by B. TRAVEN
This forest belonged neither to don Laureano nor to his carreteros, nor to any other carreteros who camped on the prairie nearby and mended their carretas. The owner of the forest was all this time in the toils of a “barmaid” to the glory of San Caralampio; so he did not care very much who stole his timber.
There was, in addition, something else the carreteros were badly in need of, if they were to keep their employers’ carretas in good order; so they crept by night out onto the prairie and slaughtered cattle. They required the hides from which to cut new thongs, because the old ones were rotten.
The carreteros never stole on their own account. They could easily have stolen poultry and pigs on the road and enjoyed the good meals they were so sorely in need of. However, once the cattle were slaughtered, it added little to the burden on their consciences if they took a few good cuts of the meat back to camp with them.
All the trains of carretas which had halted on the prairie were in the same condition and each needed a new hide. So, in the interests of the different cartage contractors, quite a large bag of cattle was made.
Stealing timber was a painful matter for a carretero if he was caught at it. There was a scene of fury and often a rain of heavy blows from a riding whip on the head of the culprit. But the slaughter of cattle was more serious—if a cowboy happened to see. That meant jail. It was true that don Laureano would not let his carreteros go to prison. They had debts to work off and he wanted their labor. If they had owed him nothing, perhaps he would not have minded so much; but as things stood he had to go to the rescue of his capital. So when there was trouble he paid the owner of the cattle the value of the slaughtered beasts, and he paid the mayor and the chief of police twenty pesos each as a mark of his friendship, and then the carreteros were released from the municipal jail. All these expenses were debited to the carreteros—and quite rightly. Don Laureano had never told his carreteros to steal timber, to slaughter cattle, to draw the nails from houses, to steal iron from blacksmiths by night. Don Laureano could not conceivably issue such orders even if one of his trains were to be held up on the road for a whole week. He was a highly respected and most estimable member of the community. He lived in awe of the Holy Church, and though the law of the land might in some instances require strengthening in favor of property owners, it had as a whole his ardent support; for it protected him in the enjoyment of his justly acquired possessions and kept those who possessed nothing in their proper places.
In spite of all this, the carreteros who were camping on the prairie contrived to get their carretas into a state of repair. The problem of getting hold of the necessary material had been more easily and quickly dealt with than they had dared to hope, because all those who might have interfered with their activities were devoting themselves to San Caralampio’s wild doings.
So they had plenty of time left over for finally taking a closer look at the fiesta themselves, instead of spending every day as outsiders on the wind-swept prairie, where they could only hear the chimes of the bells and the racket of the fireworks.
Like everyone else who goes to a fiesta, they had the unfounded expectation that something of extraordinary interest was sure to happen to them or that something would fall into their hands from the sky. But on these occasions nothing surprising ever happens if you expect it to.
In any case the carreteros were desperately eager to see and hear and smell something else for a change than the everlasting carretas and oxen. Even an intelligent person turns very rapidly into an ox if he sees nothing but oxen day in and day out.
9
The fiesta of San Caralampio was at its height. There was a surging, heaving mass of people within the narrow confines of the square in front of the cathedral. They cackled like flocks of geese, they cried and bawled and shouted in a confused uproar. Drunken men bellowed and sang at the tops of their voices.
Here and there bands of musicians were performing. The musicians went barefoot in patched trousers and torn cotton shirts. A marimba was playing in front of a circus which had pitched its tent in the roomy patio of a substantial house in a side street close by. Another played on the plaza in front of the cabildo. Every ten minutes policemen hauled a drunken man into the cabildo and put him in the lockup.
These drunks were mostly peons or Indian peasants. They could pay no fines. They had to work instead. In the morning when they had slept off their debauch they were given mugs of hot, sweetened black coffee. As soon as they had drunk it they had to go out and clean the streets and squares under the eye of a policeman armed with a loaded rifle, and on their return they were given coffee, two spoonfuls of black beans, and a few tortillas.
The cleansing of the streets was entered in the municipal accounts with an excellent precision at so much a day for wages. But there were always enough arrests for drunkenness every day, or, if not, there were always stray Indians who could be charged whether drunk or not, and so there was no need for the mayor and the treasurer actually to pay out the wages which were so clearly entered in the books.
The cost for maintenance of arrested persons was naturally entered also; and to judge by the entries you lived far better in jail than any substantial and respected citizen in his own house. The prisoners received meat, eggs, fruit, and cigarettes—according to the expenses charged. It is really surprising that Indian farm laborers did not get themselves taken in every day, for a look at the books showed that nowhere on earth could they hope to live so well as in the town jail.
2
The square in front of the cathedral was on very low ground. During the rainy season it was frequently under water for days on end.
Now, however, it was flooded only by stalls, refreshment booths, shooting galleries, gambling tables, and dice tables. The lanes between booths and stalls were so narrow that the people who crowded them could scarcely elbow their way along. There was a continual barging and pushing and squeezing. This gave the impression of tens of thousands; though, if they had been counted, there were probably three thousand at most.
What these surging and shoving, pushing and barging people really wanted they had no idea whatever. There was nothing to buy they could not have bought as well, and better and cheaper and far more reliably, whenever they chose at any shop in the town. But on every face there was the look of a man who hopes to find twenty-peso gold pieces at a peso a chance.
Whatever they bought, they bought not because they had any need of it, but because it was there under their eyes; because they were in the spending mood; because a knowing salesman persuaded them that only from him and from no one else in the world was a particular article to be bought, and that it was lucky for them he was there, and even though they did not want it at the moment they were sure to want it tomorrow, and then it would be too late and they would have let slip the greatest opportunity of their whole lives.
Thus people got into a kind of intoxication. The outcry, the noise, the music, the shouts of the vendors crying their wares went to their heads, and they bought and bought as though the end of the world was at hand; they lost all control over themselves and their actions. They were dazed and the power of calm reflection deserted them. So they bought and bought without sense or discretion, bought things that were hideous and had no value whatever. They bought and bought because all around them they saw people who were buying and buying too.
It was the same with the shooting galleries and the booths where black cats of pasteboard were knocked down with balls. For ten centavos you had three shots at a target with an air gun. If a marksman got three bull’s-eyes he won a gilded flower vase of tortuous design. Such vases were sold for twenty centavos apiece in the larger towns and no one with any taste would buy them. Even here, in this little place where things were in fashion which in the larger towns had been written off thirty years ago, scarcely a shop could have hoped to sell these vases to its customers, or any other of the articles offered as prizes in the shooting galleries and other booths. But if you won such trash in a shooting gall
ery it was like a present. It was taken home and displayed in the house. It was entirely out of place, but no one had the courage to throw such a beautiful gilded vase on the rubbish heap. Attempts were made to use it as a flower vase, but as soon as flowers were put in it, it toppled over, water and all, because the Czechoslovakian manufacturer had thought less of true proportion than of giving it a costly appearance. So there it remained on show in the marksman’s home because there was no other purpose it could serve. And so it never got broken but descended from one generation to another, and in this way the taste of the people was so misled that each generation strove to win a similar vase by paying for three shots twenty times over at ten centavos a time.
It was certainly by no means easy to win anything in the shooting gallery. It was pure chance, which could arise only when you aimed your three shots somewhere else than at the target. The air guns were sighted in such a way that even lucky hits were very rare. The proprietor could carry his vases and shaving mugs, his Japanese fans from Halle-an-der-Saale, his alarm clocks and his Virgin Marys around with him for two years to forty different fairs and fiestas; and when you saw him again he still had the same vases and alarm clocks displayed. And the people went on paying ten centavos for three shots to win an alarm clock which was rusty with long service and dented by all the packing and unpacking of its many journeys.
But the man was good-natured. If anyone had shot and shot and tried hard and made some good shots which just missed winning him a vase, the showman would call out with an encouraging smile: “Otra vez, caballero, más buena suerte—better luck next time, sir,” and pin a medal on this fine marksman, which distinguished him among all the rest of the crowd as a man of great importance.
You could also shoot at packages of cigarettes stood up on end. These packages cost three pesos a hundred, and you could buy one in any shop for six centavos, but when the fiesta was on people went to great pains to secure such a package at the cost of three shots for ten centavos ten times over.
When they had shot their money away too recklessly and wanted to replenish their supply they went to the gambling booths and roulette tables. It was so simple to get five pesos at a blow for twenty-five centavos. It was an opportunity not to be let slip, and everyone was grateful to the roulette man for coming to the fiesta and giving people the chance of getting rich overnight without needing to work.
3
Everyone who attended the fiesta knew that the shooting galleries and the dice tables and the rest were run by crooks. The air guns did not shoot true and had not sufficient force to knock a package of cigarettes over unless the showman tipped it backward on purpose, so that the least touch upset it—for he had to lose a package now and then to encourage the rest. Even the man with the black cats put a bean here and there under their wooden stands, so that the cat fell down and the thrower got six more throws for nothing to try his luck once more for a gold watch.
But the man with the roulette table was different; he was an honorable man. Everyone knew that. Anyone who had put money on it had the right to spin the roulette, and if he thought it stood askew it was trimmed for him. There was no foul play here; nor would the police have put up with it. The remarkable thing was that the only man who won consistently and made money was the roulette man. How else could he have paid the high taxes levied on him? And he had to live. Nevertheless all the people who staked their pesos were firmly convinced that he only brought his roulette along to make them rich; and when the players, however hard they kept at it, instead of getting rich, lost all they had, they only blamed themselves and said they had no luck and that it had always been their fate to have no luck.
It was true that the knowing gamblers did not for a moment hope to win so much as a peso from the roulette man. They knew that if there was any risk of it he would not be there. These knowing ones played only to win from their fellow gamblers and so share in the gains of the roulette man. They kept it up at the table for hours and played by a system. They frequently won and so helped to encourage new clients; for the man paid out their winnings with a flourish: “Here, caballero, another five pesos for your tostón. You’ll ruin me. I’ll have to shut up shop tomorrow. I’ve a family to keep. But I’m a man of my word. Now, caballeros, a new game begins. Your stakes, caballeros. Se fué. Rrrr. Quince negro. Who has the black fifteen? No one? Your stakes, caballeros. A new game begins.”
The knowing ones were, in fact, ahead—twenty pesos, thirty pesos—but they wanted to win a hundred before they stopped. And when the table was closed to them at one in the morning, its owner was the only man to have won anything; the knowing ones were fleeced as bare as the fools. The only man who came out on the right side was the roulette man.
All the gambling tables, roulette included, at which hard cash was played for, were licensed until nine o’clock at night. They were licensed solely on that condition. But it was only after nine that business began in earnest, because the caballeros sent their wives to bed at that hour, and then they were their own masters.
At nine o’clock the chief of police sent a policeman to say that it was closing time for roulette. The proprietor left the table in charge of his cousin and went to a cantina where he met the chief of police.
“A copita, Jefe—have a drink, Chief?” he asked. Without waiting for the great man’s reply he ordered two large glasses of comiteco añejo, and before they were half empty he called for two more. Then he took five pesos out of his pocket and placed them in the chief’s unobtrusively opened palm, and said with a wink: “You’re a family man, Jefe. That’s for the children.”
Until ten o’clock not a policeman came near the roulette table. Play went on merrily. According to the conditions of the license no one was allowed to stake more than five centavos at a time, but of course he could put five centavos on ten different numbers, or on as many as he chose. After seven in the evening the roulette man was already greeting anything less than a quarter of a peso with a severe look. By eight only half-pesos were seen. By ten, less than a peso was not accepted.
But now another policeman appeared. It would have to be the last game: further play was forbidden. The proprietor gave the policeman a peso and went once more to a cantina—a different one this time. But sure enough, there was the chief of police. It was remarkable how he always managed to find the chief without wasting time on the search. He always hit on the right cantina. Once again he stood two glasses of comiteco añejo; but now it was ten pesos for the family.
And that was not all this time. The chief jerked his head toward a man seated at a table with a bottle of beer in front of him.
“El presidente—the mayor,” he said.
The roulette man understood at once. He went up to the table.
“Cómo está, señor Presidente? How are you?”
“Ah, don Claudio, qué tal—how goes it? How’s business? By the way, I must tell you that we cannot on any account allow you to carry on play after nine. You know the terms of your license.”
“I am closing at once, señor Presidente, only another game or two. There are some gentlemen there who insist on having their revenge. I can hardly refuse them. The gentlemen are excited and there might be a scene. It might come to a few pistol shots.”
“You’re right, don Claudio,” the mayor agreed with a nod. “In those circumstances, of course—but not too long, you know. Will you have a bottle of beer with me?”
“You must excuse me, señor Presidente,” said the roulette man, tactfully declining the invitation, which was not seriously meant. “By the way,” he added, checking himself in midcareer as he was hurrying out to resume business, “I hear you are building a hospital here. Will you allow me, señor Presidente, to make a small contribution?”
“I thank you in the name of the town,” the mayor replied.
The roulette man took five gold pieces out of his pocket and slipped them halfway under the mayor’s arm, which was resting on the table. The gold pieces vanished before the man had time to retu
rn his hand to his pocket.
“With your permission, señor Presidente, I must hurry back now in case there’s any trouble at my table.”
“Bueno, don Claudio, but remember, not too long.”
At one o’clock business was at its height. The finqueros were playing now. All those who could stake only a peso or so kept away. The cheapest stakes were five pesos. And as play now was carried on only by chips it was very simple for the proprietor to say, if by any chance the chief of police or the mayor took it into his head at last to enforce the letter of the law, that they were only five centavos apiece. Nobody, not even if he were gifted with second sight, could say by looking at them how much the chips stood for.
The chief of police, after three more interviews in a cantina, had instructed his men to get after drunks and rowdies and not to bother the finqueros at the roulette table.
The mayor too had been three times sought out—about the hospital. Then he retired to his bed and left the town in charge of the gambling finqueros. It was safe in their hands; for the finqueros stood for law and order and believed that God was in His heaven and that all was right with the world.
10
Andrés got to the town late in the afternoon. The dense crowd was growing denser. The cries of vendors were louder now, even if hoarser. The uproar came from every direction. It is a human characteristic that when people get together they like to shout. Each man wants to shout down his neighbor, because each thinks that what he has to say is more important than what the other has to say.
“Aquí, aquí, la seda legítima de Francia y la más barata—only from me can you get it so cheap.”
This genuine French silk, which the shouting salesman held aloft and unfurled to show its undulating sheen, was made of henequen in Yucatán. But since it was so loudly proclaimed as French silk the women standing around believed it must be. Otherwise, a man who lied so loudly would be choked by his lies.