tent than an article of clothing. It was much favored by Los Angeles beatniks who were infesting Mexico under one pretense or another and had come to serve as a badge of distinction. Even if the young man had not had his conspicuous blond hair the Pachuca sweater would have a.s.sured me that he was an American, for no self-respecting Mexican would have used this sweater for other than its original purpose: to keep sheepherders warm in the mountain pastures.

"You want somebody ..." the young man asked, leaning slightly forward.

"I wanted to hike into town." For some unaccountable reason I added, "The way I did when I was a boy."

"Memories?" the young man asked with amus.e.m.e.nt. He reached out with an indolent gesture to indicate that he was willing to carry my case and a.s.sured me, "I'll sort of ..." His voice trailed off.

At this moment an older man seated behind me intercepted me as I started pa.s.sing the cameras back to the American youth, and in excellent Spanish asked: "Aren't you John Clay's son?"

"I am," I replied in Spanish.

"I thought I recognized your father's bearing. You want me to look after the cameras?"

I considered the question only for a fleeting moment, during which I compared the undisciplined young American lounging in the back in his ridiculous Pachuca sweater with the Mexican businessman in his conventional dark suit. In Spanish I said, "I'd deem it an act of kindness if you took care of them for me." Thus the motion of my arm, originally directed toward the young American in the backseat, was easily diverted in flight, as it were, to the Mexican closer at hand. To the American I apologized: "He'll know where to deposit them."

The young man laughed-insolently I thought. With three chopping movements of his palm as if delivering karate blows, he dismissed me.

"Where are you stopping?" the Mexican businessman asked.

"At the House of Tile," I replied. "Please leave the cameras with Don Anselmo."

"He's dead," the man said simply. "His widow runs the inn."

"She knows me," I replied, starting to dismount, but then I realized that I was about to hike into the city with no camera at all, and it occurred to me that if the event I was concerned about did take place, I might profit from having some good background shots of the festival to provide local color. So I begged the disgusted bus driver to wait for an additional moment while I retrieved one of my rapid-fire j.a.panese cameras, and with this slung around my neck I stepped down onto the highway at Kilometer 303. The bus accelerated swiftly, leaving a hazy trail of exhaust, and I was alone at four o'clock on an April afternoon at the spot where, above any other in the world, I wanted to be.

But I was not alone for long, for overtaking me with their soft, resolute strides were the two Indian women on their way to the fair, and as I stood somewhat bemused in the road they nodded gravely and pa.s.sed on. How magnificent they were, those women coming down from the hills to grace the fiesta that their ancestors had initiated more than four hundred years before. They were a timeless part of the red earth of Mexico, and of the restless motion of the earth. When they nodded to me, their faces were impa.s.sive like the basalt statues on Aztec monuments, and yet their eyes glowed with the fire that had consecrated this land. They were the Indians of Mexico, and everything began and ended with them.

I remained motionless as they moved out of sight, held fast I think by a respectful unwillingness to add my ungainly movements to the subdued ballet their soft motions had created, but when the Indian women finally disappeared around the bend ahead, I shifted my camera strap and started slowly along the path they had followed.

For the past two years my magazine had kept me working in the trouble spots of Latin America. I had covered Vice President Nixon's catastrophic tour of the area and Fidel Castro's abominations in Cuba, and I was threatened with burnout. Apparently the home office had become aware of the risk, for Drummond, my editor, who seemed to keep an eye on everything that happened in the world, sent me a telegram that he felt sure would revive me: Rumor tells me two Mexican matadors are heading for a showdown in which one of them is likely to force the other to such extremes that it will be the same as murder. People say Victoriano the filigreed dancer and Juan Gomez the brutal Indian are natural enemies. They're scheduled to compete in a festival at Toledo. Didn't you tell me you were born there? Take a week off. Go there. Catch what you can, but focus on the drama. Pick up camera gear from our office in Mexico City and get powerful photos.

At first I was inclined to wire back "No thanks" because of professional vanity. This was the casual kind of story I did not like to fool around with; I was a writer and not a photographer. If it had been an important story, the magazine would have sent me a major photographer, and the fact that Drummond hadn't made me suspicious that the whole affair was his device for giving me a vacation I needed without upsetting the home-office accountants. I resented such trickery and had been about to say so in a snippy cable from Havana when I was restrained by a little lecture I gave myself: "Take it easy, Clay. There's every reason you should head for Toledo. As a bullfighting fan you knew this boy Victoriano in Spain, and you've been casually following the career of Gomez for years. With a little brushing up, you could turn out a pretty fair article. And forget the photographer insult. You do know how a Leica works, and the new j.a.panese cameras can take pictures by themselves."

But even as I reprimanded myself I knew there were other, deeper reasons for accepting the a.s.signment. I was gripped by a memory of Mexico in the spring and the splendor of Toledo and the Festival of Ixmiq. So I took the job, because I wanted to see my homeland again.

If you had asked me: "Isn't this a case of ordinary homesickness?" I'd have had to say: "A man fifty-two years old doesn't indulge in homesickness. This is far more basic." I had been born in Mexico in 1909 of an American father who had also been born there. In 1938, when I was already a mature man and married to a fine Mexican woman, Father and I had been forced to quit the country. The Mexicans had stolen our property and we could not stay. When my wife confronted the thought of moving to Montgomery, Alabama, with me, she couldn't stomach such an exile and divorced me.

It was then that I became a writer, though not a real writer like Scott Fitzgerald, who had also gone to Princeton; I was more like Richard Halliburton, another Princetonian more my age and type. I dabbled in travel books, never successfully, and debased myself by writing as-told-to junk. My magazine found me useful, because without a wife or children I could be dispatched on little notice to cover any hot subject that exploded in Asia, Africa or South America.

It had been in January of this year, 1961, that 1 caught a glimpse of the gray years that lay ahead of me. I had been in Havana trying to explain Castro's bewildering behavior during his first two years after overthrowing Batista. In 1958 and '59 I'd been a strong Castro supporter, living with him in the mountains, writing articles about him giving him moral support as he marched toward the capital, and rejoicing with his bearded ones as they captured Havana. After that it was all downhill. He lied to me, said he had never been a communist, swore he wanted peace with the United States and laughed at me when I asked: "Fidel, why are you breaking diplomatic relations with us?"

When my onetime hero revealed himself as such a liar and a fraud, I had to evaluate myself, to see if I was any better. What I saw during those three bad days in Cuba did little to rea.s.sure me. I had accomplished little. I'd written nothing that would last. I had no wife or children, and I was confused as to whether I was a Mexican or an American.

But as I stood beside the little concrete marker K. 303-- indicating the number of kilometers from Mexico City, about one hundred and eighty miles--I felt the good heat of Toledo upon me and suspected that I had done right in accepting the a.s.signment. And when I looked past the marker and at the parched land I knew I had. I had always been fascinated by these cactus plants, with their burden of thick red dust, because for me they were the truest product of the Mexican soil. Unforgiving, bitter and reluctant, they etched themselves against the dark blue sky and stood like gaunt cathedrals. I loved their awkward angularity, the fact that they offered no concession to anyone, and that year after year they were the same. They were very Mexican, these perpetual cactus bushes. Oftentimes an Indian farmer would surround his little plot of land with them, and then the goats had better beware. At first sight they seemed worthless for anything except for functioning as improvised fences, and yet it was they that gave character to the land; without the cactus bushes this would not be Mexico.

One of my earliest fancies had been a.s.sociated with these unruly and forbidding plants. At about the age of six I developed the idea that my father was controlled by an unseen cactus plant, had indeed sprung from one. He was an angular man, and his sharp beard, when unshaved, resembled the spines I had so often tested. He had both the ruggedness of the cactus and its essential strength. I often thought of him as standing solitary against the sky, the way the cactus did, and in later years when the city of Toledo erected a granite monument to him, that is how his statue stood. Like the cactus, my father had a majestic beauty of his own, and it sprang directly from his unyielding rect.i.tude, for he was one of the best administrators Mexico has ever known. When I was a senior at Princeton with time to restudy my father's famous book I realized that it, even more than he, had a kinship with the cactus. It was sharp, angular, lacking in flowery rhythms, but it achieved a local immortality primarily because it did stand alone, like an isolated cactus bush. It was a completely self-inspired book, like none other that had ever been written about Mexico. And that was the source of its greatness.

I studied the cactus for some time and wished that I had absorbed a little more of its unyielding vigor, just as I occasionally wished that I had inherited more of my father's relentless probity, for I knew myself to be vacillating while he was always sure of where he stood. He lived in a simple world, where categories were rigidly maintained without necessity for explanation: for John Clay, Englishmen were demonstrably superior to Americans, who were obviously better than Spaniards, who were inherently better than Indians, who were infinitely superior to Negroes. Banks were better than newspapers, Protestants than Catholics, Lee than Grant, and silver much better than gold. Education was good and s.e.x bad. Paved roads were very good and an insecure water supply was an abomination. Hardworking engineers saved the world and soft-living writers corrupted it. Nevertheless, he is now remembered as a writer, for his book, The Pyramid and the Cathedral, constructed from the relentless dichotomies of good and evil that he espoused, had somehow caught the inmost spirit of Mexico.

I started hiking down the road, delightfully aware that after a few hundred yards I would see opening before me the prospect of Toledo with its shimmering towers, but as I walked I noticed that in the field to my right the cactus plants had disappeared, for the Indian farmer, whoever he was, had rooted them out and replaced them with orderly rows of that amazing plant, the maguey, and as I walked beside these dark green shrubs, man-high and undulating in the sun, I recalled something my father had told me forty years ago. It could have been in April as we walked that day along a patch of maguey, for I remember that the sun was warm but not oppressive. He stopped and poked at a twisting maguey with his cane and observed, more to himself than to me: "A land is never occupied until the cactus is rooted out and maguey planted."

This was a surprising thing for my father to have said, for to him c.h.i.n.king was an abomination, and it was from these maguey plants, whose mysterious arms twisted about the landscape as if seeking to embrace it, that the Indians had centuries ago learned to brew their intoxicating mezcal drink. I would have expected my father to hate the maguey for that reason. Instead, he reflected: 'These are the plants that lend grace and dignity to the land. They're like dancers with beautiful hands. Or like women. They're the better half of life."

I remembered these curious comments when years later I read his book at Princeton and came upon his remarkable evocation of the cactus and the maguey as contrary symbols of the Mexican spirit. Cactus was the inclination to war and destruction. In contrast, "maguey," he had written in a much-quoted pa.s.sage, "has always been the symbol of peace and construction. From its bruised leaves our ancestors made the paper upon which our records were transcribed; its dried leaves formed the thatch for our homes; its fibers were the threads that made clothing possible; its thorns were the pins and needies our mothers used in bringing us to civilization; its white roots provided the vegetables from which we gained sustenance; and its juice became our honey, our vinegar and after a long while the wine that destroyed us with happiness and immortal visions." Cactus, my father wrote, was the spirit of the lonely hunter; maguey was the inspiration of the artists who had built the pyramids and decorated the cathedrals. One was the male spirit so dominant in Mexican life; the other was the female, the subtle conqueror who invariably triumphed in the end. My father argued that it was not by accident that the Indian worked all his life fighting the cactus and received his only respite from the sweet liquor of the maguey. He had also written that if cactus was the visible spirit of earth's hard core that generated life, the twisting arms of maguey were the green cradle of nature that made life bearable. He ended this comparison with the pa.s.sage that was later inscribed on his monument: "Where the cactus and the maguey meet, my heart is entwined in the tangle of Mexico."

k Here, beside me now in central Mexico, the cactus and the maguey met. For an instant, in these adjoining fields, the unyielding cactus and the wild, aspiring maguey stood side by side, and in them my heart was entangled as my father's had been. I was an American citizen and had helped protect my country in two wars, as a fighter pilot in World War II and as a combat reporter in Korea, but my spiritual home had to be here, for somehow these two plants had helped determine my character.

I now faced some two hundred yards of steeply climbing road, and the work of hiking became demanding, but I was fortified by the a.s.surance that in a few minutes I would once more enjoy the sight that had tempted me to leave the relative comfort of the bus. At last I approached the crest of the hill where the road pursued a ledge between two reddish heights. With my eyes half closed I walked the remaining yards until I felt a fresh breeze greeting me from the other side of the pa.s.s. I stopped, opened my eyes wide, and saw before me the vision of my youth. It was the city of Toledo, the old mining city of colonial days, its monuments intact, and it was the fairest sight I had ever known.

To the north, just barely visible beyond the sloping edge of the hill that helped form the pa.s.s in which I stood, rose the gaunt and terrible pyramid of the Altomecs. Reddish brown in the sunlight, truncated sharply at the top, its tiers of steps clearly outlined against the ma.s.s, it stood mutely as it had for thirteen hundred years. It was enormous, brooding, mysterious. It spoke to me now, as it had nearly half a century before when I was a boy in its shadows, of fearful rites and death and the terror that accompanied ancient life in Mexico. It was the most westerly of the Mexican pyramids and had been erected in its primitive form sometime in the seventh century by a shadowy civilization known simply as the Drunken Builders, whose domain had been overrun in the year 1151 by one of Mexico's most savage tribes, the Altomecs, whom even the warlike Aztecs had feared. Through the centuries the gaunt old pyramid had witnessed a succession of cultures and had undergone complete resurfacing five separate times. In various rituals during its nine hundred years of religious use, well over a million men had been sacrificed on its altars, their blood running down its steep flanks in rivulets.

There it was. There it was. With relief my eyes left the monstrous pile and looked straight down the road and over the indistinct roofs of the city to where the twin towers of the cathedral rose against the deep blue of the western sky. How subtly beautiful they were, those ancient towers built in 1640 by a Mexican bishop who had studied drawings from Spain and had vainly tried to imagine what his ancestral Salamanca had looked like and the spires of Zaragoza. The spires that he built in Toledo were not soaring pinnacles but honest, st.u.r.dy pillars of gray stone. Nestled between them, however, was the most glorious facade in all Mexico. It had been erected by another bishop, in 1760, after the mines had begun to spew out silver, and it was a masterpiece not of silvery gray stone but of marble. Its manifold niches were decorated with the statues of saints, and every aspect of it spoke of poetry and celestial music.

From the hillside overlooking the city I could not see the marvels of this fa?ade, but from the manner in which reflected light shone from the ornaments, I knew that this gem of colonial architecture continued to shed its radiance as it had when I was a boy. Experts from New York and London had termed our cathedral "the acknowledged masterpiece of churrigueresque design." My mother said, "If angels wanted to build a church of their own, they would have to copy ours." My father, who did not much like churrigueresque flamboyance, replied, "They might use it as a model for a wedding cake, but hardly for a church." In this matter I sided with my mother, and although later I was to see such awe-inspiring cathedrals as Chartres and Salisbury, I always thought that our cathedral in Toledo was the most angelic I had ever seen. If I were a Catholic, I would want my church to look like this. Flamboyant it was. Gingerbready it was. But it was also an evocation of the period when Mexico was secure, before the terrible revolutions, and before the corroding doubts of the twentieth century.

And then, off to the right, my eyes sought out what I had really come to see. From my earliest days at the mine I had known the pyramid as a monitory thing whose fierce ghostly priests might torture me if I did not behave, and I had always taken pleasure in the cathedral with its fairy-tale facade, but what had been intimately mine, a definite part of me, were the Arches of Palafox. And there they were! Entering the city from a northeasterly direction, this fantastic line of arches carried an aqueduct from springs that rose beyond the pyramid. Upon the arches depended the city's water supply, and I recall that when I first saw these graceful curves marching over the hills I thought how providential it was that their stony legs were of varied lengths so that they exactly accommodated themselves to all the ups and downs of the rough terrain.

The arches are still the glory of Toledo, and even the most jaded visitor who might be repelled by the pyramid or alienated by a Catholic cathedral has to respond to the subtle rhythms of this aqueduct. Dominating the landscape, its top is a bold line that is absolutely flat, but there is infinite variety in the arches, which grow deep to traverse a valley or fade away to nothing as the water channel rides directly across the crest of a hill. As a boy I used to sit for hours watching the aqueduct, which old Bishop Palafox had built in 1726, and it seemed to me to have been divinely inspired not for the purpose of providing water for our city but for that of linking the pyramid and the cathedral.

I hiked down the road, keeping my eyes fixed on the slope of hill that limited my vision to the right, and with each step another of the bishop's arches came into view until at last I could see the whole magnificent sweep of the Arches of Palafox; but it was not this spectacle that I was seeking. It was something that still lay hidden behind the hill, and I broke into a run, so eager was I to see it again.

As the hill fell away the thing I sought came into view, and I halted, in the middle of the ancient road where stout Cortes had once halted to inspect what he sought. There it was, the old, abandoned silver mine of Toledo. It stood perched against a gray-brown hill, an a.s.sembly of roofless buildings, the remnants of a place from which more than $800 million had been dug when a single dollar was worth five today.

This was the Mineral de Toledo, that legendary hole in the earth whose name had been more famous in imperial Spain than that of Lima or any other city in the New World. In those now shattered buildings I had been born and my father before me. Up there my father had resisted General Gurza, the revolutionary wild man who had come to capture the mines. The precious seed bull Soldado had been sequestered in a cave in a successful attempt to salvage the bloodline of the Palafox ranch. Up there General Porfirio Diaz, the benevolent old president, had come in 1909 two years before he fled to exile, driven out by General Gurza and his murderous gang.

The history of our mine had been the history of Mexico, and it was appalling to see it in ruins. Of our Mineral de Toledo it was said that half the wealth of Madrid had been dug by Indians from its deep mouth. Now it was empty, a scar in the earth, but how warm its vacant buildings still seemed. I could almost see, in the distance, my father marching erectly about the property, supervising the excavation of the last ore.

This was Toledo! The pyramid, the cathedral, the arches, and the mine. How deeply entwined my emotions were with this place I did not appreciate till later in life, for when my father took me with him to Alabama I quickly established myself as an ordinary American. I'd already gone to college there, then I served in the American armed forces and dated American girls, though I found none to marry. I worked for an American publication, ate Southern cooking and forgot things Mexican. But often, in moments of accidental reflection, I caught powerful reminders that I had been born a Mexican, for the sights and sounds and tastes of my childhood days were deeply ingrained. I could not think of myself as only an American, for now, as I stood just west of K. 303 at the point where all of Toledo first became visible, every object of importance that I saw had been built by some ancestor of mine. The pyramid had been raised by one of my Indian forebears. It had been refurbished in 1507 by another ancestor. The earnest Spanish bishop who built the cathedral had had a daughter who played a role in my lineage; the later bishop who had constructed the churrigueresque fa9ade had had a son; and the great bishop who had built the aqueduct had sired fifteen children, one of whom served as an ancestor. The Mineral, of course, had been salvaged by my American grandfather after the Civil War and had been operated in its final days by my father. I could look nowhere without seeing the handiwork of someone in my family, stretching back for more than a thousand years, tied to the harsh red soil of Mexico. For nearly sixty generations my ancestors had stood where I now stood surveying the mountain-rimmed valley of Toledo, and invariably they had found it gratifying. I recalled the letter my grandfather had written to his young wife in Richmond in 1847 during the Mexican War while resting at this spot: "Colonel Robert Lee has dispatched me on a scouting expedition to inspect the famous silver mines of Toledo, and I am now halted in sight of this famous city. My guide is a resident, Captain Palafox of the Mexican army, leading a troop of his soldiers and mine, and I must confess that looking down upon his city I observe a sight as inviting as any I have seen in my own country, and I trust that it shall be G.o.d's will that as an outcome of this present war these two lands be joined together. When they are, I would not be unhappy to live in the area I am now overseeing, for in my opinion it could produce fine cotton." Years later, after the defeat of the South, my grandfather would choose exile in Mexico, where he would be employed as engineer for the mine owned by this young Mexican captain who had brought him to Toledo. In time the son of that American lieutenant would marry the niece of that Mexican officer, and they would be my parents. So, by the fortunes of war and exile, I became a Palafox of Toledo as well as a Clay of Richmond.

I think it must have been at that moment when I renewed my acquaintance with the grandeur of Toledo that I felt fully the dissatisfaction with my own accomplishments that had been d.o.g.g.i.ng me for months. "d.a.m.n it, Clay, get yourself straightened out. You have twenty more years, maybe thirty. Make them count." As soon as I uttered those last three words I liked them, saw them as the challenge that had been building since my disillusionment in Havana, but how exactly to respond I did not know. However, as I resumed my march toward Toledo I was buoyed by a rea.s.suring thought: Where but in his place of origin can man best find the important answers?

It was five in the evening of a quiet spring day when I entered Toledo along the street I had so much treasured as a boy. It was flanked by rows of brightly colored houses that crowded each inch of s.p.a.ce, so that I seemed to be pa.s.sing down a canyon whose walls were alternately red and green and purple and most of all a brilliant golden yellow. At one corner I could look down another street of similar colors and see the clean new building that replaced the shambles of shacks and warrens that had served as the market when I was young, and I knew that a few more steps would bring me to the central plaza of Toledo, which was the essential heart of the city. One block more ... half a block ... and then ... here I was, in the plaza itself.

For a long time I studied it from where I stood, and to my pleasure I found little changed. Directly on my right was the historic blue-and-yellow hotel known as the House of Tile, where I would be staying. In the late sun it was more scintillating than ever, each of the tiles that formed the facade flashing like an individual mirror.

Along the north-south axis of the plaza, and fronting on the Avenida Gral. Gurza, so inappropriately named to perpetuate the memory of the rebellious general who had ravaged this part of Mexico, stood the cathedral, its somber silvery-gray towers flanking the delicate luxuriance of its central facade. Not a stone was out of place in this veritable poem of marble, and old women pa.s.sed through the side portals as they had been doing since 1640.

Facing the cathedral, along the eastern edge of the plaza, was the building that had occupied a curious place in the affections of those city residents who were so vociferously anticlerical during the revolutionary days that they refused to enter the cathedral. Instead they revered this ancient building that had been built in the 1500s by two ancestors of mine, a devout Catholic bishop and his strong-willed Indian wife. Originally a refuge for impoverished old women, later a nunnery of the church, it had become in the 1860s the grandiose Imperial Theater. Its reconstruction had been commissioned by the Austrian Maximilian and his Belgian wife, Carlota, when they ruled Mexico as the emperor and empress and dedicated by them with a performance of Bellini's Norma. Rebuilt to Maximilian's specific plans, it represented his understanding of the cla.s.sical Greek style. In its new incarnation it remained a magnificent building, chaste but royal, and had played a significant role in Mexican history. From its stage the ill-starred emperor had delivered his last address to his reluctant subjects. In one of its dressing rooms he had spent two weeks of his imprisonment, and from its Athenian portals he had climbed into the wagon that had carried him to the fusillade at Queretaro. Later, the famous theater had been the scene of numerous const.i.tutional conventions at which the future of Mexico was hammered out, and it was here that I heard my first opera as a very young child, with Luisa Tetrazzini singing Aida.