The Bridge in the Jungle (7 page)

Manuel had walked away. After a few minutes we heard him calling in the darkness: 'Carlos! Carlosito! I've got candy, Carlosito! Where are you? I got candy, Carlos. Carlosito!' His voice went farther into the night and finally was heard no longer.

Talk ceased. Everybody listened for an answer from the kid. Yet there was only the whining, the singing, the chirping, the humming from the jungle, at intervals interrupted by Manuel's distant shouts.

Stirred up by Manuel, other groups on the square became interested in what was going on. They all began to move, to fall in line for the dance to which the ghostly music was playing faster every minute.

The pump-master went to the open shed where the pump and the boiler were located. With lighted matches he peered into every corner. Those who were near him watched his every move and expected him any minute to drag out the boy from some hidden retreat behind or under the pump. On seeing him return empty-handed, everybody thought it very silly to have believed the kid to be under the pump or inside the boiler or in the ash pit.

The Garcia looked pitifully from one to another. Holding one fist against her mouth, she nibbled thoughtlessly at her fingers. Her eyes were like an animal's which sees some danger approaching and finds itself without means of defence. A certain thought entered her mind. She took her fist away from her face and hid it in the palm of her left hand. For a while she pressed both hands against her breast. With a jerk she turned around and hurried towards the bridge. After a few paces she stopped. In utter despair she let her head drop. Slowly her arms glided down her body until they dangled lifelessly. She turned away from the bridge and with heavily dragging feet she came back to our group.

Old man Garcia was standing with us, and not knowing what better he could do, he began rolling a cigarette.

'Carlos! Carlosito! Carluchito!' Now from this direction, then from that, sometimes nearer, sometimes far away, Manuel's strong voice could be heard calling his kid brother.

Only the jungle answered with its whining.

The boys, spurred by Manuel's anxious search, formed half a dozen groups of two and three and scattered in all directions. Soon from everywhere one heard 'Carlosito!' After each call there was silence for a few seconds so that little Carlos might have his chance to answer, were it ever so faintly. It seemed that even the jungle fell silent for a moment as if it wanted to help save a little child.

11

'Senora! Senora Garcia! Senora Garcia!' The bright and jubilant voices of two boys broke the monotony of the calling of the child's name. These young voices freshened up the heavy atmosphere like a cool breeze wiping the depressing glow off a treeless plain at the height of a midsummer day. And again those animated and exultant voices blared through the night like the cornets of a military band. Running like devils, the two boys, shouting and yelling all the time, were now crossing the bridge.

'Well, well! Now, there, there! There is the boy at last,' the pump-master woman cried out, and blew a deep sigh of relief. 'Haven't I said a hundred times that a healthy boy like him can't get lost? Well, thanks to heaven, that's all over now! "

All faces lost their funny distortions and became ordinary human faces again. Hurriedly uttered words were flying about all groups. Everybody wished to say something very quickly and wanted to confirm that he had said so long before. Some even went so far as to boast that they had known all the time where the boy had been hidden.

A few youngsters and girls left the centre of the square, bored now with all that noise about nothing. It was pure nonsense, the whole excitement was, for how could it be possible that a boy would disappear with a hundred people around?

The Garcia swallowed something which had been in her throat for a long time. Then she licked her dried lips. After this she took a deep breath as if she had not breathed for an hour. Somehow, though, she was not fully taken in by the joy of relief shown by all the others. There was hope rising in her soul, but doubt remained the stronger emotion within her. So hard had she worked her mind into the certainty that her boy was lost that now she had some difficulty in giving her thoughts a new direction. She was perhaps not clear as to her true feelings at this moment. Yet deep in her heart there was something in which her doubts found nourishment. One could read it from her eyes, in which doubt and suspicion mingled with bits of hope and a slight expectation of the best.

The two boys arrived at our group. Breathlessly they said: 'Senora Garcia, you are looking for your chiquito, for your little Carlos, aren't you, senora?'

'Yes, yes, of course, she is. We all have been looking for him a long time.' It was not the Garcia who answered the boys; it was other women in our group who pressed the boys for a quick report. 'Well, where is he? Come, come! Out with it.'

The Garcia was staring at these two boys as if they had come from another world.

'Carlos has ridden to Tlalcozautitlan, that's where he has gone,' the elder of the two boys said, stumbling over his own words, so hurriedly and breathlessly were they spoken.

'Yes, that's true,' confirmed the younger one, 'that's absolutely true, Senora Garcia, cross my heart and soul.'

'Well then, everything is all right now,' the pump-master woman said, slapping the Garcia on her shoulders in a neighbourly way.

'Didn't I say so long ago?' another woman broke in. 'A boy can't fall out of the world just like that.'

The men said nothing. Most of them left us to go back to other groups where they wanted to take up their interrupted discussions.

The Garcia frowned as if she had great difficulty thinking. Holding both her hands against her abdomen, she looked at the two boys without speaking.

The boys were getting slightly irritated under this piercing stare and they tried to run away. The Garcia, however, grasped one of the boys by his arm and so the other boy remained also. 'You say he rode to Tlalcozautitlan?'

'Yes, senora, he really and truly has.'

'On what did he ride to Tlalcozautitlan? '

'On a horse, senora.'

'On whose horse? On whose horse can he have ridden away?' The Garcia questioned the boys with a deadly calm, almost frightening voice. A woman condemned to death, with only one hour to live, might question in this calm, direct way a newly discovered, very important witness on whose testimony the governor's decision for a stay depended.

'Whose horse was it?' She repeated her question, since neither of the boys had answered yet.

Now the elder said: 'A boy bigger than me was coming this way, and he was riding on a beautiful white horse.'

'Yes, that's right, senora,' the younger one said, 'he was sitting on a beautiful white horse and Carlos was standing right here by my side and the big boy on the white horse said -'

'- and the boy on the white horse said,' the elder boy took up the tale again, 'he said: "Won't you come with me, Carlos? I am riding very fast."'

'And what did Carlos answer?'

'"Are you riding to Tlalcozautitlan?" Carlos asked. To this the boy on the white horse said nothing and only nodded his head. Then Carlos said: "That's fine, because then I might ride with you to Tlalcozautitlan and buy myself lots of candy; you see, I have twenty centavitos given me by my big brother who has come today for a visit from the far Texas land." So then the boy on the white horse said: "All right, let's go, my horse is a very fast one, awfully fast, we will be there in no time." And saying so, he helped little Carlos up on his horse, and the very moment he had done so, the horse was away like nothing and we couldn't see it any more.'

Whenever one of the boys telling the story stopped or hesitated, the other one took up the tale and went on with it. From all appearances the story seemed to be true. Two boys of their age are not able to tell a false story the way these two boys were narrating it.

The Garcia searched the boys' faces. The boys looked into her eyes with frankness. Then the Garcia looked at the faces of the people standing by, glancing from one to another although their faces could not be seen clearly.

Manuel arrived at our group. A few boys had gone after him and told him there was news at the pump-master's.

The Garcia woman looked at him. Then she turned violently round to the two boys and said, almost yelling: 'I don't believe it!' Again she shouted: 'I don't believe it. Carlos does not ride away from home, not when Manuel is here and when he knows that Manuel has to leave early Monday morning. He will not miss a minute to be with Manuel. And if he really wanted to go to Tlalcozautitlan he would have come first to Manuel and told him so and made him go with him.'

'But it is true, senora, he rode away with that big boy,' the elder boy insisted.

'Who was that boy?' the Garcia asked suddenly.

'We don't know.'

'Is that so? You don't know him, you don't even know that boy?'

'No, we don't know him, senora,' the elder boy repeated. And the younger answered: 'I saw him once pass by here with a loaded burro, but he didn't stop here, not even for a drink of water did he stop, as all the travellers coming this way do.'

The pump-master came close and asked: 'What did the boy on the horse look like?'

Up to now the two boys had been very clear about everything they had been describing. But in trying to answer this new question they became more and more confused and even contradicted each other. Neither remembered exactly what that boy looked like. Asked if he was an Indian boy or a Mexican or a white, they said they had not looked closely enough and it was too dark to see whether he was Indian or white, and that they had looked more at the beautiful horse than at him. They could not, when questioned further, even describe the saddle on which he was sitting. The younger boy insisted the horse had no saddle, while the elder said it was saddled. Nor could they say anything about how the boy was dressed. Then again, the time they gave as to when the boy invited Carlos for the ride, fitted into the time when the kid had last been seen. According to the two boys, it was now one hour since Carlos rode away. This would mean it had been eight o'clock. And it was exactly eight when the child left the hut and ran as fast as a weasel towards where he knew Manuel and his father were. Since that moment his mother had not seen him again.

All those present save the mother believed the story of the two boys, especially since a dozen men declared that they had seen several men riding by, some of them riding in the direction of Tlalcozautitlan. Everybody added that the two boys had no reason whatever to tell such a story and in so serious a situation, that they gained nothing by telling it except maybe a good thrashing if they were found out to be lying deliberately.

Garcia wakened from his lethargy. He looked for a horse to take him to Tlalcozautitlan. It was quite possible that the boy on the horse was travelling farther than just to that little town and on reaching it he might have left Carlos there all by himself. Boys play such tricks on other boys, especially smaller ones. They never think of the consequences of such tricks. All the stores in that town were closed by now and there was never any light in the streets. Little Carlos was perhaps at this moment sitting in a dark corner, forlorn and either crying or asleep. If perchance he were picked up by good people he couldn't even tell where he lived. Because this settlement had no name and was not to be found on even the best map. It was just 'Huts by the River', and of such places there are thousands in the republic.

Garcia's activity — saddling the horse, mounting it, listening to a score of opinions as to which was the shortest and best trail, for there was no road — filled the Garcia woman with new hope. At least she thought it was hope, while in fact it was only that for a few minutes her thoughts were moving in another direction. She felt easier knowing that her man was on the way to find the boy at the place where everybody assured her he was. She sat down with other women on a bench and soon she joined their talk about everyday things.

Manuel leaned against a tree-trunk. He, at least for the present, had no desire to mix with the girls, as all the other boys were doing now that the excitement was over. But after ten minutes he walked slowly back to his pretty girl, and both soon disappeared where the shadows were deepest.

Sleigh had shown little interest in the whole affair. I wondered what could get him aroused to some sort of enthusiasm. Sometimes I thought him just brain-lazy. Then again I thought him a wise man who had learned that nothing matters, not even his own death. He was interested in his cattle. That was true. But I often doubted even that interest, for he probably showed concern about the cattle only because he was hired to attend them. Yet maybe he really loved the cattle and did not wish anybody to know it. When the excitement was at its peak he said to me that he had better go to his house to see whether the missing cow had come in. He returned in time to hear the two boys telling their story. After this he helped Garcia fetch a horse and saddle it.

Now he was again standing with me, telling me in his slow drawl that the goddamned cow had not come home yet and that he would give anything to know where that cow might be at this time of night.

12

A boy called for Manuel. After a while Manuel came out of the dark and I went closer to hear what the boy wanted of him.

'It isn't true at all, Manuel, that Carlos rode to Tlalcozautitlan,' the boy said. 'I know that Carlos and another boy have ridden to Pacheco, and they did not ride a horse, but just a burro.'

'Did you see that? ' Manuel asked sceptically.

'Sure, I saw it or I wouldn't be telling about it. Do you think me a liar, or what?'

'Why didn't you tell it before?'

'Simply, I didn't know that those two boys had told you Carlos had ridden to Tlalcozautitlan.'

The Garcia heard his last words. She jumped up and ran over to us.

Shaking the boy wildly by his shoulders, she cried: 'What did you say right now?'

The boy repeated his tale and swore by all the saints that he had seen Carlos riding away with another boy on a burro and that they had taken the trail which leads to Pacheco.