by B. TRAVEN
“That would suit me very well,” she said. “Tuxtla’s a big place and I might get a good job there, at ten or even fourteen pesos.”
“Certainly you could,” he put in, “and if you don’t get it there and want to go farther, Arriaga and Tonalá are fine places too and there they’re always wanting criadas. Servant girls are in demand down there. But if you won’t tell me your name, I won’t take you and you’ll stay here.”
“Rosario López, su servidora—your obedient servant,” she replied in jest.
“Rosario then,” he said. “Chayo, querida mía———”
But she stopped him short, laughing at the same time: “Mira, mira, caballero—not so fast! Querida suya—your dear girl. We’ll see about that. Not so fast. You don’t even know whether I like you. Pero, pensando, but thinking about it—yo creo que sí.”
“Creo que sí?” he asked. “What do you mean you ‘think so’? Either you like me or you don’t. So out with it.”
She flushed and smiled in confusion. “Perhaps I do.”
“That’s better. Then it’s a bargain,” he said abruptly. “Then I’ll take you along. We can see about the rest on the road. There’s no sleep for me tonight. We still have goods to load and we have to yoke up. But maybe you can get two or three hours’ sleep. We have another girl with us, Andrés’s wife. You can sleep with her and keep warm. We’ve no time tonight, either of us, to bother with our wives. We shall be hard at it. They’re dancing again. Come on, Chayo, stir your legs and get to it.”
While they danced he had the chance to consider his rapid courtship and engagement calmly. He took a look at her now and again without her noticing, for she looked down at her feet, as a modest girl should when dancing an Indian zapateado.
He liked her better the more he saw of her. She was an Indian, but she spoke good Mexican Spanish. She was obviously experienced and no longer entirely ignorant of life; for she had acquiesced without false modesty in the proposals he made, although he had no more than hinted at them. She had cut him off merely because of the suddenness of his suggestion, as it is the part of any girl to do who wishes to keep a hold on a last shred of her modesty. No woman likes to have it thrown in her face by the man she honors that she fell into his arms at the very first moment. She does not like it, on her own account, if she has waited and looked forward to nothing more worth her desiring than taking the first chance that came along as soon as it presented itself.
And when he thought all this over, he only took a stronger fancy to her. Never mind a girl’s past when time presses and nothing better offers. After a while it is always found that it makes no real difference. Any woman may be the right one and any can be intolerable, whatever her past may have been. A woman is far less influenced by her past than a man by his. A man is too much inclined to be pedantic, moral, and respectable through and through, to be plagued by his conscience, and to sacrifice everything, including his wife, to his narrow-minded and strait-laced respectability. If you leave out the desiccated holy women and withering spinsters, a man is far more of an intolerable and stinking pharisee than a woman.
5
After Manuel had danced a few more times with his newly won girl, he looked up at the sky to see by the stars what time it was.
“We can have two more dances, querida, and then we’ll go,” he said. “They’ll be looking for me at the camp.”
When the two dances were over, Manuel took the girl by the arm and they went to pick up her bundle. On leaving the little restaurant, they passed by one of the cantinas.
“There, muchacha, have a look at that,” he said, stopping. “The finqueros and the big shots from the monterías are chucking their money about in grand style. They’re giving San Caralampio the time of his life. Damned if every one of them hasn’t a couple of girls riding on his knees. Now, look at that—they’ve got three of them sitting on the table in front of them, stripped to their stockings—their clothes are all hanging on the hat pegs. There’s life for you. The cantinero’s getting it in by the sackful. That’s the style.”
“Why do you look at them?” she asked, pulling him on by the arm. “You’d like to be there too. You’d enjoy it, I’m sure.”
“Celosa? Jealous?” he asked with a laugh. “You’re shaping up well, querida mía. Wait a bit, Chayo, we’ll get along all right together. You’ll have no complaints to make. But,” he went on, “when I see all that carrying-on, I can’t help thinking of the slave-driven peons on the fincas and the wretched muchachos in the monterías, who have nothing and go to wrack and ruin like mules and dogs. And here the money’s chucked about on women and drink, and the women take it any way they’re asked as long as it’s gold pieces. Not that the women ever see much of it. Most of it goes to their dueñas, those madams who steal it from them when they fall down drunk on their beds. And what’s left their boy friends take, the fellows who live off them in Tapachula, Veracruz, Frontera, El Carmen, or wherever else these girls come from. And those fellows spend the money these girls earn for them on other girls around the corner. There was a gang of these girls who came along with the carretas. I listened to them talking and quarreling among themselves and heard all about it. It’s a hell of a life they lead.”
Suddenly he gripped her by the arm and pulled her toward him and held her tightly. “To the devil with it, querida, let’s go. When I think of the carretas and look at all this and then think how we founder in the mud and never have a whole shirt on our backs—yes, to hell with it all. I’d just like to know who made this damned world!”
They went on their way. But his bitterness rose again now he had started. With the feel of the girl’s warm body close to his own, stumbling along the dark street, dodging stones and holes and puddles and quagmires, he began, probably for the first time in his life, to take a clear view of the world, of his place in the economic order, and, indeed, of his whole wretched existence.
The girl was strong and healthy, quite unlike the child Andrés had taken for his wife; and while he danced with her, stood about with her, and drank coffee with her he had seen something in a woman he had never seen before. The openheartedness of the strong healthy girl whose hands were hardened by toil, her free and easy way with him, and the warm and womanly feeling that streamed out from her inspired him with a wild and, at the same time, almost diffident desire.
He stopped and took her tightly in his arms. “Chayo,” he said, “I’ve only known you for an hour or two, but it’s nothing to me what you are and why you’re running away. I want you to be my wife.”
“But—” she stammered, “well—but wait till we’re on the road, or—not just here—there’s plenty of time—and of course I’ll—you’re taking me to Tuxtla and I know well enough why you take me. I will—I promise you. You know that—but————”
“No,” he interrupted, “that’s not what I mean. Yes, of course I mean that too. But I mean something else. I want you to be my wife altogether—I mean, for always. What I mean is—I want to live in a hut with you on a piece of land. Or we’ll go to a town where I can get work and where you’ll be with me always, and have children and be properly man and wife. I’ll see to it that I get hold of a little money. As soon as we get to Arriaga, I’ll clear out with you and make for the next station. There we’ll buy tickets and go along the line to a town where no one will know that I’m a runaway and owe money to the patrón. I’ll say I’m from Tapachula. And after a time we’ll go on to a bigger town. There no one will know anything and I’ll work in a factory. Then we’ll have a life of our own, you and I, just you and I and the children. Would you do that, Chayo?”
“I think I would,” she said simply.
As soon as he had said all this, and still more when he heard her honest and unromantic reply, Manuel was overcome by a deep and serene contentment, which released the pressure of his immediate desires. It was something like what had occurred in Andrés, though the cause and grounds of it were quite different—as different as Andrés was from Man
uel and Estrellita from Rosario.
It was no novelty for Manuel to be with a woman, and he could tell that Rosario too was not a novice. Neither for one nor the other was there any mystery left in these matters. Yet, in place of the importunate desire which had tormented him for the last hour or two, he now felt the aspiration to something beautiful. He might not be clear about the beauty of it, but he felt it was the best life had to offer, that which gave it its real worth. As a carretero he had thought a hundred times over that he might as well not live at all as carry on in that life of hopeless toil which could never change or come to an end.
At the sight of this strong, healthy, and openhearted girl there flamed up in him the wild longing, which is in every Indian’s blood, for a family—a family to bind him to home and country—and for work which he could see living and growing under his eyes and which gave him an aim and a return. It was that unquenchable yearning of man for a point of rest, for a core to his life, without which life is nothing but a ceaseless flux.
The calling which had him in its grip stifles such yearnings in the men who are trapped in its toils. And until this day, until this very hour Manuel had scarcely known such a yearning at all. The carretas had almost succeeded in killing it for good.
As soon as he recognized all this he no longer felt that unabashed, aggressive desire for the girl which he had given signs of all evening. No longer did he see in her just a stray girl he had picked up, to be taken and kept, or discarded as he chose. He wanted now to have this woman for good, and the first step was to win her.
It was not sentiment that moved him, and he knew nothing of ruses and stratagems. He was as innocent of soft and tender feelings as she was. If he meant to win her, it was not with long discourses and fine words or with gallantries and chivalrous service. Nothing of all this entered his head, any more than it would enter the head of any Indian who had not given up his natural and healthy attitude to life.
His instinct told him that the way to win her was not to take what was now his for the taking, but even to give up all thought of it. It was not that he was plagued by any notion of its being hateful or unclean or that it would be taking an unfair advantage.
What he felt suddenly was the longing to be free, and it came to him that only through and with this woman could he attain freedom. So long as this woman was the core of this longing, he could never surrender the aim of freeing himself from the carretas. It might be that, if he let himself go, the woman might cease that very night to be all that he wished her to be. Whether or not, he had no wish to gamble on it. His desire for a home and a family was bound up in the desire to store up something beautiful for an opportunity less casual and meaningless than the present moment.
If Manuel had been of a highly civilized race he might be suspected of thinking of his pleasure and how to enhance it. But Manuel was an Indian—and a carretero. He knew nothing about the enhancement of pleasure by cunning preparations and delays. Even if any such ideas had occurred to him he would never have taken the trouble to carry them out. It would have taken too long. His notion was to reach his goal by the shortest and surest path without any fooling about.
He could not have said why he behaved as he did. It was instinctive. If he could have attached the woman to him by not delaying for an hour, he would not have delayed. But he felt that if he delayed he would be on better terms with her and they would be better friends. She would wonder why he did not do as she expected he would; and that would show her that his feeling for her was more serious than she had thought it.
He behaved in this way because he did not know how otherwise to express himself and to tell her what he felt for her and that what he felt came from the depth of his heart, for he had no words for this feeling. He was as incapable of expressing deep emotion in words as of forcing tears from his eyes when he felt sadness or pain of mind.
6
Meanwhile they had been walking on. Manuel no longer had hold of her. They had separated without thinking, while he debated within himself and came to his decision.
The real reason may have been the stones and holes and puddles and quagmires and pits and pieces of timber, which made hard going of the dark streets. They had fallen apart as they stumbled along; it was easier like that to fight their way on.
When they left the outskirts of the town and had the open prairie before them, the going was better. Rosario now walked beside him.
A thought struck him. “Chayo,” he said, “don’t say a word, not even to one of the muchachos, about me clearing out. If the patrón hears of it, I’ll never get down to Arriaga and the railroad; or he might sell me to a montería, to be sure of what I owe him, and that would be a thousand times worse. There’s no escape from a montería. The muchachos there are better guarded than convicts.”
“I won’t say a word, you muchacho,” she promised him. Then she added: “But what is your name? I don’t know what to call you… . Oh—Manuel. I give you my promise, Manuel. I won’t betray you.”
It bound him closer to her to have her promise of secrecy. They were now conspirators. He could tell from the tone of her voice that he might rely on her promise. They were not only conspirators but loyal comrades. It needed only these few and apparently trivial words to bind them closely and firmly together. It was not the words themselves so much as the tone and the way she spoke that told him he was on the way to win a woman to depend upon.
So far she had said very little. She did not seem to be a great talker. She was like that, he supposed.
She was no longer a girl. She might be twenty-five or so.
7
He saw her now only as a shadow as he went along beside her in the darkness dimly lit by the bright stars. She was barefoot and walked with a long firm stride. She was only a little shorter than he.
He was still carrying her bundle. For the sake of saying something instead of walking along in silence he asked her: “What’s in your bundle, querida?”
“Only my Sunday dress, two shirts, a towel, a pair of shoes, and a pair of long cotton stockings,” she said. “Not much to bring you, but I didn’t steal them and I don’t need much.”
Then, without beating about the bush and without fear that she might lose him or that he might despise her for it, she told him all that had happened to her. She saw nothing tragic in her experiences any more than he saw anything tragic in a carretero’s lot—not even bad luck. To them, as to all their kind, whatever came their way, every calamity and every pleasure, belonged to the natural order of things; if unpleasant it might be avoided, granted you were smart enough, but otherwise it had to be put up with once it came and could not be eluded in time. And if they sought an explanation they fell back on the submissiveness which they had had well hammered into them, and said: “It is God’s will.” It never occurred to them to say that God’s will is merely what man wrests for himself by the exercise of his reason, his perseverance, and his will. If they had reasoned thus they would not have belonged to the lowest and most wretched class.
8
Rosario, as they walked across the prairie, told him that at the age of twelve she had had to leave the Indian village where she was born, because there were too many children at home. It was a village of free Indians, and the land which the commune allotted to her father was stony and barren and too small for sustaining a large family. The more fertile land had been taken away bit by bit from the commune by don Porfirio’s political chiefs and sold by them for their own benefit to Spanish and German landowners.
Rosario went into service at Yajalón with a Mexican shopkeeper. She got a peso a month. Her employer got her with child before she was fourteen years old. She stayed on there and was given fifty centavos more a month. Her baby died and her employer wanted to give her a second one.
The first had arrived without her knowing anything about it. She was very much surprised when one day it suddenly made its appearance as she was cooking over the fire; it just fell to the ground at her feet. She knew whose the ch
ild was, so she stayed quietly on in the house, since the child really belonged to the household. In this country such events are not taken tragically. The wife pitches into her husband for an hour or two, and then they are reconciled. She never for a moment thinks of separating from him. They are good Catholics, and though the Catholic Church tolerates every sort of beastliness in marriage—wife-beating, scandals, and whatever you please—it does not allow divorce, no matter to what lengths of hatred the married couple may go. For God has joined them in heaven even when the marriage was merely a question of money, or a maintenance policy, or an impulse which did not last.
But when her master approached her again, thinking that she would now easily admit his right to her, Rosario showed more sense. She had learned by experience where children came from and the reason. So she made a commotion in the dead of night and her mistress came along and the husband got his discharge.
Rosario stayed a few months longer in the house, but it became more and more intolerable, for the man gave her no peace. At last she left and went from place to place, taking jobs at two, three, and four pesos a month. Finally she arrived at Balún-Canán. She worked in various houses as cook and maid-of-all-work.
After several changes she settled down with a widow whose temper was getting worse from month to month from the exasperation of having no man in her bed. There were times when she became confidential with Rosario, and sometimes so confidential that this Indian girl, whose instincts were entirely normal, could not make out whether the woman was more man than woman. She made proposals which confused the girl and even nauseated her, so that by degrees Rosario became far more afraid of the widow than she had been of her first master—though it was only because she was so afraid of him and because he beat her that she had submitted to him.
She gave notice. The woman, who had reached the most difficult crisis of her life, lost all control. She thought she had found in Rosario a suitable victim, whom she could win over in the course of time by presents and other favors, and so indulge her abnormal cravings. When Rosario stood by the notice she had given, the woman took her revenge, still in the hope that the girl would prove amenable. She went to the police and accused the girl of a theft of money. The money was found in the dark hole where the girl slept.
