by B. TRAVEN
6
It sometimes happened that Bujvilum was without a secretary for five years at a stretch or longer. It owed this good fortune to the fact that the place was forgotten; and it was most likely to be forgotten when the higher powers were at loggerheads.
A new governor had been elected. He maintained that he had a majority; but his defeated opponent maintained and proved that the returns had been faked, and that if they had not been faked he would have been the elected governor. So he took office and established his government in another town in the state and hastened to put all his friends into jobs so as to have their support. The elected governor did the same in order to follow up his success; for the best way to follow up a success is to have as many followers as possible.
And now since these two new governors were irreconcilably at odds, it was the patriotic duty of the outgoing governor to remain in office also.
The federal government, which could not keep out of this imbroglio in case it lost control of the state, appointed a provisional governor who likewise assumed office.
Now, in Mexico there were always two governments, the civil and the military. Each state had two regents, the governor and the jefe de las operaciones militares. This jefe was the commanding officer of the federal troops in the garrisons throughout the state. As this general had been made responsible for the preservation of peace in the state, he held it his duty to set up a provisional governor on his own account, because he did not feel able to give the governor provisionally set up by the federal government his confidence and with it his military support.
So it came about that there were five governors exercising authority over the state at the same time, all warring against one another since none would give way. Each had a lengthy train of friends and relations and each was determined to make the fullest use of his time in office in order to set himself up for the rest of his days. All maintained emphatically that they were inspired by the purest and most unselfish love of their country.
Similar battles were frequently waged among the jefe políticos. And these were the periods when the Indians of independent villages in the remoter regions lived in peace. Dogs experience the same thing: when the bacon is being fought for, the bones are overlooked, but when possession of the bacon has been thrashed out then the bones become important.
During the dictatorship of don Porfirio the bacon was settled. He had it, and he divided it at leisure among his fat retainers, all the relations and friends who sucked his blood. Those who were too remote from him to be of any danger or use did without the bacon and had to be content with the bones. And there were bones to be picked far and wide in this vast country. Every man who worked, every man who produced anything was a bone from which it was the duty of every jack-in-office to extract the marrow. Whether you looked at it from inside or out you got the same impression—that to have any office meant nothing but the opportunity to get rich.
There was no fear of being hauled over the coals unless the holder of an office was suspected of being unfriendly to the dictatorship, or, worse, of babbling about democracy, universal suffrage, and the ineligibility of a president for re-election. That was the one crime of which an official could be guilty. He himself had supreme jurisdiction over any other crimes and corruptions he might commit and practice. Where there is a dictator at the top of the ladder, you find nothing but dictators on every other rung. The only difference is that some are higher up and others lower down.
Those who occupied the lower rungs were the big businessmen, the manufacturers, the large landholders, the mining companies, the owners of plantations, and the proprietors of large farms—the finqueros.
7
Don Gabriel was no innocent infant at the breast. He knew how it fared with secretaries in the independent Indian pueblos. Hundreds of instances were known to him, as they were to everybody in the state.
But he also knew, from hundreds of examples, what a secretary of these Indian communities could make if he was up to his job. And that was what decided him to accept the post with alacrity as soon as it was offered him. Like all secretaries before him, he decided to crack the bone as fast as he could and then to make himself scarce with equal speed before the Indians were stung to frenzy.
The Indians were far from being ill disposed. They were not warlike. They were tillers of the soil, who are everywhere of a peaceable disposition as long as they are left to go their own way. They have no other desire but to cultivate their fields in peace, to support their families, to rear their children, and to enjoy a quiet old age. Agriculture rules out the warlike spirit. Fields and herds go to ruin if men have to be out on the warpath; and if on a foray they lay waste the fields of their neighbors, these neighbors are then compelled to support themselves by overrunning the fields of the aggressors in turn. Agriculture is no nursery of adventure. The adventurous and warlike spirit arises only when his own land no longer supports the agriculturalist.
Don Gabriel knew Bujvilum and he knew the Bachajontecs. He had often dealt with them as a cattle buyer and had always found them easy to get on with in the way of business. Knowing their friendly disposition he had no fear of going among them as secretary.
8
It was three years since the Bachajontecs had had a secretary. Their last one had died in his bed, of fever or a cramp in the stomach. In any case, he had departed this life by a natural death. It is true that he had not brought matters to such a pass as to have a shower of lead about his ears as a warning to remove himself and his family before worse happened. His wife had stayed on with his children for a few months and carried on the official duties of her deceased husband. Then when her tienda was sold out she had returned to her home at Shcuchuitz.
After this the place had been without a secretary because the jefe político could not find a suitable man who was willing to go, and those who did want to go spoke not a word of Tseltal.
Don Gabriel took a few soldiers with him, as every secretary always did; in his case it was not for protection, but because they were the only document the Indians could read. The soldiers were the announcement of don Gabriel’s formal appointment as the new secretary who was to represent the government in Bujvilum.
As always when soldiers approached the place, the Indians vanished into the jungle; but some of them soon emerged when they saw that the soldiers had stacked their arms in front of the cabildo and lain down to sleep without having entered the village area to search the huts.
As soon as the advance party of Indians returned to the village, the soldiers bought poultry and eggs from them and paid, in hard cash. Then, their purchases completed, they returned to their camp and set about cooking their evening meal.
Next morning don Gabriel hoisted the national flag on a high pole in front of the cabildo. The soldiers stood at attention and the trumpeter sounded the flag salute. Then the soldiers marched away.
At night don Gabriel hauled down the flag and set off a few fireworks. He did not dole out brandy, as the few men who had come back to the village remained in their huts. That same night some of them went into the jungle to tell the people that the soldiers had gone and that there were only the new secretary and his wife in the cabildo. In the morning smoke ascended peacefully from the hearths of all the jacales.
One by one the men approached the cabildo. The jefe of the village introduced himself and his delegates—his elected councilors—to the new secretary.
When the men saw that don Gabriel had meanwhile opened his tienda they began making purchases at once. A little later the women and children came too and bought salt, needles and thread, candy, tobacco, and coffee.
The cabildo, which was constructed of thin stakes daubed with mud and roofed with palm leaves, was in a wretched condition. Without don Gabriel’s having to say a word, the men came at midday and began repairing the building, and particularly the flimsy roof. They also replaced the half-rotted door of the prison with a strong new wooden one with a grating.
“That’ll st
op murderers and criminals breaking out,” said the jefe as his men brought the new door along.
Don Gabriel gave each man who had worked on the cabildo a copita—a nip of brandy. The jefe refused. He never touched aguardiente, he said.
That night don Gabriel said to his wife, “I say, the viejo, the casique, doesn’t drink. I don’t like the looks of it.”
“He’ll drink quick enough,” his wife replied reassuringly. “He’d be the first I’ve known who didn’t. Try him when he’s alone with you.”
9
Don Gabriel could never grow rich on the proceeds of the store. For one thing, the store was not large. It took up just a corner of their room, where an opening had been made in the mud wall. This opening was closed by a stout wooden shutter; at the bottom of it were two loops of bast which were passed over pegs in the wall, so that it could be either let down or held up. When it was let down the opening in the wall was like an open window. The board had two hinged supports on which it rested, and in this way the shutter became the counter when the store was open. If anybody wanted to buy anything he stood outside at the opening and waited patiently, without calling or rapping, until don Gabriel or his wife chanced to notice that there was a customer in the shop—as one might say elsewhere. When the shutter was up, the store was closed.
For another thing, the store was not well stocked. No one had allowed don Gabriel a centavo’s worth of merchandise on credit, not even when he said he had been appointed a secretary; and so he had been limited in the purchase of his stock by the ready money in his possession—and this was very little. The few pesos he had been able to borrow from friends and relations of his wife had gone for household and traveling expenses.
The one thing he had got on credit was a keg of aguardiente—the low-quality brandy sold to the Indians of Mexico—and that at an outrageous price against his promissory note, payable on the last day of the second month without further notice or warning. Don Gabriel’s wife had had to sign as surety. The brandy distiller, however, had agreed to let him have aguardiente at the usual wholesale price in the future on a month’s credit, if he met the first bill on the date when it fell due.
Aguardiente cannot be sold on credit to Indians in Mexico. In small places with a purely Indian population no brandy can be sold at all. But don Gabriel had been given a special license for the sale of brandy by the jefe político, who could make and unmake laws according to his own discretion in his own district, just as the governor could in the state he governed.
Laws for the common good are all very well. But there must always be officials to see that the laws are honored, and these officials who have power and authority to see that the laws are honored must be strong enough in their own sphere to go beyond or to alter or to tighten up the laws just as they see fit. Otherwise there would be no sense in a dictatorship and you might just as well have a democracy. There has got to be some difference, after all. And the dictator who is at the top could not maintain his dictatorship very long without good friends who in their turn exercised power and authority under him.
Don Gabriel sold four small glasses of brandy on the second day, one on the third, none on the fourth, two on the fifth, and on the sixth, a Sunday, none.
That evening don Gabriel remarked to his wife, “If I don’t give credit I won’t sell the keg in four months, and how I can pay the bill in six weeks is more than I know.”
“Of course you’ll have to give credit, tonto, you idiot,” his wife replied. “The fellows’ll pay up all right when they sell some pigs or maize or wool.”
Don Gabriel’s receipts for the week from the sale of goods from the store amounted to two pesos thirty centavos. True, there was no fear of starving. The people in the village were not unfriendly. One day a man brought him a hen as a present, another day he was given a kid, the day afterward he got a sackful of maize, and the day after that a heavy cluster of golden bananas. And the Indian jefe gave him a plot from the communal land and also sent some boys to put it in order for him.
But what don Gabriel wanted was money. You cannot make your pile out of maize, poultry, and eggs unless you deal in them wholesale and have a ready market.
What was the good of having power in the place if it was not put to use? When you have power you must use it—and use it quickly before you lose it.
10
Two Syrian peddlers passed through the village. They had a variety of useful articles to sell and a lot of trash besides—matches, printed cotton, cloth, buttons, many-colored combs of celluloid, hairpins, needles, white shirt material, knives, spoons, brightly enameled cups, percussion caps, glass beads, gawdy rings and earrings, bicarbonate of soda, quinine, pictures of saints with looking glasses on the back, gay silk scarves, thread.
The Indian is very much like the rest of us. The women love bright ribbons and gawdy necklaces and gleaming earrings; and like all other women on earth they pass very easily from the important things required for the household and for clothing to the purchase of innumerable other things which give them pleasure or distinguish them from other women and attract the attention of their husbands or their lovers. Here too, as everywhere else, the husband is induced to let his wife buy what she likes by the persuasion of laughter and cajolery or of tears and cross looks. And the man too, as elsewhere, buys all sorts of things which are of little use, merely because he thinks they will give his wife pleasure or open the heart of a girl to his courtship.
The traders who go from one Indian village to another with their pack mules know from long experience how best to do business. They know how to get rid of what they have brought with them, whether it is what the Indians need or not. It matters no more to them than it does to other merchants whether the articles they offer for sale are useful or are trash; all that matters to them is that they are salable and bring a good profit.
Traveling peddlers, when they arrived at a place to sell their goods, went first to the alcalde and introduced themselves. It was a polite formality. The alcalde sometimes asked to see their license and tax receipts and informed them that they could not sell brandy.
The two Syrians went first to don Gabriel. True, he was not the alcalde. The head man of the village was the casique, the jefe elected by the Indians. But the dealers regarded the secretary as the real man in authority, and don Gabriel would have taken it very much amiss if they had not.
When they saw that he sold brandy, they first had a drink and stood him to one too, to increase the outlay. Then they asked whether they might spend the night in the cabildo and have their meal with him. That again gave him a chance to make something.
The two traders paid up to the hilt in federal taxes, they paid state taxes, and they paid rates in the municipalidad where they lived. Besides all this they paid for a special license as peddlers.
Don Gabriel did not examine their licenses and their receipts for taxes paid. It was of no interest to him what others made on them. As soon as the copitas were downed he came straight to the point.
“There is a special tax for the village here, one peso a day for each trader.”
“But,” objected one of the Syrians, “we have paid already for a license from the municipalidad in Jovel.”
“What you fellows pay in Jovel is no concern of mine,” he snapped. “You come here to do business and so you’ve got to pay a tax. If you don’t pay, you get no permission from me to display your goods or to go to people’s homes, and you leave the place within an hour.”
“But that is an injustice,” said the other of the two.
To this don Gabriel replied: “I am secretary here and I know whether there is a tax to be paid in this place or not.”
The Syrians paid.
“There is no need to write you a receipt,” he said, as he took the money. “I am here on the spot and no one in another place will want a receipt for taxes paid here.”
Thus they had no proof if they should wish to bring a complaint. They would not in any case have got very far with a co
mplaint even if they had had a receipt to show. Dictatorships and military regimes don’t hold with complaints and the right to complain; and those who open their mouths get shot as disturbers of the peace and resisters of authority.
Don Gabriel was not through with them yet, however. When you have hooked a fish you must keep a firm hold on the line.
“I get no pay to speak of here,” he said. “My pay consists in the right to run a store and sell brandy. You come along to sell the same things that I have in my tienda, and if you sell them it means that I can’t sell them. You must each pay me an additional peso a day in consideration of your competition and as some compensation for the harm you do me.”
The two traders paid this too.
It is the case everywhere that when a half-cent tax is put on a package of cigarettes, the retailer sells the package not for half a cent more but for five cents more—“by way of adjustment,” as he says. He justifies the increased price by the new tax.
Here these traders at once added 50 per cent to all their prices. The Indians, who had no alternative, paid it. Don Gabriel, who as secretary was supposed to protect the Indians against extortion and robbery, could say nothing against these exorbitant prices because it was by his authority that the traders were permitted to do business in the place.
11
Don Gabriel was kind and obliging. When he saw that many of the Indians wanted to buy material for shirts and other necessities but had no money, he offered them credit—quite of his own accord. His only regret was in not having more cash on hand to lend out, though the sum he had just collected from the traders was a help.
