by B. TRAVEN
The youngsters started to fight about whose turn it now was to carry the coffin. None of the boys wanted the honor, which before had been much coveted. The stench near the coffin had become unbearable even for the toughest of them. All had their handkerchiefs tied over their mouths and noses to protect them as much as possible from the horrible odor emanating from the box.
It was certainly a marvel how bravely the Garcia marched among the crowd, considering that she had not closed an eye during the past thirty-six hours, that she had received the most cruel beating from fate that any mother on earth could suffer, that for twenty hours she had wept, yelled, and lamented as never before in her life, and that she had eaten nothing since late afternoon the day before. Hers is a race which has a great future, provided it is not taken in by installment plans for buying things they can do without.
And there was another marvel, the musicians. The whole night through they had played dances, one right after the other without any intermission. If Indians dance, then they dance—there’s no sitting out, and no gazing at the moon, either. They have time enough for staring at the moon when there is no music around.
Looking objectively at this show, I almost wondered whether anybody still considered it a funeral tram. All were marching to the cemetery, no doubt, yet somehow it appeared as if the dead one had been dismissed long ago and the march now received its meaning solely from the music which was played. In spite of all my silent protests and solemn curses, American dances and torch songs had won after all, dominating all the senses and feelings of the marchers, who apparently preferred this music to that of their own land. My noble thoughts had made me but a preacher in the desert and I was positive that if I were to yell my disapproval of our night-club achievements, they would have believed me crazy from the scorching heat
Perhaps they were right after all. Why should anybody have thought of death and of funerals? The world around us was green and full of life. The sky was blue, the sun golden. Butterflies by the thousands, some as big as two hands and others prettier than precious jewels, fluttered against the dark walls of the bush. Birds hidden in the thicket twittered noisily. The jungle fiddled, sang, chirped so intensely that for seconds the music was drowned. Life was all around and everywhere and we maintained the silly notion that we were on a funeral march. Why didn’t we leave that kid in the river, forget him, and have done with it? Why all the fuss? Wasn’t he better off in the river than in a hole in the cemetery where dogs and hogs would dig him out and eat what was left of him? God gave him the river to play with, so we should have let him stay there and allowed him to be happy in his own way. Why did we interfere with the burial the Lord had prepared for him? Of course, since we had learned to be Christians we could no longer act like heathen and we had to do what was considered our Christian duty.
What the hell, if I only could concentrate on the march and not let my mind wander off all the time—and that’s the reason why now I was stuck in a swampy hole and everybody was laughing at me! I wanted to be decent too; that’s why I was marching and tripping over roots for a silly idea.
Long live the world which is so very funny to live in! What meaning to the living world had that little box of decomposing flesh? None. How insignificant is man in the universe, how insignificant his worries, his wars, his struggles, his ambitions, his trying to outwit his competitors! What is left of the great Cæsar? There would be one Rome just the same, Cæsar or no Cæsar. Perhaps it would not be on the river Tiber, but there would be one Rome. What will be left tomorrow of the dozen little Cæsars of today who think that they can build up a new world and terrify mankind? What are all the wars and dictatorships and bolshevisms for if finally men always end up by doing what is best for them, great men or not? So then why not enjoy life, love, merriment? And if some day you cannot enjoy them any longer, die and be forgotten and leave no ghosts behind. That’s paradise.
33
There, at last, the village was in sight. Huts, palm huts, grass huts, and one rotten imitation of an American bungalow. A multitude of naked children were running about. Chickens, hogs, turkeys, mules, goats, dogs in front of the huts, between them, inside them.
The people came out of their huts and in deep silence awaited the procession. And in deep silence they let it pass them. The men took off their hats as soon as the first mourners came near. Even the naked children stopped their playing and yelling and stared at us with wide-open eyes. A woman holding a baby in her arms shrieked when the marchers passed. Another woman looked around with harassed eyes, grasped her child playing at her feet, lifted him up, and folded her arms around him as if he were to be taken away from her. Then she cried out plaintively, and many of the women marching, among them the Garcia, joined her and howled in the same manner, as if they were answering calls of their kind.
Out of the general store a man staggered. He was dressed in a cheap white cotton suit, with a coat on, which is something I had not seen for weeks. In his right hand he held a twig which he swished aimlessly through the air. He could hardly keep on his feet.
He was the teacher in the next village. Only for two months would he be in that village school, because the government paid that village only two months’ salary for a teacher—a salary of seventy-five centavos a day. More than two months’ salary the government could not spend on that Indian village. When the job was over, the teacher would return to town, where his family lived, and he would wait there for another assignment, which might come soon, which might come late, which might come never. It all depended on the teacher’s personal friends and on their good standing with a diputado or another politician. Usually the teacher had to get the money for his return ticket by going from hut to hut and asking for as much as the parents of his pupils could spare; and as they were all very poor Indian peasants, it was not very much. After he had paid for his simple board and lodging in the village and sent the rest home to his wife and children, nothing of his salary was left for the ticket. But as a government employee he was entitled to a reduction of fifty per cent on a railroad ticket used in his capacity as a returning or outgoing teacher. This treatment of the teacher was caused not so much by a faulty government as by the fact that the resources of the republic are very limited and, as often happens in richer countries also, expenses for education and for schools in general come last. Soldiers always first. Another reason is that, just as elsewhere, politicians take twenty times more from the nation’s income than is their legal share.
The school he taught in was a large room in a palm hut. No chair, no bench, no table could be found in the class-room. The children squatted on the earthen floor and put the paper on which they wrote upon their knees. Only the teacher had a crudely made chair, and a box for a table.
I had known the teacher when he taught in an Indian village about a hundred and twenty miles from here. I had been living there for a few months, and as I had had plenty of time, I had accompanied him on his Saturday excursions with the children to teach them the elements of geography, botany, insect life. In that village he had opened a night school for adults, since in the whole village there had been only five or six persons who could write and read, and no more than a dozen who could write their names.
Each grown-up pupil had paid him one peso a month, which considerably bettered his small income. I had visited this night school chiefly to get acquainted with my fellow students, to make friends with them and be welcome in their homes. This had been worth more to me than learning how to write my name without a mistake and learning whether the Spanish word for work is spelled with a v or a b. I had known ever since that he was a good teacher and that he deserved a better lot than being chased around from village to village.
That he had got pupils for his night school had not been due to the ambition of the people in the village, but to communist agitators who twice every month visited that village and told the young men that if they did not learn how to read and write they would never amount to anything and would be exploited by America
n imperialistic companies and by Spanish hacendados and German coffee-planters, and if they did not learn quickly, the United States would come and take the whole republic away from them and teach them the English language by force. The fact was that, because of the constant preaching of the communist agraristas, practically every young Indian had gone to night school and many of them had learned reading and writing fairly well in four months.
Seeing that teacher now, one might think him a common drunkard. I knew that he was as sober a man as any teacher anywhere. He was not Indian, more likely of Spanish descent with a heavy dash of Arabian blood. That he was drunk today was something which a hilarious fate had obviously prepared in advance. I knew something was going to take a different turn from what was expected. I only wondered what it would be and how it would come out. Fate was at play, or the teacher would not have been drunk.
Friends of the Garcia family who lived in that village had begged the teacher to come and say a few words over the kid’s grave. The teacher knew the kid because the kid had gone to his school for a week when his father had had a job with the railroad. The job had lasted only a week, but during that week the kid’s mother had sent him to the school near by, where the kid had learned to say: “An I which has no dot over it is no I.”
The teacher had accepted the invitation to speak at the grave and had come to the village where the cemetery was. Here he had met the fathers of his pupils. On arriving, and not knowing any other place to go, he had stepped into the general store, where he had asked for a soda. In had come a man who was the father of two of his pupils. The father greeted the teacher and invited him to drink with him just one little copita of mescal. Beer was too expensive, and since there was no ice to be had, the beer was warm and therefore had no taste. To say no to such a kind invitation would have made the father believe that the teacher was too haughty to drink with an Indian. The teacher had a good heart. He knew how the father would feel if he were to refuse to drink with him. Even a soda or an orange crush costs more than a copita. So the teacher had drunk the hard mescal. The father of another pupil had then come in, and since he had accepted a drink from the first father, he could not refuse a drink from the second. Another father who had heard that the teacher was in the village stepped in and another drink was knocked down. Never more than just one little copita of mescal. But no matter how you count, a certain number of copitas make a pint. The heat did the rest. God in heaven, how drunk that teacher was!
The procession marched on. Many of the villagers joined the mourners and went along with them. Far behind the rest the teacher was staggering along. He needed the whole road for himself. On his left arm hung that friend of Garcia who had invited the teacher to speak at the grave. This man was even more loaded than the teacher, whose knees might be weak, but some of whose senses were intact. But to drag along a drunken companion who did not make the slightest effort to keep on his own feet—that, surely, was a dangerous task for one who had to fight hard himself against those spirits which are so very friendly to man the first three times, but are nasty fellows after the tenth.
The teacher tried his best to show that he was a dignified personage. His companion, however, walking practically upon his knees, dragged and pulled the poor teacher every few paces down to the ground. That drunken friend stumbled and tripped and fell, and the good-natured teacher had to lift him up again to his feet. That job made the teacher seem more drunk than he actually was at the time the mourners arrived at the village.
34
The procession reached the cemetery. What a cemetery! It was one more proof of the fact that Christianity had not yet come to the Indians, but instead a degenerated, corrupted religion dolled up with empty ceremonies borrowed from the Roman Catholicism of the first half of the sixteenth century.
The gate consisted of two lattice wings made of sticks. The gate was purely for decorative purposes because one could enter the place at either side of the gate, where the fence had rotted and collapsed; from the posts hung rusty barbed wire, some of which was lying on the ground.
From the top of the center gate post a cross greeted the visitor. Three little hillocks covered with withered flowers and simple crosses without names on them were the only signs that this place was supposed to be a cemetery. Everything else looked like what the earth will look like on doomsday late in the afternoon.
There were a great number of little mounds. None had the shape of a grave. All these mounds were overgrown with wiry grass and thorny bushes which had been trampled upon, and most of the mounds had been dug open, obviously by dogs, hogs, and wild beasts searching the ground for tasty morsels. Bones were strewn all over the place, but mercifully hidden by the high grass. Rotten boards from decayed coffins were lying everywhere. A score of crude crosses were lying flat on the ground. And this ground was richly decorated with the dung of cows, horses, burros, mules, and dogs wherever you looked or walked. The funny thing about that cemetery was that I liked it immensely. If I cannot be dropped into the sea, which by all means I prefer, I should like to be buried silently in a cemetery of that kind, and, please, send no flowers.
We make too much fuss over our dead. We believe them holy or saintly and treat them accordingly. A dead one is dead. He has left us and we ought to leave him in peace. He should be forgotten the moment he is covered with earth or sent up in smoke. The billions we spend on our dead would serve mankind better if they were spent on more hospitals, on prepaid doctors’ fees, and on more research on disease. It would be more human and surely more civilized if instead of wasting billions upon the dead we spent that money on the living to keep them sane and healthy and so have them longer with us. Just on the flowers that are thrown to the dead, who cannot see or smell them, we could save enough money to take care of ten thousand babies every year and make their mothers happy.
I wondered if that teacher and his companion would ever reach the cemetery. Now he was floored, now the other was.
At last we were standing before the open grave. There were no grave-diggers about. The grave had to be dug by the father or a relative or a neighbor. In this case Manuel had dug the hole. He had done the job early in the morning when it was cool. Then he had hurried back on horseback to be ready to follow the procession.
The coffin was put on the ground a few feet away from the hole. The coffin-maker pulled out the two nails and took off the lid so that the mother could see her baby for the last time. It was also the law, which ordered that a coffin must be opened just before it is let down so that the mourners may convince themselves they have the right corpse and are not by mistake burying the wrong one. It was furthermore the last chance for the dead to come back to life if he thought he was not yet fully dead and could afford to hang on a while longer. With the coffin open, practically nothing of the body was visible. The box was apparently filled only with a mass of colored paper, a golden crown, and a scepter from which the paper was already peeling off. The face was covered by the crown, which had dropped over it and hid its ghastly ugliness. The bared teeth grinning out from under the crown were the only evidence that the crumbling mass of wet colored paper hid the remains of a human body.
With a terrific outcry the Garcia threw herself across the open coffin and embraced the whole box. Her crying ebbed to a long, bitter whimpering.
And while her body shook violently from inner convulsions, the little wooden whistle, which she had caught when it had fallen out of the kid’s pants’ pocket after he had been fished out of the river, dropped at this moment out of the bosom of her dress. The whistle fell on the ground. She stared at it, ceased whimpering immediately, picked up the whistle, pressed it against her lips, and quickly, as if she might forget it, she hid it inside the paper frocks and said in a low voice: “Here, mi nene, chiquito mio, don’t leave your whistle behind. And forgive me, chiquitito mio, my beloved darling, that I spanked you because you wouldn’t stop blowing that whistle all the time right into my ears, and that made me so very angry. You forgive me, won�
�t you, Carlitos mio?”
All the women, on hearing her speak to her baby as if he could still hear her, started sobbing.
Garcia, half staggering, half stumbling, came up to the grave. He leaned against the two men who had supported him. He could no longer stand up by himself, because his second bottle, which he had kept in reserve, had in the meantime been finished.
He considered it his right to stand before all the other people beside the open box, for he was the father, drunk or not. He opened his mouth to say something to the crowd. Perhaps he wished to cry, but only a little squeak came out. With one hand he wiped off the thick tears which were rolling down his cheeks. In spite of his drunkenness and all the numbness in his head, he realized fully that his little boy was leaving him forever.
All the women were weeping bitterly as if the child were their own. The pump-master woman, assisted by another woman, went close to the box and lifted the Garcia up from the ground on which she had fallen exhausted.
No sooner did the coffin-maker see the box freed from the mother’s attention than he put the lid on, and in a few seconds it was nailed fast—this time for good.
Then it was carried to the hole.
35
Now everybody turns his head around towards the gate and waits for the teacher to appear. He is still outside. Ashamed to meet the weeping mother and the crowd of mourners in his present condition, he refuses to enter the grounds. But his companion finally pushes him through the gate. When the teacher still resists going farther, that fellow, despite his being so drunk, has sense enough to wink to another man, who immediately approaches and leads the teacher to the grave.
After much labor and time the teacher is at last standing at the edge of the open hole. All look at him in anticipation of his speech.