Читать книгу I, Rigoberta Menchu - Rigoberta Menchu - Страница 11

‘This is why there is no hope of winning the hearts of our people.’

—Rigoberta Menchú

After forty days, when the child is fully integrated into the community, the routine of going down to the fincas begins.

From when I was very tiny, my mother used to take me down to the finca, wrapped in a shawl on her back. She told me that when I was about two, I had to be carried screaming onto the lorry because I didn’t want to go. I was so frightened I didn’t stop crying until we were about half-way there. I remember the journey by lorry very well. I didn’t even know what it was, but I knew I hated it because I hate things that smell horrible. The lorry holds about forty people. But in with the people go the animals (dogs, cats, chickens) which the people from the Altiplano take with them while they are in the finca. We have to take our animals. It sometimes took two nights and a day from my village to the coast. During the trip the animals and the small children used to dirty the lorry and you’d get people vomiting and wetting themselves. By the end of the journey, the smell–the filth of people and animals–was unbearable.

The lorry is covered with a tarpaulin so you can’t see the countryside you’re passing through. Most of the journey is spent sleeping because it’s so tedious. The stuffiness inside the lorry with the cover on, and the smell of urine and vomit, make you want to be sick yourself just from being in there. By the time we got to the finca, we were totally stupefied; we were like chickens coming out of a pot. We were in such a state, we could hardly walk to the finca. I made many trips from the Altiplano to the coast, but I never saw the countryside we passed through. We heard other lorries and cars, but we didn’t ever see them. We never saw any other villages on the way. I saw the wonderful scenery and places for the first time when we were thrown out of the finca and had to pay our own way back on the bus.

I remember that from when I was about eight to when I was about ten, we worked in the coffee crop. And after that I worked on the cotton plantations further down the coast where it was very, very hot. After my first day picking cotton, I woke up at midnight and lit a candle. I saw the faces of my brothers and sisters covered with mosquitos. I touched my own face, and I was covered too. They were everywhere; in people’s mouths and everywhere. Just looking at these insects and thinking about being bitten set me scratching. That was our world. I felt that it would always be the same, always the same. It hadn’t ever changed.

None of the drivers liked taking us because, naturally, we were filthy and burned from the sun. No-one wanted to drive us. The lorries belonged to the fincas, but they were driven by the recruiting agents, the caporales. These caporales are in charge of about forty people, or more or less what the lorry holds. When they get to the finca, the caporal becomes the overseer of this group. They are usually men from our villages too, but they’ve been in the army or have left the community. They start behaving like the landowners, and treat their own people badly. They shout at them and insult them. The finca offers them opportunities to get on, if they do what the landowners want. They get better wages and they have a steady job. It’s their job to order us around and keep us in line, I’d say. They’ve learned Spanish so they can act as go-betweens for the landowner and his workers, because our people don’t speak Spanish. They often take advantage of us because of this, but we can’t complain because we never see the landowner and don’t know where he lives. We see only the contracting agents and the overseers. The contracting agents fetch and carry the people from the Altiplano. The overseers stay on the fincas. One group of workers arrives, another leaves and the overseer carries on giving orders. They are in charge. When you’re working, for example, and you take a little rest, he comes and insults you. ‘Keep working, that’s what you’re paid for,’ he says. They also punish the slow workers. Sometimes we’re paid by the day, and sometimes for the amount of work done. It’s when we work by the day that we get the worst treatment. The caporal stands over you every minute to see how hard you’re working. At other times, you’re paid for what you pick. If you don’t manage to finish the amount set in a day, you have to continue the next day, but at least you can rest a bit without the overseer coming down on you. But the work is still hard whether you work by the day or by the amount.

Before we get into the lorry in our village, the labour contractor tells us to bring with us everything we’ll need for the month on the finca; that is, plates and cups, for example. Every worker carries his plate, his cup, and his water bottle in a bag on his back so he can go and get his tortilla at mealtimes. Children who don’t work don’t earn, and so are not fed. They don’t need plates. They share with their parents. The little ones who do earn also have plates for their ration of tortilla. When I wasn’t earning anything, my mother used to give me half her ration. All the mothers did the same. We get tortilla and beans free, but they are often rotten. If the food varies a bit and we get an egg about every two months, then it is deducted from our pay. Any change in the food is deducted.

The same goes for anything we get from the cantina. As well as alcohol, the cantina in the finca also sells things that children like: sweets, cakes and soft drinks. It’s all in the shop.

The children, who are hot and tired and hungry, are always asking their parents for treats and it makes parents sad to see their children asking for things they can’t give. But everything they buy is marked up on an account, and at the end when you get your pay, you always owe so much for food, so much at the shop, so much at the pharmacy. You end up owing a lot. For example, if a child unintentionally breaks a branch of a coffee bush, you have to work to make it up. They deduct for everything and you end up having to pay debts before you can leave.

Every finca in Guatemala has a cantina, owned by the landowner, where the workers get drunk on alcohol and all kinds of guaro, and pile up debts. They often spend most of their wages. They drink to get happy and to forget the bitterness they feel at having to leave their villages in the Altiplano and come and work so brutally hard on the fincas for so little. I remember my father and mother going to the cantina out of despair. It was sometimes terrible for us. My mother and my brothers and sisters often had to bear all our household costs when the month on the finca was over because my father owed all his wages to the cantina. He was a very sensitive man. When anything went wrong or when times were very hard for us, he used to drink to forget. But he hurt himself twice over because his money went back to the landowner. That’s why the landowner set up the cantina anyway. Once I remember my father working the whole day picking cotton but somehow didn’t pick the required amount. He was so angry that he just wanted to forget everything and spent the whole night in the cantina. When the month was up, he owed nearly all his wage to the cantina. We honestly don’t know if he really drank all that rum or not, but it was awful to see such a huge debt chalked up against him after a whole month’s work. You get into debt for every little thing. This taught us to be very careful. My mother used to say: ‘Don’t touch anything or we’ll have to pay for it.’ My mother used to see that we all behaved ourselves and didn’t get her into debt.

This is what happened that time we were thrown out of the finca. (We were told by one of our neighbours who stayed on there.) When they came to get paid at the end of the month, the overseer included my mother and my brother and me, and a neighbour who was thrown out with us, in the list of workers to be paid, just as if we were finishing the month and collecting our wages. Of course, he collected the pay due to us himself. That’s what they do. With what they earn and what they steal from our people, the overseers buy lovely houses in the Altiplano and have houses in other places too. They can live wherever they want to, in the places they like best.

Many of them are ladinos from Oriente.^* But there are also many of our people from the Altiplano among them. My father used to call them ‘ladinized Indians’. When we say ‘ladinized’ we mean they act like ladinos, bad ladinos, because afterwards we realized that not all ladinos are bad. A bad ladino is one who knows how to talk and steal from the people. He is a small-scale picture of the landowner.

I remember going along in the lorry and wanting to set it on fire so that we would be allowed to rest. What bothered me most was travelling on and on and on, wanting to urinate and not being able to because the lorry wouldn’t stop. The drivers were sometimes drunk, boozed. They stopped a lot on the way but they didn’t let us get out. This enraged us; we hated the drivers because they wouldn’t let us get out although they used to drink on the way. It made me very angry and I used to ask my mother: ‘Why do we go to the finca?’. And my mother used to say: ‘Because we have to. When you’re older you’ll understand why we need to come.’ I did understand, but the thing was I was fed up with it all. When I was older, I didn’t find it strange any more. Slowly I began to see what we had to do and why things were like that. I realised we weren’t alone in our sorrow and suffering, but that a lot of people, in many different regions, shared it with us.

When we worked down on the cotton plantation (I think I was about twelve) I was already big and did the work of a grown woman. I remember the first time I saw a finca landowner, I was frightened of him because he was very fat. I’d never seen a ladino like that. He was very fat, well dressed and even had a watch. We didn’t know about watches then. I didn’t have any shoes although many of our people wore caitos; but nothing which compared to the shoes this landowner had. At dawn the overseer told us: ‘Listen, you’re going to work one more day at the end of the month.’ Whenever anything like this happened, they’d just announce they were adding another day on to the month. If the month had thirty-one days, we had to work the first day of the next month, or if there were rest days for any reason, we’d have to make up the day. So the overseer told us: ‘The owner is coming today to thank you for your work and wants to spend some time talking to you, so nobody leave because we have to wait for him.’ So we stayed in our camp, in the workers’ barracks where we lived and they divided us into groups. Then, when the great landowner arrived, we saw he was accompanied by about fifteen soldiers. This seemed really stupid to me, because I thought they were pointing their rifles at the landowner, so I asked my mother: ‘Why are they forcing the landowner to come and see us?’ But it was really to protect him. There were about fifteen soldiers and they found a suitable place for the owner to sit. The overseer said: ‘Some of you have to dance for the owner.’ My mother said no, and hid us. They wanted the children to prepare a sort of welcome for the owner. But none of us dared even go near him because he had so many bodyguards with guns. When the owner began to speak, he spoke in Spanish. My mother understood a little Spanish and afterwards she told us he was talking about the elections. But we didn’t even understand what our parents told us–that the ladinos had a government. That is, the President who had been in power all this time, was, for my parents, for all of us, President of the ladinos’ government. It wasn’t the government of our country. That’s what we always thought. So my mother said that he was talking about the government of the ladinos. What was it he was saying? The landowner was speaking, and the overseer started translating what he was saying. They told us he said we all had to go and make a mark on a piece of paper. That would be a vote, I imagine that it was a vote. We all went to make our mark on the paper. They gave my father one and my mother and showed them the place to put their mark. I remember that the paper had some squares with three or four drawings on it. So my parents and my older brothers and sisters marked the paper in the place the owner told them. He warned us that anyone who didn’t mark the paper would be thrown out of work at the end of the month. Anyone who was thrown out would not be paid. The workers were forced to mark the paper. So that was another day of rest, and it meant we would have to work the second day of the next month as well. The landowner left, but afterwards…I dreamed about him over and over again…it must have been the fear, the impression made on me by that man’s face. I remember telling mother: ‘I dreamed about that old ladino who came here.’ And mother said: ‘Don’t be silly, he’s only a man, don’t be afraid.’ That’s what she said. But all the children there ran away from their parents and cried when they saw that ladino, and even more at the soldiers and their weapons. They thought they were going to kill their parents. I thought so, too. I thought they were going to kill everybody, because they were carrying guns.

We didn’t even know what the name on the paper was. My father sometimes used to tell us names because of the things he remembered. In the defeat of 1954, he said they captured men from our region, and from other regions. They took our men off to the barracks. My father was one of those caught. He has very black memories of those days. He says many, many of our people died and we only escaped because of our own quick wits. That’s how we survived, my father said. His memories of this period are very bad. He always talked about the President there was then, but we didn’t know any of the others. We didn’t know the rest, not their names or what they were like. We knew nothing about them. Then the landowner came to congratulate us. We saw him a second time. He came with his wife and one of his sons. They were nearly as fat as he was. They came to the finca and told us that our President had won, the one we had voted for. We didn’t even know that they were votes they’d taken away. My parents laughed when they heard them say ‘our President’, because for us he was the President of the ladinos, not ours at all. This was my impression as a small girl and I thought a lot about what the President would be like. I thought he was an even bigger man than the landowner. The landowner was very big and tall, and we didn’t have big men like that in our village. So I thought that the President was even taller than the landowner. When I was older, I met the landowner again and he asked my parents for me. That was when I was sent to the capital. That’s another stage in my life.