by B. TRAVEN
A finca without permanent labor has no value whatever. The only farm workers a finca can rely upon are the families who belong to the finca as an inseparable part of it.
“Pues, all I can tell you,” Celso said when Andrés had finished his tale, “is that you’re just as much in the shit as I am.”
“You said it, manito, up to our necks. You’ve got a girl waiting for you and so have I,” said Andrés. “Our girls will probably have to wait until their little wells dry and shrivel up and are no longer good for anything.”
“Seems, after all, I’m slightly better off than you,” Celso stated. “I can run away. They can’t take it out on my father, nor do I have any captive brothers whom they could drag off in my place. But in your case they’d get hold of your father and to save him you would again have to leave your girl and your ox carts.”
“Well, then, you stupid ass, why don’t you run away,” Andrés asked, “if neither your father nor anybody else can be dragged off in your place?”
“Stupid ass yourself. Where can I go? If I want my girl I’ll have to return home. She wouldn’t leave the village. There she has her land and her father and mother and her whole clan. If I return to that pueblecito, the police will get me in three days. Then I’m returned to the monterías, and I get a hundred lashes or perhaps two hundred and I’m one hundred or two hundred pesos deeper in the hole for the expenses of catching me. I’m not that dumb. And if I can’t go back to my girl, what’s the use of going anywhere else? Wherever you go you have to work, and work damned hard. Nobody gives you a single centavo for nothing. So I might just as well work at the montería. Run away, move freely as you wish, where to? From one place of work to the next. Wages are the same everywhere—coffee plantation, montería, ox carts, mule driving. How many years did you say you been working as a carretero? All right. Can you buy yourself a milpa, even a very small piece of land to grow corn and beans? Nothing. You haven’t got a thing. For years and years you’ve driven carretas and worked harder than all your oxen put together. And now you can’t even pay your father’s debt. You even had to transfer into the contract the debt you owed the owner of the carretas for whom you slaved. Run away? Where to?—Here, take this cigar. I can roll them better than you. That’s something you’ll learn in the monterías—how to roll a good cigar.”
22
On the first day the troop arrived at a small ranchería, a settlement called Chiquiltic, an Indian name which means “ticklish place.” The main building was an adobe hut, located on a rise from where the owners overlooked all the miserable huts of their peons, which were located around the base of the heights.
Some of the troop camped among the huts, while others rested at the edge of the woods and some even inside it.
Although the march on this first day had not been long, the distance covered was, however, considered “una jornada regular,” a regular day’s journey. A fair-sized river had had to be crossed. That meant a lot of work. The animals were unloaded and their packs carried across the river on the heads of the men. Had the loads remained on the mules’ backs they would have been completely soaked, because the water was deep enough to come up to the men’s shoulders.
The animals had to be allowed sufficient time to dry out, otherwise they would become saddle galled. Then they were loaded again. All this took time and shortened the marching day. As a result the afternoon was well advanced when the troop arrived at Chiquiltic.
Andrés and Celso squatted at the same fire.
“Go and see,” Andrés said, “if you can get ten centavos worth of lard in the main building up there or in one of the huts. Here, take this can along.”
Celso left. In every hut he saw men of the troop shopping: eggs, dried meat, lard, tortillas, chile, piloncillos, totopostles, fruit.
When he returned with the lard he said: “What do you think of that, manito? We’ve got a new one.”
“What do you mean, a new one?”
“A new one in the trap. A volunteer, eager to go to the montería. And for pure pleasure, too.”
“Don’t give me that, burro. Pure pleasure. Crazy.”
“But it’s true, I tell you. He has been hanging around the place for three days, I was told, waiting for the labor battalion to pass by. So just when I was up there in the main house asking for manteca, the guy approached Don Gabriel. Far as I could see Don Ramón was not about. Perhaps he was off whoring some of the widows somewhere.”
“Widows? How do you know?”
“Yes, widows. That’s what I said. There’re always widows around these rancherías. More widows than married women. Ask me. Well now, Don Gabriel had strung up his hammock for the night up there on the porch of the ‘casa grande’ where the ranchero lives with his family. Myself, I wouldn’t care to sleep there. Infested with fleas, ticks and full of rats. You can’t walk without stepping on them, what with all the maize stored up in the house. So that fellow pops in and asks meekly if Don Gabriel might not perhaps need one man more for the monterías.”
“And voluntarily? I don’t believe it.”
“But it’s true, mano, I tell you.”
“All right, go on. What happened then?”
“So now Don Gabriel examines him from every side and angle, squeezes his biceps, then his thighs—well, you know how he plays it up with new ones, trying to make it look very important—and then he says in a tone as if he were making the guy a valuable present: ‘Bueno,’ he says, ‘bueno, matter of fact, I’m full. Got more than I need. Anyway, since you’re begging me, all right, I’ll take you along. One tostón, fifty centavos a day. Wages start with the first full working day. Any debts? No? Good. Cuanto enganche quieres? How much advance? Well, take five pesos enganche, so that you can buy your supplies for the march. We’ll make out the contract in the montería. Saves you lots of cash. Need not pay any stamp tax, see? Only my commission. It’s fifty pesos. Go down there and find yourself a fire where you can sit with the other muchachos. What’s your name? Santiago, eh? Santiago what?”
“ ‘Santiago—Santiago—’ He fumbled around, rummaging in his mind for a new name.
“ ‘Well,’ said Don Gabriel, ‘don’t you know your own name?’
“ ‘Por supuesto que sí, patrón. Santiago—Santiago Vallejo, a sus órdenes.’
“ ‘Spelled with a B-burro or with a V-vaca?—Forget it. Doesn’t matter. Bueno, on your way, Santiago.’ Don Gabriel dismissed him with a short gesture and continued swinging in his hammock. You see,” added Celso, “the fried turkeys fly straight into his mouth. Someone always even opens Don Gabriel’s mouth for him, so he won’t have to overwork himself.”
“Where is he now, the new one?” asked Andrés.
“Wandering around the chozas, buying his supplies. Look, here he comes.”
The new man came straight toward the fire where Andrés and Celso sat, probably because he saw only two at this fire while around most of the others six, eight and even twelve men were squatting.
When he was still about five paces away Andrés shouted: “Hey, you don’t mean to tell me that it’s Santiago, from Cintalapa!”
“Keep your maldito hocico shut, Andresíto, if you know what’s good for you. I told that mangy dog, the enganchador, that I was from Suchiapa, and I warn you, cuate, if you ever tell a living soul that I was a carretero, I’ll knock out all your teeth. And,” with a gesture at Celso, “that goes for you too, mano. Say, Andrésito, who is this guy sitting here with you anyway?”
“You needn’t worry about him. He’s all right. Name’s Celso. Used to slave at coffee fincas down Soconusco way. Now he’s an old hand in caoba. Finest guy in the whole mahogany army. May God damn caoba forever and ever.”
“Amen,” Celso said.
Santiago began to unpack his net.
“You know,” Andrés explained to Celso, “Santiago used to be a carretero together with me, working for the same boss. For years we drove in the same ox cart caravan.”
“Suits me. And why shouldn’t
he?” Celso said indifferently.
“By the holy soul of a working ox, hombre, Santiago,” Andrés said with a happy grin, “you’re the very last guy I expected to see in a caoba army. But now, to tell the truth, life can’t be so utterly miserable any longer with you around. Old comrades meet again. It’s really sort of a consolation.”
“Well, you know, m’ijo,” said Santiago, while putting the beans on the fire, “you know I’ve always had a deep longing for the monterías. They say that if you’ve been a carretero for several years you’ll get a dispensation from purgatory without paying any goddamned padre for it. But you know it’s also said that people who’ve been in the monterías for two years aren’t accepted in hell, because nobody can scare them with boiling chapopote, tongs and pitchforks any more. So I’m asking you, then where is all the fun in hell? I always had a great desire to see how things really look in the monterías. That’s why I’m here.”
“Aw, hombre, be yourself,” Andrés laughed. “Don’t give us that. Come across with the real story. Que mosca te cayó en el caldo? Come on.”
Santiago made a wry face and said: “Well, manito, the fly in my ointment means ten years in the penitentiary, and if the judge has overeaten the day before or, worse, has a horrible hangover, it might run up to a stretch of twenty years. So now you’ll understand my longing for the monterías somewhat better. And you’ll also understand why I’d feel forced to beat you up so thoroughly that you won’t know which side is which if you tell anybody here or anywhere else a word about it. And that goes for you, too, Celso.”
“You can trust us, manito. I vouch for Celso’s good behavior,” said Andrés.
Santiago stirred the beans, poured some of the ground coffee in the little tin pot, threw in a few lumps of brown sugar and added water almost to the brim. When everything was on the fire just as he wanted it and he only had to wait patiently for the beans to cook, he made himself a cigarette by rolling coarse tobacco in a corn leaf, lit it and said: “Whether I could get off with the minimum, that is, eight years, I doubt very much. The little incident really was in fact a bit thick. It would be ten years at the very least. There’s a certain lover boy six feet deep in the ground. You get into a mess like that and you never know how it all happened. All of a sudden he lies there flat on the ground and not a peep out of him. And no ointment and no manzanilla brew will do him any good. So you have to rely on your legs.”
“But, manito, see here, that’s not the way to tell a juicy story,” said Andrés. “If you can’t tell it straightforward then for heaven’s sake keep your trap shut.”
Santiago could not keep his trap shut. Nobody can when something is eating him up inside. He has to get it off his chest, even if it should mean his life. It is not brains or hands, but the mouth that brings the greatest calamities upon mankind.
“You know my girl, that Sinforosa, I had in Cintalapa?” said Santiago.
“Of course I know her. Who wouldn’t?” replied Andrés. “Every child knew that she was your woman. Didn’t she have a child by you?”
“A child? Three she had. Two died. I was always sure Sinforosa’s mother poisoned them. She could never stomach me, that old slut. She told me hundreds of times right to my face that she’d love to see me under ten feet of earth, together with all my bastards. That would really make her happy, she always said. But the girl loves me, and I love her. She’s really a sweet thing. So when I was away again for two months off on the road, there was some fiesta, some great goings-on in Cintalapa. A carnival or inauguration of the new Presidente Municipal or some such celebration. What do I know? Dancing everywhere. And lots of beer and tequila and muscatel and anise. Sinforosa, of course, in the midst of it. Twenty years old, very pretty, and she loves to dance. Now, if once in a while she has her little private fun—well, it’s just one of those things and I don’t begrudge it. A bottle must feel the cork now and then, otherwise it will forget that it is a bottle and out of spite may turn into an ordinary open drinking glass. And a plant must be watered frequently or it withers away. Of course there must be a limit to everything, that’s what I say.
“But now, what really got me mad when I heard about it was that such a dirty mug of a peddler should’ve dared to make her, Sinforosa I mean, and keep her for good. That was too much.
“You know she operates a little store in Cintalapa where she sells all sorts of useful things like thread, needles, safety pins, ribbons, cigarettes, matches, writing paper, pencils, ink, candles which she makes herself to earn more, bananas, mangos, lemonades, well, you know all the stuff people need every day. I bought her that little store with an advance I borrowed from the boss so that while I’m away on the road with the carretas she’d be kind of independent and have something to do and to live off of. Everything was fine and perfectly settled as it should be, if you know what I mean.
“So now, one fine day I arrive with my train of carretas at Cintalapa. I get there and see how Sinforosa is doing and everything seems just like always.
“So Sunday comes. I went to the poolroom where all the town yokels used to gather. One of them was well up in his cups. He grinned and yelled: ‘Hello, amiguito Santiago, how do you like being a second-hand stopper?’ ‘Shut up,’ hollered a few of the other guys hanging around, and one of them says to me: ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s stinking drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s babbling about. Since yesterday he’s been so full of booze that it’s running out of his ears.’
“ ‘Well, what exactly do you mean?’ I asked him, dragging him by his shirt collar until he got bluish all over. He could only squeak: ‘Just ask your chicken, she can tell you better than I.’
“I pushed him over the pool table and rushed off. ‘Now you’d better come across with the whole damn story,’ I said to her. ‘I know how things stand. So you might just as well tell me the rest of it.’ Since Sinforosa believed the boys had told me everything up to the last little detail, she broke down and really talked about herself and this guy.
“He also owned a store. In a small town like Cintalapa, you know, everyone knows everybody else. So at the public fiesta he pumped her up to the brim with muscatel. You know that goes down like honey with cream, then suddenly you don’t know your own name any longer. He took her to his house so that her mother shouldn’t see her so drunk, that’s what he explained to her. His wife was not at home. But you see, Sinforosa didn’t know it. Otherwise she wouldn’t have gone to the house, that’s what she told me honestly. After they had been alone in the house for some time he started trying to make her. She pushed him off and wanted to leave and go home. But he struck her with a bottle over the head, made her lose her good sense and threw her on the bed.
“Worst thing is, after that she gets seriously entangled with the peddler. May hell get him! Every time I think of it I just could jump out of my own skin and hang it on the washline.
“Bueno, manitos, you know how women are built. Always itching for something. Talking sugar to you all the time, but the fact remains that you never know where you actually stand with them. You never know what is the truth and what is a blazing lie, where it begins and where it ends. And so she ended up that it hadn’t been her fault at all, that she had been miserably seduced by that brute and hit by him several times over the head, and that’s why she didn’t know how it all happened. But then when she finally admitted she had been with that sonofabitch uncountable times, she said she had to be with him because he had sworn in her presence, por la Santísima, that he would stab her in cold blood, and that he would stab his wife and his children also to make the job complete, if she wouldn’t consent. ‘What else was there for me to do?’ she finished up her story.
“ ‘You could’ve said No and No and forever No,’ I told her, ‘and just because you didn’t say No it is now my turn to tell you how to behave when I’m on the road.’
“So I took off my belt and let her have it. I had to do something at least to make her realize how matters stood. And when she had gotten what
she honest to God deserved, she whined: ‘Santiago, mi cielo, mi vida, mi alma, my life and my very soul, you know that you and only you mean everything to me por toda la eternidad, forever and ever.’ Sounded fine and elegant, like you hear it at the tent show. I believed her. And because I believed her, I was off the next minute, straight to that peddler. ‘Hey, tu, cabrón, you goddamned stinking worm, what’ve you done to my woman?’ ‘I?’ says he, grinning. ‘Me? What have I done to her? She placed herself very conveniently—or didn’t she? How otherwise could I have made her? Get out of here, you loafer, you good-for-nothing, you drunken tramp, or, by God Almighty, I’ll call the police and have you thrown in the calabozo till the rats leave nothing of your carcass but the naked bones.’
“He reached back for the gun he carried in the holster on his belt. In front of me, on the counter there stood a bottle of tequila, more than half full. So I grabbed the bottle and hit him over the head. He pulled at his gun but it had caught on some button of his pants. I pushed him against the wall and continued clubbing him with the bottle. And since I was at it I went wild. I kept on beating him until the bottle broke over his head and all the tequila ran over him. Then I caught a wooden board that was nearby and kept on hammering him. I wanted to beat the stuffing out of him so he wouldn’t think of Sinforosa for weeks. He was bleeding heavily and I thought that by now he must have had enough. So I went on my way.
“I hurried to Sinforosa and sat down to have something to eat. I told her that, for a while at least, she wouldn’t be bothered by him. ‘But what have you done?’ she asked, frightened and getting pale all over. ‘I just pasted him a few on the noodle same as he did to you, to pay him for service rendered.’ She began to cry and sob: ‘The poor, poor man. He hasn’t done a thing, not a single thing, it was all my fault. You’re a dirty beast. I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.’