The Cotton-Pickers (12 page)

He stood in the doorway and listened to the interchange. Then without a word he pulled out his revolver and with the butt end struck the picket who was standing nearest such a blow on the head that the blood spurted out. Then he whistled. Two policemen came up and he ordered them to conduct all the pickets and a few bystanders to the police station.

Just as they were marched off, Morales returned to the scene. He had been relieved for three hours and was just coming back to his post. When he heard what had happened, he shouted inside: “You son-of-a-bitch in there, now you’ll be in for it. Just you see! We’ve only been playing so far, but we can change our tune.” And away he went to the union office.

Within ten minutes the union Secretary arrived at the police station and demanded to see Inspector Lamas. “I want a few words with him. He must be drunk!”

The Inspector was summoned. When he arrived the Secretary then asked for the Police Superintendent, who came at once. He was quite disturbed when he saw the union Secretary, and he got right down to business.

“Why did you strike the picket?” the Superintendent asked Inspector Lamas.

“He was insulting people in the café.”

The Superintendent looked at him, enraged. “What authority have you to strike a man who does nothing more than insult someone?”

Lamas was about to reply but the Superintendent cut him short. “Don’t you know your regulations?” He turned to the clerk. “Record this: `Lamas doesn’t know his regulations’!”

Then he faced Lamas. “This isn’t the right place for you, so I’ll see about getting you transferred to a village where you can’t make trouble. And if anything of the kind occurs again, the Police Department will have to dispense with your services. That won’t be difficult. Now, why did you arrest these men?”

“They insulted all the guests and Señor Doux,” Lamas said diffidently.

“Insulted? Insulted? What do you mean, insulted?”

“They called them sons-of-bitches.”

“If you’re going to arrest everyone who says son-of -a-bitch, you’ll have to build a prison wall around the entire nation! You must be crazy.”

“They threatened persons as well.”

“Threatened? What do you mean by that?”

“They said they were going to kill Señor Doux.”

“We said nothing of the kind!” the pickets called out.

The Superintendent looked scornfully at Lamas. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that he wanted to kill you? Your wife? Your friends? Acquaintances? And did you strike them on the head with your revolver butt?”

“Well, in this case it appeared to be very serious.”

“Serious? For whom? Has one man of those you arrested struck anybody, or robbed or wrecked Señor Doux’s café? Obviously not, or you would have told me right off. Yes, the police are here to protect the property and person of Señor Doux, but that isn’t to say that we’re here to back him up in paying wages on which no decent man can live, or to help him keep his men at work for such long hours that they haven’t time even to take a promenade with their families. If the men put up with it, that’s no affair of ours; but if they decide that they can’t stand it any longer, then it’s certainly no part of our duty to arrest them for that. Why can’t Señor Doux come to terms with his men? If he did, he’d be left in peace. As it is, this disorder can’t be allowed to continue, for it might lead to a serious breach of the peace. So I’m going to order the Café Aurora closed for two months; then we’ll have some peace.”

He turned to the clerk. “Draw up the closing order for two months, and I’ll sign it now. And you, Señor Lamas, may consider yourself relieved of your office until I have the Governor’s instructions for your station of transfer. The prisoners are released. Are there any other complaints?”

“No,” answered the pickets.

The Superintendent got up and shook hands with the union Secretary, who was about to leave.

“The police of this district are no longer concerned with this affair,” said the Superintendent. “Further developments are up to you. It was a good thing that I was called in so quickly, for there are always officers who are backward about these things.”

“Backward, or don’t want to keep up with the times because they have so many private obligations,” the Secretary added.

“Lamas will get a district where he won’t have expenses of that kind. I’ve already got a place in mind for him, a sort of bandit district. If he’s got anything in him, he can show it there; and if he hasn’t, we’ll fire him. He’s from the old school that thinks dictatorship is the best form of government. We’ll soon have all the old ones out of our departments, and in the meantime, it’s not a bad thing if the last of them give themselves away by slipping into their old habits.”

“In other countries,” exclaimed the Secretary, “for example in the United States, some of those reactionary old habits are ultramodern institutions.”

“I know,” answered the Superintendent. “We copy our neighbors in many things, but we mustn’t copy them in everything, and we must be particularly careful not to copy those things that are out of keeping with the spirit of our times. The rough tactics are outdated and unjust. When it comes to asses of the two-legged species, the States have more than we have.”

13

Two police officials in green-braided uniforms called on Señor Doux and handed him the closing order. It came as a terrible shock to him, and he shouted to his wife: “Now, you see, we’ve got a proper Bolshevik government. They’ve played a nice trick on me.”

“What’s the matter?” she called as she came waddling up to him.

“They’ve closed us down.”

“I always told you we shouldn’t have come here. This country is stark, raving mad. There’s no law and order here. You can go on paying your taxes, and paying them on the dot, but you never get a say in anything.”

“You must close at once,” said the official who had handed Doux the order, “or there will be a fine of over a hundred pesos.”

“But surely my guests may finish their drinks?”

The official consulted his watch and said: “Half an hour, and then you must close. An officer will be posted here to see that no more customers are admitted. And you must pay the officer.”

“I pay him?”

“You don’t imagine that we’ll pay him, do you? We have no funds available just to ensure that you obey the order.”

The two officials went out, posted themselves at the entrance, and waited for the half hour of grace. When it was up, they shouted inside. Doux, furious with rage, shut the doors. Only the corridor entrance to the hotel remained open, for the hotel hadn’t disturbed the peace.

Peace, however, didn’t descend upon the café. On the contrary. Things became even livelier, for the Douxs themselves came to blows.

The Señora was consumed with fury; every centavo lost to the business ate into her heart. She waddled about in her slippers among the empty tables and made her husband’s life a hell. She wore only a sleeveless negligee gathered loosely about her, the fat, flabby flesh of her bosom exposed, and bright yellow silk stockings over her bulging calves. Only her youth kept these overflowing masses looking somewhat more seductive than repulsive. Another five years and the seductiveness would certainly have vanished, leaving repulsiveness triumphant. The whole length of her arms protruded from the negligee, arms which might have passed for a wrestler’s except that they were as flabby as the rest of her body. At the back of her neck there was a bulge of flesh that, for the present, protruded only shyly; but in a few years’ time it would be a real landmark.

She always wandered about the place like this. Anywhere else she would have been taken for a brothel madame with whom it did not do to trifle. Occasionally she changed her negligee; she had a gray one, a pink one, a green one, a deep-yellow one, and a pale-mauve one. Whether or not she had other clothes I don’t know, for I never saw her in anything else.

Señor Doux was always to be seen in shirt and trousers, and only when he went to the market did he put on a hat. He wore black trousers only, secured with a narrow leather belt, and a white shirt with a black bow tie. His belly stuck out in front of him like a balloon. The Señora too had a protruding paunch, but it was hidden in part by the loose negligee. Alas, what she had too much of in front she lacked behind. That isn’t to say that there wasn’t plenty behind, but the proportions in relation to her stomach were not generous enough to give her whole figure a harmony. All in all Doux could hardly complain, for he had in her something solid to hold on to, and was in no danger of chafing himself on protruding bones.

“You must have been off your head ever to have come to this crazy country,” she was yelling at him.

“Me? Wasn’t it you who kept telling me every day that millions were lying on the streets waiting to be shoveled up?”

“You dirty liar, you!” she howled. “You filthy Marseilles pimp! Didn’t you draw out all my money and tell me that it’d earn a thousand percent in two years?”

“Well, wasn’t I right? We came here with nothing — or how much was it? Eight hundred pesos? And I’ve already been offered sixty-eight thousand for the house and café. And why don’t I sell? Because I know it’s worth much more.”

“Worth more?” she blazed. “Why, it’s not worth a handful of horse shit! How can it be worth anything when it’s closed? No one would give you the price of the bricks in it. And I told you that when the new government came in, that — what’s-hisname? — that pig, one-armed general, that Obregon — yes, that’s his name! He finished us off for good.”

“How could I know this Revolution would change everything, even the value of the money, labor conditions, laws that affect property and all and everything that goes with it? But it’s only since the new government that we’ve really begun to get anywhere. You wouldn’t say that it was before then, eh? — when we had to grease everybody’s palm with one hundred pesos, one after the other, for permission to breathe, even. Everybody was holding out a hand then.”

“And now,” she fired back at him, “is it any different? Now it’s the working people who are holding out their hands. First in the kitchen, then the waiters, and you’ll see, next will be the bakehouse. And when that comes, we might as well pack up and go home like beggars.”

“Shut up, confound you!” he shrieked in full fury. “You spoil everything with your greed and your damned miserliness.”

“Me, miserly? Miserly? If I didn’t keep a hold on the money it would all go on you and your whores. And you call me miserly?”

Now we were hearing some fine family secrets. I could hardly believe the Señora was right; how could he have possibly found time for escapades? But of course their little dispute was really a conjugal dialogue, for they actually lived together in complete harmony which was disturbed only by the fact that the workers were waking up and taking an interest in their masters’ profits. Similar displays of interest have been known to shake kings and to rock empires. So it wasn’t surprising that the striking waiters gave the Douxs’ domestic bliss a bit of a shaking.

The conjugal dialogues became not only more violent during the following days but also more frequent. They filled the days, and extended through the nights as the Douxs lay side by side in bed. We who were working there overheard the complete life history of each of them, from the day they were born to the moment when they came to blows with table lamp, wash basin, and chamber pot.

When they reached the stage where she was going around with the idea of putting rat poison into his coffee, and he was dreaming nightly of the razor with which he was going to slit her throat, he proved the superiority of man.

He went to the Superintendent of Police and asked what could be done to get the two months’ closing order revoked and the waiters back into his café. The Superintendent told him that he himself could do nothing in this case. It was a matter of coming to terms with the union; the café couldn’t be operated until the dispute between the two was settled.

“Then I’m bankrupt,” said Doux. “And the waiters will be thrown out of work.”

“Don’t worry about them, señor,” the Superintendent replied. “As long as people want to sit in a café and spoon up strawberry ice, they’ll want waiters to serve them. You can see that from the Moderna, which is always full now. All your old customers go there, of course. But I can’t do anything about it. Your premises are closed, and they’ll stay closed for the two-month period. My advice is, go to the union and arrange things with them.”

On the afternoon of the same day Doux met Morales, whom he approached with all humility.

“Listen, Morales,” he said, “I’ll agree to everything. Could you see to it that the waiters return to my place?”

Morales eyed him coolly from head to foot and said: “Do I know you? Oh, yes, you’re Doux of La Aurora. But we waiters have nothing to do with you; we walked out remember? If you want anything with us, you must go to the union. Adios.”

Doux wrote a letter to the union saying that he would like an interview with the Secretary; he ventured to ask the Secretary to call on him to discuss the situation of the waiters’ strike.

On the following day he received his reply. It was just one sharp sentence: “If you want anything from the union, the address of the office is: Calle Madero No. 18, Second Floor. The Secretary hadn’t even considered it necessary to sign his name.

For Señor Doux there was no alternative but to go, for the razor was haunting him day and night, so that even when he was eating he had the feeling that his table knife was a razor.

“Take a seat in the waiting room,” said a worker in the union office. “There’s a conference on, but it won’t last long.”

It lasted over half an hour, and while he was waiting Doux had time to digest the slogans displayed on the walls. Those slogans made him angry at first. But the longer he studied them, the more he came to fear what lay in store for him behind the Secretary’s door, through which he could hear the tapping of a typewriter.

At last a worker appeared. “The Secretary will see you now, Señor,” he said.

Doux swallowed nervously as he stepped into the small room that was the Secretary’s office. He had intended to look the Secretary straight in the eye, but he found that he couldn’t; again, his gaze was drawn to the walls, for behind the Secretary’s desk the entire wall was covered with a red and black flag, while above the flag in bold letters screamed the slogan:
PROLETARIOS DEL MUNDO, UNIOS!