High-quality stuff, as far as historical fiction goes. I never would have thought that I would find bull-fighting so intriguing.
The first-person narrator is a half-American son of the fictional city of Toledo, who has returned to document a momentous bull-fighting weekend, who then guides the reader back through the monuments of his city (a pyramid, a cathedral, and a silver mine) to trace his various lineages (Native American, Spanish, and American). The result: I’m left at least a little bit awe-struck by Mexico, as a beautiful and indefinable place.
I had read one other Michener book before this, Chesapeake, which I enjoyed as historical fiction, for a fun way to learn history, and not much more. I was taken aback right away at how the quality of the writing in Mexico is so much better.
There is a certain grace to the book. Whenever it starts to feel like there is a definite conclusion about something’s goodness or badness, then deeper elements are brought out and final judgment is delayed again. And somehow, it all ties back into bullfighting. Near the end of the book, all of the historical characters are depicted in a festival play, and in that play mercy and forgiveness are declared upon each and every one of them. That was perhaps the highlight of the book for me, not defining any one side of things as ultimately good nor beyond redemption.
At its deepest, the book offers some glimpses into the value of keeping the reality of death at hand. The “critic” character, who writes about the bullfights in the newspapers from an artistic perspective, writes this in his column (pg. 233): “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’ assumptions 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.”
In the same vein, there is a moment at a vividly brutal scene of Jesus suffering, at the 11th station of the cross in the cathedral, where the critic says the following in response to his guests’ revulsion at such a brutal depiction of Christ: “The cardinal principle of Christianity is that Jesus Christ died for us. He died on a cross, suffering the most extreme agony… as you see here. He did not die quickly… We have, I am afraid, tried to hide this fact from ourselves. We depict Jesus in flowing white robes, or with insignificant little needle pricks on his brow, or lying serenely in a sepulcher. The inescapable fact is that he came from a violent God, into a violent world, to save violent men from a terribly violent hell. 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…” (pg. 222).
I had an eerie moment in reading this book. I finished chapter 8 late at night in bed on July 9. At the end of the chapter a young bullfighter (matador) dies suddenly on the bull’s horns. The next morning I woke up and heard on the news that for the first time in years, a matador in Spain was killed in the ring, gored by his bull. Strange coincidence.
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