The Carreta

by B. TRAVEN

  This dealer in silk was an Arab from Tabasco, who had been long enough in the country to know in Spanish how best to cajole and bamboozle Mexicans of small towns.

  Next to him was a Cuban selling medicine. There was no human ailment for which he had not the right remedy—roots, herbs, pills, extracts, waters.

  A Spaniard stood at a table selling Peruvian toothpowder. This powder, he affirmed, had been used by the Incas. He had come upon it in the vaults of ruins in Peru and Bolivia. There was not a great deal of this wonderful toothpowder left, only a few hundred kilos. And when once he had sold out, those who wished to keep their teeth sound would be left to vain regrets. His advice was that they buy five packages right off rather than one. It was the best investment they could make.

  When he had reached this point in his oration he caught hold of a little Indian boy who was hanging around. He forced the boy’s mouth open, all the while talking hard and gesticulating and making passes like a conjurer, and then rubbed a little powder on his teeth.

  “With this powder, ladies and gentlemen, no toothbrush is required. With this miraculous powder of the old Incas you need only use your forefinger as the old Incas themselves did,” he said while he polished the boy’s teeth with his finger.

  When, still talking and extolling, he had done with the polishing, he poured a mouthful of water into the boy’s mouth and told him to rinse and spit. After this he levered his mouth open again, far wider than it normally would go, and turned his face this way and that as though he were a doll. The boy’s enforced grin revealed teeth of a blinding whiteness. All the people standing around were now convinced that this Peruvian toothpowder was what they had always lacked and that to this lack alone they owed their bad teeth. They bought the five packages held out to them, because one would certainly not last their lifetime, and were now perfectly sure that they would never have a toothache again. They had been promised as much.

  The four little Indian boys who were the powder man’s exhibits each got two centavos an appearance. For this they were required to smear their teeth with a greenish-yellow paste of maize which the powder man’s helper prepared for them behind the stalls. Then they had to hang around within the powder man’s reach so that when the moment came he could pluck them apparently at random from the crowd.

  Near the powder man a gap between two stalls was occupied by two men and a woman. One of the men had a guitar and the other a fiddle and the woman had printed leaflets, red and green and yellow and blue, in her hands.

  “Now the next song, ladies and gentlemen!” the man with the guitar shouted. “We will now give you ‘Soy Virgencita’—I am a virgin still, a spotless virgin. Now then———”

  And he bent over the guitar on his knee, tuned up, moved the bridge, and struck the key. The man joined in with the violin and the woman began to sing. After the first verse the men sang as well.

  They sang softly and rather plaintively, but musically, and their voices were good. The woman pretended to sing the song from one of the leaflets in her hands, but she knew it by heart. She, and the men too, had sung this song and their whole repertoire a good ten thousand times before. They were cantadores de corridos, Mexican ballad singers who go from place to place and never miss a fiesta.

  When the song came to an end they turned to the crowd standing around them in a ring. “This beautiful ballad which we have just sung for your benefit and with great pleasure, in sweet and melting tones, is now, together with other songs, at the disposal of our kind and valued patrons. Dos surtidos cinco centavos, cinco surtidos diez—nada más. Quién? Cuáles?” they asked. A selection of two went for five centavos, a collection of five for ten centavos—no more. Who would have them and which would he have?

  The leaflets were handed around and picked over and twenty or twenty-five centavos collected.

  As soon as business flagged, the singers called out: “No one else for the Virgin? Oigan, oigan, amigos, hear, hear. Then a fresh, an entirely new song: ‘The Life, Exploits, and Death of General Santana.’ Or shall we sing: ‘The Gringos at Churubusco’? Say the word. We sing at your command.”

  The fiddler tuned up and another corrido was sung.

  It was here that Andrés came to a stop. It was the cheapest entertainment. You could stand and listen to the ballad singers hour after hour. You were not compelled to buy a ballad.

  Two of the corridos pleased Andrés and he bought them—one red and one green. He read them through, folded them, and put them in his shirt pocket with his package of cigarettes.

  Then he thought it his duty to go into the church.

  2

  The church doors stood wide open. Now and then a few notes of the little organ mingled with the mundane cries and tumult of the square outside, but what could more often be heard was the monotonous chant in which the congregation gave the responses to the adjurations of the priests.

  Andrés knew little of the Catholic and still less of the Christian religion; and what he knew was somewhat confused. The only things he knew well were the ceremonies connected with religious services. He could cross himself and sprinkle himself with holy water, and he knew when he had to kneel and how many times to cross himself at certain moments in the litany.

  He knew neither less nor more of the Catholic religion than that which his mother had been able to teach him, what his neighbors in the huts on the finca knew, and what he had picked up without comprehending it when he was in service in his master’s house at home.

  Don Arnulfo and his family themselves had only the most rudimentary knowledge of religion. It did not go a step beyond the ceremonial and the usual prayers and Ave Marias. Like all half-educated persons they stopped short at the surface and at a mere observance of the ritual, which in this country occupies so prominent a place that the reality behind it is forgotten and ritual is confounded with religion itself.

  3

  The church was built high above the square. Its foundations rose more than three meters above the level of the square. Thus the building was spared the frequent floods which in the rainy season turned the square into a lake.

  It was not, however, the Spanish monks who had first discovered this excellent site for their church. They had merely erected it on the foundations of the Indian temple-pyramid which had stood there for thousands of years. With few exceptions all the churches in Mexico are built on the foundations of the old Indian temples or pyramids.

  A broad flight of stone steps led up to the church—so broad that it extended a long way on either side of the main entrance. Crowds of men, women, and children—Ladinos and Indians—ascended and descended the steps.

  This broad flight of steps was crowded not only with the pious as they entered and left the building. There were just as many beggars seated there day and night. The Church teaches charity, so the churchgoers give to the first who crouches at their feet with outstretched palm. The pious man distributes here a centavito and there a centavito, and with that his conscience is clear.

  On the top steps and right up to the doors were crowded the stands of the dealers in consecrated and unconsecrated candles, prayersheets, amulets, crosses, rosaries, silver hearts, images of the saints, dried bits of their bones, fingers, pickled hearts in gold bottles, and brains in ebony boxes. About the doorway inside the church there were even more of these stands, and they stretched on and on along the walls. The fair inside the church was as extensive as outside in the square, with the difference that inside the church business was carried on in whispers and bargains made in undertones with vehement gestures of arms and hands.

  4

  Andrés climbed the steps, took off his battered bast hat, and entered the church. Dipping his hand in the stone basin he sprinkled his forehead, knelt down, and, prostrating himself at the very entrance before the altar at the far end of the building, crossed himself again and again.

  With this he had acquitted himself of all that he knew of the Catholic religion. There was nothing more to be done. Thousands of
others, even Ladinos, knew no more and did no more than this.

  But Andrés was inquisitive and thirsty for knowledge. He wanted to see what it was all about that went on in the church. He had been in other churches often enough—at Tenejapa and Chiapa de Corso—but he had been younger then and had known less about the life he lived and all that went on around him. Everything had been new and strange. Now he was older, and the company of carreteros from various places, as well as the ideas and opinions he had picked up from time to time here and there, had added to his knowledge. The life he had lived for some years past had no secrets left for him, and now that things had lost their strangeness he saw them more plainly and clearly. He was already beginning to compare one event and one circumstance with another, and hence to criticize them. He was no longer taken in by words and opinions. He listened and considered a matter, compared it with other similar things he had heard and seen, and began to accept and endorse only what he himself was sure about in the light of the experience he daily acquired.

  He had begun to think for himself. His thoughts sometimes went askew and jostled about, and by this he knew that they were on the wrong track. Then he went back to the starting point and began afresh on a new track. Work had become lighter because he now knew it from top to bottom and did not need to think it out; so his mind was more at liberty. He could sit for hours in the carreta, when the road was good and the carreta in good order, and do nothing but think and think. His thoughts took a free and independent course. He had the great advantage of which millions are deprived, that his thoughts had not been schooled to take one definite direction. His thoughts had no bias. He could attack anything without prejudice and without being hindered by what others before him had said or thought about it. He drew his conclusions from naked circumstance and from his own experience. He saw things and happenings not as someone else had described them, but as they were or seemed to him to be.

  As he knew very little, or, to be exact, nothing about religion, he looked on it too and its ritual with an unbiased mind. He was quite free of the superstitious belief in miracles such as the virgin birth, the rising from the dead, the walking on water, the feeding of five thousand hungry people with two ordinary fishes, the turning of water into wine, the ascension into heaven, and the rest. If anyone had tried to persuade him to believe in all these things as being true he would have thought him a brazen liar. Only one of all these miraculous stories he might perhaps have believed—the story of Christ’s appearing to the disciples after His death on the road to Emmaus. He would have believed it, not on the authority of the Church, but because in his father’s hut and in the huts of other Indians he had heard much talk of such appearances. To some an uncle had appeared after his death, to others a long-buried grandmother, and to others a murdered son. None of his own relations or friends had as yet appeared to him after their deaths, but as he had grown up with such tales he might perhaps have believed that the dead Christ had appeared to several persons who had known Him.

  From all this it is clear enough that Andrés was a wicked heathen who should have been burned for his sins. He was an example of the wisdom of the Church in gathering its flock together while the child is still a child and takes everything literally, without the faculty of thinking for himself and separating the possible from the probable and the impossible from the symbolical. Whatever is put into a child’s mind before he can think and judge remains implanted there and entwines itself as years go on with the romance of adolescence; and since the grown man does not like to vex his mother who taught him all these fairy tales, he gives his assent to them all; and growing up to become a useful member of society he looks on with all the satisfaction of sentimental reminiscence when his wife tells his own children the same stories and teaches the children to believe them. The Church thrives and prospers because, like Communism, it makes sure of the new generation in good time.

  5

  After Andrés had finished kneeling and crossing himself he looked about him at the people herded together in the cathedral. It seemed that people outside, who pursued their customary lives and occupations, were never in harmony nor ever could be in harmony, whereas inside here they found the unity which as a herd they needed.

  Hundreds of candles smoldered and flickered. There were candles not only on the altar, where they were most numerous, but in every corner of the church. They were alight in every niche that supported a plaster figure, whether in cotton frock or plush mantle. Candles were burning before every plinth—and these were endless—on which stood hideous wooden dolls with glazed protruding eyes and moldering human hair. People by the dozen who were too poor to have anything but splinters of pine to give light in their own homes sacrificed their last peso to buy beautiful painted spiral candles to set up in the church.

  Many women and children knelt with their candles in their hands. They did this so that the figures of plaster and wood might know whose offerings the candles were. For, when a candle was set up among so many hundreds more, the saint—so they believed—could not possibly tell to whom he owed it, and perhaps might even forget to fulfill the prayer addressed to him.

  The church had very few benches and these were all at the front. The seats on them were sold or rented to those who had money to pay for them and who did not wish to pray to the same God as a lousy Indian woman unless at a safe distance. That is more than you could expect of a family who has money; and it is nowhere said in the Bible that a man who has learned to use a handkerchief should sit down in church next to one who has not. Therefore it is no reproach to millionaires if they occupy mahogany-paneled boxes in the churches they patronize.

  Several hundreds of people were on their knees, but scarcely twenty among them were men. When men submit to the influence of the Church and its apostles it is nearly always from motives of business and politics. They want to be shining examples and to pass as virtuous and honorable men in their public or commercial life. They like to inspire confidence in the sheep whom they design to fleece. They have observed over and over again how well it pays to be a zealous churchgoer. A woman, on the other hand, as a rule submits her whole being to the influence of the Church, even to the point of deserting her husband’s bed at the bidding of the priests.

  6

  The floor of the church, made up of stone slabs, was thickly strewn with fresh pine needles whose aromatic scent mingled with the smoke of the candles and the censers that were swung to and fro by small boys who aspired to the priesthood. Owing to these fumigations the church was shrouded in a thick haze. Nothing could be clearly distinguished. Everything swam in a mist.

  The women were so disguised by the long black cotton shawls over their heads that from behind they looked like rows of black ninepins. Many of these muffled women had consecrated images of the saints hanging down their backs from blue ribbons around their necks. Instead of an image some had a medal dangling. Those who had these objects hanging down their backs were particularly pious and holy; even a back view showed that earthly things had been put away and that no temptation of the evil one could touch them.

  When there was nothing enjoined upon them from the altar and nothing was happening there, the women sang: “Al cielo quiero ir, al cielo quiero ir—to heaven will I go, to heaven will I go.” They sang this indefatigably and without the slightest variation, so that the church was filled with a weird, monotonous chanting, like that in the Buddhist temples of India and China. Unless you knew the words beforehand you would never have been able to make sense of this unvarying singsong. It might have been Chinese or Japanese or Malay. No one could possibly have told. But it chimed in remarkably well with what was now happening in front of the altar.

  A man stood there—though really Andrés was not very sure whether it was a man or a woman; for he wore a skirt to distinguish him from the very start from all other men around and to declare to all that he was something out of the common. Andrés got the impression at once that he was a magician or something of that kind.

&n
bsp; He was enveloped in a wide and heavy mantle of gold brocade which entirely shrouded his human form. This garment probably cost more than all the women kneeling there put together could earn in their lifetimes.

  Andrés saw only the gold-brocaded back, and the mantle was so wide that he could not see what the man did with his hands. But from the movements made by the mantle it was to be concluded that the man was engaged in all kinds of mysterious doings. He took a silver candlestick that was standing at his right and moved it across to his left. After a time, during which he kept on muttering, he moved the candlestick back to his right again. Then he muttered from a thick book which was lying open at his left, and again from another thick book which he had lying open on his right. Every few moments he inclined himself before the books and toward the little holy boys swinging their censers.

  Then a man stepped forward out of a dense cloud of smoke. He was just a simple man, a half-breed Indian, clothed only in cotton shirt and trousers and with sandals on his feet. He bowed three times toward the altar and then he placed another golden mantle over the shoulders of the personage who was busied there. This new mantle was even more costly and splendid than the other; it was plentifully adorned with large and brilliant gems and there were gold and silver ornaments sewn into it. The man was now hung about with riches which the yearly budget of the whole district could never have bought.

  Now he inclined himself several times. Then he produced from somewhere a gold vessel over which was a lady’s handkerchief. He removed the handkerchief and waved the vessel to and fro. He then replaced the handkerchief and put the vessel down wherever he might have found room for it on his magic table.