March to the Monteria Read online

  Shortly before noon, he passed through the last hamlet on his march. It was a hamlet composed of only five huts and one adobe house. Right in back of the hamlet Celso waded across a wide river, the water of which reached no higher than a few inches above his knees.

  On the opposite side of the river the jungle came into sight. At the beginning it was open and clear, like overgrown land that had been cultivated some fifty years ago and then abandoned. Slowly but definitely noticeably, it grew ever thicker, darker, more imposing and more menacing the farther Celso advanced.

  He loped along at the typical light trot of the Indians, expecting to arrive at the last settlement before nightfall. Just before coming near the settlement, when he could already hear the dogs barking, he had to wade across another river, somewhat narrower but rather deep in the middle, so that, feeling with his feet and his stick, he could sound his way through without swimming. That this river was the abode of a considerable herd of alligators was not known to him since nobody had told him. And since he knew nothing about the alligators infesting this river he waded fearlessly through. Quite obviously the alligators were entertained at the moment by something more important farther down or up the river and therefore paid no attention to Celso.

  When Celso finally arrived at the settlement, he told the mayordomo in charge of the place: “This afternoon I got a fair impression of the jungle; an ugly, horrible trip.”

  The mayordomo crossed his legs, looked at Celso, rolled himself a cigarette into a maize leaf and remarked casually: “This afternoon? Why certainly, you got yourself a fair idea of the jungle, quite so. Only the truth is that where you have been marching through, that’s no jungle, that’s our recreational park, where we take a walk on Sunday afternoons to stretch our legs. Two days march from here, there one meets a region where I usually say: now, this is where the world starts to be a bit closed in and not quite open to look through. But, my boy, don’t get frightened. You see, generally tigers don’t attack during the day, because that’s when they take their nap. They are seriously interested in a good-looking boy like you only when you toss around in your sleep. But I know quite a lot of people who’ve never been bothered by a tiger. Of course I have to admit that all the others had no chance to tell their stories.”

  He licked his cigarette, lit it, and then went on. “I don’t know anything of you, Chamula, but should you ever happen through here again, then perhaps you’ll tell me how you got along with the tigers or how the tigers got along with you. And then if we have an opportunity to chat in a friendly way, I’ll count you among the people who have not been bothered by tigers.”

  Recreational park for Sunday afternoons! It was now almost dark. Celso took a look around him. Barely thirty paces back of the mayordomo’s primitive hut, the jungle lifted its steep wall of trees which covered the sky to such a height that if he wanted to look at the stars, he had to twist his head back at almost right angles to his neck. It was dark and tightly closed, inaccessible, apparently with no opening.

  “What will you need for the road, Chamula?” asked the mayordomo. “I have some hard toasted tortillas, a special kind that will not become specky or moldy. You can’t use any others. I also have rice, beans, raw sugar, freshly ground coffee and limes. I can also let you have fresh pozol. But only if you order it half a day in advance, so that it is fresh and won’t get sour and moldy so quickly. And if you roll your own cigarettes I have sufficient fresh tobacco leaves, which are better and cheaper than wrapping paper, which I don’t have anyway. Of course, I can let you have some cigarette paper. But I noticed that you smoke cigars and roll your own, so you don’t need paper. Anyway, it will be better for you to spend tomorrow here and wait. We’ll knead you some extra good pozol. You’re in no hurry, are you? In this place it is like that; he who has to go through the jungle must not be in a hurry. It won’t do him any good. Especially not if he finds himself in the middle of the grand selva insufficiently prepared. Take your time. The jungle won’t run away, and the bridges won’t be carried away, because there aren’t any.”

  The mayordomo got to his feet and went into the hut, where he tried to get the smoke-soiled lantern to function properly. Night had closed in completely.

  In the yard in front of the hut a sleepy fire was burning, spreading some light, enough to see as far as the picket fence around the yard.

  Celso was sitting on a beam on the ground. The beam was the trunk of a tree with the bark partly peeled off. Nobody had taken pains to peel it off properly. In many places, the beam showed deep scars. These cuts had been made by people standing or sitting around with nothing else to do but play with their machetes.

  “Take your time, you’re in no hurry.” This remark of the mayordomo came back to Celso now in the darkness of night. To him it sounded more like a warning and at the same time like a possible solution to his problems.

  During the last two days he had been more and more influenced by the many stories he had heard and he had begun to look at his jungle march from an entirely different point of view. He had ceased to think of the two-peso reward for extra speed in delivering the letters. He busied his mind in searching for a solution by which his task might turn out less dangerous to him.

  The instinct of self-preservation would not allow him to gamble recklessly with his life. He knew that he had only one life; and he felt it his duty not to risk this one life for papers and a few silver pesos reward.

  He argued with himself thus: “I undertook to deliver the letters and the box, but if I perish in the jungle the letters will be lost, together with the box, and I can deliver to Don Eduardo neither the letters nor the medicines. Now, to be able to deliver the letters safely, I must protect my life. The surest way to protect it is not to march through the jungle alone but to wait instead for someone going the same way.”

  Consequently the strongest support of his reasoning was the mayordomo’s remark: “Take your time, boy. Don’t be in a hurry. Wait here.”

  When the mayordomo finally appeared with the smoking lantern, Celso was in a state of mind as calm as if he had to march only the well-known road from his native village to Jovel.

  He scratched his bare feet, pulled out a thorn or two, examined his toes in search of niguas, those terrible sand fleas, tearing a dozen ticks, called garrapatas, out of his skin and rubbing the mosquito bites with a piece of camphor. All this he did with the philosophical calmness of the wandering Indian who won’t have to march on the following day but is going to put in a rest day instead.

  Once finished all these hygienic tasks, he took a jícara from his pack and asked the mayordomo where he could get some water.

  The mayodomo was swinging lazily in a homemade hammock suspended from two beams of the porch, passing the time until supper was ready.

  With a toe peeping out of his burst boot he pointed in a certain direction and said: “Right over there you’ll find a brook-pure, clear, healthy and almost ice-cold water.”

  Celso disappeared into the darkness. He washed his hands, threw water in his face, drank out of his gourd, filled it again to the brim and went back to the long trunk where he settled down once more.

  He withdrew a few paces from the porch, so as to put a greater distance between himself and the table set up on the porch, where the mayordomo would have his evening meal. Pulling his pack close to him Celso commenced to fumble in it.

  Out of its depths he fished some rolled-up tortillas which were about to grow moldy. He produced some black-reddish dried meat that looked like fresh leather, then a fistful of black beans, cooked to the consistency of a mash and wrapped up in fresh banana leaves. That was followed by coarse-grain salt, carried in a dry corn leaf held together by a thin fiber string. A few green chile pods and a handful of green leaves were added to give his meal its accustomed taste.

  He piled all that on a small mat of woven fiber, then stood up and stepped to the fire in the yard. The fire was always, day and night, at the disposal of the traveler, be he an Indian or
a ladino, unless the host needed it temporarily for himself.

  Celso pushed the embers around, put on some more wood, and yard and hut immediately lit up. Against this sudden lighting, the black wall of the jungle looked all the more threatening.

  Leaning the tortillas against the fire, Celso turned them, blew off the ashes and turned them over again. When they commenced to get crisp, he laid them upon hot embers pulled from the fire to keep them warm.

  On a pointed stick he speared the dried meat and placed the stick on two forked branches driven into the ground. The beans he left in their banana leaf, but he placed the leaf also on the hot embers next to the tortillas.

  The meat began to roast and he spread his entire meal on the little mat, which was placed near the fire. Now he turned the meat over a few times, took it off the stick and started eating.

  Taking up a pinch of salt, he shoved it directly into his mouth. He ate his meat and the beans by tearing off a piece of tortilla, picking up the meat or the beans as though the piece of tortilla was a sort of little napkin, rapidly rolling the piece of tortilla into the form of a small cone and pushing this cone, filled with meat or beans, into his mouth.

  Now and then he took a drink of water from the gourd which he had filled at the brook. He ate unbelievably slowly. Like all tired workers, he considered the meal part of his rest from hard work.

  While he was still eating, an Indian maid began laying the table on the porch. Once the dishes, plates and tin cups had been set on the rough, shaky and unplaned mahogany table, the mayordomo’s wife made her appearance. Fat and clumsy, she waddled like a duck. She was barefoot and on her body hung a long thin cotton skirt that touched the ground. It showed signs of considerable wear, as did the threadbare cotton blouse, half open at her breast.

  As soon as the woman appeared on the porch, Celso got up from the fire, approached her, bowed and said: “Buenas noches, patrona.” The woman replied lazily to his greeting with a short nod and, just to say something, asked: “Where you from, Chamula?” But when the youth answered she no longer listened, because it was a matter of complete indifference to her where the muchacho lived. She sat down on a very low, small stool. There were only two chairs. But the low stool seemed to appear more comfortable to the woman than any ordinary chair. And since she sat so low that her eyes just looked over the table, she took the plate into her lap.

  When the woman started to eat, the mayordomo let out a loud and sonorous yawn, wriggled in his hammock, then got up, groaning as if, after a good long sleep, he had to undertake some disagreeable task.

  Knives and forks were absent from the mayordomo’s table. There were only a few spoons which, ages ago, might have looked like imitation silver, but which by now had been scraped and sanded so much that the leaden-looking tin was all that remained visible. The mayordomo’s wife ate with her fingers, just as Celso did. She tore off a piece of hot tortilla, picking up the meat or the beans or the chile or the rice, doubled the little rag like a napkin over the food and shoved the whole package into her mouth.

  The mayordomo would have loved to eat in the same way. But since he felt that, as a mayordomo, it was his duty to be different from all other mortals and command their respect, he used his pocket knife, picking up the food with it and lancing it into his wide-open mouth. Occasionally he used a spoon, but whenever he thought himself unobserved, and even his wife was not watching, he ate in exactly the same fashion as Celso.

  The servant girls farther back, somewhere in the dark, were sitting on their haunches around a glowing fire on the ground. They could not be seen, but their talk and giggling could be heard. When they got too loud, the woman shouted at them: “Damn you, you bitches, shut up or I’ll club you on the head. Let’s eat in peace.”

  For a while the girls would be scared and keep quiet. But after a short while they would start to giggle again until finally the woman took whatever she had at hand and threw it at them with a juicy oath.

  When the girls started to take away the dented coffeepot, the mayordomo shouted: “Ven, Chamula, have some coffee.”

  Celso approached the table with his now empty gourd and the mayordomo poured the entire remains of the coffee into the gourd. “Gracias, patroncito,” Celso said and went back to his fire, carefully balancing the gourd which was filled to the brim.

  The coffee was black but it had been boiled together with brown crude sugar.

  The woman got up from her stool. It demanded a tremendous effort on her part to rise to her feet. First she leaned over in front so that her nose practically touched her knees, then swung back rapidly, using this momentum to get up.

  The mayordomo went back to his hammock and began to swing. He let his legs hang down on the sides of the hammock, his folded hands back of his head serving him as a cushion, and noisily sucked his teeth. Whenever he thought fit to help his digestion, he grunted and belched with satisfaction. Whether it was just out of pure well-being or out of a physical necessity, or just to tell his wife in this way that she was a good cook, was hard to tell. One might not be greatly mistaken if one assumed that he did so because he felt at home where he was the mighty sovereign who did not have to worry about pleasing anybody.

  7

  In the meantime Celso, too, had finished his meal. He went to the brook with his jicarita, washed his hands, rinsed and gargled his mouth and, after filling the little vessel again with water, returned to the fire. Once he had collected his various objects and stowed them back in his net, he dragged the pack to the beam near the porch, pulled out one of the cigars he had rolled before, lit it with the aid of a glowing stick from the fire and, with the comfortable feeling of not having a care in the world, sat down on the trunk, leaning his back against a pole of the porch.

  “Who sends you to Agua Azul?” asked the mayordomo, just to make conversation.

  “Don Apolinar.”

  The mayordomo took some tobacco from his shirt pocket and rolled it into the white paper which was being sold as cigarette paper but which, in fact, was just ordinary newspaper.

  Celso jumped to his feet with a glowing stick in his hand to light the cigarette for the mayordomo.

  “It’s a hell of a bad road to the montería. But at times it seems to me that it is easier to make it on foot than with saddle horses and pack mules.”

  As Celso did not say anything to that the mayordomo had no idea how to keep the conversation going. All the details which really mattered had been discussed.

  But then he heard the sound of voices approaching. He cocked his ears, listened carefully and said: “Why! There they are now.”

  Celso, too, had heard the voices. When he looked in their direction he saw, emerging from the darkness, the figures of a man and a boy.

  “Bueno, Don Policarpo, did you find your burros?” the mayordomo asked the man as soon as he came close.

  “I did. All five were keeping together.”

  “They are all right?”

  “In fine shape, gracias.”

  The man stepped onto the porch, and as he sat down on a chair which he pulled away from the table he saw Celso.

  “Bueno, Chamula, como estás?” he addressed Celso.

  Celso got to his feet, bowed and said: “Buenas noches, patrón.”

  “This here is Don Policarpo, a merchant from Socoltenango,” explained the mayordomo. “He’s been here already two days, getting his burros in shape for the trip. He also aims to march to the monterías. You might go along with him, Chamula.”

  There was nothing Celso had been hoping for more longingly during the past days than that someone, no matter who, would also have to go to the monterías.

  However, he was no longer the awkward Indio he had been when he went to work at the coffee plantation. Since then he had changed thoroughly. And he knew it.

  He had received his first lesson in how to get acquainted with the world he lived in when Don Sixto had deprived him of the money he had saved for his marriage. A second valuable lesson came when he coul
d not buy a present for his mother because the storekeeper demanded three times the real price for the gift for no other reason than to sell him hard liquor instead. And another important change occurred in him when he learned from his father that Don Sixto had not been entitled to take the money away from him the way he did.

  This bitter schooling he had received contributed to his newly acquired ability to think quicker and to say “yes” and “at your service, patroncito” slower. Since quick thinking and slow assenting had given him noticeable superiority in his dealings with Don Apolinar, he was resolved to apply this system in the future whenever he had a chance to do so. Before this change he would have said: “Patroncito, how lucky I am to have met you, because we can make the journey through the jungle together.” But by now he knew that the immediate consequence of such frankness would be that the peddler would exploit him mercilessly to his own advantage.

  He took a good look at Don Policarpo, watching him closely without seeming to do so.

  Don Policarpo was of the same bronze color as was Celso. Short, thick-boned and sinewy, like Celso, he had the same black, slightly slanted eyes. And, like Celso, Don Policarpo had thick, black, wiry hair that grew so low on his brow and that gave the impression, as in the case of Celso, that he had a low, undeveloped brain, while the back part of his skull was dome-shaped and looked as if he were wearing a thick black turban or cap. There was no doubt that the two grandfathers, and possibly also the two grandmothers of Don Policarpo had been pure Indians in the service of townspeople, and that most likely the mother of Don Policarpo had married a mestizo and brought up her children in town. Thus Don Policarpo had become a ladino, standing on his own feet, independent because of his small ambulant commerce.

  He spoke Spanish and Tsotsil as well as Tseltsal fluently. This, of course, was of great advantage in his trade, especially in respect to most other small merchants, who spoke only Spanish or Arabic. Since he not only spoke Indian, but looked Indian and, whenever he deemed it advantageous, assumed and applied Indian customs, he always won his customers’ confidence in the small Indian villages and also that of the peons living on the large fincas. He was honest in his dealings, in his way, and content with less profit than any of the other small peddlers of Mexican or Arabian descent who roamed the country. The disadvantage lay in the fact that he possessed only a limited capital and therefore could travel with few goods.