A Latin from Killarney

In Mexico city, the bars close at two A.M. Those who are serious about their drinking and not mere dilettantes move on to the bordellos, where life plays on into the dawn. At Tia Serafina's, for instance, there is an excellent bar and passable mariachis. I had come into Serafina's about three o'clock one morning. The place was jammed. There were 20 Mexicans and half a dozen American tourists, like myself, who had gotten off the Chapultepec-Palace-Xochimilco-run-out-to-the-Pyramids tour.

A man came in, round-bellied, muscular, ruddy-faced, whom I recognized as one of the sturdy back court men at the frontón. Nearly all of them had satisfying and appropriate names like Unamuno and Chicuri, Salsamendi and Zubiria. But this one was called O'Reilly.

I know that sooner or later Irishmen fight their way into everything, but it was difficult to imagine a wearer of the green holding his own professionally in this exhausting game of the Basques adopted by the Latins. I smiled at O'Reilly and on my next tequila, I got up the courage to invite him for a drink so I could ask him my question.

O'Reilly did not speak with a brogue or with a Bronx intonation but with a decided Mexican accent. "I am not an Irishman, my friend. I am a Mexican. My mother is a Mexican. My father is a Mexican. My grandparents are Mexican. My great-grandmother----"

"I see, Señor O'Reilly. But your great-grandfather ...?"

"Ah," said my new Mexican friend, O'Reilly, "that is a story."

"Let me order you an Escocés-con-soda while you tell it to me."

"Here is Paco O'Reilly, at your service," he said with a slight bow.

It was not a one-drink story. When you cross a fighting Irishman with a sporting Mexican, that would be too much to expect....

• • •

Paco's great-grandfather had been an Irish prize fighter back in the 1840s, when they fought to a finish with bare knuckles. Ancestor Packy O'Reilly had proclaimed himself champion of Ireland. He had gone on to England, where he had met the best of the British brawlers and barely missed winning the bare-knuckle championship from Deaf Burke, who was known as the scourge of the Irishmen because his blows had ended the life of Simon Byrne.

Paco's great-grandfather had stood up under the punishment of the Deaf 'Un for two hours and did not fail to come to scratch until both of his eyes were puffed, bloody and tightly closed. His backers had lost their 500-guinea side bet, but they were so proud of the courage of Packy O'Reilly that they carried him off in honor--in stupefied honor, one might say. On the wave of this glorious defeat, Packy came to America to show off his fistic prowess. He won a few fights for $500 a side and with this small fortune, he sailed and drank his way down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where an Irish river-boat brawler who claimed to have some sort of international reputation with his mauleys, one Sam O'Rourke, ran a tavern that was a hangout for the rowdies and their lady-friends in the riotous New Orleans of the 1840s. In the rear of O'Rourke's saloon--so Paco O'Reilly told me the tale--the fearsome proprietor promoted bareknuckle fights. Often the contestants were red-eyed barflies who stripped for action and climbed into the back-room "blood pit," as it was called, to try their luck, the purse being little more than free drinks for the night.

Packy O'Reilly, of course, had a reputation from the British prize ring. So Sam O'Rourke decided to fatten his own fistic reputation at the expense of O'Reilly. His plan was worthy of Machiavelli; and after all, there are. some who say that the Irish are the Italians of the northern sea. Sam O'Rourke received Packy as a towering celebrity, no less a man than the challenger for Deaf Burke's championship belt, a diadem to which Sam O'Rourke himself aspired. Everything for so distinguished a visitor as Packy O'Reilly was on the house--including, of course, the free flow of the finest Irish whiskey on the premises. The great-grandfather of my Paco O'Reilly was not averse to Irish whiskey. Indeed, it was Packy's proud boast--said Paco-- that he could consume more fine Irish whiskey than any man in the house--a boast he put nightly to the test.

Packy O'Reilly, to put it briefly, was going to hell in Sam O'Rourke's hack. He had arrived in reasonable condition for a pugilist out of training; but after a month of Sam's largess, he had put on 20 pounds of blubber and his main exercise had consisted of lifting his whiskey glass and navigating his way from the bar to the star guest room above the saloon. But despite the erosion that fine Irish whiskey, or any spirits, for that matter, can offer bibulous mankind, Packy was confident that he would need only a few of his well-aimed Sara-Janes to bring the local hero and boniface to his ruin. Indeed, when Sam O'Rourke offered to double the side bet from $250 to $500, which was a formidable bundle of pesos a century ago, Packy doubled him--$1000 a side. That was the style of pugilists in the 1840s--winner take it all, nice and clean and bloody and simple.

That did not mean, man being man, that it did not have its own systems of skulduggeries. There in the engrossing blood pit to the rear of Sam O'Rourke's saloon, Packy O'Reilly found himself involved in the coils of man's deceit to man that has little to do with the larger issue of man's inhumanity to man. Packy went directly from the bar, where he had spent so many pleasant hours, to strip for action in the blood-pit ring. Some said he staggered toward the ring, where his second, a fine, dependable New Orleans Irishman by the name of Lynch--dependable to O'Rourke, for whom he was secretly employed--helped him toss his hat into the ring. The first time, he missed, according to Paco. The dependable Lynch also helped carry Packy up to scratch--the line drawn through the ring against which the fallen fighter had to place his toe within 30 seconds after his fall--which is why "up to scratch" or, more often, "not up to scratch," is a familiar, if old-fashioned, North American idiom.

Packy O'Reilly lost the first round by swinging wildly, falling down and being dragged back (continued on page 204)A Latin from Killarney(continued from, page 115) to squat, if he could, on his second's knee. He lost the second round by simply falling against the strong, round chest of Sam O'Rourke and being cross-buttocked and thrown roughly to the sawdust. In the third round, Packy drove a strong right fist into Sam's eye and shut off the light as if a candle had been tamped out by a snuffer. But the power of the blow weakened Packy and a light gib sent him to one knee.

The next round was the last, for there is little suspense to the story of the bare-knuckle contest between O'Reilly and O'Rourke. In the next round, Packy O'Reilly, who was nearly champion of the British Empire, was pushed like a heavy weight off the knee of his second, the dependable Lynch, waddled up to scratch like an ailing duck, threw his right mauley aimlessly into the air like an amateur butterfly catcher and was rewarded with a left hook from the now one-eyed O'Rourke that struck Packy in an extremely vulnerable place, where he had been depositing his fine Irish whiskeys--his overfleshed belly.

Down fell Packy O'Reilly. Nose-deep in the sawdust he lay. And great was the merriment of the O'Rourke clientele when their champion performed an Irish jig over the fallen body of the visitor. It was drinks on the house that night and happy cries of freeloaders, "Up Big Sam!" As for Packy O'Reilly, not only was he out his $1000, his life's savings, he was told that he would be allowed only one more day of hospitality at Sam O'Rourke's. After that, he was out on his penniless own.

Two days after his debacle in the blood pit, Paco's bloodied and bowed ancestor was staggering along the New Orleans waterfront. He was reduced to begging for his drinks. It seemed his only chance was to ship out on a merchant schooner, which was not much higher than the life of a common slave, or to pick up a job on a side-wheeler moving up the Mississippi. That was when he fell to the wiles of a passing recruiter for the Army of the United States. General Winfield Scott was raising an invasion force to sail to Veracruz and "teach them dirty spics a lesson." That was the beginning of the century in which the Yankees were always going off to teach some poor Latin a lesson at the end of a cannon or a bayonet. The sergeant happened to be an Irishman himself, which helped things along. He lead Packy to the nearest waterfront saloon and set him up to a double whiskey with an ale chaser, which helped things along even more. The war would be a short one and a merry one, said the sergeant. Everyone knew the spics couldn't fight. The pay would be only ten dollars a month, but there would be plenty of side advantages--a rich, exotic country that would be easy pickings and all the beautiful and willing señoritas a man--a red-blooded he-man like Packy O'Reilly--could ask for.

On the third round of drinks, Packy signed up with the famous, or infamous, Fighting Harps of the Second Brigade. The transport ship was a top-heavy scow that had been converted to wartime duty. Packy lost to the violence of the Gulf of Mexico those 20 pounds he should have cast off in a more constructive way, preparing for his fray with Sam O'Rourke. When he staggered ashore--it seemed from Paco's account that great-grandfather Packy was forever staggering for one good reason or another--at Veracruz, he took a solemn oath in the name of his blessed mother, with a string of Hail Marys for good measure, that he would never set foot on another ship again. "Sure and how will you get away from this stinkin' country?" asked his side-kick, Tom Sullivan.

"I'll walk," Packy swore. "I'll crawl. I'll make paper wings and fly. I'll do anything before I ever put foot again on one of these blitherin' sea devils."

The redoubtable General Scott rode a tired horse while most of his disgruntled Yankees dragged themselves behind him. There were red bugs and mosquitoes and heat that left the skin a crazy quilt of hot, wet patches to be scratched to the bleeding point. And just what this war was about remained a mystery to Packy, Tom and his Irish chums, most of them refugees from the terrible potato famine. If it had been a war against the bloody British, now, that would have been something worth the red bugs and the flies and the sharp points the of the cactuses that seemed to reach out like long arms to tear at a man's worn khakis. On toward Mexico City they scratched and straggled, prepared to do battle with the wily Santa Anna. But Santa Anna, a man of bold pronouncements and erratic militarism, chose to abandon the city after grandly promising to defend it. There was a short, bloody battle at Churubusco, where Packy and Tom and the other Irish mercenaries of the invading Yankees felt somewhat conscience-stricken to find themselves having captured not a fort but a chapel. They fell to their knees before the golden altar that their artillery had partially destroyed and begged forgiveness for their Catholic souls.

Then they were ordered on to secure the shuttered city of Mexico that the great defender Santa Anna had left to the mercies of the vigorous but militantly inefficient Winfield Scott. The streets were deserted. As the Yankees, with their Irish rag-tail regiment, marched through the old Colonial streets, they sang Green Grow the Lilacs and, according to Paco, the besieged Mexicans began to call them "green-grows" or "gringos," a name that soon enjoyed a central place in the derisive vocabulary of the Latinos.

Finally, the gringos encountered their first and only resistance. It came, surprisingly, not from the regulars of the Mexican National Army but from the military school cadets, some 300 of them, foolish, brave, insanely patriotic boys of 15 or 16 who refused to surrender. To compensate for the cowardice of Santa Anna, they had dedicated themselves to one of those beaux gestes of futility. While the cursing, sticky-hot invaders moved in to wipe them out, these inspired or demented children stood their ground and fired their ancient rifles. They would make those foreigners fight for every foot of their military school campus. Backing up reluctantly until they were on the precipice of the promontory on which their school was built, they would wrap themselves in Mexican flags and hurl themselves over the edge, shouting, "Death before surrender!" and "Viva Mexico!" into the falling air.

Packy O'Reilly fired his rifle and a boy who looked about 14 years old fell to the ground, squirming in pain. Packy went forward and knelt over him. He saw the boy pull the crucifix from his shirt and kiss it. His eyes were very young and nearly dead and it gave Packy an uneasy feeling when the boy, in his final suffering, tried to talk and bloody bubbles would form on his lips. "What the hell is he tryin' t' say?" Packy O'Reilly asked.

Tom Sullivan, who had picked up a few words of the spic lingo, said, "The kid says he's a Catholic--he's afraid he'll wind up in purgatory if he doesn't get the last rites."

"Where in hell is the chaplain?" said Packy.

"What good is he, our fuggin' chaplain is a goddamned Protestant," said Tom.

So Packy tried to take the religion into his own hands. He said, "Son, I am a Catholic, too. I am a chaplain. I will give you the last rites." And he said all the right words, "Hail, Mary, full of grace," that he had learned as a good little rosy-faced altar boy in Killarney.

The 14-year-old Niño Héroe smiled, almost, and thanked him and said, "God bless my mother and my father and my two brothers who have just died also. God bless Mexico. Viva Mexico!" And he close his eyes and his troubles were over.

The death of the 14-year-old Niño must have been sickening, even to a tough hide like Packy O'Reilly. In a single moment, he was no longer fighting merely an itchy, uncomfortable war that he despised and wished to hell he had never signed himself into, he was supporting the head of a young fellow Catholic who was dying in defense of his land, of his school, of his people, of his pride. And it was Packy, an aiming but aimless prize fighter from Ireland, who had murdered him. That was when Packy went loco. "Goddamn it, Tom," he said, "we're fighting on the wrong goddamn side. All we're doin' is killin' fellow Catholics for them bleedin' British Protestants who came to America. To hell with it; if I have to fight for anybody, I'll fight for the Catholics and a kick in the fat arse of General Scott!"

It was a whole new way of looking at the war. Tom Sullivan said how the idea suited him fine, and Billy Kane, a corporal, said he was ready, and the spirit of rebellion, always close to the skin in the strange, hot-blooded Irishers, broke loose, burst, split at the seams and out poured the Irish regiment, rank deserters to the North American cause but Catholic heroes, defenders of the one true Church, according to their adopted Mexico.

So Packy and Tom and Billy and others like them fanned out and hid in sympathetic Indian huts. They regrouped into what they called St. Patrick's Brigade to fight for the other side, for God and for country. It was almost as if they were home in Ireland. They slept with Mexican girls, who taught them the language and the culture and the color and the pleasant feel of their new world. They fought bravely and most of them survived.

Ten years later, Señor Packy was a happy--well, at least a married--man with half a dozen freckled Indian kids and a small grocery store in one of the Nahuatl villages outside Mexico City. He spoke Spanish and--when he was drunk on his new-found mescal--a little Gaelic, but he had practically forgotten his English and he would curse the gringos like any good Mexican. Only in the time of Juárez and Lincoln did he soften, for even as an aging father, he was ready to follow the Indian from Oaxaca against the French invaders; when Lincoln spoke out in the same way and sent letters of sympathy to Benito Juárez acknowledging their common cause against slavery, oppression and foreign intervention, then old Packy, a true Mexican son of Killarney, would grumble that maybe there was a little good in some of the gringos, after all--at least those like old Abe, who were able to throw off their British high hat of superiority....

• • •

A lot of Escocés had flown over the bar, along with the blood, sweat and piety of Packy O'Reilly. Tia Serafina's was quiet now. The mariachis were huddled in a corner, having sung and drunk themselves into well-earned slumber. The great-grandson of the original O'Reilly was leaning heavily on the bar, as if exhausted by reliving Packy's adventures.

"So, amigo," I said to Paco, "you are an Irishman, after all."

"Soy Mexicano," Paco O'Reilly growled. "I have proud to be a Mexican. Anyone who calls me anything else had better be ready to come outside and fight me in the street."

He turned and pushed his strong chest against me. "Now you tell me, am I a Mexican, or----"

He was never more Irish than in the way he protested it.

"Paco O'Reilly," I said. "Why should we fight? Of course you are a Mexican. A loyal son of the eagle and the serpent."

"To that I will drink," said Paco O'Reilly. And somehow he managed to find his mouth with the glass. "Always you will be my very good friend. Even if you are a gringo."

Then he broke into song, not Ireland must Be Heaven but Yo Soy Mexicano, the national anthem of the cantinas. As we left Tia Serafina's arm in arm, we were singing it together.

Tomorrow I would find my official guide at the Hotel Hilton and he would take me to the national palace and explain the Rivera murals panel by panel. But it was the night at Serafina's that I would remember, when Señor Paco O'Reilly led me back into a forgotten chapter of Irish-Mexican history, face to face with a Latin from Killarney.