The Cotton-Pickers Read online

  Then, as usual, the swapping began. Antonio swapped his beans for tomato salad, which he prepared himself at the table, and I swapped my stew for an omelette.

  Now Antonio put his rice into his soup; if he’d kept his beans he’d have put them in as well. Apparently he got enough beans at the bakery, but tomato salad was a treat.

  I shook a layer of pepper onto my meat and another layer onto the fried potatoes. Then I seasoned the rice with chile sauce and sweetened the beans with sugar.

  At the end of the meal we were each served a dulce ― a sweet ― and I had café con leche, that is, coffee with hot milk, but Antonio took only the hot milk.

  Antonio and I exchanged small talk while eating. We didn’t want to spoil our digestion by taxing our brains with profundities.

  For our meal we paid fifty centavos each, all included. It was the usual price in a Chinese restaurant, a café de chinos.

  And now we sailed along to the bakery. I went into the pastry shop and asked a clerk if I could see the boss.

  “Are you a baker?” the owner asked me.

  “Yes, baker and pastry cook.”

  “Where were you working last?”

  “In Monterrey.”

  “Good. You can start tonight. Free room, board, laundry, and I pay you one peso twenty-five a day. Wait a moment,” he added suddenly. “Are you good on cakes, cakes with fancy icing?”

  “In my last job in Monterrey I did nothing but cakes with fancy icing.”

  “Fine. But I’d better have a word with my master baker and hear what he says. He’s a first-class man. You can learn a lot from him.”

  He took me into a dormitory, where the master was in the act of putting on his shoes, getting ready to go out.

  “Here’s a baker from Monterrey who’s looking for work. See if he’s any use to you.” The boss went back to his office and left the two of us alone.

  The master, a short, fat fellow with freckles, didn’t hurry himself. He finished putting on his shoes and then seated himself on the edge of his bed and lit a cigar. When he’d taken a few puffs he looked at me suspiciously, looked me up and down and said: “Are you a baker?”

  “No,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know much about baking.”

  “Really?” he said, still suspicious. “Do you know anything about cakes?”

  “I’ve eaten them,” I said, “but I’ve no idea how they’re made. That’s just what I want to learn.”

  “Well, have a cigar. You can start tonight at ten s Would you like something to eat?”

  “Not just now, thank you just the same.”

  “All right. I’ll have a word with the old man. Now I’ll show you your bed.” It seemed he’d lost all his mistrust of me, and was very friendly.

  “I’ll make a good baker and pastry cook out of you if you pay attention to what I have to tell you and don’t try bringing in new-fangled ideas of your own. That would never do you any good around here.”

  “I’ll be most grateful to you, señor. I’ve always wanted to become a baker and pastry cook of the first order.”

  “You can have a nap now if you want one, or you can have a look around the town ― just as you like.”

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll take a walk in the town.”

  “Well, ten o’clock, don’t forget.”

  9

  I met Antonio, as agreed, in the park.

  “Well?” he greeted me from the bench where he sat.

  “I’m starting tonight.”

  “That’s fine. Maybe later on I might hike down to Colombia with you.”

  I sat down beside him.

  I couldn’t think of anything to talk about and, searching in my mind for some subject of conversation, it occurred to me that this might be a good moment to mention Gonzalo. Actually I wasn’t so much interested in talking about it as in observing his reaction and seeing how a man with murder on his conscience would behave when someone surprised him by disclosing that he knew all about the crime.

  There was, no doubt, a certain risk involved. If Antonio discovered I knew he was a murderer, he’d make it his business to do away with me at the first chance. But I was prepared to run the risk; the very danger made me itch to throw my card on the table face up. I wouldn’t be taken by surprise and was quite able to defend myself, although I would certainly avoid tramping through the bush, or going to Colombia, with him as my only companion.

  “Do you know, Antonio,” I said suddenly, out of nowhere, “that you’re wanted by the police?”

  “Me?” He seemed quite astonished.

  “Yes, you!”

  “What for? I don’t know of anything I’ve done wrong.”

  It sounded very genuine, a bit too genuine to be on the level, I thought.

  “For murder! Murder and robbery!”

  “You’re nuts, Gales. Me wanted for murder? You’re badly mistaken. True, I was mixed up with Emiliano Zapata, but no murder. It must be someone else with the same name.”

  “Not a matter of mistaken identity,” I said, getting tired of that cat and mouse play. I let loose, almost shouting: “Did know that Gonzalo is dead?”

  “What?” he shouted, even louder than I had.

  “Yes,” I said, very quietly now, yet watching him intently, “Gonzalo is dead; murdered and robbed.”

  “Poor devil. He was certainly a good guy,” Antonio said sympathetically.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “he was a decent fellow. It’s a pity. Where did you see him last, Antonio?”

  “In the house, where we all had been sleeping during the harvest.”

  “Mr. Shine told me that the three of you ― you, Gonzalo, and Sam ― left his place together.”

  “If Mr. Shine says that, he’s mistaken. Gonzalo stayed behind. Only the two of us, Sam and I, went to the station to catch the train.”

  “I don’t understand,” I put in. “Mr. Shine was standing at the window and definitely saw the three of you.”

  At this, Antonio gave a short laugh and said: “Mr. Shine is right, and I’m right too. The third man with us wasn’t Gonzalo but a man from nearby, a native who came to buy the hens from Abraham because he thought he’d get them cheap. But Abraham left two days before and had already sold them, to Mr. Shine I think.”

  “In the house where you last saw Gonzalo,” I said, slowly now, “I found him murdered and robbed. That is to say, he hadn’t been robbed of everything; the murderer had left him a little over five pesos.”

  “I wish I could be serious about this tragic story,” said Antonio, smiling slightly to himself, “but I can’t help laughing. The rest of Gonzalo’s money is in my pocket.”

  “There you are! That’s just what I’ve been talking about.”

  “You may have been talking about it your way, Gales,” replied Antonio, “but I won the money from him. Sam knows all about it; he was there at the time. Sam lost five pesos himself. He would have a stake in it.”

  This was a strange story indeed.

  “Sam, myself, and the Indian neighbor, we left the house together. Gonzalo wanted to stay behind and have a good sleep. I went with Sam by train to Celaya. Sam went on by train, and I did the rest of the way here partly on foot and by riding freights for a few stretches.”

  What Antonio said rang true. What was more, he had Sam for a witness. That Antonio should have traveled back the long distance from Celaya to murder Gonzalo seemed highly improbable. He had already won Gonzalo’s money, honestly, as Sam could testify. Gonzalo had no valuables of any kind. Each of us knew the entire possessions of the others, and none of us could have secreted anything on his person, for we were all going around half naked. There remained no grounds for suspicion. Antonio was innocent.

  “Well, my dear Antonio, you must accept my sincere apologies for thinking that you’d be guilty of Gonzalo’s murder or responsible for his death.”

  “That’s okay, Gales. No offense taken. But all the same, I wouldn’t have thought that you’d have been so qu
ick to suspect me. I’ve never given anyone cause to think badly of me, have I?”

  “True, you haven’t. But you know it was remarkable how all the circumstances pointed against you. You and Sam were the last with Gonzalo in the house. If, as you say, Gonzalo didn’t go with you, he never left the house; he was murdered there. Mr. Shine told me that no one else had been around since you left. There’s nothing to steal there, and there’s no trail nearby that could lead anyone there by chance. I was up that way again because I had to wait for a message from the oil field. It was sheer curiosity that made me look inside the house, where I found Gonzalo dead. He had several knife wounds, the most serious of which was a stab in the chest from which he’d evidently bled to death.”

  As I went on describing the wounds, a terrible change came over Antonio. He turned as white as a sheet, stared at me with horrified eyes, moved his lips, and gulped again and again. But no words came. With his left hand he worked at his face and about his throat as though he wanted to tear the flesh away, while with his right hand he groped toward my shoulder and my chest as if he were trying to discover if there really were someone sitting beside him or if it were only a figment of his imagination, a dream from which he would awake.

  I was at a loss to know what to make of it. It just didn’t make sense. Antonio had suddenly taken on the appearance of a guilty man who had just begun to realize the full implications of his dark deed. And only a few moments before he’d been laughing at the thought that I suspected him of Gonzalo’s murder. How was I to figure out his behavior? And yet I must; otherwise I’d get lost in my own confused thoughts. I might even begin to imagine that I’d killed Gonzalo myself! The park lights came on. Night had suddenly closed in around us. Darkness had fallen within the moments since the start of Antonio’s inner battle, for I’d last seen his face, open and guileless, in clear sunset light. Then the coming of night had obscured what I’d glimpsed of the true, the undisguised Antonio. What should have been for me the unforgettable experience of studying the features of a man assailed by the powers of darkness, shaken, moved, his every hair and every pore electrified, was now distorted by the harsh lights. They lied, throwing lines and shadows into Antonio’s face that were in truth not there.

  But his warm breath was truth, his groping, clawing fingers were truth. All the rest was footlights.

  An Indian laborer was sitting on a bench near us, ragged like tens of thousands of others of his class because their wages are barely sufficient to pay for their food. It often happened that such a laborer had nothing left over for a thirty-centavo bunk in one of the many flophouses ― dormitorios, they’re called ― where in the morning fifty or eighty or a hundred bedfellows of every race and every nation, afflicted with every disease in the medical dictionary as well as others that no doctor had heard about as yet, all washed in the same bowl, all dried themselves on the same towel, and combed themselves with the same comb.

  The Indian had fallen asleep on the bench. His limbs sagged and his overworked, exhausted body was crumpled into a heap of rags.

  At this moment a policeman came sneaking up. He circled the bench, his eyes glued on the man sleeping there. Then, when he was again behind the bench, he raised his leather whip and brought it down hard and pitilessly on the shoulder of the sleeping man, at the same time yelling at him: “You bum, you, get up, out of here or I’ll turn you in! The law prohibits sleeping in the park and you know it. Get going before I get seriously rough with you.”

  With a suppressed groan the Indian plunged forward as if a sword had slashed into him. Then his body jerked upward again and, writhing and moaning, he felt for his tortured shoulder. The policeman now stepped in front of him and grinned maliciously. Great tears of pain streamed down the Indian’s face. But he said nothing. He didn’t get up. He remained sitting where he was, for he like any other citizen was entitled to his park seat. No one could deny his right to sit on the bench, however ragged he might be and however many elegant caballeros and señoritas might be strolling about to enjoy the cool of the evening and listen to the bandstand music.

  Yes, the Indian knew that he was a citizen of a free country, where a millionaire had no more right to occupy a park bench than a penniless native. The Indian could have sat there for twenty-four hours if he’d wanted to, but sleeping on a park bench wasn’t permitted. Freedom didn’t go that far, though the bench was in Freedom Square. Locally, it was the sort of freedom in which anyone in authority could whip anyone not in authority: the age-old antagonism between two worlds, almost as old as the story of the expulsion from Paradise; the age-old antagonism between the police and the weary, burdened ones, the tired and hungry. The Indian had been in the wrong and he knew it; that was why he said nothing but only moaned. Satan or Gabriel ― this policeman regarded himself as the latter ― was in the right.

  No! He wasn’t in the right! No! No! The blood rushed to my head. In England, Germany, the USA, everywhere it is the police who do the whipping and the one in rags who gets whipped. And then the people who sit smugly at their well-laden tables are surprised when someone rocks the table, overturns it, and shatters everything to fragments. A bullet wound heals. A cut with a whip never heals. It eats ever more deeply into the flesh, reaches the heart and finally the brain, releasing a cry to make the very earth tremble, a cry of “Revenge!” Why is Russia in the hands of the bolshies? Because the Russians were a people most whipped before the rise of the new era. The policeman’s whip or club prepares the way for an offensive that makes continents quiver and political systems explode.

  Woe to the complacent and smug when the whipped cry “Revenge!” Woe to the satiated when the welts of lashes eat into the hearts of the hungry and turn the minds of the long-suffering! I was forced to become a rebel and a revolutionary, a revolutionary out of love of justice, out of a desire to help the wretched and the ragged. The sight of injustice and cruelty makes as many revolutionaries as do privation and hunger.

  I leaped to my feet and got over to the bench where the policeman was still standing, drawing his whip through his hand, slashing it through the air, grinning bright-eyed at his writhing victim. He took no notice of me. Obviously he thought that I was just going to sit down on the bench.

  But I went right up to him and said: “Take me to the police station at once. I’m going to report you. Your instructions only give you the right to use the whip if you are attacked, or in a street riot after you’ve given warning. You must know that.”

  “But the dog was asleep on the bench here.” The little devil of a cop scarcely taller than five feet, was trying to defend himself.

  “You could have awakened him and told him that he shouldn’t sleep here, and if he fell asleep again you could then have turned him off the bench, but under no circumstances should you strike him. So come along with me to the station. By tomorrow you won’t have a chance to whip anyone.”

  The little cop eyed me for a moment, took note that I was a white man, and realized that I was in earnest. He hung his whip onto the hook of his belt, and with one lightning leap disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him.

  The Indian, without a word, disappeared into the night. I walked slowly back to where I had left Antonio. What now, when I see him again?

  What is murder? I thought. It all comes to the same thing, the law of the jungle. The whole world is a jungle. Eat or be eaten! The fly by the spider, the spider by the bird, the bird by the snake ― so it went, round and round. Until there came a world disaster, or a revolution; and the whole circle would begin again, only the other way around.

  Antonio, you were right! You are right! The living are always right! It is the dead who are guilty. If you hadn’t murdered Gonzalo, he’d have murdered you. Perhaps. No, certainly. It’s the law of the jungle. You pick it up so quickly in the bush. It’s all around you and, after all, is only the natural result of an outstanding capacity for imitation.

  10

  “No,” said Antonio, calmer now, “I certainly didn’t m
ean to kill Gonzalo. It might just as well have been me. Believe me, amigo mio! I’m not to blame for his death.”

  “I know, Antonio. It might just as well have been you. It’s the bush that grabs us all by the scruff of the neck and has us at its mercy.”

  “Yes! You’re right, Gales, it’s the bush. Here in town we’d never have hit on such a crazy idea. But the bush talks to you the whole night through: a jungle pheasant giving his death cry as he’s attacked, a cougar howling as he goes to the kill; nothing but blood and strife. In the bush it’s teeth; with us it was knives. But, honestly, it was only a game! We did it for fun ― really, only fun, nothing more.

  “We used knives, but it might just as well have been dice, or cards, or a roulette wheel. The point was that after seven weeks’ work we didn’t have enough money left to get away from that godforsaken place to look for something better. We had just about the same amount. Gonzalo had a little over twenty pesos. I had twenty-five.

  “It was Sunday night. We wanted to be on our way on Monday morning. Charley had left a few days before; Abraham had gone too. That left the three of us, Gonzalo, Sam, and me.

  “We counted out our money on the floor. Each of us had some gold pieces, and the small change in silver. And as the money lay there before us, hardly visible in the light of the fire, Gonzalo let fly.

  ” ‘What can I do with these few lousy coppers?’ he asked. `Here we’ve been, slaving away like mad for seven long weeks, seven days a week, from dawn to sundown, all through the blazing heat. We limped home so done in we could hardly move our fingers to cook our miserable grub that we were too tired to swallow. We slept on the floor. No Sunday, no pleasure, no music, no dancing, no girls, no drinking ― only some stinking tobacco rolled in corn husks. And now look ― what’s the use of these lousy coppers?’

  “He shoved the money away with his foot.