by B. TRAVEN
“Naturally, he would make an awful noise,” the pump-master remarked. “I know that kid, I do. There wasn’t a day in the year when he wasn’t in the water swimming and splashing and making such a row that you would think he owned the whole river all by himself. In the water he is like a fish, the kid is. He would have got out just like that, shoes on or no shoes on. And if he had met with some difficulty he would have hollered like the very devil himself, that’s what he’d have done.”
The Garcia had listened to every word; not once had she interrupted the talk. Now, however, she felt that she had to defend her boy. “Certainly he would have worked himself out of the river, and all alone, and he would have yelled, too, if he couldn’t get out. But how could he yell? He was wearing his new shoes, so he wasn’t safe on his feet. Running across the bridge fast as he could and not thinking of anything but of Manuel. And so he stumbled with his shoes against the rim. Had he been barefooted, he would have got hold somehow. But the soles were smooth and polished like a mirror. Before he even realized what was happening to him he had already tumbled over and had knocked his head against the rim or against a post. So he became unconscious instantly, and before he could come to, he was already under the water with his belly full and his windpipe choked. He never got any chance to make a noise.”
Having told her story so as to make everyone see that she was not out of her mind, the Garcia had nothing more to say. Nobody could convince her that the kid might be somewhere else. She knew he was in the river and she had to get him out. That was all she was thinking of now.
13
The men or women were by no means satisfied with the Garcia’s narrative. They said she was just seeing things because she was not herself any more. Someone remembered the boys who had been sitting on the bridge and singing at about the time when Carlos was supposed to have fallen into the river. These boys declared that they had seen nothing and heard nothing, and that they were sitting at the end of the bridge on this side, facing the water and thinking only of their songs; but they were positive that the kid could not have fallen in the river without their seeing or hearing it. Of course, they added, the night was so black that they could not have seen the kid if he had been half the length of the bridge away from them. They would have paid little attention to a splash because they were fully occupied with their singing. After all, fish jumping out of the water to catch flies and mosquitoes make the same noise.
“Now, there you can hear it for yourself, Carmelita,” the pump-master said; “these youngsters have been sitting here near the spot during the whole evening and they haven’t heard a thing, not the slightest splash. So you see you are just making up a story which has no foundation. It simply couldn’t have happened the way you imagine.”
The Garcia was silent.
Everyone produced another idea with which to convince the Garcia that she was wrong. No one supported her.
A couple of men, noticing that I had not joined the discussion, asked me bluntly what I thought of the Garcia’s tale. I knew where the kid was. Sleigh knew it too. I saw him shrug his shoulders as if he wanted to answer on my behalf. Then I spoke. “What can I say, amigos? I don’t know all the nooks and corners, holes and trees and tunnels around here where a little boy might hide himself. So what can I say? Anybody might fall in the river; why not a boy?”
“Well, then, do you really think he may have fallen in the river?”
“I’ve told you my opinion. It’s possible. Anything under heaven is possible. Therefore it is also possible that the kid may have fallen in the water. Where there is water, anybody may fall in any time, whether he wants to or not. That’s the way with all water.”
“The señor is perfectly right,” a man next to me said. “Don’t you folks remember—it’s only a year back—when in this river, only two miles farther down, the Egyptian was drowned?—I mean that Egyptian who had his choza there and who planted onions and lettuce for the market.”
“Yes, I remember it well,” another stated, “but the circumstances were entirely different. That Egyptian was taking a bath in the river and he unexpectedly reached a deep washout or some sort of whirlpool into which he disappeared and never came up again.”
An old Indian was nearing our group. He came close and asked me: “What do you think, señor, what we might do and what we should do?”
Half a hundred people were talking and denying and talking again, yet none had suggested anything practical. The old Indian was the first to do so.
“Since you ask me, I would advise that the river be searched along both sides of the bridge and also for a hundred fifty feet or so down the stream. If the kid really is in the water, then we’ll find him and so we’ll know at least where he is. What is more, if the men who have gone in search of him return and have not found him in either place and in the meantime we have not discovered him in the river, then we will know that we have to search the whole jungle.”
The Garcia had crossed the bridge again. With the lantern in one hand she was standing at the other end of the bridge. After a while she went close to the rim and held the lantern as far out over the water as she could. Suddenly she let out a horrible scream.
A few boys ran across to her.
They came back right away, tapped their heads, and said: “The señora must have gone nuts, for nothing is in the water.”
It was hardly necessary to tell us that, for even if the kid were in the water at that particular spot, the Garcia would not have been able to see him, so muddy was the water, so dim the light of the lantern.
Nevertheless, the Garcia now yelled continuously. No sooner had she finished one of those long plaintive cries than she uttered another, still more plaintive, still longer. It was the crying of a primitive Indian woman bewailing the death of a loved one. It wasn’t weeping, it was a howl which seemed to accuse the heavens. It was the howl of an animal whose mate or child has been killed. But I recognized in that almost savage howl the same deep sorrow that one finds in the silent weeping of an American woman.
If all the women here had been convinced that the kid had been drowned, they would have joined the Garcia in her lamentation. And they would have joined her with all the compassion that mothers and wives are capable of when they open their hearts and souls to the suffering and pain of another mother or another wife. For only a mother and wife knows what a mother and wife suffers when bemoaning the loss of someone beloved. Because what befalls one mother, the same befalls every other mother on earth at the same moment, wherever she may live, for in all eternity it is never just one single woman, a Garcia woman in a Central American jungle, who is in deep pain, but it is always all womanhood that suffers and weeps.
No other woman here was sure of the kid’s death. They remained quiet. Some called their little ones to them as if they might be in danger, and they held their babies against their breasts as the safest place on earth they could offer them.
Two men crossed the bridge and, ever so delicately and lovingly, led the Garcia woman back to this side and made her sit on a bench in the pump-master’s portico.
The pump-master woman gave her water to drink, sat beside her, and, in a motherly way, stroked her hair and occasionally dried her tears with the ends of her shawl.
The men were standing around, once more wondering what to do and how to behave in this situation. They were uneasy in the presence of a mother who had lost her baby and who, in spite of all the sympathy shown her, was alone in the world. They had a feeling of guilt, they shuffled about and tried to hide themselves. No one spoke. Whenever the woman cried out again, the men’s faces became distorted. Their uneasiness became finally so unbearable that they began to do what every man on earth does when he finds himself superfluous. They got very busy about nothing in particular.
Without uttering many words and without waiting for a leader, they ran like ants this way and that. Some carried timber, others took their machetes and went into the bush to get more wood. Huge fires were lighted on both banks
and arranged so that both sides of the bridge were illuminated. One stripped and waded into the river. He started diving alongside the bridge. It was a daring job and might easily have cost the diver his life.
The river-bed was boggy and covered with all sorts of plants, partly tropical water shrubs, partly shrubs and bushes torn away from the banks far upstream and caught by the bridge posts when they were carried down by the current. This marine jungle was infested with water snakes, crabs, and young alligators, not to mention the hundreds of other tropical underwater creatures.
The swimmer who keeps to the surface will rarely be in danger, but a diver may easily be caught. Yet, a few minutes later, another man stripped and started diving too. Soon there were six bronze-brown human bodies in the water. Women and girls lined the river-banks and the bridge to watch the naked men searching for the kid. The lean, brawny bodies, which looked youthful in spite of the fact that most of the men were fathers, seemed to be covered by a metallic gold film. Their thick, long, wiry hair appeared still blacker and thicker when their heads popped up on the surface. Breathing deeply, they gazed up to the bridge, where men and women were watching them, and said not a word. But one could easily read in their dark brown eyes the answer to the unspoken question: “Nada! Nada! Nothing, nothing!”
Among the men in the river there now appeared a very old Indian with white hair. His body, while still well formed and lean, was less brawny, less agile and flexible than those of the others. His skin was less golden. And his chest was not so strong. Hence he could not stay under water as long as the young could. Yet whenever the others, the young ones, showed signs of getting tired, he was the one who fired them on again.
Carrying a long iron hook tied to a lasso, the pump-master strode up to the bridge. Slowly he walked along the rim, constantly throwing in the hook and dragging it along the bottom. Whenever he thought he had caught something, he pulled it up—to find only some weeds or twigs.
Sleigh was standing near the pump.
I went up to him and said: “If we only had a boat, more might be done. A pity that the pump-master hasn’t got one.”
“There is a boat down the river that belongs to a Dutchman who raises chickens and grows tomatoes there and never makes any money. He has a boat all right, home-made. But it is at least three miles from here, if not four. And what is worse, the trail can’t be made before the sun comes up.”
We walked together to another group where Sleigh started talking about things which had nothing to do with the kid. He was right. One cannot talk all the time about the same thing; you have to go on living, boy dead or no boy dead.
14
It was a picture—a picture exuberant in its greatness, in its truthfulness, in its liveliness, in its colors, in its constant changes.
On both banks huge bonfires were flaring. They threw their flames high up into the air and flickered in the mild breeze. A hundred different shadows, long and short, bulky and thin, darted now this way, now that, now playing upon the ground, then sweeping over the water or along the bridge, until at last they were swallowed up by the jungle walls—only to shoot out again two seconds later. On the bridge a score of men and boys were lined up, holding torches and flaming sticks over the water. Others were running like deer up and down the banks to start new fires or to bring light to a diver who was shouting for it. Long pennants of smoke followed these torch runners.
Bronze-brown men and youngsters were hurling fresh fuel into the fires. Swarms, thousands, millions of sparks rose towards the dark sky.
Here and there boys were kneeling on the bridge, leaning with their torches far over the rim, and a black head dripping with water would appear on the surface of the muddy river.
Women and girls gaily dressed in their cheap but bright-colored dance gowns, with crowns of beautiful wild flowers on their heads and with little bunches of flowers fastened on their breasts and girdles—many of the women carrying babies in their arms, others leading children by the hand—were wandering back and forth across the bridge. Now and then half a dozen people would suddenly run to a definite spot on the bridge, where someone was shouting as if he had seen or found something of importance.
Little clouds and flags of smoke were flying over our heads like strange night birds, like fairies, like ghosts trying to materialize and falling apart at the same moment.
The surface of the river seemed to be bedecked with thousands of floating gold coins. Into that river of gold, naked human bodies were diving. Here they came out again, swam to a bridge post, wiped the water off their faces, and shook their thick black hair. There one diver was hanging on to the post with one hand while with the other he pulled thorns off his legs. One diver left the water and went to a fire to warm his hands and feet, which had become numb. With his back to the river and his face to the flames, he stretched out his arms to the fire and closed and opened his hands quickly, while a friend of his put a lighted cigarette between his wet lips.
A child that had been asleep awoke and whined. Another child, awakened by the first, began to cry. Their mothers ran up to feed them from their breasts.
Most of the children had fallen asleep. They lay on the ground near the portico, huddled together in groups to keep warm and feel safe. Some of the children were wrapped in a blanket as if they were sticks. Others were covered with ragged pieces of cotton cloth. Some were lying on mats of the kind put between the saddle and the back of a horse. Others were sleeping on old sugar sacks. Many were stretched out on the bare sandy ground.
The bigger children were, of course, having the time of their lives. Here they were watching the divers. There they were betting on which of the divers would stay longest under water. Others were more interested in the bonfires and torches. A few practical jokers of the next generation were playing nasty little tricks on smaller boys and girls. Some boys who had never had a chance were now at last testing their skill as musicians on the mouth-organs snatched from the trousers left ashore by the divers.
So it appeared that everybody had his own kind of fun and was making the best of a party which two hours before had looked like a complete flop. Even the mules of the caravan were partaking of that lively affair in their own fashion.
They were grazing near the banks. Now and then they brayed sadly into the night and were answered by others out on the prairie. Frequently, when they got in the way of the men who were busy near the river, they got kicked in the hams. Yet they took it as a friendly gesture and did not move—until they themselves decided to change places, which is the way the stubborn always win.
The night was getting cool.
Aided by a neighbor, the pump-master woman was in her kitchen making coffee. A very fine kitchen it was. All the neighbors agreed to that. The kitchens of all the huts in the settlement on the opposite river-bank were far less luxurious. No one else had his kitchen separated from the main room, which in all the homes was the only room. The fact that the pump-master had a separate kitchen proved that he was of a higher class. The hearth was a wooden case filled with earth, like Sleigh’s. The pump-master and Sleigh were the only people in the community elegant enough to possess that last word in stoves. But the pride of the pump-master woman’s kitchen, and the reason why everybody thought it the finest and classiest in the world, were the various pots and dishes she could boast of. They were all earthenware, but they were richly ornamented with all sorts of fancy designs. On many vessels these designs represented flowers, bees, squirrels, butterflies, antelopes, birds, tigers, lions, dogs, coyotes. Yet of all these flowers, insects, birds, and animals, not one looked natural; they were creations of an Indian artist who was in no way satisfied with the work of the Creator and thought he could do a lot better if he were given the power to create life. Some of these pots were neatly arranged on a shelf, others were hanging in rows against boards nailed to the posts on which the roof rested. Whenever a woman visitor came to see the pump-master woman, she just stood in front of these rows of pots and gazed at them with shinin
g eyes as if she were beholding paradise. All the other families in the settlement used pots and vessels of the crudest sort, most of them broken or cracked. Two families, and the Garcia family was one of them, owned only potsherds. So very high class was the pump-master woman that she actually used these beautiful vessels and did not keep them just for decoration.
The coffee was cooked with crude brown sugar. In another pot black beans were being boiled. A piece of sheet iron about twenty inches square leaned against the wall—to be used to heat tortillas. In a reed basket tied to a piece of rusty wire dangling from a rafter, the tortillas left over from an earlier meal were kept. There were other foodstuffs in that basket. In fact, it was the pantry of the house.
The Garcia had gone once again to her hut. What she was looking for or what she expected to find, she herself would not have been able to say if she were asked. When she returned, carrying the lantern which seemed to have become a part of her, she watched the divers for a few minutes as if they were fishing for something she was not the least interested in. Then she walked with dragging feet, as if in a dream, towards the pump-master’s.
Manuel was sitting on a bench, gloomy and brooding. He saw his mother standing beside him. With wide, glassy eyes he stared at her. An idea entered his mind. He jumped up, crossed the bridge, and, along the sandy path which passed through the jungle to distant villages, he walked into the night.
15
The pump-master was throwing his hook untiringly into the water. Like an expert, he carefully sounded the bottom, trying to get the right feel for the shrubs and for what might be the kid’s body. Occasionally he pulled out a load of dripping weeds.
The divers began to show fatigue. Less and less often did they dive, and longer and longer did they hold on to the bridge posts before diving again. A few did not go to the bridge posts at all, but swam or waded to the banks where they could stand on their feet.