Preciliano subsequently left this family—gave up an agreeable and lucrative position—because the wife of the employer thoughtfully suggested that, on account of his advancing years, it would be wiser of him not to exercise a certain imperfectly broken horse. He was “covered with shame” and sorrowfully bade them farewell.
VII
HERE is a letter from a coffee plantation:
When I got back in October, they received me with formalities—gave me a kind of Roman triumph. If it hadn’t been so pathetic I should have laughed; if it hadn’t been so funny I should have cried. For I had been fourteen hours on a slow-climbing mule, and you know—or rather you don’t know—how the last interminable two hours of that kind of riding unstrings one. Being Mexican, everything about the Roman triumph went wrong and fell perfectly flat. In the first place they expected me a day earlier, and when I didn’t arrive they decided—Heaven knows why—that I wouldn’t come the next day, but the day after. In the meanwhile I appeared late in the afternoon of the day between. They had built in front of the piazza a wobbly arch of great glossy leaves and red flowers, and from post to post had hung chains of red, white, and green tissue paper. But the arch, of course, had blown down in the night and most of the paper garlands had been rained on and were hanging limply to the posts. All this, they assured me, would have been repaired had I arrived a day later, and I marveled at my self-control as I enthusiastically admired the beauty of a welcoming arch lying prostrate in the mud.
It had been the pleasant intention of everyone to assemble and welcome me home, and when at the entrance to the ranch the Indian who lives there gave a prolonged, falsetto cry (un grito)—the signal agreed on—and I rode up the slope to the clanging of the bell we ring to call in the pickers, and the detonations of those terrible Mexican rockets that give no light but rend the sky apart, I had a feeling as of a concourse awaiting me. The concourse, however, had given me up until the next day, and when I got off my mule I found that the entire festivities were being conducted by Manuel the house-boy, Rosalía the cook, and Trinidad the mayordomo. Trinidad shot off all six cartridges in his revolver and then shook hands with me. Rosalía was attached to the bell rope—Manuel was manipulating the rockets. At that moment I knew exactly how the hero feels when the peasantry (no doubt such plays are now extinct) exclaims: “The young squire comes of age to-day. Hurray, hurray, hurray! There will be great doings up at the hall. Hurray, hurray, hurray!” It was all so well meant that when I went into my bedroom I could not bring myself to scold at what I found there. On the clean, brown cedar walls they had pasted pictures—advertisements of sewing machines and breakfast foods and automobiles, cut from the back pages of magazines and slapped on anywhere. They see but few pictures, and ours, although rather meaningless to them, are fascinating. A picture is a picture, and my walls were covered with them; but I pretended to be greatly pleased. Since then I have been quietly soaking them off at the tactful rate of about two a week.
Trinidad, the new mayordomo, seems to have done well in my absence. He planted thirty-five thousand new coffee trees with an intelligence positively human. Casimiro, his predecessor, and I parted last year—not in anger, only in sorrow. Casimiro had been a highwayman—a bandit. His police record, they say, makes creepy reading on dark and windy nights. That, however, I never took in consideration. It was only when he began to gamble and to make good his losses by selling me my own corn and pocketing the money that we bade each other good-by. There was no scene. When I told him such things could not go on, he gravely agreed with me that they couldn’t, and without resentment departed the next morning. They are strange people. When they do lose control of themselves they go to any lengths; there is likely to be a scene more than worth the price of admission. Somebody usually gets killed. But nothing short of this would seem to be, as a rule, worth while, and on the surface their manner is one of indifference—detachment. Trinidad, who took Casimiro’s place, rose, so to speak, from the ranks. He was an arriero for seven years and then drifted here as a day laborer. But he understands coffee, and the experiment of suddenly placing him over all the others has so far been a success.
What a watchful eye the authorities keep on them even in far-away places like this! The instant Trinidad ceased to be a common laborer on whatever he could earn a day by picking coffee, hauling firewood, cleaning the trees, and received a salary of thirty-five pesos a month, his taxes were raised. They all pay a monthly tax (the “contribución” it is called) of a few centavos, although what most of them, owning absolutely nothing, are taxed for, it would be hard to say, unless it be for breathing the air of heaven—for being alive at all. He tried to keep secret the fact of his advancement, but it became known of course, and his tax, to his great disgust, was raised fifteen or twenty cents.
Last week we had our first picking of the year and, weather permitting (which it won’t be), we shall pick with more or less continuity for the next four months. Coffee is different from other crops (“not like other girls”) and often inclines me to believe it has acquired some of its characteristics from prolonged and intimate contact with the hands that pick it. For quite in the Mexican manner it cannot bring itself to do anything so definite and thorough as to ripen—like wheat or corn or potatoes—all at once. A few berries turn red on every tree and have to be removed before they fall off. By the time this has been done from one end of the place to the other, more have ripened and reddened and the pickers begin again. “Poco á poco—not to-day shall we be ready for you, but to-morrow, or perhaps next week. To do anything so final—in fact, to be ready on any specific date is not the custom of the country,” the trees seem to say. However, it is just as well. Nature apparently knew what she was doing. To pick the berries properly requires skill and time, and if they all ripened at once one could not take care of them.
Beyond the fact that you “don’t take sugar, thank you,” and like to have the cream poured in first, do you know anything about coffee? Did you know that the pretty, fussy trees (they are really more like large shrubs) won’t grow in the sun and won’t grow in the shade, but have to be given companionship in the form of other trees that, high above them, permit just enough and not too much sunlight to filter mildly in? And that unless you twist off the berries in a persuasive, almost gentle fashion, you so hurt their feelings that in the spring they may refuse to flower? And that the branches are so brittle, they have a way of cracking off from the weight of their own crop? And that wherever there is coffee there is also a tough, graceful little vine about as thick as a telegraph wire which, if left uncut, winds itself around and around a tree, finally strangling it to death as a snake strangles a rabbit?
When I see the brown hands of the pickers fluttering like nimble birds among the branches, and think of the eight patient processes to which the little berries must be subjected before they can become a cup of drinkable coffee, I often wonder how and by whom their secret was wrested from them. Was it an accident like the original whitening of sugar, when—so we used to be told—a chicken with clay on its feet ran over a mound of crude, brown crystals? Or did a dejected Arabian, having heard all his life that (like the tomato of our grandmothers’) it was a deadly thing, attempt by drinking it to assuage forever a hopeless passion for some bulbul of the desert, and then find himself not dead, but waking? A careless woman drops a bottle of bluing into a vat of wood pulp and lo! for the first time we have colored writing paper. But no one ever inadvertently picked, dispulped, fermented, washed, dried, hulled, roasted, ground, and boiled coffee, and unless most of these things are done to it, it is of no possible use.