Government

by B. TRAVEN

  “You want a loan of three pesos, Hipolito?” he asked.

  “Yes, don Gabriel. I have no shirt and my wife says we must have a few yards of cloth.”

  “You can have three pesos and welcome,” said don Gabriel. “Who will stand surety for you?”

  “My brother Eleoso.”

  “Bring him to me.”

  “I’m here,” said Eleoso.

  “You’ll stand surety for Hipolito?”

  “Of course. He’s my brother.”

  “When are you going to sell those two pigs of yours, Hipolito?” asked don Gabriel.

  “In five weeks, don Gabriel. I’ve spoken to don Roberto about it already. He is the dealer who always comes here to buy pigs and goats.”

  “Then in five weeks, you’ll give me five pesos. Is that so, Hipolito?”

  “Certainly, I’ll give you the five pesos then,” said Hipolito.

  “You’ll answer for the five pesos in five weeks, Eleoso?” said don Gabriel. “And a peso for every week over?”

  “Certainly, I’ll answer for my brother,” said Eleoso.

  “Good. Then here are your three pesos,” said don Gabriel, giving the money to Hipolito, who at once bought material for shirts.

  Don Gabriel lent out all the ready money he had in the house to the Indians who wanted to buy from the traders; and as the people got the money so easily, they spent it to the last centavo.

  12

  A few weeks later cattle dealers arrived on the scene.

  “So you want to buy up animals?” don Gabriel asked when they had drunk a few rounds.

  “Yes, we come regularly,” they said. “We make good purchases here.”

  “You know about the local taxes?” asked don Gabriel.

  “We pay taxes where our homes are as well as the local rate for our slaughterhouses.”

  “It doesn’t concern me what you pay elsewhere,” said don Gabriel. “For every pig you buy here, you have a peso and a half to pay, for each sheep a peso, and for each goat eighty centavos. Unless you pay it I cannot give you permission to do business, nor can I give the villagers permission to sell to you.”

  Now the dealers had come a long way and they wanted to keep the business they had in the place, but in order to realize their profit they had to offer the Indians much less for their animals than they had expected, so as to make up for the tax they had to pay.

  The Indians refused to sell at the prices offered and said they would drive their animals to Jovel, where they would be sure to get the old prices for them. The dealers became angry and refused in turn to buy. They said they would have a look around in other places.

  If they did not buy, don Gabriel would not pocket his tax; but this time, too, he did not let the fish he had hooked escape him. He summoned the jefe of the Indians.

  Whenever don Gabriel wanted to carry his point with the Indians and was afraid it might lead to vehement opposition and long-winded explanations, he always allowed the decision to rest with their own chief, to whom they had themselves given authority. That way he remained merely the modest secretary who recognized the authority of the head man of the place; for the actual ruler of the community was always an Indian, a member of the tribe which for hundreds of years had been settled there. This local chief was elected by the Indians each year from among the reputable and competent men of the tribe. The secretary was no more than the representative of the government, who, because the Indians could not read and write, acted as a link between the government and the community. He had no right to dispose of any matter or to make regulations without the consent of the Indian jefe.

  So the law ordained. The law was made not out of love of the Indians and not out of consideration for their natural rights, but because it was the only means by which the government could live in peace with the independent Indians. Military expeditions to try to keep them otherwise under government control were costly. And even when an expedition went out and soldiers succeeded in destroying whole Indian villages, the Indians who were driven from their homes formed bands and went about robbing and murdering and plundering among the farms and villages of the Mexican population, burning haciendas and whole settlements to the ground, slaughtering cattle, burning crops, destroying telegraph wires and bridges, stealing horses and mules from the prairies, and causing so much damage that the government hastened to make peace with them. The Indians had no liking for wandering about in bands. They preferred to live quietly in their villages, surrounded by their families, cultivating their fields and rearing their animals. Not only the government but the whole country benefited when the Indians were left in peace.

  But even though the law left the Indians complete self-government in all places where the population was exclusively Indian, the law was still subject to the interpretation the secretaries chose to give to it and to the manner in which they applied it. It is always the interpretation of laws and what follows from it that does the mischief.

  13

  Don Gabriel could carry out what he intended only with the help of the Indian jefe. “Look here, Narciso,” don Gabriel said to him, “this is how it stands. These nine men”—and he named them all—“have all borrowed money from me, one more, another less. They all gave me security when they borrowed the money. The money is now due. They promised to pay me back as soon as they sold pigs or sheep. Now the dealers are here and the men won’t sell, because the price doesn’t suit them. But that is no fault of mine.”

  “No, certainly not,” said the jefe.

  “They want to sell their animals at Jovel market,” don Gabriel went on, “because they think they’ll get a better price. But if so many animals are all driven at once to market, the prices will be lower than they’re offered here. Of course, that does not matter to me. But there’s this in it, don Narciso”—he now addressed the Indian as “don” to show that he put him on an equality with a Ladino—“you see, if the people sell their animals in Jovel, they’ll spend their money there on drink, and then how will they pay me back the money which is due and for which others have stood surety?”

  Narciso at once had all the men whom don Gabriel had named brought before him. He asked each what he owed don Gabriel, counting the interest for which he had given security.

  Don Gabriel had his book in his hand and he checked the amounts which each debtor carried in his head. Not one tried to give a wrong figure. They would never do that, for their word was their bond and they stood by it.

  “Then you promised,” asked Narciso, “and produced sureties, that as soon as dealers came to the village you would sell pigs or whatever else you had, so as to pay back to don Gabriel the money you had borrowed?”

  The men admitted it, but said that the prices the dealers offered were much lower than they had always paid before.

  “I can’t help that,” said Narciso.

  He turned to one of the dealers. “Why are prices so low all of a sudden? For years they have never been so low.”

  The dealer was about to answer when, looking around, he saw don Gabriel’s eye fixed upon him. He had been ready to say that he had such a heavy tax to pay per head on all animals he bought here that he had to give less in order to make any profit at all when selling to the butchers.

  But don Gabriel did not let him speak. “Rates and taxes are so high now,” he said, “that the dealers can’t pay the old prices.”

  The dealer fell in with this at once. He saw that it would never do to cross up the secretary if he wanted to do business there. A secretary could find a hundred ways of putting difficulties in a dealer’s path and could make it impossible for him to buy so much as a skin as long as he remained secretary of the place. What could the dealer do if the secretary said that the animals he had bought in another village had a contagious disease and had to be destroyed at once to prevent the infection from spreading? The animals would be killed and burned. How or to whom could the dealer prove that they were not sick at all? Don Gabriel would not have been the first to resort to s
uch measures if a dealer or anyone else who came to the place disputed his word and authority as secretary.

  Narciso, the chief of the Indians, could only judge by what he saw and heard. The men had contracted debts with don Gabriel and had promised to pay the debts as soon as a dealer arrived to whom they could sell their animals. He recognized that don Gabriel’s claim was just and that no one disputed it. So his verdict was that all the men who owed don Gabriel money had to sell animals to the dealers at the best prices they felt they could offer. The other men might do as they liked.

  All the men of the village had meanwhile gathered in the open space in front of the cabildo, for the proceedings had taken a leisurely course and lasted some hours. The men, even the debtors, agreed that their chief had settled the dispute justly. As none of them knew, or could have known, anything about the bargain don Gabriel had made with the dealers, they recognized the justice of the jefe’s verdict. And as it was not the secretary, whom none of them trusted, but their own chief who had given the verdict, they willingly submitted to it and the dealers got even more animals than they had hoped for.

  “Now you see how foolish you were to have made a fuss over the few pesos I take off you,” don Gabriel said to the dealers that evening. “If I hadn’t been behind you, you wouldn’t have seen so much as the tail of a lousy goat. And look at you now—where else could you have made such a haul as you have here? You’ve no occasion whatever to pull a long face over the few miserable pesos that find their way into my pocket.”

  His job, which at first had looked like a very lean one, now appeared to have possibilities.

  2

  The few pesos don Gabriel had handed out had come back to him, bringing their sheaves with them; and he was now in a position to extend his operations.

  One of his duties was the opening of a school. It was one of the many sidelines of his office, a sideline he could easily find time for, since his chief function, properly speaking, was merely to be on the spot.

  He had never been a schoolteacher. He could read and write and do simple arithmetic, and with that his qualifications to teach began and ended. But the dictatorship set little store by the education of the common people. As soon as they had any education their wants increased and they became discontented with the life which God, with the help of the Church and the State, had made for them and in which it was His desire they should remain.

  But then, tourists and journalists came into the country from abroad, and people came who had money and wanted to invest it to advantage in a country where competition was less severe and exacting than in their own. The dictator wanted to see the country opened up and taking its place in the ranks of highly civilized nations. The dictator of a highly civilized nation is looked up to and his place in history is more secure than that of a dictator who rules a horde of savages. The Mexicans, in the dictator’s opinion, were not capable of opening up the country themselves. They did not know how to work and, besides, they did not want to work.

  He himself, though a Mexican, was an exception. That was why he allowed himself to be elected time after time by those to whom he gave the right to elect him and who in return were rewarded with offices and jobs. The farce of election was kept up in order to demonstrate to civilized countries that this was a constitutionally conducted republic, where foreign capital could safely be invested and concessions safely taken up by the American banks and mining companies.

  The dictator thought himself the best Mexican alive and the only Mexican whose life was of consequence.

  When the elections came around he gave solemn audience to his following and allowed himself to be implored to run again. He then turned a deaf ear like some millionaire’s flunky who is above taking a tip but is grievously disappointed if it is not placed in the open palm he holds behind his back. Finally, when his followers begged him on their knees to consent, the dictator declared that it had not been his intention to run again. He had taken an oath not to be a candidate for election, “but since, caballeros, you insist upon it, I will sacrifice my personal inclinations once again for the sake of the people of Mexico.”

  This was reported in all the American newspapers and the world knew that Mexico was not governed by a despotic dictator. It was an up-to-date and civilized republic with a highly developed constitutional system.

  The dictator sacrificed himself for his people in this manner eight times in succession, until a protracted and bloody revolution threw him out of the saddle. The ungrateful Mexican people allowed their great statesman to die in exile in a foreign land, embittered and sorrowing.

  One of the most important tasks the dictator set himself was to cook up statistics for the benefit of the world at large. If he had neglected to do this, the world would never have known what a great statesman he was and what a debt of gratitude the Mexican people owed him for sacrificing himself again and again, bearing the heavy burden of dictatorship and wearing the president’s crown of thorns, in order to be the first and foremost of the servants of his beloved people.

  Countless hordes of bandits, composed of Indians whose land had been taken from them and given to the big landowners, American companies, and members of the aristocratic clique, roamed the country and were joined by peons who had fled from the tyranny of the landowners. These hordes were put down by the dictator’s iron hand—insofar, at least, that no newspaper might make any allusion to them on pain of confiscation.

  But the dictator did not want merely to show the iron hand of a great statesman who guaranteed peace and security within his country’s borders; he wanted also to have the reputation in civilized countries of being the man who educated the people of Mexico. This fame he achieved by means of statistics showing the number of schools he had opened in the country, in order to provide the children of Indians and peons and, indeed, of all the working people with up-to-date instruction.

  A country which has many schools stands high in the scale of civilized nations, and there is nothing like it for attracting foreign capital and investments. The schools in the large towns were quite as good as the schools in the United States. They had to be, for the tourists, bankers, and journalists who came to these towns were invited to inspect them.

  These gentry did not, however, go to the remote Indian villages. Instead they were given statistics on all the village schools which the dictator had established, and with this the foreign visitors were content. They quailed at the thought of arduous journeys into the interior of the country, and saw all they wanted of village schools from the beautifully made models of rural schoolhouses which were exhibited in the Department of Education.

  The escuela rural, the village school at Bujvilum, of which don Gabriel was the teacher, was one of the schools established by the great statesman-educator of the Mexican people, and it was glorified in the returns as a school for Indians with one hundred and twenty scholars.

  This village school at Bujvilum was conducted in very much the same way as all other village schools of the Republic. It had in fact one hundred and twenty scholars of the male sex. The statistics did not lie.

  2

  “How many boys are there in Bujvilum and the outlying places belonging to it?” don Gabriel asked Narciso, the chief.

  “I will have them counted,” said Narciso.

  He brought the answer a few days later. “A hundred and twenty, or perhaps a few more.”

  “They must all come here to school,” don Gabriel announced.

  The jefe gave the order.

  Next Monday morning about thirty boys, most of them naked, came to school. Don Gabriel wrote down all their names. If any of them did not know their last names, because they had never heard them, he gave them names of his own selection.

  On Tuesday there were again thirty; half of them were new ones who had not come on Monday. The others were absent because don Gabriel, not knowing what to do with his pupils, had beaten three of them for the sake of doing something and to show them what school was for. Some of the fathers,
on hearing of this, had not been pleased and so had forbidden their children to go to school again. They did not see why the secretary should beat the boys merely because they horsed around in the open space in front of the cabildo.

  Don Gabriel again beat a few of the boys—after all, he was the schoolteacher. Next day half the boys were again absent. They preferred working in the fields with their fathers to going to school to be beaten. But a dozen new ones came who had not been there either on Monday or Tuesday. And in the course of two weeks each of the hundred and twenty had been to school at least once.

  Don Gabriel sent his report in to the government, giving a list of one hundred and twenty scholars. The school appeared in the statistics and made a very good impression there.

  Now that don Gabriel had scholars every day, he had to teach them. The boys arrived at six in the morning as they had been instructed to do—or, to be accurate, at sunrise, for neither don Gabriel nor anyone else in the place had a clock. Don Gabriel himself had not yet left his bed. Only his wife was up and about.

  At about half-past seven he had his coffee. Then at last he went to the door and called out, “Are you all there, muchachos?”

  “Yes, señor Profesor, we are all here,” the boys shouted back.

  “I am coming in a moment. Don’t make so much noise,” don Gabriel called, and for a time the boys sat on the grass as still as mice.

  But while don Gabriel was lounging about indoors and quarreling with his wife because he had no idea what to do next, the boys went back to running around and chasing each other. In about an hour don Gabriel appeared at the door again, in a very bad temper after one of the usual arguments with his wife, and called out, “Didn’t I tell you to keep quiet, you vermin?”

  Grabbing one of the boys, he gave him a clout on the ear. The boy set up a howl and cried out, “I’ll tell my father you hit me.” Then he ran off to his home and did not return that day.