by B. TRAVEN
“A sus órdenes, mi comandante!”
“You and all your men get back into the finca. Los prisioneros para los caballeros. Leave the prisoners for the gentlemen.”
“A sus órdenes, mi comandante!”
The commanding officer of the police troop shouted to his men, “You remain here on guard.” When he had given this order, he followed the major and the other officers who strolled back to the finca.
Don Delfino summoned some of his peons. “Run, get spades and pickaxes from the stores.”
The spades were brought, and the finquero ordered the captured muchachos to dig holes, each about four and a half feet deep.
After these holes had been dug, the muchachos were forced to stand at the edges.
“You’ll enjoy this, you lousy cabrones!” shouted the finquero. “One shot and it’s over. But not so quick! Now, jump into the holes! Each into his own!”
The muchachos tumbled in. But as the finquero had anticipated, the holes were not long enough for the men to lie in. They half stood, half lay, their heads projecting above the edge of each hole.
The finquero called up some of the capataces. “Cut off the ears of the swine.”
“Hey, you, where have you got your stinking ears?” asked the finquero, walking over to one of the muchachos in his hole.
“Patroncito mío, they were cut off in the monterías.”
“Ah, I see, because of mutiny.”
“With your kind permission, patroncito, not because of mutiny. My little boy was drowned in the river. Then I was so sad that I went down the stream.”
“A deserter, then. It’s all the same.” With a movement of his head he beckoned to a nearby capataz. “The dog’s no longer got any ears to cut off. Chop away his nose. Hey, you, don’t squirm so; if your cheek goes with it, so much the better. Then the devils in Hell will know who you are when you get there.”
The peons who were present as witnesses said nothing. Not with an expression did they betray what was going on inside them. They looked as humble and obedient as ever. The finqueros were convinced now that they had nothing to fear from them.
Then the peons received the order to fill in the holes.
When that had been done, and only the heads of the muchachos streaming with blood showed above the ground, a finquero shouted to the heads; “Tierra y Libertad is what you want? Now we’re going to give you land and liberty. More than you can swallow. You lousy swine.”
He jabbed a capataz in the ribs and said to him, “Stuff the tierra in their traps until it comes out of their tails.”
He himself took up a shovelful of earth, flung it in the face of the nearest head, walked up to it, and kicked the soil into the mouth with his boots. “There’s your tierra and your libertad. Now are you satisfied? Hey? And you too, we’ll stuff you full of Tierra y Libertad. Fetch some water, José,” he called to another capataz. “Get water for them all and pour it into their mouths, so they swallow tierra till they burst. Libertad. Freedom. Now at last you’ve got all the libertad there is on earth, and in Hell, too.”
He called up all the major-domos and capataces and ordered them to treat all the heads in the manner he had shown them.
The capataces, fired by the finqueros, booted all the loose earth heaped up around the holes into the mouths of those heads, ramming it home with their fists, and when the mouths, noses, eyes, and bleeding earholes were so full of earth that not a grain more could have gone in and not even the cascades of water helped in cramming any more into the orifices, they stamped with their boots on the heads, stamping them deeper and deeper into the loose soil until the faces, wholly masked with blood and earth, had become unrecognizable and were composed only of a mass uncertainly held together by the thick black thatch of hair on the skull.
At the beginning of this distribution of tierra, the muchachos had spat, sneezed, coughed, moaned, and choked. But not one had complained. Nor had one spoken a single word that could be taken as a plea for pity or mercy. So long as they could still see with their eyes, neither fear nor reproach was in their looks. Only hate, and nothing but hate, glowed in the last flicker of their black and dark-brown eyes. And it was that boundless hate in them that made them forget all pain, that made them numb as if their heads were stones. It was the inextinguishable hate of the oppressed, who, downtrodden and tormented though he might be, knows only one emotion—hatred of the oppressor. It was the hatred of the proletarian who has never known justice—only commands and curses. A hate more bitter and remorseless than the hate of Satan for God, this was their hate that permitted no wavering of their courage, not even to beg for a last merciful kick that would extinguish life and that would certainly have made their tyrants rejoice at thus havng broken down the rebels.
Four of the muchachos, when they felt that the next kick in the face would stop them from ever uttering another word, screamed as loud and powerfully as the earth in their throats allowed, “Tierra y Libertad! Viva la revolución de los peones!” It came out far from clear and strong. But to all those muchachos who, with the last flicker of their lives, caught the stifled, choking sounds, though not the separate words, and yet instinctively grasped their actual meaning, these muffled, grunted noises were a hymn of praise such as all the heavenly host could not have sung for the muchachos at the birth of their Savior. It was a hymn that heralded no savior. It was a hymn of praise announcing the arrival of a new mankind. It was a hymn in praise of heroes such as only a dictatorship, an autocracy, could have produced, not in support of that autocracy but heralding its destruction.
The finqueros had not merely heard these last cries, the only cries uttered by the dying muchachos; they had also understood them.
And they were thrown into such a rage that they completely forgot themselves. They now no longer left it to their capataces to stamp the rebels off the earth; after those cries, they now leaped themselves upon the heads and trampled and danced about on them as if they had gone mad.
“Where are the horses, you filthy lazy dogs of mozos?” shouted several of the finqueros, beating their capataces with their fists. The horses had not yet been rounded up; they were grazing on the open pastures and had first to be found and driven in.
“Horses! Bring in the horses! We want to gallop these swines’ damned heads into Hell!”
Not only the finqueros but also the peons had heard the cries of the four or five muchachos. And although they spoke Indian more easily than Spanish, they nevertheless understood immediately these rebel cries. And they understood rightly, for the first time in their lives, what these revolutionary words really meant.
The finqueros had made the greatest mistake they possibly could have made: they had invited the peons to the exhibition in order to terrorize them. And for the first time the peons had the sensation of being a part of humanity, bound one to another and all together, not just because they were peons, but because they had a common enemy, because their enemies were the masters who had always posed to them as benevolent fathers. Now they began to understand, for the first time in their existence, that these professing fathers had suddenly been transformed into monsters as soon as their paternal domination and the authority that went with it were threatened.
At this instant the peons, who had been invited as witnesses, realized that their oppressed and tormented class could bring forth heroes who in point of courage, of upright decency, of strength of character, of hate and pride were not a whit behind those who hitherto had regarded these human qualities as the inalienable inheritance of their class—the feudal master class—proclaiming to all the world at every opportunity that peons and proletarians were indeed peons and proletarians because they had no pride and no courage.
But now the peons felt pride swelling up within themselves as they heard the gurgling screams of victory from the muchachos. Their hitherto nebulous and undifferentiated individualities flowered to a comprehension of their own possibilities as human beings when they became aware that these rebels, who even under
the most terrible pain could still fling their hatred into the faces of the dictator’s lackeys, belonged in fact to their race, their class, and not to the class of their masters. Not one of them had ever seen a finquero die with such a great, glorious gesture as these rebels had achieved.
The finqueros had hoped to flood the peons with fear and terror when they commanded them to be present at the executions. Now, without the finqueros even yet suspecting it, their plan had gone awry and achieved the very opposite.
Filled in their hearts with a deep religious adoration for the rebels, the peons now slunk back to their huts and there told their wives and children of what they had seen and experienced. And they told this with a reverence and awe, as if they had seen in the bush the Holy of Holies appearing to them in person and commanding them to build a chapel.
Men and women knelt before the tiny, smoky, smeared pictures of the Holy Virgin, propped on little chests that served as altars in their huts, and prayed for the souls of the dead rebels with as much fervor as if they had been their own fathers. When they had ended their prayers, and the men had once more left their miserable huts in order to follow the major-domo to their places of work, they were no longer the same peons that they had been.
6
General, after he had withdrawn his main army and the west army about five miles back into the bush, now prepared for a decisive counterattack. The bush gave covering not only to his two armies but also to his preparations. He now held a wide field of approach and had sufficient room to attack his opponents from either flank, whichever suited him best. Guided by his healthy Indian instinct against being taken by surprise so long as this could be avoided, he placed his outposts and forward patrols so skillfully that he would be able to capture any peon or bush worker or hunting finquero promptly enough to prevent Santa Cecilia receiving news that might disturb his plans. The fundamental point of his plan was to make his opponents believe that the army of rebels from the monterías had been totally destroyed in that murderous battle he had offered the enemy, and that only around a dozen wounded and fleeing muchachos were wandering about in the bush and the plain, filled with terror and desperation. The one anxiety he had was that the Federals, the Rurales, and the finqueros, together with their major-domos and capataces, might leave Santa Cecilia on the day after that fight.
Early in the morning on which the prisoners at Santa Cecilia had been buried alive according to the rules by which mutinous Indian peasants were normally punished under the dictatorship, he summoned two muchachos whom he knew to be well acquainted with the neighborhood because they had been born and had grown up on one of the fincas in that region and had later been sold by their masters into the monterías.
“You two, Pablo and Mario, can you understand the idiom the peons speak hereabouts?”
“Sí, General. It’s Tseltal.”
“All right. Take your pack nets and cut a mighty pile of grass over there in that clearing. Masses of grass. Then stuff it into your nets, and stuff them so full that they look like huge balls. Then the two of you make straight for Santa Cecilia. Go into the peons’ village there. Put on the stupidest expressions you can, and say to the peons that you are on your way to Balun Canan and from there you want to go to the coffee plantations as contract laborers, and that you want to sell the grass in Balun Canan for a good price in order to buy yourselves tobacco for the journey.”
“We can do that all right and easily enough. I worked in a coffee place once in San Geronimo,” answered Pablo.
“Stop there about half a day, as if you wanted a rest. Here’s thirty centavos for each of you so that you can buy something from the peons—tortillas for the journey, beans, chilies, a few tobacco leaves. Then wander around, near the buildings, and keep your eyes open for anything you can learn. You know enough Spanish to understand what they’ll be talking and shouting about. If you can, count how many men are there, whether they intend to stay one or two days or to go straight off again. Have a good look to see where the gates are, whether they’re bolted at night or just pushed to; where the rifles are kept, and the machine guns; which rooms the officers sleep in, whether they drink a lot. Can you find out all that?”
“Of course, General. We have heads and good stomachs to give us plenty of sense.”
“And when you leave the village, say casually that, on your way there, you met a few exhausted, dirty muchachos, carrying rifles and with wounds on their heads and bodies, and that these muchachos had been in great terror and had disappeared into the bush in a hurry. As soon as you have said this as if it were something quite unimportant, set out in the direction of Balun Canan. Of course, when you arrive at the finca, no one must be able to guess that you’ve come from here; and when you leave there go at first half a league or more toward Balun Canan, and then turn off and double back on your tracks. It’s important that no one in the finca, not even the peons, should guess that you have come from here and are returning here. Well—everything understood?”
“Everything, General. And don’t worry about us. We’ll find out all you want to know, General.”
“Then be off. And should one of the soldiers or finqueros question you, tell them that you’ve seen two men with rifles running into the bush, and that they were so frightened they didn’t even exchange a word with you. But most of all, avoid the Federals. Just keep your eyes open, and talk to the peons.”
Later these two scouts returned and delivered their reports to General. From them the muchachos learned the fate of their captured comrades. But instead of being thrown into terror and shattered at the prospect of a similar or even worse fate, this news aroused in them an indescribable rage and evoked such hatred that, had not General, Colonel, Professor, Andreu, Celso, and a few other muchachos been calm and intelligent enough to persuade the inflamed muchachos to follow their carefully prepared plan, they would have started off immediately to attack Santa Cecilia by day without regard for the consequences.
Modesta, who was squatting beside Celso and combing the hair of her little nephew Pedrito, had heard the news. Little Pedrito had had both ears cut off, like his father. This hideous punishment had been inflicted on the father for an unsuccessful attempt at escape, whereas the little boy, in the presence of his father, had had to endure the same mutilation in order to add to the father’s punishment and to mark the child for the rest of his life as the son of a deserter. If, as a consequence of his attempted flight, the father had been flogged half to death, as happened in similar cases, he would have been unable to work for several days, and this loss of his valuable working power would have annoyed the owner of the montería. Whereas the cutting off of his ears did not prevent him from resuming work immediately, and production did not fall off as a result of his punishment.
When Modesta, who hitherto had believed that her own brother had fallen in the attack on the north army and thus suffered a rapid death, now realized from the mention of the prisoner with the missing ears that among those so brutally executed had been her beloved brother, she paled, and burning tears swelled into her eyes. But she gave no vent to these tears. She only pressed her lips tightly together, parted them again quickly and as if involuntarily, and then expelled her breath vehemently. Then she drew the little Pedrito close to her and kissed him. “Your father is one of the heroes of the fighters for Tierra y Libertad,” she said, and kissed him again.
“Isn’t my father ever coming back, tía mía?”
“No, little one, from now on he lives with all the other Indian heroes on the stars, where all great men live whose wonderful deeds will never be forgotten by people.”
“Then I will be able to see him with my field glasses, won’t I?”
“Yes. I’m sure you will,” she answered, with a sad smile.
Meanwhile, the scouts’ report had ended. She had paid no further attention to it.
Now, however, when all around her were silent under the impact of the news, she looked for a long time at Celso, who was standing with his head bowed
forward, staring at the ground. She touched him gently and said softly, “You’re in charge of the second machine gun, aren’t you, Celso?”
“You know well enough that I am, Modesta. And now that Colonel’s so unfortunately gone and lost his own gun, I’m the only machine gunner in the whole army. And I needn’t tell you how proud I am to be in command of such a beautiful, shining, fine-firing machine gun.”
“Of course not, Celso. You’re right to be proud of it.”
She was silent for a while, and with her big toe drew a pattern in the earth.
Suddenly she said, “You like me, don’t you, Celso?”
“Wha-a-at?” he answered in a long-drawn-out, astonished voice. “Of course I like you. Why not? You’re a pretty girl, and you can cook. Really, I like you very much, very much indeed. I didn’t think there was any need to tell you that. Any sensible young girl could see that for herself.”
“Then if you want me to like you, to like you very, very much, you must do something for me, too, Celso.”
“Anything, Modesta, anything you ask. You’ve only to say it, and it’s already done. But with one exception. I must say that right away. If you’re wanting to have my machine gun, I can’t give it you. At least not until we’ve won the revolution. Then I’ll make a sewing machine for you out of it.”
“No, Celso, I don’t want your machine gun. What I want you to do for me is just to teach me to shoot so well with your machine gun that I can shoot down a mango from its branch at two hundred paces.”
“But why a mango, girl?”
“So that I can cut to ribbons the cruel hearts of all who are not for us, who do not shout Tierra y Libertad with us, and who stamped on our brothers’ heads, my brother’s among them. The ears of little Pedrito will be paid for. Paid for dearly. And now his father’s trampled head must be paid for, too. And very dearly. Very, very dearly, Celso.”