The Night Visitor
Page 23
Macario had never asked of his partner any special favor. Never had he claimed from him any individual whom the Bone Man had decided to take. He even had let go two grandchildren of his without arguing his dinner guest’s first claim.
This time everything was different. He would be burned alive at the stake as a witch doctor convicted of having signed a pact with the Devil. His children, now all of them in highly-honored positions, would fall into disgrace, because their father had been condemned by the Holy Inquisition to suffer the most infamous death a Christian could die. All his fortune and all his landed property, which he had meant to leave to his children and grandchildren, would be confiscated and given to the Church. He did not mind losing his fortune. It had never meant much to him personally anyhow.
What he did mind above all was the happiness of his children. But more still than his children he was, in this most terrible moment of his whole life, thinking of his beloved wife.
She would go crazy with grief on learning what had happened to him in that strange, vast city so far away from home, and she would be unable to come to his aid or even comfort him during his last hours on earth. It was for her sake, not for his own, that this time he decided to fight it out with the Bone Man.
“Give me that child,” he pleaded, “give him to me for old friendship’s sake. I’ve never asked any favor of you, not one little favor for the half turkey you ate with so much gusto when you needed a good dinner more than anything else. You gave me voluntarily what I had not asked you for. Give me that boy, and I’ll pour out the last drop of your medicine and break the bottle, so that not even one little wet spot be left inside to be used for another cure. Please, oh please, give me that boy. It isn’t for my sake that I ask you this. It is for my dear, faithful, loyal and beloved wife’s. You know, or at least you can imagine, what it means for a Christian family if one of its members is burned at the stake alive and in public. Please, let me have the boy. I shall not take or touch the riches offered me for curing him. You found me a poor man and I was happy then in my own way. I don’t mind being poor again, as I used to be. I’m willing to chop wood again for the villagers as I did when we met for the first time. Only, please, I pray, give me that boy.”
The Bone Man looked at him with his deep black holes for a long time. If he had a heart he was questioning it at this moment. Now he looked down before him as though he were deliberating this case from every angle to find the most perfect solution. Obviously, his orders were to take the child away. He could not express his thoughts by his eyes or his face, yet his gestures clearly showed his willingness to help a friend in dire need, for by his attitude he tried to explain that, in this particular case, he was powerless to discover a way out which would meet halfway the problems of both.
Again, for a very long while, his look rested upon the boy as though judging more carefully still Macario’s plea against the child’s fate, destined before he was born.
And again he looked at Macario as if pitying him and as though he felt deeply distressed.
Presently he shook his head slowly as might someone in great sadness who finds himself utterly helpless in a desperate situation.
He opened his fleshless jaws, and with a voice that sounded like heavy wooden sticks clubbed on a board he said: “I am sorry, compadre, very sorry, but in this case I can do nothing to help you out of that uncomfortable pool you have been put into. All I can say is that in few of my cases I have felt sadder than in this, believe me, compadre. I can’t help it, I must take that boy.”
“No, you mustn’t. You mustn’t. Do you hear me, you must not take that child,” Macario yelled in great despair. “You must not, you cannot take him. I won’t let you.”
The Bone Man shook his head again, but said nothing.
And now, with a resolute jerk, Macario grabbed the boy’s bed and quickly turned it round so that his partner found himself standing at the boy’s feet.
Immediately the Bone Man vanished from sight for two short seconds and, like a flash, appeared at the boy’s head once more.
Quickly Macario again turned the bed so that the Bone Man would stand at the feet, and again the Bone Man disappeared from the child’s feet and stood at the boy’s head.
Macario, wild with madness, turned the bed round and round as if it were a wheel. Yet, whenever he stopped, for taking a breath, he would see his dinner guest standing at the boy’s head, and Macario would start his crazy game again by which he thought that he might cheat the claimant out of his chosen subject.
It was too much for the old man, turning that bed round and round without gaining more than two seconds from eternity.
If, so he thought, he could stretch these two seconds into twenty hours only and leave the city under the viceroy’s impression that the boy was cured, he might escape that horrible punishment which he had been condemned to suffer.
He was so tired now that he could not turn the bed once more. Touching, as if by a certain impulse, the little pocket in his trousers, he discovered that the crystal flask with the last two drops of the precious medicine in it had been smashed during his wild play with the bed.
Fully realizing that loss and its significance, he felt as if he had been drained of the last spark of his life’s energy and that his whole life had become empty.
Vaguely, he gazed about the room as though coming out of a trance in which he had been held for an uncountable number of years, centuries perhaps. He recognized that his fate was upon him and that it would be useless to fight against it any longer.
So, letting his eyes wander around the whole room, he came to look at the boy’s face and he found the boy gone.
As if felled he dropped to the floor, entirely exhausted.
Lying there motionless, he heard his one-time dinner guest speaking to him, softly this time.
He heard him say: “Once more, compadre, I thank you for the half turkey which you so generously gave me and which restored my strength, then waning, for another hundred years of tedious labor. It certainly was exquisite, if you understand that word. But now, coming to where we are at this hour, see, compadre, I have no power to save you from being burned at the stake on the Alameda and in public, because that is beyond my jurisdiction. Yet, I can save you from being burned alive and from being publicly defamed. And this, compadre, I shall do for old friendship’s sake, and because you have always played fair and never tried to cheat me. A royal payment you received and you honored it like a royal payment. You have lived a very great man. Good-bye, compadre.”
Macario opened his eyes and, on looking backwards, he saw his one-time dinner guest standing at his head.
Macario’s wife, greatly worried over her husband’s not coming home, called all the men of the village next morning to help her find Macario, who might be hurt somewhere deep in the woods and unable to return without help.
After several hours of searching, he was discovered at the densest part of the woods in a section far away from the village, so far that nobody would ever dare go there alone.
He was sitting on the ground, his body comfortably snuggled in the hollow of a huge tree trunk, dead, a big beautiful smile all over his face.
Before him on the ground banana leaves were spread out, serving as a tablecloth, and on them were lying the carefully cleaned bones of a half turkey.
Directly opposite, separated by a space of about three feet, there also were, in a like manner, banana leaves spread, on which was the other half of the turkey, but untouched.
“How strange!” said his wife, thick tears welling out of her sad eyes. “I wonder why he cut the turkey in two? It was his dream all during his life to eat it all himself! I just wonder who he had invited to eat the other half of his turkey. Whoever he was, he must have been a fine and noble and very gentle person, or Macario wouldn’t have died so very, very happy.”
Bibliography
A chronology of B. Traven’s books, as first published in English and German.
The Death Ship (New
York, 1934). Published in German as Das Totenschiff (Berlin, 1926).
The Cotton-Pickers (London, 1956). Published in German as Der Wobbly (Berlin, 1926).
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (New York, 1935). Published in German as Der Schatz der Sierra Madre (Berlin, 1927).
Land des Frühlings (Berlin, 1927), a Mexican travel book not yet published in English.
The Bush, stories, some of which appear in this volume; published in German as Der Busch (Berlin, 1928).
The Bridge in the Jungle (New York, 1938). Published in German as Die Brücke im Dschungel (Berlin, 1929).
The White Rose (London, 1965). Published in German as Die Weisse Rose (Berlin, 1929).
The Carreta (London, 1935). Published in German as Der Karren (Berlin, 1930).
Government (London, 1935). Published in German as Regierung (Berlin, 1931).
The March to Caobaland (London, 1960). Published in German as Der Marsch ins Reich der Caoba (Zurich-Wein, 1933).
The Rebellion of the Hanged (New York, 1952). Published in German as Die Rebellion der Gehenkten (Berlin, 1936).
Die Troza (Zurich, 1936), not yet published in English.
Sun-Creation, “a legend,” published incomplete in small magazines in the United States, but not yet in book form. Published in German as Sonnenschöpfung (Zurich, 1936).
The General from the Jungle (London, 1954). Published in German as Ein General kommt aus dem Dschungel (Amsterdam, 1939).
Macario, a Mexican folk tale; published incomplete in various magazines in the United States; this volume of stories publishes the first complete authorized text in English (New York, 1966). Published in German as Macario (Zurich, 1949).
Asian Norval (Vienna, 1960), not yet published in English.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Introduction
The Night Visitor
Effective Medicine
Assembly Line
The Cattle Drive
When the Priest Is Not at Home
Midnight Call
A New God Was Born
Friendship
Conversion of Some Indians
Macario
Bibliography
Newsletter Sign-up
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 by B. Traven
Introduction copyright © 1966 by Charles H. Miller
All rights reserved
Library of Congress catalog card number: 66-15892
eISBN: 978-0-374-72258-6
First American Century Series edition, 1973
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