The Carreta

by B. TRAVEN

  “Memory?” she asked, opening her eyes wide and looking at him. “Don’t you wish me, then, to stay with you always? I want to stay with you always. I want no memory of you. I want to be with you wherever you go, whether for good or bad.”

  Andrés seized her hand and for a long while sat silently beside her.

  “Who knows,” he said at last, “whether I shall always please you, little girl. I don’t know how I shall be to a wife. I have never had one. Perhaps I am not what you think. You’ve only known me for a day.”

  She nodded, and said in a voice deep with feeling: “Yes, I’ve known you only one day. And you have known me for only one day too. But after many moons we’ll have known each other a whole year.”

  He laughed, and she joined in.

  Two great beetles landed at their feet.

  “Every beetle has her mate,” she remarked without looking up at him. “I don’t want to be all by myself. I want to be with you. I want to help with the oxen and all your work. I shall wash for you, and whatever you say I will do—just as I washed myself and combed my hair for you. I don’t comb my hair otherwise; it only gets matted again with the wind and from sleeping. But for you I comb it again and again. I also sewed up my skirt for you. I don’t care for myself if my skirt is full of holes.”

  “That is how it ought to be,” he said in playful earnest. “I don’t want you like the wives that many muchachos have in the carretas, who never wash and are always in rags, who get drunk whenever and wherever they see the chance, and then grovel about on the ground and scream and shout out shameless things.”

  “Anything like that I shall certainly never do, Binash Yutsil,” she replied, setting her lips firmly.

  Then she added: “But how am I to know what is good and right and pleasing to you, if you don’t tell me? I am not as clever and experienced as you. You must tell me everything I must do so as to be what you wish. You are my husband—and I am glad that it is you and no other. Nobody has troubled about me since my father’s death. But you”—she suddenly looked into his face with wide eyes, eyes in which beseeching and sadness and helplessness were all seen at once—“but you, my husband, you trouble about me and care for me. It is you who can, who may, who shall make me whatever you wish.”

  “I will for sure never forsake you, little girl,” he said, weighing his words, “and I want to tell you how endlessly glad I am that I found you and that you want me to be your husband.”

  He put his hand on her head and drew it to his breast and stroked her hair. She took his hand and drew it across her cheek and kissed it. Then he bent his head down to her hair and touched it with his lips in a caress like an unspoken prayer, and remained thus so long that it seemed to him as though centuries flowed through the universe.

  Neither spoke. Neither made a movement, fearing in their tremendous suspense lest they might thereby disturb some unknown beneficent influence in their own beings and in the world at large.

  The last faint glow of day died away over the wide plain. The prairie was veiled for the coming of night in a mist which swept up in long waves from all sides at once, with darkness hastening on its heels.

  Night came down.

  When the two woke at last from their trance of rapture and opened their eyes and looked about them, they found themselves enclosed in an inky darkness. It seemed to them as though countless eternities had fled past, while they, unaware of all that took place around them, had remained behind alone. They were glad that they had not been torn apart, but rather had grown together in heart and soul and body to form a single part of nature by the kindness of a destiny that meant them well. But the night, now that it had come, inspired no wishes; they continued to feel the deep contentment in which departing day had left them and which they felt in their present mood nothing could ever destroy, whatever might happen and whatever cares and troubles the days to come might have in store for them.

  2

  She loosened herself a little from his arms and raised her head.

  “Shall we go back to the carretas now, or to the plaza, or would you like to sit on here and talk?” he asked her.

  “It is lovely here in the black night,” she answered. “Unless you have work to do at the carretas I’d rather sit on here with you, until it gets cold.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “No, not a bit. And if I were, it could wait. I have let hunger wait so often that I’ve learned how to forget it. I have often had nothing to eat for a whole day, and even two—but only since my mother was buried. One day she was dead. We didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the fever. The finquero had no medicine, none of that white powder. He told me not to worry, my mother was only lazy and would be all right again next day. But in the morning she was quite still and dead. She had gone without a sound.

  “After that I cooked and did everything at home. But one day it was the feast of San Antonio. And the finquero gave every peon some brandy. It was to give them the taste for it. When they had enough taste for it, then they would want more brandy. That is why he gave them the firewater to start with. But then when they wanted more they had to buy it from him. He sold them as much as they liked, but not on credit.”

  “I know that,” said Andrés. “The finqueros daren’t sell aguardiente on credit. It’s against the law.”

  She went on with her story: “Then the peons emptied their pockets to buy aguardiente; then they brought their pigs, their goats, their sheep—everything, to get more aguardiente. They could not drink it all. They poured away more than they drank, but still they went on buying. My father drank very little. He was sad because of my mother.

  “Next day there was the great feast when the old capitanes of the church were put down and the new capitanes for the new church year were chosen. It was my father’s turn that year to be chosen capitán, but there was another man who said it was his turn. And as the new capitanes have to give the people a feast in their houses, this man said that my father could not give a feast, because he had no wife—to which my father said no, but he had a daughter. Then the man said a daughter, and this was me, could not cook and give a good feast, and so the people would not have their holy feast if my father was chosen capitán.

  “The men were very drunk, for they had been buying aguardiente all night and until early in the morning. And as soon as it was light they began their drinking again. So it came to a quarrel which of the two, my father or the other man, should be one of the two new capitanes. The quarrel got hotter and all the men, who were too drunk to know what they were doing, began playing around with their machetes. This too grew hotter and hotter and my father, who had no machete on him, got a deep stab in the body from the other man. He died that night. Then the other man got a stab too, but he did not die.

  “So then, when my father was in the cemetery, the finquero called my two brothers and showed them my father’s account. But they could not pay it. And as the finquero wanted the money for my father’s account, he sold my two brothers to a montería, where the Spaniards get mahogany wood from the forest.”

  “And that happened to your poor brothers?” asked Andrés with deep concern.

  “Yes,” she said, “that happened to them. They were still so young, one sixteen and the other just seventeen, and being so young they could not have any land on the finca, and of course they had no wives either. And the finquero would not let them work off the debt on the finca. He said he would never get his money back on the few centavos their work would be worth to him. In the montería they could earn more. And because the Spaniards can never get enough men for the monterías they buy peons who are in debt and then they have to work it off.”

  Andrés was just going to say that a montería was worse than any hell could be, and that any Indian who was sold to one found his grave there; but he did not say what he had been told, because it would have added to her pain.

  “The finquero wanted to sell me too, but the agent of the montería did not want me. He said I was too small
and weak and no good even to help cook, and I would not be alive at the end of the weeks and weeks of journeying through the jungle.

  “Everyone in the village told me I would never see my brothers again, that no one sold to a Spanish montería ever comes back. He perishes there, more wretchedly than a beast. That is why the agents are always around to buy up more peons and to entice other men who are free into signing on.

  “When my brothers had gone, the finquero came to our hut and said: ‘I have now given this hut to Daniel. You will come into the house and work in the kitchen. Now, right away.’ So then I worked in the house—from early morning, three hours before sunrise, grinding corn and washing laundry and washing up and cleaning the rooms, till long after sunset. He paid me nothing and no clothes or anything at all.”

  “And so you ran away,” Andrés broke in.

  “No, not for that,” she replied. “All the girls have to work like that. But José, the finquero’s son, was always after me and sending me now here and now there at night, and then he’d catch hold of me and tell me to come to his bed. But I was terrified of him. He is so horrible and has such black looks.

  “He has eight peon girls, who all have children by him, and then the girls get no husbands of their own people. The young fellows are all afraid he will shoot them, because the girls are his girls. And if one does find a fellow who wants her, he never knows when José may want the girl back; and if he says anything, José beats him or shoots him. He has shot two already. The municipalidad did nothing to him, because the Presidente is his friend, and he said that the two young fellows meant to cut his head off with their machetes when he was looking for strayed cattle with them in the fields, and that he had to shoot them to save his life. He did not shoot them both in one day—one he shot last year and the other this year. He was going to shoot another too, but that one took his wife with him and got away to Tabasco.

  “But the girls can do nothing against him, he is so strong, and they have to work in the house. He brings them silk ribbons from the town, and pearl necklaces and earrings, and tells them that he will always keep them with him and they’ll live like ladies. The girls know that all that is lies, but they can do nothing. They are only peon girls.

  “When I was down by the river washing clothes he came riding by and stopped and said: ‘You’ll come to my bed tonight, do you hear, you rat?’ I said: ‘But I will not come. I’m afraid of you. You make the girls cry and beat them.’ He said: ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, you rat. I’ll be very good to you if you’re good to me. The girls are dirty liars and that’s why I beat them—to stop them carrying tales to the village to their mothers. I’ll bring you back red ribbons when I ride to the town.’ I said: ‘Leave me in peace, patroncito, I won’t come and I can’t come.’ At that he got off his horse and came down on my back with his whip till I fell on my knees from pain and fright. Then he bent over me and caught hold of me by the hair and lifted me from the ground till I screamed because it hurt so much. He pulled me backward and forward by the hair and said: ‘You rat, you’ll come to my bed tonight. If you don’t, I’ll drag you out of your corner and tear off your hair, scalp and all, and throw it to the pigs, and I’ll shut you up all night in the granary for the rats to eat you up alive, and what’s left of you in the morning I’ll throw to the pigs. That I swear by the Virgin and Child. So if you don’t come to my bed tonight, that’s what’ll happen to you. I’ll leave my window open.’ Then he threw me to the ground.

  “You see,” she went on, turning to Andrés, “there are more than a thousand huge rats in the granary and they eat up whatever they find there at night, and so I was terribly frightened. That’s why I meant to go to him at night. But, as I was coming up from the river, I met one of his girls who has three children by him and she said to me: ‘Chica, I know that José’s after you, but don’t listen to him. You won’t get a good boy of your own, and you will get a child and you’re still too young to know how to look after it and it will die.’

  “After dinner when the master and everyone in the house, José too, were asleep, I ran away—first through the great forest, where I was so frightened I nearly turned back again. But then I met an Indian and his wife driving pigs to Jovel, and I went with them for a long way. They were kind to me, both of them, and we spoke the same language. They told me that there was the fiesta of San Caralampio at Balún-Canán and that I ought to go there, because I could easily get into service there and working in a town I would be safe from the finqueros. Then we came to a crossroad which they said was a shorter way to Balún-Canán. If I went with them to Jovel I would be late for the fiesta, because it was a long way around and they could not go as fast with the pigs to drive as I could going alone and with nothing to carry.

  “They told me what to do and that I was sure to fall in with traders on the road—Indian dealers in crockery, hat-makers, petate weavers, dealers in skins—who would all be going to Balún-Canán to sell their wares. I was to join up with the ones that seemed most friendly, and if anyone asked me why I was traveling alone and whether I had run away from a finca or from service, I was to say I had made a vow at my mother’s deathbed to go to San Caralampio and offer up a candle to him and kiss the soles of his feet so that my mother would go to heaven. If I said that, everyone would believe me. And I was not to say I had come from a finca, but from Bachajón, because that is a free Indian village.

  “They gave me some tortillas and frijoles and a few chiles for the journey, and off I set. But the first day I met no one, not for the whole day. Late in the afternoon I came to a corn field where there were two huts in which lived some Indian families to whom the corn field belonged. I told them I was on my way to Balún-Canán to kiss the soles of the great and holy god Caralampio, because I had made a vow to my dead mother, and I told them everything else the man and woman with the pigs had told me to say. The people gave me some food, and I spent the night in one of the huts, near the fire where it was warm.

  “In the morning when the sun was up I wanted to go on, but they said I could not go alone, because there were tigers along that way and perhaps even mountain lions too—though they had never seen lions in the neighborhood yet, but plenty of tigers. So I had better wait, they said, until the afternoon or next morning, for there would be many Indian traders passing with their wives and children, all going to Balún-Canán with their wares, and there were a man and his wife waiting to go from that very place, who were taking parrots to sell at the fiesta.

  “And so it turned out. By midday the traders came along with their families. They were from Cancúc, Oshchúc, Chiilum, Hucutsín, Sivacjá, Tultepec, Chanjál, and all over the place. They had collected at Achlumál, and there the presidente of the town refused to let them pass. They had first to pay a tax for the right of passage, for the right to use the roads. They had not known that the presidente would take all their money, otherwise they would have gone another way around and avoided any place where there was a presidente. That’s how presidentes all get rich and then they can soon buy a large finca.

  “So then I came on here with these traders. But I found no work. No one here asked me whether I wanted to go into service. Whenever I stood at the door of a house meaning to ask for a place someone came out and gave me angry looks. So I was afraid and did not ask for a place. But all the same I stood waiting at the doors of houses, from hunger, hoping that someone might ask me if I wanted to go into service in the house. Then a woman came out and gave me a push and shouted at me: ‘Get off with you. We want no thieves here. Get off and don’t let me see you here again.’ So I got more and more frightened, and didn’t know what to do and what to eat.

  “At last I crept into a dark corner to die, because I was so miserable. And while I was sitting there in my misery and thinking I’d soon be dead, there you were and you were good to me, and you made me your wife without knowing who I was or where I came from. You are good, Binash Yutsil, and I will always be good to you and never be a sorrow or a pain to yo
u.”

  3

  Andrés drew her to him and stroked her face. He resolved to make up for all the hardships she had suffered the last months, so that she would forget that she was ever alone on the earth. She came to meet him so willingly in her helplessness and loneliness, doing whatever he asked, that he began to feel poor beside her.

  He did not know what to do—whether to stay as they were or to take her in earnest as his wife. There was no one whom he could ask what he ought to do to make the girl happy. Perhaps if he had had his mother there she could have told him what was best. Yet, when he thought it over, he came to the conclusion that not even his mother could have given him any advice. It became clear to him that it was a matter for himself alone, and that only he could decide what his feeling for the girl required and how to behave accordingly. But the more he weighed it and debated it with himself, the more uncertain he became. He could not make out what this meant. It was not his way to be irresolute. As a carretero, particularly, hesitation was not in his line. Carreteros have to make up their minds quickly and act at once. The time it takes to think things carefully over may be as much as a carreta and its load and a pair of oxen, and perhaps even the life of a human being, are worth.

  Even though Andrés had had no personal experience of women up to now, he felt instinctively that with any other woman he would have known without thinking what to do and what was the right thing to do. But with this girl he was irresolute, just because of his affection for her and because he did not want to lose her affection for him. He was afraid that if he did the wrong thing he might lose her trust, but what the wrong thing was he could not tell.

  The girl had not understood when Andrés represented her as his wife to the other carreteros, because he had spoken in Spanish. But her instinct and feelings had revealed to her what he meant. She herself had told him that she was now his wife.