Mexico by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online Page B

your rooms with cheap girls like the ones I found here when I arrived."
    "Where are they?" Leal asked.
    'They are gone, matador," the visitor replied.
    "Who are you?" Leal insisted, standing close to the gentleman.
    "I am known as Don Alfonso," the man said, fixing his penetrating eyes on Leal's, "but the name is a courtesy. Like you, I am a simple peasant who has prospered in Mexico." He laughed, then drew himself erect so that he was almost as tall as the matador. "But also like you, I am a Spaniard." He hammered his fist into his palm and repeated, "I am a Spaniard."
    "What have you to do with me?" Leal pressed.
    "I have come to introduce you to your future wife," Don Alfonso replied.
    Bernardo Leal did not laugh. Something in his visitor's grave manner inhibited him and he asked, "Where is the girl?"
    And Don Alfonso replied with dignity, "In my house, for she is my daughter." He paused, then added with intensity: "You are a Spaniard, matador, and you must not allow your precious blood to be lost among Mexicans."
    "Mexico is now my home," Leal began, but whatever he was about to say was cut off when his visitor grabbed him by the back of the neck and thrust him toward the frameless mirror that graced the barren hotel wall.
    "Look at your eyes, son!" the determined old man cried. "Look at your skin! Matador, you are a Spaniard. You are too precious to be lost."
    He led Leal from the hotel and through the crowds that had come to pay him homage. The girls who had accompanied him from Mexico City fell back and the hangers-on that pursue all matadors stood aside. Through the narrow cobbled streets of Toledo, most gracious of the Mexican cities and the most Spanish, went the two Spaniards until they came to a white stone wall sixteen feet high on which had been pasted, some days before, a garish red-and-yellow poster proclaiming the arrival in Toledo of the famed Spanish matador Bernardo Leal.
    "I tell them they must not place posters on my wall," Don Alfonso complained. "But with Mexicans what can you do?"
    He led the way to a huge wooden gate studded with bronze fittings, and after he had jangled the rope for a while, muttering as he did so, 'These damned Mexicans!" a barefoot servant swung the heavy portal aside and Bernardo Leal entered for the first time the spacious entrance chambers of his future father-in-law.
    He found himself in a corner of Spain. There were the solid wooden trunks carved in Salamanca. Above them were crossed Spanish swords from Seville. And in the patio beyond played a handsomely carved stone fountain copied from one in die ancient city of Ronda. When Don Alfonso's wife appeared the young matador saw she was one of those large-boned, horsey women so common in Spain, and he thought, It was she who sent her husband to fetch me. But the tall Spanish woman had the graciousness of her native land and immediately made Bernardo feel at home.
    "This is a most unusual meeting," she said softly, "but I saw you twice in Mexico City and I thought, We Spaniards must stick together."
    Quietly, Bernardo repeated what he had told her husband: "I think of myself now as a Mexican."
    With equal control, but with much greater force, Don Alfonso's wife replied, "As you grow older, matador, believe me, the heritage of your Spanish blood will come to the fore." She smiled, took Leal by the arm, and said, "Raquel is waiting for us in there. You can appreciate that for her this is a difficult moment."
    When the studded doors were swung back, the matador saw standing by a heavy refectory table a girl of twenty-five or so, tall like her mother, big-boned, possibly awkward, but obviously eager to be charming. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, but when she left the massive leather chair upon which she had been leaning, she moved forward with vigor and grace. "I saw you at the bullfight today, matador," she said quietly, "and you were superb."
    "If I had seen you there, senorita, I should have dedicated the first bull to