The Cotton-Pickers Read online

  It was a difficult business with the till. Señora Doux didn’t trust any waiter. She sat at the cash counter or wandered around the place observing what the guests were eating. When they paid, the waiter had to hand over the money at once. The Señora reasoned that if waiters were allowed to pocket the money they collected, amounting at times to hundreds of pesos, and to settle up at the end of the shift, there was nothing to prevent them from leaving hat and coat behind and walking off with the cash a quarter of an hour before quitting time. It must be admitted that such things happened, even when the waiter had collected only sixty or seventy pesos, but in the Café Aurora such a thing wasn’t possible.

  On days when bakery orders were slack, the bakers and confectioners had a rough time. Señora Doux would intentionally order them around in such a way that one or another among them would ask for his money and leave, for on slack days she regarded the bakery expenses as so much wasted money. If on the following day the orders doubled or trebled, the men had to work three, four, or five hours more, since of course no new worker had been hired to replace the one who had quit.

  The musicians in the café fared no better; in fact, worse. The bakers at least produced something; but in the minds of the Señor and Señora music was the most absurd waste of money imaginable. However, the neighboring cafés had music, so the Café Aurora had to have music too, if it was to stay in business. Señor Doux had a row with the orchestra every day. If the place was empty he told the musicians it was their fault because they played so badly. Sometimes, after such a row, the musicians packed up their instruments, asked for their money, and left. Señora Doux was well satisfied with this state of affairs as it enabled her to save money, and, besides, she could explain to the guests that the musicians had quit.

  But after a few days the customers would get restless and demand music, so Señor Doux would have to run and look for musicians. On such occasions it might happen that he could get only one guitarist, and the customers would stay away until a good orchestra was hired. After a while there would be another row and the whole story would be repeated.

  One day an excellent eight-piece orchestra arrived from Mexico City and offered its services to the various cafés, coming first to Doux in the Aurora.

  “Fifty pesos a day for eight men? I’m not going to pay that! And their meals in the bargain? I’m not crazy. And contracted by the week, with three days’ notice? You can go all around this town and you won’t find any café owner crazy enough to take you on those terms. I’ll pay you twenty-five, on a daily basis. I can get musicians enough when I want them, on a day’s notice.”

  So the orchestra went to another café and got what they asked for. As a result, that café was full of customers every night, despite the fact that people in this region don’t sit around at café tables or loaf in restaurants. Here, they usually stay just long enough to swallow their ice creams or sip their refresco drinks, and then they go. They prefer to promenade in the parks and squares, or to sit there on the benches rather than at café tables. But the music could hold customers for another iced drink or an extra bottle of beer, and that all the more readily since the café owner was decent enough not to put a surcharge on the drinks because of the musical entertainment.

  The café where the new orchestra played to such crowds was only five doors away from the Aurora, and the Aurora was as empty as a coffin in a carpenter’s shop. The Señora wanted to turn off half the lights because they were burning unnecessarily, but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. Every hour he strolled over to the cinema without hat or jacket, ostensibly to look at the posters of the coming attractions. Actually he went to count the customers in the Moderna. He passed the competing café seemingly without turning his head, but in fact he saw every guest in the Moderna, and to his chagrin he saw many of his former clients.

  For a few days he put up with it. Then he posted himself in front of his café and waited for the first violinist of the Moderna orchestra to come along.

  “One moment, Señor!”

  “Yes?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to come and play here? I’ll pay you fifty.”

  “I’m sorry, we’re getting sixty-five.”

  “That I won’t pay.”

  “Muy bien, Señor, adios.”

  After a week had passed, he asked the first violinist once more: “All right, for fifty, Señor.”

  “Settled. Agreed. From Friday, then.”

  Señor Doux rushed in to his wife. “I’ve got the orchestra. For fifty!”

  The orchestra had agreed to play for fifty because they had been given notice at the Moderna and had no other engagement in town. They were no longer a novelty and the customers were ready for something different.

  The cream had been skimmed off. The Café Aurora was full enough, but not as full as the Moderna had been every night. So Señor Doux told the orchestra that they played abominably. The musicians wouldn’t take this, it led to a row, and they left the café; therefore Señor Doux didn’t have to pay “notice” wages, and so saved money once again.

  At about half past eleven every morning, Señor Doux was finished with his account books and ready to sit down to lunch. At ten, unable to hold out until noon, he would eat a cold chicken; but now he had his first proper meal of the day.

  Then he took a siesta. At five he got up, washed and shaved, and, driven by hunger, hurried into the café.

  He stayed in the café until closing time. The local police weren’t concerned with the moral behavior of the townspeople; they left that to the people themselves. Anyone who had the money and time to hang about all night in a café was free to do so; it was his money, his time, and his health. When the place was empty the landlord would close up, if he pleased, without the advice or penalties of the police. And as there was no official closing time, no one got any satisfaction out of defying regulations; thus at midnight the cafés were so empty that it hardly paid to keep the lights on. The people who for professional reasons had to be up all night didn’t frequent the cafés, but were to be found in the bars, which served full meals or specialty dishes at all hours of the day and night, and were cheaper than the cafés.

  No matter how quiet the café was, we in the bakery were having our busiest time at midnight.

  “You can clean up the baking sheets,” the master baker told me. “You’ll be able to do that all right. If the old girl comes in,” he said, referring to Señora Doux, who was barely thirty, “just keep on cleaning baking tins. She has to poke her nose into everything, but if you’re busy she won’t notice that you don’t know the trade. She won’t come down here now, though, because the old man’s up there with her, and they don’t often get around to wasting time on that! It beats me that they find any time or thought for it at all, but I don’t suppose their minds are really on it while they’re at it. They’re more likely to be thinking about us and wondering if we’re beating up an egg or two for ourselves. Good idea. We’ll do it now.”

  He took some eggs, broke them in businesslike fashion, gave them a quick whisk, added some butter, and popped them into the oven, producing a baked omelet. After we finished it off, I learned how to clean the baking sheets. It wasn’t as simple as it sounds, but something that had to be learned properly. Then I had to weigh off flour, which must be done exactly. Then I had to break five hundred eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. If you went about this in mother’s way, it would take a week; here, I had to break and separate the five hundred eggs in about twenty minutes, and if the slightest trace of yolk got into the whites there would be culinary complications.

  Later I learned to look after the dough-mixing machines, keep the oven fires going, set the dough for bread and rolls, ice the small cakes, cut the flan puddings and prepare them for decoration, wash the pots and pans, wipe off the tables, sweep the bakehouse, crush the sugar for the icing, prepare the icing, and do many other things. I learned them all bit by bit; that way, one can learn anything. There’s absolutely nothing that you can’t
learn if you go about it one step at a time.

  Saturday arrived — pay day. But there was no pay. “Mariana, tomorrow,” said Señor Doux. Sunday was the busiest day of the week, but when it came to paying wages, Señor Doux explained that he never paid wages on Sunday. “Mariana.” But on Monday he didn’t pay because he hadn’t been to the bank.

  On Tuesday there wasn’t enough money in the till because he had spent the money he’d brought from the bank for supplies. On Wednesday, the waiters got paid first; on Thursday he had no money on hand and couldn’t pay the bakers. On Friday he couldn’t be found; whenever anyone went to look for him they were told he’d just gone to his flat and didn’t want to be disturbed. By Saturday two weeks’ wages were due, but then his outgo was so heavy because he had to buy supplies for Sunday, “the busiest day,” and besides this the banks closed at noon on Saturday. “Mariana,” he said; but tomorrow was Sunday, and he never paid wages on Sundays. “Mariana,” he recited; but on Monday he didn’t go to the bank. And so it went on.

  I had been there three weeks when I got my first pay; and then I was paid not for three weeks but for one week. It went on and on like this, with Señor Doux always being weeks and weeks in arrears with the wages. But we couldn’t be fifteen minutes behind in our work; if we were, there was hell to pay, for customers expected their bread and pastries on the dot, like clockwork. We had to put in fifteen, sixteen hours a day, and sometimes as many as twenty-one. Señor Doux took this for granted; he also took it for granted that he paid wages when it suited him, and not when they fell due.

  The master baker had four months’ wages owing him. He couldn’t have left the place even if he’d wanted to, for Doux would have taken months to pay off the balance. As for the rest of us, there was no other work to be found, and even if there had been, we had no time to go and look for it. By the time we’d finished in the bakehouse it was usually late after-. noon and often evening, and places of work where we might have inquired for a job were already closed. We just had to stick it out at the Aurora. If you want to live you have to eat, and if you can’t find food any other way you have to fall in line with the man who has the food.

  The waiters were no better off. They received only twenty pesos a month and were expected to live on their tips. But the people weren’t liberal with tips; and when customers were few and far between, the waiters had an even harder time. Then, too, they were blamed for the shortage of customers and Señora Doux begrudged them even their twenty pesos in wages. The bakers lived in the dormitory, but the waiters had families and lived at home, so that they had household expenses. They weren’t even given food, but got a meal only occasionally as a favor or special privilege.

  One of the waiters got the fever and was dead in three days; he was a Spaniard who had come over here only two years before. A Mexican called Morales came to take his place, a quick, intelligent fellow. When I had to take pastries into the café I would notice that Morales was usually talking to one or another of his fellow waiters. Of course they always talked among themselves when they weren’t serving customers, but now I saw a difference. Before, the waiters had talked together superficially, about the lotteries or about their side activities or about girls or about their families. They had laughed and joked as they gossiped.

  But when Morales spoke with them it wasn’t a laughing matter, and they listened to him attentively. Morales always did the talking and the others always listened. I saw something come to life: the Union of Restaurant Employees.

  The Mexican trade unions had no cumbersome bureaucratic machinery. Their secretaries didn’t consider themselves to be “officials,” but were actually young hotheaded revolutionaries. The Mexican unions had come into being during the 1910-1920 Revolution, and had developed along the most modern lines. They could draw upon the experiences of the North-American trade unions and of the Russian Revolution; they had the explosive power of a young Sturm and Drang movement, and the elasticity of an organization that is still feeling its way and changing its tactics daily.

  Up the street at the Moderna there was a waiters’ strike.

  Doux, however, smiled to himself, having no fear of such a thing happening in his place. And now all the Moderna’s customers were coming to Doux’s Café Aurora because they were ill at ease in the strike-bound Moderna. They had good reason to be, for the police were neutral in the struggles of striking workers. If a customer went into a strike-bound café and got hit on the head with a flying brick or a bottle, he would be helped to the Red Cross station to get his wound dressed, but aside from that the police wouldn’t worry about him. After all, the pickets in front of the café had warned him of the strike; he had read of it in the newspapers and had had enough handbills thrust at him, so that he might have known what to expect. There was no need for him to go into this café; he could have gone to another one, or taken a seat in the plaza, or gone for a promenade. Anyone who deliberately enters a place where stones are being thrown has only himself to blame if he gets one on the head.

  After four days of strike, the Moderna agreed to all the union’s demands.

  12

  One afternoon, about three weeks after the Moderna strike was settled, when there were only a few customers in the café, Morales went to Doux and said: “Now listen, Señor, an eight-hour day, twelve pesos a week, one full meal a day, and coffee and rolls twice a day.”

  For a moment Doux looked scared, but he quickly collected himself and said: “Come along to the cashier’s counter, Morales. There are your wages, you may go. You’re dismissed, fired!”

  Morales turned around, took off his white jacket, and picked up the money that Doux had set down on the counter. All the other waiters, who had been watching, immediately took off their jackets and went up to the counter. Taken aback, Doux paid them their wages and let the men go; he was quite sure that he could get other men right away.

  In his anger Doux had roughly pushed his wife’s nose out of the till, almost knocking her off her tall stool. With everything having happened so suddenly, Señora Doux had looked on speechless, for once.

  “What happened?” she now managed excitedly to ask. “Why did you pay them?”

  “Imagine asking me to double their wages and shorten their hours! I fired them without even listening to all the further demands they had in store for us.”

  At this explanation, Señora Doux calmed down. “That was the most sensible thing, cheri, you have ever done in your life. We have been overpaying them wastefully anyway since the day we were fools enough to get into business in this godforsaken country where everybody seems to be going crazy with what they call their Revolution. The ones you fired were Bolsheviks anyway. They were thieves on top of that, never turning in the exact amount they received from the customers.”

  “Now don’t you worry, cherie. In a few hours we’ll get more waiters than we need. They’re running around falling over their own feet in their eagerness to land a job.”

  Señora Doux finished serving the few customers. When new customers arrived and saw that there were no waiters they did not even sit down but left at once. A few foreigners came in, ordered something, and thought the slow service was a local peculiarity.

  The following day there were pickets outside the café and handbills were distributed with great gusto. Any person now wanting to enter had to confront the pickets, but everything was quite calm; there was no sign of violence. There were no police around.

  Aside from a few of Doux’s regular customers, only foreigners went in. They couldn’t read the handbills and hadn’t understood what the pickets had said to them. The pickets, of course, didn’t bother the foreigners, who were mostly North American, English, or French and who, soon feeling the atmosphere to be depressing, quickly left the place, some of them without touching the food or drink they had ordered.

  To Señora Doux’s chagrin, waiters were not falling over themselves to get a job. Finally, after two days, Doux found two, one an Italian, the other a Yugoslav; both were
in rags, pitiful specimens. Doux gave them white jackets, shirt fronts and collars, and black bow ties, but no pants or shoes, and it was in the lower departments where the two fellows looked the most deplorable. They couldn’t understand a word of Spanish and were quite useless as waiters; but Doux wanted them there only to spike the guns of the pickets, so to speak.

  In the evening at about half past eight the Italian was standing at one of the doors, all of which were wide open so that you could see from the outside everything that happened inside, as clearly as if it were happening in the middle of the street. That was the local way, for the customers liked to look out and liked to be seen, just as the passers-by enjoyed looking in and seeing people having a pleasant time in a café.

  The Italian stood at the door and flapped his napkin, proud of being a waiter; in normal circumstances he might perhaps have been a good dishwasher. The pickets took little notice of him, merely casting a glance in his direction now and then.

  Before long, a young fellow came along with a heavy wooden stick in his hand. The proud new waiter instinctively took a step backward; but the young man mounted the doorstep and struck him two sound blows on the head. Then he threw the stick down and casually walked away.

  The waiter fell headlong, bleeding profusely from the wound on his head. Doux rushed to the door calling “Police! Police!” A policeman appeared, swinging his truncheon. The few customers in the café quickly left the place.

  “They’ve killed him!” shouted Doux.

  “Who did?” asked the policeman.

  “I don’t know,” answered Doux, “probably those waiters who are on strike.”

  Two of the pickets immediately sprang forward and shouted: “If you say that again, you son-of-a-bitch, well break every bone in your body.”