The Mensú · I

Cayetano Maidana and Esteban Podeley, logging camp laborers, were returning to Posadas on the Silex, along with fifteen companions. Podeley, a timber cutter, was returning after nine months, his contract completed, and with a free passage as a result. Cayé—a monthly wage worker—was arriving under the same conditions, but after a year and a half, the time necessary to settle his account.

Gaunt, disheveled, in their drawers, their shirts open in long slits, barefoot like the majority, dirty like all of them, the two mensús devoured with their eyes the capital of the forest, the Jerusalem and Calvary of their lives. Nine months up there! A year and a half! But they were returning at last, and the still-painful axe-blow of the logging camp life was barely a splinter’s scratch compared to the absolute joy they scented down there.

Out of a hundred peons, only two reach Posadas with their wages. For that week-long glory downriver to which the stream drags them, they rely on the advance payment of a new contract. As intermediaries and accomplices, a group of girls, cheerful in character and profession, wait on the beach, before whom the thirsty mensús let out their “ahijú!” of urgent madness.

Cayé and Podeley stepped off staggering from a pre-tasted orgie, and surrounded by three or four female friends, found themselves in a moment before a sufficient quantity of cane liquor to satisfy the hunger of a mensú’s appetite.

A moment later they were drunk, and with a new contract sealed. In what job? Where? They neither knew nor cared. They knew, yes, that they had forty pesos in their pockets, and the power to go much further in expenses. Drooling with rest and alcoholic bliss, docile and clumsy, the two followed the girls to get dressed. The savvy maidens led them to a clothing store with which they had special percentage arrangements, or perhaps to the contractor’s storehouse. But in one or the other, the girls renewed the explosive luxury of their rags, nested large combs in their heads, draped themselves in ribbons—all robbed with perfect cold-bloodedness from their companion’s noble alcohol, for the only thing a mensú truly possesses is a brutal detachment from his money.

For his part, Cayé acquired far more extracts, lotions, and oils than necessary to scent his new clothes to the point of nausea, while Podeley, more sensible, insisted on a cloth suit. Possibly they paid very dearly for an overheard bill settled with a wad of papers thrown on the counter. But anyway, an hour later they thrust their gleaming persons into an open carriage, shod in boots, poncho over the shoulder—and a .44 revolver at the waist, of course—their clothes stuffed with cigarettes that they clumsily shredded between their teeth, letting the corner of a handkerchief dangle from every pocket. They were accompanied by two girls, proud of that opulence, the magnitude of which was evident in the somewhat jaded expression of the mensús, dragging along with them morning and afternoon through the heated streets an infection of black tobacco and logging camp extract.

Night finally arrived, and with it the dance hall, where those same savvy damsels induced the mensús to drink, whose royalty in advance money made them drop 10 pesos for a bottle of beer, only to receive 1.40 in change, which they pocketed without even glancing at.

Thus amid constant squandering of new advances—an irresistible need to compensate for the miseries of the logging camp with seven days as a grand seigneur—the Silex headed back up the river. Cayé brought a companion, and both, as drunk as the other laborers, settled on the deck, where ten mules were already packed in intimate contact with trunks, bundles, dogs, women, and men.

The next day, their heads now cleared, Podeley and Cayé examined their account books: it was the first time they had done so since the contract. Cayé had received 120 in cash, and 35 in expenses, and Podeley 130 and 75, respectively.

Both looked at each other with an expression that might have been one of horror, if a mensú weren’t perfectly cured of that ailment. They didn’t remember spending even a fifth of it.

“Darn it...!” muttered Cayé. “I’m never going to pay it off...”

And from that moment on he had simply—as just punishment for his squandering—the idea of escaping from there.

The legitimacy of his life in Posadas was, however, so evident to him that he felt jealous of the greater advance granted to Podeley.

“You’re lucky... he said.—Big, your advance...”

“You brought a companion,” objected Podeley, “that costs you out of your pocket...”

Cayé looked at his woman, and although beauty and other more moral qualities weigh very little in the choice of a mensú, he remained satisfied. The girl was indeed dazzling with her satin dress, green skirt, and yellow blouse; wearing a triple pearl necklace on her dirty neck; Louis XV shoes, brutally painted cheeks, and a disdainful leaf cigarette beneath her half-closed eyelids.

Cayé considered the girl and his .44 revolver: it was really the only thing worth having of all he carried with him. And even the latter ran the risk of going under after the advance, no matter how tiny his temptation to gamble might be.

Two meters away from him, on an upright trunk, the mensús were conscientiously playing monte with everything they had. Cayé watched for a while, laughing, as laborers always laugh when they are together, whatever the reason may be, and approached the trunk, placing five cigarettes on a card, and over it.

A modest beginning, which might end up providing him with enough money to pay off the advance at the logging camp, and return on the same steamboat to Posadas to squander a new advance.

He lost; he lost the other cigarettes, he lost five pesos, the poncho, his wife’s necklace, his own boots, and his .44. The next day he recovered the boots, but nothing more, while the girl compensated for the nakedness of her neck with incessant disdainful cigarettes.

Podeley won, after endless changes of ownership, the necklace in question, and a box of scented soaps which he managed to gamble away against a machete and half a dozen stockings, thus remaining satisfied.

They had arrived, at last. The peons climbed the endless red ribbon that scaled the bluff, from whose summit the «Silex» appeared petty and sunken in the lugubrious river. And with shouts of encouragement and terrible invectives in Guaraní, though all were cheerful, they bade farewell to the steamer, which was bound to stifle, in a three-hour washing-down, the nauseating atmosphere of squalor, patchouli, and sick mules, which it had ascended with for four days.

For Podeley, a timber logger whose daily wage could reach seven pesos, camp life was not hard. Used to it, having tamed his desire for strict justice in the measuring of the wood, and offsetting the routine pilfering with certain privileges of a good hand, his new phase began the next day, once his patch of forest had been marked out. He built his lean-to with palm leaves—roof and south wall—gave the name of bed to eight horizontal poles, nothing more; and from a main post he hung his weekly rations. Automatically, his logging days began anew: silent maté upon rising, while it was still night, following one after the other without taking his hand from the kettle; the scouting expedition for timber; breakfast at eight, flour, charqui, and lard; the axe after that, bare-chested, whose sweat drew horseflies, blackflies, and mosquitoes; then lunch, this time beans and corn floating in the inevitable lard, to finish at night, after another struggle with the 8-by-30 logs, with the noon stew warmed over.

Aside from some incident with his fellow cutters, who invaded his jurisdiction; from the tedium of rainy days that relegated him squatting in front of the kettle, the task continued until Saturday afternoon. He would wash his clothes then, and on Sunday he would go to the store to provision himself.

This was the true moment of relaxation for the mensús, forgetting everything amid the curses of their native tongue, bearing with indigenous fatalism the ever-increasing rise in the cost of supplies, which then reached five pesos per machete, and eighty centavos per kilo of hardtack. That same fatalism which accepted this with an ¡añá! and a laughing glance at their companions, dictated to them, as a rudimentary form of redress, the duty of fleeing the logging camp as soon as possible. And if this ambition did not dwell in every breast, all the peons understood that sting of counter-justice, which, should it succeed, would sink its teeth into the very entrails of the boss. He, for his part, carried the fight to its ultimate extreme, watching his people day and night, and especially the contract laborers.

The mensús were then busy at the landing stage, hauling down logs amid an endless clamor, which reached a fever pitch when the mules, unable to hold back the handspike as it spun down at full speed, tumbled over one another in a heap, timbers, animals, carts, all thoroughly mixed together. The mules were rarely hurt, but the uproar was the same.

Cayé, amid all the laughter, was constantly plotting his escape. Fed up with revirados and yoparás, which the foretaste of flight made all the more hard to stomach, he still held back for lack of a revolver, and above all, facing the foreman’s Winchester. If only he had a .44, though!...

Fortune came to him this time in a rather roundabout way.

Cayé’s companion, now stripped of her fine finery as she washed the peons’ clothes, changed residences one day. Cayé waited two nights, and on the third went to his replacement’s house, where he gave the girl a superb thrashing. The two mensús remained alone, chatting, as a result of which they agreed to live together, to which end the seducer moved in with the couple. This was economical and quite sensible. But since the mensú seemed genuinely to fancy the lady—a rare thing in their trade—Cayé offered to sell her to him for a revolver with bullets, which he himself would fetch from the storehouse. Despite this simplicity, the deal almost fell through, because at the last minute Cayé asked that a meter of rope tobacco be thrown in, which the mensú thought excessive. The bargain was finally struck, and while the fresh couple settled into their hut, Cayé conscientiously loaded his .44, setting off to finish the rainy afternoon drinking mate with them.