Laughing at the dead. Not laughing. (1955)

We took the second-class bus from Mexico City to the plaza in Xochimilco, then started walking carrying the bundles with our suits and capes and the swords. The afternoon was sunny and hot. The street was paved with rocks for several blocks, then it was dirt. I hadn’t noticed before, but maestro Fijardo walked like a duck. I pointed it out to Sergio.

“Mida. El maestro camine como un pato.”

Sergio grinned and shook his head no. He nodded toward Antonio, warning me.

“Camine como un pato,” I said. I started walking like a crippled duck. Antonio looked at me suspiciously. Sergio grinned and shook his head no.

Maestro Fijardo turned in through two tall, green wooden doors in an adobe wall and we followed him into an old stock pen. The bullring was a corral built from poles and timbers inside the rectangular stock pen. Spectators would buy their tickets and enter the same doors we had, which is where, during the week, the animals were still driven through.

Inside the pen in one comer was a small modern stuccoed house. We went in the house to the kitchen and stood around, then we went in the bare little bedroom and began changing. I took off my clothes down to my shorts and drew on the long pink stockings. I put on the white shirt, then the green tights I’d rented with the heavy white embroidery and the silver ornaments. The seam on one leg opened up so I took the tights off and got the sewing kit from the maestro and sewed up the tear with green thread. There were four repaired places on the tights, three on the right thigh and one on the left. The repaired place on the left thigh was eight inches long and was on the inside of the thigh but there was no stain.

I drew on the tights again and Sergio and I helped each other draw on our slippers because we couldn’t bend over to draw on our own slippers. Sergio used hairpins to fasten my pigtail to my hair. The clerk in the second floor showroom where we had rented the equipment we didn’t own hadn’t had any blond pigtails so I’d rented a brown one. In the little bedroom there was a full-length mirror leaning against one wall and we inspected ourselves carefully. I tried on my rented cap. It had gotten smaller since I'd rented it.

“Do not worry,” Sergio said in Spanish. “You can carry it when we enter. You do not have to wear it.”

When we started dressing we’d been alone in the bedroom but by the time we were finished the room and the little hallway outside were full of men drinking and smoking cigars and laughing. The Americans from Mexico City came in the bedroom to wish me well. They had cameras with them.

He said: “How do you feel?”

“I feel all right,” I said.

“Are you nervous?”

“No. I’m all right.”

She said: “If I were in your shoes, I’d be really scared.”

“Well, I’m all right.”

“Your first formal fight and all.”

“Huh?”

“Your first formal fight. Nobody would blame you if you felt anxious.”

“Yes. I’m all right though.”

There was a moment when the Americans didn’t say anything.

“I’m all right,” I almost said.

When it was time we walked through the house out into the stock pen. The spectators had climbed up on the adobe wall and they were sitting on the corral rails and peering through the bars. Some were sitting in the dirt eating lunch. Men were drinking beer and whooping it up. There were a lot of people.

On the west side of the corral there was a raised platform with eight metal fold-ing chairs. The judges were sitting up there with their backs to the sun, along with the two Americans and a couple Mexican spectators who had paid extra. The two judges wore neckties and snap-brimmed felt hats.

The flatbed truck with the three big shipping crates was on the east side of the ring backed up to the corral. Each crate held one small bull of mixed blood, a criollo. We walked through the spectators and climbed through the poles into the ring and when the two men with trumpets began to play we strode across the little ring, saluted the judges who nodded gravely in return, and walked back to our place behind the wooden tabla.

Two men in straw hats were standing on the bed of the truck. Now they climbed up on top of one of the crates and at a signal from the chief judge they yanked up its sliding gate and a strong little animal jumped out onto the ground, stumbled, then got up and charged around the corral blowing and bellowing.

In the first moment it looked like a good animal but when Antonio went out to work it, it chose a territory to defend beneath the judge’s stand and Antonio, who was the best of the three of us with a fully developed style who we all believed had a career before him, couldn’t draw it out. After fifteen minutes of fruitless drudgery, he killed it.

Sergio killed his animal next, which wasn’t much better than Antonio’s had been, and when it was time for my animal the crowd was restless. They tossed beer bottles in the ring and yelled insults. The little animal jumped out of her cage into the ring and charged around the corral. It was a two-year-old becerra. She looked very good. She was clearly the best of the three. I watched her carefully from behind the tabla to determine which horn she favored. I was still studying her when Antonio ran out and called her with his capote. She charged beautifully. Antonio performed three good veronicas and ended with a standing remate. The crowed cheered. I turned to Sergio.

“He should not have done that,” I said.

‘”No,” Sergio said.

“It is my animal. “

“Yes. Go to her.”

I walked out toward the powerful little animal with my capote. Somebody yelled out in Spanish: “Do not be afraid, gringo. That Indian has already shown you how to do it.”

I heard men laughing. I called the animal carefully and thoughtfully with the cape.

“Hey, gringo,” someone shouted. “You do not have to be so careful. You weigh more yourself than that calf weighs.”

I heard the crowd laughing. I made a few passes with the capote. They weren’t very good. I didn’t understand why. I positioned the becerra very carefully and made two more. They didn’t quite work. I heard the maestro shouting for me to exchange the capote for the smaller muleta. At that moment I heard someone yell in Spanish at the top of his voice:

“GUARD YOURSELF. SHE IS COMING!”

I jumped behind the nearest tabla with the maestro.

”NOT THAT LITTLE CALF,” the guy yelled. “MY OLD LADY.”

The crowd thought that one was funnier still.

The maestro said: “Do not laugh.”

“It is all right,” I said.

I saw Sergio and Antonio trying not to laugh. Antonio was not trying as hard to not laugh as Sergio was.

The maestro said to them: “Do not laugh.”

I tried a few passes with the muleta. I could pass her high but I couldn’t work her low. It wasn’t clear to me why. High passes don’t mean as much with an animal as low passes do, no matter what size iut is. I worked her with the right hand, then the left, but I couldn’t get anything going. A half-eaten tamale whizzed past my face. A beer bottle hit the animal on the ass and she gave a start. I heard a man shout:

“Hit the gringo, not the cow.”

I could hear the laughing.

I exchanged the wooden sword for the killing sword. I lined up the becerra with great care. I wanted to prepare her perfectly and go in perfectly. It had become necessary for me to do this one thing right. Sergio was nearby with his capote to take care of me if anything went wrong.

“Do not wait,” he said

I felt like I was being rushed. The afternoon from beginning to end had gone too fast. The animals had moved faster than I’d expected. Antonio, the bastard, had moved faster than I’d expected. Now I was being rushed into the kill.

“Do not wait,” Sergio shouted.

The crowd was yelling and taunting me. I wasn’t ready, but I was very close. I drew her toward me with the left hand with the muleta and swept her by and as she passed I went in with the sword over her right horn keeping the right elbow high. The blade entered between her withers at a deep angle just like I had practiced it so many times. It went in her body like a hot knife slipping into butter. The ease of the entry took my breath away. At the same time I heard a gasp escape from the crowd.

And then I was standing alone in utter silence before the swaying animal, my right arm half-raised, aware of the fullness that was somehow in the sudden quiet, aware of the late afternoon sunlight flooding the corral, how the trash littering the ground at that moment was somehow not merely trash, aware of the different textures of the ground through the soles of my slippers. I think I was aware in that moment for the first time of the wonderful purity of silence and light when they are inside you too and not just outside.

I watched the vecerra lower her head, I heard her moan, I saw the blood roll down one whither. Snot poured from her nostrils like long lavender and green jewels and trailed in the dirt. I watched her make one last move toward me then fall on her side. I heard the crowd cheer and then Sergio put his knife through her spinal chord just behind the skull and there was the spasm and then the sudden stiffness of her death and then the afternoon was over and when we went in the little house to change back into street clothes there was blood on my right wrist up under the cuff of the white shirt and I knew it wasn’t mine. Later on there would be times when it would be my blood.

There were always those Americans who were against the bulls because of the cruelty of the baiting and who treated toreros contemptuously. It isn’t possible to deny that it is cruel to bait and kill bulls in public, but bulls don’t whine like mistreated dogs or run from danger. Fighting bulls have a different sense of things and when you’re in the ring with one you understand the cruelty intellectually but you understand about the cruelty of the bull too and that neither of you will complain about what happens or have hard feelings afterward. I’ve met many ex-toreros who have been crippled by a bull, the tendons tom form their legs, their forearms twisted, an ear gone or an eye ripped out or a testicle but I never met one who complained about the bulls or had bad feelings toward them.

Nevertheless it troubled me that I couldn’t defend the bulls intellectually. It troubled me that even those who had no experience with bulls could talk against them so successfully. I tried one argument then another to defend what I was doing but finally I always understood I was losing the argument on moral grounds. It was very frustrating and troubling. It surprised me sometimes how angry it made me feel.

In Mexico City I usually trained in the Plaza Monumental. At eight in the morning I’d be at the Plaza with the others at the iron gate beneath the stands with my capes and the training sword and when the watchman unlocked the gate we’d walk through the dark tunnel out into the stands, then down through the stands in the bright morning sunshine to the ring where the sand would still be softly dark with the dampness from the night.

1’d do the track work first, running backwards around the ring for twenty minutes, then I’d work with the capes. By mid-morning there would be twenty or thirty of us on the sand. At ten-thirty sharp the gatekeeper would wheel out the killing machine and we’d take turns practicing on t. There was the bull’s head mounted on a bicycle wheel, and behind it the chunk of maguey plant wired to the frame and then the two long handles. When the machine was run at you the idea was to go in properly with a little class over the right horn and place the sword in the maguey at the correct angle. The angle is very important because if you enter tendida, at too shallow an angle, you won’t go deep into vital organs, which is what kills, and you will have to withdraw the sword and go in again and you will have diminished all the work you have done with the animal up to that moment.

From the beginning I felt a particular interest in the sword and after the first corrida in Xochimilco my interest heightened. At the same time I couldn’t get over my uneasiness at the barbarity of the way of life I was entering, because I knew that was what it was. I knew I would never be able to convince myself it was right to perform cruel acts in public for pleasure and money. I was willing to convince myself that it was right, but I couldn’t, and every morn-ing at eight I was at the iron gate beneath the Plaza with the others.

One morning after I finished training I walked up through the stands and through the tunnel and out again into the bright sunlight and around the Plaza toward Avenida Insurrgentes. Ahead I saw a truck parked at the curbing filled with workingmen wearing straw hats. They sat quietly in the back of the truck. As I approached the rear of the truck I felt I was being watched. I thought probably the men were curious seeing a gringo carrying capes and a sword.

Then I saw the workman lying on the pavement on his back. With a single glance I knew by the position of his body that he had fallen off the back of the truck. Maybe he’d been sitting on the tailgate, the truck had lurched forward suddenly and there you had it. As I drew near I saw that the back of the man ‘s head was perfectly flat against the pavement and that there was blood and other stuff coming out of it.

I looked up at the workmen in the back of the truck. They had been waiting for the moment when I would understand what had happened, and now as I looked up they looked off into the distance or down at their feet. One of the men in the truck, sitting with his back to the cab, grinned at me. He was wearing a ragged shirt with only one sleeve and some of his teeth were missing.

I didn’t mean to but I smiled in return. He shrugged his shoulders and gave a little laugh. I looked away. I walked past the truck and on up the street. Behind, I heard someone in the truck begin to talk. Then there were many different voices and there was someone who laughed. I walked on past the concrete soccer stadium that seats a hundred thousand spectators. The grass in the parking way was very green. There were beds of snapdragons and beds of roses and petunias exploding their colors into the brilliant sunlight.

When the bus came I realized I was still smiling. I dropped the fare in the coin box and moved down the aisle. Thought was saving it was all right to laugh at the dead. Then as I started listening to it thought said it was all right about the bulls too, that it was all right about a lot off things that appear questionable to decent people but that nevertheless are perfectly all right in the real scheme of things, which isn’t very much like very many decent people imagine it to be. It was exciting listening to thought go on like that and I understood why I was still smiling.

I didn’t get off the bus at my regular stop but went on downtown to the park at the Alameda where I bought a cone of shaved ice from a man with a pushcart. The man put the ice in a white paper cup and poured strawberry syrup over it and I walked across the park through the green shade to where the display of photographs of the old revolutionaries hanging by their necks and the cadavers of working men thrown into piles in the streets were still being exhibited. I looked at the portraits of Zapata, Villa and Carranza and the other historical and non-historical figures. I looked at their horses.

I’d seen the photographs before but it was good looking at them again because I felt I was going to see them now from a new perspective, with a new understanding. At first it was fine and the photographs were very interesting but after awhile I started seeing them like I’d seen them the other times. They fascinated me, but they enraged me too. I wanted to tear them off the walls and destroy them. It wasn’t the photographs themselves. It was how they were being exhibited. As if they were art.

End

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