Government

by B. TRAVEN

  The two agents knew that no such right existed, because there were no bridges or causeways in the district to be kept in repair, but they knew also that it would do them no good if they refused to pay. They could easily with their eighty men have overcome any opposition, but they would then have incurred the secretary’s enmity—and enmity in that quarter would have been embarrassing. They were not only agents for labor for the coffee plantations; they were also buyers and sellers of animals and hides and skins, and occasionally they might have goods to forward by pack mule. It would mean a loss of three days if they had to avoid this village on the journey to the region of the Grijalva River, where the goods would have to be put on board ship. It might be three years before they had to pass through the place again; but it might equally well be in two months. It depended on the vagaries of business. Anyway, it was a costly matter to make an enemy of the secretary of any place which they might have to pass through or come to in the course of business—it was far more advisable to have him as a friend. Every traveler, whether on business or not, is always very much at the mercy of the local secretary. He is the only man in the place who is not an Indian and the only person with authority to give or withhold protection.

  The agents paid the sixteen pesos passage money. When they asked for a receipt, Mateo said, “We haven’t got the new forms yet. But you don’t need a receipt, caballeros. We won’t ask you to pay twice for the same gang.”

  When the party was out of sight, don Mateo turned to his brother. “Do you see how I worked that? You’d have let them through without a word said. Whatever passes, on four legs or two, must be fleeced. That’s the only way. When these fellows come back on their way home from the plantations they’ll be on their own and no agent with them. Then you must take a peso apiece off them. They’ll have their wages in their pockets then, and what else have they to spend their money on? And you can load them up with comiteco as well. Don’t you worry about the two agents complaining of being unjustly taxed—certainly not as long as you are secretary here, and when you’re not it won’t matter to you; anyway, they’ll have forgotten all about it by that time. And how will they know you haven’t got an influential job somewhere else? They don’t pay it themselves, never fear. The muchachos pay it—and they can’t check on it. Their accounts are too long for that.”

  2

  A wedding took place in the village. According to custom, the young bridegroom had to treat his own friends and the friends of both families concerned to brandy. He had already bought the brandy weeks before in Jovel, where he could buy it many times more cheaply than from don Gabriel. The cask had been secretly smuggled into the village and don Gabriel had heard nothing of it.

  But since it was to be expected that a few men would get drunk, the young Indian had taken the precaution of buying ten liters from don Gabriel so that it might appear that all the brandy drunk at the wedding had come from the secretary’s tienda.

  “You can have more,” don Gabriel told him. “It doesn’t matter about paying for it now, I’ll give you credit with pleasure.”

  But the young fellow replied that he thought he would get by on the ten liters.

  All Indians are very easily and very quickly affected by brandy, particularly by the brandy sold to Indians. Many of them lose all control of themselves. Anyone who knows Indians knows this, and if he does not he finds it out quicker than is sometimes pleasant.

  There was dancing without pause for two days and two nights to the music of an accordion and two guitars. The young men drank very little, and the little they drank had scarcely any effect on them owing to their indefatigability at dancing and the large quantities of coffee and even larger quantities of water they drank. Also, the young men without exception were set upon making a good impression on the girls, and particularly on their own girls. Indian girls prize sobriety in a man above good looks. They are taught by their mothers to judge men by this standard. Indian boys know this, and they know that if they lack the reputation for sobriety they will find it very hard to get the girl they want for a wife—though they may get one they don’t want.

  With Indians, as with other peoples, the character of a husband or a wife only begins to show itself in its true colors when there is no further need to keep up a high standard or to pretend to one; whether this happens in two weeks or two years after marriage depends on the durability and vigor of the pretense. Many married persons are so gifted at pretense that they can keep up this mutual imposture for twenty years, without either’s suspecting what the other’s true character is; and it sometimes occurs that the simulated character becomes in course of time and by force of habit almost the real one. That is why it so often happens that marriages of twenty-five years’ standing reveal cracks, on one side or the other or on both sides at once, which no one would ever have thought possible in so harmonious a union.

  It was the married men, men provided with wives and children, who found in brandy their last refuge from disillusionment. If even educated persons cannot explain why they go on pouring champagne, whisky, and cognac down their throats long after they have exhausted the impulse to arrive at self-forgetfulness or to reach a state of exaltation, it is useless asking an Indian to explain it. It is a waste of time to try to explain it at all. The best thing is simply to recognize that there are inveterate drinkers among them, as well as moderate drinkers, occasional drinkers, and total abstainers.

  It was the inveterate drinkers and the occasional drinkers who made the wedding an excuse for a prolonged bout. Three of them, after they had half slept off the drunkenness of the evening before, appeared early in the morning at don Gabriel’s tienda and asked for brandy. There was no more to be had at the wedding festivities because though they were kept up for days the brandy was supplied only by the members of the two families.

  The men brought liter bottles with them and money too. Don Gabriel was unwilling to sell them any brandy. He was willing enough to do business, but he knew that if drunkenness got out of bounds it could mean a lot of trouble for himself.

  But don Mateo came on the scene. “What does it matter to you,” he said, “how much the fellows like to drink? You’re not their medical adviser. All that concerns you is whether they can pay or whether, if they don’t, there’s money behind them.”

  Don Gabriel gave the men the brandy.

  Two hours later wild yells were heard from the village, and an Indian woman with her baby in her arms came running to the cabildo, screaming, “He’s murdered my brother and cut his head off.”

  Don Gabriel and don Mateo ran into the village, and there behind one of the huts they saw a crowd of men who were trying to overpower Gregorio, one of the three who had come to buy brandy that morning.

  Gregorio was whirling a machete which was dripping with blood. The corpse of a boy of about eighteen was lying against the mud wall of the hut. His face was hacked up and there were deep gashes in his body.

  The men, who were mostly still drunk, were trying to knock the madman over with poles, but they did not dare go near enough. They were afraid Gregorio might throw the machete.

  The Indian jefe had come up as soon as he had heard the outcry, but he, too, was far from sober and looked from one to another with glazed eyes, without understanding either what was happening or what had happened.

  Don Gabriel told a boy to run to his wife and ask for the lasso from his saddle. The boy was back within a few minutes. After failing in several attempts to lasso the man, don Gabriel crept around the hut and, coming on Gregorio from behind, finally succeeded in throwing the lasso over his head and bringing him to the ground. As soon as he fell several of the Indians ran up and bound him so tightly with the lasso that he could not move hand or foot. Then they carried him to the cabildo and put him in the prison. His strength was now utterly exhausted and he fell asleep.

  A few drunken men, who did not know what else to do with themselves, were bellowing and carrying on in the open space in front of the cabildo. Don Mateo advised
his brother to put these fellows in the prison too, in case they became a cause of further trouble. So don Gabriel summoned some men who appeared to be sober and took the fellows in charge with their help. All the women of the place and all the men who were sober agreed that don Gabriel did well to shut them up, before a second murder took place.

  The inhabitants of the community, particularly the women, were in a state of panic. Four women came running to the cabildo with their children for protection against drunken husbands and brothers and spent the whole day in the schoolroom. Another woman came to don Gabriel, crying aloud and imploring him to shut up her husband because he had said he was going to kill her and her children. Don Gabriel had the man brought in and locked him up, and the woman went home with her children.

  By the end of the morning peace was restored. The drunken men were apparently all asleep and the others could be seen going to their work in the fields.

  3

  The prison was very confined. The prisoners were packed as tight as sardines.

  At midday their wives came with food for them, which they put through the bars of the stout wooden door. But not one prisoner was awake. The wives returned in the evening with more food and lit a fire in front of the door to give a little warmth during the night.

  The men were still drunk. Their wives thought it safer if they remained in prison. Not one of them went to don Gabriel to ask him to release her husband. They knew, too, from previous experience and from occasions when their husbands had been locked up for drunkenness in a market town, that getting in was easier than getting out.

  Next morning as soon as the sun rose the wives of the prisoners came again and squatted at the door with their infants in their laps and talked to their husbands. They put their coffeepots on the embers of the fire which had glowed all night in front of the door.

  Indians are not happy at night unless they have a fire burning, or at least smoldering, at their feet. One of the women had pushed a long stick through the bars of the door, and with this, the men, whenever one of them woke from his drunken sleep and came to his right mind for a moment or two, had been able to poke more logs on the fire to keep it going.

  4

  Don Gabriel had not until now had an opportunity of putting anyone in prison. There had been many quarrels among the inhabitants, but no one had come to him and asked him to reconcile them. They had always been settled by the casique. Don Gabriel had no right to intervene in the affairs of the community itself. Nobody came to him when there was disagreement over the dividing of the land or a quarrel over the right to game which had been killed, or a dispute as to whether a stray kid was the offspring of Tomás’s or Panfilo’s goat or whether Elias was right in accusing Lino of alienating the affections of a girl he had intended to marry.

  All these matters were disposed of satisfactorily by Narciso, their chief. Don Gabriel had only the right to intervene, in certain well-defined circumstances, as the representative of the government. Such a circumstance was when there was a disturbance of the peace which threatened the country and its inhabitants beyond the confines of the village itself.

  His authority extended to crimes such as murder, banditry, robbery of a serious nature within the village, all robbery and attacks on the roads, and disturbances of the peace which affected the community and therefore the State. The cabildo and the space in front of it were within the jurisdiction of the State. There every citizen had the right to be unmolested. What the Indians did in their own territory, as long as it did not affect other citizens, was their own affair. Yet even here don Gabriel had the right and the duty to intervene if he were called upon. When the women of the place had been at a loss as to how to protect themselves from their drunken husbands, when their own jefe, because he was drunk himself, had been incapable of overpowering the murderer and bringing the other men to order thus averting further trouble, then they had gone to don Gabriel as their last and only resort.

  It would have been easy for the young men of the place, who were not drunk, to restore order. But it was against Indian custom for sons or young men to give orders to their fathers or to the older men of the community, and still less to enforce them. No one would bind his father or knock him down, even though his father was going to kill his mother in a fit of drunken madness. The son could only try to get his mother away and, if he could not succeed, nothing would be left but to receive the fatal blow of the machete in her stead. If a father, in a drunken fit and with his machete in his hand, called his son to him, the son would obey and be struck down without so much as lifting his arm to ward off the blow. If he was afraid that his father might try to kill him in senseless rage, he might keep out of his way; but if he heard his father’s voice, or a messenger from his father found him, he would come out of his hiding place.

  It was for these reasons, which lie deep in Indian custom, that don Gabriel’s help had been called upon.

  There were other reasons why a secretary might be asked to settle quarrels and disputes, even of a private nature. There were cases where the chief was too clever to give a decision, because he knew that whatever the decision it might bring on him the enmity not only of one man but of a whole family. In such cases he left the decision to the secretary. The secretary was accepted as impartial, since neither he nor his family nor any of his friends stood to benefit either way; for he and his possessions and his friends lay outside the community.

  Such contingencies, arising inevitably from the customs and character of the Indians and their ties of blood and occupation, gave the secretaries a power and influence which lead, in the hands of corrupt officials, to the pitiless exploitation and complete enslavement of independent Indian communities.

  5

  Under the regime of the dictatorship the Mexican had nothing else before his eyes from childhood but an officialdom that regarded public office only as a means of enriching itself. The people were taught nothing else and they heard nothing else. If an official was spoken of, it was not “The man has a difficult and responsible post” but “The man has rounded up his sheep, he has only to shear them—he’s a governor.” And from early youth don Gabriel had learned that even the smallest post had to yield an income far in excess of the salary.

  The dictator, don Porfirio, had astonished the world by showing in a brief space of time that the bankrupt Republic of Mexico was so flourishing that other countries could only envy its bursting treasury. It was proved by the statistics, which proved also that a great statesman had brought the Mexican people to a level of civilization and prosperity which no one would have thought possible. He knew how to keep national expenditure down to a ridiculously low figure. That was easy. Official salaries were in many cases so small that a mouse could scarcely have lived on them; and if a government inspector or a judge wanted to live in a manner befitting his station, he had to find some other source of income as well. It went without saying that he used his power to enlarge this other source to the utmost. The treasury grew richer and richer, the national debt, on paper, smaller and smaller; the poverty of the people, ignorance, corruption, and shameless injustice were, on the other hand, more and more widely diffused.

  Don Gabriel knew that he was given his post as a means to enrich himself, and that he was not given it to promote the well-being of an Indian village and its inhabitants. All he lacked was the adroitness and cunning to squeeze out the last drop the job could yield.

  He would never have seen that a convoy of Indian laborers passing through the place could put sixteen pesos in his pocket if his brother Mateo had not demonstrated it. Don Mateo had a rich store of experience, gleaned from his life among other officials. It was not experience only, however, that inspired don Mateo, but—what an official needed even more—imagination and resourcefulness.

  “If a job brings nothing in,” he said to don Gabriel ten times a day, “then you must make it bring something in.”

  6

  That morning, as they sat at breakfast, don Mateo said, “Well, now you
have a good fat porker at last, Brother—and a milking cow too.”

  Don Gabriel stopped munching.

  “I? Are you tipsy too? Porker and milking cow. Cómo?”

  “It’s a case of pearls before swine with you, hombre,” don Mateo replied. “You’re joking! You can’t be such a blockhead as not to see the heap of pesos waiting to be picked up—the lockup full of men who want to get out, and you sitting here without a cushion to put under your hams. I believe you’d let the fat turkey escape and laugh to see it fly away into the bush. You’d let these fellows go scot-free after they’ve been so kind as to get themselves locked up. The luck of it—all coming of their own accord. You didn’t even have to call them. They handed themselves over of their own free will.”

  “But I can’t keep them in the lockup forever,” said don Gabriel. “I’ll have to let them out today or they’ll smash the place down.”

  “Don’t you worry,” said don Mateo, “they won’t do that. They know that will bring the soldiers along and that their houses and fields will be burned.”

  Before don Gabriel could reply he heard some men talking outside who were clearly waiting to see him. He put on his hat, tightened his revolver belt, and went around the corner of the building to the portico, where he found the men at the door of the office. Don Mateo buckled on his revolver and followed.

  “Good morning,” said don Gabriel.

  The men returned the greeting.

  Don Gabriel opened the door and went to his table, fumbled among his papers, uncorked the ink bottle, picked up the pen, wiped it clean on his hair, and sat down.

  The men sat down on one of the benches. Don Mateo went over to the other bench and rolled a cigarette.

  Then one of the men began speaking. “I am the brother of Isidro, who is in prison. This man here is the brother of Isidro’s wife. And this is a half brother of Isidro’s wife. And this is the brother of Isidro’s father.”