by B. TRAVEN
And of course the man immediately converts these fifty pesos into the purchase of more pleasure. One week after having returned from the monterías, he wakes up, finds that he’s an ass and, after another week back in the jungle again, begins to dream of the delights and the enchantment to be enjoyed at the Candelaria fair two years hence.
Celso was not to be caught that easily. The Candelaria fair with its various pleasures did not appear to him as the promised paradise in which all desires come true. No enganchador, not even the smartest coyote, could have used the fair as a bait to get him on his hook.
It had certainly been a very bright idea of the first labor agents who engaged men for the monterías to consider the Candelaria fair the beginning and the end of a labor contract. However, Celso was no inexperienced Indian yokel who knew nothing about the world and its snares. He had seen similar festivities in the small towns of the Soconusco district where he had worked on coffee plantations. Often he had attended the important San Juan fair at Chamula. He had visited fairs in Jovel and Balun Canan. To him the Candelaria fair was not sufficiently exciting to dull his senses and make him forget what it meant to work in a montería for two long years or to make him lose sight for an instant of why he had gone to slave in the jungle in the first place.
While the majority of the men still in the jungle dreamed of how they would make up for the miseries and sufferings of a year or of several years during the fair, Celso dreamed of nothing but marriage and fifteen children. Compared to the good things he wanted, all the glamour of the saint’s feast seemed to him like an inflated, bright-colored rubber balloon which is good to look at for a while, but shrinks in the evening and is swept away with the rest of the garbage.
11
Days before, Celso’s gang boss had intimated to the manager of the montería that Celso very likely might not return. The montería could not afford to lose a powerful, highly skilled cutter like Celso. So the manager sent a letter with another boy marching in the same group to Don Gabriel, the agent who would be in Hucutsin for the fair to deliver an important troop of new men.
The letter contained several instructions concerning the recruitment of workers. The instructions referring to Celso read as follows: “One more thing, Don Gabriel; a certain Celso, a Chamula youth from Ishtacolcot, has drawn all his wages and I suspect he intends not to get on the hook again. We cannot do without him. He is too good an ax-man to be lost. I shall give you an additional fifty pesos for this boy, apart of course from the usual commission. This muchacho is passing through Hucutsin with the group of retiring men and it will be easy for you to locate him there.”
For an extra fifty pesos Don Gabriel would have dug up a corpse, revived him and hired him for the montería. To catch a live worker was a cinch, and it was many times simpler if he happened to be an Indian. Whether this Indian intended to visit his dying mother or thought of marrying or wanted to save his old father from losing his little farm was no concern of Don Gabriel. Don Gabriel had to support a wife, his mother and his mother-in-law. Therefore he could not reflect upon the feelings of others, much less on those of an Indian who was not even sufficiently civilized to have the feelings of a proper human being. An Indio! Bah! An animal that can speak and laugh but is still just an animal!
On the very day on which the letter from the montería arrived in Hucutsin, the pushers working for Don Gabriel had discovered Celso in the troop of workers who had come from the monterías to visit the fair. From that moment on they did not lose sight of him for an instant.
Watching his every move, they were disappointed to find Celso did not drink. To get the victim drunk and catch him in his drunkenness was the easiest and, therefore, the most common trick. Celso was not averse to a glass of strong comiteco once in a while, but he would never drink when he realized it might somehow get him into trouble. His two years in the montería had given him enough second-hand experience from his comrades about the working system of the enganchadores and the coyotes.
Soon he had become aware that there were always two mugs near him no matter where he went, and that they were always the same two mestizos, dressed in cheap small-town fashion. They were the type from which the monterías selected their overseers, the so-called capataces or cabos. During the recruiting of contract labor they were used as pushers, or game-drivers; they were those who, on behalf of the agent or the coyote, carried out the snatchings, the fights, the knifings and any other sordid acts indirectly suggested by the agent. The agent kept his hands clean in the eyes of the law and, when things became too hot, the drivers disappeared temporarily. They were supported by the agent and returned when the odor of the crimes committed had blown off or when friends of the agent came into public office.
The agent was a respectable ladino, a real caballero who practiced the recruiting of caoba workers as an honorable trade. He was properly licensed and therefore protected by law. The shabbiness of the trade fell to the pushers, who were not interested in pretending to be decent and honest citizens. They were far more sure of their income doing the dirty work for an agent than if they had been on their own as bandits or footpads. Being the tools of an agent, they enjoyed a certain protection, just as hoodlums do in the pay of racketeers who in turn are backed by influential politicians.
As soon as Celso saw the two characters circling around him he guessed the contents of the letter which he was certain had been sent to the agent. He realized that from now on anything could happen. There was only one crime of which he need not be afraid: murder. He would not be murdered, because nobody was interested in a dead Indian, not even the devil who, as every Indian knew, selected exclusively white people, ladinos, that is, to broil in hell.
Celso was afraid. His was the fear of a man who knows the trap is set for him but who, at the same time, sees that he is unable to avoid running into it, whatever he may attempt to do.
He began to ponder over various plans for fooling the drivers. First he thought of sending the money to the girl’s father and then escaping while on the march to the monterías. But the more he considered this plan the more useless it appeared. There was nobody in Hucutsin whom he could trust with the money. Nobody was there from Ishtacolcot or from any of the neighboring villages. And he could not think of sending the money by mail. In that case, he would have to hand over his hard-earned money to a post official, another ladino.
Of course nobody could drag him by force to the monterías. There had to be a contract. Once a contract existed it would not help him much to be successful in his flight. The authorities were paid twenty-five pesos tax for legalizing the contract so that in the case of escape the police would catch and return the runaway.
For some time Celso thought of paying his shadows five pesos, so that they would leave him alone. But his fellow workers’ experiences had taught him that even if he paid the pushers they would still continue to work for the agent, who would also pay them five pesos, and thus they would make ten pesos. Whatever Celso might offer them, they would take his money and still betray him since, in every case, besides the money received from Celso, they would get five pesos on top of it from the agent. Even if the agent paid them only two pesos for their job, they would still betray Celso, because it meant two pesos on top of what they got from Celso. No matter what Celso paid them, they would sell him anyway, for the agent was a permanent customer and Celso was not. They were loyal to their agent. Sometimes even the lowest scum is loyal and sticks to his word, even if only temporarily and under certain conditions.
Celso had thought of remaining three days in Hucutsin. In the first place he wanted to rest and heal the wounds he had received on his march through the jungle. And also he wanted to listen to the corrido singers and to the itinerant musicians; go to church and offer a candle to the Virgin for his safe return from the monterías; buy some presents for his mother, for his girl, for the girl’s father and for his own father.
Throughout the two years’ absence from home, he had not been able to send any
message to his parents, and in turn he himself had received no word from them, for none of the family could read or write. The beginning and the end of his formal education had consisted in his mother’s teaching him to cross himself correctly, to sprinkle himself with holy water when entering church, to kneel decently before the various images and to say a brief Ave Maria. Why all this had to be done he did not know and his mother had not been able to explain it to him because she, herself, had learned it in turn from her mother without any explanation. Even had he had the best of intentions to send a brief note back home, nobody could have helped him, as none of his fellow workers knew how to write. And none, himself not excepted, had the necessary leisure to compose a letter. During the long months in the jungle, working ceaselessly, all their interests in life fell to such a level that only by their human aspect were they distinguishable from the oxen and the mules that worked side by side with them. All their requirements were limited to sleeping, eating and delivering a minimum of two metric tons of trimmed caoba a day. They had no other desire than that of finding good trees, easy to fell, and no other thought than that of escaping a whipping, or worse, being hanged at night. To write letters was as far from their minds as was the idea, for an ox, to explore the South Pole.
When Celso noticed the two men stalking him, he gave up his plan to spend a few days in Hucutsin. He decided to elude them by a few deft turns and twists in the festive crowd, and to march off late at night and reach the high pass of Teultepec. The path over this high pass was far more difficult than the road passing through Sibacja. Consequently the hirelings would assume that he was going to choose the easier and shorter route via Sibacja. He was certain they would follow him on the easier road as soon as they discovered he had outsmarted them.
Taking into consideration all the possibilities that might confront him, an unexpected departure in the middle of the night seemed the only way open to Celso to deceive his shadows. If he remained in Hucutsin even for one more day, he might lose against their cunning. They could not waste too much time on just one snatch. Many other men were marked already by the agents to be hooked. The three or, at best, five pesos which they received for Celso would not fatten them. They had to work fast on Celso to be ready for other prey. Celso, by sheer instinct, knew that his chance was now or never.
Had he not been bothered with his pack, it would have been easier for him to escape unnoticed. Baggage is always an obstacle to speedy travel. However, his pack contained all his earthly possessions, except for the money he had received on presenting his check in town, which he now carried wrapped up in his woolen sash.
Camping close to the adobe wall of a house under the widely protruding shingled roof, he had several other youths of his tribe for companions. When one of them went for a walk there was always another one on guard, watching the packs.
The two men who were after Celso watched his pack more closely than his person. They knew full well that an Indian on the road cannot abandon his pack because the pack contains everything he needs on his long marches: his petate, on which he sleeps, his woolen blanket, mosquito bar, pitch-pine splinters to build a fire, huaraches for thorny or sharp-stoned stretches and for those parts of the trail which are covered with sharp-edged clam-shells, deposited there in unknown, remote geological ages, perhaps hundreds of millions of year ago. Since in those regions ordinary matches are as good as useless, he carries a piece of steel, flint and matchwick in his pack. He also carries raw tobacco leaves and sun-dried meat, mashed cooked beans, tortillas, salt and green vegetable leaves needed to season his food and provide important vitamins for his diet. Without his pack and without his machete, an Indian on the march is almost helpless.
It was his pack that had made Celso realize that coyotes were after him. Shortly after arriving in town he opened it to take out some tobacco leaves, and happened to notice that the two were talking to one another rapidly, pointing to the pack as if to memorize its peculiarities. For a few moments Celso thought they intended to rob him. But immediately it occurred to him that mestizos had no use for the pack of an Indian; they would not be able to sell anyone its contents or even part of them. However important the pack might be for its owner, an Indian, it is valueless for anyone not an Indian. Celso knew that his pack was of no intrinsic value and that nobody would give him two reales for it, except another Indian.
Now he began to consider possible ways of taking away his pack without the two drivers noticing it. He thought of arranging with other Indian boys to take the pack somewhere to the outskirts of the town where he would pick it up and be on his way. Or of leaving the pack in some little store and fetching it on the following day. He himself would spend the night outside the town under a tree. This way he might mislead the snatchers and make them believe he had already escaped.
But everything he thought of, his persecutors seemed to have considered. He had to invent something absolutely new and completely unexpected to escape unnoticed.
As soon as these hounds finished their tasks in town, once the saint’s feast was over and the march to the monterías started, they would get jobs as drivers. Not as drivers of pack animals, but as drivers of Indians contracted for the caoba camps. It was up to them to keep the troop together, to see that nobody straggled behind, tried to break ranks or attempted to run away. For this purpose, they were given whips, lassos and good horses, yet no agent would ever trust them with a gun.
These hirelings were crazy for a chance to shoot an Indian, to enjoy the sadistic pleasure of watching the painful dying of a mortally wounded human being. They would invent any sort of accusation to justify to the agent that they had had no other recourse but that of killing the runaway or the slacker. And they killed when quite certain that the agent could not successfully investigate a reported mutiny.
Had they been trusted with guns, the agent might have delivered barely one-half of the men recruited to the monterías, because the other half would have been shot along the march for mutiny or for an attempted attack on the drivers. The agent had to be constantly on the lookout to prevent the drivers from hanging a man who remained in the rear, just to amuse themselves. He had sufficient other means of punishing mutinous workers along the march, and punishing them so that they would have preferred death by shooting. To deliver men alive and capable for work was the agent’s main object. The monterías did not pay for men shot on the road.
Once the workers had been delivered, complete in number, the most brutal of the drivers remained as capataces with the groups they had driven through the jungle.
It was not just a matter of the few pesos which the drivers got for each man enlisted, it was the prospect of an agreeable job as capataces which moved them to serve their masters with devotion. Against the sadistic inclinations of the drivers, Celso had no weapon which might protect him. As matters stood, suicide would be the only sure way out. Murdering the two bloodhounds would not liberate him. Within one hour he would be sentenced to pay five thousand pesos, which he would have to earn in a montería. Thus the drivers would actually have been murdered in favor of an agent’s commission.
Had Celso been able to guess the drivers’ plan, even then he would have had no chance of escape. The way the two mestizos had planned to get him within the next few hours was so clever that only a miracle could have saved him.
12
Celso began getting ready for his trip home. His idea was to steal away during the night. He hoped the two hounds would get drunk, or go to sleep, or bed a whore. Lowdown as they were and tough as they pretended to be, they were human beings, subject to human needs. They had to sleep sometime.
It was around eleven at night. Although the town was the commercial center of a district of some thirty thousand square miles, it had no street lighting. The politicians in power preferred to spend public funds on feasts, fireworks, banquets, receptions, street decorations and monuments of heroes and presidents rather than street lighting, a water supply and drainage, which would not have given them a pers
onal advantage.
Nevertheless, during the Candelaria fair enough light at night came from candles stuck into bottles and lanterns hung in windows and from the merchants’ oil and kerosene lamps which were dimly lighting the streets. Some merchants left their lamps burning throughout the night to avoid thefts of their merchandise, which was covered with tarpaulins on counters and in booths. Any town in the Republic where a saint’s festive day was celebrated was as full of merchants as of thieves, robbers, pickpockets, counterfeiters, whores, pimps, gamblers and con men.
Cautiously Celso got up and slipped along the street to investigate. He did not see the two mestizos, or any other man who gave the impression that he might be in cahoots with them.
Thus, finding the coast clear, he went back to the porch where he had meant to spend the night and silently lifted his pack. One of the boys resting on the same brick floor woke up while Celso took his pack.
The youngster lifted his head and asked: “What is it? Going away?”
“No,” replied Celso. “I’m only going to look for another place to sleep. It’s too cold here and besides it’s too full of fleas.”
Satisfied with the reply, the youngster stretched, grunted and immediately fell asleep again.
Celso was afraid the boy might have talked too loud and that one of the hunters might have heard talk about moving away. So he remained on his haunches for a long while. When he heard no noise other than that which came from the stalls of the merchants, he felt reasonably safe.
With far greater silence and caution than the first time, he again lifted his pack and eased toward the deep shadow in the corner of two adjacent adobe houses. Here, in the darkness, he adjusted the straps of the supporting front band and finally arranged the pack on his back. He was ready to leave.