The world the narrator finds himself in is distinctly that of the indios, in their jungle habitat, with only the very occasional mestizo (a person of combined European and Amerindian descent), “Spaniard,” or American farmer or businessman thrown in. These stand out like a sore thumb, reaffirming the predominance of the indigenous population living in the “bush.” One of them is the narrator, Gale, the only white man for many miles around, a long and often impassable way from doctors, railways, roads, or shops. And a “fremdes Land,” a strange world it is in the eyes of the narrator. He appreciates faraway Mexico for its lack of streetcars, automobiles, telephones, and other sine qua nons of that
“andere Welt” (152), America and Europe. But alienation persists: “Man ist ein Fremder, und man befindet sich unter einer fremden Rasse, die anders denkt und anders urteilt” (“One is a stranger, and one finds oneself among an alien race that thinks and judges differently,”13).
When Gale witnesses native dances in the nocturnal jungle, with the shrill and screeching pitch of their music, reminiscent, he thinks, of the war cries of the Aztecs that sent shudders down the conquistadors’
spines, he feels that “ich in einer andern Welt lebte, daß Jahrhunderte mich von meiner Zeit, Tausende von Meilen mich von meiner Rasse trennten, daß ich auf einem andern Erdball lebte als dem, auf dem ich geboren worden war” (“that I lived in a different world, that centuries separated me from my time, thousands of miles from my race, that I did not live on the planet I was born on,” 21). Of course, it works the other way around as well: when an indio finds out that the American lives all by himself in the bush, with no woman around to cook frijoles and bake tortillas for him, he “stand einer völlig fremden Welt gegenüber”
(“faced a completely alien world,” 86), much as his ancestors did when they first set eyes on a horse brought along by the white men: surely a god to be worshipped and to be offered a tribute of the most beautiful flowers — until he dies of starvation (“Die Geburt eines Gottes” [“A New God Was Born”]). Understanding across the cultural barriers, this case shows, is virtually impossible (as some postmodern discourse theorists will be quick to observe). The impasse extends in particular to the encounter of emotions. True, the indigenous tribes have largely
discarded their traditional costumes and cultural paraphernalia for Western dress, boots, soap, perfumes, even Western dance-hall music, but their minds remain terra incognita:
Die wahren Motive einer Handlung zu ergründen, die der Angehörige einer Rasse begeht, die nicht die unserige ist, ist ein törichtes Beginnen.
Vielleicht finden wir das Motiv, oder wir mögen glauben, daß wir es gefunden haben, aber wenn wir versuchen, es zu begreifen, es unserer Welt- und Seeleneinstellung nahezubringen, stehen wir ebenso hoffnungslos da — vorausgesetzt, wir sind ehrlich genug, es einzugestehen —, genau so, als wenn wir in Stein eingegrabene Schriftzeichen eines verschollenen Volkes entziffern sollen. Der Angehörige der kaukasischen Rasse wird, wenn als Richter über die Handlung des Angehörigen einer andern Rasse gesetzt, immer ungerecht sein. (54–55)
It is foolish to try to get to the bottom of the true motivations of the action of a member of a race that is not ours. Maybe we discover the motivation, or we believe that we have discovered it, but if we try to grasp it, to bring it in line with our worldview and mindset, we don’t stand a chance — presuming we are honest enough to admit it — no more than if we had to decipher the chiseled inscriptions of a lost civilization. The Caucasian, sitting in judgment on the conduct of one of another race, will always be unjust.
Der Busch is teeming with the cross-cultural misunderstandings, both touching and grim to the point of grotesqueness, that result from attempts to overcome this impasse: Gale lives by himself in his grass-covered cottage, overjoyed to be far from the curses of everyday civilization, but his Indian neighbors conclude that a solitary man must ipso facto be unhappy, and so they try to cheer him up (“Indianertanz im Dschungel” [“Indian Dance in the Jungle”]); all inhabitants of a village have their teeth pulled because they have paid for the privilege of medical care (“Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung” [“The Welfare Institution”]);
an Indian family rejoices when a skinny uncle’s dead body swells up in the tropical heat so that the white-tie suit handed down by an overweight white merchant will actually fit and thus ensure that the funeral service is a huge social success (“Familienehre” [“Family Honor”]), and so on.
A noteworthy feature of the quoted statements about the strangeness of Mexico is the reference to the “race” of the natives as well as that of
the newcomers, suggesting that race is at the bottom of the intercultural difference in outlook, behavior, and attitudes. These statements are by no means isolated instances; nor is the insistence that the Indians the gringo encounters are not mestizos but pure-blooded, “Vollblut-Indianer,” even
“ungetrübtes [“undiluted”] indianisches Vollblut” (28, 18). On the face of it, “Rasse” is of course a biological term, as it is also in Traven’s non-fiction book on Mexico, Land des Frühlings (1929; Land of Springtime).17 But perhaps one should also keep the connotations of the Spanish word
“raza” in mind here, which are cultural as well as biological. For, on occasion, Traven seems at least to hint at that dimension, as when he has an uneducated Indian associate technological competence and financial greed with the “white race” (153). This is corroborated by the distinction that is elaborated more than the mere catchword “race” — that is, the distinction between (European-American) “Zivilisation” and “still genuine” indigenous ways (80). This distinction still serves as the overall conceptual framework for the stories, as it did for the novels, but more unobtrusively so, as it is overshadowed by the richness and variety of human experience. Civilization vs. Nature is, of course, a time-honored alternative; but Traven in the Busch stories does not merely revive a tired cliché, precisely because he gives the wealth of his observations its due. As he does so, he implicitly contradicts his own belief that the
“other” is categorically inscrutable, projecting instead interpretations and judgments characteristic of his own, European mindset.
For one thing, Traven’s Indians are definitely not the “noble savages,” that construct of the European imagination, which to some extent owes its existence to the discontent of Europeans with their own mores. True, the Indian tribe that elevates the Spanish horse to the rank of a god is touchingly “gastfreundlich” (“hospitable”) and full of
“Güte und Friedensliebe” (“kindness and love of peace,” 24); another tribe thinks nothing of treating the gringo holed up in his cottage in the wilderness as one of their own, inviting him to their ritual dance.
True, also, as early travelogues often pointed out, prudishness is unknown to the natives, and they have an uncanny sense of hearing beyond the reach of the white man (“Indianertanz im Dschungel”), to say nothing of their fabulous health and longevity, which offers the
17 See Karl S. Guthke, “Rassentheorien von links: Der Fall B. Traven,” in Guthke, Die Entdeckung des Ich (Tübingen: 1993), 235–242.
narrator a welcome opportunity for time-honored satire on the medical profession (162). Furthermore, there is something appealingly authentic about the unrestrained emotionality of the Indians, exemplified by the uncontrolled shrieks of horror in the face of personal tragedy, like the loss of a child or another loved one:
Der Schrei Teofilias kam nicht von dieser Welt, in denen [sic] die Gefühle und Empfindungen der kaukasischen Rasse wurzeln. Man falle nicht in den Irrtum, anzunehmen, daß diese Gefühlserregung Teofilias Komödie oder Verstellung war, um vielleicht das Mitleid ihrer Herrin wachzurufen.
Dieses Stadium der Zivilisation, wo man mit vorgetäuschten Gefühlen Geschäfte macht, Geldgeschäfte oder Gefühlsgeschäfte, haben die Indianer noch nicht erklommen. Ihre Äußerungen des Schmerzes oder der Freude sind noch echt, wenn sie uns auch manchmal gekünstelt oder übertrieben erscheinen, weil sie in andern Instinkten wurzeln. (80) Teofilia’s scream did not come from this world, in which the feelings and sensations of the Caucasian race are rooted. One should not make the mistake of presuming that Teofilia’s emotional outbreak was a farce or pretense, designed, perhaps, to arouse her employer’s sympathy for her. The Indians have not yet reached this stage of civilization, where one simulates feelings to conduct business, financial or emotional. Their cries of pain or of joy are still genuine, even if they sometimes strike us as artificial or exaggerated, because they are rooted in different instincts.
Yes, then, there is a certain naiveté “unspoilt” by “civilization” about some of the indios that come into focus in Der Busch, but shrewd is the observer who can tell where it shades into deviousness or where an innocent becomes a clever crook. The familiar schematic dichotomy of the perversions of civilization and the innocence of man in the state of nature breaks down time and again. In “Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung”
one begins to have one’s doubts about the real motivation for the seemingly naive communal wish to have perfectly healthy teeth pulled.
For the upshot is that, through their later demand to have their teeth put back into their jaws, the natives, threatening an uprising, bamboozle the American mining company into granting higher wages, while the matter of the teeth is not brought up again. Naiveté or cunning manipulation of the gringos?
Cunning is everywhere in the Mexican bush and its villages, and all too often the line is hard to draw between criminal fraud and mere deviousness when it comes to outwitting the white man, even one so
well-disposed to the Indians as Gale. In “Ein Hundegeschäft” (“Selling a Dog”), “the Indian Ascension,” a clever practitioner of double-talk, contrives to buy a puppy from the American newcomer with the American’s own money. This transaction, commercially complicated and logically sophisticated as it is, does however, on the part of Ascension, have a sort of innocent joy in trading about it. Something similar may be said about one of the longer stories, “Der aufgefangene Blitz” (“When the Priest is Not at Home”), which foregrounds Cipriano, a “Vollblut-Indianer” of long-time service as factotum to the mestizo village priest. Given this constellation, it is not hard to guess who gets the better of whom by hoodwinking him. Cipriano’s negligence leads to the partial burning of the church’s statue of the Virgin Mary, but he keeps his mouth shut when the vox populi proclaims that the mishap was a matter of the mother of God sacrificing herself in order to deflect a bolt of lightning from the rest of the church. The priest and the clerical administration profit handsomely from the much-touted “miracle” that so clearly favored them. Needless to say, it is the Indian, Cipriano, the man of indigenous common sense, who emerges as the real hero, fooling the European and mestizo authorities by not confessing his sacrilegious, if accidental, mutilation of “das Allerheiligste,” which represents “Sinn und Inhalt der ganzen Religion” (“the most holy object, […] the meaning and content of the entire religion,” 34).
Die Kirche wurde eine fette Pfründe. Und eine fette Pfründe ist sie heute noch.
Es ist menschlich durchaus zu verstehen, daß Cipriano niemals etwas sagte. Denn wie durfte er, der einfache Indianer, der weder lesen noch schreiben konnte, den Bischöfen und anderen großen Herren der Kirche, die hierherkamen, um Messe zu lesen und zu firmen, in das Gesicht hinein sagen, daß hier ein kleiner Irrtum unterlaufen sei. Die Bischöfe würden ihn ausgelacht haben, und sie würden gesagt haben, er sei zu alt geworden und darum schwach im Geist. Und als echter Vollblut-Indianer wußte er wohl zu schweigen, wo es nicht notwendig schien zu reden und wo gar kein Vorteil für irgend jemand darin lag, Dinge zu verwirren, die große geistliche Herren, tausendmal klüger als er, als zu göttlichem Recht bestehend betrachteten. Es war nicht seine Aufgabe, Religionen zu reformieren. Nach guter Indianerlebensauffassung dachte er, daß man die Dinge am besten läßt, wie sie sind, solange sie einem selbst keine Unbequemlichkeiten bereiten. (43)
The church became a cash cow. And a cash cow it is to this day.
It is quite understandable, in human terms, that Cipriano never said a word. For how could he, a simple Indian who could neither read nor write, tell the bishops and other great men of the Church who came here to celebrate Mass and conduct confirmations, to their faces, that a little error had been made here. The bishops would have laughed at him, and they would have said he was getting old and feeble-minded. And as a genuine full-blooded Indian, he knew to keep quiet when it seemed unnecessary to speak and where there was no advantage to anyone in confusing things that the great man of the church, a thousand times wiser than he, viewed as an act of God. It was not for him to reform religions. In his fine Indian attitude, he thought things are best left as they are, as long as they don’t cause one any inconvenience.
Cipriano’s expert deviousness may still be passed off as obliquely ingratiating. But it gets worse. Crooks rule the day in “Der Eselskauf”
(“Burro Trading”), where the unsuspecting newly-arrived gringo pays various “owners” several times for the same mule that nobody wants. Theft and armed robbery are the order of the day in the bush. If one needs to organize a wedding on a shoestring, a nearby American farmer will find that two of his cows are missing (54). Worse still, “Der Banditendoktor” (“Midnight Call”) suggests in its concluding section, where a chief of police reveals his monumental incompetence, that organized banditry is rampant. And it was always so, and in all classes of society. If Porfirio Díaz had shot all bandits, we hear, not a single Mexican would have survived (105), and the exploitation of all classes by industrial concerns from north of the border does not help matters (107). Violence is the law of the land. Weddings are a risk — one may end up with a bullet in the heart, even the bridegroom, or, more rarely, the bride (135). Elections are no safer — stabbing is common at political speech-making (169–170). When Gale, in “Der Banditendoktor,” is called in to save the life of a wounded bandit, he more or less expects it to be good business practice for the bandits to shoot him for his efforts (177): after all, he might talk, and “zwischen einer intelligent geführten Räuberbande und einer gewissen Sorte von Bankgeschäften, wo der Präsident im eleganten Automobil fährt, ist der Unterschied nicht so groß, wie man meint” (“the difference between an intelligently run gang of robbers and certain transactions of banks whose president rides
in an elegant automobile, is not as big as one thinks,” 178). Brecht would have understood.
Actually, shooting, ubiquitous as it is, is a relatively mild form of brutality in the strange world of the hinterland of Tampico. Take the Indian in “Die Medizin” (“Effective Medicine”), whose wife has run away and who, prompted by his belief in the superiority of the “weiße Rasse” (153), now expects the gringo to tell him where she is, or else
“schlage ich Ihnen den Kopf ab” (“I’ll chop your head off,” 154). “Die Geschichte einer Bombe” (“The History of a Bomb”) takes the prize in this category. When “der Indianer Guido Salvatorres” discovers his wife has run away and set up home with another man, he, with routine competence, throws a homemade bomb into his rival’s hut while a party is in progress; none of the survivors, not even his unfaithful wife, will give evidence against him in court; acquitted, he finds himself another wife the next day, only to be blown to bits by a tin-can bomb of similar design in his hut the same evening.
It is a macho world. If a woman — a mestiza, significantly, not an Indian — thinks otherwise, she will be taught a lesson. “Die Bändigung”
(“Submission”) is The Taming of the Shrew, Mexican-style. A parrot, a cat, a favorite horse are shot point-blank for what is perceived as disobedience — the bride gets the point and mends her ways in a matter of minutes. Would Don Juvencio really have shot Doña Luisa too, if she had not brought him his coffee as ordered? Of course he would have, he says; for after all, the worst that could have happened to him would have been the death penalty, whereas a good horse is very hard to find (145). Strangely, this matter-of-fact statement, with its bizarre variation on ordinary logic, is interpreted to be “das innigste Liebesgeständnis, das ein Mann einer Frau nur machen kann” (“the most tender confession of love a man can make to a woman,” 145). The “fremde Land” has a psychology all of its own.
Human relationships, it must be said, are among the most alienating features of the new life that the narrator finds himself thrown into. As
“Die Geschichte einer Bombe,” where wives are changed more quickly and more casually than shirts, or “Familienehre,” where the human loss is so gloriously outweighed by the sartorial gain, or other stories touched upon might already have suggested: for all their passionate nature, human relationships, as seen by the outsider, are only skin-deep
or seem to be. Wives are chosen according to the value of the gifts to her family that the prospective bridegroom can afford, and if one daughter is too expensive, it is: “Ich kann auch die da nehmen” (“I might just as well take that one there”), namely the older and less pretty and therefore bargain-priced sister (52). Here is the concluding observation on the Indian in “Die Medizin” who threatened to chop the gringo’s head off if he did not reveal the whereabouts of the Indian’s wife who eloped with another man; the gringo sends him to a village some 600 miles away, confident that he will find a “new Mujer” en route:
Er ist ein starker und gesunder Bursche. Er wird keine fünfzig Meilen gehen und dann irgendeine Arbeit finden. Oder er stiehlt einem Farmer eine Kuh. Inzwischen hat er Tortillas gegessen und Frijoles. Und wenn er Arbeit hat, hängt ihm am nächsten Tage eine neue Mujer ihren Sack mit dem Sonntagskleide, den Strümpfen und den Schuhen in seine Hütte.
(156)
He is a strong and healthy fellow. He won’t go fifty miles before he finds some kind of work. Or he’ll steal a farmer’s cow. Meanwhile he will have eaten Tortillas and Frijoles. And when he has found work, the next day a new Mujer will hang her bag, packed with her Sunday dress, stockings, and shoes, in his hut.
To be sure, there is also sympathy with the indios, and while this does
To be sure, there is also sympathy with the indios, and while this does