The Cotton-Pickers

by B. TRAVEN

  So there it was. We in the bakery and pastry shop had to make good the loss. Now Doux invested in publicity. Ads in newspapers and movie houses declared the excellence of his bread, his cakes, and his pastries.

  The result of this was that we now had to start work at ten every night, Saturdays at nine, and work through until four, sometimes five o’clock the next afternoon. That became a new rule. If anyone didn’t like it, he left; and Doux would then declare that no one had applied for the job, and that the rest of us would have to take over the man’s work for the time being. Sometimes it happened that two men quit on the same day, and then there was the work of two men to make up for.

  Doux would put off replacing the missing workers as long as possible so as to save the wages. We knew this because we sent men to him and he told them there was no vacancy. This went on until we simply left orders unfilled. When it was a case of an order for a birthday cake or some other food for a special occasion, it went badly for Señora Doux. Of course the Señor would make himself scarce and she would have to fight it out with the customer. At last this got to be too much for her, so she herself would hire one or two new men, always the cheapest she could get, men who knew nothing about the trade and hadn’t the intelligence to pick it up quickly.

  The master baker had daily arguments with Doux over supplies. One day the sugar supply was very low. The master went to Doux and told him that we needed two hundred kilos of sugar.

  “All right, all right,” said Doux, “I’ll order some right away.”

  But he put off ordering it, just to keep the money in his pocket a few days longer. The moment came when we had no sugar at all, and we were having rows with the waiters who came into the bakehouse to take the last scrapings from the barrel for the café, where every sugar bowl was empty. Then Doux rushed off in a frenzy to get the sugar in as quickly as he could, while we in the bakehouse had to stand about and wait, as we couldn’t bake without sugar; worse, we couldn’t clean up and go to bed, for the baked goods had to be finished.

  It was the same with the eggs. Five hundred cases were ordered one week, and they were delivered. Then, when we were working on the last fifty cases, the master told Doux that it was time to order more eggs.

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” asked Doux.

  “Yes, it can wait until tomorrow, but not a moment longer.” “That’s all right, then,” said Doux, mightily pleased that he could put it off for one day.

  Next morning the master had to run to him again. “It’s getting urgent. By day after tomorrow we’ll be all out of eggs.”

  This time Doux didn’t ask if it could wait until the next day; but he put it off, on his own responsibility. And so the moment came when we were all standing about, just waiting for eggs.

  And it was the same story with the ice. The ice cream had to be ready by two o’clock. We might have the mixture ready in good time, but the ice wouldn’t be on hand because Doux had ordered it too late. It would arrive at three or four, when it should have arrived at one o’clock, and so we would have to stand around two or three hours, unable to knock off work until the ice cream was ready for the café.

  That was how we wasted our time, not working time, but our own free time, just because Doux wanted to hang on to his money for a few more hours; and because our time was bought by him not by the hour but by the day. Each minute of our lives belonged to him; he bought it and paid for it, by way of our meager wages.

  If we didn’t like it, well, it was true that we could leave. We could go and starve, for jobs were few and far between; and any available work was snapped up by local men who did it for a wage on which it was impossible to live — even if you did see them and their families living on it.

  There wasn’t any choice. You either had to starve or do as the boss wanted. He couldn’t do as he liked with the waiters anymore, so we had to cope with everything that he couldn’t push onto them. We were the rabble. If we quit, there were twenty more waiting outside only too pleased to get into a bakery where there was not only plenty of bread and cake to eat, but where there were even regular meals, the like of which these hungry men had never seen on their own tables.

  The waiters were intelligent fellows, Mexicans and Span-. lards, alert and active. But we in the bakery were gathered in from the road and the bush, without family or fixed abode. Some couldn’t even speak Spanish. Our working conditions and wages didn’t offer the slightest inducement to workers with any pride. We had a certain individualistic common pride, but you can’t reform the living conditions of the worker with that; for the employer has pride enough of that kind himself and he knows how to use it to his own advantage. That battlefield is his; he knows every trick and can parry every thrust with success. We itinerant workers were simply attempting to save a little money and start a small business, or scrape together the fare for a try somewhere else — Colombia or wherever. We were trying to get as much from the furrow we were plowing as we possibly could. Whether those who came after us fell by the wayside was a matter of indifference to us. Everyone is his own best friend. If the grass gets scarce while I’m grazing I’ll pull up the roots as well.

  Doux and the other businessmen in town knew how to keep us too busy at work to learn to think for ourselves. It was a new country, as far as business ventures went. Everybody had but one thought and that was to get rich, and to get rich quick, without regard to what happened to the other fellow. That was the way of the oil people, the mining people, the merchants, hotel proprietors, plantation owners — in fact of anyone who had a few pesos. They must all exploit something or someone. If they couldn’t exploit an oil field or a silver mine, or customers or hotel guests, they would exploit the hunger of the down-and-outers. Everyone must bring in money, and everything did bring in money. There was gold in the veins and muscles of the hungry workers as surely as there was gold in the gold mines. To exploit a gold mine a great deal of capital was needed and risked. To exploit an oil field might mean drilling ten times to a depth of two thousand five hundred feet, at great expense, to get nothing but dry holes in the end. But as long as any worker could move his limbs he was no dry hole; he was more conveniently exploited than any gold mine or oil field.

  Take Apfel, a Hungarian. He arrived in Mexico with a few hundred pesos in his pocket but couldn’t find work. So he rented a small shack and bought tools from one junk dealer and some old sheet iron from another; out of this junk he made buckets and water tanks.

  One day a man came and said: “Could you make me a tank?”

  “Sure, if you give me an advance of one hundred pesos,” said Apfel.

  But he couldn’t make this tank single-handed.

  In a Chinese eating joint he ran into a compatriot from Budapest, begging and in rags. The man had come into the joint, gone up to Apfel’s table, and asked in broken Spanish if he might have the half of a roll which was lying there unwanted.

  “Take it,” said Apfel. “Aren’t you Hungarian?”

  “Yes, I’m from Budapest.”

  So they conversed in Hungarian.

  “Are you looking for work?” Apfel asked.

  “Yes, I’ve been looking for work for a long while, but there’s nothing.”

  “No, there’s not much of anything,” Apfel agreed, “but I can get you work.”

  “Really? I’d be so grateful if you could.”

  “But it means a fourteen-hour stretch.”

  “That’s all right, as long as it’s work and pays money for food.”

  “The pay’s not so good either. Only about two pesos and fifty centavos.”

  “I’d be satisfied with that.”

  “Then come tomorrow morning,” said Apfel, and he explained how to find his work shack. “I work there, too; I’ve got a small contract.”

  “I’m glad to be working with a fellow countryman.”

  “You may well be,” said Apfel, “for who else would take you on? There’s absolutely no work to be had.”

  The man started to wo
rk for Apfel, and he worked with a will. Fourteen hours a day. In a tropical country. In a wooden shack under a corrugated iron roof. Two pesos fifty a day. Fifty centavos a night for a bed — no, not quite a bed, but a wooden frame with a piece of canvas stretched across it. In a flophouse, where bugs and mosquitoes made each night a hell. Fifty centavos for a noon comida at the Chink’s, and fifty more for a supper there. Twenty centavos for a cup of breakfast coffee and ten centavos for two dry rolls. A few cigarettes a day. A glass of ice water for five centavos — perhaps two or three glasses during the long day. Then his shirt fell to pieces, his shoes already having gone west before he began to work for Apfel. New shoes consumed a full week’s work, a shirt two days’ work, always assuming that he bought nothing to eat. This went on for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. Then he was taken to the local poorhouse — malaria, fever, God knows what. Two days later he was crammed into a pine box and shoved into the ground.

  But Apfel fulfilled his contract for the tank and got an order for three more of the same. He could always find more starving immigrants, if not Hungarians, then Austrians, or Germans, or Poles, or Czechs. The port was swarming with them; and they were all so grateful to Apfel for giving them work. Now it was only a twelve-hour day; he moved ahead with the times and didn’t want to exploit the unemployed. But it was still two-fifty a day, with three-fifty for the foreman whom he now needed. It was going on four years since he had made his first tank; and he was driving his own car and had built a house for himself in the North American Quarter. Yes, even the bones of a compatriot to whom you extended a helping hand and who, because of this help, because of overwork, because of the rat hole in which he slept, because of the lack of proper nourishment died of fever and was buried in a pauper’s grave — even this could be turned into gold.

  The Budapest newspapers reported that citizen Apfel had, “by his industry and enterprise made a sizable fortune in a few years.” Fortunes were made overnight that way. All you had to do was to exploit the various kinds of gold mines.

  And the foreigners could do it more handily than anyone else, for if natives and noncompatriots made trouble for them, they claimed the protection of their embassy; and then freedom-loving America would threaten military intervention.

  15

  The dormitory for the bakery help was a huge wooden box with a tin roof — you couldn’t have called it a house. Daylight entered through window openings which were innocent of either glass or screen. Six wooden steps led up to the door; the space underneath them was crammed with old egg crates, empty cans, old rope, and rotten rags, and there were packs of rats running wild among the junk. During the rainy season this became a swamp hole and an ideal breeding ground for hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes.

  The dormitory room, just big enough to permit passage between the contraptions that we called our beds, served not only as our home but also as the home of great lizards, huge cockroaches, and spiders. There were also three dogs wandering about our place; one of them had mange and was horrible to look at. When he got better, the others got it. But the dogs were very fond of us and we didn’t chase them away; they were our only solace on those days when we had no time or strength to take a walk in the streets or the park and fell into our canvas cots, too worn out to sleep.

  Occasionally Antonio or I would sweep the room. It was never scrubbed, but, as the roof leaked, we got plenty of water inside whenever there was a tropical downpour, which during the last weeks of the rainy season happened every half hour. We got bathed in bed, too, and our night’s rest was a game of getting up during rainstorms, again and again, to push our beds under some section of the roof where we imagined no rain would trickle through.

  Each of us had a mosquito net, or bar, as they are called. But they were full of holes, and the mosquitoes not only found the tears with the greatest of ease but also came through those places which we imagined were free of holes. We sewed up the nets as best we could, but on the following day a rip would start from the old hole. You could say that each net consisted of a number of large holes held together by shreds of rotten fabric.

  In addition to this net we each had a tattered blanket and a dirty pillow. On the wall our predecessors had left us an old mirror in a tin frame, a few photos of nude girls, and some

  other photographs of the kind which, in many countries, would come within the province of the public prosecutor. No fine arts commission, however progressive, could possibly have defended these photographs, for they had absolutely nothing to do with art and had everything to do with nature’s processes. But in a country where a boy of ten can buy them as easily as a gray-haired sailor, they are of no special interest; it’s always only the forbidden fruit that tempts. So we saw nothing special about the photos. We didn’t have time to bother about them.

  Between nine and two in the daytime you couldn’t stay in the dormitory; if you’d tried you’d have turned into seared meat. But of course we didn’t try, because during those hours we were working in front of the bakery ovens. And just at the time of night when it began to get cool and we could have enjoyed a gorgeous sleep, we had to get out and go to work.

  The work itself wasn’t hard; I couldn’t say that it was. But being on your feet for eighteen hours or so without a break, constantly running to and fro, bending down and reaching up, putting things here and carrying them there tires you out far more than working hard for eight hours in one spot. It was always “Quick, quick, the round rolls out of the oven… Hurry up, the devil take you, get those trays greased… Damn you, fix the beater into the mixer…. Quick, quick, I gotta have the egg whites beaten…. That mixture’s too salty; hurry, hurry, take it away and mix one up again…. I want two kilos of icing, I told you that an hour ago… Why, damn it, why didn’t you boil up the caramel yesterday? Now we’re sunk…. Holy smoke, now José has to slip up with the ice cream mix, and the slop’s all over the floor. Thanks a lot, José, we’ll all be here until six again today, if that’s the way you’re doing things.” There was a constant hustle and bustle and bullying and scurrying. I’m sure that I covered a good twenty miles a day, rushing up and down that bakehouse.

  Then there was the constant change of staff. Hardly had a new man been trained than another left. In fact, training the men was our biggest stumbling block. Doux would say: “Now you’ve got two new men whom I’ve got to pay, and yet you’re not getting any more stuff baked. What’s the point of my hiring new men? There’s nothing to show for it.”

  In a sense he was right, but that was because no new hands knew anything about baking. They had to be shown everything, even how to handle a hot baking tray or a wooden spoon; and while you were showing them you could have done it yourself ten times over. A few picked it up quickly, but most would get under our feet and only succeed in slowing us down. We had one pastry cook who couldn’t manage the simplest flaky pastry although he could produce recommendations from first-class patisseries.

  It was the aliens who made the money for Doux. They were the ones he could exploit to the limit. The Mexican workers would put up with things for two, three, or maybe four weeks; then they’d say, “There’s too much work here!” and they’d quit. By then they had perhaps saved a few pesos to start up a small business in cigarettes, chewing gum, leather belts, revolver holsters, candy, fruit — things of that kind. Their trade would bring them a profit of about one peso a day, but they managed on it and they remained free men. Some of these small traders climbed higher and higher until they could rent some small, dark alcove — what you might call a hole in the wall — in a narrow street, where they set up shop. But we stayed on, being afraid to lose that security the bakery offered us.

  Of course, we wouldn’t have been content with one peso of daily profit, for we made much more, one twenty-five with room and board. And we wanted more out of life.

  Those who worked just long enough to save a little money to make themselves independent were content with cotton pants at three pesos fifty a pair; but such pants weren
’t good enough for us. Ours had to cost seven or eight pesos. We felt that if we allowed ourselves to be seen in anything less expensive we would lose our dignity and status as white men. The “free” men bought shoes for six or eight pesos a pair. We wouldn’t have dared to cross the street in such footwear. Think what we’d look like! We simply couldn’t do it, if only on account of the señoritas. So our shoes never cost less than sixteen or eighteen pesos. After all, we were white men; and in order to remain so in the eyes of the other whites — Americans, British, Spaniards, French, and so on — we had to remain slaves to the bakehouse, earning good wages. Noblesse oblige — all the more so in tropical countries where the whites are only a small minority in the overwhelmingly native population.

  It should be admitted however that, although we made the greatest efforts not to lose caste, we lived in an uncertain social position. The Americans, British, and Spaniards did not consider us their equals. To them we were still only filthy scum, the scum that sticks to the heels of the prosperous whites and follows them about the world, and this we remained. But it is the big bosses, the power-hungry and the profit-hunters, who create the scum; then, when conditions become too hot and they are called upon to clean it up, they just pack up their profits, go home, and let the scum rot.

  We did not even belong to the mixed-bloods, the Mestizos, to whom we were alien rabble. Nor were we accepted by the pure-blooded natives, the tribes or subnations of Indians all over the Republic. They would have little to do with metropolitan migrant workers, half-vagabonds such as we. Although every native and at least two-thirds of the Mestizos were proletarian like us, we were nevertheless separated from them by a gulf that couldn’t be bridged. Language, past, habits, customs, philosophies, views, and ideas were so utterly different that no common link could be forged.

  One pay day Antonio and I decided to go shopping. He bought a new hat, shirt, and shoes. I treated myself to a new pair of pants and a pair of smart brown shoes, which to make them appear as having been imported from England were called Oxfords, and so stamped in big letters on the soles. Naturally, that word alone, not the quality of the material or the manufacture, explained the extra high price I had to pay for them.