by B. TRAVEN
“Get up now, you scum! And fill in the grave.”
When the work was finished El Faldón said: “On the way now! We’ve hardly got time to reach camp tonight.”
“But,” Urbano protested, “what about Pascasio? Aren’t we going to bury him?”
“We’ll leave his carrion here. The vultures will take charge of it.”
“If I had known that only that dog was going to get a grave, I wouldn’t have done anything.”
“That’s why I made you fetch the two bodies. But what there is of him will stay right here. A pig like him doesn’t need a Christian burial. He doesn’t deserve it. Now then, get a move on. Let’s go.”
El Faldón went up to La Mecha’s horse, which was tied to a tree.
“I ought to drag you by its tail, but I’ve got no time. I prefer to hurry and get back to the camp. The devil knows if we can get there tonight.”
He jerked the lasso and Urbano fell over on the ground like a bundle. Revolver in hand, El Faldón went and tied his hands.
“Stand up and turn around!”
He secured the Indian’s hands behind his back and untied his feet.
“Now mount!”
Stupidly, like anyone who has never been on a horse’s back, Urbano tried to heave himself up. El Faldón found himself obliged to put his revolver in his belt in order to help the Indian with both his hands and even his knees and teeth.
During this operation Urbano might have been able to take advantage of the occasion, as of all the other openings offered during the next ten minutes, to try to escape or even to assault the foreman. He knew perfectly well what awaited him on return to the camp. He knew that when night fell he would bitterly regret not having shared the fate of his unhappy companion, who at least no longer suffered. But his strength was beginning to ebb and his energy had left him. The rapid flight and the dash to the arroyo had exhausted him. Then the sight of Pascasio’s struggle with the foremen had excited him as if he himself had been the hunted animal. And, finally, Pascasio’s death showed him the futility of every attempt at flight. The little strength remaining to him had been expended in digging the trench with the branch. He was in such a depressed physical and moral state that if El Faldón had untied him and left him free on the back of the horse he could not have taken advantage of the occasion to flee, but would have followed El Faldón docilely. In the morning he would doubtless recover his strength and reproach himself for the mistakes he was making. Then he would wish that he had fought to win his freedom or die for it.
“We can’t go any farther.” These were the first words El Faldón uttered after they started on their way back to the camp. Night had fallen. The sky was covered with clouds. The horses advanced laboriously. El Faldón had lost the way, and it had been the horses that had brought him back to the main trail, but now they were getting lost, and every ten steps they tried to turn to the right or the left, warned by instinct that they were going to get bogged down. El Faldón felt the danger: he was running the risk of getting lost in the jungle. So he decided not to proceed, but to camp where he was. There was no need to fear that Urbano would escape, for to try it at night was impossible. Furthermore, he knew that the Indians had lost their packages of provisions when crossing the arroyo. He and La Mecha had felt so sure that they would catch the Indians and get back to the camp the same night that they had not brought any provisions with them. If Urbano tried to run away, he would die in the jungle. He would not die of hunger, because like every Indian, he would know how to find plants on which to subsist. But he would have to cover great distances without finding even a palm tree, and to cross the jungle it was not enough merely to have sufficient food.
Assisted by Urbano, El Faldón succeeded in lighting a fire for warmth. Their clothes were still went with arroyo water and the drops of rain that fell on them from the trees. El Faldón took the precaution of tying up Urbano before wrapping himself in his sarape and settling to sleep near the fire. It rained heavily during the night. When dawn began to break, both men—the guard and the guarded—felt relieved at being able to continue their journey.
Don Acacio and one of his foremen, El Pechero, had just sat down at the table when El Faldón, leading his prisoner at the end of a rope, stood at the office door.
El Faldón went into the dining room.
“And La Mecha?” asked Don Acacio. “Where’s he?”
“The son-of-a-bitch killed him.”
“And the son-of-a-bitch?”
“I killed him. He had attacked me from behind.”
“Two men lost! A foreman and a peon! The next time you’ll pay me for it. This has never happened to me, understand? To lose at the same time a workman and my best overseer. Besides, not one has ever escaped me. I’ve chased them a day, two days if necessary, but I’ve always brought them back. Have you at least brought back the other one?”
“Yes, chief.”
Urbano appeared in the doorway, his hands still tied.
“Come in, you,” shouted Don Acacio without getting up from his chair. “So you wanted to slip away, eh? So you wanted to escape and to rob me?”
Don Acacio tore off a piece of tortilla and dipped it in his soup.
“I didn’t want to rob you, little chief.”
“You still owe me more than two hundred and fifty pesos, and if you save yourself from paying your debts with your work, you’re robbing me! Now I’ll add one hundred pesos more to your account.”
“It is well, little chief.”
“As regards my good co-worker La Mecha, he owed me two hundred and thirty pesos. I ask myself how he came to owe me that much. Anyhow, as he liked to run after the old whores, and as you were the cause of his death, so that now the vultures are eating him, you’ll be the one to pay me those two hundred and thirty pesos. Now then, how much do you owe me? Well, whatever it is, I’m not going to bother adding it up, least of all while I’m having a meal. All I can say to you, Urbano—that’s your name, isn’t it?—is that before you’ll be able to pay your debts, you and I will be old men, very old. But that’s your business.”
“Yes, little chief.”
“Go to the cookhouse and get a mouthful to eat. Later, when I’ve had my siesta, we’ll get down to serious explanations, because I’m going to hang you by your thumbs and by something else I know about. We’ll see what remains of your skin then. I think that’ll make you shed all desire to run away again! Say, cook, what’s the matter with my stew?”
“Coming now, chief,” replied the cook from the hut that served as a cookhouse.
“Did you understand what I just said to you, or don’t you speak Spanish?” he asked Urbano.
“I understand very well,” Urbano said in a tone of indifference. “With your permission, little chief,” he added, bowing and going out.
“Let the cook untie you,” Don Acacio shouted. “I’ve told you you won’t save yourself from this.”
“No, little chief,” the Indian replied, moving away.
“Winds of rebellion are definitely blowing around here,” Don Acacio said to El Pechero and El Faldón, who had just sat down and was beginning to pull himself together. “It’s the fault of my brothers. They’ve been too easygoing with the men and have let them do as they please. Result—less mahogany. If things go on this way until Christmas, we’ll all be begging alms from the Indians in the streets of Villahermosa—the Indians we’ve enriched by our generosity, by filling their hands with money. When those swine arrive here, the only thing they think about is loitering around or stoning to death my best foremen, the ones I’ve trained myself. But this must change! They’ll see what happens when my patience is exhausted. Now, today, I’ll begin showing them who I am!”
This discourse, promising energetic measures, had not been delivered in one breath. Between phrases Don Acacio had taken the time necessary to chew and swallow. One after another each of the men around the table took advantage of these pauses to approve the master’s words with a servile “Yes, chief
.”
They wished in this way to bear witness that they shared Don Acacio’s opinion. In reality, they were incapable of having any personal opinion, but it satisfied them to put in a word and pretend to take part in the discussion. They felt flattered to be above the peons, who did not have even the right to approve.
All that was asked of a peon was blind obedience, even when he was ordered to throw himself in the water with a rock at his neck. For the slave there is only one virtue and one right: that of considering as gospel whatever his owner says. The slave who neither practices that virtue nor exercises that right contravenes the rules, and in such circumstances to kill him or torture him is a meritorious act that never receives enough praise.
After eating a little, Urbano sat down in the cookhouse. He felt worn out and stupefied. When he had returned to his hut, he had found a few provisions that Pascasio and he had left behind so as not to load themselves too heavily. Among these had been some scraps of tobacco. Now he rolled himself a cigarette and squatted down to smoke in silence. From time to time he replied to remarks directed at him by the cook or the woman who helped him. As time went on, his agony increased. Had Don Acacio and El Faldón battered him to pieces immediately on his arrival back at camp, he would now be stretched out on the ground or perhaps washing his wounds in the arroyo—or he might even be off hauling logs. “It could be,” he said to himself, “it could be… .” He watched the smoke rising from his cigarette. “It could be… .”
He did not know exactly what this “could be” meant. He was trying not to think about Don Acacio’s threat. He thought of taking flight again, though he knew that this second time he would have far fewer chances of success. Alone, he could not bring it off, but he clung to the idea of flight as to a life preserver. This time he would defend himself, beat down the overseers with stones or sticks, not so much to avoid his fate (which was settled beforehand) as to make them kill him as Pascasio had been killed. Once he was dead, Don Acacio could not do anything more to him.
As for his body, they could do what they liked with it. Was Pascasio now greatly troubled that a jaguar was eating him, that rats were gnawing at him, or that he was serving as a depository for flies’ eggs? With the disappearance of his best comrade, life seemed senseless to Urbano. Why go on living? To stay here in the jungle suffering until his account was worked off? With the single prospect of being beaten to pulp each week or, still worse, hanged? And all because, in spite of all his efforts, he could not produce as much as they demanded. Away in his own village he had always eaten badly, but here the food was much worse. So then?
The office, the bungalows occupied by Don Acacio and the foremen, the cookhouse, and the huts of the workmen were grouped on a sort of open space on one bank of the river. From where he was sitting, Urbano could see the swift current and the opposite shore. The muddy water was carrying branches and roots of trees. Where was it taking them? Urbano did not know. None of the peons had the slightest idea of the course of the river; nobody seemed to give it a thought. He was thinking that the river must end somewhere, in a peaceful region where it passed beautiful villages peopled by men who loved their neighbors. The current rolled precipitously toward such a region—no doubt to reach more quickly that Eden in which peace and goodness reigned.
Two weeks earlier one of the boys had drowned while moving tree trunks with his comrades. Perched on top of a raft made of branches, he was trying to lift up a log when the raft was jerked from its cable and broken apart by the current, which swept the boy away. Because he could not swim, he was flung over three times and then disappeared in the foam. The next day they found his body about one mile down the river among some branches. Urbano had helped to disentangle it. He still remembered the serene expression on the dead man’s face. What a contrast the expression on the drowned man’s face was to that of boys who had just been flogged or hanged! He must surely have seen, though from far away, the enchanted village toward which the current rushed.
Urbano rose painfully, went to the riverbank, and began looking for a stone. He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he spoke aloud to himself: “If I tie a stone to my feet I’ll soon sink to the bottom. Then it’ll all be finished and there won’t be any more Don Acacio to torture me.”
At that exact moment he heard Don Acacio calling him: “Hey, you! Where have you got to? Come here. We still have something to tell each other.”
Urbano immediately forgot everything. He was so accustomed to obey that his dreams vanished the moment the voice of his master was heard.
He hurried toward the office. “At your orders, little chief.”
Don Acacio ambled out of the office smoking a cigarette and saw Urbano hurrying toward him. In his hand he held a heavy whip that was beginning to be curved with wear. As he walked he fixed the whiphandle firmly around his wrist. He came to within two steps of Urbano.
“Good, you Indian son of a bitch. We two are going to have a little private talk, you and I. You have to learn once and forever that you’re not going to leave here before paying your debts down to the last centavo.”
From one of the huts the melody of the waltz Over the Waves reached them. Don Acacio turned and looked at his girl in the doorway of the hut, swaying her hips in time with the music and smoking a cigarette.
“Don’t go so far away to do what you’re going to do, my pet,” she shouted. “There’s so little entertainment here that I’m dying of boredom.”
“Shut your putrid mouth and go inside at once if you don’t want me to give you a hiding too,” growled Don Acacio.
“Just to think that he refuses to entertain me even when it doesn’t cost anything! I think I won’t stay very long!” the girl replied in a rage, entering the hut.
“Come,” continued Don Acacio to Urbano. “We don’t need witnesses for what we’re going to say to each other. We’ll go a little farther away, to the riverbank. Nobody will hear you there.”
From the hut to the river was only a few steps, but the distance was long enough for Urbano to make the most varied plans. He was following a few paces behind Don Acacio. As he went along the lash of the whip, suspended from the handle, was dancing constantly before his eyes. At times Don Acacio’s alcoholic breath reached his nostrils. Certainly Urbano himself took a swig of aguardiente whenever he had a chance. In other times, in his village, he had often drunk more than his share when he had money in his pocket. But he had never felt so nauseated by the smell of alcohol as he did now. This fetid odor did not arouse in him any desire for a drink. On the contrary, it disgusted him horribly. He experienced the sensation felt by a smoker who, when he has kissed a pretty girl who smokes a daily pack of cigarettes, swears that he will never smoke again.
They reached the slope and went down it. The enormous whip wavered before Urbano’s eyes and at times its tip seemed to strike the agitated water. It seemed to him to cut the current that rushed toward those places he had just been dreaming of. But at the same time there came to him the painful memory of the night when they had hanged him and a dozen of his companions by the feet and had lashed them unmercifully because they had not been able to move their quota of logs to the farthest dump. That had been exactly three days earlier, and it had been that barbarous treatment which had driven him and Pascasio to flee. They had made up their minds never again to suffer such punishment. The welts on his body were still fresh and bloody. Suddenly a terrible fear invaded Urbano. He was afraid of the new blows about to fall on him and reopen his still raw wounds. He feared the pain awaiting him, which he knew he would not survive. One second later his fear was matched by desperation, and the two feelings were transformed into courage, courage such as he had never felt: a fury unknown to him and seeming to possess someone else who was not he.
About a dozen yards from the bank of the river there rose an enormous dried-out tree that seemed to have lost all its sap and its strength either from age or from prolonged contact with water. Not one leaf adorned its branches, which pointed sadly hea
venward like the arms of a grotesque scarecrow. It was the only tree to be seen in that place. Along the edge of the river only dwarf vegetation grew, sunk in the sand and so poor and miserable that it seemed certain not to survive the next flood.
“Let’s go over there, to that tree,” Don Acacio ordered. “We’ll settle our accounts there. At least there we’ll be left alone without witnesses, away from the chatter of those whores who imagine that for us there’s nothing but pleasure and amusement and that we have mountains of money.”
Urbano moved on toward the tree,
“Damn and blast it all! May the Devil take me! Why, I’ve forgotten the main thing!” shouted Don Acacio in a fury. “You won’t be able to stay on your feet if I don’t tie you tightly. Quick! Run back and fetch me a rope.”
Urbano climbed the slope swiftly, helping himself along with his hands. Two minutes later he returned with the lasso. Halfway down he hesitated a few seconds. The river water was flowing there below him, so free, so independent. Nobody flogged it; nobody tortured it. And that tree trunk looked so miserable, suggested such despair… .
Urbano closed his eyes sorrowfully. He remembered the horrible torture of that night, saw in his mind pieces of bleeding flesh that struck the unfortunate wretches in the face and got into their mouths when they opened them to scream or groan. Only the young workers cried out. The older hands simply shrank or collapsed under the blows. It was not their habit to show their sufferings or to ask for mercy. They were too proud for that, however enslaved they might be. They moaned silently, and the only sounds they emitted were of hatred. The more they suffered, the more they hated. The more they hated, the less they felt their pain and the more their spirits were set ablaze by the thought that one day—it might be far ahead, but it would surely come—one day they would be able to return blow for blow, and with interest, even though they might have to pay with their lives for this yearned-for revenge.