John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

“Fellowworker McCreary… My comrades wrote me you were coming.” “That’s me, allright… I’m glad you talk English.” “I lived in Santa Fe many years and in Brockton, Massachusetts. Sit down… please… I am very happy to welcome an American revolutionary worker… Though our ideas probably do not entirely agree we have much in common. We are comrades in the big battle.” He patted Mac on the shoulder and pressed him into a chair. “Please.” There were several little yellow children in torn shirts running round barefoot. Ricardo Perez sat down and took the smallest on his knee, a little girl with kinky pigtails and a smudged face. The place smelt of chile and scorched olive oil and children and washing. “What are you going to do in Mexico, fellowworker?”

Mac blushed. “Oh, I want to kinda get into things, into the revolution.”

“The situation is very confusing here… Our townworkers are organizing and are classconscious but the peons, the peasants, are easily misled by unscrupulous leaders.”

“I want to see some action, Perez… I was living in Los Angeles an’ gettin’ to be a goddam booster like the rest of ’em. I can earn my keep in the printin’ line, I guess.”

“I must introduce you to the comrades… Please… We will go now.”

Blue dusk was swooping down on the streets when they went out. Lights were coming out yellow. Mechanical pianos jinglejangled in bars. In a gateway a little outoftune orchestra was playing. The market was all lit up by flares, all kinds of shiny brightcolored stuff was for sale at booths. At a corner an old Indian and an old broadfaced woman, both of them blind and heavily pockmarked, were singing a shrill endless song in the middle of a dense group of short thickset country people, the women with black shawls over their heads, the men in white cotton suits like pajamas.

“They sing about the murder of Madero… It is very good for the education of the people… You see they cannot read the papers so they get their news in songs… It was your ambassador murdered Madero. He was a bourgeois idealist but a great man… Please… Here is the hall…. You see that sign says “Viva the Revindicating Revolution prelude to the Social Revolution.” This is the hall of the Anarchist Union of Industry and Agriculture. Huerta has a few federales here but they are so weak they dare not attack us. Ciudad Juarez is heart and soul with the revolution… Please… you will greet the comrades with a few words.”

The smoky hall and the platform were filled with swarthy men in blue denim workclothes; in the back were a few peons in white. Many hands shook Mac’s, black eyes looked sharp into his, several men hugged him. He was given a campchair in the front row on the platform. Evidently Ricardo Perez was chairman. Applause followed in every pause in his speech. A feeling of big events hovered in the hall. When Mac got on his feet, somebody yelled “Solidarity forever” in English. Mac stammered a few words about how he wasn’t an official representative of the I.W.W. but that all the same classconscious American workers were watching the Mexican revolution with big hopes, and ended up with the wobbly catchword about building the new society in the shell of the old. The speech went big when Perez translated it and Mac felt pretty good. Then the meeting went on and on, more and more speeches and occasional songs. Mac found himself nodding several times. The sound of the strange language made him sleepy. He barely managed to keep awake until a small band in the open door of the hall broke into a tune and everybody sang and the meeting broke up.

“That’s Cuatro Milpas … that means four cornfields… that’s a song of the peons everybody’s singing now,” said Perez.

“I’m pretty hungry… I’d like to get a little something to eat somewheres,” said Mac. “I haven’t eaten since morning when I had a cup of coffee and a doughnut in El Paso.”

“We will eat at the house of our comrade,” said Perez. “Please… this way.”

They went in off the street, now black and empty, through a tall door hung with a bead curtain, into a whitewashed room brightly lit by an acetylene flare that smelt strong of carbide. They sat down at the end of a long table with a spotted cloth on it. The table gradually filled with people from the meeting, mostly young men in blue workclothes, with thin sharp faces. At the other end sat an old dark man with the big nose and broad flat cheekbones of an Indian. Perez poured Mac out two glasses of a funnytasting white drink that made his head spin. The food was very hot with pepper and chile and he choked on it a little bit. The Mexicans petted Mac like a child at his birthday party. He had to drink many glasses of beer and cognac. Perez went home early and left him in charge of a young fellow named Pablo. Pablo had a Colt automatic on a shoulder strap that he was very proud of. He spoke a little pidginenglish and sat with one hand round Mac’s neck and the other on the buckle of his holster. “Gringo bad… Kill him quick… Fellowworker good… internacional… hurray,” he kept saying. They sang the International several times and then the Marseillaise and the Carmagnole. Mac was carried along in a peppery haze. He sang and drank and ate and everything began to lose outline.

“Fellowworker marry nice girl,” said Pablo. They were standing at a bar somewhere. He made a gesture of sleeping with his two hands against his face. “Come.”

They went to a dancehall. At the entrance everybody had to leave his gun on a table guarded by a soldier in a visored cap. Mac noticed that the men and girls drew away from him a little. Pablo laughed. “They think you gringo… I tell them revolucionario internacional. There she, nice girl… Not goddam whore… not pay, she nice working girl… comrade.”

Mac found himself being introduced to a brown broadfaced girl named Encarnacion. She was neatly dressed and her hair was very shinyblack. She gave him a bright flash of a smile. He patted her on the cheek. They drank some beer at the bar and left. Pablo had a girl with him too. The others stayed on at the dancehall. Pablo and his girl walked round to Encarnacion’s house with them. It was a room in a little courtyard. Beyond it was a great expanse of lightcolored desert land stretching as far as you could see under a waning moon. In the distance were some tiny specks of fires. Pablo pointed at them with his full hand and whispered, “Revolucion.”

Then they said good night at the door of Encarnacion’s little room that had a bed, a picture of the Virgin and a new photograph of Madero stuck up by a pin. Encarnacion closed the door, bolted it and sat down on the bed looking up at Mac with a smile.

when everybody went away for a trip Jeanne took us out to play every day in Farragut Square and told you about how in the Jura in winter the wolves come down and howl through the streets of the villages

and sometimes we’d see President Roosevelt ride by all alone on a bay horse and once we were very proud because when we took off our hats we were very proud because he smiled and showed his teeth like in the newspaper and touched his hat and we were very proud and he had an aide de camp

but we had a cloth duck that we used to play with on the steps until it began to get dark and the wolves howled ran with little children’s blood dripping from their snout through the streets of the villages only it was summer and between dog and wolf we’d be put to bed and Jeanne was a young French girl from the Jura where the wolves howled ran through the streets and when everybody had gone to bed she would take you into her bed

and it was a very long scary story and the worst of the wolves howled through the streets gloaming to freeze little children’s blood was the Loup Garou howling in the Jura and we were scared and she had breasts under her nightgown and the Loup Garou was terrible scary and black hair and rub against her and outside the wolves howled in the streets and it was wet there and she said it was nothing she had just washed herself