Bridge in the Jungle

by B. TRAVEN

  After a short while he returned, went to the hearth, and lit a new cigarette. Then he squatted Indian fashion on the floor facing Perez and me, who were sitting on his rotten wicker chairs.

  The baby of the girl under the mosquito bar whined softly. From the movement of the bar and by the gleam of the fire I saw the girl giving her baby to drink. Before the baby was satisfied, while he was still suckling, the girl snored again so heavily that the hut trembled.

  Both Perez and Sleigh got sleepy, let their heads drop upon their chests, and blinked into emptiness. In his sleep Sleigh sensed that his cigarette had gone out. He rose swaying as if he were drunk and walked in a shuffling manner to the hearth. His cigarette again lit, he leaned against a post and dozed off again.

  He slept only a few minutes. He woke up and walked to the door. Looking up to the sky, which had begun to clear and in which a few stars could be seen now, he said: “It is just past two. I thought it later.”

  I looked at my watch and said: “Twenty past.”

  “I’ll have to go to milk the cows now or they’ll get restless and start for the prairie. Perez, are you coming with me?”

  “Of course, vamonos!” He was so fast asleep that his cigarette had dropped without his being aware of it. Now he looked for it, lit it, and followed Sleigh, who, with a bucket in one hand, had already walked off to the corral.

  He shouted back: “Hey, Gales, why don’t you turn in for a coupla hours? You must be dog-tired and it will surely do you lots of good. Don’t you bother about me, man, I’ve got to get busy with them cows, you know. Hi, Perez, where are you? Are you coming?”

  Perez, just leaving the hut, said: “Now, don’t you holler, amigo. Here I am, always on the spot, just call on me for any trouble. Who, por la Santisima, put that damned log right in my way? Anyone could break his neck here, what with all sorts of sticks, logs, and stones lying about.”

  26

  As Perez had taken the little lamp with him, the hut was dark once more. A few forlorn embers gleamed on the hearth.

  I was left alone and since I did not know what better I could do, I groped my way towards the corner where the bed I had slept in last night and the night before was. It wasn’t a bed in the true sense of the word. It was more like a corrupted hammock.

  The bed in which Sleigh and his wife slept was shoved against one wall. It was similar to the one the Garcias had, but the network was made more carefully and the mattress consisted of a softer fiber. The corner in which the family bed stood was separated from the main room by a wall of sticks six feet high. The sticks which formed that wall were so far apart that one could put his finger between them. To get some privacy Sleigh’s woman had put up on this wall a few pieces of threadbare cotton goods.

  Well, I was tired. I took off my boots, unfastened my belt, and, sailor fashion, crawled into that hammock, which only the greedy landlady of a cheap boardinghouse would call a cot.

  Bridges, rivers without a downstream current, mule-drivers yelling for more coffee, alligators, asthmatic pumps which cough, queens of England waving a ragged handkerchief, bodies of little babies, naked Indians (some of them armless), black-haired heads popping out of prairie grass, lighted candles swimming under water like fish, cows with cougars on their necks, mouth-organs which play by themselves nailed to bridge posts, bandits riding on white burros, a picture of the Holy Virgin singing on a fiddle, Canada vanished from the earth and leaving mere emptiness behind, a few blurred lines from a Kansas City paper printed in Texas on a goat ranch, an oil well cemented with a splash in the water caused by a jumping bean, a girl with flowers in her hair dancing with a steel spring mattress which belongs to the president, a young woman with wreaths of fire-red flowers wound around her knees bent in an awkward position and crying: “No, no, I won’t, I won’t, don’t you dare, no, no, I say no and no,” battered enameled cups without bottoms but full of hot coffee and flying across a white table on which a sailor suit is weeping bitterly, a five-gallon hat walking through the night with no face under it—no, to hell with it, I could not sleep. Maybe it was the coffee. My head whirled. Yet I was as tired as a coal-heaver on a death ship. At last I dozed off, but not for long and I saw Mr. Erskin lying at the bottom of the river moving his hands and shouting: “Bring me a lantern which will obey orders, a lantern, please, a lantern for all my mules!” The water was very deep, twenty feet past two in the morning, but still I could see him because the water was lighted at the bottom. I didn’t know Mr. Erskin, I had never seen him, yet I knew it was he who sat on eggs and hatched grown-up yellowhoods which sang a song about oilmen who made cigars out of cement. Nobody but me could see Mr. Erskin lying in the water and I shouted to the people: “There are two little American boots in the river.” Nobody listened and they said: “We’d better put a crown on his head and say it is a scepter of the Toltecs.” Chinamen were coming and there was an explosion in the lake and a coffee pot drowned in a sack half filled with corn-cobs and held fast by alligators jumped high up in the air and a man dropped out of the pitch-dark clouds. He was an aviator milking a cow which had come home late and drunk, telling a little tin bottle lamp that two tigers and two lions went to a dance with the musicians stuck deep in the mud. And again dynamite was thrown in the lake and it exploded with a hundred reverberations.

  It was this explosion of dynamite that awoke me. There was another explosion, and still another and another. I was fully awake now and I heard shots being fired outside the hut.

  I got up and put my boots on. There was no longer any hope of getting some sleep.

  It was still night. Peeping through the wall, I saw the little flame of the tin lamp by the corral where Sleigh was milking the cows and Perez, holding the lamp, squatted beside him. I could hear their voices, although I could not understand what they were talking about.

  Boots on and belt fastened, I went to the door.

  At the Garcia’s yard there was a huge bonfire throwing its flames high up into the air. By this light I saw a score of Indians dismounting from their horses and firing their guns at the dark sky.

  I went closer to see what was up.

  The news of the kid’s disappearance had already traveled more than ten miles in every direction, in spite of the night, in spite of the fact that the nearest telephone was a hundred miles from here. Although old man Garcia was one of the poorest Indians of the region, he was beloved by all, for some reason or other. Therefore as soon as the people had heard the news, they had left their beds and homes and come to offer their help. So far they knew only that the boy was missing. Nevertheless they had all brought fireworks to be used in the event that the kid should be found dead.

  Among these Indians it is customary to ignite heaps of fireworks if a child dies, so that the angels in heaven will take notice that a new angelito is on his way up. Fireworks burnt at the death of an adult had the opposite consequences; that is to say, on hearing the fireworks the devil would wait close by the gate and look the newcomer over to see whether he might not be on his list. If it is a child, the angels, aroused by the fireworks, meet him half-way; and it does not matter whether the devil is at the gate, because he can do nothing with a child; an innocent child is not allowed to be registered on the devil’s list, for he is still without sin.

  The fireworks which had been brought were received and taken care of by the second brother, the half-wit. From this moment on he no longer had any interest in anything but the fireworks. He had long ago ceased to weep. For him the more joyful part of the funeral had now come.

  The newly arrived had already heard that the kid had been found. One after another, with their hats off, they entered the hut to look at the kid and say a few consoling words to his mother. While in fact not much interested in how it happened, every one of them asked the mother to tell the story. Not from curiosity. Very wise men, they merely asked the mother in order to get her mind off the body.

  Once she had started, the Garcia liked to tell the story from the very beginning. She to
ld it over and over again, and always with the same words and with the same tone of voice and with the same emotions displayed at the same episode. By being repeated so often, it became more and more an ordinary story of everyday life. Even the emotions at the various points in her tale got to be almost like those of a bad actress, the oftener she recited the narrative. She herself began to feel a certain distance from the event. She reached a point where she could tell it like a story she had heard from somebody else. It became impersonal to her. Her emotions were getting dull and leaving her heart and soul clearer every minute. Finally, when she was telling it for the twentieth time, she heard her own words sound like mere gossip.

  She was beginning to take leave of her baby, without realizing it, at this moment.

  She looked at him. To her astonishment she imagined that the boy lying dead on the table was not her baby any more. Her Carlosito was an active, lively little boy, forever talking and shouting and full of all sorts of mischief, who had to be spanked twice every day to keep him sensible and save him from himself. He was restless from the minute he opened his eyes in the morning until he closed them at night. That lump of ugly, clammy flesh with the smashed-in jaw and its arms held stiff across its chest, that could not be her baby. That had to be somebody else’s baby, perhaps the baby she was just talking about. Hers wasn’t so ugly. Everyone had told her how beautiful her Carlos was, one of the finest-looking kids for twenty miles around. The sailor suit, the crown, the scepter had made him a stranger to her. God knows where that child had come from. “What is he doing in my house, anyway?” she asked herself.

  She wept now. And while she wept she realized, in sudden bewilderment, that she no longer wept only about her baby. She was now weeping about herself more than about the kid. She believed herself badly treated by fate, and unconsciously she began to hate many of the women present simply because they had babies at their breasts. She lamented the sad fact that she no longer had a child on whom she could heap her motherly love.

  All these thoughts were running wild in her mind while her month was telling the story that was stale from so much repeating. But through her thinking and brooding and analyzing in her primitive manner her thoughts, emotions, pains, and heartaches, she came to realize that she was not at all an exception. She looked around and noted the presence of seven other women who she knew had also lost children as dear to them as her baby had been to her. So she became conscious of the fact that she was but an average mother and not a mother selected by fate to suffer something extraordinary. What she suffered tonight, thousands, millions of mothers had suffered before her, a thousand were suffering the same in this very hour, and thousands of millions of mothers would suffer when she herself would again be happy.

  Perhaps it was because she was so very tired, so exhausted, from worry, pain, and weeping and yelling, that she began to be herself once more.

  27

  The Garcia’s front yard was a sandy square open on two sides, while the other two were fenced in by thorny bushes. The hut was framed by a row of old rusty kerosene cans and broken vessels filled with earth in which flowers had been planted, some of which were now in full bloom. That conglomeration of old cans and potsherds with flowers in them was considered the Garcia’s garden. Close to the hut on one side there was a wild chile shrub which daily provided the family with green pepper. Because there were so many visitors present, the bushes, thorny shrubs, and magueys were decorated with hats, diapers, shirts, rags, and blankets.

  The whole place looked like a camp. Men, women, and children were sleeping on the ground or just dozing. Some were lying on mats, others on blankets, but most of them on the bare ground. Some people had put up mosquito bars, which looked like little tents. Bits of music played on mouth-organs fluttered about. The place was lighted by torches and campfires. There were also a few small lanterns and half a dozen of the usual open tin lamps.

  Many boys were helping the half-witted son shoot off the firecrackers. No one was allowed to shoot them off but himself. The others were only permitted to stir up the fire and try out the firecrackers which had failed to go off the first time. The stepson’s great day had come at last. He felt like a dictator among the boys who had to humiliate themselves before him to get the privilege of firing one occasionally. Two days later he would get his reward by being beaten up by all those whom he now refused a share in the game.

  Many of the visitors had brought bottles of mescal, that very hard brandy distilled of mescal juice and tasting like rubbing alcohol blended with unrefined kerosene. Sometimes this brandy travels under the name of tequila; at other times it is called aguardiente, then again comiteco, also cuervo, or viuda, in some parts herradura, but whatever its name, it is always the same stuff.

  The bottle went from mouth to mouth. One man, obviously with a heart of gold, took a bottle, entered the hut, removed his hat, and offered it to the Garcia woman. She looked at it, but she did not hesitate long. She took a shot of it that was equal to no less than three fingers of a hard-working peasant. Any sane white man who would whip into his belly a portion like the one the Garcia lashed down her throat, would be floored as if he’d been clubbed.

  Among the Indians who arrived at this moment there was a very poor peasant. He was practically in rags, but they were clean. His horse had no saddle but a bast mat. He entered the hut with the others. He ran his eyes over the kid, then went up to the mother and told her how beautiful the kid was and how prettily dressed, like the Holy Child of the Madre Santisima in church, and that he was positive that the kid was already with the angels, so sweet did he look. The Garcia smiled proudly, straightened her whole body, and thanked him and the other men for their admiration and praise.

  When that poor peasant came out of the hut, he looked around and found a bench that was not occupied at the moment. He sat down and drew out an old book which looked like a prayer book. For a few minutes he leafed through it as if to find the right page. Then he began to sing.

  Unable to read, he knew by heart all the words he sang. He looked into the book only because he had seen people in church looking into such a book when they sang.

  Most stanzas he repeated two, three, or even four times before he went on to the next. Perhaps these were the stanzas he liked or knew best. Whenever he began a stanza that was known by the people, many men and practically all the women who were awake fell in and sang with him.

  Now he sang the second stanza and all the women inside the hut, including the pump-master woman, took up the song, at first hesitatingly but after a while with full voices. At times only one man sang because the others were rolling a new cigarette or greasing their throats from the bottle. Some got tired of singing and talked on without being disturbed by those who preferred the song.

  The ragged peasant, however, sang all the time. He refused to take a swallow from the bottle which was offered him every once in a while. He was an agrarista and thought himself a communist. In his hut in the little village where he lived he had a little house-altar with a picture of the Holy Virgin in the middle and on one side a picture of Saint John and on the other side a little picture of Lenin, who he believed sat next to the throne of the Lord like Saint John and all the other saints. His demands from communism, like those of all the other agraristas in the republic, would be fully satisfied the moment he was given from ten to twenty acres of fairly good land free and with the assurance that it would never be taken away from him or his family. He was the kind who makes you wise about politics and makes you believe that communism can be boiled down to one simple formula: give men food, plenty of it, and assure them that they will always have a job. Keep the bellies well filled and provide lots of movies, admission one cent, and there will be no more preaching from soap boxes and never any talk about a revolution.

  The singer was paid by no one. He sang out of pure love for the bereaved mother, to help her get over her loss without too many scars. The kid would be buried without the blessings of a priest and without a death certifi
cate from a doctor. Priest and doctor cost money. Even if all the mourners contributed half the money they possessed they could not raise enough to meet such expenses. Moreover the burial could not wait two days. Despite the fact that the night was cool, the body had already started to decompose.

  The agrarista sang only church hymns. But nobody who knew Roman Catholic hymns would ever think that these songs were really church hymns. Perhaps Catholics used to sing that way when the first monks came wandering through these jungles to bring the true faith to the poor pagans of the Americas. But whatever the original tunes might have been like, they had since been blended with worldly songs, including American dance melodies of more recent times. Once a year, or once in two years, the people might go to church and listen to a real hymn, and a little of it would remain in their memory. And then there were the dances in the settlements and villages where the musicians brought new tunes which had been picked up in the nearest large town, where they were considered the latest hits just arrived direct from Broadway, while in fact in New York no one could remember them any more, because they must have been crooned about the time when the best-dressed American was running for mayor. And so here in the jungle after each dance new tunes were added and the former ones were dropped as obsolete. Moreover, the uneducated Indian couldn’t and wouldn’t sing the way we think songs should be sung. In all their songs there was a certain pagan motif and frequently an almost savage one, which seemed to be a heritage from their forebears. In their hymns, sung without any accompaniment, save perhaps the beating of high drums and the plaintive sound of a home-made clarinet, this strange native motif was often so strong that it carried the whole tune and left hardly ten notes of the original hymn.

  This funeral singer was known far and wide in the whole jungle region. He was considered the best of his kind and everybody admired him. He was their movie star and radio crooner all in one, because on other occasions, at weddings or at Saints’-day festivals, he sang corridos-that is, native ballads. He could not sing corridos as well as the professionals who visit the ferias and who bring to the people who cannot read newspapers the news of the latest political events and love tragedies in the form of ballads sung in the open places. As a funeral singer, however, this agrarista was far better than any of the corrido singers.