The Bridge in the Jungle

by B. TRAVEN

  Out of the general store a man staggered. He was dressed in a cheap white cotton suit, with a coat on, which is something I had not seen for weeks. In his right hand he had a twig which he swished aimlessly through the air. He could hardly keep on his feet.

  He was the teacher in the next village. Only for two months would he be in that village school, because the government paid that village only two months' salary for a teacher — a salary of seventy-five centavos a day. More than two months' salary the government could not spend on that Indian village. When the job was over, the teacher would return to town, where his family lived, and he would wait there for another assignment, which might come soon, which might come late, which might come never. It all depended on the teacher's personal friends and on their good standing with a diputado or another politician. Usually the teacher had to get the money for his return ticket by going from hut to hut and asking for as much as the parents of his pupils could spare; and as they were all very poor Indian peasants, it was not very much. After he had paid for his simple board and lodging in the village and sent the rest home to his wife and children, nothing of his salary was left for the ticket. But as a government employee he was entitled to a reduction of fifty per cent on a railroad ticket used in his capacity as a returning or outgoing teacher. This treatment of the teacher was caused not so much by a faulty government as by the fact that the resources of the republic are very limited and, as often happens in richer countries also, expenses for education and for schools in general come last. Soldiers always first. Another reason is that, just as elsewhere, politicians take twenty times more from the nation's income than is their legal share.

  The school he taught in was a large room in a palm hut. No chair, no bench, no table could be found in the class-room. The children squatted on the earthen floor and put the paper on which they wrote upon their knees. Only the teacher had a crudely made chair, and a box for a table.

  I had known the teacher when he taught in an Indian village about a hundred and twenty miles from here. I had been living there for a few months, and as I had had plenty of time, I had accompanied him on his Saturday excursions with the children to teach them the elements of geography, botany, insect life. In that village he had opened a night school for adults, since in the whole village there had been only five or six persons who could write and read, and no more than a dozen who could write their names.

  Each grown-up pupil had paid him one peso a month, which considerably bettered his small income. I had visited this night school chiefly to get acquainted with my fellow students, to make friends with them and be welcome in their homes. This had been worth more to me than learning how to write my name without a mistake and learning whether the Spanish word for work is spelled with a v or a b. I had known ever since that he was a good teacher and that he deserved a better lot than being chased around from village to village.

  That he had got pupils for his night school had not been due to the ambition of the people in the village, but to communist agitators who twice every month visited that village and told the young men that if they did not learn how to read and write they would never amount to anything and would be exploited by American imperialistic companies and by Spanish hacendados and German coffee-planters, and if they did not learn quickly, the United States would come and take the whole republic away from them and teach them the English language by force. The fact was that, because of the constant preaching of the communist agraristas, practically every young Indian had gone to night school and many of them had learned reading and writing fairly well in four months.

  Seeing that teacher now, one might think him a common drunkard. I knew that he was as sober a man as any teacher anywhere. He was not Indian, more likely of Spanish descent with a heavy dash of Arabian blood. That he was drunk today was something which a hilarious fate had obviously prepared in advance. I knew something was going to take a different turn from what was expected. I only wondered what it would be and how it would come out. Fate was at play, or the teacher would not have been drunk.

  Friends of the Garcia family who lived in that village had begged the teacher to come and say a few words over the kid's grave. The teacher knew the kid because the kid had gone to his school for a week when his father had had a job with the railroad. The job had lasted only a week, but during that week the kid's mother had sent him to the school near by, where the kid had learned to say: 'An I which has no dot over it is no I.'

  The teacher had accepted the invitation to speak at the grave and had come to the village where the cemetery was. Here he had met the fathers of his pupils. On arriving, and not knowing any other place to go, he had stepped into the general store, where he had asked for a soda. In had come a man who was the father of two of his pupils. The father greeted the teacher and invited him to drink with him just one little copita of mescal. Beer was too expensive, and since there was no ice to be had, the beer was warm and therefore had no taste. To say no to such a kind invitation would have made the father believe that the teacher was too haughty to drink with an Indian. The teacher had a good heart. He knew how the father would feel if he were to refuse to drink with him. Even a soda or an orange crush costs more than a copita. So the teacher had drunk the hard mescal. The father of another pupil had then come in, and since he had accepted a drink from the first father, he could not refuse a drink from the second. Another father who had heard that the teacher was in the village stepped in and another drink was knocked down. Never more than just one little copita of mescal. But no matter how you count, a certain number of copitas make a pint. The heat did the rest. God in heaven, how drunk that teacher was!

  The procession marched on. Many of the villagers joined the mourners and went along with them. Far behind the rest the teacher was staggering along. He needed the whole road for himself. On his left arm hung that friend of Garcia who had invited the teacher to speak at the grave. This man was even more loaded than the teacher, whose knees might be weak, but some of whose senses were intact. But to drag along a drunken companion who did not make the slightest effort to keep on his own feet — that, surely, was a dangerous task for one who had to fight hard himself against those spirits which are so very friendly to man the first three times, but are nasty fellows after the tenth.

  The teacher tried his best to show that he was a dignified personage. His companion, however, walking practically upon his knees, dragged and pulled the poor teacher every few paces down to the ground. That drunken friend stumbled and tripped and fell, and the good-natured teacher had to lift him up again to his feet. That job made the teacher seem more drunk than he actually was at the time the mourners arrived at the village.

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  The procession reached the cemetery. What a cemetery! It was one more proof of the fact that Christianity had not yet come to the Indians, but instead a degenerated, corrupted religion dolled up with empty ceremonies borrowed from the Roman Catholicism of the first half of the sixteenth century.

  The gate consisted of two lattice wings made of sticks. The gate was purely for decorative purposes because one could enter the place at either side of the gate, where the fence had rotted and collapsed; from the posts hung rusty barbed wire, some of which was lying on the ground.

  From the top of the centre gate post a cross greeted the visitor. Three little hillocks covered with withered flowers and simple crosses without names on them were the only signs that this place was supposed to be a cemetery. Everything else looked like what the earth will look like on doomsday late in the afternoon.

  There were a great number of little mounds. None had the shape of a grave. All these mounds were overgrown with wiry grass and thorny bushes which had been trampled upon, and most of the mounds had been dug open, obviously by dogs, hogs, and wild beasts searching the ground for tasty morsels. Bones were strewn all over the place, but mercifully hidden by the high grass. Rotten boards from decayed coffins were lying everywhere. A score of crude crosses were lying flat on the ground. And this groun
d was richly decorated with the dung of cows, horses, burros, mules, and dogs wherever you looked or walked. The funny thing about that cemetery was that I liked it immensely. If I cannot be dropped into the sea, which by all means I prefer, I should like to be buried silently in a cemetery of that kind, and, please, send no flowers.

  We make too much fuss over our dead. We believe them holy or saintly and treat them accordingly. A dead one is dead. He has left us and we ought to leave him in peace. He should be forgotten the moment he is covered with earth or sent up in smoke. The billions we spend on our dead would serve mankind better if they were spent on more hospitals, on prepaid doctors' fees, and on more research on disease. It would be more human and surely more civilized if, instead of wasting billions upon the dead, we spent that money on the living to keep them sane and healthy and so have them longer with us. Just on the flowers that are thrown to the dead, who cannot see or smell them, we could save enough money to take care of ten thousand babies every year and make their mothers happy.

  I wondered if that teacher and his companion would ever reach the cemetery. Now he was floored, now the other was.

  At last we were standing before the open grave. There were no grave-diggers about. The grave had to be dug by the father or a relative or a neighbour. In this case Manuel had dug the hole. He had done the job early in the morning when it was cool. Then he had hurried back on horseback to be ready to follow the procession.

  The coffin was put on the ground a few feet away from the hole. The coffin-maker pulled out the two nails and took off the lid so that the mother could see her baby for the last time. It was also the law, which ordered that a coffin must be opened just before it is let down so that the mourners may convince themselves they have the right corpse and are not by mistake burying the wrong one. It was furthermore the last chance for the dead to come back to life if he thought he was not yet fully dead and could afford to hang on a while longer. With the coffin open, practically nothing of the body was visible. The box was apparently filled only with a mass of coloured paper, a golden crown, and a sceptre from which the paper was already peeling off. The face was covered by the crown, which had dropped over it and hid its ghastly ugliness. The bared teeth grinning out from under the crown were the only evidence that the crumbling mass of wet coloured paper hid the remains of a human body.

  With a terrific outcry the Garcia threw herself across the open coffin and embraced the whole box. Her crying ebbed to a long, bitter whimpering.

  And while her body shook violently from inner convulsions, the little wooden whistle, which she had caught when it had fallen out of the kid's pants' pocket after he had been fished out of the river, dropped at this moment out of the bosom of her dress. The whistle fell on the ground. She stared at it, ceased whimpering immediately, picked up the whistle, pressed it against her lips, and quickly, as if she might forget it, she hid it inside the paper frocks and said in a low voice: 'Here, mi nene, chiquito mio, don't leave your whistle behind. And forgive me, chiquito mio, my beloved darling, that I spanked you because you wouldn't stop blowing that whistle all the time right into my ears, and that made me so very angry. You forgive me, won't you, Carlitos mio?'

  All the women, on hearing her speak to her baby as if he could still hear her, started sobbing.

  Garcia, half staggering, half stumbling, came up to the grave. He leaned against the two men who had supported him. He could no longer stand up by himself, because his second bottle, which he had kept in reserve, had in the meantime been finished.

  He considered it his right to stand before all the other people beside the open box, for he was the father, drunk or not. He opened his mouth to say something to the crowd. Perhaps he wished to cry, but only a little squeak came out. With one hand he wiped off the thick tears which were rolling down his cheeks. In spite of his drunkenness and all the numbness in his head, he realized fully that his little boy was leaving him forever.

  All the women were weeping bitterly as if the child were their own. The pump-master woman, assisted by another woman, went close to the box and lifted the Garcia up from the ground on which she had fallen exhausted.

  No sooner did the coffin-maker see the box freed from the mother's attention than he put the lid on, and in a few seconds it was nailed fast — this time for good.

  Then it was carried to the hole.

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  Now everybody turns his head around towards the gate and waits for the teacher to appear. He is still outside. Ashamed to meet the weeping mother and the crowd of mourners in his present condition, he refuses to enter the grounds. But his companion finally pushes him through the gate. When the teacher still resists going farther, that fellow, despite his being so drunk, has sense enough to wink to another man, who immediately approaches and leads the teacher to the grave.

  After much labour and time the teacher is at last standing at the edge of the open hole. All look at him in anticipation of his speech.

  Swaying dangerously, he stares at the mother. His eyes get moist and with an energetic twist he turns around and runs away. His companion, the friend of the Garcias, wakens from his torpidity just long enough to note the teacher's retreat and he yells after him to come back immediately and keep his promise like a real he-man and look the goddamned world bravely in the face. As the teacher does not heed his yells, he starts to swear terribly, until he is stopped by two men who slap him straight upon his hatchway, which censure astonishes him so much that he forgets what he was doing and why he was yelling.

  A few other drunks take up the call and holler to the teacher not to be a deserter of the poor and ignorant. Sober men try to quiet the unruly shouters, telling them to pardon the teacher, as they could see what a state he is in. This fails entirely, and one of the drunken callers, just to show the crowd that nobody on earth, not even that goddamned son of an old hussy — the president of the whole damned republic — can tell him what to do, he now roars like an angered bull and insults the teacher in the most filthy manner.

  Well, it is about to become a lively funeral after all.

  The sober men, seeing no other way to calm the drunks, and too decent to give them a well-deserved thrashing right here in the graveyard, go after the teacher and beg him, please, to come back and just say a few little palabras, muy pocas palabras, which will do all right, and never mind the condition he is in, because everybody understands that and all of us are human and nobody thinks himself fit to blame or reproach his fellow men.

  The teacher cannot answer audibly. He only jabbers incoherently. Turning around, he struggles clumsily to free himself from those who want to bring him back. While still struggling, he suddenly sees the weeping mother, who silently and tearfully looks straight into his eyes. He immediately stops his struggle and stares at the mother as if he were awakening from a dream. Perhaps just because his brain is befogged, he detects something in the stare of the mother which others cannot see. For a few seconds he stands still as if listening to something which speaks to him from the inside, while his eyes are firmly fixed upon the mother's face. Then he goes slowly to the grave.

  Once more he stands in front of the hole, his body swaying in every direction. Both his arms gesticulate for a while before he opens his lips. Still holding the twig in his right hand, he looks savagely around as if he were going to fight an invisible enemy who is defending himself with a sword. His dull and glassy eyes gaze into emptiness. The hundred or more faces before him must surely be making a horrible impression upon his numb mind. He apparently sees in this lake of faces a monster creeping towards him, because his features are distorted with terror.

  It cannot be stage fright, for I have heard him speak on a national holiday, and from that occasion I know that he is a fairly good orator who is not afraid of speaking before a crowd.

  And now all of a sudden he throws both his arms up, opens his mouth, and then closes it almost automatically. This he does several times. It seems he thinks that he is speaking, yet not one word can be hear
d.

  Now he shouts with great force: 'We all assembled here are very sad. Very, very sad indeed, that's what we are, all of us who are gathered here, God and men know why and what for.'

  These words he shouts so loudly that if there were six thousand people present, all scattered over a wide plain, they could be heard by everybody.

  Again he yells, and this time as if speaking to twenty thousand: 'The little boy is dead. He is completely dead. I am sure of that. We'll never see him again. We shall never, as long as this world may exist, never more hear his innocent and happy laughter.'

  Tears well in his eyes.

  All this was nothing. He now lifts his voice as if he had a good mind to split open the skies: 'The mother of that little boy of ours is very sad too. Yes, you folks, believe me, she is very sad, because she is the mother and she no longer has her baby with her to play with.'

  He looks over all the people without seeing one in particular and he yells: 'I tell you, folks, the mother is grief-stricken. She weeps. You can see that for yourself. She has been weeping all through this terrible night, the mother has, and you people, you have to believe me.' While thus shouting, he grasps his twig firmly and whips it through the air with all his might as if he meant to slay anyone who dared doubt that the mother is very sad and that she weeps for her baby.

  That stroke at his invisible enemy, whom he apparently considers the mother's enemy also, was well meant and it surely was an honest stroke. But it was too much for his wavering body. He tumbles over, straight into the hole in front of him. He does not quite reach the bottom, though, thanks to the two poles laid across the hole on which the coffin should be standing. Fortunately for him, it had not yet been put there. Owing to the long fight to get the teacher back to the grave, this part of the ceremony had been overlooked and the box is still on the opposite edge of the hole.