“I don’t see anything,” muttered the traveler. “It must be a scent.”
“Of people?”
“No; she wouldn’t roar that way . . . Still . . .”
“She’s afraid, boss . . .”
“Right, and in the case of a scent she wouldn’t be—especially if she smelled humans,” he concluded, with a delicate smile we’ve already noted when he spoke of her on other occasions.
Meanwhile the lioness had begun to move cautiously ahead, without lifting her snout from the earth, and howling ceaselessly.
“Now I know what it is!” shouted the traveler suddenly. “Divina, come here, Divina! It’s going to bite her!”
The Indian shuddered.
“Yes, it’s a snake. A month ago I heard that same complaint of hers from far away, and she came in with her snout horribly swollen . . . Divina!”
The two men jumped forward, and with a shove the traveler drove the lioness aside. They were already halfway through the woods and there, on the red earth, they saw a black viper—a ñacaniná—with its neck erect and ready to spring upon the first creature to come near.
These ñacaninás, serpents two or even three meters long, are terribly aggressive and afraid of nothing. As soon as they sense they’re being attacked they fall upon the attacker, be the latter a man, a dog, or a wild animal. And not only that: they pursue, dashing with incredible speed after whatever has annoyed them; and since they take cover stealthily, these black snakes are the most appalling residents of the jungle.
For all that, the lioness had no desire to give up the fight. Her owner just barely restrained her, worried to death, since with one more step his Divina would cause the serpent to strike out against her, and there’s no antidote in the world for the venom of the ñacaniná.
“Guaycurú, the machete! I can’t hold her anymore!”
The Indian understood. With lightning speed he pulled out his machete and in one leap was between the pair and the ñacaniná. Then he took a step ahead and the neck of the snake contracted. The lioness, between the arms of her master who was holding her around the neck, was roaring as she struggled to get free.
“Quick! She’s getting away!” he had time to yell in desperation. A second later the lioness was leaping at the serpent. But the Indian, with frightening calm, had taken another step forward, and as the ñacaniná came at him, extended straight-out like a spear, he made a quick move with his wrist that was almost imperceptible. When the lioness fell on the serpent, all you could see was a black body flip-flopping in horrible contractions among the feet of the beast. But now it had no head; the machete had sliced it off without a jolt, with no roughness at all, solely by way of a marvel of presence of mind and hand.
Finally! The men let out a sigh, now free of that second ordeal of their gloomy nocturnal expedition. The lioness, with two silent bites, had torn up the still convulsive body of her enemy. Now quiet, she joined her master, and the three set out on their trip again.
The storm had passed, but the sky, still cloudy, remained profoundly black. In that murky darkness the somber wayfarers had no guide but the scarcely visible line of the trail, and above all their keen backwoods intuition.
They were walking in single file, with no vacillation; and from a distance someone who’d been watching them would have seen, in the distressing forsakenness of the jungle, two greenish lights, the two awful shining dots of the jungle, that guided the somber trio’s nocturnal progress.
In the meantime, and while their strange adventure continues on its course, let’s say a few words about our characters, so as to understand the frightful drama which was coming to a head.
III
On a certain summer afternoon, at three o’clock, at the peak of an oppressively hot siesta-time, two sweaty men were waiting on the bank of the river for the steamboat that came upstream against its racing current. The two were Yucas Alves, owner of a logging camp four leagues from the shore, and his overseer.
When the steamboat had come to a stop, a scow moved off from her side, boarded by a passenger dressed in white.
When the craft landed, Alves went ahead to meet the passenger.
“Are you Longhi?” he asked him—in Spanish, but with a very thick Portuguese accent.
“I am,” replied the other simply, looking calmly at the repulsive face of the owner of the logging camp.
“You’ve been highly recommended to me,” added the latter. “Do you know your work well?”
“Yes, I’ve been a lumber inspector for fourteen years in Misiones.”
“If you’re not too demanding, I think you’ll be satisfied here.”
“I hope so.”
Four hours later they were entering the camp. The work of inspecting the lumber cut and trimmed by the axes, of plunging day after day into the bush, of moving ceaselessly from one place to another, of wasting away from heat and mosquitoes, is appallingly hard. The newly hired inspector, however, had energy enough for every trial, and within his lean body concealed extraordinary physical strength.
Things went well at the beginning. But little by little he began to notice the atrocious cruelties that prevailed in the camp. Those who know what happens in almost all logging camps will understand perfectly what is here undisclosed; and those who are unaware are better off to remain so forever.
Alves was the prototypical despot, irate, cowardly, cheap, cruel to the point of refinement, and possessed of an iron will.
At the end of the first month Longhi understood that he wouldn’t last there very long. At the end of the second, he was certain that Alves disliked him and that something serious was going to happen. And the clash did in fact take place, with regard to some logs that were badly measured, according to Alves.
“It seems to me that you showed more promise at the beginning,” the owner told him dryly.
“That’s possible,” replied the other, keeping calm.
“It’s your duty to do things well,” Alves cut in rudely.
Longhi looked him straight in the eye, and retorted, turning pale:
“My duty is to do what I can.” His voice was calmer still.
“Your duty is to keep your mouth shut!” bellowed Alves, flaring up in anger.
The livid inspector slowly put his hands in his pockets, with a composure much more terrible than his contained anger, and said to him, enunciating clearly:
“It seems to me that you’re mistaken, Sr. Alves.”
“. . . ?”
“I’m no common laborer.”
“Eh?”
“And no hireling like those others . . .”
Alves made a motion, but at once Longhi added, still looking at him:
“. . . and I swear to you that the first move you make to draw your revolver, by my mother’s ghost I swear to you that I’ll blow off the lid of your brains.”
The inspector didn’t even reach for his own pistol to back up his threat; his look was enough. Alves understood that he’d made a mistake, and turning green he muttered something and left. But Longhi in turn understood that the struggle was no more than begun and that Alves wouldn’t leave it at that.
And in fact six days later the expected catastrophe fell on the heads of Guaycurú and the inspector—our nocturnal traveler, that is, as all will have understood by now.
The climax came one morning near noon, and its incidental cause was the following: Among the innumerable laborers at the camp there was an Indian called Guaycurú, who as a child near death had been abandoned by his parents in the woods, and whom an old woodcutter from Corrientes had taken in and raised. At first the Indian—an excellent logger, by the way—had looked upon the new inspector with suspicion, which was perfectly understandable. Inspectors, as a rule, measure wood in such a manner that they always find a way of recording a lesser amount: instead of four meters, two and a half; rather than eighty square feet, fifty—and so on in the same vein. It’s useless for the lowly woodcutter to defend the inches that have cost him hours of agony,
of heat, mosquitoes, and snakes in the back country; the inspector starts laughing or warns him that if he keeps on causing trouble he’ll be obliged to blow his brains out. The woodcutter lowers his head, hands over his lumber without a word, and so on till the next log. What can he do? Sometimes there are tragic attempts to settle the score, but the terror inspired by the boss is usually too great.
As one might expect, Longhi was too much of a man to lend himself to such thievery, all the more vile since its victim was a poor godforsaken laborer, of whose privations and harsh labors to earn a sack of fat or beans he was only too aware. So by the end of the second week he had won the affection of the peones—but in spite of themselves, since, accustomed as they were to the endless plunder and bad faith of the lumber inspectors, they thought that his fairness was merely apparent, concealing some kind of trick. Longhi recognized the legitimate suspicions of those hapless creatures, grieving for them from the bottom of his heart.
The Indian, especially, had always been the enduring victim of the inspectors. In the great helplessness of his race and humble condition, he had never been able to get credit for even half of his lumber. They always found that his beams were badly squared, or had wood-borers, or had been felled during a rainy period—always something bad for him. Mutely, the Indian would go back to his job, which hardly brought in enough to keep him from dying of hunger, and by now his stringent misery had lasted for twenty years.
So when the new inspector measured his lumber without robbing him of a centimeter, his surprise was without end. Like the other peones, he inevitably believed it was nothing but some sort of ruse, but when he delivered another log, and another and another, and saw them all measured fairly, in the dark soul of the savage the divine light of blind trust in another human being slowly began to shine.
And that wasn’t all. One afternoon as Longhi finished measuring his log and while the Indian was watching him, the inspector raised his eyes and saw that he was shivering, with his head sunk between his shoulders.
“What’s the matter?” he asked him. “The fever?”
“Yes,” replied the other laconically, looking away. In his gaze there was a cold, bitter sadness, that of a sick man disillusioned and as lonely as a stray dog.
“Why don’t you take quinine?”
The Indian didn’t answer.
“Don’t they have some in the store?”
“Yes,” murmured the Indian, “but it costs a fortune.”
“How much?”
The Indian said something in a low voice.
The inspector let out a cry of indignation.
“What a crime!” he exclaimed, looking at that human being fatefully condemned to be consumed in his fever, and feeling a tenderness for the poor pariah that came up from the very depths of his manly fortitude. He finally left, and Guaycurú watched him walk away with a look of painful irony.
“Like all the rest,” he muttered.
But the next day he had the surprise one might suppose when he saw the inspector arrive at his thatched lean-to, deep in the woods.
“Here you are,” he told him, holding out a large box. “Take two, an hour before the attack. There’s forty of them. If it doesn’t go away, let me know.”
The Indian took the box without looking at him, and without saying a word.
“See you tomorrow,” said the inspector simply as he drew away.
When he had already walked a hundred yards or so, he heard the noise of footsteps, and saw the Indian coming towards him. His brow was contracted as though he were in pain.
“I want to know what this costs,” he said in a muffled voice.
“It doesn’t cost anything,” the inspector replied.
The Indian knit his brow still more, examining his fingernails one by one.
“It’s not poison?” he muttered, looking at him out of the corner of his eye.
The inspector understood the whole sum of sufferings, injustices, and suspicions that had soured the logger’s soul to the point of making him question the simplest act of kindness.
“No, it’s not poison,” he answered gravely.
Seeing that the Indian kept his head down, he drew away again, but after a few steps felt his hand pressed hard against a mouth, and heard a voice broken by sobs saying:
“You’re a good man, boss, a good man.”
Longhi took his hand away, laughing to disguise the deep emotion he felt.
From that moment on, no loyalty and faith were greater than those of the Indian. The inspector was simply a god to him, the object of that absolute fidelity to be found only in the savage when he surrenders his elusive soul.
And this devotion to the inspector, added to the sympathies he inspired in the other peones, was the reason Alves found for avenging to the dregs the bitter bile Longhi had forced him to swallow. His hostility toward the inspector, which had begun with jealousy of the respect his workers had for him, burst into total flame when he found out how much Guaycurú loved him, and especially when he learned that Longhi didn’t rob his woodcutters. Of course the natural thing would seem to be that he summarily fire an employee who held down his profits; but, aside from the fact that what he paid Longhi was a lot less than usual, Alves simply wanted to take revenge.
So it came about that one afternoon the most trivial pretext added fuel to that venomous vengeance.
Alves was coming back from the port on horseback when he ran into Guaycurú. The boss reined in his mount.
“What are you doing at this hour dilly-dallying along the trail?” he reprimanded him.
“Nothing. I’m going to the store to get flour,” replied the Indian as he came to a stop, trembling with fear.
“Flour? Didn’t you get some on Saturday?”
“Yes, but it got wet on me.”
“It got wet on you! Damn your hide! Did you deliver lumber?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“One lapacho.”
“How much was that?”
“Twelve feet.”
Alves brought down his fist in a violent blow against the saddle-tree.
“Sure,” he said snidely, “twelve feet. Don’t let me catch you on the trail again, bandido!”
With his head still lower than before, the Indian murmured:
“I delivered wood on Saturday too . . .”
“What do I care about your Saturday and your wood? What I want is for you to work. Hear that? Come with me! Let’s go see your stupid log.”
They started out. Alves wasn’t talking, but his ignoble face remained constricted. When he arrived he dismounted and threw the reins violently to the ground, certain that there were a dozen people there who’d rush to pick up the reins of boss Alves, and went down to the dock with the Indian.
He looked over the log prepared by Guaycurú, and finally raised his head, staring at him with a gaze lit up by sullen fire, which announced a storm of wrath.
“And this is the wood you brought in?” he said, with a slight kick at the beam.
The intimidated Indian didn’t open his lips.
“Who accepted this wood?”
“Boss Longhi.”
“Around here there’s no boss but me, bandido!” cried Alves, turning red. “You hear? The only boss here is me, me! All the rest are a mess of bandits, all of them! You get that? All of them!”
This last was addressed to the laborers and other employees who were listening a short distance away. Such was the tyrannical control Alves held over his people that not one of them lifted his forehead. The laborers glanced at each other furtively; the others acted as though the words had nothing to do with them. But his thundering was too severe for the bolt of lightning not to be near.
“Boss Longhi . . . ,” continued Alves, now unable to contain himself. “I don’t know if he’s a boss in his blasted country! But the one who accepted that blasted wood is a jackass! Longhi or whoever! The one who . . .”
He was going to go on, but when he noticed that
all of them were looking toward the main trail, which lay behind him, he turned and saw Longhi coming back from the woods at a tranquil pace. Though he was still quite a distance away, there was no chance he hadn’t heard, given the silence of the countryside. The employees exchanged a rapid glance among themselves. But Alves had already turned white-hot. When he saw Longhi he held back, and for a few seconds one could see portrayed on his face the struggle between his fear and his hatred of Longhi. The latter won out.
“Who accepted this wood?” he asked, addressing the employees, as if he didn’t know.
“I did,” answered Longhi, sure that this occasion was decisive, and already putting his hands in his pockets so as to better contain himself.
“You?” asked Alves, turning his head toward him with disdain. “You don’t know what wood is, then!”
“I think I do, though,” replied Longhi calmly. “What’s the matter with it?” he added, approaching the log.
“Nothing at all! Just totally eaten up inside!”
Longhi squatted and struck the log with his knuckles in several spots.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“You don’t think so! What I think is that you’ve been stealing your salary from me; that’s what I think.”
Remembering the prior clash between Alves and Longhi, the employees trembled, and opened their eyes wide so as not to miss a bit of what was going to happen.
But Longhi had squatted again, as though to examine the beam more closely than before. When he stood up he was still pale.
“Besides,” continued the Brazilian, “that’s no way to square. Where you come from maybe, but not among respectable people.”
This time he seemed to have violated the limits of Longhi’s deep-seated self-control; but once again the inspector bent over the end of the beam, set his eye at the level of an edge, and checked angles for a while. Again he stood up. And now he was livid.
The Exiles and Other Stories Page 3