Mexico by James A. Michener

THE INDIAN

I spent Wednesday night after the poetry competition and all day Thursday in a forced explosion of energy I had not displayed since my all-night cramming for exams at Princeton. Consulting experts, borrowing their newspaper clippings regarding memorable fights, and even conducting hurried interviews with Juan Gómez and his manager, I was able to construct a mental image of the bowlegged Indian. Then, when I had my room organized as a workstation, my typewriter on a table away from the sun, my pile of white paper neatly within reach and fresh carbons at hand, I plunged into the task of grinding out the type of story that New York treasured: good guy versus bad, all-white versus all-black, premonitions of tragedy to come, plus a general breathlessness to keep the story line galloping ahead. As the pages piled up, I was not unhappy with what I was accomplishing, for I took professional pride in my ability to write quickly and accurately while fitting my data into the patterns that Drummond liked.

What we have in the three-day festival that starts tomorrow, Friday, is a Spanish celebration dating back about two hundred years but based upon Indian rituals almost two thousand years old. It's appropriate, therefore, that our protagonists should represent almost ideally the two historic strains of Mexican history: the ancient Indian, the recent Spanish.

The Spaniard I've already given you in detail: slim, tall, blue-eyed and with exceptional poetry of movement. You have my photos of him that I've caught in other plazas and earlier in Spain and they show the charismatic Victoriano, but use those that emphasize his elegant style. I haven't sent you too much on Gómez yet, but he's different, a grubby little Indian peasant with no elegance whatever, only a brutal determination to get the job done and a willingness to risk his life in doing it. Fortunately for us, he looks like what he is: awkward, a stumpy little guy with a head of dark hair encroaching on his eyebrows, and legs that are decidedly bowed. Taciturn, moody, afraid of the press, he is not a likeable matador.

So I see Ixmiq-61 as a duel between the two faces of Mexico, the Spaniard versus the Indian. Also: sunlight versus shadow, hero versus villain, beauty versus ugliness-and, above all, a young man protected by three extremely canny bullfight operators versus an older fellow assisted by a beat-up codger who poses as a manager but who really uses Gómez as a last-chance meal ticket, and a brassy dame who believes Gómez will help her become a flamenco entertainer in Spain but who will drop him instantly if something better comes along.

As I pushed my chair back to stare out the window at the plaza, I was not entirely happy with my facile comparison of the two matadors, for I suspected that in stressing their obvious differences I was missing essentials. A few days earlier I had telegraphed New York a brief report on Gómez and their response proved that the home office had adopted my simplification, because the art editor had cabled me: "Be sure get moody shot Gómez working bull deep in shadows. " Drummond himself cabled: "Essential you provide us with numerous incidents that show good guy in peril and bad guy momentarily triumphant. " In our shop Victoriano had become certified as the good guy.

Thus, through words and photographs we were prejudging an event that had not yet happened, and I could detect in the communications reaching me from New York evidence that the editors had become emotionally involved in this duel between the matadors. Late Thursday afternoon, a few hours after dropping off my latest dispatch at the cable office, I was startled by a messenger who brought to my room an urgent cable from Drummond that asked: "Highbrow philosophizing aside, which matador do you think is likely to die?"

Sitting at my desk, I stared at my typewriter and grumbled: They're forcing me to make a prediction I'm not capable of making. Then as I blinked and restudied the cable I realized that it did not represent a business query. It was a personal question from Drummond as a man, not an editor, one who had become caught up in the struggle between Victoriano and Gómez and after a long day at work and a cocktail at some bar or bistro had shot me an honest inquiry. I was not required to answer, and yet as I sat there, my head resting on my hands as dusk fell and my room grew dark, I found that I wanted to give him an answer.

"It's the Spaniard who will die," I said aloud, and I could see the culmination of this insane contest. Juan Gómez, the relentless little Indian, would continue to fight the bulls with increasing valor, "tickling their tonsils with his elbows," as the bullfighters described it, and he would goad Victoriano into executing more and more arabesques until the final afternoon of the festival when in the lengthening shadows a bull would suddenly hook to the left, and Victoriano would hang suspended for a long forty seconds, after which he would be dead.

And then I must have lost all sense of morality because I found myself praying, "Dear God, if he has to die, let it be now, at the height of the festival, with the bands playing and not at the end of the fight but at the beginning, while the light is still good, so that the camera can catch the full detail as he dangles from the horn."

I regained my senses. "Jesus Christ! " I gasped. "What am I saying? " But before my self-disgust could drive the grisly prayer from my mind I had to admit that what I had prayed for was what I actually wanted. If Victoriano was doomed, let the swift horn thrust come at the Festival of Ixmiq, early in the afternoon on a sunny day when the light was good-not for the photographers, but for this photographer, me. "If there's to be a story, let it be a good one, a classic of the bullring. Let me write a story that cuts right to the heart of the bullring, at the heart of Mexico itself. Purged of all nonsense. Just the bare truth."