B. Traven - The Cotton-Pickers

“He shoved the money away with his foot.

“‘My shirt is in rags,’ he grumbled on. ‘My pants are rags. My sandals — take a look at them, Antonio — no soles, no nothing. In the end, after sweating like a work horse, there’s nothing left. If only it were forty pesos!’

“Saying this, his face lit up.

“‘With forty pesos I could manage. I could go to Mexico City, buy myself some decent clothes so that if I wanted to say buenas tardes to a girl she’d see me as a human being. And I’d still have a few pesos to tide me over for a few days.’

“‘You’re right, Gonzalo,’ I said, ‘forty pesos is just the sum I need to buy the absolute necessities.’

“‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ Gonzalo went on. ‘Let’s play for the money. Neither of us can get anywhere with the few sickly coppers we’ve got. If you get my money or I get yours, then at least one of us can do something. As it is, we’re both bums. I’d drink away these few coppers at one sitting, just out of rage at having worked for nothing.’

“Gonzalo’s idea wasn’t bad,” Antonio went on with his tale. “I too would have drunk up the little I had left. Once you get started on that goddamned tequila, you don’t stop until the last centavo’s gone. You go on drinking, drunk or sober; and what you don’t get down your gullet, your fellow boozers will swig for you. The café and flophouse keepers will cheat a drunk, and the miserable coins that are left are pinched from your pocket. You know all about it, Gales.”

Didn’t I, though. I knew cheap tequila. You shudder after each copita and have to gulp down something for a chaser. The barkeeper, or cantinero, is always wise enough to keep a supply of pickled botanas on sticks, but they burn your throat. So you keep on guzzling tequila, drenching your gizzard with the stuff as if bewitched or as if the damned throat-stripper were some magic elixir which, for some mysterious reason, had to be shot down without touching the tongue. And when at last you think you’ve had enough, you’ve ceased to exist. Everything is wiped away — trouble, sorrow, anger, passion. Only absolute nothingness remains. World and ego are dispersed.

Antonio brooded for a while, as though searching his memory. Then he went on: “We had no cards and no dice. We drew sticks. But the same stake of one peso kept passing from one to the other. It was never more than five pesos that changed hands. Then we played heads or tails. Strange, it still was never more than a few pesos that passed from one pocket to the other. Sam played too, and his money didn’t change much either. Meanwhile it had got late — ten or eleven o’clock by my judgment.

“Then Gonzalo got wild and cursed like a madman. He’d had enough of this kid’s game, he said, and wanted to know for sure how he’d stand in the morning.

“‘Well, Gonzalo, what do you say we ought to do?’

“‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s just what makes me so mad.

Here we are fooling around like half-witted kids and not getting anywhere-back and forth all the time. It’s enough to drive you up the pole.’

"Then, after squatting by the fire for a while, staring into the embers, rolling himself one cigarette after another and throwing them into the fire half smoked, he jumped up suddenly and said, ‘I know what we’ll do. We’ll have an Aztec duel for the whole stake.’

“‘An Aztec duel?’ I asked. ‘What’s that?’

“‘What? You don’t know the Aztec duel?’ Gonzalo was, genuinely surprised.

“‘No. How should I, Gonzalo? My family is of Spanish descent, even if we have been here for more than a hundred years. I’ve never heard of an Aztec duel.’

“‘It’s quite simple, Antonio. We take two young, straight saplings, trim them clean, tie our knives securely to the tips, and then hurl them at each other, until one or the other of us gives up from exhaustion. One of us will tire before the other; the one who stays on his feet wins, and gets the money. That will decide the money.’

“I thought it over for a few moments. It seemed a crazy idea to me.

“‘You’re not scared by any chance, are you, Spaniard?’ laughed Gonzalo.

“There was a funny sort of sneer in his voice and this made me flare up: ‘Scared of you? Of an Indian? A Spaniard is never scared! I’ll show you! Come on, let’s have your Aztec duel!’

“We took a flaming stick from the fire and stumbled around in the bush until we’d found two suitable saplings. Sam had been directed to bring plenty of fuel and build up a good fire so that we could see where we were aiming. We stripped the saplings and tied our opened pocketknives firmly to their tips.

“‘We don’t let the whole blade stick out,’ said Gonzalo. ‘We don’t want to murder each other. It’s only a game. The blade needn’t stick out more than an inch. There, that’s right!’ he said, looking at my spear.

’Now we must bind a piece of heavy wood near the blade end to give the spear its proper shaft weight; otherwise it’ll wobble and won’t fly straight.’

“Then we padded our left arms with grass and wrapped them round with a coarse convas sack. ‘This is important,’ Gonzalo explained. ‘That’s where the fun comes in, catching and parrying the spear. The well-padded arm serves as a shield did in ancient times. You know, the old Aztec warriors also used shields. You must understand, in this duel we are fighting, that we don’t want to kill one another, only exhaust the other partner. Keep all this in mind; it is supposed to be only a game;

“When we’d got everything ready, Sam said: ‘What about me? Am I supposed to stand by and watch? I want to be in on it too.’

“The Chink was right. He had to have something for his trouble as stakeholder and witness. You know what devils the Chinese are for gambling, don’t you, Gales? They’d gamble away the price of their own funeral if given the chance.

“‘Now see here, Sam,’ Gonzalo said to the Chink, ‘you can bet on one of us.’

“‘Good,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll bet on you, Gonzalo, five pesos. You give me five pesos if you win. If you lose, you get five pesos flom me. It’s not in youl intelest to lose, because that would mean good-bye to youl twenty pesos.’

“We each deposited our twenty pesos, which Sam placed before him on a stone; then he added his own stake of five pesos. Sam paced off twenty-five steps from either side of the fire, and we each placed a wooden pole on the marks. If either duelist overstepped his mark he would forfeit five pesos to the other.

"Then we started throwing the spears at each other, parrying each spear with our grass-girded arm as it came to us, and then returning it. With the fire flickering and smoking as it was I could see Gonzalo only in uncertain outline. I could hardly see the spear as it flew toward me, the night was so pitch dark. At the second throw I got a stab in my right shoulder. You can still see the wound, Gales.”

He pulled his shirt from his shoulder and I saw the stab wound, still not healed.

“Gradually, we got into our stride, or, rather, we got worked up. After a few more exchanges I got another stab which went through my trousers and into my leg. But I was a long way from finished.

“How long we kept on throwing, I don’t know. As neither of us would give in, the tempo became more and more wild.

An element of savagery entered into the match, and anybody watching us then never would have believed that it was only a game.

"Perhaps we threw for half an hour, perhaps for an hour; I don’t know. Neither did I know if I’d hit Gonzalo at all seri ously. But I knew that I was beginning to tire. The spear began to feel as if it weighed twenty pounds, and my throwing slowed down. Before long I found myself hardly able to bend down to pick up the spear, and once when I was bending I almost collapsed. But I knew that I mustn’t allow myself to sink to the ground; if I did I would certainly be unable to get on my feet again.