Government

by B. TRAVEN

  5

  The prisoner’s keep cost neither don Gabriel nor the State anything. The prisoner’s wife had to prepare his meals and bring them to him, and if he had had no wife, then his mother or his brothers or some relation or other would have had to provide for him.

  With a patience which never flagged or wearied or allowed a word of reproach to escape, his wife came three times a day to the prison with her children to feed her husband, give him clean clothes and tobacco, and see to all his needs.

  Sometimes, if don Gabriel was in the mood to let him out, the whole family sat outside the prison door and ate their meal together. If any of his friends had the time or the wish, they came and squatted outside the prison and talked to him. Most nights his wife slept with her baby on a mat just outside the prison door so as to be near her husband. She did all that had to be done in his fields and for his animals, and if her strength or time gave out her brothers came and helped her.

  During this time Narciso had been to the cabildo several times to discuss official business with don Gabriel, but on these occasions the prisoner’s name had never been mentioned. Then one day when don Gabriel was alone, his brother Mateo having gone hunting in the jungle, Narciso sat down on the bench in the office and said, “Don Gabriel, what are you going to do now with Gregorio, who killed Aurelio? Are you going to keep him all his life here in jail?”

  Don Gabriel uncorked the ink bottle, smelled the ink, corked it up again, and said, “You are presidente here and are acquainted with the laws and regulations.”

  “Certainly I know them,” answered Narciso.

  “Then you must know,” don Gabriel went on, “that murder is a very serious and a very terrible thing. Gregorio will be shot.”

  “Yes, I know that,” answered Narciso.

  “If he could pay a hundred pesos or at least fifty pesos multa,” said don Gabriel, “then I could let him go free.”

  “Gregorio has nothing like that,” said Narciso, “and never will have in his whole life.”

  “I have been waiting till now, Narciso, for Gregorio’s sake, and I have not yet telephoned to the municipalidad. But I cannot wait any longer. We must do something. Murder is a very serious matter. If I telephone, the soldiers will come and shoot him on the spot.”

  “Yes,” said the jefe, “they undoubtedly will.”

  “But all the same I cannot let him go,” don Gabriel continued. “I have no right to do that. Any ruffian here might think that he would get off as lightly. The consequences might be unpleasant. We might have a murder a week.”

  “It might be so,” the jefe replied.

  In the course of this discussion don Gabriel had an idea which so far had not occurred to him. Ever since he had taken up his position in the place he had never had an opportunity of going to Jovel to see how the world was getting along and whether any crevice had opened through which he might creep into a better crib. Now he might use Gregorio as an excuse for going to Jovel and be paid a daily allowance in addition. He had only to take Gregorio as a prisoner to the authorities, an official activity for which he would receive extra pay. It would be cheaper for the authorities if he took the man himself than if soldiers were sent either to carry out the sentence or to take him to the town to be sentenced there.

  No sooner had this idea come into his head than he set about putting it into execution. “We have no right to pass sentence here in such a serious matter,” he said, “neither you as presidente nor I as secretario. It is a matter for the courts. I must take him to Jovel and hand him over to the authorities there. I can tell you, Narciso, that this will be far better for him. The judges in Jovel will perhaps not be so hard upon him. They will condemn him to maybe three or four years in prison or in a labor colony, and when his time is up he will be set free, and then he can come back here to his own people. On the other hand, if the soldiers come here he will have little to hope for. They will either shoot him on the spot or else on their way back. They will say he attempted to escape, whether he did or not. They only have to invoke the Ley Fuga.”

  “I believe you are right, don Gabriel,” the jefe said to this. “It will be best for him and it will give a good example to our ruffians here.”

  “Then I will go tomorrow, Narciso,” said don Gabriel. “Don Mateo will take my place here as secretario. You agree to it?”

  “Yes, I agree,” replied Narciso. “I will go to his family and tell them that Gregorio will be taken tomorrow to the town to be tried.”

  As it was their own jefe who told them that it would be best for Gregorio to be taken to the town and tried there, his family and everybody else agreed. They knew quite well that there was nothing else to be done. Once there was a secretary representing the government in the place they had no right to settle this matter among themselves.

  The prisoner’s wife informed her husband that he would be taken out next morning. Narciso went to him too, to tell him that he had to go quietly with don Gabriel to Jovel because that would be the best thing for him.

  Gregorio took it, as far as could be seen, as unconcernedly as if he had been told that he was free to go home. His wife brought him his supper and sat outside the prison with her children till midnight, sometimes asleep, sometimes awake. She spoke a word or two to her husband now and then and kept the fire alight.

  Soon after midnight she was back in her hut to cook him his breakfast and to prepare his provisions for the journey with the help of some neighbors, for it was a journey of four days or so.

  Next morning at sunrise don Gabriel and his wife were ready to start. He was on horseback; his wife rode an old but sure-footed mule. A second mule carried their packs for the journey. Gregorio had helped to get the animals ready for the road. He had been taken out of prison before sunrise to make himself useful. He was to act as their boy on the journey.

  He went to his hut to pick up his provisions. He went unguarded and remained away an hour. If he had wished he could easily have made his escape, as he could do even more easily on the journey.

  2

  But Gregorio came back to the cabildo. It had been his destiny to kill Aurelio, and just as he had been able to do nothing against it so he could do nothing to interfere with the further course of his destiny in being sent to his trial in the town. What help would it have been to him to run away if that was not the decree of destiny? He might have escaped from don Gabriel and the soldiers and his judges, but he could never have outrun his fate.

  And even if he had not felt himself to be a helpless pawn, where would he have fled? If he had gone to the village of another tribe where his language was not spoken, he would have been a stranger there. Even if he settled down there, he would not have been taken into the community and no one would have accepted him. Their distrust of him would have increased every day. It would have been his fault that children died in infancy, that the maize did not flourish, that the sheep did not bear, that the stream changed its bed. Then one day his hut would have been burned down and his maize patch trodden underfoot. If he had stayed on in spite of this, one day he and his family would have been murdered.

  He might have taken his wife and his children and settled in the jungle. But his feeling for community was so strong that he would not have been able to live for long in the jungle. He would have withered and pined without his family group. Sooner or later he would have had to return to his people. And if his tribe would then have condemned him to death it would have set his soul at rest and he would again have been in harmony with this world and thankful from the bottom of his heart that he could die among his own people. He might have survived in the jungle as an animal, but only in communion with his tribe could he live as a being conscious of human kinship.

  He might have fled far away to a town where no one would have known him or bothered about him. But on the way he would have met people who would have asked him, “Where are you going, my friend, and why?” He could lie in the ordinary matters of his daily life, but it would have been beyond him to
lie adroitly over complicated things and in strange surroundings and to strange people who looked distrustfully at him. He would have lost confidence and only aroused graver distrust, and at the next place been arrested by the authorities.

  Or he might have crept cunningly by bush paths, avoiding anyone who was not an Indian, sleeping in the bush away from any path, and in that way reached the town. But everything would have been strange to him. He would have been unable to speak a word of Spanish, and besides the speech, the habits and way of life of the people would have made it impossible for him to find work that he could do. He would not even have known how to beg, nor how, when a man had no work, he could scrape out a living in a town. He would have found no plants or fruit growing in the town with which he could have satisfied his hunger as he could in the jungle or the bush. It might have been possible to find work helping ox-cart or mule drivers, but he would not have known how to approach them, and even such people would have been distrustful and sullen when not understanding a word he said.

  Even if he had somehow had the luck to find work somewhere, it would have been the hardest, harshest, dirtiest, most wretched work, and he would have had to be on hand twenty-four hours a day for nothing but a starvation ration as wages. A laborer who asks for no wage is welcome even in Mexico. If he takes nothing else for his work than a plate of beans, which he receives with a grateful nod to his master, he is well liked and considered very polite.

  Yet even such a refuge would not have been a rescue. The longing for his wife and children would one day have become so strong that he would have had to go back to them, without caring what happened to him. He would have been unable to live in separation from his family.

  And so whatever he might have done he was in a trap from which there was no escape.

  3

  Gregorio took up his pack and set off on his journey.

  His wife had gone far along the trail so as to take leave of him where the path entered the bush. She crouched there with her baby at her breast waiting for her husband. The other children scrambled about her.

  The woman squatted on the ground, Indian fashion, weeping silently to herself, while she swayed the upper part of her body to and fro in a rhythm which no doubt kept time with the painful throb of her emotions. She clutched her infant to her heart and then released it in the same rhythm. It was as though all her pain was inspired only by the little child. It drew forth the physical emotion she would not and perhaps could not show for her husband.

  The relation of an Indian to his wife and of an Indian woman to her husband is as close as any love can be. Yet its expression is crude—so crude that a European is profoundly affected by its crudity, because, since the inexpressible feelings of the heart are the same in all human beings and are felt in the same way, this very crudity only deepens the impression made by the strength of their feelings. The strength of their feelings is so deep, so genuine—because it is so primitive—so violent and so true that they lack all power to dissemble them. It is because they cannot endure that the least trace of dissembling should creep into the expression of their feelings that they give them this outward appearance of crudity. It is not a mask to hide their true feelings; it is merely a spontaneous protection against the outbreak of overwhelming and violent emotion. If they did not put a strong curb on their feelings they might be led to an exposure of their deepest emotions; their neighbors would laugh at them, their innermost feelings would be cheapened, and they would never get over the pang of shame at having lost the modesty which is like a bloom on their feelings, however old they may be.

  Gregorio came along with a rolling step, bent double under the weight of his pack. He did not look up; owing to the strap of his pack which pressed on his forehead he could see only a step or two in front of him and could glance only a little way to right or left. So he did not see that his wife was there.

  When he was only three steps from her he gave a jerk to his load to make it sit better, and then he saw his wife crouching beside the path.

  “Huj!” he blurted out.

  He was surprised to see her there. He stopped, but turned only halfway toward her, as though to show that he had no intention of halting, still less of resting.

  The woman held up her child for her husband to see. Her breast was bare. Noticing this she caught her dress together, but in her haste and excitement she did not pause to fasten it.

  Raising herself a little she got up on her knees, still holding the child out to her husband. Then she began to cry aloud like an animal. Her face, which was unwashed and swollen with nights of weeping, seemed to be blotted out but for her wide-open purple mouth and powerful teeth. Her two black eyes were thin streaks from which her tears poured. Her thick black hair was tousled and unkempt; its matted strands were like the tangled branches of a dense bush of the jungle. Her short broad nose was distended, and its wide nostrils looked like the cavernous openings to an unknown world behind the weathered and copper-colored face.

  In long-drawn sobs she uttered the wailing cries of an Indian woman who feels the ruthlessness of the world about her, and the wretchedness of being harnessed to it by physical needs and feelings which make the lot of a dumb animal enviable in comparison; for the animal is spared at least all feeling for the future.

  It was her lamentation over a dead child, her dead mother, her dead husband. She did not need to be told—she knew that her husband was being taken from her never to return, just as a sheep, driven from the village by a dealer, never returned. He was an animal, though he could talk and laugh—without a soul, according to the views of those who were to sit in judgment on him. Dirty, lousy, baptized a Catholic and yet a heathen, as untaught as a dog, greedy for brandy, with his work-hardened hands like ebony, and the hair on his head worn by the un-tanned thongs which harnessed him to many loads, worn and bare like the rubbed places on the flanks of a pack mule—a victim to be butchered at the will of those who had conquered his land and his race.

  The woman knew as little of all that went to make up her destiny as her husband did. A cow driven by dealers to the butcher does not look for a chance to escape on the way there, and just as little did she think that her husband could ever return. She knew how cattle were driven off; and as she knew from a hundred instances that the great patroncitos, the gentry with revolvers in their belts, made no distinction between cattle and Indians, she knew also that she saw her husband for the last time.

  No thought for what would come of herself and her children was concealed in her piercing cries. That did not touch her. The children had been born and they would eat and live. The morning was far off, and when it came the table would be spread.

  She was wrought up to this volcanic pitch of grief only by her husband’s fate; and her suffering was not provoked by the thought of him as her bedfellow or the provider for her children. That was nothing. It would not have provoked her to cry out, scarcely even to whimper.

  But her husband was the father of her children, who were like the beat of her own heart. The altar at which her children prayed was in ruins. And for her, his wife, the central point of her life was in ruins. Her husband might be a drunkard; he might beat her and work her to the bone; but all the same he was the core of her being. All her thoughts and acts and cares were centered in him; he was her religion, her master, her only friend and dearest comrade. He was her real home and all she knew as country. He was the life of the world about her, and without him it fell to pieces. It was not the problems of existence that bound her to him. These could be solved with the help of her clan, harshly perhaps, but with tolerable certainty. It was her soul that was empty and meaningless without him, just as the souls of people who have no personal feelings are empty when their God or their idols or saints are taken from them.

  Her grief was not for herself; she had no pity for herself. The grief that shook her was the expression of her pain, the almost physical pain of being torn asunder, of having a piece of her very self, the greater part, indeed, of her being,
cut from her.

  4

  The children heard her cries and came up and crowded about her and began to cry when they saw the sorrow she was in.

  Gregorio at first had stopped and looked at her as though she were no longer a part of him and he had meant to go on again. But at the sight of her despair, and even more perhaps at the sight of the naked struggling infant which she held up to him, he went to her and knelt down and took the thong from his forehead.

  “Tata, Tata,” cried the children, scrambling about him. They stopped crying as soon as they saw that their mother was calmer for a moment with her husband at her side.

  He could stay only a few minutes, but these fleeting minutes which she lived with every sense and feeling were the experience of a hundred years. She did not rob them of one second by wasting a single thought on the future. Not one of these minutes would ever come again; what was not felt and lived then, eternities could not make good.

  Gregorio’s face showed nothing of what went on inside him. He took the baby from his wife’s outstretched arms and nursed it on his knees; he caressed his own face softly with its round brown cheeks.

  His lips moved as though parched, but he did not utter a word—not a word of comfort, not one of vain hope of a return. It was his fate to be as the beasts. He had no power or chance of influencing this fate. Neither his yes nor his no could influence it at all. He had to accept what the patroncitos decided and what they would do with him. Human kindness and mutual understanding dwell far outside the limits of the world, and the all-wise and all-just Creator of all things remains invisible and inscrutable, so that His priests may not lose the profits of the vineyard.

  The woman sobbed gently and edged nearer to her husband to feel him. Now and again she said “Gregorio, Gregorio.” They were the only words into which she could put the feelings that went through her.