by B. TRAVEN
After don Gabriel had taught school for two or three weeks he found that his pupils were still not sure whether the letter he chalked up was an A or a G. He told them ten times a day that they would never learn it even if they came to school for a hundred years. The boys agreed with him, and so they came to school only when they did not know what else to do. There was never a day when more than a quarter of them were present.
Don Gabriel then hit on a new method, though really it was not his own discovery. He had seen it in practice in another place when as a cattle dealer he had been buying animals through the secretary there. This method now occurred to him and he adopted it with a slight improvement on the patent.
He collected useless scraps of paper from the store, torn wrappings and the margins of newspapers. Then he wrote a short sentence on each of the scraps of paper in ink: The cow is brown and has four legs; The goat has horns and a tail; Sheep are black or white and have wool; The tree is tall and has many branches; The secretary is a caballero and has a wife; The governor rules the state uprightly and well; The president of the country is a general and a good and wise man; The Mexican Republic has a famous president, don Porfirio; The jefe político of our district is an honorable man and respected by all; The Mexicans are the best fighters in the world and a noble people; The sun is in the sky and is round; My father has a field and goats and sheep.
When he had inscribed a sufficient number of bits of paper in this manner, he gave one to each of the boys and showed him how to hold it in the correct position for reading the sentence written on it. “Always hold it so that the thumb of your right hand comes on this spot. Look, like this.”
Then he read the sentence over and the boy had to repeat it until he knew it by heart. The boy was given only a rough idea of what the sentence meant as a whole. He was not told which word meant sheep and which goat. All he could do was gabble out the words without knowing either the sense of them or distinguishing one word from another.
He was then left with his piece of paper and instructed to keep on rattling off the words he had learned by heart, without break or pause, looking all the time at the paper in his hand. Don Gabriel meanwhile took on the next boy and repeated the process, until he too could reel off his sentence.
Finally every boy had had his scrap of paper gone over with him; and all of them rattled off their lines, of which don Gabriel was the author and begetter, as hard as they could in a wild babble of voices.
For the next weeks the curriculum consisted almost entirely in repeating every day the two lines which don Gabriel knew of the national anthem and in reciting the sentences which each boy had on his own scrap of paper. This went on for four or five hours, with a number of breaks—during which the boys romped about outside and don Gabriel retired to drink some brandy.
And, sure enough, one day don Casimiro, the jefe político of the district, arrived on a tour of inspection.
After the boys had been called to attention and had bawled out their “Buenos días, caballero,” they repeated the first two lines of the national anthem in a singsong which had no resemblance at all to the tune. But don Casimiro did not mind that. Nor did it strike him that these two lines were all they knew, for as soon as they had rattled them off they shouted out, “I am a Mexican, viva México, arriba México!”
All this convinced don Casimiro that, in the matter of education, the utmost to be expected of Indian children was already achieved.
Then the boys stepped forward, one after the other with their bits of paper in their hands, and rattled off their sentences. The jefe político looked at a few of the bits of paper and saw to his great satisfaction that the boys read what was actually written.
In return for don Gabriel’s tactfulness in not wearying him too long with this demonstration, don Casimiro was equally tactful in not requiring that one boy should read what was written on his neighbor’s paper. He did not summon a boy and point to a particular word and ask, “What is this word here?” Nor did he single a boy out and say, “Show me the word maize in this sentence.”
Next don Gabriel had his pupils count from one to twenty. And finally he asked: “What is Mexico?” The children shouted in chorus: “Mexico is a free and independent republic.”
“Who is at the head of the Mexican Republic?” he asked, and the children shouted: “A president.” “What is his name?” “General don Porfirio.”
With this the proceedings came to an end. Don Casimiro shook don Gabriel’s hand and told him that he was extremely pleased with the result. In his report he stated that the boys of the place, under the instruction of a secretary whom he himself had chosen for his outstanding ability, could all speak and read and write Spanish and knew their figures.
The school appeared in the annual statistics as a village school of maximum efficiency, to which was added the note: “Ages from seven to fourteen. No illiterates.”
Hundreds of Indian villages which were situated at distances of between eighty and four hundred kilometers from the nearest railroad were awarded an equally flattering mention in the returns; for no jefe político was so lacking in zeal as to yield the first place to another. Not even Denmark could boast such statistics, and the dictator’s fame as the educator of his people and a zealous protector of the Indian race was assured for all time. For the statistics were carefully printed on the best of paper and splendidly bound, and were dispatched to the governments of every civilized nation.
“What a promising country,” said the American bankers. And they gladly lent millions to the American-owned railroad companies, to the light and power companies, the mining companies, the oil companies, the development companies, and the rubber companies, so as not to be behind in the exploitation of a country with so great a future, where the Mexican had as little political liberty or economic scope as a Chinese in Australia and where the Indian was no less a slave than the proletarian Negro in Liberia.
3
Don Gabriel’s great sorrow was that the school brought him no monetary return.
He had succeeded during all the weeks he had spent in the village in bringing off all sorts of deals by a discreet exercise of his authority. There had been special levies on dealers, special levies on animals the Indians slaughtered in the village, special levies on family celebrations which the Indians of the village held among themselves, fines on brandy which the Indians brought back with them when they had been to a town to market and had not been able to conceal from don Gabriel—particularly when their drunkenness gave the show away.
It was not don Gabriel’s intention to spend the rest of his life as secretary in this Godforsaken place. The task he had set himself was to make his money there as quickly as he could and then to buy himself a large farm—a finca—or to start a brandy distillery in a town.
If God bestows a job on anybody, he must not tempt God and make a fool of Him. He must make the very most of the favor shown him, remembering that he is unworthy to appear in God’s presence, and so profiteer with a dollar that it becomes ten. But don Gabriel was not fertile in ideas which might have hastened this happy process.
However, it happened that his younger brother Mateo came to visit him in the nick of time.
2
Don Mateo’s visit was not entirely of his free choice. He had no particular affection for don Gabriel and he did not care whether his brother’s affairs went well or ill.
Mateo had always been lucky—or, since luck is not easy to define, it is more exact to say that he had the faculty of choosing for his friends only those who would be of personal service to himself. By means of these useful connections he had run through a whole series of good jobs—postmaster in a small town, inspector of weights and measures, locust warden, inspector of slaughterhouses, market overseer. From this last post he had at one bound secured the most coveted of all jobs the dictatorship had to offer—that of tax collector.
No post, not even that of inspector of schools or commissioner of health, demanded knowledge of any kind
. Illiterates might be generals. Anyone who was acquainted with the effects of castor oil and was quite sure that the majority of people had their hearts on the left side could be an army doctor and put what letters he liked after his name. Offices were created not for the benefit of the people but as a provision for those who considered don Porfirio the greatest statesman of the last four centuries, or to line the pockets of those who might otherwise use their influence as members of rich and powerful families to make things unpleasant for the ruling coterie.
When it was considered that a tax collector had had plenty of time to make his pile, and when in spite of ample warning he did not retire in favor of another who was eager to make his fortune, it frequently happened that he became involved in a brawl, usually on some festive occasion when a good deal of drink was put away. The man was purposely insulted and provoked until he pulled out his revolver. This was the signal to shoot him in self-defense. In this way his post became vacant; and the man who had shot him was usually his successor. As the judge, the chief of police, the mayor, and the witnesses were all in the game with the man who was to have the job, the murder was forgotten as soon as the tax collector who had met his end in this unfortunate and regrettable manner had been buried with every mark of esteem. The new tax collector gave a large dinner party and a smart ball.
A tax collector had an adequate salary, but he treated it merely as pocket money. The receipts that made the office such a coveted one came from other sources.
First of all, he received a good percentage of all taxes he collected. The object of this was to interest him in his job and ensure that he would squeeze the utmost that could be squeezed out of the industry of the country. Before an enterprising manufacturer could start to weave a thousand yards of cotton he had to pay out the value of twenty-five yards in licenses and taxes. The government was not interested in Mexicans building up industries of their own in their own country. It suited it better to make a profit out of the high tariffs on imported goods and to stand well with American, English, and French export houses; and the high import figures were a proof of the golden age introduced by the dictator.
A tax collector also had other means of adding to his income. He had the right to assess the tax for every branch of industry and for every vocation and for every income. There was some justification for this. In so large a country it was scarcely possible to lay down a flat rate by one legal enactment. Districts which were far from rails and roads had higher transport costs; in some districts the cost of living was high, in others low; in one place wages and overhead charges were low, in another high.
If the state administration computed the tax on a brandy distillery at two hundred pesos a month on the basis of its output, the collector might on grounds of his own put it at four hundred pesos. Then the manufacturer paid him a visit. He maintained that it was impossible for him to pay such a high monthly tax. The upshot was that he gave the collector a thousand pesos; in return the collector put him down for a monthly tax of two hundred and fifty. There was the additional advantage that the collector got the credit for exacting fifty pesos more than the state had reckoned on.
The manufacturer could, of course, have disputed the tax by legal means. But he would have had to pay for a year or even longer at the rate assessed, and then months and months would have gone by before the appeal was heard. Even if the higher authorities decided in his favor it might have been another year or longer before he recovered the amount he had paid in excess. As the manufacturer would have had to pay all the costs of the hearing and engage a lawyer in the town where the appeal was heard, his expenses would have eaten up most of what he could have hoped to recover. So even if he had been successful, the sum that would finally have come into his hands would not have been worth talking about.
Usually, too, it turned out that he had in fact paid less tax than he ought to have paid. This would have been revealed in the course of hearing the appeal, since an investigation into his affairs would have been included. For these reasons it was in all cases simpler for the taxpayer to come to terms with the tax collector and leave him to his pickings. It was both cheaper and safer in the long run.
It is easy to see, therefore, why the post of tax collector was so eagerly coveted and why a runner-up did not scruple to put the occupant of it out of the way if he did not vacate it of his own accord when his time was up.
3
The town in which don Mateo, with the help of influential friends, had secured his post as tax collector was only a small one. But even this little job was a source of satisfaction to a man who had no other means of support, just as don Gabriel welcomed the post of a local secretary, miserable though it was, as an opportunity of getting on his feet.
Then one day there was to be an audit and don Mateo was more than three thousand pesos short. He tried to borrow the money but failed. Whereupon he hit on a remarkable expedient—one, however, which though remarkable was not without precedent.
Don Mateo started out on horseback to a remote part of his district to collect taxes. On the next day but one he returned without his horse, in a sorry state and with a gun wound in his arm. He went to the chief of police and told him that he had been attacked by bandits on the way home and robbed of all the money he had on him—more than three thousand pesos. His horse made its way home that night, with a bloodstained saddle.
Even so, his accounts did not balance when it came to the audit. He had not been clever enough to disguise the fact that the three thousand pesos which he said he had collected and been robbed of were the same as the three thousand pesos of which he could give no account. But the auditors, who knew next to nothing of bookkeeping and had only become auditors because they wanted some job or other and no other was available, were not up to the task of bringing the deficiency home to don Mateo. They contented themselves with the assertion that the three thousand pesos of which he had been robbed were the same three thousand pesos as those which were missing.
As one of the auditors had a friend to whom he owed a good turn and for whom he had long since promised to find a job, he took the opportunity of suggesting to don Mateo that he should resign his post of his own accord. Don Mateo did not need a second hint and sent in his resignation.
From that time onward he did next to nothing. He kicked up his heels in Balún-Canán, ran after women, tried a few deals selling houses and farms, bought and sold horses and mules off and on, and supported his friends in their fights for office in the municipalidad and in the district in the hope that if one of his friends got a job something would then turn up for him too.
There was a fierce conflict during the canvassing for the election of the presidente of the municipalidad and the rival gangs began a shooting match. Don Mateo had the misfortune to plug the chief of police, who was on the other side, in the right leg with a .45 bullet. The misfortune was in the bullet, for while none of the others exchanged on that occasion could be traced to their source, the chief of police knew for certain who it was to whom he owed the .45. And as the party to which he belonged was for the moment in power, there was nothing for don Mateo to do but to be on horseback and to take the road for Guatemala while his friends covered his retreat.
Everybody in those parts who on account of any indiscretion has to flee for his life makes for Guatemala, where he is neither picked up nor handed over for deeds done in Mexico; so the chief of police was pretty sure that don Mateo would not fail to do the same.
The road is a good one as far as the lakes, but it is no better for the pursuers than for the pursued. Beyond the lakes there is nothing but a Godforsaken jungle trail as far as the first village in Guatemala. Don Mateo had had a good start, but it was the jungle he was afraid of.
His pursuers had orders to call on him to halt when they came in sight of him, and if he did not halt to shoot him down. Don Mateo knew what he could expect. He knew that he would be shot on sight whether he halted or not—naturally. The chief of police was his bitterest enemy—because of a ce
rtain woman to start with, and in addition because it was known that don Mateo hoped to be chief himself if his gang came out on top. In that case the chief would have had to leave the town, for Mateo would have found some pretext for doing him in in self-defense.
Because he was afraid of the long and lonely ride through the jungle, and because, too, he felt that his horse began to weary, Mateo altered his plan. He turned aside and headed north, skirting San Antonio and Las Margaritas. He rested at Santa Helena, continued on his way up to Santa Rita, skirted Hucutsín, where he was known and where there was a telephone, and landed at his brother’s in Bujvilum.
There he was almost as safe as in Guatemala. He was in another district; and if anyone were to pass through who knew him he could hide. No one would dream of looking for him there, because everyone would believe him to be in Guatemala.
In three months the wound in the chief’s leg would have healed and been forgotten. Don Mateo could then return and lie low until such time as his own gang was in the saddle again.
In Mexico people are not cantankerous over these occurrences. If you keep out of the way and give time for the blood to cool and the wound to heal, you can be sure of being left in peace; that is, until you plug a fellow afresh.
4
Don Gabriel had no great love for his brother Mateo. Mateo was quarrelsome and self-opinionated, forever boasting of his superior knowledge and abilities and never missing a chance of putting down his brother and belittling whatever he might try to do.
