B. Traven - The Cotton-Pickers

The girls were sitting on the long settee waiting for dancing partners, while the men sat at the bar or in the recesses. Two or three men had girls with them and were conversing with great decorum and with as much animation as if they were in a ballroom of New York’s upper set. But they were enjoying themselves more because they could, if they so wished, say what was in their hearts, whereas in the upper set such talk might lead others to suspect that you didn’t know the niceties of the language.

A one-step dance piece was blaring from the platform, but the men were slow to react; they seemed embarrassed and shy, and if the girls hadn’t given them such friendly and encouraging smiles they never would have brought themselves to dance. They tried to conceal their shyness by sitting at the bar and drinking and drinking, drinking more than they really wanted. It was their way of showing their manliness, for they lacked the courage to show it in any other way. They went on drinking so as to be able to stay in the Pacifico near the girls whose smiles they loved and whose pretty faces they were delighted to see. But despite the smiles of the girls, the men held back and obliged the girls to dance with each other. Finally, a few men plucked up courage and asked a señorita for a dance. Then others began to unbend a little.

After a dance, the men as a rule escorted their partners back to their seats while they themselves went to the bar or to a seat in the recesses; but now and again a gentleman might invite one or two — if he didn’t feel confident, three or four — girls to share his table and drink a bottle of beer or take a shot of something stronger.

“What will you have to drink, señorita?”

“A whiskey and soda for me.”

“I’ll have a cognac.”

“For me, a bacardi.”

“I’ll have a bottle of beer.”

“I’d like a pack of cigarettes.”

They never ordered champagne or expensive wines on such easy invitation, but if a man happened to be there who felt like showing off or was bent on getting through four months’ wages in one night, he would order champagne and goodness knows what else and issue the invitation, “It’s on me, señoritas!” Twenty or more of them might then join in the spree, and things would warm up. On such occasions nothing was forbidden and there was no closing time.

The proprietor had his legal license, all stamped and hung up in plain sight, to manage his business so that it did not run at a loss. To avoid misunderstanding, he had signs hung up, such as “All Drinks One Peso.” There was no need for police regulation, in price or anything else. The customers and proprietors regulated things between themselves by the free play of supply and demand, through free competition, and the absence of conditions imposed by over-restrictive licenses. If too many bars opened there was no need for the authorities to intervene; the ones that were superfluous went broke of their own accord. Only the ones that gave good value for their money survived.

Antonio and I had taken a table when we came in. We ordered beer. Then we danced with two girls and invited them to sit with us; they ordered whiskey. We didn’t quite know what to say to them, and I felt sorry for them while they were making every effort to get a conversation going. I was glad when another dance started; we could make more progress with our feet than with our tongues.

For the sake of talking, we asked them all sorts of silly questions. Did they have to see their health doctors every week or every two weeks? Did those who didn’t dance in the cafés have to pay more rent for their apartments than the dancers? What were their earnings?

They must have thought us very green to be asking such silly questions, when we might have been talking about more interesting things. But their amiable manner didn’t desert them; it couldn’t, for they couldn’t allow themselves the luxury of moods and pouts, which would be bad for their business.

“Will you have another of the same to drink, señorita?” I asked the girl with whom I had danced. “Thank you, señor, that will be fine.”

“Then I’ll order,” I said.

There she sat, and after a few sips of the drink I had ordered, the girl started a conversation.

“I’m from Charlottenburg,” began Jeannette. “Oh, I thought you were a Parisienne,” said I.

She was flattered. The genuine French girls, she said, called her “Boche” when they were having one of their frequent rows. Her real name was Olga, but she had her health certificate in the name of Jeannette, with a photo to authenticate it.

Jeannette had lived in Buenos Aires during the war of 1914-1918. She had been very active in her profession there and had made a small fortune.

“I suddenly got the urge to go back home and see what it looked like,” she told me.

She found her father and mother living in the most pitiful circumstances. Before the war her father had been with a big Berlin firm as factory doorman, but had been dismissed after the war because a disabled veteran had been given preference. Her father and mother had lived poorly all their lives, saving and saving for their old age, investing their money in government savings bonds; but when the government devalued the currency, and thus cheated orphans, widows, servant girls, and honest old folks out of their savings so unscrupulously that if any private individual had dared to do it he would have been publicly branded and perhaps imprisoned, the supposedly gilt-edged security of the Bartels family — Jeannette told me this was her German family name, though I didn’t believe it — became scraps of paper so worthless that they couldn’t even have been put to good use in an outhouse.

The Bartels decided to gas themselves, but just at that point they received a two-week supply of groats, rice, and dried vegetables along with a tin of corned beef from some charitable organization, and with this they kept body and soul together for another four weeks.

Then one fine afternoon Jeannette arrived without warning, having traveled from Buenos Aires to Hamburg. She brought with her so much money that she could have bought up a whole street in Charlottenburg, for she had dollars from the New World.

“My dear girl, how did you come by so much money?” her mother asked.

“I married a cattle rancher in the Argentine. He owned two million head of cattle, and when he died he left me a little fortune.”

“Whoever would have thought that my girl would have such a stroke of luck?” said the mother. Thus, Jeannette was known in the neighborhood as the Argentine millionaire’s widow.

With a handful of dollars, Jeannette bought her parents an apartment house that before the war had been worth maybe a half million marks. She had the title made out in her own name, so businesslike had she become in the New World, but her parents were assigned the income from the apartment house. Then she bought them a good number of sound shares that would move with the stock market prices; these she deposited with a dependable banking firm, with instructions that the dividends when due were to be paid to her parents.

This business over, Jeannette took a few weeks off to treat herself to a good time, which she well deserved after the strenuous years that lay behind her.

For the proper enjoyment of these weeks of pleasure the cooperation of the opposite sex was, of course, required. Pleasure is barely conceivable without it. But Jeannette didn’t make it a matter of her professional business; being on vacation, she carefully chose a gentleman with whom she knew she could enjoy herself.

The Bartels had moved into the apartment house; with official permission from the housing authorities they were allowed to occupy the flat on the top floor, which Jeannette had had built at her own expense. One morning Father Bartel went to Jeannette’s bedroom to speak to her and found her in bed with a gentleman. Jeannette and her friend had sat up late in a cabaret, drinking plenty of champagne, and for that reason he had not wakened in time to take his leave at a respectable early hour, in propriety and silence.