The Cotton-Pickers (8 page)

“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 quick 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 mean 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.

” ‘My shirt is in rags,’ he grumbled on. ‘My pants are rags. My sandals ― take a look at them, Antonio ― no soles, no nothing. In the end, after sweating like a work horse, there’s nothing left. If only it were forty pesos!’

“Saying this, his face lit up.

” ‘With forty pesos I could manage. I could go to Mexico City, buy myself some decent clothes so that if I wanted to say buenas tardes to a girl she’d see me as a human being. And I’d still have a few pesos to tide me over for a few days.’

” `You’re right, Gonzalo,’ I said, `forty pesos is just the sum I need to buy the absolute necessities.’

” ‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ Gonzalo went on. `Let’s play for the money. Neither of us can get anywhere with the few sickly coppers we’ve got. If you get my money or I get yours, then at least one of us can do something. As it is, we’re both bums. I’d drink away these few coppers at one sitting, just out of rage at having worked for nothing.’

“Gonzalo’s idea wasn’t bad,” Antonio went on with his tale. “I too would have drunk up the little I had left. Once you get started on that goddamned tequila, you don’t stop until the last centavo’s gone. You go on drinking, drunk or sober; and what you don’t get down your gullet, your fellow boozers will swig for you. The café and flophouse keepers will cheat a drunk, and the miserable coins that are left are pinched from your pocket. You know all about it, Gales.”

Didn’t I, though. I knew cheap tequila. You shudder after each copita and have to gulp down something for a chaser. The barkeeper, or cantinero, is always wise enough to keep a supply of pickled botanas on sticks, but they burn your throat. So you keep on guzzling tequila, drenching your gizzard with the stuff as if bewitched or as if the damned throat-stripper were some magic elixir which, for some mysterious reason, had to be shot down without touching the tongue. And when at last you think you’ve had enough, you’ve ceased to exist. Everything is wiped away ― trouble, sorrow, anger, passion. Only absolute nothingness remains. World and ego are dispersed.

Antonio brooded for a while, as though searching his memory. Then he went on: “We had no cards and no dice. We drew sticks. But the same stake of one peso kept passing from one to the other. It was never more than five pesos that changed hands. Then we played heads or tails. Strange, it still was never more than a few pesos that passed from one pocket to the other. Sam played too, and his money didn’t change much either. Meanwhile it had got late ― ten or eleven o’clock by my judgment.

“Then Gonzalo got wild and cursed like a madman. He’d had enough of this kid’s game, he said, and wanted to know for sure how he’d stand in the morning.

” ‘Well, Gonzalo, what do you say we ought to do?’

” ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s just what makes me so mad.

Here we are fooling around like half-witted kids and not getting anywhere-back and forth all the time. It’s enough to drive you up the pole.’

 “Then, after squatting by the fire for a while, staring into the embers, rolling himself one cigarette after another and throwing them into the fire half smoked, he jumped up suddenly and said, `I know what we’ll do. We’ll have an Aztec duel for the whole stake.’

” ‘An Aztec duel?’ I asked. `What’s that?’

” ‘What? You don’t know the Aztec duel?’ Gonzalo was, genuinely surprised.

” ‘No. How should I, Gonzalo? My family is of Spanish descent, even if we have been here for more than a hundred years. I’ve never heard of an Aztec duel.’

” ‘It’s quite simple, Antonio. We take two young, straight saplings, trim them clean, tie our knives securely to the tips, and then hurl them at each other, until one or the other of us gives up from exhaustion. One of us will tire before the other; the one who stays on his feet wins, and gets the money. That will decide the money.’