by B. TRAVEN
He was the first to speak, and he spoke so loudly that it was audible over the whole patio and beyond the walls, probably as far as the village of the peons.
Shaking his fists, rising up to his full height, and giving his voice all the strength of which it was capable, he yelled, “In terror and brutality the dictatorship was born! With terror, brutality, and whips it kept itself in power! In brutality, terror, and the slaughter of millions of men it will be destroyed! In streams of scarlet blood the golden age of falsehood will drown! Viva la revolución del proletariado! Tierra y Libertad!”
The muchachos, suddenly awakening as from a trance, brandished their knives and machetes in the air and screamed the answer: “Viva la revolución! Abajo los tiranos! Tierra y Libertad para todos, sin amos y sin capataces! Viva nuestra rebelión! Viva la rebelión de los indios!”
And it happened in the course of the revolution that an attack like that on the Santa Cecilia finca was repeated not once, not ten times, but many thousands of times throughout the whole land, until at last nothing was left to recall that golden age except for the ruins of once-flourishing domains, and the smashed and now rusting machines in a hundred factories, and a population diminished by almost three million. The golden age of the dictatorship had been able to produce an unheard-of increase in productivity. But in doing that it had forgotten the human being and the individual, and it had also forgotten that each and every thing can be made into a product, with one single exception—the brain and the soul of a man.
When day broke and the victors began to search the finca, they came upon that piece of ground where their executed comrades lay with their shattered heads and mangled bodies.
“We will bury them, our poor compañeros,” said Andreu, “and we’ll bury them in the peons’ cemetery.”
“That would be an insult to them,” replied General.
“General’s right,” said Professor. “We can do them no greater honor than to leave them here where we found them. Here they bled. Here they spat their last revolutionary cries into the faces of those uniformed animals. Here they shall remain. We will only cover their heads with mounds of earth and then build a fence of stones around their last resting places. And when God passes along here on Judgment Day to summon them, He will find them just as they were buried by the tyrants. Then God will know what to think of the accusations of those caballeros who are now being picked by the vultures, and who was in the right in this struggle between the rulers and the ruled.”
“We are always in the right!” shouted Celso. “We are always in the right because we’re rebels. Rebels are always right. For no one, whether Indian or ladino, is entitled to stop another’s mouth; our mouths aren’t given us only to eat with, like pigs and goats, but also to speak with, and to speak what we wish, whether it pleases the scientists and aristocrats or not.”
“Celso,” said Andreu to him softly when he had finished his speech, “that’s what Modesta told you yesterday. You didn’t think that up for yourself.”
“And why shouldn’t she have told me that? She’s just as clever and learned as you. She can read well, and she can write, too. But you needn’t tell all the world here that Modesta said that to me. I’m now in charge of a machine gun and mustn’t let people notice that I’m just as stupid as I was before. Besides, I can tell you I’m a great deal better at handling that buzzer than I am with a pencil.”
“And it’s far more use, Celso. For I don’t believe it will always be as quick and simple as it was last night.”
“Nor do I,” said General, who approached and entrusted Andreu with drawing up a list of all available weapons, ammunition, and provisions.
“Professor has looked through all the orders, telegrams, and reports that the colonel of the Federals and the major of the Rurales received,” continued General. “It’s possible that a whole regiment is already on the march between Balun Canan and Achlumal to reinforce the garrisons in the northern district. They’ll be coming our way. And we won’t get out of their way. We march ahead!”
For a week the army remained at this rich, once so beautiful and regal finca.
On the day of their departure Professor divided the estate lands among the peons who, just like their forefathers, had worked this great domain with their sweat, their blood, and their tears for more than three hundred years.
When the army was on the march toward Achlumal and was no more than five miles away from the finca, all the buildings that had been spared during the attack now went up in flames. The peons remained in their huts, as before. They had no desire to live like lords.
* A Spanish muzzle-loading cannon.
8
The little market town of Achlumal contained at the moment only twenty soldiers, because the greater part of the garrison, which normally numbered sixty men, had been sent to reinforce the contingent now providing meals for vultures at Santa Cecilia.
The town, however, boasted a local police force consisting of a commissioner and six men who went about barefoot and carried as weapons a machete and a muzzle loader.
Besides these there was the presidente municipal, or mayor, who had a revolver; the tax inspector, the civil judge, the postmaster, and the town clerk, who all wore revolvers as symbols of their dignity and also to inspire respect. Without their revolvers at their hips they looked like any other ordinary citizen, and no one would know that they had some say in affairs here. In addition, the majority of the shopkeepers and independent artisans had revolvers, which, even if they were badly rusted and the ammunition did not always fit, at least gave the impression of being deadly weapons. And that is quite sufficient to put the fear of God into one’s fellow creatures, despite the fact that one otherwise looks like a section supervisor in a warehouse or a film clown with a black toothbrush mustache under a runny nose.
General could have assaulted and taken Achlumal in exactly the same way as he had Santa Cecilia. Yet he intentionally tried another form of attack.
He sent thirty muchachos, all armed with their machetes, to the market at Achlumal, just as if they were small peasants who had come to buy. Every Indian carries his machete with him everywhere. It would attract attention if he came without his machete.
The Federal soldiers, under the command of a lieutenant, were quartered in the town hall, in a room which served them as a guardroom and which, like all the other rooms in the one-story building, was situated on the ground floor with its door giving onto the portico. And like all the other rooms in the cabildo, this one, too, had no second door in the back and no windows, either.
Around the portico there squatted, as usual, a large number of Indians, partly for the sake of sitting in the shade and partly because they had some sort of business to transact with the civic administration or another of the government offices housed in the building. At night, traveling merchants and wandering Indians slept in the portico of the cabildo.
A soldier paced up and down in front of the door of the guardroom with his rifle at the slope, because a soldier must do something to show the taxpayers that their money is not being poured out in vain. The corporal, minus his tunic and with his shirtsleeves rolled up, sat at a minute table in the guardroom, surrounded by forms and documents, and chewed absent-mindedly at a pencil. The lieutenant was not present. Probably he was in a cantina in the plaza getting drunk, or else in search of a bed companion for the night. Two soldiers lay on mats in the guardroom and snored. Since the corporal could not perpetually chew at his pencil, he added another occupation to his duties in order not to appear totally inactive. When one of the sleeping soldiers snored too loudly, he stood up and kicked the man in the posterior until he turned over and ceased snoring. Then the corporal returned once more to the table and resumed the chewing of his pencil.
The remaining soldiers squatted on the portico, their tunics and shirts unbuttoned from top to bottom. A few were playing cards. One was picking his teeth. Another was reading a fable which caused him so much difficulty that he scratched his he
ad incessantly and then licked his fingernails.
It was so peaceful that one could hear the flies buzzing. At intervals, from this house or that, a child howled, thus deepening the atmosphere of comfortable domestic bliss. The citizens of the town were recuperating from their labors and swinging in hammocks or squirming on hard beds. Now and then a girl or a woman hurried into a shop to purchase something needed at home. And the woman serving in the shop would waddle lazily out from her corner, half-drowsy and half-angry, and search in the drawer for the centavos change for the customer who had bought three centavos’ worth of salt. It was scorching hot at this hour, and every honest citizen regarded it as a sin against God and an offense against morality and custom to work at this time or to carry on business or to walk about the streets.
The muchachos acted so swiftly and surely that when they entered the guardroom, the corporal had only time to look up and for a quarter of a second to be amazed at the impertinence of Indians coming running into the guardroom without first reporting to the sentry outside. But the sentry, as well as the other soldiers squatting in the portico, had been simultaneously hauled into the guardroom in such a manner that, had anyone witnessed it from the plaza, he would have thought it was the soldiers who had seized the muchachos and were dragging them in for interrogation by the corporal. In fact, the soldiers were no longer alive. Before the corporal had even realized this, he had joined them in the ranks of the departed. The soldiers who were sleeping stretched out on the floor suddenly ceased to snore. They emitted a noise similar to that of the last gush of water running out through the drain of a bathtub.
The next moment the soldiers were undressed, the muchachos put on their uniforms, and a sentry was calmly marching up and down in front of the guardroom with a rifle at the slope. At this instant the lieutenant came rolling along to hear the corporal’s report of any incidents that might have taken place while he had been in the bar with various generous citizens, sampling for hours on end the different kinds of old comitecos.
Swaying slightly at the hips, he came up to the sentry and said, “You’ll never as long as you live learn how to shoulder arms properly.” Then he gave him a slap across the face and said, stumbling over his words, “I’ll have a word with the corporal about you. He’ll teach you to carry your gun like a broomstick, and you’ll practice that till your shoulder swells up to your chin. Then someday you’ll learn how a soldier holds his butt. Why the hell do I have to have such a lousy, filthy garrison in this lousy, filthy place, where at every step one skids twice in the dirt, having to deal with swinish Indians who think they’re soldiers.”
He went up to the open door of the guardroom and shouted, “Hey, Corporal, come out of there and take a look at this sentry.” He took half a step forward and leaned with outstretched arm against the doorpost. Then, as if he were revolving about the doorpost in order to get into the room without letting go with his hand, he vanished inside. All that could be heard was a sound like the fall of a heavy sack and the dragging of that sack over a paved floor. This dragging caused the heels of his leather shoes to make a squeaking noise on the flagstones.
A few minutes later the muchachos were swarming into Achlumal from all directions. Then in that little town a howl of terror went up that would have roused the deepest sleeper.
There arose a wild, confused turmoil in the half-dozen streets and on the plaza. Women screamed, children cried, men cursed, dogs barked. There was shooting in the town hall. All the officials and employees of the municipality now paid dearly for the honor of carrying revolvers. For the muchachos had been too quick and too adroit for their opponents.
Everything found in the government offices—such as registers, documents, lists, books, papers, and regulations—was piled in heaps and burned. The prison, which was situated in the patio of the town hall and which, like all prisons of the State, was occupied solely by Indian peons and Indian peasants, all practically starving, had already been broken open. The prisoners, who felt no bond of sympathy with anything that smacked of the law, had but one impulse: they must now at last commit the crime for which they had lain in jail for weeks or even months. In many cases their offense had been insolence toward the authorities or to finqueros, and such insolence was always termed mutiny, rebellion, refusal to work. These released prisoners knew much quicker than the muchachos exactly where to find those with whom they had an account to settle—officials, citizens, and denouncers. They were the ones who now did in the town what neither General nor a single one of the muchachos would have dreamed of doing. Their fury and their desire for revenge knew no bounds. Wherever they broke into a house, not a man, woman, or child remained alive. Although they stole nothing, except for a blanket, a machete, or a shotgun, they left the house only when everything within had been completely destroyed, smashed, slashed, and cut to pieces. And then they lit any candles they found in the house and placed them against the piled-up wreckage of furniture, against the wooden walls, against the doors, and in cupboards and chests.
It was not very long before the town, the most important little market center in the area, was burning in a dozen different places. No one bothered about the fires. The rebels were masters of the town. But they had no thought of remaining masters there. Seeing greater tasks in front of them, what did they worry about the well-being of a town that had never done a thing for them? Wherever they came across a town that possessed a town hall and a prison, they knew that it was a stronghold of the dictator. Even the schools were only for the sons of the ladinos. And if children of the Indian inhabitants of the town, the proletariat, living in crumbling daub huts on the fringes of the town, were sometimes admitted to the schools, they were the children whom the teacher took pleasure in whipping, for the fathers of the ladino children turned up at the school with revolvers and had conversations with any teacher who had so far forgotten himself as to lay a hand on their children. Proletarians raise no objection to their children being beaten at school: therefore, not only are their children beaten but the fathers also when they fall into the clutches of the police.
On the plaza there was a shop in every house; that was why the place had become a market where the whole population lived by trading and bartering with the Indians of the region. Even the numerous small artisans in the town, besides their occupations as carpenter, builder, or smith, owned a shop as well, which guaranteed them a small but certain income—more, generally, than did their proper trade. Admittedly, the majority of the shops were so tiny that it must have been difficult to find space in them for more than ten pesos’ worth of goods.
When the muchachos broke into the town and the citizens realized what was happening, they immediately shut their shops. Or, rather, they attempted to shut their shops. The majority did not have time enough for this and preferred to run or to hide.
The shops that had been shut were quickly broken open by the first kick or thrust with a rifle butt. For if a shop is no bigger than will hold a hundred pesos’ worth of goods, the proprietor can hardly be expected to fortify it with a heavy, iron bound door and good locks that would cost him at least two or three thousand pesos. The security of the shops was in direct ratio to the value of the goods in them. Unknown people who arrived here were always suspect and could not take a step without being watched. Thus thieves came into the town only when the feria, the great sacred festival, was being held. And since stealing was rare under normal conditions, there was no reason to indulge in heavy expenditure for the protection of the miserable array of goods.
Every shop was cleared out. But the muchachos took only what they needed for their onward march. It was not that they plundered less because they did not wish to thieve; they simply knew they would have to carry everything on their backs. None carried more than was necessary for his own existence. None cared whether they were called thieves, plunderers, looters, or vandals. In this respect they had no sense of honor. Their ambition was to win the rebellion and depose the dictatorship. Once that had come about, there woul
d be time to think of other forms of satisfaction.
Although each took only what he needed, in the end the bourgeois were naturally right when they asserted, “Achlumal was so thoroughly plundered that not a grain of salt was left, not one stone upon another, and not a sheet upon the beds.” Rebels must live, if they want to win a rebellion; and if they cannot find any leaders of industry or bank directors who will lend them money for their revolution, then they must make the revolution pay for itself, one way or another. But rebellions must be if the world is to progress. A lake that has no water flowing through it or is not fiercely agitated by storms soon begins to stink, and finally becomes a swamp.
General ordered the signal for advance to be given. It was three hours before sunset.
“We could spend the night in this place,” suggested Colonel.
“Certainly we could,” retorted General. “But we won’t. I’ve got a feeling in my stomach, or perhaps my bones, that there’s a battalion on the march against us—or even a division. You’ve seen today how easy it is to take a whole town. If we stay here when it’s not really necessary, we’ll just be sitting coolly and quietly in a trap. I’m for the open country or the bush; we’ll have more space there. Besides, there’s no more to be said about it. I say we’re going to march, and everybody who’s still got legs will march. Get ready!” he shouted across the plaza in a resonant bellow.
An hour after the muchachos had left Achlumal, the town slowly began to come to life. The inhabitants came creeping out of their hiding places in the patios and back gardens of their houses. A good number of them had hidden under and behind the numerous altars in the cathedral. For some reason, not one of the muchachos had entered the cathedral to see what it looked like from inside. It wasn’t shyness or superstition; it was simply that not one of them believed that he would find anything in the cathedral that would be of the slightest use to him for the onward march. The most important item of all was weapons, and they didn’t think the vestry would conceal weapons. All the weapons to be expected in the town had been captured. They had only hunted out the citizens in order to be sure of getting the last rusty pistol or shotgun. As soon as they came near a man who was carrying a revolver, the quarry made haste to throw it down. Every citizen felt that the non-possession of a weapon ensured the safety of his skin.