The Carreta

by B. TRAVEN

  The women dipped the forefingers of both hands into a gourd of water and wiped their eyes. This is all the washing a carreta traveler, man or woman, undertakes on a journey as far as the face is concerned. After this they held out their cupped hands to the boy, who poured a little water into each. The gourd held only a third of a liter, but it did for the four of them and they did not bother their heads about its purity.

  The women rubbed their moistened hands together and smoothed their hair. Then they combed it flat with four strokes of their pocket combs and were ready for the day’s journey.

  It was all done so quickly that scarcely two minutes had elapsed since the boy knocked at the door and the women were already swallowing a few mouthfuls of hot coffee which a girl of the rancho brought them. The knocking had roused the girl and the coffee had been kept hot on the red ashes of the hearth.

  No traveler went to more trouble than this when he was on the road. It used to be the same with us—or our grandfathers—before there were sleeping cars and railroads, and when rattling along in a coach was the quickest and preferred means of travel. An ox-drawn carreta is a clumsier affair than a well-sprung coach of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and therefore you cannot expect those who travel by it to be as smart and well-groomed as though they were to dine at the Ritz with the Emir of Afghanistan. A toilet unsuited to its surroundings disturbs the harmony of life—and anyone who traveled with a carreta had, unconsciously, a fine and cultivated instinct for the harmony of things with their surroundings.

  Carreteros never washed their faces during their three- or four-week trips, or shaved or cut their hair. Although those of Indian blood commonly have no beard to speak of, some tribes do have strong beards; and carreteros who came from those tribes or whose ancestors intermarried with them began to look so frightful on the road that the devil himself would have thrown them out of hell.

  This picturesque appearance of the carreteros might sometimes be disturbed by a false note. If they halted long enough near a river and were not too exhausted, they bathed; if there was time they bathed for two hours at a stretch. But the harmony of dirt was soon restored again.

  The first thing a carretero did in the morning before he ate or took a drink of coffee was to rinse his mouth thoroughly and at great length. And night or morning or during the day’s journey, before he put a bite of his meager provisions into his mouth, he washed his hands. If there was no water near and his gourd was empty, he would not eat rather than eat without washing his hands. Even though the washing was a mere symbolic act because he may have had only a drop of water to do it with, still he must have performed this act before he could eat.

  Three minutes after being waked the women, a fourth part washed and an eighth part breakfasted, were seated in the carretas and the train was in motion.

  8

  Meanwhile other trains were getting ready for the start. One of them had to find their oxen from among the oxen of the other trains and bring them in; and this was not easy, as it was still dark. Another train was delayed by having a wheel to mend. With another the oxen had flesh wounds to be doctored.

  The encargado of a fourth, after a careful inspection, found that it would be impossible to start until midday. The oxen were so exhausted that nothing would induce them to get to their feet. Owing to their exhausted condition they had scarcely grazed at all during the night. The carreteros carried maize to them and put it right under their noses to try to make them feed. These oxen had made four trips without having rested, and each trip had lasted three weeks. This was don Laureano’s train in which Andrés drove a carreta.

  Don Laureano’s carreteros and oxen had particularly long and hard spells of work because he always had plenty of freight. Before one cargo was disposed of there was another waiting. There was a limit, however, beyond which the oxen could not be worked without a break. When they got too low and exhausted and were not given a rest out at grass, they finally refused to rise to their feet while on a journey, and then not the best of feeds or any other persuasion could urge them to go any farther. Blows had no effect. Oxen will very often act as mules do. They lie down, refuse food, and die.

  Oxen and mules required a break of three or four weeks out at pasture in good grass three or four times a year; and they got them. Oxen and mules were costly, and therefore suicide on their parts was expensive for their masters. The carreteros never had a holiday. They worked day after day, Sundays and holidays, by day and by night, in rain or tropical glare, in sandstorms and thunderstorms of such violence that the sky seemed to burst. The carreteros too sometimes lay down by the way; but they did not commit suicide from exhaustion. That was the privilege of oxen and mules. And if a carretero actually perished by the way, or fell down a ravine while hoisting a caretta out of a hole, or got under the wheels, he was no loss to his employer. Carreteros did not mean the outlay of a centavo, unless it was that the employer took over a debt of a carretero to a previous master; and this debt would be little compared with the money an ox cost, even if the employer were left with it unredeemed due to the mishap of a carretero.

  7

  Andrés was now nearly nineteen. He had been working for don Laureano as carretero for more than three years. The debt of the twenty-five pesos which brought him into don Laureano’s possession had long been paid off and he had for some time been getting his wages in cash.

  Andrés had meanwhile become an excellent carretero. He knew the road from Arriaga to Balún-Canán so well that he could travel it on the darkest night and avoid any hole and every place where the road had given way. He knew every stone, every bend, every boggy patch, every ford. He knew to an inch the depth of every river which had to be crossed and the best place to cross in mid-June and mid-September. The fords shifted their position according to the rain that fell. In the rainy season a halt had to be made for a few hours or perhaps half a day on the riverbank till the water had run down and the carreta could cross without the load getting wet. He knew every halting place on the road by the name given it by the first carreteros who had halted there two hundred years before. He knew every patch of grass on the road and what its value was as feed and how many oxen it would carry. He knew every rancho and every Indian hut and all the people who lived on the road. He had learned how to load to the best advantage, how to handle the oxen properly so as to get the most out of them, and he could undertake the repair of a wheel or an axle as well as the most experienced man. Whatever happened on the road he was never at a loss, even if he was alone. He had already on several occasions acted as encargado of a small train. Don Laureano had not a criticism to make of him or his work. In every respect he had turned out even better than his patrón had expected.

  Don Laureano had even raised his wages on the strength of all this and he now received forty centavos a day—twelve pesos a month. This was no mean sum when he compared it with the four or five pesos a month which the laborers earned who worked in the sugar mills, brandy distilleries, henequen processing factories, brick works, timber yards he passed on the road and who had to work sixteen hours a day and lived, often with families to keep, more wretchedly than beasts.

  He worked hard enough, but he was not racked by the consuming and hectic toil of those half-starved men on the haciendas where the products of the soil were dealt with in factories. He and his fellow workers were not tied to hours. Once his load was well stowed away and his carreta in good going order, if his oxen were not overtired and overworked, and if the road offered no special difficulties, he could sit hour after hour in the carreta, dreaming or contemplating the beauty of the landscape around him.

  The oxen knew the road, which they had traveled over and over again, every bit as well as the carreteros. That was only natural, since their eyes and noses were closer to it. Experienced oxen are not so stupid as may appear from the way people have of using the term “ox” to express contempt for a fellow man. Their pace was slow, for it was all one to them whether the carreta reached its destination th
e following day or the following week. There was time; and they took their time both in feeding and working. Perhaps they knew that they would always remain oxen and draw a carreta as long as they remained on their legs, that their fate was the same whether they hurried or not. No, the oxen were not stupid. They knew the road, and they would not venture one step more than their strength allowed.

  And they did not just plod blindly on. They carefully inspected each bit of road as they came to it, and so far as the encumbrance of the carreta allowed they avoided every large stone, every hole and broken piece of road, every gnarled tree root. This was not, certainly, from love of their drivers, but for their own advantage. It lightened their toil and brought them more quickly to the next halting place.

  By lightening their own toil the oxen lightened the toil of their drivers. The carreteros who had experienced oxen in their carretas could dream and doze over long stretches of road. It was the aim of all hardened carreteros to know the worth of all the oxen of their respective trains and to get hold of the best ones at the start of each trip. The encargado of a train, who had to keep his eye on all the other carretas as well as on his own, had first pick. Then came the carretero who had been longest in the patrón’s employment. The rest took what was left.

  2

  Andrés had the inborn cunning of the defeated and downtrodden races. And as the peons from youth up relied on their cunning for their existence, they did not cramp their cunning by petty considerations of morality. Strike before you are struck. And if you cannot strike because your master can shoot you down like a dog if you raise your hand against him, then you must turn and twist like a snake to avoid a blow or to ward it off if you cannot avoid it. The lead swinger among soldiers and other slaves is the clever man; the rest are the fools.

  It was to little tricks that Andrés owed his raises in wages. The worker is rarely paid for what he really does, but only for what he seems to do in the eyes of the one who pays his wages.

  Don Laureano once accompanied a very long train of carretas for a whole day, because his way happened to be the same. The oxen in one of the carretas refused to pull; they backed, and did all they could to shake off the yoke. The encargado and the drivers did everything to get the oxen to move on, but without success. Don Laureano came up, but he too was at a loss. The carreta was holding up the whole caravan. Don Laureano said he had a good mind to sell the oxen and plant them on a friend of his.

  While the whole caravan was at a standstill because of this intractable pair of oxen, with the carreteros standing around and making suggestions which led to nothing, Andrés came up. He tried to urge the oxen on. They took a few steps forward and then jibbed again.

  “I think I know what the trouble is with the bueyes—the oxen,” he said.

  “You!” the encargado broke in. “You’re the one to tell me—an old stallion who’s done his thirty years with carretas on the road. Run home to your mother and get a dry diaper.”

  But Andrés was not to be daunted. He said quietly: “The oxen are lashed too tight to the yoke—that’s the trouble; or else a hard thong has got twisted and cuts into them.” Without waiting to hear what the encargado had to say, he set to work unlacing the thongs.

  Don Laureano sat down on a boulder by the roadside, lit a cigarette, and without taking much interest looked on at what Andrés was doing.

  As soon as Andrés had got the straps loose he smoothed them out and softened them with plentiful applications of spit. “These two oxen won’t stand being strapped too tight,” he said. “Lucio has not been long with us and he doesn’t know the animals. It’s no fault of his.”

  By saying this he cleared his mate, Lucio, of all blame; otherwise Lucio might have been told off by don Laureano or the encargado for bad harnessing.

  While he was loosening the oxen Andrés had stood in such a position that he was able by adroit movements of his arms and hands to divert attention from what he was actually doing, and neither don Laureano nor the encargado nor any of the carreteros who stood around in boredom had been able to see the trick he was engaged in.

  The evening before he had made some little sharp pegs out of hardwood and early in the morning when the oxen were put in he had cunningly inserted them under the thongs. For the first half hour the oxen felt no discomfort from them and went along as usual. But when the sun came up and it got hot, the thongs hardened and contracted and the pegs pressed into the skin at the back of the oxen’s heads. With every kilometer the pegs pressed deeper and became so unbearably painful that the oxen behaved as though they were going crazy.

  Andrés knew very well that tricks of this sort were often played with thorns and prickles when a carretero wanted to have a little fun. But the thorns penetrated so quickly that the beasts refused to pull from the first. Then of course their driver knew at once what was wrong. He had to unharness and harness up again. It was a joke played on greenhorns to give them double work and to make fools of them.

  But the trick with little cones of hardwood was Andrés’s own invention. It had a delayed action and so was quite unsuspected. Even the oldest and most experienced carretero would never have been able to explain why the oxen should start by going well and then by degrees become recalcitrant until finally they refused to go on at all.

  When Andrés had lashed the yoke to their horns again and then to the pole, he urged the oxen forward and they set off as willingly and cheerfully as a pair of thriving dray horses. The old encargado gaped and made up his mind to treat Andrés henceforth as a grown man and veteran carretero, whose friendship was worth cultivating.

  Don Laureano opened his eyes wider than any, though it is true he knew very little at first hand about a carretero’s job, and if he had had a train of carretas to take from Arriaga to Chiapa de Corso, it’s doubtful whether the caravan would arrive before the end of this century.

  When the train was in motion again he found an opportunity to take Andrés aside. “Listen to me, my boy,” he said. “You can have three reales a day now. You know your job and you’re worth your thirty-six centavos a day.”

  Andrés owed his second raise to another trick he played. During the time he had worked as carretero he had acquired enough wisdom to see that he would never get recognition or reward from his employer merely because he worked well and hard and efficiently. His work was not greatly valued. He had to draw attention to himself and arouse the fear in his employer’s mind that he might lose a thoroughly efficient carretero, who knew more about the management of oxen than an old encargado, unless he gave him a raise in wages.

  3

  Andrés had had to work more than four months before he worked off the debt of twenty-five pesos which his previous master had lost to his present one.

  During these four months Andrés had had to buy shirts, trousers, a bast hat, a new serape, a white cotton blouse. The work of a carretero was almost as hard on clothing as sulfuric acid. One packing case had a nail sticking out, another a long splinter of wood; and when he was loading up, they caught in his shirt or trousers and in a moment the thing was in shreds. On the road his clothing was wet through one hour and in the next dried so quickly in the tropical sun that in a few days the cloth was as brittle as tinder and fell to pieces if his carreta so much as lurched against the side of the cliff. The thorny scrub by the roadside tore bits right out or made a long tear. However careful he might be, something went every time he handled the goods, either to load up or to shift them while on the road.

  A carretero during a journey stands himself a comiteco when it is cold and wet and he can’t get his clothes dry. He buys a few lemons and makes lemonade, or a few mangoes or a piece of cheese to vary his rations. He may pass through a place where there is a feast day or a market day and he does not want to look on like an outsider—he wants to join in and enjoy himself for a change. He buys a mouth organ or a cheap guitar to cheer up the evenings around the fire, which are usually so dreary. Then he must have a piece of soap now and again, have his hair cut
, and now and again he loses his wooden comb and must buy a new one. Then the bottle of creolin for doctoring the oxen gets broken and he has to buy some more and a new bottle. As for shoes to protect his feet against the stones and all the myriad thorns and prickles on the roads—he cannot think of them. He has no shoes and cannot afford them. He is thankful if he can get hold of untanned hide to patch up the Indian sandals he wears.

  However carefully he might stint and save he was always in his employer’s debt; for his employer was the only man on earth who would give him credit. Almost every article he needed had to be bought from his employer, and the employer fixed the price of everything he sold to his carreteros.

  These advances on wages were debts, and as long as he had a debt with his patrón he could not leave his service. If he did, he was brought back by the police and the cost of apprehending him was added to the debit side of his account.

  But the carretero was no peon—who was a fixture on a finca or hacienda. He was a free laborer. He only had to pay his employer what he owed and then he might go where he liked. The whole world was his and all it produced. No one forced him to run up debts; neither the law nor the State compelled him to. He was entirely free to choose whether he contracted debts or not. If he did not avail himself of his liberty, neither his employer nor the State nor the dictator, General Porfirio Díaz, could be held responsible. And if he did not amass capital in order one day to be a forwarding agent, a factory owner, or a finquero, it was only because he did not choose to save. The way was open to anyone who wanted to start a bank. If the laborer did not become a banker it was only because he blew all he got. The capitalist system is all a myth, trumped up by agitators and anarchists in order to fan the flames of a world revolution and take over the banks and perfumed daughters of the directors. Save, workingman, and then you can acquire the bank at the first corner you come to—without the bother of a world revolution.