The Rebellion of the Hanged

by B. TRAVEN

  Full advantage was taken of this day of rest. Each company sent two men forward and two back to establish contact with the company ahead and the one in its rear, so that the whole troop could be aware of what was happening.

  Not even the most experienced general could have worked as assuredly as this simple, almost unlettered sergeant, who had such officers as the Professor, and such men as Celso, Andrés, Santiago, and Matías, uneducated and lowly Indian boys, born rebels with no personal ambition but that of carrying to triumph the idea of liberty and justice as they conceived it—without compromise or surrender. They wanted that idea carried through whole and complete, and to see it succeed they marched at the head of their men without stopping to consider obstacles. “We want land and liberty.” That, and nothing else, was their program.

  “We want land and liberty, and if we want that, we have to go and look for it where it is to be found and then fight for it every day to preserve it. We don’t need anything else. If we have land and liberty we shall have all that man needs in this world, because it is in them that love is to be found.”

  The program was so simple, so just, and so pure that the Professor had no need to deliver long speeches to convince the men of its wisdom. He had no need to draw up long statutes or give explanations or recommend to the men the reading of treatises on political economy to make them understand that any man, however stupid he is, will be able to take over the governing of a people, provided he is equipped with machine guns and takes care to see that others have none.

  The route that the column followed was crisscrossed by rivers and streams whose overflowing waters had spread out over their submerged banks. Also, it was necessary to go around the many lakes of the region. Some of these lakes were shut in between two mountains where the upper paths were generally found in good condition, because the waters did not stagnate there, and the moisture in the ground was evaporated quickly by the first rays of the sun.

  At times the upper paths descended to join one that bordered a lake, so that during the rainy season it was necessary to wade long distances, sinking into muck up to the waist, to find water fit for drinking. This was the one hazard that could most easily upset the well-laid plans of the rebel general staff.

  When, at the end of the sixth day, the first company reached the edge of Lake Santa Lucina, the General went up to join the vanguard, of which Celso and Santiago formed part.

  “This looks God-damned bad,” he said.

  “Look whom you’re telling that to, General,” Celso answered, laughing, though submerged up to his thighs.

  “This is the first time our revolutionary march has been halted.”

  “It’s also the first battle we have to fight,” added Santiago, who, a few yards from Celso, was struggling against the current of mud.

  “I’m afraid,” the General said, “that we’ll have to wait here for a whole week.” Then, having looked around carefully, he reflected some seconds and added: “We might have to stay here three months, until not a drop of water falls.”

  Celso withdrew slowly until he succeeded in planting his feet on more solid ground.

  The General ordered the company to halt and await new orders. Then he sent a few men to find a path that would take them farther from the lake and be more practicable but still would not lead them in the wrong direction. At the end of two hours he received the first report from the scouts: within a radius of three miles there was nothing but swamps and seas of mud.

  “It was to be expected,” Celso observed. “Otherwise the caravans that follow this route every year would have found other routes.”

  “That’s true,” said the General, “but just the same we have to get out of here, find another road. Maybe there’s one behind that chain of mountains. That will mean a detour of two or three days, and perhaps that’s why the drivers, who always want to save time, haven’t looked for it. But we can allow ourselves this detour. We’ll arrive on time anyhow, because the fincas we want to conquer, with their land and liberty, won’t get away from us because of the delay.”

  The Professor came slowly up to the group, saying: “Clearly the land won’t escape—but liberty? If we want land and liberty, not only must we arrive at the right moment, but we must also arrive together. If we don’t, we’ll be exterminated. We can win only in a mass, by means of the mass, and with the mass; because nothing will be worth anything if we are not in mass. Let’s take a man in the group, any man—Celso or Santiago, for example. Working in isolation, you’d lack the necessary education, the brain trained in the right way to prevent any scribbler in a municipal registry, any shopkeeper, however stupid, from doing whatever he likes with even a hundred of you because of your ignorance, because you don’t even know how to read and write. That’s why they have always been able to deceive and rob you. But when we work together in a mass, things are different. Then a thousand heads and two thousand vigorous arms make up a superior force. That is why I’ve been telling you that freedom can evade us easily if we don’t form a large mass and if we don’t all arrive at the same time. The strongest lion is helpless in the face of ten thousand ants, who can force him to abandon his prey. We are the ants, and the owners are the lions.”

  “All you say is well said, Professor. But what matters most now is to find a route by which we can get ahead. We can’t go back to the camp and wait two months or more until the rains stop and the paths dry up. We’ve got to continue on our way in order to get there soon and stir up the peons. When they realize our strength and see our weapons, they’ll wake up. Well, then—forward!”

  It was truly a titanic task to discover a new road through the submerged jungle. They had to make a detour of three miles to the north, driving through virgin undergrowth.

  So many hours of the hardest work had been required by the first company that this afternoon, for the first time since they had set out, the second company arrived in time to camp with the first. But as the original plan of marching separately had to be followed, the second company had to remain in camp three hours the next morning after the first again set out.

  The companies that followed the first had no reason to consider themselves favored. Even though the first had the heavy task of finding a place where potable water could be obtained and which at the same time was free of mud so that they could set up the huts of the camp, the other companies had to fight against the state in which those preceding them had left the paths and tracks. Again and again they had to march, without losing their way, many yards above or below the path in order not to sink up to their necks in the muck.

  This first fight with the elements was not the only one. The flooding river and arroyos they had to cross caused considerable losses in the little rebel army.

  When at last they got out of the dense jungle and found themselves in the first little village, the General announced the losses suffered: twenty-eight men, four women, and three children. Some of the victims had met frightful deaths lost in the swamps; others had been drowned, carried away by the floods. Among the living, over a dozen had a broken leg or arm. Others had big head wounds, and at least fifty were dragging along with the blazing eyes and yellow skin of fever. Of those who were missing, probably more than one had been eaten during the night by some wild animal. It was impossible to say who had died that way: the troop had become used to the cries of the delirious, and it was hard to tell, in the middle of a black night, whether a man was struggling with a real or an imaginary animal. When daylight came, the absence of some man would be noticed. Sometimes, when the rain had not erased them, the tracks of the animal that had visited the encampment would still show.

  Twenty horses and mules had disappeared for the same reasons, with this difference: that the horses and mules were not attacked by malaria, but by dysentery, and that nearly all of them were wounded, despite the drivers’ precautions, which had been useless in preventing packsores, snakebites, and the attacks of wildcats.

  Despite losses, sickness, and weariness, the mor
ale of the troop was excellent. In every company the best of humor prevailed, displayed to the degree and in the way that Indian austerity allowed.

  So great was the confidence they felt in themselves, so big were their hopes, and so genuine was the joy they felt at having undertaken that march toward liberty, that they could not recall ever having lived happier hours.

  Months, perhaps years earlier they had abandoned hope that their situation would ever improve. For in spite of contracts, promises, and laws, they knew that once they had been meshed into the machinery of the lumber camps they would never be able to return to their homes, or even to see a village. But now, one after another, the companies had reached a village, the first they had seen in many years.

  Behind them lay the jungle, with its perils and its horrors. Before them, their homes, parents, and families. Before them, land and liberty! Free land for all! Land without foremen and owners!

  All together now, they wept with pleasure when the Professor spoke these words to them: “Listen well, men. Even if we lose this battle, even if we go down to the last man under the bullets of the federal soldiers and the rural police, even if not one of us should ever obtain land and liberty, we will have triumphed. Because to live as free men, even if only for a few months, is worth more than living a hundred years in slavery. And if we fall now we won’t fall as peons, as hanged men in flight, but as free men on the earth, as open rebels, as true soldiers of the revolution.”

  “Long live the Professor! That’s the way to talk!” hundreds of voices shouted. “We’re free and we’re fighting for the liberty of all the peasants and workers, of all honest women and men!”

  From the vantage of a branch to which he had climbed so that his voice might reach them all, the Professor looked at the multitude acclaiming him. Then he went on: “You have said it, men. We are free, but we don’t want liberty for ourselves alone. We must join all the others to fight together for liberty.”

  “Hurrah for the Professor! Long live liberty! Forward with the fight for land and liberty!”

  Long after the Professor had climbed down from the tree the shouts of enthusiasm could still be heard.

  The last company had arrived. The whole body of men was reunited. Friends and comrades belonging to different companies met again seated around the same hearth and told about the sufferings they had endured during the march through the jungle. In all the groups happiness dominated. Some were playing mouth organs, producing soft, sweet sounds; others strummed small guitars to accompany the singing of plaintive songs whose simple, profound words expressed everyone’s simple, profound feelings, words with which they alleviated the wounds of so many old pains and so much suffering. They danced, they sang, and they made noise, because the idea of having been able to come out well despite the horrors of the forest, with its swamps, the flood of its rivers, and the attacks of its wild animals had caused an explosion of joy among them. This was their way of reacting to the end of that exhausting march.

  The little village claimed to be the final point of the forest—which nevertheless extended into it. The roads were no better here, and there were places where the undergrowth was impenetrable. Furthermore, the rains might continue for some weeks. But this would not be torrential rain—only the fine rain so common in the mountains. During a respite of two or three days the rain let up completely. Nevertheless, the nocturnal downpours of the tropics had to be expected. But what could that matter now that they had dodged the horrors of the jungle?

  A few miles from its edge they found clusters of huts, small ranches, then fincas; and still farther on, still a considerable distance away, they would see the hamlets of Hucutsin and Achlumal. From there onward they would pass little caravans, convoys of mules and Indians on the way to market to sell the products of their labor.

  Between these little villages they would still have to cross desert or forest regions covered with thick brush through which they would have to plow for whole days at a time. But the jungle and its dangers were far away now. At last they had been left behind.

  They began to see cornfields and patches of frijoles. As they advanced, the cultivated lands became more extensive, until their boundaries were lost to sight at the appearance of the first fincas.

  Corn and frijoles! And with them assurance that they would not die from hunger. Until that moment they had sustained themselves with what they had carried away from the lumber camps. Provisions for four or five days more still remained. But the fear of hunger disappeared at the sight of the fincas, with their immense wealth of corn, pigs, sheep, cows, wheat, sugar, and all the things that this crowd of young men desired with all their hearts. For months, and in many cases years, they had been deprived of all those things which make men’s lives supportable.

  For corn alone was not enough, even though they prepared the ground meal and made the dough, which—by recipes transmitted from generation to generation for centuries—made possible a whole series of foods, including tortillas of several kinds and sizes, some with cheese rolled inside them, and corn-meal-water made aromatic with orange leaves or the little flowers of the anise plant.

  At the fincas more than just tortillas and frijoles awaited them. There they would find an endless amount of good things for which it was well worth their stopping awhile. The men were not highway robbers. But a rebellion cannot exist without rebels, and rebels must live if they are to go forward. Rebels are not to blame for the disagreeable consequences that rebellions bring in their train for those who have everything. Those responsible for the acts of the rebels are men who believe it possible to mistreat human beings forever with impunity and not drive them to rebellion.

  20

  The first little village they reached on coming out of the jungle was called El Requemado. Thirty years earlier it had been nothing but a lumber camp. Later, when not a stick of mahogany remained standing, despite the promises of reforestation made by the contractors, the friend of a politician had bought the property for a handful of pesos. He had then brought in a few Indian families who worked to his profit under the orders of an overseer. Thus he had tried to transform the camp into a ranch. But it proved so poor a ranch that it did not produce an income for its owner, who, furthermore, never set foot there, preferring to keep on running his business in Jovel. If he got one hundred pesos a year from the ranch, he felt that his expectations had been fulfilled. The majordomo did not receive any salary and lived by selling provisions and other stuff to the workmen who passed through on their way to the lumber camps.

  Don Chucho, the majordomo, was seized by terror when the first company appeared. When the rebels began to camp in the vicinity of the ranch, he tried to get them to tell him whether they had been discharged and why they had horses and mules with them and especially why they were traveling unaccompanied by a single foreman. He could elicit only evasive answers. But he was prudent and astute enough to understand that he would do better not to insist. He tried to keep up his courage by telling himself that nothing of all this was of any importance as far as he was concerned and that if the men had left the lumber camps it was their own business.

  But on the following day, when he saw a new company arrive and realized that the first had no intention of leaving, he conceived the idea of sending one of his peons to the neighboring finca to inform the finquero of what was happening. Then his wife dissuaded him, saying: “Look, Chucho, so far nobody has robbed you. Those men pay you for whatever they need. If they’re not buying much, that’s nothing new. That’s the way they always do. And if they have anything on their conscience, that’s not our affair. But if they get to know that you’ve sent to warn the finqueros, who knows what will happen to us? I think you’d better keep quiet.”

  Don Chucho had the sense to know that his wife was right, and that upset him even more than the presence of the armed boys camping on his ranch. He knew perfectly well how pistols and rifles had come this far in the men’s hands, but he wanted not to consider (he might have died of fright) what h
ad taken place in the lumber camps. His wife thought as he did, and without having consulted each other they carefully avoided any reference to it. They preferred not to find out the certainty, for it would have made them die of fear.

  Also, his cautiousness was not based on fear alone. Don Chucho did not attempt anything, because he knew very well that, even if the rural police were informed, they would never come to El Requemado to fight the rebels. They would wait in the outskirts of the important villages, if possible lying in ambush on one of the rich fincas, where surely they could defeat the rebels. Then the rebels would find themselves obliged to flee—and Don Chucho knew that they could take refuge only in the jungle. To reach it they would necessarily have to pass by the ranch again, and when they returned in defeat, in small, isolated groups full of rancor, what would be left of his ranch? Nothing. Not even a wisp of straw. And of himself? They would not leave even a tiny patch of skin, because by then they would know who had betrayed them.

  The men had not set up their encampment within the ranch because it was not big enough. In reality it was hardly more than a clearing where the jungle ended. A little farther on, along the road leading to the fincas, the General had installed the camp on a wide meadow bordered by the grasses and reeds of the riverbank.

  The site was strategic: it cut the road, and nobody could go to or from the fincas without passing through the camp. For the moment, then, they had nothing to fear from either finqueros or rural police. The men could rest for a few days, because they too knew that neither soldiers nor rural police would venture into this region. The jungle was still near, and its undergrowth formed natural ramparts against which the best rifles in the world—or even machine guns—would be useless. There the rebels, barefoot and scarcely covered by their tatters, were the kings; for them the forest held no secrets, and to combat them it would have been necessary to engage in hand-to-hand fighting, the terrible dueling with machetes, stabbings, stones, or even bare fists. And there the iron fists of the cutters—as the soldiers were well aware—were worth more than the best armament. For these reasons the men were completely calm. They were sure that even if the rural police were told of their being at El Requemado they would not come there to fight them.