Mexico: A Novel Part 19

"My father missed World War Two. Exempted because of me. But he's a very military man."

"Army, Navy?" the Oklahoman asked.

"Nothing. Just make-believe military," the boy said. By the manner in which he attacked the Valencian rice he indicated that he was not interested in further conversation, but Mrs. Evans asked quietly, "How old were you when you went into the Marines?"

"Sixteen. My old man lied about my age. Said every red-blooded American ..."

"I don't like the way you speak of your father," Grim protested. "What's the matter? Weren't you proud to be a Marine?"

Without looking up the boy said, "You talk just like my old man."

"Now, wait a minute!" the Oklahoman snapped.

"O. K., so you were a big hero," the boy said, still not looking up.

"What the h.e.l.l are you, a beatnik or something?"

"Like I said, you were a big hero. It's O. K."

"Marine or no Marine," Grim shouted. "You don't talk to me-" He belligerendy rose from his chair but the young man remained seated, eating his rice.

It was Mrs. Evans who broke the tension, and she did it by using Mr. Grim's real name. "Sit down, Chester," she commanded.

At this the boy threw down his napkin and said, "I might of known his name was Chester."

"That does it!" the red-necked ex-Marine bellowed. He grabbed for the boy's throat but caught only the Pachuca sweater, which pulled out to a ridiculous length, so that one of the antagonists stood on one side of the table and the other clear across it.

Mrs. Evans began to laugh. "You look so ridiculous," she cried, and the other Oklahomans also began laughing. Chester's daughter said, "Sit down, Daddy. You're making a fool of yourself."

When the red-necked ex-Marine let go of the sweater collar, it flopped back around the boy's neck, and this caused more laughter. "Where in the world did you get such a sweater?" Mrs. Evans asked.

"Sort of a ..." the boy began.

"It's a uniform affected by students," Ledesma explained. "Where did you see your first bullfight?"

It was obvious that Ricardo Martin was just as impressed by the bullfight critic as he was annoyed by the Oklahomans, so he turned directly to Ledesma and addressed him exclusively, "I get home from Korea-"

"Does that mean you were wounded and sent home as a hero?" Ledesma asked perceptively.

The boy squirmed in his chair and rolled up the sleeves of his sweater until it looked even more ludicrous than before. "Well . .." he fumbled. "Couple of medals. So they station me at San Diego . . . recruiting . . . high schools."

"And there you saw a bullfight?" I suggested, recalling the time I'd driven down from an interview I was doing in Hollywood to see the border fights.

"Not so simple. There was this coffee joint. A guy singing ballads ... a guitar. Real gone. Real far out. On off time we used to go there, and some of them were mad about bullfighting . .. flamenco .. . you know .. ."

"So one Sunday they took you to Tijuana," I guessed.

"Yep."

"You liked it from the start?"

"First day, Juan Gomez. Boom!" He used his right arm like a sword and plunged it into an imaginary bull.

"So when did you decide to become a bullfighter?" I continued, eager to understand the phenomenon of American boys who underwent great sacrifices to become toreros.

Again he became fidgety and I thought he might not reply, but apparently he wanted so much to talk with Ledesma that he was willing to share his thoughts with me, too. Turning to Ed Grim, he said, "You won't like this, but I mean no offense." He spoke so softly and with such obvious goodwill that Mrs. Evans laughed and said, "Chester wouldn't dare raise trouble with a Marine who has medals. What did you get them for?"

Ricardo ignored the question and said to Ledesma, "So one day I was sitting in this coffee shop in San Diego ... in civvies ... and I was sort of joining the gang in some music and my father had driven down from Idaho to visit me at the base.... He was always mad about Marine bases and parades and me in uniform.... So he's disappointed I'm not there and they send him to the coffee joint and when he sticks his nose inside there's this smoke and the smell of java and this guy playing a guitar and me sitting in the corner playing a recorder, and he takes one look at me sitting there in civvies and he yells, 'My G.o.d, what are you doing with a flute?' And right there I knew I wanted to be a bullfighter. Because I want to be as much unlike that pathetic crock of ..."

"Has he ever visited you here in Mexico?" Mrs. Evans asked.

"Once. He says, 'What you doin' in a spick college?' When he sees my new name is Ricardo Martin ..." He gave the name its Spanish p.r.o.nunciation, then explained, "My mother's name was Martin. From Denver."

"Does he send you any money?" Mrs. Evans asked.

"You know why he came down here?" Ricardo addressed this question to Ledesma. "He's been named chairman of the Idaho Civil War Centenary Commission and he's all mad for staging replicas of the major battles. He's going to be General Lee and he came down for me to be his aide, General Beauregard." He stopped and ate some more rice. "Imagine! When the Civil War was fought Idaho was a prairie. You ever stop to think that everyone like my old man who is mad for the Civil War wants to be General Lee. n.o.body ever wants to be General Grant. My old man is no more related to the South-"

"I ought to smash you right in the mouth," Ed Grim muttered. "Who the h.e.l.l are you to ..."

Ricardo ignored the threat and said to Ledesma, "But, anyway, my old man's going to be hightailing it all over Idaho as General Lee and I'm going to be in Mexico fighting bulls."

"Have you had any fights?" I asked.

"Village fairs."

"Ever fight with picadors?" Ledesma probed and his question was significant. For if Ricardo said yes, it indicated that he had fought bulls of some size, for picadors are not employed against scrubs.

"I had a novillada at San Bernardo."

Ledesma nodded approvingly.

"Have you fought real bulls?" Mrs. Evans asked.

"Of course," Ricardo said.

"Have you actually killed a bull?" Mrs. Evans pursued.

"Eight ... ten ..."

"Are you any good?" O. J. Haggard asked.

"Yes," the young man replied.

"Do you mean to say-" Grim began.

"Yes," the young man said quietly, "I mean to say that I'm going to be a bullfighter."

"Why would a decent American kid ..." the red-necked man began, but Mrs. Evans didn't hear the finish of the question nor Ricardo's reply, for she was recalling with amus.e.m.e.nt the fact that in Cuernavaca she had used exactly the same phrase when chiding the druggist's son who -had graduated from Yale to become a paid escort. She thought: Older generations have trouble dealing with the ambitions of the young. She therefore broke the thread of interrogation by interrupting whatever Chester and the boy were fighting about to say, "Ricardo, when I was in Cuernavaca I met more than a dozen young American boys like you who were . . . well . . . they ..."

"Escorts?" Ricardo asked with no surprise.

"Yes. They seemed to have reasonably satisfactory lives worked out for themselves. Why would you choose bullfighting instead of the easier way?"

'That's the first intelligent question I've been asked here tonight," the quiet young man said. Quickly he corrected himself, saying to Ledesma, "Except yours about the picadors, but that was specialized." Ledesma, gratified by the young man's payment of moral graft, as it were, nodded condescendingly and the young bullfighter continued: "As a matter of fact, I tried being an escort once. When you want to be a bullfighter you'll try anything-absolutely anything." He whipped about to me and asked, "You got anybody you want killed?"

Mrs. Evans resumed her questioning: "Didn't it work?"

"For some proud men it's impossible to romance an older woman."

At this remark the red-necked man gasped, leaned across the table, and slapped the young bullfighter across the face. "No man can talk like that in front of my daughter," he said, but the effect of his words was diminished by the fact that when he said them, Penny started giggling at the ridiculousness of it all. To my surprise Ricardo took no notice of the blow and continued talking solely with Mrs. Evans: "So after three months in Cuernavaca and Acapulco I quit."

"How do the others explain the fact that they don't?" Mrs. Evans asked.

"Good heavens, Elsie!" Grim protested. "You'd think you were trying to line up an escort for yourself."

"I'm interested in what women my age do to solve their problems," Mrs. Evans replied firmly.

"What problems?" Ed asked.

"The problem of meaning in life," Mrs. Evans said. "When a husband dies and the children are gone and your eyes are too weak for constant reading, what in h.e.l.l does a woman do? Apparently a good many take the hard-earned money their husbands left them and spend it on young men in Mexico."

"It's repulsive," Haggard said, reaching for the lima beans and ham hocks.

"It's not repulsive," Mrs. Evans argued.

"He just said it was," Grim replied, pointing with his fork at Ricardo.

"He said it was repulsive to him," Mrs. Evans responded, "and properly so, for young men should be interested in young girls, but I don't think he gave any opinion about how the women who were paying the bills-"

"Ethel!" Grim shouted. "What the h.e.l.l's happened to you? If Paul heard you-"

"He wouldn't understand a word I was saying, and that's a pity."

"Was Paul a lot like my old man?" the young bullfighter asked.

"No," Mrs. Evans corrected. "He was a fine, thoughtful, hardworking man with whom I lived for forty-two years without even remotely comprehending what he was all about. Maybe when you're older you'll say the same about your father."

"Stupid jerks remain stupid jerks," the boy insisted. Then quickly he turned to warn Ed Grim, "And if you ever touch me again, Pop, I'll tear you limb from limb, you miserable son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h."

Grim rose automatically to the insult, as Ricardo knew he would have to, and lunged for the young man, who stood him off with two lightning-quick jabs that did no harm.

"Sit down, Chester!" Mr. Haggard commanded with some irritation. "We came to see the fights in the bullring." Not rising from his chair, he said to Ricardo, "I'd appreciate it if you'd apologize to Chester, for that last remark was out of line. He had a right to knock your block off."

"I apologize," Ricardo said honestly. "I withdraw those words, Mr. Grim. And I apologize to you too, Miss Grim. But your father has strong opinions, as I'm sure you know." When Grim said, "I knew no Marine could be all bad," the table relaxed.

Mrs. Evans turned to Ledesma. "I've been so impressed by your opinions-I wonder if you'd drive me out to the pyramid again? It's been haunting me all day and I'd like to see it by moonlight."

Ledesma groaned: "I will not go back to that pile of bloodied rocks." When Mrs. Evans said, "But you must," he replied: "On this day of death I will show you something appropriate to the occasion, something unique in the New World," and Mrs. Evans cried: "Let's go!" Ledesma banged on the table and cried: "Widow Palafox! Watch our plates while we descend into the past."

The widow appeared on the Terrace to warn that if anyone got up from the table, when he or she returned the food would be gone, for it was now one in the morning. So we ate in big gulps, then hurried toward Mrs. Evans's Cadillac, but on the way she nudged me and revealed her growing interest in Ricardo: "Fetch him. He ought to see it if it's significant." Soon we were piled into the big car and with me at the wheel and Ledesma guiding me, we drove a short distance west on the Leon highway to a place where a grove of cypresses gave it a funereal aspect. Ledesma routed out the caretaker, gave him some pesos and asked him to turn on the lights, and when this was done we saw among the trees the kind of stone monument common in Mexican cemeteries. This one provided a portal that led us down a flight of steep steps to a geological miracle, a cavern in the same rock layer that held the silver ore at the Mineral, except that here it provided an atmosphere with zero humidity.

"For ten thousand years," Ledesma told us, "no moisture entered this place, and with modern machinery none is allowed in now. The result? Voila!" and with that he carefully opened first a huge wooden gate, allowing us to enter a small antechamber guarded by a small, tightly fitted steel doorway leading to whatever was hidden inside. Switching on another light, he opened this last door and led us into a subterranean miracle that had not yet been opened to the public when I lived in Toledo.

It was a gallery about eighty feet long and twenty feet wide that had been cut into solid rock millennia ago by some underground force, perhaps a long-vanished stream or a readjustment of volcanic lava, and then sealed off by some mysterious agency. It formed a perfect catacomb, its sides lined by dozens of amazing figures, men and women of all ages and sizes who had died hundreds of years ago and been chosen, because of wealth or local fame, for the honor of this burial spot. Now they stood erect, still dressed in the fine clothes they had worn at their funerals. Time had not touched them. Their bodies had not turned to dust or been attacked by worms. Their clothes had not raveled or been wasted by moisture. They were an awesome a.s.semblage, these mummies of Toledo created by nature.

"Could they be of wax?" Mrs. Evans asked. "Like Madame Tussaud's?"

"No artifice here," Ledesma said. "These are the people of Toledo, preserved forever."

As the others moved down the corridor as in a reception line where they were greeting the dead citizens in formal dress, I heard behind me a startled cry, but not one of fright, and when I turned 1 saw Penny Grim standing with mouth agape before the exquisite figure of a Chinese woman, perhaps thirty years old when she died. But what differentiated her from the other mummies was her radiant costume, as pristine as it had been when it served as her burial gown. Of Oriental design, it had been made of precious fabrics that she might have brought with her when she crossed the Pacific from the Philippines to Acapulco. It contained also bejeweled silks and satins that must have come from j.a.pan, and it was so gorgeous that Penny cried, "Oh, Mr. Clay! Isn't she magnificent? Even I would look beautiful in a dress like hers." Prematurely the Chinese woman had died of some unknown cause, but here she was, as if living, and the mystery surrounding her seemed to give life to all the other figures in the catacomb. This was a grand ball celebrating the Festival of Ixmiq in 1710, so vivid and real that I expected to hear music from the Negro dance band that would have played.

"Aha!" Ledesma cried as he came upon us. "I see you've found our lovely China Poblana. Doesn't she look as if you could ask her for the next dance?"

Mrs. Evans asked, "What's a China Poblana?" and Leon was about to explain when he was called to the other end of the corridor by Ricardo: "What's this mean?" and we went down to see the contorted head of a man who had obviously been hanged and entombed with a portion of the rope about his neck.

As we four stood in silence in the presence of what seemed a double death--the hanging and the entombment--Martin began speaking quietly, without the reticence he had shown before. As though we had never left the Terrace, where we had been talking about bullfighting, he said vehemently, "I am going to be a bullfighter. I've known death in Korea, and it's frightening, this afternoon I saw a man killed by bulls, and that's frightening too. But nothing can scare me away from what I've determined to do. I--am--going--to--be--a-- bullfighter."

"Do you have the skill?" Mrs. Evans asked in the darkness.

"I'm not the best," Ricardo answered. "But I'm a professional. Better than sixty percent-no, eighty percent of the Mexicans fighting today. I have all the pa.s.ses, all the knowledge. Mrs. Evans, I know more about bullfighting than your husband did about oil."

"You sound like him, son. Same determination."

"Can you keep your feet still?" I asked.

"I can."

"Everybody can-till he's. .h.i.t once," Ledesma replied. "You ever been hit?"

Quickly he rolled up his pant legs and showed us three separate horn wounds above his knees. "This I got fighting a bull seven years old that had been fought a dozen times before. I made four great pa.s.ses, even though I knew he was going to hit me. So I got it, and I was in a grubby little hospital in Michoacan for three weeks. Next time I fought I was just as brave and got it here. Back to a different hospital. And on the next fight after that-" Realizing his voice was rising, he stopped speaking.

"Back to the good old hospital sheets?" Ledesma asked.

"Yes," he said in a very low, controlled voice. "And one month later I fought my first fight with picadors and look-" Like every would-be matador, Ricardo carried in his wallet a set of glossy photographs, which he now produced. It was too dark to see them well, for the electric light was not strong, but we could discern a vast hulk of animal rushing past a slim young man. "Look at those feet," he cried exultantly. "You ever see feet firmer on the ground than those, Mr. Clay?"

I replied that in the catacomb I couldn't see, and he said: "You can take my word for it."

Mrs. Evans asked, "Do you get good marks in college?"

Ricardo relapsed into his former style: "Well ... you know how it is ... like mosdy A's ... blah ... blah ..."

"Stop that!" Mrs. Evans cried impatiently. "How can a boy your age talk like that?"

"Because it is mostly blah," he replied coldly. "My old man's a jerk. You saw him tonight at dinner. Like Chester, he thinks he can solve things by getting into a Civil War uniform and belting somebody. He loved Mexico because the peons are like serfs. He says the strong have got to rule. He was absolutely mad about war, but he w.a.n.gled a deferment. My mother is one of the most beautifully stupid women on earth. They invented television because she was around. She takes westerns seriously and honest-to-G.o.d wonders if the hero will win this week. When horses stumble on the TV she cries, and she dreads Thursday nights because she's afraid Eliot Ness might get shot.

"That was my world, Mrs. Evans. So I leave it and go to Korea, and half my buddies are killed in a war that makes no sense at all. You ever hike down from a reservoir in North Korea in mid-winter, just because some colossal jerk wearing stars made a mistake? So I'm back home safe in San Diego trying to con other kids into joining up for future wars and my old man writes me, T hate to think of you...." I could quote you the whole letter by heart, Mrs. Evans, but he was humiliated at the golf club because the war in Korea was still going on while his son was recruiting in San Diego. You want to hear the end of that letter? And may G.o.d knock off the rock above this cave if I miss a word. 'Richard, it is the duty of every man in uniform constantly to seek out the enemy and destroy him. Your place is back in Korea and I'm going to see the general and get you a transfer back to real duty.' "

He paused to stare at the hanged man, then asked, "Can either of you even imagine what Korea was like in winter?"