by B. TRAVEN
“Very good. That’s the way I’d like things to be. That night in the patio of the jail, I couldn’t sleep for thinking about what would happen if I had to leave everything without arranging for someone to take care of it.”
“We did all we could, the natural thing to do,” replied Modesta in the tone she might have used to speak of the changes a family undergoes when the father or mother dies.
The tone impressed Cándido and gave him courage to say: “I am glad that Marcelina is dead. At least she doesn’t know what has happened. She can’t see what is happening now. How sad she would be if she saw all this, to know that I had to sell myself to save her life. It would be impossible for me to make her happy again, and she would die of grief.”
“She would have gone with you to the lumber camps.”
“I’d never have allowed it. She could easily have found another man.”
“You know very well that she would never have loved any other man. I would have gone to live with Marcelina, and together we’d have cultivated your land, taken care of the goats and sheep, so that when you returned you’d have found the house all in order and the children grown and healthy. We would have waited for you and thought of you day and night. We would have set up a little altar in a corner of the house, with a light for the most holy Virgin, and we would have prayed to her every day to have you return safe and sound.”
Cándido poked at the fire. It was too small to give enough heat, and there was hardly any light from it, but it gave the spot a feeling of intimacy and awakened in those two beings a comforting feeling that for some hours helped them forget their griefs and their sad destiny.
At neighboring fires other people sat, worn out or excited, vague, less defined than shadows, their voices mixed in conversation, rising suddenly to call someone and fading immediately into the night; insects buzzed incessantly in the bushes, and branches groaned, agitated by the wind—all these sounds intermingled, fusing into a fantastic reality in which Cándido and Modesta felt themselves isolated from the world, linked to it solely by the fire.
The children slept, wrapped up in the sarape. One of them was breathing deeply, and the other, dreaming, was saying some unintelligible words. Soon they fell silent. Modesta arranged their sarape, not so much to prevent the cold air from getting at their half-naked little bodies as to make them feel that, even while they were asleep, a loving hand was taking care of them.
“Tomorrow you can go to start to work, little sister,” said Cándido after a long silence.
Modesta slowly rolled herself another cigarette as though she were particularly interested in doing it well. She lighted it and took a few puffs. Then she slowly lowered the hand in which she held it, letting her gaze wander toward the underbrush where its black shadow was marked off in an irregular line against the dark, clear sky, in which some stars were shining. She sighed deeply and said: “I won’t go into service, brother. I’ll not be a maid to people like that any more. I’ll go with you to the camps. From now on, the only work that interests me is serving you and the children.”
Cándido leaned above the fire and said in a very low voice: “You ought not to do a thing like that, little sister. The camps are no good for women, and still less for girls. It’s not for me to give you orders, but I advise you to go back. If you don’t want to work any more with the city people, you can stay with our uncle in my house, which is your house, and where you have a perfect right to live.”
“Uncle Diego and our aunt said the same thing to me. So did the neighbors. But the more they insisted, the more I felt that I would never be able to live quietly and in peace and that I ought to go with you and the children because you need me.”
“You don’t know how hard life in the forest is, Modesta, and how much harder still in the camps. You are only a young girl, and you’ll have to live surrounded by men among whom not one amounts to much.”
“I was told all that before I set out. But remember that life didn’t begin to be hard for you until you had to take charge of me when I was a tiny orphan. How, then, can it be hard for me to help you, to be at your side now that your children are small and have no mother? Some day we’ll go back home, and then I’ll look for a good man like you and marry him.”
These were the last words they exchanged. They pulled the wool blankets more tightly around them and smoked, their glances lost in the dying fire. Thus they awaited the new day.
The dawn came slowly, enveloped in a damp, heavy fog that fell on the thicket and the field when the sun rose. The sun appeared on the horizon suddenly, without warning, as if with one leap it flung itself into the universe.
4
“The devil take you, you pack of nobodies! That’s the way you rob me of the money I’ve worked so hard to make. For three months all you’ve done is scratch your asses, and I haven’t been able to send off even one load of mahogany. God and the most holy Virgin are witnesses that I’ve paid you down to the last centavo, that I don’t owe you anything. And now I come to the end of three months and find nothing in the dumps, not one chip of mahogany worth mentioning. Expecting to find logs piled up as high as hills, or at least as high as the cathedral in Villahermosa, I find nothing! But, by God and all the saints, what have you been doing all this time? Now scratch your bellies, you sons of bitches! Now answer me, and don’t try lying or I’ll punch you each one in the nose. Come on, let’s see! What’s your answer?”
In these choice terms Don Severo directed himself to his two overseers, El Pícaro and El Gusano—the “Rogue” and the “Worm.” He shouted so loud that he could have been heard over a mile away, and nobody hearing his shouts could have helped choking up with fear.
The more Don Severo thundered, the redder and more congested his face became. No doubt he was afraid of bursting, for suddenly he muted his fury, though in such a way as to announce clearly that this was merely a short respite and that when his two overseers had given him their explanations, he would return to a display of his vocabulary’s shining gems.
Don Severo was the oldest of the three Montellano brothers, owners of this great mahogany camp and of two smaller ones situated on the other side of the river. The most important was called La Armonía, the others La Estancia and La Piedra Alta.
La Armonía covered an area so large that it had been found necessary to divide it into four regions or camps: north, east, south, and west. The boundaries of the exploited territory were very vague; it had been difficult to determine them clearly because the property was all buried in the jungle. Streams ran near its edges, and these had sometimes been taken as its natural boundaries. From one frontier of the exploited territory to the other, it measured at least fifty miles as a bird flies, a distance that seemed easily doubled in walking or on horseback because of such natural obstacles as rocks, gorges, rivers, and swamps.
The north camp was under the personal direction of Don Severo. Each of the other camps was in charge of trusted overseers, foremen, and some assistants.
Don Félix, the second brother, looked after the accounts in the central office of the administration, known as “the village.”
The administration office was not situated in the center of the camps, but at one extreme edge, near the bank of the river that carried the wood to the sea. This allowed the management to supervise and control the cargoes of wood set going down the river, make a reasonable estimate of their extent, enter their number in the books, and calculate their value. This location also allowed the personnel to circulate more easily between the central office and the various camps, using canoes called cayucos and paddling along tributary streams, all other means of communication being precarious. To tell the truth, it was often impossible to paddle up the small streams, but the owners of the camps had chosen this site as best for their central office, their chief reasons having been strategic. The exploitation of this area had been begun by an American group, which in time, having found a richer region, had ceded it to the Montellano brothers.
The youn
gest brother, Don Acacio, managed the camps on the other bank of the river. That completed the organization of the business as settled by common agreement among the three brothers.
Don Severo had so much to do in his own camp that he could not go to inspect the other camps every two or three weeks. The routes between them were so bad and so long that a tour of inspection of the three camps, not counting his own, would have taken him fifteen or twenty days, especially if he should wish to visit the dumps. He had, then, to be satisfied with an inspection every three months, and that was anything but a pleasure tour. It was, in fact, a penance that ought to have merited divine indulgence and direct admission to paradise.
Don Félix could not undertake this inspection because it was impossible for him to leave the central office, the heart and brain of the camps.
To the office came the customers. It was there that tools and equipment were received, that everything required for the existence of the workers was stored. The invoices were received there, as were official communications from the tax office, letters from banks and from customers, and reports from agents in New York and London, with information about the state of the market in mahogany and of the timber trade in general.
Thanks to his energy and to his long experience, Don Severo was clearly the man to direct the exploitation and hauling of the mahogany. It was for this reason that the hardest job had been given to him, leaving to Don Félix the more agreeable administrative work.
In his distant post Don Acacio was as indefatigable as his brothers, but he was even more greedy than they—and more irritable. From the time the three Montellanos had bought the camps, he had hardly set foot in the central office or even risked sending a messenger across the swampy roads. For long periods of time at a stretch his brothers did not know whether he was alive or whether his corpse was rotting somewhere.
It was not certain that Don Severo and Don Félix would have grieved much to know that their brother Acacio had been murdered, that fever had carried him off, that a jaguar had devoured him, that a scorpion had mortally stung him, or that he had drowned in the swamps.
Very probably if he had left the dumps well enough supplied with mahogany logs—this was the only thing in the world that interested the Montellanos—the other two would not have been able to shed one small tear over the premature end of their younger brother. In any case, they would have consoled themselves quickly by thinking that the profits from then on would be divided into two parts instead of three.
Don Severo was making his inspection in the south camp and was directing his amiable words to El Pícaro and El Gusano. He had set out very early on horseback, accompanied by El Pícaro, intending to note the quantities of mahogany felled and collected in the various dumps and ready to be sent floating down the rivers. At each dump he estimated with a quick glance the number of piled-up logs and then let loose his fury.
“So this is all the work done in three months! How is it possible to have produced so little in three long months? It’s a crime, a sin against all the saints!”
And every time this happened, El Pícaro gave the same reply: “But, Don Severo, there are still other dumps where you will find plenty of logs.”
This did not stop Don Severo from declaring at the next dump that it had fewer logs than the one before, so that as his inspection progressed, his anger grew. This anger was slowly changing to a mad fury, a demented rage. When, on returning to the camp office after an exhausting ride, they found El Gusano stretched out full length on the floor and helplessly drunk, Don Severo struck him with his whip, lashes that El Gusano did not even appear to feel, being in a world in which grief and pain seem as sweet as syrup.
Then Don Severo began to bang the crude wooden table, and each phrase of his discourse, emphasized with disgraceful oaths, was underlined by thwacks of his whip on the table, the other pieces of furniture, and the door: “I ought to tear your guts out! There’s no excuse for bastards like you! Hell would be too good for the two of you.”
In his rage he rushed on: “But, by the devil and all the carrion-eating curs, what have you been doing these three months? Scratching your asses and picking your noses? Answer me!”
El Pícaro stayed on the other side of the table, where he had barricaded himself against Don Severo’s anger. As things went from bad to worse, he cautiously moved nearer the door, ready to escape.
“Are you going to speak up, you rat?”
“All the trunks of the trees were cluttered up with roots.”
“With roots! With roots! Is that a reason?”
“We had to build scaffolds at least two yards high to get at the trunks,” argued El Pícaro.
“Anybody would think it’s the first time that has happened! As if I myself didn’t have to do it for years and years with nearly every tree. I myself have built scaffolds because the branches and the roots were nearly ten feet up. That didn’t prevent me from making the men produce up to three and four tons every day. But you, you pair of good-for-nothing overseers, whom I leave in charge of the simplest work in the world in return for wages as high as a contractor’s—you find a way to produce four times less. You’re a pair of bandits, thieves who take my money to drink yourselves silly. Hardly one ton a day per man!”
El Pícaro sidled a little toward the door and said: “Pardon, but the amount is more than two and a half tons a day per man.” He spoke in a frightened tone as if to defend himself.
“Shut your mouth when I speak to you. Understand? Two tons! Did I or didn’t I order you to produce at least four? And to top it all, the rains are coming. Within four weeks we’ll be beginning to haul them to the water, and what am I going to dispatch? A ton and a half! That’s not the way we’ll be able to pay the sixty thousand pesos due on the first of January.”
He looked round the room furiously, unseeingly. His bloodshot eyes falling again on El Gusano, he rushed at him and kicked him in the legs: “Pig, pig of a hog!”
El Pícaro decided that the moment had come to take up the defense of his pal: “This is the first time he’s been drunk for six weeks, for the simple reason that we haven’t had even a drop of aguardiente. Until yesterday, when the Turk came, we couldn’t get any bottles. It was natural, then, for him to drink a little.”
“A little! Magnificent! Where’s your bottle?”
El Pícaro went to a corner of the office and from under the bed drew out a half-empty bottle. He thought that Don Severo would snatch it from his hands and smash it on the floor, but that was not what happened.
Don Severo had shouted so much that his throat was dry. He seized the bottle, looked at it against the light, shook it, and took several good swallows. He cleared his throat, shook the bottle again, and drank from it a second time. It seemed to calm him a little.
“Refreshing!” he said more calmly.
But his calmness was of short duration. It disappeared almost immediately when he remembered the reason for his presence in this place.
Three days before, Don Severo had received from Don Acacio the first and only letter he had written since he had been in the camp. He had sent the letter by a foreman who had traveled on horseback. Don Acacio informed his brothers that the exploitation of the small camps he managed must be suspended for the time being. Deeply shut in between two hills and two mountains, the camps had been turned into two swamps by the recent heavy rainfalls. The oxen could not walk without getting bogged down, as a consequence of which it was impossible to transport logs to the dumps. Even more serious, the cutting had had to be interrupted because the cutters were being drowned in mud.
This short letter brought Don Severo the disastrous news that the cutting in Don Acacio’s camps must be regarded as lost that year. The loss was all the worse because it represented more or less half of the total production. The deficit would probably prevent them from meeting the obligations they had contracted in order to buy the business, and in that case it was possible that the company that had sold it to them would foreclose on their p
roperty and resell it to others, as it had a right to do by the contract, the terms of which were very hard because of the small down payment made by the Montellano brothers.
Immediately, Don Severo and Don Felix had met in the central office to discuss the situation, and both had reached the conclusion that there was only one method of saving the year’s production.
They admitted that Don Acacio, the youngest, was the most energetic of the three when it came to obtaining the maximum yield from the men. If he wrote that his district was temporarily unexploitable, that must be the case, and nobody in the world would make more effort than he to obtain something. In these circumstances, then, seeing that the two small camps could not produce anything, it was necessary at least to double the production of the big camp or, if it was possible, quadruple it. It was entirely a question of yield, because the mahogany was abundant enough in La Armonía to make up any deficit. Nobody could be better qualified than Don Acacio, assisted by the foremen he had trained, to obtain this result. Don Severo and Don Felix knew Don Acacio would run grave risks, but they had to have recourse to the last possibility if they wished to win the game.
Don Acacio’s messenger returned with their reply inviting him to move to La Armonía with his men to start new dumps.
Don Acacio, at least as intelligent as his older brothers, was a step ahead of them: he was already on the way toward La Armonía when he met the messenger, fortunately for the latter, who was on the verge of being bogged down, together with his horse.
When Don Acacio and his men arrived at the principal camp to get provisions and tools, Don Severo had left for the south camp, administered by El Pícaro.
The aguardiente seemed to have a soothing effect on Don Severo, but only for a short time. He was thinking that all hope was lost as far as the other two camps were concerned. On the other hand, he had counted on an output double what he had found in El Pícaro’s dumps.