The Contract Laborers

Horacio Quiroga

The Contract Laborers

  Logging-camp workers Cayetano Maidana and Esteban Podeley were returning to Posadas with fifteen comrades on the riverboat Sílex. Podeley, a woodcutter, was coming back after nine months, his contract fulfilled, and thus with his passage free. Cayé, a laborer, was arriving in the same circumstances, but after a year and a half, the time he had needed to work off his debt.

  Skinny, disheveled, in short pants, their shirts torn in long slashes, barefoot like most of the others and dirty like all of them, the two mensús devoured with their eyes the capital of the woods, Jerusalem and Golgotha of their lives. Nine months up there! A year and a half! But they were coming back at last, and the still painful axe-blow of life in the logging camp was barely the graze of a wood-chip in view of the grand delights they could smell in the city.

  Of a hundred peones, only two get to Posadas with any money. For that one week of bliss to which they are swept downstream by the river, they count on the advance on a new contract. Waiting on the beach, as collaborators and intermediaries, is a group of girls, joyous by disposition and profession, at the sight of whom the thirsty laborers let out their ¡ahijú! of urgent lunacy.

  Cayé and Podeley got off the boat reeling with the foretaste of orgy and, surrounded by three or four girls, in a moment found themselves in the presence of more than enough rum to satisfy a worker’s longing for that potent beverage.

  A little while later they were drunk and signed to new contracts. For what kind of work? Where? They didn’t know, and didn’t care either. They did know that each had forty pesos in his pocket and the right to spend much more than that. Docile and awkward, drooling with relief and alcoholic bliss, they both followed the girls to shop for clothes. The shrewd maidens led them to a place where they had a special arrangement for a certain percentage, or perhaps to the store of the very company that had contracted them. But in one or the other the girls renewed the extravagance of their glad-rags, nested their heads full of combs, strangled themselves with ribbons—all of it stolen as coolly as can be from their royally drunk companions, for the only thing a mensú can really call his own is a drastic detachment from his money.

  For his part, Cayé bought many more extracts and lotions and oils than necessary to perfume his new clothes to the point of nausea, while Podeley, more sensible, opted for a flannel suit. Possibly they paid an inflated bill, only half understood, and backed by a fistful of papers thrown on the counter. But anyhow, an hour later they were flinging their brand-new selves into an open carriage, wearing boots, ponchos over their shoulders (and .44 revolvers in their belts, of course), their clothing stuffed with cigarettes that they clumsily tore apart between their teeth, and the tip of a colored handkerchief hanging from every pocket. Along with them went two girls, proud of such opulence, the extent of which could be seen in the rather bored expression of the laborers, as their carriage, morning and afternoon, spread through the scorching streets a noxious smell of wood-extracts and black tobacco.

  Finally night arrived, and with it the usual spree, in which the same shrewd young ladies cajoled the workers to drink. And their regal wealth in advanced funds led them to lay out ten pesos for a bottle of beer, getting only one-forty in change, which they pocketed without even batting an eye.

  So, after repeated squandering of new advances—out of an irresistible need to make up for the miseries of the logging camp with a week of living like lords—the laborers went back up the river again on the Silex. Cayé took along a girlfriend, and the three of them, drunk like the rest of the peones, settled in on the deck, where ten mules were already huddled together in intimate contact with trunks, bundles, dogs, women, and men.

  The next day, their heads now cleared, Cayé and Podeley inspected their account booklets—the first time they’d done so since signing their contracts. Cayé had received 120 pesos in cash and 35 in expenses, and Podeley 130 and 75 respectively.

  The two eyed each other with an expression that might have been one of panic, if every mensú were not thoroughly cured of that disorder. They didn’t remember having spent even a fifth of what was recorded.

  “¡Añá! . . .” (the devil!), muttered Cayé in Guaraní. “I’m never going to work this off . . .”

  And from that moment he quite naturally took up—as fair punishment for his extravagance—the idea of escaping from the work camp. The legitimacy of his life in Posadas was so evident to him, however, that he felt jealous of the larger advances granted to Podeley.

  “You’re lucky . . . ,” he said. “It’s big, your advance . . .”

  “You’re bringing a girlfriend,” countered Podeley. “That costs you in the pocketbook.”

  Cayé looked at his woman and he was satisfied, though beauty and other endowments of a more moral sort carry very little weight in the choice of a mensú. As a matter of fact the girl was dazzling, in her green skirt and yellow blouse of matching satin; displaying Louis XV shoes, a triple necklace of pearls around her dirty neck, brazenly painted cheeks, and, below her half-closed eyelids, a disdainful cigarette.

  Cayé looked over the girl and his .44 revolver: the two were really all there was of value in what he was taking with him. And even the .44 ran the risk of going under like his advance, no matter how slight his temptation to gamble.

  A few steps away, in fact, on top of a trunk stood on end, the workers were conscientiously betting everything they had in a game of monte. Cayé watched for a while laughing, as peones always laugh when they’re together, for whatever reason; and he drew near the trunk, putting down five cigarettes on a card.

A modest beginning, that might turn out to provide him with enough money to pay off his advance at the logging camp and return on the same steamboat to Posadas, to squander another advance.

  He lost. Lost the rest of his cigarettes, five pesos, his poncho, his woman’s necklace, his own boots and his .44. The next day he won back the boots, but nothing else, while the girl made up for the bareness of her neck with endless contemptuous cigarettes.

  After innumerable changes of ownership, Podeley won the necklace in question and a box of toilet soap, which he found a way of betting against a machete and a half a dozen stockings, which he won, and was thus content.

  A week later they finally reached their destination. The peones cheerfully climbed up the endless strip of red earth that scaled the bluff, from the top of which the Sílex looked miniature and half-submerged in the gloomy river. And with ahijús and terrible abuse in Guaraní, they took leave of the steamboat and her crew, who had to swamp away, in a three-hour dousing with buckets, the nauseating stench of filth, patchouli, and sick mules that for four days she carried upstream.

  II

  For Podeley, the woodcutter, whose daily pay could amount to seven pesos, life in the camps wasn’t too hard. Adapted to hope for strict fairness when it came to measuring the lumber he’d cut, and made up for the routine swindling with certain privileges accorded to dependable workers. His new hitch began the next day, once they had marked off his zone of woods. With palm leaves he built himself a lean-to (a roof and south wall, nothing more), settled for eight cross-poles as a bed, and hung his weekly rations from a fork-post. Automatically, he resumed his camp routine: silent mates when he got up before dawn, drunk quickly one after the other without letting go of the teakettle; the scouting expedition for timber; breakfast at eight (flour, jerked beef, and drippings); then the chopping, stripped to the waist, his sweat attracting horseflies, barigüís,1 and mosquitoes; and later lunch (this time beans, and corn floating in the inevitable drippings); to conclude at night, after further struggle with eight-by-thirty timbers,2 with the same yopará he ate at noon.

  Aside from an occasional incident with fellow woodcutters who encroached on his territory, and from the tedium of days when it rained, which left him crouching before his teakettle, the job went on till Saturday afternoon. Then he washed his clothes, and on Sunday went to the store to get provisions.

  This was the true moment of relaxation for the workers, when they could forget everything amid the imprecations of their mother tongue, weathering with native fatalism the ever-increasing rise in the prices of provisions, which by then had got to eighty centavos for a kilo of hardtack and seven pesos for a pair of denim shorts. The same fatalism that accepted this—with an ¡añá! and a laughing glance at his comrades—imposed upon the mensú, as basic retribution, the duty of escaping from the logging camp as soon as he could. And if this ambition wasn’t in the hearts of all of them, all the workers understood that biting thrust for retaliatory justice, which, if it came, would sink its teeth into the very vitals of the boss. The latter, for his part, carried the struggle to the limit, watching his people day and night, especially the contract laborers.

  At that time the workers were busy at the pier, bringing down timbers in the midst of endless shouting, which rose to its peak when the mules, incapable of holding back the wagon as it came down the towering bluff at full speed, ran into one another and stumbled—with beams, animals, wagons, the whole works all mixed up. The mules rarely got hurt, but the uproar was always the same.

  Cayé, between one laugh and another, kept on planning his flight. Already sick of revirados3 and yoparás, made still more indigestible by the foretaste of escape, he nevertheless held back for lack of a revolver, and surely also on account of the foreman’s Winchester. But if he had a .44! . . .

  In this case fortune favored him in a quite roundabout way.

  One day Cayé’s girlfriend—who, now deprived of her sumptuous finery, was earning her living washing clothes for the peones—changed her place of residence. For two nights Cayé waited for her, and on the third went to the hut of his substitute, where he loosed on the girl a colossal thrashing. The two laborers ended up alone in a friendly chat, and as a result they agreed to live together, to which end the seducer moved in with the original couple. This was economical and fairly sensible. But since the other worker seemed to really like the lady—something rare in that fraternity—Cayé offered to sell her to him for a revolver with ammunition, that he himself would get from the store. Despite this straightforwardness, the deal came near the point of falling through, because at the last minute Cayé asked for a meter of rope tobacco in addition, which seemed excessive to the other mensú. The sale was finally closed, and while the fresh new couple settled into their hut, Cayé conscientiously loaded his .44, then setting forth to end the rainy afternoon drinking mate at their place.

  III

  Autumn was coming to an end, and the sky, till now in steady drought broken by five-minute squalls, was finally churning up into constant bad weather, humid to the point of stiffening the workers’ backs. One day Podeley, who’d been free of this problem till then, felt such a lethargy when he got to the beam he was working on, that he just stood there, looking all around him without knowing what to do. He had no zest for anything. He returned to his lean-to, and on the way felt a light tingling in his back.

  Podeley knew perfectly well what to make of that listlessness and that crawling sensation at the surface of his skin. Philosophically, he sat down to drink mate, and a half-hour later a long and penetrating chill ran down his back.

  There was nothing he could do. He lay down on the poles of his bed shivering with cold, doubled up under his poncho, while his teeth, uncontrollable, rattled as fast as they could.

  The next day the attack, not expected till twilight, was back again at noon, and he went to the commissary to ask for quinine. So clearly was fever revealed in his appearance that the clerk took down the packets of quinine almost without looking at the ailing mensú. Podeley calmly dropped that awful bitterness onto his tongue and, on his way back to the woods, ran into the overseer.

  “You too!” he said, looking him over. “That makes four of you. It doesn’t matter about the others . . . they don’t amount to much. You’re dependable. . . . How’s your account?”

  “Just a little short. . . . But I’m not going to be able to chop . . .”

  “Bah! Take good care of yourself and it’s nothing . . . See you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow.” And Podeley went off at a quickening pace, because he had just felt a slight tingling in his heels.

  An hour later the third attack began, and left Podeley collapsed in severe debility, his gaze fixed and murky, as though it couldn’t reach beyond a meter or two.

  The total rest he succumbed to for three days—a special balm for a mensú, due to its unexpectedness—did nothing but turn him into a chattering hulk bundled up on a stump. Podeley, whose previous fever had had a reliable and periodic rhythm, could find nothing to hope for in that wild run of attacks, almost without intermission. There’s fever and then there’s fever. Since the quinine hadn’t cut off the second attack, there was no point in his staying up there, only to die huddled up in some bend of a trail. So he went down to the store once more.

  “You again!” he was greeted by the overseer. “That doesn’t look good . . . Didn’t you take some quinine?”

  “I did . . . I’m out of sorts with this fever . . . I can’t handle my axe. If you’ll give me enough for my passage, I’ll make it up as soon as I get better . . .”

  The overseer studied that ruin of a man, and didn’t put much value on the life that was left in his laborer.

  “How’s your account?” he asked him again.

  “I still owe twenty pesos . . . I turned in some work on Saturday . . . I’m real sick . . .”

  “You know damn well that as long as your account’s not paid off you have to stay. Down there . . . you could die. Get over it here, and you’ll settle your account in no time.”

  Get rid of a pernicious fever right there, where he caught it? No, of course not; but a worker who leaves maybe won’t come back, and the overseer preferred a dead man to a distant debtor.

  Podeley had never failed to carry out a thing—the only boldness toward his boss that a strong mensú allows himself—and he told him so.

  “I don’t care if you’ve failed or not!” retorted the overseer. “Pay your account first, and then we’ll talk!”

  This injustice toward him naturally—and very quickly—roused the desire for revenge. He went to stay with Cayé, whose turn of mind he was well acquainted with, and they both decided to escape the next Sunday.

  “There you have it!” the overseer yelled at Podeley that same afternoon, as he crossed his path. “Last night three got away . . . That’s what you’d like, right? Those guys were reliable too! Just like you! But you’ll drop dead here before you leave the dock. And be plenty careful, you and everybody listening. You know what’s in for you!”

  The decision to flee and its dangers—for which a mensú needs all his strength—is enough to hold in check even more than a treacherous fever. Furthermore, Sunday had arrived; and with motions faked to look like the washing of clothes, and simulated guitar-strumming in this or that one’s hut, the laborers managed to delude the guards, and Cayé and Podeley soon found themselves a thousand meters away from the commissary.

  So long as they didn’t feel they were being followed, they wouldn’t abandon the trail, since Podeley had trouble walking. And even so . . .

  The distinctive resonance of the woods brought them a hoarse voice from the distance:

  “Up ahead! The two of them!”

  And a moment later, out of a bend in the trail, emerged the foreman and three peones, running. The hunt was underway.

  Cayé cocked his revolver, without delaying his flight.

  “Surrender, ¡añá! the foreman yelled at them from behind.

  “Let’s get into the woods,” said Podeley. “I’m not strong enough to swing my machete . . .”

  “Come back or I’ll fire!” another voice called.

  “When they get nearer . . . ,” Cayé began. A slug from a Winchester came by them whistling along the trail.

  “Go on in!” Cayé yelled to his comrade.

  And taking cover behind a tree he fired five shots from his revolver at the pursuers.

  They were answered by strident shouting, as another Winchester slug stripped bark from the tree that was hiding Cayé.

  “Surrender or I’ll blow your head off! . . .”

  “Go ahead!” Cayé urged Podeley. “I’m going to . . .”

  And after firing another volley, he followed his comrade into the woods.

  The pursuers, held back for a moment by the burst of shots, now charged madly on, firing blast after blast of their rifles along the probable route of the fugitives.

  At a hundred meters from the trail, and following its direction, Cayé and Podeley kept moving farther away, bent low to the ground to get under the vines. The pursuers expected this maneuver; but since in the woods an attacker has a hundred chances to one of getting stopped by a slug in the middle of his forehead, the foreman was content with Winchester salvos and threatening yells. Moreover, the shots that missed today had nicely hit their target Thursday night . . .

  The danger had passed, and the fugitives sat down, exhausted. Podeley wrapped himself in his poncho, and leaning against his comrade’s back endured, in two terrible hours of shivers, the counterstroke to all that exertion.

  Then they continued their flight, still in sight of the trail, and when night finally came they camped. Cayé had brought manioc cakes, and Podeley lit a fire, despite the thousand disadvantages of this in country where, apart from butterflies, there are other creatures with a weakness for light, to say nothing of men.

  The sun was already quite high the next morning when they found the stream—the first and final hope of fugitives. Without being very selective, Cayé cut a dozen shafts of tacuara bamboo, and Podeley, whose remaining strength was applied to cutting vines of isipó, barely had time to complete the job before curling up to shiver again.

  So Cayé built the raft by himself—ten tacuaras bound parallel with vines, and attached to a cross-piece at either end.

  Ten seconds after it was done they cast off. And the little raft, swept along by the current, drifted into the Paraná.

  The nights in that season are unduly cool, and the two laborers spent the night half-frozen, huddled up together with their feet in the water. The current of the Paraná, which came down laden with enormous rains, twisted the raft in the froth of its whirlpools, and slowly loosened the knots of isipó.

  Through all the next day they ate only two manioc cakes, the last of their provisions, which Podeley hardly tasted. Full of holes bored by tambú, worms, the tacuaras were sinking, and as afternoon fell the raft had gone down almost a foot below the surface of the water.

  On the wild river, its flow confined between the huge gloomy walls of the forest, devoid of the remotest human cry, the two men, submerged to their knees, drifted downstream spinning in circles, held up a moment motionless before a whirlpool, then moving on again, just barely keeping their balance on top of the almost loose tacuaras slipping away from their feet—in the midst of an inky black night which their desperate eyes couldn’t manage to penetrate.

  The water was already up to their chests when they ran aground. Where? They didn’t know . . . A stand of reeds. But right there they fell still, stretched out on the bank on their bellies.

  The sun was already dazzling when they woke up. The reeds extended twenty meters inland, serving as the edge of both river and woods. Not far to the south was a tributary, the Paranáí, which they decided to ford when they’d recovered their strength. But that strength didn’t return as quickly as to be wished, since the crickets and worms found in tacuara are hardly very nourishing. Then for twenty hours the dense rain turned the Paraná into whitish oil, and the Paranáí into a furious flood-stream. An impossible situation. Podeley suddenly sat up dripping water, leaning on the revolver to get to his feet, and aimed at Cayé. He was crazy with fever.

  “¡Pasá, añá! . . .” (Get going, damn it!)

  Cayé saw that he couldn’t hope for much from that delirium, and he bent over slyly to get at his comrade with a stick. But Podeley insisted:

  “Get in the water! You brought me here! Get across the river!”

  His livid fingers trembled on the trigger.

  Cayé obeyed; he let himself go in the current and disappeared behind the reeds, where after a terrible trial he managed to get ashore again.

  From that point, and from behind, he spied on his comrade; but Podeley was lying on his side again, with his knees pulled up to his chest, under the ceaseless rain. As Cayé approached he lifted his head, and barely opening his eyes, which were blinded by water, he murmured:

  “Cayé . . . , damn it all . . . I’m freezing cold . . .”

  It was still to rain all night long on the dying man—that dull white rain of autumn floods—till at dawn Podeley lay motionless forever in his watery tomb.

  In that same stand of reeds, hemmed in for a week by the woods, the river and the rain, his survivor went through all the roots and worms available and little by little lost his strength, till he sat quiet, dying of cold and hunger, with his eyes fixed on the Paraná.

  The riverboat Sílex, which went by the site as evening fell, picked up the now almost dying mensú. But his joy turned to terror when the next day he realized that the steamer was going back upstream.

  “I ask you please!” he whimpered to the captain. “Don’t put me off in Puerto X! They’ll kill me! . . . I’m really begging you! . . .”

  The Sílex went back to Posadas, with the mensú on board, still steeped in nightmares.

  But after ten minutes on shore he was already drunk, signed to a new contract, and making his staggering way to buy perfumes.

  Notes

  1 Small biting insects.

  2 About 26 feet long by 1 foot in diameter (8 meters by 30 centimeters).

  3 A dish made of wheat flour, milk or water, and beef fat.