"At times he is."
"What did you do?"
"They tell me I grew black in the face. I wanted to strangle that d.a.m.ned Indian, but the music started and the three young would-be matadors marched out into the sunlight. And as I watched the Indian strut into the arena I swore, I"ll handle that Altomec later."
"Did you?"
"He handled me. Most grievously he handled me."
"Would you care to tell us?" Mrs. Evans asked, and he nodded, drew himself baek against the jaguars and said: "It happened on the last bull of the day. Gomez had the gall to come to where I was and dedicate his bull to me: "Protector of the public, lover of bulls and master of the matadors." Men around me started laughing, so I told Nacho, "Make him look foolish," and Nacho did. Moving in on Gomez, he did a series of splendid pa.s.ses, cape behind his back, but on the last one the bull turned back too quickly, caught him in the middle of the chest and heaved him in the air, catching him again on the way down."
"Dead?" Grim asked and Ledesma nodded, and we fell silent.
Finally Mrs. Haggard asked, "Did you ever find another boy?" and he said, "Mine died at Torreon."
I had never before seen Leon so willing to talk about his disasters, so I probed: "But if you hate Gomez so much-- despise him, really--why have you gone out of your way to promote and even sponsor these hand-to-hand fights?"
"Because, miraculously, we have two fighters who represent the best of their competing styles. And if the world is to be kept in balance, it requires one like Gomez to underline the brilliance of one like Victoriano. So even though Gomez pays me nothing, I"m forced by the respect I have for bullfighting to speak the truth, and the truth is he"s a courageous fighter. One of the bravest."
"Did I hear you say that the matadors pay you for good notices?" Haggard asked.
"That"s how I earn my living."
"Does your paper know that?"
"They encourage it. Allows them to pay me less."
Haggard was shocked by this inside view of Mexican criticism, but young Penny Grim was proving rather sharper than I had supposed, and would not be sidetracked, for she asked, "Hating him as you do, are you able to be unprejudiced?"
He reached out to pat her hand. "I go to each hand-to-hand praying that the next bull will throw that d.a.m.ned Indian in the air eleven times and puncture his heart on each descent."
"Do you think that"s the way it will end?" I asked, and he said, "I"m sure of it. Victoriano has style, but Gomez has only raw courage. And in real life, style beats courage every time. So the better Victoriano becomes, the more Gomez will have to take risks. Until one day he brings on his own death." He ground his fat knuckles into the table as if he were crushing the bowlegged little Altomec.
After our delicious luncheon we thanked Ledesma for his thoughtfulness in arranging for it. Mrs. Evans spoke for all of us when she said: "Senor Ledesma, you"ve been so kind to us here at the pyramid that we wonder if you"d spare a few more minutes and accompany us to the cathedral" He started to reply that he wanted to be at the ring at noon to watch the sorting of the bulls, but he stopped and reconsidered. "A visit there would help all of you understand the fights better, but I"m afraid Brother Clay won"t appreciate it because I shall have to point out again that his sainted father had it all wrong."
"I can take it," I said. "I a.s.sociate with you, Leon, to learn things I was not clever enough to see for myself. And I"m not teasing." Indeed 1 was not. In my efforts to sort out my priorities, specifically what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I kept thinking about Mexico, and to attempt to understand this tangled, magnificent land with its constant revolutions would require all the brainpower I had. And it occurred to me that Leon and I were curiously similar, each of us an alien-he a Spaniard, I an American-so that we saw the nation from the perspective of an outsider. I needed to know what he knew, and was eager to hear what he had to say about the cathedral, which had been so important to my father.
"I"ll take you!" he decided abruptly. "Thus I will complete my own preparation, and you, Mrs. Evans, shall again ride with me, if you are not a coward."
The sprightly widow jumped into the Mercedes, and with a roar she and the critic started back to town, but after a few hundred yards he spun the car perilously in a circle, roared back and shouted while negotiating a second circle, "We"ll convene in the plaza facing the front of the cathedral." Then dust flew from beneath his tires, and he disappeared toward town.
We reached the plaza before he did, for apparently he and Mrs. Evans had stopped somewhere in town to make a purchase. When he did arrive he carried a rather bulky package under his arm, and when he joined us he made up for lost time, for he exploded into almost frenzied praise of the ornate fa?ade that graced the cathedral. "Unique in the world, I mean the beautiful item and the ugly word that names it. Churrigueresque. That"s the name of the architectural style you see, but what it means I do not know, except that it denotes a twisting, dancing, flaming creation, as you can see."
Allowing us some minutes to appreciate the glorious fa9ade, he resumed with an observation I will never forget: "But we must not allow ourselves to be seduced by this lovely facade, for it hides an ugly secret, precisely the way our ugly pyramid hid a beautiful secret, the Terrace of the Jaguars. John Clay, not having been permitted to see either of the secrets, fell into understandable error, the brutal Indian pyramid competing with the delicate, lovely cathedral, each a false description."
"What do you mean?" Mrs. Evans asked. He said: "Come with me, children," and led us to the south side of the cathedral where he stopped us before a very old fountain, which sent its water leaping into the sunlight. "For decades scholars have wondered why this statue of the first Bishop Palafox, our city"s builder, had been stuck in this out-of-the-way place rather than in the s.p.a.cious plaza we just left, for to tell you the truth our Palafoxes are not a reticent breed. At the bullfights, watch their present leader, Don Eduardo, breeder of bulls. If one of his bulls does especially well, and the crowd demands that he take a bow, he"s allowed to enter the ring and garner the applause, but he"ll jump in whether there"s any real applause or not. I"ve heard two handclaps bring him in for bows. So if our first Palafox chose this inconspicuous corner for his fountain, there must have been a reason."
After giving us time to think about this, he explained, "In 1953, again well after the death of John Clay-so what I"m about to say does not reflect on his leadership-archaeologists pulled down the stucco facing of the old fortress-church opposite and laid bare one of the rude, rough statements of the earliest Spanish architecture. Over there you see the outdoor pulpit built in 1527 from which Fray Antonio converted the Altomecs."
Leaving the fountain, we crossed over to the old chapel, where Ledesma marched about indicating its features. "Look at the brutal form of this sanctuary. Its grand low arches are as profound as the pyramid and not a bit different, for the Spaniards used Indian architects. It has no ornament, no single extraneous line of beauty. The consecrated rock from which the friar first preached stands just as it was stolen from the ruined temple of the Mother G.o.ddess. This crude holy place is the heart of the Catholic Church in the plateau region. Our church did not conquer and convert the Indians because we had the delicate churrigueresque architecture that John Clay held to be the essence of Catholicism in Mexico. We triumphed because we spoke from the solid rock of the land we had invaded. Our first chapels were low and powerful, like the temples from whose flanks the stones were stolen. We did not introduce completely new G.o.ds to our Altomec Indians; we adopted those we found and gave them the names of Spanish saints. Nor did we indulge in any sentimental piety." He paused. "If we had been Indian peasants in those early days, we"d have gathered here to listen to some Spanish priest shout theology at us in words we could barely understand. Spanish soldiers with their guns at the ready would have lined those battlements up there, and if a strong-minded Indian like Mr. Haggard even so much as opened his mouth in protest-bang, bang! You, Mr. Haggard, were dead."
He laughed, then said gravely, "I"ve grown to love this rude chapel that lay so long hidden beneath the stucco of respectability. It reminds me that the conquest of Mexico, my adopted home, was a harsh and often cynical affair. Here I see the nonsense of history ripped away, the soft words and the guileful lies and the distortions of the truth. We Spaniards were a hard people, and if when we had the land properly subdued we did find time to build a marble facade that dances for joy, we were cautious enough first to kill and subjugate."
When we finished inspecting the remnants of Toledo"s earliest Spanish structure, Ledesma surprised me by leading us into the interior of the cathedral, because ever since that day in 1911 when General Gurza"s troops had sacked Toledo and ravaged the cathedral few guides bothered to take their American tourists inside. Prior to that vandalism, the church had been famous for its three high altars of pure silver, its Virgins with faces of gold and rubies, and its ornate swaying lanterns sixty feet above the aisles. These too were of pure silver. It was a cathedral known throughout the Catholic world as the ideal example of a rich man"s devotion to G.o.d, and it had been brought into being by the fifth Bishop Palafox, who had badgered his wealthy cousin to pay the bill.
The sacking had been started by an Altomec Indian from Chihuahua State who had learned to read and who had shouted from the main entrance: "Soldiers! Look at the silver in here! Our grandfathers mined that silver and it belongs to us." Three hours later there was no silver, and the looters, as they left with the marvelous lanterns, paused to fire several hundred volleys into the stone statues that helped support the walls.
In subsequent years no effort was made to rebuild the interior, and the once-great cathedral of Toledo had remained a glittering sh.e.l.l containing nothing of importance. In 1935 my father, a Protestant, had proposed that the citizens of the city contribute toward the reconstruction, but his proposal was made during the presidency of General Cardenas, a powerful anti-cleric who would later expropriate the oil wells, and his government would not permit even voluntary contributions to be used for such purposes.
So now, as we entered the church of the Palafoxes, we saw barren walls pockmarked with bullets. The three main altars each had cheap wooden constructions showing ghastly Christs and even more ghastly saints; the wings of the angels were painted with cheap gilt and the garments were gray with dust. The church was kept viable only because of the inherent sanct.i.ty of the altars.
I could not at first understand why Ledesma had brought us into this gloomy memorial, repellent with its dirt and tawdriness, but obviously he had some plan in mind, for he led us directly to a spot between two ribs of the vaulting, and there he pointed to the Eleventh Station of the Cross. It was a carving I had not bothered to look at before, but at first glance it fitted in well with the rest of the interior; it was gray and dusty.
It was in the form of a tall rectangle, carved from several stout pieces of wood that had been nailed together. At the top was Jesus Christ, crowned with thorns and nailed to the cross, his torso covered by a dirty purple cloth that hung about his loins. Lower down and to his right and left were the two thieves on their crosses, and they were notable in that they wore the gold-and-silver satin pantaloons of the conquistadors. On a lower semicircle, repeating the lines of the crosses, knelt the Virgin Mary clothed in a dusty purple velvet cut in the style of 1500, Mary Magdalene in scarlet velvet, and Elizabeth in brilliant huntsman"s green.
Neither the carving nor the design merited comment, but the figure of Christ did, for simple human agony has rarely been more revoltingly depicted. From his contorted brow hung the crown of thorns, each spike cutting visibly into his already purplish flesh and sending drops of blood dripping across his wan countenance. His arms, legs and shins had been gashed, as they probably had been at Gethsemane, with deep saber slashes that had broken the bones and sent reddish-purple blood coursing down his extremities. Most horrible, however, was the centurion"s lance thrust into his side, for in this particular statue the wound was actually big enough to permit any doubting Thomas to thrust his fingers in up to the wrist and thus to be convinced that Jesus Christ actually did die upon a cross.
I recoiled from the horrible scene, as did the women in the party. Mrs. Evans caught her breath: "It"s sickening. I think I"ll go.
Ledesma said quietly: "But it was this that I wanted you to see."
"What has a monstrosity like this to do with religion?" O. J. Haggard asked.
"With ordinary religion, nothing," Ledesma replied slowly. "But with Christianity, everything." He then began speaking as if he were addressing a cla.s.s, and he would not permit any of us to leave. "You asked to be brought here, Mrs. Evans, and now you must in fairness stay."
"I did not want to see this," Mrs. Evans protested in a stricken voice.
"This afternoon you will not want to see the bulls die," he reminded her, "but that is why you have come to Mexico. To see death."
He stood below the Eleventh Station and said: "The cardinal principle of Christianity is that Jesus Christ died for us. He died on a cross, suffering the most extreme agony, with his arms and legs broken, as you see here. He did not die quickly, but he slowly bled to death.
"We have, I am afraid, tried to hide this fact from ourselves. We depict Jesus in flowing white robes, or with significant little needle p.r.i.c.ks on his brow, or lying serenely in a sepulcher. The inescapable fact is that he came from a violent G.o.d, into a violent world, to save violent men from a terribly violent h.e.l.l. We fool ourselves in the most bitter mockery if we try for the sake of prettiness to gloss over the terrifying fact that Jesus Christ died in the agony you see depicted there, and by and large, only the Spanish peoples have been brave enough to acknowledge that fact. Have you never wondered why it was that Spain perpetually defended the faith, even though it cost us our empire and our position in the European sun? Why was it that Spain alone poured forth her blood to save the Church of Christ? Because we Spaniards, led by men like Seneca, Garcia Lorca and Cervantes, have never been afraid of death. Always remember Cervantes"s arrogant last words, "Yesterday they gave me Extreme Unction, so today I take my pen in hand." That"s the way a man should face death, the way Jesus did, the way Seneca did. He said: "Give me the cup." We don"t know what Garcia Lorca said, nor even how he died, but I can imagine him saying, not anything profound or poetic, but something totally ba.n.a.l like "Let me stand over there." To be in a Spanish mind, or in a Spanish cathedral, is to be near death.
"Mrs. Evans, why do you suppose G.o.d chose this instrumentality, this horrible crucifixion, to save us? Don"t you suppose that someone as generous and as loving as G.o.d could have devised an alternative way? Why do you suppose he elected to impress this b.l.o.o.d.y scene on our conscience as the only true way to salvation?
"Let"s imagine that G.o.d had decided to turn his duties over to a women"s club in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Don"t you suppose that the good women could figure out a more tasteful way to denote the salvation of the world? You could use doves or Easter lilies or any of a hundred other delicate and wonderful symbols of peace and serenity of the soul. I am quite satisfied that you women would come up with something much better than what G.o.d used. For He chose blood. He chose the most cruel form of death that men of that time knew. It wasn"t death. It was outright torture. And He did it, I think, in order to show us how insignificantly mortal we are."
He stood in the shadows of this ruined church and made us study the awful crucifixion. No one of us who saw that b.l.o.o.d.y statue could ever doubt that Jesus Christ had been tormented beyond human endurance. Ed Grim was the first to speak: "Don"t those G.o.dd.a.m.ned satin pants on the two thieves look ridiculous?"
"It"s all ridiculous," Ledesma agreed brightly, moving from the shadows. "This magnificent interior gutted because a few greedy soldiers wanted silver. What could be more ridiculous than that?" He waved his arms expansively, then said softly: "All that you will see this afternoon will be ridiculous. Truthfully, you would be wiser not to attend the bullfights."
"Will they be as bad as ..." Mrs. Evans paused. "As bad as this?" She pointed to the crucifixion.
"They will be exactly the same," Ledesma replied. "They will be very sickening, and Americans ought not to look at them."
Grim said: "If we"ve driven all this distance and paid all this money for tickets, I"m sure goin" to see the fights." Mrs. Evans agreed and the Haggards said: "The only sensible thing to do," and Penny Grim said: "I came to see the matadors and I intend to see them." Upon the unanimous agreement, Ledesma said: "So if you"re determined to go, you should do so prepared to understand what you"re going to see-the spiritual significance I mean. The technical details of this and that you can get from any of the little handbooks." From the packet he had purchased on the way down from the pyramid he handed each of us that day"s special English-language edition of a newspaper that contained a long article by Ledesma in polished translation.
"It will explain what I"ve been driving at. Take a look and I"ll see you later." With that he left us in the church, but as he went he called back: "And study the carving from time to time as you read, since they"re both about death." And so we six Americans sat in the bleak cathedral and read what would be for the Oklahomans their first taste of Mexican sports writing. Ledesma"s essay bore a cryptic t.i.tle.
EARTH AND FLAME Today many readers of this newspaper will make the pilgrimage to Toledo for the Festival of Ixmiq-61 and those who have been guided by friends will have studied John Clay"s masterpiece, The Pyramid and the Cathedral, and will thus discover some of the values inherent in Toledo.
But in another sense this book will be poor preparation for the bullfights at Toledo, for Clay suggests that the soul of Mexico can be comprehended only if one counterbalances the Indian pyramid against the Spanish cathedral, as if the two were mutually exclusive yet somehow symbiotic. Of course, when we drive to the festival and see at Kilometer 303 the finest view in Mexico, we will for a moment contrast the pyramid and the cathedral, and if we stop with that surface contrast, we shall be able to adopt John Clay"s thesis with ease. But if we plan our excursion to Toledo so that we have time to inspect the city, and if we attend the bullfights in a spirit of exploration, we may in some oblique way stumble upon the essential mystery of Mexico. To accomplish this we must visit the pyramid of the Altomecs before we see our first fight, and as we approach this grisly scene of sacrifice we will see it exacdy as John Clay knew it when he wrote. There is the brutal pile and aloft the hideous altar. Down that steep flank the bodies were thrown and the implacable blue sky is exactly the way it was a thousand years ago. It is the essential monument of Indian Mexico.
As we reach the top we shall see again the eagle warriors, those powerful figures that so enchanted Clay. Their finely sculptured heads wearing the eagle masks show men indescribably cruel in purpose, and the blend of human and animal is a masterly accomplishment of both the sculptor and the psychologist.
(At this point in his reading O. J, Haggard put down his paper and asked: "When do we get to the bullfighting?" I replied: "But the whole piece is about bullfighting.") In fact, if I were required to select the one work of art that best typified central Mexico, I would choose these fierce men, half brutal warrior, half soaring eagle. They summarize our ancient heritage, and in selecting them for his eulogies John Clay spoke for us all. Had he in 1920 known the Altomec bullfighter Juan Gomez he would probably have agreed that in Gomez the eagle warriors lived again.
From the pyramid one should move direcdy to the cathedral. It is best seen in the early morning from across the plaza near the Imperial Theater, for only from this spot can one appreciate the glorious churrigueresque facade of Bishop Palafox. It is extraordinary, this twisting, convoluted, magic a.s.sembly of white marble and fluted columns and saints standing in niches. For two hundred years people have been studying this amazing pile of architecture-indeed, this is a perfect year in which to study it again, for we are in the two hundredth anniversary of its completion-and I suppose that in the centuries to come its fame will grow and even more will visit it. But I suspect that no one has ever really seen it nor ever will, because even as you look, its components constantly shift in their relationship to one another. When I last studied it, during an early dawn at the last Festival of Ixmiq, I swear I caught Saint Anthony dancing. Of course, whenever I looked directly at him, he stood dutifully in his niche like a boy in school, but when my eyes wandered, I could catch him dancing up and down and teasing Saint Margaret, who shied away from his impertinent attentions. This is the glory of the churrigueresque as it is epitomized in Toledo: that it cries to unyielding marble and traditional Gothic: "I am weary of buildings standing stiffly in the cold. Let"s dance." And dance this great fa$ade does. Even its stoutest columns are in motion.
Of course, the reader will understand that I am writing not about the facade of Toledo but about the matador Victoriano Leal, for the arabesques that he is able to carve with his magical cape are also cries of longing. And like the facade, this poetic torero, this glory of Mexico, does dance, and he sets our hearts on fire.
So there we have the easy symbolism of Mexico, all neatly wrapped up in one set of bullfights. Juan Gomez is the cold, stolid Indian of the pyramid and Victoriano Leal is the poetic dancer of the cathedral, all explained in the clever words of our visitor from the North, John Clay. But I am sorry to have to tell you now that every conclusion John Clay drew was wrong and that he is the worst possible guide to the Festival of Ixmiq.
I say this not in rudeness and not in criticism of Clay, but simply because he could not have known what we now know; he could not have avoided his tremendous and misleading errors, but we can. To do so we must double back to the pyramid. This time we don"t climb the steps to the fierce eagle warriors. We stay below, walk a few steps to the west and feast our eyes on the elegant jaguars who march sedately about the terrace that bears their name. They are the other aspect of the brutal pyramid, and we must keep them in mind when we are too hasty in denouncing the pyramid. It isn"t all brutality as Clay would have us believe.
(I had a strange reaction to this mild castigation of my father, whom I revered. During our morning visit to the pyramid Ledesma had been careful to apologize for having to disagree with Father, but I had thought this unnecessary, because the criticism was just. Father had been wrong in dichotomizing the bad Indian pyramid and the good Spanish cathedral. Mexico was like the huge snake that appears as one of the symbols on its colorful flag. It is a twisting, writhing ent.i.ty that no one can really grasp, hold still and study. Ledesma was not criticizing my father; he was helping educate me: "Quit accepting snap judgments. Look carefully and honestly at the conflicting data and reach your own conclusions." And just at that point my eyes fell upon almost the same words in Ledesma"s essay.) The same kind of correction must be made at the cathedral, so let"s march back there and look not at the scintillating facade-but off to one side at the almost ugly outdoor chapel in which the Indians had to worship while Spanish soldiers guarded them with guns. Just as the harsh pyramid had its gentle side, so did the graceful cathedral have its brutality.
To understand how these two apparent contradictions apply to bullfighting, and especially to the duel between Victoriano and Gomez,-1 want you to leave Mexico and accompany me to a very large room in Madrid that many consider the most beautiful in the world. It is on the second floor of the Prado, the city"s huge treasure-filled art museum, and it contains more than a dozen superb canvases by Velazquez.
Half the people represented are Spanish kings, queens and royal children. They are foppish or elegant or aloof. The other half are peasants drinking wine as they rest after toiling in the field or women weaving the fabrics that made Spain famous for that art; these strong men and women live on Spanish soil, drink Spanish wine, and eat Spanish bread soaked in Spanish olive oil. Even the n.o.blemen exhibit the stolidity of Spanish life, and if in a certain light they appear almost stupid, this is an illusion; what appears to be stupidity is in reality merely the enormous force of character that allowed Spain to stand firm against innovation, against doctrinal change, and even against the lessons of the New World. The rugged power of the Spaniard has never been better exhibited than in the paintings of Velazquez, and if a stranger were to ask me: "What is a Spaniard?" I would take him to this room and point to these earthy men and women.
But if he persisted: "I do not want to see how you look. I want to see how you are," then I would have to lead him to that smaller, darker room where the canvases of El Greco hang, luminous as if lit with a green flame. And there, as we studied the attenuated tortured figures with faces expressing pure anguish, I would say, "Here you sec the Spanish soul."
In attempting to understand Spain, one confronts both the solidity of Velazquez and the spirituality of El Greco, and we have now identified the true dichotomy that inspires the duel between Juan Gomez and Victoriano Leal. It does not spring from a surface difference between Indians and Spaniards, nor between the paganism of the pyramid and the idealism of the cathedral, nor even between the harshness of the cactus and the soaring beauty of the maguey. It is not an either-or disjunction. It springs from the conflict that exists in Spanish life itself. It is the battle between earth and flame. It is a dichotomy in which all men are imprisoned, but which the Spaniard alone is willing to exhibit as an open fact.
(At this point in his reading Ed Grim threw down the mimeographed sheets and said, "I came here to see a bullfight, not get an art lecture. Where"s the bullring?" I pointed down the Avenue Gral. Gurza and said: "Walk one block beyond the cathedral, it"ll be on the right." He jammed on his panama hat and asked: "Will I be able to recognize it when I see it?" I said: "Possibly not. It"s crowded in among other buildings." Turning to his daughter, he asked, "You coming with me?" She tapped the essay: "Nope. This is beginning to make sense, and I want to see how it comes out." Ignoring her and speaking to me, he said: "I"ll find it. I"ll be able to smell the horses." And he left. The rest of us continued reading.) It would be an error to a.s.sume airily that Velazquez and Juan Gomez represent the brutal earthly body of man, while El Greco and Victoriano Leal represent the ethereal flame of man"s spirit. I think the difference is much subtler than that. Veldzquez"s people are humanity, with all their limitations and powers. His kings are vain, foolish people who reign for a little while, then pa.s.s their authority on to others who are no less stupid than themselves. His peasants sweat a while in the sun, grow old and die, their places being taken by others exactly the same. This is how the world revolves. This is how men actually live, and there is in his paintings a sense of down-to-earth dignity that men like El Greco can never achieve, just as in the pyramid of which we have been speaking there is an inescapable, foursquare lightness that the ornate cathedral can simply never challenge. It is not that Velazquez restricts himself to the corporeal world and El Greco to the spiritual. That is too easy a disjunction. What has happened is that Velazquez has depicted the ultimate meaning of life by approaching it through the earthly body, whereas El Greco has reached for the same goal by denying the body, by contorting it and abusing it, and by concentrating on the deepest psychological forces that animate man. But the goal of each is exactly the same.
I said earlier that the men who built the pyramids were driven also to build the Terrace of the Jaguars, whereas the priests who built the cathedral were also motivated to build the squat, brutish open-air chapel. Similarly, Velazquez often gives us glimpses of the most exquisite poetry, while El Greco is not loath occasionally to portray people who are distinctly earthbound. The dichotomy of which we are speaking thus lies within each man, and forms two parts of his being. As a Spaniard, I am at once part Velazquez and part El Greco. As a Mexican going to the bullfights at Toledo I am at the same time part Juan Gomez, brutal and stupid, and part Victoriano Leal, the lyric poet; and the greatness of this series of fights we have been witnessing since the first of the year is that these two men disclose to us aspects of our own secret life, and each contains an essential part of the other.
These conflicting aspects of man are also exhibited in the great writers" of Spain, for a man who writes cannot escape spreading out on paper a major proportion of what he thinks, whereas artists in other categories can sometimes avoid this, or obscure it. In order to investigate the ideas I have in mind, I am going to discuss the two most representative writers Spain has so far produced.
(O. J. Haggard asked cautiously: "In Mexico do they call stuff like this sports writing?" I replied: "In Mexico they don"t regard bullfighting as a sport. It"s an art." Mrs. Evans put a finger on a line to mark where she stopped and asked: "But do other writers about bullfighting go on like this?" I answered: "I bought a book the other day that was supposed to be about bullfighting, but the outsider would have thought it was an essay on religion" Mrs. Evans shook her head ruefully and observed: "To me it seems very pretentious. In Tulsa I"m afraid this young man wouldn"t get very far reporting on football.") I should first like to discuss Federico Garcia Lorca, for he epitomizes physically, intellectually, spiritually and artistically one part of the Spanish nature. His life was his princ.i.p.al work of art. No people that I know hold poetry in such high esteem as the speakers of Spanish, and it is not unusual to see in either Madrid or Mexico City a man and his wife strolling down a street, he reciting from Garcia Lorca while she holds the prompt book. Exactly why Garcia Lorca should have captured the Hispanic mind is difficult to say. His awkwardness in playwriting often leaves me embarra.s.sed. For example, the plotting of Blood Wedding is quite pedestrian, while his House of Bernardo, Alba comes straight from eighteenth-century Gothic. To appreciate how deficient the Spaniard was, you must compare his plot devices and characterizations with those of Goethe and Eugene O"Neill.
But when I get to the words of Lorca and forget his silly plots, I conclude that in his poetry he stands second to none, and it is for this that we prize and praise him. I wonder if there has ever been another Spanish writer who could compress into so few words the agony of life, as when in Blood Wedding the bridegroom"s mother confesses: "Always in my breast there"s a shriek standing tiptoe that I have to fight back and keep hidden under my shawls." How brilliantly he compresses the action of Yerma into a single song sung by the ghostly offstage voice: "When you were fancy-free, You and I could never see. But now that you"re a wife. You have become my life."
Little wonder that Lorca, who wrote so emotionally about bullfighting, has become the acknowledged poet laureate of the plaza, for in its intense and compressed drama he found the summation of the tragedy he sought. The literary counterpart of El Greco, he exhibits the same leaping flame of pa.s.sion, and also like El Greco, his artistic ambitions override his technical skills-he thus becomes the patron of matadors like Victoriano Leal, whose artistic aspirations are greater than their basic skills. Yet with Garcia Lorca there is always something more. He speaks to us Spaniards with a fury that no other poet commands, and we instantly recognize the authority of his speech.
But let us now turn to a writer from a much earlier age, one whom I consider the greatest Spaniard who has ever lived, and that includes the painters, the musicians, the philosophers and the kings. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, born in 4 B. C., that year in which historians believe Jesus too was born, began his life in Spain. But, like the sensible lad he was, he quickly moved to Rome, where his wit, his stalwart character and his skill at playwriting attracted such favorable attention that in time he became chief counselor to Emperor Nero, and as long as Seneca remained in control, Nero was an exemplary ruler. Seneca was also a notable administrator, Rome"s leading dramatist, the conscience of the empire, and one of the capital"s most brilliant intellects. In Spain we cherish his memory because he was the first man of any intellectual substance to become a Christian and is thus the spiritual father of Catholicism in Spain. At his death he was the most distinguished man in the world who had so far embraced the new religion, and his advice to the Roman world was as profound as Saint Paul"s to the world at large. Seneca"s dealt with more immediate problems: "G.o.d is not to be worshiped with sacrifices and blood; for what pleasure can He have in the slaughter of the innocent? He is to be worshiped only with a pure mind, a good and honest purpose. Temples need not be built for Him with stones piled high upon high; He is to be consecrated in the breast of each."
The impact of Seneca upon the Spanish mind is felt daily, and the contradictions that plagued him continue to plague Spain. He was subject to keen pa.s.sions, yet he preached a calm and even cautious adjustment to conflicting forces. He was the supreme stoic, taking nothing too seriously, yet he feared death. In literary style he was ornate, but in the essentials of life austere. I have always considered myself a disciple of Seneca"s, and I would rather talk with him for half an hour than with any other Spaniard who has ever lived; yet often his down-to-earth realism irritates me because it can be so prosaic. He is par excellence the Velazquez of the written word: the glowing man of earth.
And so we have the intellectual battle lines drawn for our visit to Toledo: there is the earth of Velazquez and Seneca directly opposed to the flame of El Greco and Lorca. There is the earthy style of the bowlegged Altomec Indian Juan Gomez directly opposed to the fiery arabesques of Sevillian Victoriano Leal. And the Festival of Ixmiq will show us a cla.s.sic confrontation of these two concepts.
(Here O. J. Haggard interrupted with "I never heard of Seneca. How come-if he"s as good as this fellow says?" His wife added, "And I never heard of Lorca. Is he any good?" Mrs. Evans observed: "After John"s death I went to New York, as you know, and I saw a group of actors do Blood Wedding in a little theater off-Broadway." Haggard asked: "Was it any good?" And Mrs. Evans replied: "It was terribly intense," at which Haggard pressed: "But was it any good?" and she said bluntly: "Yes. At the time I didn"t think so, but it occurred to me later after seeing it I thought about Blood Wedding five times for every once that I recalled the usual Broadway play." Haggard grunted and said, "Then it was good." They resumed reading and came to the first major point of Ledesma"s essay.) But it is not the differences between Seneca and Garcia Lorca that bind them together in our minds as the supreme examples of Spanish thought. It is their similarity, and when I say what this is each reader will understand why these two writers now serve as the apostles of bullfighting. Seneca and Lorca are concerned primarily with death, and every Spaniard, whether he lives in Pamplona or Peru, is similarly preoccupied with this ultimate mystery. It was not by accident that in the long history of Spain no two Spaniards ever died more appropriately than Seneca and Garcia Lorca. At the height of his fame, when his plays commanded the Rome theater and his shafts of wit monopolized Roman conversation, Seneca was ordered by an insane Nero to commit suicide. And now what at times had seemed to be weakness in Seneca"s character, especially his tendency to shift with each new wind that blew from the Roman Forum, was seen to be the Stoic"s honest adjustment to the necessities of life. When it came time for Seneca to die, he lifted the poisoned cup fearlessly to his lips, and Rome saw a Spaniard die a n.o.ble death. Not even Socrates, in similar circ.u.mstances, met his end with greater dignity.
It would have been unforgivable had his final act been flawed, for in life Seneca was preoccupied with death, and his philosophy could be summed up in his statement that "the whole of life is nothing but a preparation for death."
In my studies I have had to read a great deal of English literature, and I never found an author who seemed honestly convinced that man is inescapably mortal, that one day he is going to die. There is something infuriating about the English writers" a.s.sumptions about immortality, and the Spanish reader soon tires of such writing because he is accustomed to a literature that lives each day with death. If Spaniards are preoccupied with death, it is because our greatest men have taught us to be so. If we love bullfights it is because we subconsciously know that this is the world"s only art form that depicts our preoccupation. That is why the reflections of Seneca are so important to all who follow the bulls. He is our philosopher and guide, and the death that he contemplated so sublimely is the death we watch being acted out each afternoon.
And a fascinating aspect of this inescapable denouement is that we cannot predict how death will strike, or at whom. Nero proved that, for sometimes when a fight between the lions and the Christians in his arena proved dull, or when the lions killed everyone too soon, he instructed his guards to grab at random a score of spectators and toss them into the ring to feed the beasts. Thus a man who had paid that morning to watch Christians being eaten suddenly found himself being part of the feast. Decade after decade, in the various bullrings of the world an enraged animal occasionally will not only leap the barrier that defines the ring in which he is supposed to fight but will vault into the rows of spectators in the stands and kill one or two. Like Nero"s Romans, those who paid to watch a fight become the fight.
(O. J. Haggard asked quietly, "Have you found the Mexicans preoccupied with death?" and I replied, "When I was a little boy living at the Mineral, General Gurza came by and hanged one of our men from a pole that stuck out from the kitchen, and the man"s legs dangled above the place where we prepared food. I asked my father why we did not cut him down, and my father pointed out that General Gurza had left a soldier in the patio with instructions to keep the man"s body hanging there, so that, in the general"s words, "We would all remember what death was." " Haggard concluded: "I prefer the English preoccupation with life. I say, "Let"s kid ourselves as long as possible that the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d is going to pa.s.s us by." ") At long last, this was the conclusion of Ledesma"s piece: If it is true as I claim that we are all Spaniards inexorably marching toward death, it is no less true that we are all stubborn Mexicans holding on like peasants to life on earth. Unquestionably we are, like Seneca, obligated to consider how we shall die, but we must not forget that for most of his life Seneca lived surrounded by the luxuries of imperial Rome and ignored death; nor should we forget that Garcia Lorca, who lived with death like a brother, spent the best years of his life in New York, where he lived vigorously.
We are tragic men, but we are also comic. We march to death, but we get drunk on the way. I cannot identify Juan Gomez with the pyramid or Velazquez or Seneca, nor can I see Victoriano Leal as his opposite in those categories. It is true, however, that I see these two matadors approaching the problem of death from two different philosophies, but just as the pyramid contains the Terrace of the Jaguars, so each of these men contains the best elements of the other.
Which matador do I prefer? As a child of Spain I should elect him who stands closest to death, and that is Juan Gomez, who knows how to kill, but I must make an unSpanish choice and say I prefer him who best depicts the flaming heart of life, and that is Victoriano Leal, who knows what grace is.
So to those traveling to Toledo I give the benediction that the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno bestowed upon us all: "May G.o.d deny you peace, but grant you glory." Gentlemen, to the bulls!
O. J. Haggard was first to finish the essay. As he stepped out of the cathedral and into the bright noonday sunlight he said: "Too much like a tomb in here. Too much death." One by one, as each of us finished reading, we too went outside, glad for the life-filled plaza and the sun.
We saw Ed Grim leaving a cafe by the bullring, and as he approached us he called out in his hearty voice: "I was waiting in the bar till you finished your philosophy lesson."
"We"re done," Haggard said.
"You know any more about bullfighting than when you started?"
"No."
"Well, I do," the red-necked man growled. "This bullfighting is a racket. When I went to the box office to buy us five seats for each of the three days, the poster said in Spanish, but with English beside it, that the cost was seven dollars each-- that"s one hundred five dollars in all--but when I tried to give the man in the booth the money, he called an interpreter who explained, "Sorry. All seats sold." So I looked#around for a scalper and a mangy-looking character stepped forward. "I just happen to have five good seats for today." When I asked how much, he said, "Twenty-five dollars each." I almost gagged but paid him. Then he said: "How about five each for the next two fights?" and I agreed. What else could I do? I cashed a traveler"s check and paid him three hundred eighty-five."
"You overpaid," his daughter said. "Fifteen times twenty-five is only three hundred seventy-five."
"He demanded a tip. For just standing there he made a cool two hundred dollars or more."
"I make it two hundred seventy dollars," Penny said quiedy, and he growled: "But what really gagged me-when I gave him the money he went around to the back door of the ticket office and gave the same clerk I had talked to fifteen times seven dollars, that"s one hundred five dollars. And without even blushing he came back to me and handed over the tickets. At those prices I guess the fat boy has a right to throw around some fancy words." Pointing to one of the newspapers, he asked: "He continue to lay it on pretty thick?"
"He didn"t hold anything back," Haggard said.
Penny Grim cried: "He"s come for us," and ran to tell him, "That essay was fantastic. You did beat around the bush, but in the end I think I caught what you were trying to say."
"Which was?" I liked the way he took the young girl seriously, and I listened when she asked hesitantly, "Maybe that life is more complex than we think? Two faces to everything? Pyramid, cathedral, the two matadors? One time we see it one way, next time another?"
"See what, for instance?"
She looked at him and then at Mrs. Evans as if seeking permission. "But there"s always death-to make things equal. Is that it?"
"Yes," he said soberly. "You read with marked intelligence, senorita. But you"re too young to worry about death."
"Not so. Last year my mother died."
He studied her carefully, took her hand and kissed it. Her father, seeing this, came and put his arm around her, then told Ledesma: "I read only part of your essay. Much too deep for me. But I"m glad one of our family knew what you were shooting at. I wondered if you were just throwing words around for effect."
Again Leon bowed. "Sir, you"re as clever as your beautiful daughter. You saw through me. Shameless exhibitionism. I do it for two good reasons. To impress my Mexican readers with the fact that I"ve read books. And because I get paid by the word." And he led us from the church back to the House of Tile for drinks before the afternoon fight. As with the picnic lunch, he paid for them.