by B. TRAVEN
It all read like a fairy tale, but then again it was so very sober and logical. Somehow, every book read easily—like excellent fiction. Some of the books were in English, a few in French, and the majority in Spanish. Whatever the language, the writing was so vivid that the bungalow, the ranch, the patches of prairie, even the bush seemed to become populated with people I read about. Not for one single hour did I feel lonely. I was constantly under the impression that the people of the books were near me.
I began to look at the surrounding country, and at the natives, in a different way. So far I had seen them only as ordinary peasants. But now, when a peasant passed the ranch and asked for a drink of water, I searched his face for a likeness to the ancient kings and nobles whose pictures I saw in the old paintings and hieroglyphs.
But I was not satisfied with merely studying their faces; I studied their gestures, the manner in which they walked, the particular characteristics of their voices when they spoke to me.
This material for practical study was scarce. For three, four, or even six days at a time, not one single wanderer would come by the ranch. This was true because the main trail which communicated with the principal hamlets and settlements did not pass by the doctor’s.
7
One morning, after having slept badly, I decided to give myself a rest from so much reading lest I should lose my connection with the real world. I ate a hearty breakfast and took a stroll through the bush for exercise.
After walking for two hours along a trail which as I could see had not been used for months, I suddenly realized that I was far in the depths of the bush where I had never been before, although I had thought I knew the region very well.
I stopped for a moment to get my bearings, wondering whether I ought to go on and learn where this new trail might eventually lead, when I was filled with a sense of the desolation of that dense jungle creeping around me like the horror of an ugly nightmare. What if I should be lost? What if I should have to spend the night here in the depths of the jungle?
Looking around to see from which direction I had come and hoping to see a mark familiar to me, I saw a thin ribbon of smoke curling above the trees hardly a quarter of a mile away. There had been no thunderstorms for months, so the smoke I saw could not have been the result of lightning.
I got to work with the machete I carried and began cutting my way through to the point where I had seen the smoke. Finally, I came upon an open space in the jungle.
An Indian charcoal-burner was squatting before his primitive kiln, a mound of chopped mahogany covered with earth. The Indian watched the play of smoke around the kiln as if he were meditating on where the smoke might go.
No move or gesture indicated that he had heard my approach. Still, I knew he must have heard my cutting through the underbrush. Somehow I was sure that he was perfectly conscious of somebody near him. Had he believed me to be an animal of the wilds, he would have taken an attitude of alertness.
I was still hidden from him by the dense foliage, but now I stepped out of hiding and went straight up to him.
He showed no surprise.
“Buenas tardes, señor,” I greeted.
“Good afternoon to you, señor. Welcome. Be seated. Visitors are rare around here.”
I offered him tobacco and corn leaves and we rolled our cigarettes. He had a strange way of rolling his, I noted, a way I’d never seen before anywhere. But I suppose there are a hundred and one ways a cigarette may be rolled.
His brown skin had a certain yellowish-copper tint which made it look like bronze mixed with gold. He was slim but wiry. The features of his face were fine-drawn, and they had a noble symmetry which indicated that he must be of high intelligence even though he might be ignorant of reading and writing.
There were two things about him which I thought strange.
One was that he had a beard. Beards among Indians are not frequent. The purer the blood, the rarer the beard. A white man, of course, would hardly call such thin silky hairs a beard. For an Indian, however, this flimsy chin web of his would entitle him to be named “The Bearded One.” This beard, insignificant as it was, gave not only his face but his whole person a certain dignity which most Indians of that region lacked. It was a dignity which would stand out in a crowd of natives.
The second strange thing I noticed was his hands. Indians in general, both men and women, have smaller and finer hands and feet than the white man has. But in spite of the hard work this man had to do as a charcoal-burner, he had hands so conspicuously fine and nobly shaped that I could not remember ever having seen hands like them before. At least not belonging to a real person. In old paintings, perhaps, one might find such hands. No great artist would paint or model such hands, because he would deny that any human being could have hands like them and still be human.
These hands irritated me. They made me feel inferior to him. I could not believe it possible that a man, any man, might work as hard as did this charcoal-burner and still have hands like his.
“Yes, señor, you are right,” he said in the course of our talk. “Yes, it is true that my ancestors have been princes of the people living in this region of land. On the same plain where today there is jungle, there used to be more than one hundred and twenty cities, towns and villages. There were sacred cities as well, temples and pyramids by the score, all of them covered now with earth—with a pitying earth to protect them from profanity. Cities and towns destroyed; their inhabitants, once so happy, murdered by the Spaniards when they conquered our lands. Our people wanted peace. A contract was celebrated with the conquistadores. But these men, with no true god to guide their hearts, broke the treaty and our people took to arms to throw off the yoke with its tortures, terrors and slavery. The first army sent against us was defeated by our men.
“Then the captain-general came with his special troops, and with him he brought twenty thousand hired Indian auxiliaries, traitors to their own blood. And he brought with him animals to ride upon, and cannons by which to spit fire on our warriors. Men, women, children were slaughtered without mercy. Our cities, villages and temples were burned to ashes.
“Within six days, five hundred princes, nobles and chiefs were hanged by the Spaniards. These were the princes captured while three times as many perished in battle. Had it not been for faithful servants to take the children of six or seven of our kings and hide them in the mountains until the region was quiet again, I most likely would not be here. I would never have been born a member of a princely family.”
As he was telling his story he did not look at me but kept watching the curling smoke ribbons on their way up in the air.
Then he slowly turned his head and looked searchingly into my eyes.
I had not observed his eyes before. But now, forced to look at them at close range, I noted that he had deep-brown eyes of a warm, velvet tone. They were slightly dreamy, their lids covering about one-third of the iris. It might have been the back glare of the bright sun upon the sandy ground—but whatever the reason, he had in his eyes a very distinctive glimmering fog. I had the curious feeling that no mortal man could possess such eyes. With such eyes a man might enslave the whole world, should he decide on it.
“You know the history of your people astonishingly well, señor,” I said. “Did you read it somewhere or learn it at a school?”
“No, señor, I never read it. It was told to me by my father and uncle, and it had been told to them by their fathers, and so on back to the times when it happened.”
“Felling those iron-like trees and chopping them up and then making charcoal must be hard work,” I said.
“It surely is hard work, señor,” he said. “Nonetheless, I like it. What is more, it is honest work, work we have done for thousands of years—ever since our god gave us fire. I can work alone, all by myself, without a master ordering me … a thing I would not like. Here I can sit and think for days and months and years while watching those little snakes of smoke playing about like faraway music that comes and
goes and comes again. Do you notice, señor, that each snake curling out of its little hole has its very own way of creeping out, playing about and disappearing in the air? Each has its own life, its own story to tell, just like a man. But each has its own personality, while many a man has none at all. Don’t you think so, too, señor?”
“You are right,” I said. “And I certainly believe that the work you do—while it may be hard—is honorable work.”
“It makes me very happy, señor, to hear you say that. You asked me about your way back home, didn’t you?”
The fact was that I had not asked him, though I had been thinking about it all the time I had been sitting on the ground beside him.
“You are well out of your way, señor,” he said. “But you’ll be all right in a minute. See that green shrub? Turn to your right there and count two hundred well-measured paces. You will then come upon a path, which you follow to your left. Good luck and many thanks for coming here and paying me such a delightful visit. Mil gracis, señor, adiós.”
I followed the way he had showed me, and I came upon the trail he had mentioned. When I was sure of my way once more, I stopped and turned around to see whether I might remember that trail if I ever returned.
I could not make out the place where I had talked to the Indian. The more I looked around the more I became confused about even the direction from which I had come.
8
I arrived at the bungalow late in the afternoon. As soon as I finished dinner, I again buried myself in the books, more eager than ever to finish them before the doctor returned. I read as if I were in a fever. I always dropped on my cot at midnight as though all my limbs were filled with lead. Morning would not find me refreshed.
My sleep was no longer sound. My temples often hammered and the veins of my arms and legs seemed to swell larger every day. My head frequently got so hot at night that I thought it might burst.
All this, however, was only physical. Mentally, I felt happy and good. No longer did I live in the present; it seemed that I was living in the remote times of the books. Emotionally, I lived the lives of the people I was reading about. As I had no opportunity to speak to living people, save on those rare occasions when a peasant passed by, I spoke to the people living in the books.
Gradually it came to me that I thought I could speak as those people did—that I could think their thoughts, and that I had their ideas and their outlooks on life.
The feeling that I believed myself living in the past was particularly strong at night while reading by the weak light of that little kitchen lamp with all the doors open and with the eternal singing of the bush in my ears.
9
One night, while reading a book on the civilization and history of the people of Texcoco, I happened to raise my eyes from the pages. It was not entirely of my own will that I had done so, I realized; it was more as if I had somehow been forced to. I had the curious impression that somebody else was with me in the room, that someone had been watching me for a length of time.
How this amazing sensation had come to me became clear almost immediately.
My active mind had been fully occupied with the book, whereas my subconscious mind, during the time I was reading, had carefully marked everything that was going on in the room. It was as if my subconscious mind had been trying to protect me against some sort of danger.
During my travels in the tropical jungles, this new sense had slowly developed within me like a special instinct. Often that new sense had wakened me in my shack or in a tent—and when this happened I usually found something wrong inside or near the place. Once it was a rattler only five feet away; another time it was a tiger lured to the shack by the meat I had hung up to dry; once I found the tent just beginning to catch fire because an unexpected breeze had stirred up some nearly dead embers and thrown them on the canvas.
Now, while still reading, my subconscious mind had called upon me to be on my guard because something was not as it should be. Strange as it may appear, I very positively felt that no actual danger was threatening me. I felt calm and safe, though slightly irritated. This irritation had grown steadily stronger until I could no longer resist it. I had to look up to see what caused that annoyance.
I turned my head.
And there, in the middle of the room, stood an Indian. He gave me the impression that he had been standing there and watching me for some time. It might well have been ten minutes or so. And strange to say, at the very moment I looked at him I could tell exactly the page and line I had been reading when he entered, unseen by me.
He looked straight at my face.
With refined tact and patience he waited until I would speak to him. Quite obviously he had stepped up to the porch without making any noise. Seeing me busy with my book and paying no attention to him, he had finally entered, apparently hoping that I would notice him at once.
It is the custom of the land that before entering a house one asks, “With your permission.” I was sure he had said so, and that I had, while reading, mumbled something which he had interpreted as, “Please come in.”
Be that as it may, there he stood, motionless as a statue.
He obviously regarded my looking at him as questioning what he had come for, because at that instant he bent a knee, touched the floor with the palm of his right hand, lifted his hand up to his head with the palm toward me and rose at the same time, holding that gesture.
It was an odd sort of greeting; I couldn’t remember ever seeing an Indian salute that way before.
“Good evening,” I said to him in Spanish.
“Night is long and cold,” he began without actually answering my greeting in the manner I had expected. “Hogs do bother me. Oh, it is horrible, ever so horrible to be on defense and have nothing to defend with. Built up with sacred care so as to be sure and safe for eternity. Yet now decaying and breaking into pieces. Long is the night, oh, señor, long, dark, and cold. Above all and everything, though, it is the hogs. Hogs are the incarnation of all that means horror in this world and in the one beyond. Nothing on earth or anywhere else is more dreadful than hogs.”
He raised one arm and pointed in a certain direction. Somehow his gesture did not agree with what he had just said. At least that was what I thought.
What was I supposed to answer?
I had not the vaguest idea of what he was talking about. It seemed confused. He was not drunk. His eyes were steady and there was no indication that he might be out of his mind or under the influence of a drug.
Not knowing what to answer, I bent over my book, stalling for time. I caught up with the line I had been reading when I had lifted my eyes—and then a terrible thought flashed through my mind. What if the strain of constant loneliness and the continuous reading about strange people and bygone days were driving me insane? Of course there was the possibility that it was merely a fever or some tropical sickness. I knew that certain fevers start by one’s seeing things and hearing voices which are not real.
I found it difficult to define clearly where reality ended and imagination began.
Only to say something, and hear my own voice sounding in the room, I asked, “Excuse me, señor, but what do you mean? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I’ll listen to your story, but please tell it plain—just one thing after another.”
I looked up again. But he was gone. He had left as silently as he had entered.
I rushed to the door. I wanted to make sure that I had in fact seen someone—or had had an hallucination. If it turned out to be a delusion, then I knew I’d better stop reading those heavy books.
Thank heaven, I was sane and my mind was still in good shape. There he was, moving like a shadow, but clearly cut out against the lower part of the sky.
He was not very tall. From a distance, he appeared to be a slender youngster of seventeen, and even his walk showed the pure blood of his noble race. He moved with the beautiful grace of a deer going to the brook for its evening drink.
10
Strange …
I couldn’t recall with any accuracy the words and phrases he had used, but I knew for certain that he had not spoken Castellano or any other language familiar to me. And still I had clearly understood every word he said, even though some of the connections had failed to make sense.
I reviewed the episode in my mind. There had been his singular greeting. He had greeted me in the way which had been customary with some of the ancient peoples about whom I had been reading. Of course I realized immediately that this was sheer nonsense. I had begun to confuse the things I had read with the things I imagined having seen. Something was happening to my mind; otherwise such confusion would not be possible.
The fact that my visitor had been in rags meant nothing at all. Practically all Indian peasants wore nothing better.
And then I remembered that he had worn neither pants nor shirt—at least not a familiar kind. He had been bedecked with ragged fabrics which had the appearance of costly garments, except that they looked as though they were badly deteriorated by time and weather. They were so threadbare that one might expect to see them fall apart any minute. The texture of the garb seemed fantastic, like the kind one may see in a museum in the department of ancient clothes.
Perhaps I was altogether wrong about his clothes, but I was quite positive about something else. His upper arms as well as his ankles were adorned with armlets and anklets of heavy gold, beautifully worked. And he wore a necklace which only a highly skilled goldsmith could have made.
Again, on trying to recall more details, I discovered that I had, in fact, seen nothing of what I believed I had seen. I had equipped the man with the clothes and jewelry I had read about during the last few days and which I had seen in the illustrations found in the books.