Every day groups of new rebels were arriving from the most remote camps, some of them consisting of five men, others of only three. These men had a really savage appearance. They had run away from their camps a long time before, but had been prevented from returning to their homes by fear of being caught along the trails by some caravan or some contractor who would have reported them. Furthermore, on the paths it would have been easy for pursuing foremen to catch them and force them to return to their camps. Even if, by any chance, they had succeeded in reaching their ranch or village, they would have been seized by the authorities.
Recognizing their fate, the fugitives had abandoned the idea of returning home. They had fled from the camps to escape inhuman treatment and had kept away from trails and roads, living beyond the borders of the law in the unconquerable depths of the jungle. They had lived in caves or in holes dug in the ground, or on the meshed branches of trees covered with dense foliage. Very few of them had gone to the trouble of building even a lean-to. With stones and arrows, taking advantage of primitive slings and bows, they had hunted the few animals whose meat had sustained them. If they lacked something absolutely indispensable—a pinch of salt or a steel arrow-tip—they had stealthily crept by night to one of the camp stores and had stolen what they had to have. Several times the workers in the camps had been blamed for these robberies committed by fugitives and had received the consequent punishment. When the fugitives had not been able to reach one of the camps, they had managed to get what they lacked, by consent or by force, from men they encountered working in the forest. Most often the workers, if they were carrying with them what was wanted, helped out the fugitives, whom they called “the Wild Men.”
When the number of Wild Men grew large, the proprietors of the camps in whose vicinity they lived would send five or six foremen to hunt them as if dealing with ferocious beasts. The intention was not to capture them, notwithstanding the constant shortage of labor in the camps. The Wild Men were shot on sight. The hunt was organized with great care, and the hunters took a fine pack of hounds with them to track down the prizes. It was not a mere love of sport or a desire to prevent depredations which motivated these hunts. No, they were trying to prevent others from following the example of the fugitives and thus increasing the number of deserters who left open accounts unpaid.
The Wild Men had no definite plans—only a vague hope that they might be forgotten at the end of a year or two and thus be able to return to their homes. They could have tried to find work elsewhere, but in any lumber camp, hacienda, or coffee finca they would have met the same fate, that of being reduced to servitude and oppressed to the point of being denied the least right to discuss their own living and working conditions.
One other possibility remained to them, provided they could get out of the jungle without being seized: that of joining some group of independent Indians. But only one out of one hundred of them was able to do this. And afterwards, if they succeeded in becoming part of a group belonging to their own tribe, they were immediately recognized. The news sped from mouth to mouth until it reached the rural police, who caught them and later returned them to the contractors. If they took refuge with a strange tribe, they were regarded with suspicion. Almost always they did not know the tribal language, and if they did not have the good luck to marry and thus become part of a family, there was nothing for them to do: they would not be given either land or seeds, and there are no wage-earners among the tribes.
But this situation arose rarely. In most cases the Wild Men would die before being able to get out of the jungle, because the life they lived there concealed dangers a hundred times greater than those menacing the workers in the lumber camps. They were threatened by fever, jaguars, mountain lions, and snakes, any one of which might take pity on them and release them from their painful existence. All the jungle workers knew perfectly well what sort of fate was in store for Wild Men, and it was precisely the terror of such a life that kept them in the camps. Had the Wild Men’s existence been a pleasant one, not a single man would have remained in the camps. Only the most resolute, those changed into wild beings by the ferocity of some threatened punishment, had the courage to run away.
Among the groups of rebels who had joined the men of La Armonía after the killing of the Montellanos and their foremen were a dozen Wild Men. Some of them had heard of the rising from old fellow-workers. Others, surprised to see the workers suddenly abandon a whole district, leaving logs where they had fallen and their work unfinished, used all their astuteness and, taking endless precautions, slipped up to one of the offices. There they sometimes met men preparing to leave or came upon the corpses of foremen, eloquent explanations of what had happened.
La Armonía was one of the most important groups of camps of the region, and furthermore was situated right on the roads that led to the big river. It was natural, therefore, for the Wild Men to go to La Armonía.
When they arrived, none of the rebels asked them questions. They were received as brothers. They met men they knew, former working companions in the camps from which they had fled, friends who welcomed them happily as forerunners of the rebellion. The fact that they had had the courage to run away and live beyond the power of the oppressive laws testified sufficiently to their revolutionary spirit.
Three of these Wild Men—Onofre, Nabor, and Isaías—had arrived on the evening of the departure. After recognizing and greeting some friends and brothers of their own tribes, they wandered around in the hope of finding others they knew. During their wanderings they came to the huts where the artisans were held as carefully guarded prisoners. They stopped to chat with the guards, who offered them cigarettes, and they asked: “Why in hell are you looking after those spies?”
“So that they don’t get away and go to denounce us.”
“Who gave you orders to watch them?” Onofre asked.
“The Professor.”
“What idiots you are!” replied Nabor. “If I were on guard here, my watch wouldn’t last long. There’s a better and surer way of taking care of these bastards, and that’s to send them once and for all where they couldn’t do any more damage.”
During this conversation Isaías had ambled around the huts, which, having no doors, revealed many artisans squatting on the ground playing cards, while others, stretched full length on the earth outside, snored peacefully. Others, their heads in their women’s laps, were having themselves deloused. Some of the other women were cooking.
Isaías, casting his eyes over this spectacle, suddenly uttered a loud cry of surprise: “Hey! Come here, quick! Look who’s over there, of all people!”
His two companions ran to where he stood.
“Well, I’m damned! Who’d have believed it? Our little friends El Poncho and La Ficha!”
The men in charge of the prisoners came forward full of curiosity. “Do you know them, little brothers?”
Onofre laughed ironically. “Oh yes, we know them. These sons of bitches are the cruelest, most ferocious ass-kissers, the most contemptible abortions, that hell ever rejected. They’re the ones to whom we owe having become Wild Men. They’re the ones who, helped by a pack of others like them, tried to hunt us down in the forest. These swine are more bloodthirsty than animals, more repulsive than snakes. Even a jaguar might feel the pity they lack. Hey! Poncho, Ficha—come here!”
The two whose names had been called raised their heads from the game of cards they were playing with other artisans. When they recognized the Wild Men, they turned pale, and the cards fell from their hands.
“Well now,” Onofre went on, “you don’t seem to be badly off here. You can still pass the time sitting around with your old women and your kids, getting fat as pigs.”
El Poncho tried to smile and replied in a scared voice: “Not so fat.”
“We’ve thought for a long time that you were cultivating your cornfields and had got married,” added La Ficha, also trying to smile and not succeeding.
The three men turned their backs on the two foremen and returned to the camp, followed by some of the sentries.
“How long have those two foremen been at La Armonía?” inquired Isaías.
“I don’t know. I don’t belong at La Armonía—I’m from Palo Quemado. Are they foremen?”
“The most cruel and brutal you could find anywhere.”
“We killed all our foremen, and the men of La Armonía did the same. If those men are foremen they shouldn’t be here.”
Nabor let himself go, cursing with the usual energy of cart-drivers, and when he felt satisfied he added: “God damn it! What has happened to you? You act like old women—yes, like old gossips! With you we won’t get far. We need to join up with real rebels, not with old women. But even the most stupid old women wouldn’t think of fattening torturers and protecting their asses so that the jaguars won’t eat them.” Then, changing the tone of his voice, he asked the guards: “What time do you have to go to supper?”
“We ought to be eating now. We’re very hungry. But we have to wait to be relieved.”
“Relief be damned! Who knows what time the relief will come?” said Isaías, laughing. “Go off now and take the time to fill your bellies till they burst. You don’t have to die of hunger—we’ll take your places here.”
The men did not wait for Isaías’s offer to be repeated.
“All right, then, we’ll leave them with you. The truth is that we’re fed up looking after those spies, seeing them drinking their paunches full and making love to their old women and passing the time playing cards for beans and tobacco.”
“You’re not joking? Tobacco and liquor for these pigs? They never gave us a leaf of tobacco! How about you?”
“Give us anything? Bah! And if you want me to tell you something, comrades, I’ll say that it’d be better to finish off all these vermin completely. We ought to treat them exactly as we treated the foremen. What’s bad is that it’s not us who give orders here. And if the Professor, Andrés, and Celso give orders, we have to obey them.”
“Good!” said Isaías. “Go and eat in peace, brother. Hurry! Don’t let the others eat it all up! They’ve roasted a brown deer and two boars. Enjoy them. Don’t hurry. We’ll take charge of the guarding here. We won’t let a single one escape. Tell the General to send our relief at ten o’clock.”
“All right, then,” said the men. “We’ll tell the General that you’re on guard. After all, what does it matter to him who looks after them? I think to him it’s all the same.”
“Leave us your machetes, comrades.”
“Sure. Take them. We’ll ask for new ones at the store. Why don’t you have any? Have you just arrived?”
“Yes. We’ve been Wild Men for six months. When we ran away, we took our machetes with us, but one got broken, another fell into a swamp and we couldn’t get it out, and the last one got left behind the day when the foremen set the pack of dogs on us and left us no time to pick it up. We might have been able to steal a machete from some of the workers, but you know that the poor devils would have had to pay for it. And when we decided to raid a store, we found that the rebellion had broken out.”
“You’ll find everything you want here, fellows. You only have to ask for it. If you want tobacco, we’ll leave you ours. When we get back to the store, we’ll get more.”
The relief appeared at ten o’clock as had been agreed. The men who arrived to act as guards found the three Wild Men squatting around the fire.
“Everything looks very peaceful here,” one of the new arrivals remarked. “As a rule you can hear them bawling and grunting, heated up with alcohol. They still have lots of bottles buried and hidden, enough for them all to get drunk—men, women, and children. The Professor has advised us to let them stupefy themselves with alcohol.”
“Don’t worry, friends,” said Isaías. “Tonight they’ve drunk more than a barrel, and they’re so full, so bloated, that they won’t say a word. Your watch will be easy. You can even go to sleep if you feel like it. Not a single one of them will escape. You can be sure of that. Good night, comrades!”
“Good night.”
The watch was changed three times more before daybreak. The men did not know each other, nor did they try to find out who came to take their places. What was important was that the watch be kept.
When the first rays of the sun began to shine, one of the new guards observed: “God damn it! They must have been fixed right last night. Not one of them is moving a finger.”
Then he approached one of the huts and looked into it from behind a tree trunk. He shouted: “Hey, guys! Come here! The aguardiente they drank last night was as red as a tomato.”
“They killed them all, even the kids!”
“Let’s look in the other huts.”
In the other huts the spectacle was the same: men, women, and children lying stretched out among bottles, splashed with red. It was impossible to mistake what had happened.
One of the men rushed off to the main camp to report what had taken place.
The General, the Professor, the Colonel, Celso, Andrés, Matías, Fidel, Santiago, Cirilo, Pedro, Valentín, Sixto, and some other rebel chiefs were seated in a group discussing the final details of the departure of the first company, which was due to set out before eight o’clock.
The guard gave an account of what had happened in the artisans’ huts.
“Are you quite sure of what you say?” asked the Professor.
“Absolutely sure. Not one of them is alive.”
“God be thanked that the filth is finished,” Celso commented.
“It wasn’t necessary to destroy them,” said Andrés. “They weren’t doing us any harm, and they could have been allowed to live.”
“No need to think about the matter,” Matías answered. “It’s all over. What use would that scum be?”
“You’re right, little brother. Now we don’t have to watch them and let them grow fat. The truth is that this business of carrying a crowd of spies on our shoulders was not pleasant.”
The Professor raised his hand and said: “Why go on talking about it? They were smashed like lice, and they deserved what they got.” Then, looking around at his helpers, he added, speaking to Fidel: “Take a dozen of the men and set fire to all the huts. Everything must burn. Nothing must remain if we don’t want the stench to be unbearable by noon. And when everything is reduced to ashes, throw a few shovels of earth over them.”