Government

by B. TRAVEN

  When at last the appeal, oiled by a few more glasses of comiteco, had been decided, it came out that don Martin had to pay twenty pesos and don Ismael fifty. Don Ismael could spare no cash because he needed it for business deals on the journey. Instead he gave the secretary a spare horse he had along, which he assured him was worth a hundred and twenty pesos.

  Don Rafael was more set on hard coin than good horseflesh and lost no time in selling the horse. It was owing to his having gone to complete the sale that don Gabriel had not found him at home.

  7

  Don Gabriel, finding his wife engaged in a long talk with don Rafael’s wife that did not interest him, strolled out to the plaza hoping to meet someone he could chat with.

  Men get indignant about idle gossip only when it is a question of gossip between women; but when they themselves get together, they can beat half a dozen fishwives at the game. A man thinks his wearisome gabble is intelligent discussion of political and economic questions, and considers the chatter of women as senseless rubbish. But looked at impartially the rubbish talked by men is no better or richer in ideas than the rubbish talked by women. The topics are slightly different, but the aim and result are as alike as a Ford and a Dodge.

  In the course of his stroll don Gabriel landed in the colonnade where the fondas were. He felt sure he would meet some dealer or muleteer there whom he knew and could pass the next few hours with.

  There was not much going on that day in the colonnade. A few Indian porters squatted beside their loads smoking fat cigars while their beans cooked in a pot over the fire that burned sluggishly on the plaza outside the colonnade.

  Two mule drivers were mending their pack saddles, pulling out the dried grass with which they were stuffed, carding it, and packing it in again to soften the saddles. The saddles now looked like the puffed-up mattresses of bridal beds sold by credit establishments. But when a saddle had been in use one day it would be just as hard and flat and broken-winded as the mattress of the bridal bed after the wedding night. The mules get used to this rapid decline in the softness and have to put up with it just as the young married couple have to—who do not complain of their miserable bargain to the furniture dealer in the hope that they may be allowed to get a week behind in their installments once in a while.

  All along the colonnade there were unhappy-looking men leaning against the posts and pillars—Indians and mestizos who wondered why they were alive. They excited no more interest here than such men do anywhere throughout the vast Mexican Republic, and here as elsewhere the picture would not have been complete without these loungers and old-timers.

  They spend the night somewhere—though no one can say where—and somewhere they pick up a tortilla—or even a tortilla stuffed with frijoles and chile—though nobody knows where or from whom.

  If anyone asks them who they are and what they are doing there, they say that they are mozos, boys waiting to be engaged by travelers for the next stage. But if a traveler really wants a mozo, because his own servant has fallen sick, these fellows ask such a wage that the traveler could get three thoroughly experienced handymen at the price, if he had the time to look around. But skilled drivers and grooms do not hang about where engagements are only to be had by chance. Competent mozos, as soon as one job is at an end, go from fonda to fonda, finding travelers to whom they offer their services. These others, who hang about, wait, on the other hand, for a traveler in urgent need of a boy, so that they can name their price.

  2

  Don Ramón Velázquez, swinging in a hammock in the colonnade, was in need of a reliable and responsible boy for his horses. He reclined with one leg dangling over each side of the hammock and his hands clasped behind his head. With eyes wide open he was staring fixedly at the roof, as though trying to count the broken tiles.

  He had already been three days in the place, held up for lack of a boy. He had got this far without one and had hoped to engage an Indian boy with the help of the secretary, but in this, owing to the secretary’s absence, he had not been successful. He could not come to terms with any of the colonnade loungers; and apart from the wage, none of them wanted to go more than a two-day journey away from a place where he could laze away his time so pleasantly. Don Ramón would have had to pay not only for the two days out, but also for the two days of the boy’s journey home again.

  He had been on the point of coming to terms with one of them for the four days, but then the boy wanted a horse to ride and don Ramón would have had to hire one in the town. Not content with that the boy wanted to bring another boy, whom don Ramón would have had to pay as well, besides hiring a horse for him; for the first boy said he could not return alone because there were Indians on the road who were ready enough to commit murder when they had the chance.

  At this don Ramón finally broke off negotiations. He decided to wait for the secretary’s return to see if he could fix him up with a reliable boy. Otherwise, he would wait for a pack-mule caravan that would be going his way.

  3

  Don Gabriel was strolling along the colonnade when he suddenly heard himself hailed. “Hombre, don Gabriel, hijo de mi alma—my dear boy, what are you doing in this Godforsaken dog kennel?”

  It was don Ramón who, hearing footsteps, had turned his head and at once recognized don Gabriel. He slipped to the ground and went up to embrace him in the Mexican fashion.

  “I never expected to see you here. It’s the last place on earth you can hope to find a civilized face under the brim of a hat. Cigarette?”

  “Gracias,” said don Gabriel, producing matches.

  If anyone is given a cigarette, he must in return supply the match, in case the Swedish match monopoly should suffer and force legislation on Latin America, by which anyone who lights one cigarette from another or, worse, takes a glowing stick from the campfire to light it with, shall be punished with not less than two years’ imprisonment. Already they have succeeded by adroit propaganda in preventing more than two people lighting their cigarettes with one match; for the third will be dogged by bad luck for the rest of his life and can only break the spell by hatching a revolution in one of the Latin American republics, with the object of replacing a president who is hostile to monopolies by one who favors them.

  Don Ramón and don Gabriel sat down on a straight-backed rickety seat which stood in front of a fonda on the colonnade.

  4

  The two caballeros were old acquaintances. They had known each other from boyhood and had often since then spent days in the same place and the same inn together when they were buying up animals or engaged in other business, besides coming across each other on countless occasions on the road and in distant ranches on their journeys through the state.

  “Are you still dealing in animals?” asked don Gabriel.

  “No, not for a long time now,” don Ramón replied. “There’s not much to be made at it. Prices are bad. For some time now I have been in a far better line, where there’s more profit, less uncertainty, and fewer losses. I deal in other cattle. I am an agent for the monterías, sometimes for the coffee plantations too. I recruit peons for contract labor. For every man I bring to Hucutsín and hand over there at the fiesta of the Candelaria, the companies pay me thirty pesos. And if I take the men on to the montería—fifty pesos a head there at the mahogany camp. No expenses—only my keep while I make the rounds of the fincas and ranches and the independent Indian villages to buy the fellows up. The only losses I have is when one of them dies on the journey through the bush or takes off and can’t be caught, but that does not happen often. A fine business, I tell you, don Gabriel. A third, in some of the monterías half, of the peons are dead within the year and have to be replaced; so business is never slack. It’s a hundred times better than dealing in cattle and pigs or horses and mules.”

  He flicked off the ash of his cigarette and waited for don Gabriel to say something. But don Gabriel was lost in thought. He saw the dawn of a golden future and he meant to seize his opportunity and find out in deta
il how to embark on this line of business. He hesitated to ask outright only because he was afraid it might not suit don Ramón to have a competitor and that don Ramón might put him on a false track if he asked too pointedly. He was wondering how he could lead him on to giving away the secrets of his method of doing business.

  So he remained silent, until don Ramón at last slapped him on the knee. “And what are you doing nowadays, hombre? Still dealing in cattle, or is it goods now?”

  “I have a post,” don Gabriel replied, “secretario at Bujvilum.”

  “That’s bad, amigo,” said don Ramón, with a sour grimace. “There’s not a bent peso to be made in these Indian villages. They haven’t got it. As soon as they can lay their hands on fifty centavos, they spend it on brandy. So how is a secretario to get on? I was had like that myself once—two years of it. Nothing but hard work and never knowing when a machete will get you in the guts or half a pound of scrap iron blow your head off your shoulders; and if you don’t have to live in fear of your life, then you’re only being too kind to the vermin and starving on the few miserable pesos you can squeeze out of your rotten country store.”

  “You’re right, don Ramón,” replied don Gabriel. “That’s exactly how it is. But I can find nothing better.”

  “What are you doing in Cahancu?”

  “Passing through,” said don Gabriel, “taking a fellow to Jovel to be tried. He got drunk and killed a man. I wanted to settle it there on the spot but he had no money. I can’t let it pass; it’s too serious. If I’m to keep any authority over them, I must do something about it. Otherwise I’d have a murder every week, till it got so bad that not a dealer passing through would be safe and I wouldn’t dare leave the house myself even in daylight, as happened to the secretary at Bicocac, till at last he had to have the soldiers around for a few weeks. You’re not much better off with soldiers in the place—only more thieving and everlasting trouble over women.”

  “How old is the fellow you’re taking to Jovel?” asked don Ramón.

  “About twenty-eight, I would say.”

  “Strong and healthy?”

  “Like a four-year-old bull,” said don Gabriel.

  “What would you have put his price at, I mean the multa for the murder, if you had settled it on the spot?”

  “I’d have let it go at fifty pesos and welcome,” said don Gabriel, “but he didn’t have five, and no prospect of his ever finding the balance. He hasn’t enough pigs and sheep, and his maize brings in next to nothing.”

  “Listen to me, amigo,” said don Ramón after a pause for reflection. “Have you forwarded particulars of the case and said you were bringing the man to Jovel to stand trial?”

  “No, I haven’t,” replied don Gabriel. “Anyway, a letter would have been there no sooner than I. We have no regular mail and I can only send letters when there’s someone passing through or when someone from the village, who has enough sense to take a letter, goes to market.”

  Don Ramón slapped his friend once more on the knee. “Seems to me we can make a deal together. Sell me the boy for the multa, and ten pesos more for your expenses. I’ll send the man with a gang bound for the monterías. I’ll lose nothing by it. The sixty pesos I pay you for him will be booked to his account in the same way as the commission I get on each man I supply is booked against him.”

  5

  Don Gabriel said neither yes nor no, and don Ramón thought that perhaps he was feeling a pang of conscience over selling the man. He hastened to blot out such damaging scruples before they became a real danger and threatened to spoil the deal.

  “What will happen to the man at Jovel? I ask you. He’ll get five or ten years in a penal settlement and won’t survive three months. He’ll never stand it—day in and day out between stone walls and iron bars. When he can’t see the sky above him and trees and grass around him, he’ll wilt and sicken in a few weeks. And there’s no escape for him. Since he has to serve a sentence, he can just as well put it in at a montería, where his labor will be of more use than in prison or wherever else they send him. On a montería he will have hard labor, true, but he’s tough and used to it. He’ll be in the open under the sky and with others of his own sort. Between you and me, don Gabriel, you’ll be dealing mercifully with the man by handing him over to me.”

  Don Gabriel made a gesture of indifference. “I have no interest in the man and no cause to deal mercifully with him or otherwise. What does an Indian matter to me?”

  Here he broke off involuntarily. He saw Gregorio squatting with his wife and children at the moment when he had come on them saying good-by. Gregorio had never personally done him any harm. He felt a twinge of pity. It was not the pity he might have felt for another man, but the pity he might have felt for a suffering horse, which looked at him with sad eyes and the glimmer of a hope that a man might be able to help him, since horses knew no God to pity them.

  It was certainly not, at least at this moment, the money that influenced don Gabriel in favor of don Ramón’s proposal. He thought it over and came to the conclusion that it would in fact be better for Gregorio if he sent him to a montería instead of to prison. It was a question whether he would ever return from prison or a penal settlement. He might get five years or eight or even ten. It all depended on the judge’s mood: he might have had a quarrel with his wife or a breakfast that had not agreed with him, or trouble with one of the women he kept, or he might have drunk too much the night before; or again this Indian prisoner might please him or disgust him, or he might be in the mood to make an example of him; or he might see a pretty girl in court who aroused kindly or severe or brutal feelings in him according to the impression she made and his notion of how he could best attract her attention to himself. On all these influences and contingencies turned Gregorio’s fate: whether he would be acquitted or condemned to two or five or fourteen or twenty years’ imprisonment, or shot.

  An accused Indian never so much as thought of a lawyer to defend him. He had no money. As a formality, the State, so as to rank as civilized in the eyes of the world, provided counsel to defend him, whose duty was fulfilled when he had got up and said, “I plead extenuating circumstances for the accused.” This said, he collected his papers and left the court in order to attend a trial from which there was something to be made; for he had to live and provide for his family.

  Don Gabriel did not take all these details of the trial of an ignorant Indian cultivator into account, for they were not of any interest to him; but he knew that Gregorio, once in court, would be in a world as far away from anything he knew of as the other side of an undiscovered planet. The montería, in comparison, would be as familiar to him as his own village.

  It did not take long for don Gabriel to convince himself that though in the eyes of the law it was an injustice to send Gregorio to a montería, it was a fate which he would prefer if he had the choice.

  He sent for Gregorio.

  “You know, muchacho,” don Gabriel said to him, “what they’ll do with you at Jovel—shoot you, probably.”

  “Yes, I know that, patroncito.”

  “And if they don’t,” don Gabriel went on, “they’ll put you in jail for twenty years. You’ll never see the sun or the sky. And they’ll flog you as well.”

  “I know, patrón,” Gregorio repeated.

  “Here is a caballero, Gregorio,” and don Gabriel pointed to don Ramón, “who is willing to take you along to a montería. There you will always be in the open, always in the forest. You’ll see the birds and the animals. And you’ll work there with other boys, Indians like yourself, with whom you can speak. The work will be hard, but hard work hurts nobody. There you will work out your multa and the contract money. In three years you’ll be a free man again and you can go home to your woman and your children.”

  “I should like that, patroncito,” said Gregorio.

  “In three years it will all be forgotten and you will live as before in peace and happiness.”

  “Yes, patrón.”
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  “Then you agree to go to the montería with this caballero, don Ramón?” asked don Gabriel.

  “Yes, patrón.”

  “Then I’ll see to it that you don’t go to prison and we’ll make the contract here and now,” said don Gabriel.

  6

  The agreement was drawn up. Gregorio was debited with sixty pesos against his daily wage of two reales, or twenty-five centavos. This was the sum which don Gabriel received for handing him over—the fifty pesos multa and ten pesos costs. The thirty pesos which the company paid the agent for each laborer were also entered. Finally there were the twenty-five pesos for the stamp, which went into the pocket of the presidente of the municipalidad at Hucutsín and in return for which the contract received his official recognition. The mayor of Hucutsín, which was the last town before entering the region of the monterías, was then bound to arrest any man who broke his contract and escaped, and to hand him over to the company overseer, and the runaway in that case had the costs of his capture and return booked against him.

  Don Ramón took out his list and wrote down Gregorio’s name, the place he came from, his surety, Don Gabriel, and the sum with which his account opened.

  Gregorio put a few strokes beneath his name as signature. He had now contracted a debt of one hundred and fifteen pesos. At the rate of twenty-five centavos a day that meant four hundred and sixty days’ labor. Every shirt he would have to buy at the company’s store during the period of his contract, every packet of tobacco, every straw hat, every blanket would be entered in a fresh account until the old account was worked off. As soon as the original account was met by four hundred and sixty days’ labor, he would have the new one to work off; and this, owing to the necessary purchases he would make during his four hundred and sixty days, would exceed the original one set out in his contract. No laborer could leave a montería so long as he owed ten centavos to the company.