by B. TRAVEN
Who had said that to me many years ago, and where had it been said? My effort to remember this kept my mind busy for the next two or three hours.
The air was filled with chirping, whispering, murmuring, fiddling, whining, whimpering, now and then shrills and shrieks of fear and horror.
The bush was singing its eternal song of stories, each story beginning with the last line of the story just ended.
Effective Medicine
One afternoon, on coming home from the cotton field where I had worked all day long, I noted, outside the barbed wire fence of the bungalow I was living in, a Mexican peasant squatting on the bare ground. I did not know him because, as I learned later in the evening, he was from another village six or seven miles away. He was very poor and all in rags.
Having greeted me he waited patiently until I dismounted from the burro I had been riding home on. When I had taken off the saddle and the burro had gone its way looking for cornstalks in the yard, the Mexican entered the front yard, came close and began talking.
He talked rapidly and in a confused manner. For a moment I thought him to be on the high—that is to say, that he might have smoked more marijuana than he could digest. However, though he was now telling the end of his story, now the beginning, now the middle, all in confusion, I soon noticed that he was neither drunk nor doped, only very ignorant and evidently suffering from a nervous breakdown—as far as this can happen to a Mexican of his kind.
It was difficult for me to make sense of his story and for a long while I was unable to see which part of his story was the end and which the beginning or the middle. The farther he came in his story the more was he swept away by his emotion until he only blubbered or shouted absolutely incoherent phrases. Never once did he fully end his tale. Whenever I thought him close to the end and I was trying to catch up with the full meaning, I realized that he was already telling his story from the middle backwards to the start again. In this confused way he told me his story more than a dozen times and always with the same words, out of a vocabulary which barely consisted of more than three hundred different words. His mood changed constantly. Each time he started as if he were telling the story of somebody else, yet invariably he ended up crying almost hysterically.
“Look here, señor doctor, that old hussy and tramp that she is and always was, she is gone. She is gone with that ugly cabron and dirty son of a heathenish dog, that thief Pánfilo, you know him, señor, the one I mean, that would steal the horns of the Devil if they were not grown on, you know that housebreaker, and if you don’t know him, so much the better for you because he steals barbed wire and cuts telegraph poles and the telegraph wire also and no hog is safe if he is around. I wish him the smallpox all over his face and the most terrible disease extra to make it worse for him. I come home. I come home from my work in the bush. In the bush I had to cut down hard trees for making charcoal; you see. I sell the wood and the charcoal if I have any to the agents—who are thieves, too. I come home tired and hungry. Home in my jacalito. I’m hungry more than a dog, that’s what I am, from hard work in the bush. No tortillas ready. No frijoles in the pot. Nothing. I tell you the truth, señor doctor, nothing. I call my woman, that old hussy. My mujer I mean. No answer. I look around. She isn’t at home, my woman isn’t. Her sack with her dress in it, and her shirt and her torn stockings, which are in that same sack also, are all gone. The sack used to hang on a peg. My mujer has ran away. She doesn’t ever return. Never, such what I say. And she is so full of lice too, my woman is. I’ve no tortillas for me to eat. Nor black beans for my empty belly. Off she went like the stinking hussy that she is. If I only knew who she ran off with, that useless old nag. I’ll get him. And I’ll learn him how to steal decent and honest women that belong to other men. He is a mil times worse than any dirty cabron.” (Mil means thousand; to his kind, though, mil means anything between one hundred and one thousand billions.) “Now, I ask you, mister doctor señor, who will make tortillas for me? That’s what I want you to tell me right now.”
So he asked, but he did not wait for my answer and he went on with his story, hardly stopping to catch a full breath.
“Nobody is going to make me tortillas now. That’s what it is, I tell you. She has ran away. I’ll catch him and he won’t live to tell who done it. I come home in my choza. I come home from the hot bush. Hungry and dying of thirst. I don’t mind the thirst. I come home and no tortillas. No frijoles. She is gone. She has taken her sack with her dress and her stockings along with her.”
At this point of his sad story he cried so bitterly that for the next three minutes it was difficult to understand what he was saying because it was all blubbering. Slowly he calmed down once more. Yet, crying or not crying, he talked on and on like a cracked phonograph record.
“I come home. From the bush I come home and I’ve worked all day long under that blistering sun and no——”
“Now wait a minute, manito.” I interrupted him before he went into his speech again and made it impossible for me to stop him. “Let’s talk this over quietly. You’ve told me your heartbreaking experience fifteen times by now. I admit it is heartbreaking. But I can’t listen to it a mil times because I’ve got other things to attend to. All I can say is that your mujer is not here in my jacal. Step in and look around and make sure.”
“I know, señor mister, that she isn’t in your house. A fine educated doctor like you would never even touch such a filthy one like her, and so full of lice that sometimes you might think the wind is in her hair, so fast it moves from all the lice in it.”
The lice seemed to remind him once more of his loss and he started telling the story again. The whole thing began to bore me and I said: “Why, for hell’s sake, do you have to tell all that just to me? Go to the alcalde—the mayor, I mean—and tell him your story. He is the proper person to attend to such matters. I’m just a simple doctor here without any political influence and no disputado backing me up. I’ve no power and so I can do nothing for you. Nothing, do you hear? Nothing at all. Go to the alcalde. He’ll catch your mujer. It’s his duty, because he is the authority in this place.”
“That alcalde, you mean, señor? I can tell you right now and here that he is the biggest ass under heaven. That’s why he was elected alcalde. And he is a thief too, and also a womanraper. Just for his meanness and his stupidity it was that he got elected because no decent and no honest person had any word in that election, see? You ought to know that, señor.”
“Anyway, amigo,” I said, “he has to look after your troubles. And as I said before, I’ve no power, no power at all, to do anything for you. Get this in your mind, friend. I’ve no power.”
“But you’re wrong, mister caballero. You’ve got all the powers in the world. We know this very well. And no mistake. You can pull bullets out of the bodies of killed bandits with fishing hooks and make them live again. I mean the boys with federal bullets in their bellies and legs. You understand what I want to say and what I know and what the federales would be so very eager to know also. Because you have all the powers to do anything under heaven. That’s why you know where my woman is at this hour. Tell her that I’m hungry and that I’ve come home from the bush after much hard work. She has to make tortillas and cook frijoles for me. I’m very hungry now.”
“Now look here, friend. Let’s be calm about it.” I spoke to him as I would have to a little boy. “See here, I’ve not seen your woman go away. Since I’ve not seen where she went I can’t tell you where she is at present. I can’t even imagine where she perhaps might be. In fact, I know nothing, nothing at all. I don’t even know her face or what she looks like. Please, amigo, do understand, I know nothing of her. And that’ll be all. Thank you for paying me such a delightful visit. Now I’m busy. Good-bye. Adiós.”
He stared at me with his brown dreamy eyes as if in wonder. His belief in the infallibility of a white man, and particularly in the immaculate perfection of a Norte-Americano, had been shaken profoundly. At the same time, though, he see
med to recall something which had evidently been hammered into his head since he could speak his first words, and that was something which, in his opinion, was forever connected with the Americanos, as is the color green with young grass.
So he said: “I’m not rich, señor. No, I’m not. I can’t pay you much. I’ve only two pesos and forty-six centavitos. That’s all I have in the world. But this whole fortune of mine I’ll give you for your work and for your medicine so that I can find my woman and get her back to my side, that hussy, because I am very hungry.”
“I don’t want your money. Even if you would give me mil gold pesos I could not get your woman back. I don’t know where she is and therefore I can’t tell her that you must have your tortillas and your frijoles. Can’t you understand, man, that I don’t know where your woman is?”
Suspicion was in his eyes when he looked at me after I had finished. He was quite evidently not certain whether it was the little money he could offer me which kept me from helping him or that in fact I might really not know the whereabouts of his spouse.
Gazing for a few minutes at me in this manner he finally shook his head as if full of doubts about something of which he had thought himself very sure before. Honoring me once more with that suspicious glance, he left my place but not until I had told him several times more that I had to cook my dinner and could no longer stand idly around and listen to his troubles, for which I had no remedies.
As I learned a few days later, he visited practically all the huts of the village, where he told his story and reported also that this white medicine man of whom they talked so highly was but a poor faker, ignorant of the simplest things of everyday life.
This low opinion of his was taken by the villagers for a grave insult upon themselves, since I was the pride of the whole community, who considered me one of the wisest and greatest medicine men that have ever walked the earth. I do not know, but I can fairly well guess, what the villagers recommended him to do so as to make my mysterious powers work in his favor.
Shortly after sunrise next day he returned to my place, placed himself outside by the barbed wire fence, and waited there peacefully until I noticed his presence and came out to speak to him.
The moment he saw me feeding corn to my burro he called me. “Just for a very, very little short moment, señor mister, please. Please, come here close to the fence and listen what I’ve got to tell you. And you’d better listen terribly carefully because I’m serious. As a plain matter of fact I’m extremely serious this morning, because I haven’t slept very much.”
On stepping up to the fence I noted that while I was approaching he picked up from the ground a long machete which as I could easily see had been sharpened with utmost care. It must have taken him hours to give that heavy sword-like bush-knife such an almost razor-like edge.
Nonchalantly, though meaningfully, he moved this machete up and down before my eyes while he was talking again. Occasionally, just as nonchalantly, he examined the edge with his wetted thumb, and now and then pulled a hair out of his thick black scalp and cut his hair softly, practically by only touching it with the edge. Whenever he did so he looked at me as if to make sure that I was observing how sharp that machete really was.
“So you won’t tell me where my esposa is, señor?”
“It seems,” I answered with dignity, “that you have a very good and very excellent machete. Looks like well-tempered steel to me.”
“And good steel it is. And it has been made in your country: There you may be assured that it is the finest and the best steel we can buy down here. You’d better not make the mistake thinking that it might be German-made, because a German-made is no good, you cannot even cut cheese with it; if you try that the edge is gone for good. But they are very cheap. Only you cannot cut trees with them, not the sort we have got here in the bush. But the one I have got here will do anything I want it to do.”
“Let me have a close look at it,” I pleaded.
He put it through the fence but held the haft fast in his hand.
“This won’t do at all. I must get a swing at it to see how good it is. I know something about steel.”
“Oh no, señor mister, I won’t let you have it. This excellent machete won’t leave my hands, not before I know where my woman is. Just touch the edge. See. Now I think you’ll understand that with one single stroke I could chop off the head of a burro from its trunk like cutting through wet mud. But should it be the head of a man, even that of a gringo, instead of that of a poor burro, I tell you, señor, I wouldn’t need to make half so hard a stroke as I would have to use for a burro, with a machete having an edge like this one, and made in your own country, where the best steel comes from. What do you think, señor?”
“Since you ask me, friend, I think a bullet is even quicker than a machete, and more certain too.”
“Maybe. Surely it is. But a bullet, without a gun to fire it, is not much to compare with such a good American-made machete. Everybody here in the village knows very well that you haven’t got a gun, not even an old Spanish muzzler. I know this or I wouldn’t perhaps bring my fine machete along with me. Understand, caballero mister?”
“I understand all right, manito. I see you want to cut my fence posts and carry them away. But you won’t do that. You know that would be plain robbery. The federales would shoot you for banditry as soon as they come to this village again. It won’t be long now and they will be on their way here once more looking for bandits.”
“I don’t need your fence posts. I wouldn’t take them, not even for a gift. They’re all termite-eaten anyhow and no good. I can get them better in the bush.”
“Then what do you want? I’ve got to get breakfast ready because I must ride to my field and look after my tomatoes. I mean that I’ve got to go now, see, right now while the day is still cool and fresh.”
“Mil times I have told you, señor mister, what I want. That’s why I sharpened my machete. I want my woman back. You will now tell me where she is so that I can catch her and give her a terrific thrashing before I’ll let her cook frijoles for me.”
“And mil times I’ve told you that I don’t know where your mujer is.”
“So you still insist on telling me that you can’t find her for me?”
“That’s what I’m saying all the time and I don’t know what to say any more. So what are you going to do about it?”
“Maybe you don’t know where she is. What I know for sure is that you can find her if you wish to. I can’t give you mil gold pesos for I haven’t any. I suppose I’ve got to speak frankly with you, señor. In other words, if you don’t tell me right away where my woman is I will be very sorry, and sorry for you, I mean, because in such a case I am desperate and I must chop off one head. I won’t promise whose head it might be which is to be chopped off, and I can’t promise either that it might not be your head which is going to be cut off with one single stroke and with that fine American-made machete too. Perhaps it will be done by mistake, so to say. In other words, señor mister, it will be your head, and no mistake about that, I am sure.”
He raised his machete high up and swung it around above his head as a drunken pirate would his cutlass. It looked dangerous enough. I was cornered. I might, of course, try to escape into my bungalow. Sooner or later, though, I would have to come out and there he would be waiting for me. I had to get to my field to look after the crop, but he’d sneak up on me from behind or lay in ambush somewhere. His kind is patient. They will wait for days and weeks until they get their man. What does he care about killing somebody? He hides in the jungle. If he should finally be caught and fusilladed he will consider it his fate, which was his since he was born and from which he, in his opinion, could not have escaped. Right now he is desperate. Without thinking of any or all the consequences which his murder will have afterwards, he, like a stubborn child, wants his wish to come true immediately.
Again I told him the same thing I had told him twenty times the afternoon before. “I haven’t seen
the way your woman went. Therefore I don’t know where she is now.”
But my answer had lost its power. When he had told the villagers what sort of answer I had given him the day before, they had suggested what he ought to say if I were to tell him again that I had not seen his woman go away. He himself alone would never have come upon the answer he had in stock now, for his mind was not developed highly enough for such mental exercise. I was sure that the whole village was as much interested in the kind of medicine I would give him as he himself was.
At that hour I did not know that he had talked to the villagers about our discussion the previous afternoon. But from the way he now presented his answer I knew immediately that it could not be his own, and that he had memorized it after being taught what to say, because he not only used words entirely new to him, but also spoke like a bad amateur actor.
“Listen here, señor,” he said, “if I’d seen the way my mujer went when she left I would have no need to trouble you, for in that case I could do well and perhaps better still alone than with the help of a medicine man. All people in the village here have told me that you are a far-seer. They have told me that you have two little black tubes sewn together to make them appear like one. They say, because they know, that if you look through these tubes you can see any man or woman or dog or burro which might walk on that faraway hill yonder, and you can see an eagle perching on a high tree a hundred miles away. You have told the folks in this village that there are people living on some of the stars, because this earth we live on is also but a star only we can’t see it as a star since we are on it. All people here have watched you often when, by night, you look with your black tubes up to the sky so as to see the people on the stars and what they were doing at that time of night and how they lived there and how many cattle they had.”
I remembered I had said something to this effect to a few of the younger men of the community.
