"Sí, hombre," said the blackish man.
For a long while the arriero walked along in silence, watching his toes bury themselves in dust at each step. Then he burst out, spacing his words with conviction: "Ca, en América no se hase na' a que trabahar y de'cansar.... Not on your life, in America they don't do anything except work and rest so's to get ready to work again. That's no life for a man. People don't enjoy themselves there. An old sailor from Malaga who used to fish for sponges told me, and he knew. It's not gold people need, but bread and wine and ... life. They don't do anything there except work and rest so they'll be ready to work again...."
Two thoughts jostled in my mind as he spoke; I seemed to see red-faced gentlemen in knee breeches, dog's-ear wigs askew over broad foreheads, reading out loud with unction the phrases, "inalienable rights ... pursuit of happiness," and to hear the cadence out of Meredith's The Day of the Daughter of Hades:
Where the husbandman's toil and strife
Little varies to strife and toil:
But the milky kernel of life,
With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil!
The donkey stopped in front of a little wineshop under a trellis where dusty gourd-leaves shut out the blue and gold dazzle of sun and sky.
"He wants to say, 'Have a little drink, gentlemen,'" said the blackish man.
In the greenish shadow of the wineshop a smell of anise and a sound of water dripping. When he had smacked his lips over a small cup of thick yellow wine he pointed at the arriero. "He says people don't enjoy life in America."