The Bridge in the Jungle

by B. TRAVEN

  Who would ever have thought that the pump-master woman, that very proud woman, as highly respected as if she were the president's wife, that this haughty woman could let herself go that way and lose all her composure. The mothers. The mothers. That's what mothers are like. They understand each other when one of them is grieved.

  The men felt themselves getting still smaller and poorer on seeing those two women weep together as one. More and more did they feel ashamed of — they did not know what. They had only one wish at this moment, the wish to be able to weep as those two mothers wept. How they envied the two who had busied themselves with the little body!

  Sleigh came up. He touched the kid, ran his hand up and down the whole body, and finally said: 'He's a goner all right, and I'll go and make coffee. The Garcia woman certainly will like to have something hot in her belly.'

  The pump-master woman wormed herself very gently out of the Garcia woman's arms and looked at the kid, who was still hanging head down while the two men worked on him. She lifted his head, stroked back his wet hair, and softly patted his cheeks. The watery blood trickled over her hand. With her dress she cleaned his bleeding mouth and blood-smeared nose. The blood still trickled forth.

  The kid wore not only new shoes but also new socks, which, like the shoes, were the first he had ever worn and which were also a gift from his big brother. His short pants, reaching only to his knees, were worn out, patched in a dozen places, and still full of holes. He had no suspenders. Instead he wore a string fastened to one button in front, running across one shoulder, and tied to one button at the back of his pants. The upper part of his body was covered with a torn white cotton shirt which was already too small for him.

  While the man holding the body by the feet shook the kid once more in the hope that at last the water would come out, a little wooden whistle fell out of one of the pants' pockets. Before it reached the ground his mother caught it. She stared at it and began to weep in a soft and woeful manner. She wiped the tears off her face to have another look at the whistle, then she hid it in the bosom of her dress.

  'Didn't he have a hat?' one man asked.

  The men who had heard this question got excited. A job was at hand. They could now do something useful. They could jump into the water and fish for the kid's hat.

  This hope, though, vanished quickly. If there had been a hat it would have been seen and found long ago or it would have drifted off downstream.

  Then the Garcia said that the hat was in the hut, and that this was what had made her doubt that the kid had ridden away, because he would have taken his hat along, for he would have needed it badly on the return trip in the daytime when the sun is high and hot. Half of what she said one had to guess because her speech was constantly interrupted by her blubberings.

  We were still standing on the bank not far away from the bridge. Someone was holding up a lantern, and by its light this part of the bridge could be seen clearly. I was looking up, thinking of Sleigh, who had said — it seemed to me a week ago — that he was going to make coffee for somebody. I saw something walking on the bridge towards us. That something was walking slowly and heavily, like a very old man. If it lifted a foot it did so as if it were nailed to the planks and had to be torn off by force. Its head was bent deep upon its breast. Before I saw the face I recognized that strange something by the Texas sombrero it was wearing: Manuel.

  He had now reached this end of the bridge. For almost a minute he remained standing there. Then he came up to us without lifting his head. He was pale, as pale as the brown colour of his skin would allow. His face had become very small and narrow. Were it not for the hat, I might not have known for a long while who he was, so much had he changed. His eyes were dull and glassy as if they had lost their light.

  The Garcia stared at her big stepson. Her eyes were filled with balls of water. She opened her mouth to say something. But the lips closed slowly and stayed closed.

  Manuel was now standing by the two men who were holding the kid. They looked at him as if he were a ghost.

  It was obvious that he did not wish to see anything. He stretched out his arms, while his head remained hanging. And in his outstretched arms the little brother was gently laid.

  No word was spoken. The men and boys who had put their hats on took them off once more while this ceremony of handing the kid to his brother went on.

  For a few minutes Manuel stood thus, statue-like, holding the kid in his arms as if he were offering the kid as a sacrifice to the gods. He was the only one with his hat on. It was this wide-brimmed sombrero on his mournfully bowed head, hiding his face, that made this simple act appear like a mysterious rite.

  The whole incident became unbearable to me. I was caught by the same fear I had felt for a minute or two while the board was floating upon the water. Any second I expected to see all eyes fixed upon me as having been found guilty of magic or witchcraft and so responsible for the misfortune which had befallen that poor settlement of peaceful natives.

  Not so much to help but merely to keep my nerves from going to pieces, I assured myself that I was still alive and sane and healthy by forcing myself to act — even though my action might have drawn everybody's attention to me and perhaps caused the very thing I was afraid of. At the very moment that Manuel was about to turn around to carry the little body to his home, I stepped quickly forward, touched Manuel's arm, and said: 'Por favor, amigo, one moment only.'

  Whether Manuel had heard what I had said I did not know, but he remained standing. I put my hand on the kid's chest, pushed his shirt away, and put my ear above his heart. For a long time I had known that the kid was dead, or at least unconscious and nearly dead, before he reached the water and that he was surely dead five minutes after I had heard the splash. No, after I had heard a fish jumping high into the air to catch a mouthful of mosquitoes. The splash had been caused by a fish. I would swear it was a fish. And I would stick to that story until the end of my life. I did not wish to be haunted all my life by the sound of the splash I had heard early that night.

  As I was saying, five minutes after that fish had made a heavy splash the kid was dead and beyond help. There was the bruise over his left eye, there was the little hole in his skull, and there was the smashed upper jaw. He was dead long before he was missed by his mother.

  The little body which I touched with my ear was as cold as ice. There was not the faintest throb of that little heart which only five hours ago had been beating so happily. No one here had expected me to declare that the kid was still alive. Yet they let me do as I liked. I lifted the head. Everybody looked at me with a question in his eyes. As though I had not been absolutely sure of my first examination I laid my ear on the clammy chest once more. This time I listened longer and more attentively. I felt the repugnant coldness of death only that much more, and only that much more did I realize the helplessness of man against death. When I raised my head I did not look up; instead I turned away from the crowd, which, I knew without seeing, had their eyes fixed upon me, obviously expecting to hear me promise a miracle. But my silent turning away convinced everybody that no miracle, not even something unexpected, would happen.

  My fear had gone. That painful agony which had gripped me twice that night had disappeared entirely. By my careful examination of the kid's heart, useless though it was, I had shown that I was willing to help. So I had been accepted as one of the mourners.

  22

  Manuel, with the kid resting in his outstretched arms, marched slowly across the bridge in time to the unheard strains of some funeral hymn.

  The mother walked beside him, leaning against the shoulder of a woman who had put one arm around her neck. Both were sobbing.

  Behind them the men marched, hat in hand, followed by the women.

  On reaching the point on the bridge from which it was supposed the kid had tumbled over, Manuel stopped for half a minute. As his head was still bowed, it could not be seen whether he said a prayer or whispered: 'Behold, O Lord, what you have done!
'

  The Garcia screamed horribly. The woman by her side put both her arms around the mother and talked to her in a low, soft voice. One man stepped to the edge of the bridge and with a few heavy strokes of his machete cut a cross in the rim as a sort of monument.

  The procession marched on, arrived at the opposite bank, reached the opening where the settlement was located, and came to a halt at the clean-swept front yard of the Garcia's hut, where in the early evening old man Garcia had been fiddling and Carlosito had had a boxing match with his big brother Manuelito.

  Following Manuel and the two women, we entered the hut.

  This home proved to be one of the poorest I had ever seen. No table, no chair, no bench, no cot, no furniture of any sort, not even of the cheapest kind. Save a box, there was absolutely nothing which could be used as furniture. In the farthest corner four posts were stuck in the earthen floor. On these four posts there rested a network of thin sticks interwoven and held together by vines and lianas from the jungle. On this flimsy construction there was an old, threadbare blanket and an armful of prairie grass which was used as a pillow. That simple thing was the bed of Garcia and his wife. The kid's bed was a petate, a bast mat, spread out on the earthen floor and now shoved under the bed. Frequently, though, the kid had slept on the grass roof with a ragged piece of cloth for a blanket. His mother had always been afraid that a scorpion would sting him, but he had not minded, preferring the roof for a reason he had been unable to explain.

  Several women had hurried to the hut before Manuel and all the others. These women had brought candles, put them into empty beer-bottles loaned by the pump-master, and set them on boxes which had also been obtained from the maestro maquinista. Owing to these preparations, the hut had a solemn aspect which, when the Garcia entered and observed it, caused her to break out crying again.

  This time, however, she shook off her despair quickly and resolutely. She found herself confronted now with the tasks of a hostess, let alone her duty to prepare the funeral for her baby. The many obligations she faced helped her to forget her grief. And it was surely a very good thing that she had to get busy around her household. It would save her from becoming morose perhaps for the rest of her life. It is the first twelve hours that count. If one can survive them and keep one's reason under control during this time, one can find life worth while again in a few weeks.

  At first she did not know what to do and where to begin. In the machinery of her daily life a very important bolt had been broken and she had to find a substitute for it before that machinery would run perfectly again. So far she knew only that she had to be busy and work hard for the next ten hours. She began with pushing the boxes to places other than where they had been put by the women who had brought them. Each box was moved and all the candles were taken out of the bottles and stuck into others and then the bottles themselves were moved from one box to another. When she was through changing those things around, it was found that everything was in practically the same place as before.

  Now she started running from this corner to that. Here she picked up something which she put down in another place, only to take it away from that place and carry it back to where it had first been. There was not much she could move around: one pot, several potsherds (all in use), a spoon, a rag, a bundle. For a while she stopped altogether. Holding one fist against her mouth, she stood thinking. Then she hurried to a corner. She bent down upon a wooden box made into a sort of trunk, which was the wardrobe of the family. She opened it and with both hands she rummaged around inside it, having obviously forgotten what she wanted. After much aimless digging into that box, picking things up and pushing them back again, she finally dragged out a bundle of marine-blue cotton goods, all crumpled and wrinkled and partly smutty and stained. Holding it up against the light, she turned it round and round without saying a word about what she meant to do with it.

  All this time Manuel was sitting on an old sack half full of corn-cobs. His chin resting on his breast, his hat covering all of his face, his dead kid brother lying in his outstretched arms, which were lying on his knees, he sat there motionless and serene as if he were a god made of bronze.

  Sleigh appeared in the open entrance. On his head he carried a table, the only one he owned. He worked it through the narrow doorway and put it on the floor in the middle of the hut. Then the pump-master woman stepped forward and spread two bed-sheets over the crude table.

  Manuel now rose, went to the table, laid the kid gently on it, and walked out into the night without once looking back.

  The Garcia ran to the table, took the cold, wet, crumpled hands of her baby into her own, and pressed them together as though she wanted to fill them with new warmth. She noted that his head hung down on the table with the chin sticking up and she saw that blood was trickling out of his mouth and nose again, leaving little pink ribbons from the corners of his mouth down his chin and neck. It was strange that out of this body that had been dead so long, after having been in the water for more than four hours, there should still flow blood. But the blood was getting more and more watery.

  It hurt the mother to see the little head in such an awkward position. She went to her bed, took a bunch of grass, and returned with it to the table. Half-way back she stopped, looked at her baby, and let the grass drop. A woman hurried out of the jacal and came back in a few seconds with a small soiled pillow.

  The pump-master woman ransacked the Garcia's box, picked up a few green rags, sewed them together as a bag, stuffed grass from the bed into it and pushed it under the kid's head, so that instead of one he now had two pillows, and the head was now in the natural position of sleep.

  On the two pillows and the bed-sheets watery pink blots soon appeared, which widened slowly into large stains.

  The mother took off his shoes, which, I noticed, covered the ankles and were therefore more like low boots than shoes. I understood better why that kid had felt helpless in such stiff, heavy shoes. The Garcia also took off his new socks, his short pants, and she pulled off his shirt, which was so small for him that it couldn't be buttoned anywhere.

  The pump-master woman searched for a comb. At first she parted his hair at the left. She looked at her job, did not like it, and parted the hair at the right.

  The roosters crowed for the second time during the night. It was one hour after midnight.

  Picking up from the ground the piece of blue cotton goods which she had dropped some time before, the Garcia spread and flattened it, and it turned out to be a cheap little sailor suit. It was the kid's Sunday suit and he had been very proud of it, because not even the pump-master's boys had anything like it.

  The mother now dressed her baby in that sailor suit.

  When this was done I looked at the kid, and horror crept down my back. In his torn and patched-up pants and in his dirty shirt with half a hundred holes in it, and with that funny-looking bit of string across his shoulders, the kid was very pretty in his way. In fact he was a real and natural-looking child of the jungle. He belonged here. But in that cheap sailor suit he no longer looked like a son of his native land. Yet somehow the clean-cut, noble features of a full-blooded Indian finally triumphed over the pale-faced, flat-footed Syrian jobbers and peddlers who had to sell cheaper and cheaper still if they wanted to sell at all.

  While alive the kid had worn that suit only once, at a feria more than a year ago.

  Neither the coat nor the pants could now be buttoned. In the first place the kid had outgrown the suit; in the second place his body was swollen with water. His mother was trying again and again to get the suit properly fixed. In vain. After many fruitless attempts she suddenly got impatient and began to twist and press the body until finally she was able to button the suit. The suit was now so tight that I expected it to burst any minute. She wrung out the wet socks and held them up to the little fire burning on the earthen floor. When the socks had dried she put them on his feet. Then she put on his new shoes.

  During the time she was working on the k
id she sniffed audibly and blew her nose every ten seconds or so into her fingers. Then she moaned and sighed deeply. Now and then she blubbered, but no one could understand what she said. Frequently she looked around the room, picked up a rag, and blew her nose into it. Her body trembled every once in a while with inner convulsions. But she uttered no more loud cries, perhaps because she forgot to do so in her concentration on her job of dressing the kid for his last trip.

  The people inside the hut whispered, murmured. She paid no attention to anyone. It seemed that she thought herself entirely alone in the room. Whatever she did was done correctly. Nevertheless one got the impression that she was in a dream and that she acted automatically.

  On one wall of the jacal there was a crude shelf. On it stood a little picture of the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe painted on glass. On either side of that cheap picture there were other, smaller pictures of saints. No image of the Lord could be seen anywhere. The pictures of the saints had short prayers printed on the back, which neither Garcia nor his wife could read. In front of the Holy Virgin there stood an ordinary drinking-glass, slightly cracked, which was filled with oil on which floated a tiny paraffin candle, no bigger than a match, stuck through a piece of tin the size of a dime. This tiny candle was lighted and it burned day and night to illuminate with its faint flame the picture of the Madre Santisima. The light was supposed to burn day and night, but often the Garcias did not have the few centavitos for oil because other things less eternal were needed more urgently. There was no oil in the glass when the pump-master woman had come to look after things. One of her first acts had been to fill the glass with fresh oil and light the candle. What would all these people have thought of the Garcia family if they had found the light for the Holy Virgin dead? They would have thought the house inhabited by pagans or, worse, by a godless gringo. The light was no more than just a glimmer, yet it satisfied the faithful and no devil could come in now to snatch a soul away.