The Log from the Sea of Cortez (19 page)
Read The Log from the Sea of Cortez Online
Authors: John Steinbeck,Richard Astro
Then that little boy, hating to do it, was burdened with it nevertheless. He hated us, just as we have hated the men we have had to ask for jobs. And he was afraid, too, for we were foreigners. He put it off as long as he could, but when we were about to go he had to ask and he made it very humble. Five centavos. It did seem that we knew how hard it had been. We gave him a peso, and then he smiled broadly and he looked about for something he could do for us. The boat was tied up, and he attacked the water-soaked knot like a terrier, even working at it with his teeth. But he was too little and he could not do it. He nearly cried then. We cast off and pushed the boat away, and he waded out to guide us as far as he could. We felt both good and bad about it; we hope his father bought a cigar and an
aguardiente,
and became mellow and said to a group of men in that little boy’s hearing, “Now you take Juanito. You have rarely seen such a good son. This very cigar is a gift to his father who has hurt his leg. It is a matter of pride, my friends, to have a son like Juanito.” And we hope he gave Juanito, if that was his name, five centavos to buy an ice and a paper bull with a firecracker inside.
aguardiente,
and became mellow and said to a group of men in that little boy’s hearing, “Now you take Juanito. You have rarely seen such a good son. This very cigar is a gift to his father who has hurt his leg. It is a matter of pride, my friends, to have a son like Juanito.” And we hope he gave Juanito, if that was his name, five centavos to buy an ice and a paper bull with a firecracker inside.
No doubt we were badly cheated in La Paz. Perhaps the boatmen cheated us and maybe we paid too much for supplies—it is very hard to know. And besides, we were so incredibly rich that we couldn’t tell, and we had no instinct for knowing when we were cheated. Here we were rich, but in our own country it was not so. The very rich develop an instinct which tells them when they are cheated. We knew a rich man who owned several large office buildings. Once in reading his reports he found that two electric-light bulbs had been stolen from one of the toilets in one of his office buildings. It hurt him; he brooded for weeks about it. “Civilization is dying,” he said. “Whom can you trust any more? This little theft is an indication that the whole people is morally rotten.”
But we were so newly rich that we didn’t know, and besides we were a little flattered. The boatmen raised their price as soon as they saw the Sea-Cow wouldn’t work, but as they said, times are very hard and there is no money.
12
MARCH 22
This was Good Friday, and we scrubbed ourselves and put on our best clothes and went to church, all of us. We were a kind of parade on the way to church, feeling foreign and out of place. In the dark church it was cool, and there were a great many people, old women in their black shawls and Indians kneeling motionless on the floor. It was not a very rich church, and it was old and out of repair. But a choir of small black children made the Stations of the Cross. They sang music that sounded like old Spanish madrigals, and their voices were shrill and sharp. Sometimes they faltered a little bit on the melody, but they hit the end of each line shrieking. When they had finished, a fine-looking young priest with a thin ascetic face and the hot eyes of fervency preached from over their heads. He filled the whole church with his faith, and the people were breathlessly still. The ugly bloody Christs and the simpering Virgins and the over-dressed saints were suddenly out of it. The priest was purer and cleaner and stronger than they. Out of his own purity he seemed to plead for them. After a long time we got up and went out of the dark cool church into the blinding white sunlight.
The streets were very quiet on Good Friday, and no wind blew in the trees, the air was full of the day—a kind of hush, as though the world awaited a little breathlessly the dreadful experiment of Christ with death and Hell; the testing in a furnace of an idea. And the trees and the hills and the people seemed to wait as a man waits when his wife is having a baby, expectant and frightened and horrified and half unbelieving.
There is no certainty that the Easter of the Resurrection will really come. We were probably literarily affected by the service and the people and their feeling about it, the crippled and the pained who were in the church, the little half-hungry children, the ancient women with eyes of patient tragedy who stared up at the plaster saints with eyes of such pleading. We liked them and we felt at peace with them. And strolling slowly through the streets we thought a long time of these people in the church. We thought of the spirits of kindness which periodically cause them to be fed, a little before they are dropped back to hunger. And we thought of the good men who labored to cure them of disease and poverty.
And then we thought of what they are, and we are—products of disease and sorrow and hunger and alcoholism. And suppose some all-powerful mind and will should cure our species so that for a number of generations we would be healthy and happy? We are the products of our disease and suffering. These are factors as powerful as other genetic factors. To cure and feed would be to change the species, and the result would be another animal entirely. We wonder if we would be able to tolerate our own species without a history of syphilis and tuberculosis. We don’t know.
Certain communicants of the neurological conditioning religions practiced by cowardly people who, by narrowing their emotional experience, hope to broaden their lives, lead us to think we would not like this new species. These religionists, being afraid not only of pain and sorrow but even of joy, can so protect themselves that they seem dead to us. The new animal resulting from purification of the species might be one we wouldn’t like at all. For it is through struggle and sorrow that people are able to participate in one another—the heartlessness of the healthy, well-fed, and unsorrowful person has in it an infinite smugness.
On the water’s edge of La Paz a new hotel was going up, and it looked very expensive. Probably the airplanes will bring week-enders from Los Angeles before long, and the beautiful poor bedraggled old town will bloom with a Floridian ugliness.
Hearing a burst of chicken voices, we looked over a mud wall and saw that there were indeed chickens in the yard behind it. We asked then of a woman if we might buy several. They could be sold, she said, but they were not what one calls “for sale.” We entered her yard. One of the proofs that they were not for sale was that we had to catch them ourselves. We picked out two which looked a little less muscular than the others, and went for them. Whatever has been said, true or not, of the indolence of the Lower Californian is entirely untrue of his chickens. They were athletes, highly trained both in speed and in methods of escape. They could run, fly, and, when cornered, disappear entirely and re-materialize in another part of the yard. If the owner did not want to catch them, that hesitancy was not shared by the rest of La Paz. People and children came from everywhere; a mob collected, first to give excited advice and then to help. A pillar of dust arose out of that yard. Small boys hurled themselves at the chickens like football-players. We were bound to catch them sooner or later, for as one group became exhausted, another took up the chase. If we had played fair and given those chickens rest periods, we would never have caught them. But by keeping at them, we finally wore them down and they were caught, completely exhausted and almost shorn of their feathers. Everyone in the mob felt good and happy then and we paid for the chickens and left.
On board it was Sparky’s job to kill them, and he hated it. But finally he cut their heads off and was sick. He hung them over the side to bleed and a boat came along and mashed them flat against our side. But even then they were tough. They had the most highly developed muscles we have ever seen. Their legs were like those of ballet dancers and there was no softness in their breasts. We stewed them for many hours and it did no good whatever. We were sorry to kill them, for they were gallant, fast chickens. In our country they could easily have got scholarships in one of our great universities and had collegiate careers, for they had spirit and fight and, for all we know, loyalty.
On the afternoon tide we were to collect on El Mogote, a low sandy peninsula with a great expanse of shallows which would be exposed at low tide. The high-tide level was defined by a heavy growth of mangrove. The area was easily visible from our anchorage, and the sand was smooth and not filled with rubble or stones or coral. A tall handsome boy of about nineteen had been idling about the
Western Flyer.
He had his own canoe, and he offered to paddle us to the tide flats. This boy’s name was Raúl Velez; he spoke some English and was of great service to us, for his understanding was quick and he helped valuably at the collecting. He told us the local names of many of the animals we had taken; “cornuda” was the hammer-head shark; “barco,” the red snapper; “caracol,” and also “burral,” all snails in general, but particularly the large conch. Urchins were called “erizo” and sea-fans, “abanico.” “Bromas” were barnacles and “hacha” the pinna, or large clam.
Western Flyer.
He had his own canoe, and he offered to paddle us to the tide flats. This boy’s name was Raúl Velez; he spoke some English and was of great service to us, for his understanding was quick and he helped valuably at the collecting. He told us the local names of many of the animals we had taken; “cornuda” was the hammer-head shark; “barco,” the red snapper; “caracol,” and also “burral,” all snails in general, but particularly the large conch. Urchins were called “erizo” and sea-fans, “abanico.” “Bromas” were barnacles and “hacha” the pinna, or large clam.
The sand flats were very interesting. We dug up a number of Dentaliums of two species, the first we had found. These animals, which look like slender curved teeth, belong to a small class of mollusks, little known popularly, called “tooth shells.”
On the shallow bottom, attached to very small stones, we found little anemones of three types. There were also sand anemones,
32
in long filthy-looking gray cases when they were dug out. But when they were imbedded in the bottom and expanded, they looked like lovely red and purple flowers. A great number of small black cucumbers of a type we had not taken crawled on the bottom, as well as one large pepper-and-salt cucumber. We found many heart-urchins, two species of the ordinary ophiurans (brittle-stars), and one burrowing ophiuran. Sponges and tunicates were fastened to the insecure footing of very small stones, but since there is probably very little churning of water on the tide flats, they were safe enough. There were flat worms of several species; stinging worms, peanut worms, echiuroid worms, and what in the collecting notes are listed rather tiredly as “worms.” We took one specimen of the sea-whip, a rather spectacular colony of animals looking exactly like a long white whip. The lower portion is a horny stalk and the upper part consists of zooids carrying on their own life processes but connected by a series of canals which unite their body cavities with the main stalk.
32
in long filthy-looking gray cases when they were dug out. But when they were imbedded in the bottom and expanded, they looked like lovely red and purple flowers. A great number of small black cucumbers of a type we had not taken crawled on the bottom, as well as one large pepper-and-salt cucumber. We found many heart-urchins, two species of the ordinary ophiurans (brittle-stars), and one burrowing ophiuran. Sponges and tunicates were fastened to the insecure footing of very small stones, but since there is probably very little churning of water on the tide flats, they were safe enough. There were flat worms of several species; stinging worms, peanut worms, echiuroid worms, and what in the collecting notes are listed rather tiredly as “worms.” We took one specimen of the sea-whip, a rather spectacular colony of animals looking exactly like a long white whip. The lower portion is a horny stalk and the upper part consists of zooids carrying on their own life processes but connected by a series of canals which unite their body cavities with the main stalk.
As the tide came up we moved upward in the intertidal toward the mangrove trees, and the foul smell of them reached us. They were in bloom, and the sharp sweet smell of their flowers, combined with the filthy odor of the mud about their roots, was sickening. But they are fascinating to look into. Huge hermit crabs seem to live among their stilted roots; the black mud, product of the root masses, swarms as a meeting place for land and sea animals. Flies and insects in great numbers crawl and buzz about the mud, and the scavenging hermit crabs steal secretly in and out and even climb into the high roots.
We suppose it is the combination of foul odor and the impenetrable quality of the mangrove roots which gives one a feeling of dislike for these salt-water-eating bushes. We sat quietly and watched the moving life in the forests of the roots, and it seemed to us that there was stealthy murder everywhere. On the surf-swept rocks it was a fierce and hungry and joyous killing, committed with energy and ferocity. But here it was like stalking, quiet murder. The roots gave off clicking sounds, and the odor was disgusting. We felt that we were watching something horrible. No one likes the mangroves. Raúl said that in La Paz no one loved them at all.
On the level flats the tide covers the area very quickly. We waded out to a wrecked boat lying turned over on the sand, and took a number of barnacles from the rotten wood and even from the rusted engine. It was a good rich collecting day, and it had been a curiously emotional day beginning with the church. Sometimes one has a feeling of fullness, of warm wholeness, wherein every sight and object and odor and experience seems to key into a gigantic whole. That day even the mangrove was part of it. Perhaps among primitive peoples the human sacrifice has the same effect of creating a wholeness of sense and emotion—the good and bad, beautiful, ugly, and cruel all welded into one thing. Perhaps a whole man needs this balance. And we had been as excited at finding the Dentaliums as though they had been nuggets of gold.
Raúl had a La Paz harpoon in his canoe, and we bought it from him, hoping to bring it home. It was a shaft of iron with a ring on one end for the line and a point and hinged barb at the other. A little circle of cord holds the barb against the shaft until the friction of the flesh of the victim pushes the cord free and allows the barb to open out inside the flesh. We wanted to keep this harpoon, but we lost it in a manta ray later. At this reading, there are many manta rays in the Gulf cruising about with our harpoons in their hides.
We also wanted one of the Nayarit canoes to take back, for they are light and of shallow draft, ideal for collecting in the lagoons and seaworthy even in rough water. But no one would sell a canoe. They came from too far away and were too well loved. Some very old ones were solid with braces and patches.
It was dusk when we came back to the
Western Flyer,
and the deck was filled with waiting little boys holding mashed and mangled specimens of all kinds. We bought what we needed and then we bought a lot of things we didn’t need. The boys had waited a long time for us, under the stern eye of our military man. And it was interesting to see how our soldier loved the ragged little boys of La Paz. When they got out of hand or ran too fast over the deck, he cautioned them, but there was none of the bluster of the policeman. And had we not been just to the little boys, he would have joined them; for they were his people and our great wealth would not have deflected him from them. He wore his automatic, but it was only a badge with no show of force about it, and when he entered the galley or sat down with us he removed the gun belt and hung it up. We liked the tone of voice he used on the boys. It had dignity and authority but no bullying quality, and the boys of the town seemed to respect him without fearing him.
Western Flyer,
and the deck was filled with waiting little boys holding mashed and mangled specimens of all kinds. We bought what we needed and then we bought a lot of things we didn’t need. The boys had waited a long time for us, under the stern eye of our military man. And it was interesting to see how our soldier loved the ragged little boys of La Paz. When they got out of hand or ran too fast over the deck, he cautioned them, but there was none of the bluster of the policeman. And had we not been just to the little boys, he would have joined them; for they were his people and our great wealth would not have deflected him from them. He wore his automatic, but it was only a badge with no show of force about it, and when he entered the galley or sat down with us he removed the gun belt and hung it up. We liked the tone of voice he used on the boys. It had dignity and authority but no bullying quality, and the boys of the town seemed to respect him without fearing him.
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