The Bridge in the Jungle (16 page)

The pump-master woman contemplated the body for a while with a smile on her lips. A new idea entered her mind. She found him not quite beautiful enough for her taste and her neighbourly love. She left the hut and then returned with a thin stick, around which she wound gold paper. When everything was done, a golden sceptre had been made, with a little golden cross at the top. This she put in the kid's right hand after loosening the strings.

Just as she finished this job, old man Garcia returned from his trip to Tlalcozautitlan and entered the choza. For a long while he remained standing at the door. Then, without showing by any gesture what was going on in his mind, he looked at his little prince. He took off his hat and stepped up to the table.

The kid was to him not just a boy; he was not just the youngest and therefore the most petted and the most beloved. This little boy meant far more to him than his other two. Having had the luck to be loved by a pretty woman who was half his age, he had seen in that child the assurance of a happy life with his young wife, permanent proof to her and to all the other men that she had made no mistake when she had married him.

All the people present in the hut stared at him to see how he would take it. Everybody knew how much he loved that kid of his, the only one he had had by his young wife and most likely the last he could expect.

He looked at the body with empty eyes as if there were nothing before him. He did not understand it, could not grasp the cold fact that the kid was dead and that he would never again hear him bustle about the house and climb up his back and ride on his neck when he returned from work in the bush. He turned around and gazed at the floor as if he were looking for something. When he raised his head again, thick tears like little crystal balls were running down his cheeks. He did not ask when, where, or how. He stood for a minute near the door, his head leaning wearily against the door post, then left the hut.

A few men, his intimate friends, went after him. He did not see them. He left the yard, mounted the horse on which he had come, and rode out into the darkness.

24

As there was nothing I could do inside at the moment, I too left the hut. Outside, in the yard, men, women, and children were lying all about, huddled up and asleep. Others squatted on the ground talking. Others were walking around. Out of every choza in the settlement dim lights were shining.

Burros brayed plaintively in the prairie. The jungle was singing its eternal song of joy, love, sadness, pain, tragedy, hope, despair, victory, defeat. What did the jungle or the bush care about the things which had happened here? To the jungle, men are of no account. It does not even accept men's dung, leaving it to flies and beetles. But it does take men's bones after the buzzards, ants, and maggots have been satisfied. What is man to the jungle? He takes a few trees out, or a few shrubs, or he clears a patch to build a jacal and plant some corn and beans or a few coffee trees. If man forgets that patch for but three months, it is no longer his; the jungle has taken it back. Man comes, man goes, the jungle stays on. If man does not fight it daily, it devours him.

I walked over to Sleigh, whose hut was only about thirty yards away. He was blowing on the fire and his face was red. The coffee seemed to be ready. It was not good coffee. It was stale, ground weeks, if not months, ago.

'Won't you have a cup?' Sleigh asked the moment he saw me.

'You'd better take some over to the women first, mister, they need it badly, they're breaking down.'

'Okay, if you say so. It's your loss. Never mind, I'll cook another pot and you can have as much as you like of that. The woman left two pounds with me. Anyway, I think we need some hot coffee just as badly as others do.'

The girl lying on her petate spread out on the ground and hidden under her mosquito bar, slept soundly. Perhaps Sleigh had told her about the kid. She did not care. He was not hers. She had hers in her arms — and what else was there to worry about? She made no pretence that she might also belong to that great world community of mothers. She was on her own.

'Get those cups, please and help me carry them over to the women.' Sleigh winked at a box on which were standing seven enamelled cups of different sizes, four of them battered so badly that no enamel was left. Two were leaking, Sleigh explained, and he said the people who used them would have to gulp like hell if they wanted to get some coffee.

'By all means leave two here for us. I don't like to drink coffee out of my hat if I can help it. Let's hoof.'

I took the cups and we returned to the Garcia's. Sleigh put the cups and the pot on the floor, poured coffee and offered the Garcia woman the first cup. Automatically she drank the hot coffee with one gulp. The pump-master woman and a few others took some sips. None drank the whole cupful, but only part of it, handing the rest to the woman next to her.

The pump-master woman rolled a cigarette. Then she handed the little bag with black tobacco to the Garcia, who also started smoking after rolling her own. She did not sit down, but kept hustling without doing anything definite. The truth was that there was nothing anybody could do now.

After the women had sat around for some time smoking cigarettes or cigars and sipping hot coffee, they felt that they had to get busy. Using old shirts and dresses and bright-coloured rags, they designed coverlets and fancy ribbons to adorn the kid and the coffin in which he was to be laid.

Sleigh winked at me, seeming to feel out of place now, as I did too. So we went back to his hut.

There we sat near the smoking little tin bottle which was his lamp. I blinked at the fire on the hearth, on which had been set an old enamelled pot full of water to make fresh coffee.

'Listen, Sleigh, where do you get the water you consume in your household?'

He eyed me as if he had not heard me well.

'Yes, I mean the water you have in that bucket.'

'Well, my eyes, such a question! That water? I guess it's big enough for you to see where the water came from.'

'You don't mean to tell me that you got the water out of that river?' I repeated the question, spoke very clearly, because I saw him staring at me as if he doubted my sanity.

'And what do you think? You don't expect me or anybody here to order water in sealed beer-bottles from Kansas City or by air mail from Yosemite Valley, do you? You shouldn't ask such a dumb question because I always believed you were a guy with some brains — sometimes, I mean, not always. Don't misunderstand me. Look here, wise guy, when I met you the first time down at that stinking pool in the jungle where I had to stick you up to save my skin from a jungle-mad greeny, didn't I see you lap up that stinking water as if it were ice-cold beer, or did I? That time you didn't ask who had spit in it or what mule had let go into it only half an hour before. You drank it all right, and you were pretty happy to have found that muddy hole with some water still in it!'

'All right, all right, you win. But now how about the water for our coffee out of that river? '

He grinned at me. 'All the water you have drunk since you came here was from the river. You don't expect me to boil the water first or, as you would call it, deseenfaict it before we drink it? Don't make me laugh.'

'You know pretty well what I'm talking about. I'm not referring to the water I drank yesterday or today. I'm talking of the water in which only a few hours ago and only a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards from here that kid was drowned.'

'And what of it? Was that kid poison or what? His mother drank the coffee we brought, didn't she? And she liked the coffee, didn't she? Well, she didn't ask me that damn foolish question of yours — where I got the water for the coffee she drank! She knew what water that coffee was made of, and if she, the mother, can drink the coffee, you aren't too good to criticize it. We're thankful to the Lord for giving it to us and that we have water all the year round, while there are hundreds of thousands of families in this republic who have no water for months and have to leave their homes and fields in search of it, taking along all their chickens and goats and what have you.'

Sleigh was right. He might not be interested in reading a full column in a newspaper at one sitting, but he was right. I should not have thought of that little spongy body and of the blood dripping out of his mouth, his nose, and his skull.

After a long silence Sleigh said: 'God, I say all this doesn't interest me a damn bit. Water is water, and as long as I can drink it without getting cramps in my belly, I consider it good water and I thank God for it, if He wants me to, even on my knees. No, it isn't that. What interests me about that water is quite another thing. What I mean is that board with the candle on it. That's what got me shivering all over. I'm still not feeling very comfortable along my spine, frankly speaking. It's a remarkable thing, that board and the candle on it. My woman has told me about it before. They also do it where she comes from. She belongs to another region and another sort of people or what you may call another tribe. But they do it just like here. And I tell you, man, that candle always finds the drowned.'

'Always?'

'Always, that's what I say. My wife has told me that the board can even sail upstream against a very strong current if the drowned man lies in that direction.'

'I doubt that and nobody can make me believe it.' I meant it. 'No Indian can do anything more than we can do, and no Indian knows more than we. No coloured man, no man of any other race, no Chinese, no Hindu, no Tibetan can perform miracles we cannot perform. That's all nonsense. We think other races mysterious only because we don't understand their language well enough and we don't understand their customs and their ways of living and doing things. It's because of this lack of understanding them that we believe them capable of performing all sorts of miracles and mysterious acts. I personally have found out that on a long march through the jungle or the bush I can stand thirst and hunger just as easy as my Indian boys, and many times even better.'

'That may be so. Anyway, it has little if anything to do with what I'm talking about,' Sleigh said. 'I've got my experiences too, and as far as I know, you are right in what you speak about. We've got more energy, or, better, more strong will — still better, we've got a better-trained will than the primitive. These people don't think it worth while to have a strong will. They ask why have it if it's only a nuisance and extra work. It's only we, who want to exploit them, who wish to train their wills and energies so that we can enslave them easier and get better workers and force them into the trap of instalment slavery so that they are never free and have to do our bidding because we've got the better-trained will and energy. But to come back to the point, you'll admit that there are Indians who let themselves be bitten by a rattler half a dozen times, or let themselves be stung by scorpions or what have you, and it doesn't do them any harm. On the other hand if a rattler bites you or the red scorpion gets you, there is a dead guy in less than twenty hours.'

'Not every one of them is immune against such poisons. I've seen Indians die of snake-bites as quickly and surely as any white man.'

'Right. That's because not every one of them knows the proper medicine.'

'Exactly. That's just it. If we knew the proper medicine we would be as immune as some of them are or pretend to be. And you know that they die from calenture and other fevers and diseases in most cases quicker than a white man who just takes ordinary care of himself.'

Sleigh nodded pensively. 'Why not, I ask. Why not? They're humans, or ain't they? So they have to die somehow or other.' He stood up, went to the fire, stirred it up, blew at it, and pushed the pot closer to the flames.

Having sat down again, he said: 'All right, all right, if you wish to insist that no mysterious and hidden powers have worked in this particular case — I mean powers and mysteries which only the natives know about and can command — then perhaps you can explain why that board sailed to the kid and actually found him where no man had looked.'

'I admit I don't know. Not yet. Perhaps I can find an explanation some time later. I have to think it over. I only deny any mystery whatever behind it. It is absolutely natural, the whole thing. So far I don't even know in which direction to go to find out the truth.'

While vaguely thinking about where I could find an explanation of how the board was made to sail towards the body, there came to my mind another method by which a drowned man could be found, which I remembered having seen once back home in the States.

So I said: 'Look here, Sleigh, I'll tell you that we are not so much dumber than the Indians. I remember a time, when I was a boy, that a drowned man was found in a way which at first looked very mysterious to me. Later, however, when I had time to think it over, I found the explanation. It seems a man had drowned in a lake when fishing. His canoe had turned over. The lake was searched for two days and the body could not be found. So on the third day cans filled with dynamite were let down in the lake and blown up. The body soon came to the surface. I still remember that everybody talked of supernatural powers which had been at work to give the body back to his family for a Christian burial. The minister didn't overlook the chance to mention it in church, telling the congregation that the finding of the body was the visible result of the ardent prayers of the bereaved family and that the mighty and merciful hand of the Lord could easily be seen in that mysterious occurrence. The people explained it in a different way. They said that the lake likes to be quiet and calm, so when it is stirred up violently, it will immediately spit out the body to get back to its quiet condition. When I became older I learned the truth. Any drowned human or animal body, even a dead fish if it is big enough, will and must come to the surface sooner or later, sometimes inside of twenty-four hours, though sometimes it may take three days. But if that body is held down by water plants or shrubs or by heavy clothing, or if it is stuck in the mud, it cannot come up. In that case if the bottom of the lake is stirred up by a bomb, the body is freed and comes up.'