General from the Jungle

by B. TRAVEN

  His closest friend in the regiment, Lucio Ortiz, was a corporal, also of Indian origin. He was the only man in whom he confided what he had done and where he had hidden the body of the demigod, in order to gain time for flight. True friendship meant more to the corporal than patriotism and far more than the solemnly sworn oath of loyalty that was as much a matter of indifference to him as a divorce in Tlaxcala would have been to a funambulating ape. “You know, Juanito,” he said simply to his friend, “I’m going with you, and to hell and damnation with the whole accursed army and all the stinking crap about patriotism and love of one’s country. What’s it to do with me?” So the two of them went off together.

  They thought of escaping to Honduras or San Salvador. Anywhere away from their sacred fatherland.

  On the way they met a recruited gang of Indian workers who were being driven to the monterías as contract laborers. They enlisted in this gang. In the monterías nobody looked for them, and anyway no one would have gotten them out, whoever was being looked for or whatever the crime that had been committed; for a contract worker in the monterías was ten times worse off than in a prison or even in El Valle de la Muerte, the dreaded concentration camp for political prisoners from which seldom anyone returned, and, if he did return, remained a broken man for the rest of his life.

  Now, the corporal, Lucio Ortiz, had been appointed by General to the rank of colonel in the army.

  As chief of staff, General nominated Celso Flores, a Tsotsil Indian. Celso had worked for several years in the monterías as a feller. Although he was unable to read or write, he possessed an acute natural intelligence. Also, he was endowed with the rare talent of being able to inspire people to extreme exertions, mostly in the Indian manner. He never demanded anything that he would not himself do first—and do better than anyone else—if it was suggested that it was impossible to carry out his command.

  As general in charge of the commissary, the muchachos chose Andreu, a Tseltal Indian who had worked in the monterías as an ox driver dragging away the felled tree trunks. He could read and write, and had acquired experience and a certain knowledge of logistics as overseer of oxen on the carreta caravans, which brought trade goods and passengers from the railway station on the coast far into the interior of the state—a distance of more than four hundred miles.

  The spiritual chief, the brains of the army, was Professor, as the muchachos called him. Professor had been a secondary-school teacher. Gradually he had begun to understand the true position of the people who lived under the dictatorship. So it happened that he became more and more unwilling to beat into his pupils by way of their behinds—as had become customary in all schools—an admiration and idolization of the system. The further he progressed in his political awakening, the less was he spiritually enslaved. Therefore, whenever he had the opportunity, in school, on the street, in cafés, he began shamefully to abuse the dictator and his supremacy; and although he knew what would happen to him, he did not come, as his colleagues put it, to his senses. Once he had properly understood the situation, he could no longer hold his tongue. From a well-paid position in the better schools and in the big towns, he was continually transferred to lesser posts. Each fresh transfer was preceded by several months in prison or a concentration camp.

  Finally, he found himself in a little mining town, where he was employed in a louse-ridden elementary school of the lowest grade, which was attended by the children of the poorest and worst-paid mine workers. He had been at his post scarcely three weeks when every evening, in one or another of the miserable adobe huts of the workers, there took place a meeting of the fathers, mothers, and elder brothers of his pupils. Six weeks later there were explosions, now here, now there, in the galleries and even in whole sections of the mines. God was on the side of the mineros; for it so happened that after none of the explosions and floodings in the mines was there a single dead proletarian to be found, although there perished a great many military personnel and agents of the secret police who had been introduced into the mines, dressed as laborers, in order to discover why the output was falling off and who stuck the dynamite into the false boreholes. When it finally came to strikes and open mutiny, the buildings of the mines administration were bombarded with stones and the police troops started to pepper the crowds of recalcitrant mineros. Then Professor was arrested again. This time the government seemed to have withdrawn him from public life once and for all. This time even the fathers and brothers of his former secondary-school pupils could no longer obtain clemency for him, as they had hitherto always been able to do successfully, since they held influential positions. This time Professor was included in a transport of incorrigibles and recidivists, a transport that took them to El Inferno, a concentration camp that was only called “Hell” because even the brightest wit had been unable to discover a stronger word to describe the hell that reigned there. Even here, Professor could not keep his impertinent mouth shut. From time to time he was gagged for twenty-four hours on end, was allowed neither water nor shade from the tropical sun. But scarcely was the gag removed and scarcely had the cramp left his tortured lips than the first words he always shouted were: “Abajo El Caudillo! (Down with the dictator!) Que muera la dictadura! Viva la revolución social! Sufragio efectivo! No reelección! Viva la revolución del pueblo!” And immediately he was gagged again, and he was carried out into the burning sun, tied up like a parcel, and laid on the sand. Finally, he succeeded in escaping with several companions in suffering, but most of these either perished or were recaptured and then slowly tortured to death. In the course of his flight Professor encountered the sergeant and the corporal dressed in rags and indistinguishable from wandering Indian peasants. And in company with these two he also allowed himself to be recruited as a mahogany worker in the monterías, in the hope of waiting in the depths of the jungle for the outbreak of the rebellion, which was already flickering throughout the country, and then opening the attack from there and winning the south of the Republic for the cause of the revolution.

  The rebel army was divided into eight companies, each commanded by a captain and a lieutenant, with corporals as platoon leaders.

  On the journey through the jungle, each company marched at a day’s interval from the next, partly on account of the more than 150 horses, mules, donkeys, oxen, cows, and goats which accompanied them, and partly also in order to allow the swamplike trail through the jungle, saturated by heavy tropical downpours, time to dry out somewhat after a company had marched over it, and thus lighten the passage of those following. When a company and its animals had marched over one of these narrow jungle paths, they left behind them a trail compounded of deep, porridgelike slime in which men sank to their knees and beasts even to their stomachs.

  After weeks of marching, terrible and exhausting as only a march can be through tropical jungle, where the ground is never dry, the army at length reached a settlement on the very edge of the jungle.

  The hardships of this march, wading through swamps, crossing streams and rivers, struggling over numerous mountain ranges, gave the rebels rich opportunity to show what they were capable of.

  No academically trained and experienced general could have brought a regular army on this march through the jungle and accomplished it with so few losses and so little sickness as General and the rebel officers had managed to do. It was excellent training for them and for all belonging to the army. An army that had succeeded in conquering the jungle so triumphantly had the right to hope that it might overcome any other forces. And these other forces that had to be fought and conquered were drawing nearer every day as the horde advanced farther into open country where the great estates, the fincas, lay, with their feudal overlords, the finqueros, and where were also villages, towns, army posts, military patrols, and roving squadrons of Rurales.

  The army marched ahead without having any particular objective. “The objective will appear when once the march has begun,” said Professor and General.

  The muchachos would have had as
little use for a narrowly circumscribed objective as they would have had for a program or a statute of some sort or other. They were guided solely by their one desire to acquire land and freedom. Once they had found both these things and were certain that they could keep them, then they would settle down, just as the Nahuas after a march lasting more than a hundred years had settled in a region that attracted them and that guaranteed them land and freedom.

  Now, of course, Tierra y Libertad could be gained only when those who owned and defended these estates had been vanquished. Therefore the first task was to fight them, to conquer them, to overwhelm them utterly, and to destroy them. The next task after that was to smash all who hindered or might hinder the achievement of Tierra y Libertad. So it might even be necessary to march on the capital, to occupy the government buildings, to slaughter the governor and all his bureaucrats, and then to direct from the government buildings everything further that had to be done, and from that day forward to keep a sharp watch that everything done was carried out in the interest of and for the well-being of the victors.

  That, in the broadest possible outlines, was the idea of the cleverer brains in the army. On this matter Professor generally uttered only brief pronouncements: “Let’s win the revolution first and destroy our enemies. Then will be the time to discuss what’s to be done. Much talk beforehand is wasted time and energy which we have greater need of for our more immediate tasks.”

  Of the immediate tasks, nothing was more important or more urgent than the procuring of arms. And the rebels could obtain these arms only by taking them from those who at present possessed them. And their present possessors were the soldiers and the Rurales.

  After reaching this first settlement, the individual companies no longer advanced with a whole day’s march separating each from the one following. Henceforward, the companies marched in closer formation so that each was about two hours’ marching time behind the next. Since it was possible that soon the first battle would have to be fought, it would have been a tactical error to have allowed the companies to march at too great an interval.

  On the second day after departure from the settlement the army reached the Rancho Santa Margarita.

  It was afternoon when the first company arrived there.

  Santa Margarita consisted of the owner’s house built of adobe—unburned clay bricks. It was flanked by two barnlike bodegas, also of adobe. Here were stored the harvested corn, beans, and henequen fiber for making ropes and mats. Here also were to be found the pack and riding saddles and the few agricultural implements that the ranch possessed.

  Four miserable huts huddled around the bodegas.

  All these buildings formed a large courtyard, or patio, for they were built to form a quadrangle. One side was, however, open. Here a rough fence separated the patio from the corral where the horses and cattle were kept. On one side next to the owner’s house was a space, also separated from the outer world by a thorn fence. In the fence was a gate leading from the patio onto the trail followed by all travelers and caravans passing the ranch.

  The ranch itself lay on a hill that was just large enough to allow space for the buildings, the patio, and the surrounding fence. On the slopes of the hill lay the primitive palm huts of the peons who belonged to the ranch. There were fourteen such huts.

  In three extremely wretched huts, which, like the owner’s house, were situated around the patio, lived the major-domo, the rope-maker, and the chief vaquero, the man who was responsible for the cattle. These three families were half ladinos, whereas the peons and their families, who lived in the huts scattered on the hill, were Indians.

  The mansion was, indeed, only a mansion, because all the other buildings were miserable chozas and palm huts of the most primitive type. It possessed no window apertures, only heavy, rough doors of solid mahogany. The floors were made of ill-baked clay bricks, the roof of rough, weathered wooden shingles. The house consisted of two rooms only. The sole object in the mansion suggesting that the occupants were not living in the fourteenth century, and in fact the only object that could be described as modern, was an American sewing machine that had begun to rust badly.

  Table and chairs were of mahogany, roughly carpentered with a machete. The beds were simple frames of ebony over which were stretched strips of raw cowhide, crisscross, on which lay thick fiber mats woven from the leaves of palm trees. Dirty pillows were stuffed with Louisiana moss containing an abundant proportion of the adjacent bush.

  This mansion was regarded as elegant and the owner as well-to-do. Everything that the family needed, apart from silk, cotton, and ironware, was manufactured on the ranch. Here spirits were distilled, woolen blankets woven, saddles and sandals made, ropes and stout henequen fibers spun, from which were knotted nets, bags, and hammocks.

  The mistress of the house led the prayers and the singing in the chapel belonging to the ranch. This chapel was a small hall, without partitions and covered with a palm roof. At one end of the hall was a rough table on which stood a picture of the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe. There were always fresh flowers before the picture. They were gathered in the bush by the wives and daughters of the peons and placed there daily every morning. Each Sunday morning the floor of the chapel was thickly strewn with green branches so that the worshippers could kneel on them.

  The mistress was also doctor and midwife to the people who belonged to the ranch.

  As to hard cash, there was seldom a hundred pesos, and often only five pesos, to be found in the whole ranch, owners and peons included. Everything was borrowed. Each borrowed from the next. And all borrowed from the masters. The “masters” felt it a moral no less than a shrewd economic duty to keep their peons alive and healthy.

  Here and under these circumstances, which existed at the time of the arrival of the rebels and which had existed thus for four hundred years, what a revolution could achieve, or even what it could change, would have defeated even the most radical European thinker, had he been commanded to liberate the peons from their servitude and to give them, through the revolution, something more than they already possessed.

  There was nothing there. And liberty—for which they would have had to thank a revolution—would have left these peons twice as poor and helpless as they now were.

  There was plenty of land available. The ranch ranked as a large estate. But four fifths of the land was bush and jungle, stony and mountainous. Of the remaining fifth, one part was prairie land, suitable grazing for cattle, horses, and mules. Only one tenth was cultivated, hard as cement in the dry season and a slimy morass during the rains. If the dry season lasted too long, all the inhabitants of the ranch, including the almighty ranchero and his family, were near starvation. His only wealth consisted in his cattle, horses, and mules, which he bred. In order to breed these animals, he had required capital, for he had to buy breeding beasts and then wait years until the offspring were big enough to be sold. If a drought lasted too long, the animals died.

  What could the rebellion, which had some sense in the monterías, do here to improve the lot of the peons? Even if it brought them freedom from their master, Heaven would soon rob them of that liberty; for their liberty was worthless if they had nothing to eat because nothing grew, and because the peons, once they were free, would use their freedom to work even less than before. No one had taught them self-discipline, how to work without being told and supervised. No one gave them seed, because others who were nearer the distribution points—insofar as these existed—required the seed more urgently. No one had taught them how to organize their work, in order to be able to form themselves into a cooperative society. Their community sense was so weak, if it ever had existed, that a cooperative organization would have been of little help to them; for envy, jealousy, and eternal quarrels over leadership would have gradually disintegrated any such organization. People who have lived in such servitude for four hundred years, or possibly four thousand, and all that time have been compelled to surrender to their masters and the authorities all th
inking, all responsibility, all organizing, all consultation and discussion, all direction—such people cannot within a year of a rebellion be made into free peasants, capable of independent thought, action, and productivity, and requiring no one to tell them to be up and about at four o’clock in the morning to plow the fields.

  The rebels who now arrived at this ranch certainly did not regard it as their task to ponder that a revolution alone does not alter a system, that it only changes ownership, that only the name of the owner is altered, and that the nation or the State in its role as capitalist may be more brutal, relentless, and tyrannical than ever the former masters were. What did systems, new or old, matter to the rebels?

  They had been so long whipped and hanged, so long humiliated and robbed of free speech, that their community sense, which bound them to all their other compatriots from purely natural causes, had been killed. They knew only vengeance and retribution. Destruction was the sole thing they understood. The more they destroyed, the more they slaughtered of those whom they regarded as their enemies, the freer they felt themselves to be. For everything that existed and everything that lived and did not belong to them was the cause of their slavery. If they desired to be released from their slavery, then they must destroy. They no longer worried about the morrow; they worried only about the yesterday, when they had been tormented.

  The tragedy is not that there can be and are dictators; no, the tragedy is that each and every dictatorship, even the most flourishing and apparently benevolent, must end in destruction, desolation, and chaos, according to the iron law of Nature that no man is able to change or influence: that is the true tragedy, because mankind thereby is hurled back hundreds of years in its irrepressible drive toward ultimate liberation from animality and anarchy.