by B. TRAVEN
He gave her no instructions on what she was to do when he had gone, nor did she ask for any. There would be time to see to all that when it arose.
The children had begun to play about again. The man and the woman sat quietly together without looking at each other. Both looked straight in front of them at the narrow path, as if they were trying to judge how recent were the half-obliterated hoofprints of the horses and mules which had passed that way.
It is certain that neither of them thought of anything, that the world around them vanished and that they had lost all sense of conscious existence, as though they were in a deep sleep. But suddenly they were harshly and mercilessly wrenched back to reality.
“Oye, listen you Gregorio, get on, get on!”
It was don Gabriel riding up with his wife. His wife rode first, the pack mule followed, and behind them came don Gabriel. As soon as he had seen Gregorio sitting there he had felt that he ought to say something to show his authority, although he knew that the Indian, in spite of his heavy pack, could not only keep pace with the animals, but would generally be far ahead. He could climb up steep hills and make his way straight across ravines where the animals could not go. He would take the shortest way, while the animals sometimes would have to make long detours.
“ ’Orita, señor,” answered Gregorio. “Ya me voy, I’m coming right now.”
He got up as he spoke and gave the baby back to his wife. Don Gabriel, without slackening his pace, rode heedlessly on.
The woman clutched the little one desperately to her with feverish movements of her arms and hands. As she could not embrace her husband and press him to her, because that was not their custom, and yet was compelled to give some physical expression to what she felt at that moment, she overwhelmed her child with the caresses which in her heart she meant for him.
She remained squatting where she was. With her lips tightly closed she looked up at her husband with large moist eyes and followed every movement he made as he got ready to go, as though she wanted to learn each by heart. She shook her head vigorously several times as though saying no to something which could never be.
While she watched her husband she over and over again caught hold of one of the baby’s hands and, grasping it spasmodically between her fingers, put it into her mouth, gently biting and sucking at it, entirely unconscious of what she did.
When Gregorio had got his pack together, he bent down to put the strap against his head and then, with a short, springy jerk forward, stood up. Now he turned to his wife with his load on his back. He gave her his hand and she, after the manner of her race, touched the first joints of the fingers without pressing his hand. But before their hands separated she held his hand fast and kissed it.
His face was sad and a shadow passed over it. He half closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and pulled with his left hand at the thong over his forehead to settle it more comfortably. For the fraction of a second he pressed his hand to his wife’s lips and then pulled it quickly away.
His wife held up the infant and he put his fingertips on its head. Raising her voice the woman called out, “Muchachos, Tata is going.”
The children gathered around and each, even the youngest, took his father’s hand and kissed it. In reply he touched each child on the head. Then the children ran off again.
He stood in front of his wife for a moment. He looked down at her in her unwashed and tear-stained misery, her every muscle and sinew taut and cramped in the wild effort to resist the tumult of emotion by which she was torn and which now began at last to get the upper hand. Her baby hung at her naked breast. Her swimming eyes, from which long round drops overflowed, were fixed upon him, and her naked legs and bare, calloused feet projected from the black tattered woolen smock which was all she had. He looked at her and saw in her, as never before, the whole meaning of his home and his world. He saw this world rise before him for the first time in his existence, and as it rose it fell apart. He opened his mouth to draw a deep breath, but before he could do so he pressed his lips tightly together again.
Then he turned quickly and went his way without saying a word, without looking back, without pausing. He had not taken ten steps before the bush closed behind him.
6
Two days later don Gabriel, with his wife and Gregorio, reached the large Indian town of Cahancu late in the afternoon.
The town was an important stage for all pack-mule trains coming from the southern and central districts of the state. The roads leading north, northeast, and northwest branched off here, and so it was an important market. The caravans bought what they needed for the rest of their journey, whether provisions or new bits of pack-saddle harness to replace those that had given out. Often the caravans spent a whole day to give the animals a good rest before embarking on the bad roads ahead of them, or to redistribute the loads according to the capacity and endurance which each mule had shown. The saddle sores of the animals, caused partly by the rubbing of badly balanced loads and partly by the fierce bites of large insects, were thoroughly doctored. If this was not done, these wounds, before many stages were over, would have been full of finger-long worms, which in a few days would have penetrated beneath the hide and begun to devour the animal alive until it finally collapsed and died by the road.
Cahancu was situated on a high, flat-topped hill, which was entirely occupied by the plaza. The Indians lived all around on the sides of the hill and below were their fields and cultivated land. No Indians lived on the plaza. Only Ladinos lived there.
The plaza was in the shape of a large rectangle. One end was bounded by the church, the other by the cabildo, where the secretary of the place lived and exercised his authority. As in all places with an Indian population, the head of their community was an Indian, who lived among his people.
One of the long sides of the rectangle was occupied by a rambling colonial building with a colonnade along its whole length. Here were the fondas, or inns, where travelers passing through could eat. They contained a few windowless rooms with bare bedsteads. Leather thongs were stretched along and across and securely fastened to the bedsteads. A straw mat was laid over this network of thongs, which still had hair on them, as they had never been tanned. The bedsteads in these rooms were let to travelers. There were four or eight of them to each room without so much as a curtain or a movable screen between them.
It was chiefly women travelers who took beds. Very little was charged for them, usually nothing at all. They were thrown in with the supper, which was cheap, whether you slept on one of the beds or not.
With very few exceptions men slept along the open colonnade, where they hung their hammocks or lay on the mud floor with a mat under them, and covered by a blanket and a mosquito net. Often enough women, too, slept without concern along the colonnade, particularly when they were traveling with their husbands, for it was usually cooler there than in the stuffy rooms.
This colonnade, although extensive, was often so full of packs, saddles, and sleepers that there was scarcely room to walk. Sometimes there were as many as ten hammocks with a man or a woman sleeping in each and mule drivers and passive Indians sleeping on the ground beneath them. It was never quiet during the night in this colonnade, nor in the plaza as a whole did the chattering and haggling and babbling of half-drunken mule drivers and Indians ever cease.
Caravans or travelers kept arriving at all hours throughout the night, or else parties were starting off, particularly when there was a moon. The fires of the Indians and the mule drivers burned all night long outside the colonnade, and here they cooked their food, because even the low charges at the inns were more than they could pay. All night long people packed, talked, quarreled, cursed, smoked, and discussed the next day’s stage.
The kitchens were at the end of the colonnade nearest the cabildo. Here too there was cooking and talking all the night through. Before the last supper had been served up for a traveler who had just come in, people were already waiting for their breakfasts, ready to start off.
The other long side of the plaza was occupied by shops. These houses of business were thatched huts and wooden shacks. Each looked as if it would fall to pieces at any moment, as it certainly would have had it not been held up by its neighbor, which also waited in an equally sorry state for the next puff of wind in order to take its final leave of a cruel world. But although these shops consisted only of boards, laths, sticks, rags, bundles of straw, palm leaves, cardboard, scraps of tin, bits of wire, empty gasoline and paraffin cans, hides, mats, and remnants of broken packing cases, they nevertheless looked as though they had been standing there when Noah was told to build an ark.
Each offered for sale very much the same articles as its neighbor. Many shops contained only three pesos’ worth of goods in all, but the occupants appeared to make a living by them. The shopkeepers were mostly women. Nobody knew, not even the women themselves, where their husbands were to be found, and they could seldom say how they came to lose them. Every one of them, however, had a number of children as a perpetual reminder that she once had one husband at least.
These shops were by no means enclosed structures. Properly seen, they were only boards laid over boxes or blocks of old wood to form a counter. Behind the counter there were sometimes roughly made shelves onto which goods were crammed and thrown together without order or method, to wait there ten years or more for purchasers.
The counter and the shelves were roofed over in every possible way that ingenuity could devise. To the left and right of the counter were partitions to show where one shop ended and the next began.
Hanging from the crazy roofs was every article which could possibly be asked for: rope, belts, candles, coffeepots, lanterns, mule-drivers’ whips, spurs, sandals, women’s patent-leather shoes, bags of bast and leather, shotguns, tinderboxes containing flint, steel and tinder, images of the saints, large bright-red neckerchiefs, gigantic straw hats, machetes, cotton shirts, and party dresses.
There were scales on the counter, placed in such a way that the purchaser could never ascertain whether they weighed correctly or not. In most cases the saleswoman was not able to tell. But scales were obligatory and so they were there.
There were bottles of beer, soda water, and lemonade on the counter, and bananas, oranges, lemons, pastries, cocoa beans, pumpkin seeds. There were enticing pieces of candy in jars and bottles.
At night the shops were lit up. Each had a different lighting system. The large and up-to-date shops burned kerosene, acetylene, oil, or gasoline. The smaller shops used candles, and the smallest pine splinters.
In front of the shops was a row of Indian food stalls which had neither roofs nor tables nor chairs. Anyone who wanted a meal crouched on the ground or stood as he ate. The customers were mostly wandering Indians or caravan drivers too tired to cook for themselves. These open-air kitchens were kept going all through the night. The Indian cooks squatted beside their little tin stoves and slept; but as soon as anyone stopped in front of them the women were alive all at once, and without the guest’s needing to say a word the fire was fanned and a few dry tortillas were thrown into the shallow pan over the fire to be warmed up or fried. Coffee was always ready, for the pot stood close by the fire.
The shops could not be locked up and it would have been useless to have locked them, since no more than a touch of a foot would have been needed to break into them. A lock would have been mere ostentation.
But as with the little Indian food stalls, so too in the case of the shops there was no closing time. You could shop there all night through. You needed only to summon the woman.
When the tide of business began to ebb at about ten o’clock and only the brandy shops were still busy, because the mule drivers were there for their nightcaps, the shopwomen cleared their counters. Everything was packed away underneath or stuffed into any corner or box where there was room for it.
In some of the shops boards were stood on the counter in such a way that they leaned against the thatch. This was to show that the shop was shut and that you could get what you wanted only by going to the back or side door. This back or side door was composed during the day of a fragment of sacking and during the night of two or three propped-up rotten planks.
As soon as the counter was cleared, so that no one prowling about in the dark of the night could lay hands on anything, the shopwoman, with the help of her children and maids, put together somewhere in this tiny building a medley of things impossible to distinguish or describe, but the woman called it, nonetheless, la cama, the bed. She took the smallest child into bed with her. The older children slept on the counter to protect the establishment from robbery and theft. The other children were rolled into blankets and put on boxes, sacks, mats, boards, or torn mattresses; and the maids—there were often two or three of them—were content to creep into any corner as long as they could sleep inside the house. Sometimes they too had children, an infant at the breast or a larger child.
At last the mosquito nets were spread and the whole shop sank to rest in preparation for the heavy labor of the coming day.
The space between the counter and the rickety back wall that separated the shop from the bush behind it served not only as a storehouse and bedroom, but also as kitchen and dining room, and as reception room for the noisy occasions when the women celebrated their saints’ days.
These shops, wretched, sordid, primitive, and yet busy all the same, filled an important role in the town—not, as you might think, because they supplied travelers and caravans with all the indispensable articles required on their long and difficult journeys. That was only incidental. Their most important function was to swell the profits of the secretary of the place. Every shop, however small and unassuming, and every tiny open-air kitchen that sold tortillas and beans, and every Indian who set out bananas and oranges on the ground to sell to passing mule drivers had taxes to pay; and the taxes were paid to the secretary.
The secretary had to account for these taxes to the government of the state. The accounts were extremely complicated and more than ordinarily voluminous owing to the many small and very small businesses. Some of them were so small they were assessed at only two centavos a day. These were the wares of the Indian who spread out on the ground the beans, onions, or chiles they had grown themselves, and squatted behind them and waited for someone to come along who thought that here was an Indian with something to give away. The only man on earth who could give the state any account of the taxability of the place and of the source and method of taxation was the secretary. As he was no student of political economy nobody expected him to be very clear on the matter. And as the revenue officials were still less at home in this maze, all the less because of their advanced mathematics, and as in the last resort only the secretary of the place could decide what the tax should be for each single business according to its profits, and as no mathematician could hope to check or analyze this medley of deductions and rebates and surcharges and special taxes and brandy license fees which the secretary fixed to suit his own advantage, the post of secretary in this lively place of call was an extremely enviable one.
In addition to the taxes there were fines for which the secretary gave receipts or not as he chose. He also ordained what offenses were subj
ect to fines. There was no arguing the matter. He was in authority. He had a revolver and four Indian policemen with shotguns and machetes.
2
When don Gabriel arrived he rode straight to the cabildo to pay his respects to the secretary. He intended to spend the night in the cabildo, since he would thus have an opportunity of discussing official questions with the secretary. Such conferences between two secretaries who happen to meet are always concerned with the measures one or the other has found of use in adding to his profits. In this they closely resemble the confabulations between saviors of souls who also meet sometimes on each other’s beats. Their object, too, is to discuss the best means of exploiting every opportunity for gain which their office affords rather than to consider the spiritual welfare of their flocks.
As in all places of this description the secretary offered food and shelter to boarders of the better sort in return for the usual payment. This right to keep a hotel was one of his perquisites and it was the only business in the town on which no tax was paid. Autocracy is always tax-free. The secretary with his hostelry was naturally more than able to compete with the other fondas, which carried on business in the long colonial building on the plaza; for travelers who could pay well never patronized these places unless the secretary was so full up that he could not take them. He made a profit not only on the meals supplied to the travelers, but also by supplying fodder for their horses and mules, as well as by providing for the travelers’ servants.
Besides all this, he kept a bar which was well patronized by all travelers who boarded with him; and this meant the loss of much trade to other bars in the town, which had to pay a large sum for the license to sell brandy.
Not satisfied with this, he ran a tienda in the cabildo and offered for sale all the articles from which the women in the shops endeavored to make a living for themselves and their families.
