Along with them went two girls, proud of such opulence, the extent of which could be seen in the rather bored expression of the laborers, as their carriage, morning and afternoon, spread through the scorching streets a noxious smell of wood-extracts and black tobacco.

Finally night arrived, and with it the usual spree, in which the same shrewd young ladies cajoled the workers to drink. And their regal wealth in advanced funds led them to lay out ten pesos for a bottle of beer, getting only one-forty in change, which they pocketed without even batting an eye.

So, after repeated squandering of new advances—out of an irresistible need to make up for the miseries of the logging camp with a week of living like lords—the laborers went back up the river again on the Silex. Cayé took along a girlfriend, and the three of them, drunk like the rest of the peones, settled in on the deck, where ten mules were already huddled together in intimate contact with trunks, bundles, dogs, women, and men.

The next day, their heads now cleared, Cayé and Podeley inspected their account booklets—the first time they’d done so since signing their contracts. Cayé had received 120 pesos in cash and 35 in expenses, and Podeley 130 and 75 respectively.

The two eyed each other with an expression that might have been one of panic, if every mensú were not thoroughly cured of that disorder. They didn’t remember having spent even a fifth of what was recorded.

“¡Añá! . . .” (the devil!), muttered Cayé in Guaraní. “I’m never going to work this off . . .”

And from that moment he quite naturally took up—as fair punishment for his extravagance—the idea of escaping from the work camp. The legitimacy of his life in Posadas was so evident to him, however, that he felt jealous of the larger advances granted to Podeley.

“You’re lucky . . . ,” he said. “It’s big, your advance . . .”

“You’re bringing a girlfriend,” countered Podeley. “That costs you in the pocketbook.”

Cayé looked at his woman and he was satisfied, though beauty and other endowments of a more moral sort carry very little weight in the choice of a mensú. As a matter of fact the girl was dazzling, in her green skirt and yellow blouse of matching satin; displaying Louis XV shoes, a triple necklace of pearls around her dirty neck, brazenly painted cheeks, and, below her half-closed eyelids, a disdainful cigarette.

Cayé looked over the girl and his .44 revolver: the two were really all there was of value in what he was taking with him. And even the .44 ran the risk of going under like his advance, no matter how slight his temptation to gamble.

A few steps away, in fact, on top of a trunk stood on end, the workers were conscientiously betting everything they had in a game of monte. Cayé watched for a while laughing, as peones always laugh when they’re together, for whatever reason; and he drew near the trunk, putting down five cigarettes on a card.

A modest beginning, that might turn out to provide him with enough money to pay off his advance at the logging camp and return on the same steamboat to Posadas, to squander another advance.

He lost. Lost the rest of his cigarettes, five pesos, his poncho, his woman’s necklace, his own boots and his .44. The next day he won back the boots, but nothing else, while the girl made up for the bareness of her neck with endless contemptuous cigarettes.

After innumerable changes of ownership, Podeley won the necklace in question and a box of toilet soap, which he found a way of betting against a machete and a half a dozen stockings, which he won, and was thus content.

A week later they finally reached their destination. The peones cheerfully climbed up the endless strip of red earth that scaled the bluff, from the top of which the Sílex looked miniature and half-submerged in the gloomy river. And with ahijús and terrible abuse in Guaraní, they took leave of the steamboat and her crew, who had to swamp away, in a three-hour dousing with buckets, the nauseating stench of filth, patchouli, and sick mules that for four days she carried upstream.

II

For Podeley, the woodcutter, whose daily pay could amount to seven pesos, life in the camps wasn’t too hard. Adapted to hope for strict fairness when it came to measuring the lumber he’d cut, and made up for the routine swindling with certain privileges accorded to dependable workers. His new hitch began the next day, once they had marked off his zone of woods. With palm leaves he built himself a lean-to (a roof and south wall, nothing more), settled for eight cross-poles as a bed, and hung his weekly rations from a fork-post. Automatically, he resumed his camp routine: silent mates when he got up before dawn, drunk quickly one after the other without letting go of the teakettle; the scouting expedition for timber; breakfast at eight (flour, jerked beef, and drippings); then the chopping, stripped to the waist, his sweat attracting horseflies, barigüís,1 and mosquitoes; and later lunch (this time beans, and corn floating in the inevitable drippings); to conclude at night, after further struggle with eight-by-thirty timbers,2 with the same yopará he ate at noon.

Aside from an occasional incident with fellow woodcutters who encroached on his territory, and from the tedium of days when it rained, which left him crouching before his teakettle, the job went on till Saturday afternoon. Then he washed his clothes, and on Sunday went to the store to get provisions.

This was the true moment of relaxation for the workers, when they could forget everything amid the imprecations of their mother tongue, weathering with native fatalism the ever-increasing rise in the prices of provisions, which by then had got to eighty centavos for a kilo of hardtack and seven pesos for a pair of denim shorts. The same fatalism that accepted this—with an ¡añá! and a laughing glance at his comrades—imposed upon the mensú, as basic retribution, the duty of escaping from the logging camp as soon as he could. And if this ambition wasn’t in the hearts of all of them, all the workers understood that biting thrust for retaliatory justice, which, if it came, would sink its teeth into the very vitals of the boss. The latter, for his part, carried the struggle to the limit, watching his people day and night, especially the contract laborers.

At that time the workers were busy at the pier, bringing down timbers in the midst of endless shouting, which rose to its peak when the mules, incapable of holding back the wagon as it came down the towering bluff at full speed, ran into one another and stumbled—with beams, animals, wagons, the whole works all mixed up. The mules rarely got hurt, but the uproar was always the same.

Cayé, between one laugh and another, kept on planning his flight. Already sick of revirados3 and yoparás, made still more indigestible by the foretaste of escape, he nevertheless held back for lack of a revolver, and surely also on account of the foreman’s Winchester. But if he had a .44! . . .

In this case fortune favored him in a quite roundabout way.

One day Cayé’s girlfriend—who, now deprived of her sumptuous finery, was earning her living washing clothes for the peones—changed her place of residence. For two nights Cayé waited for her, and on the third went to the hut of his substitute, where he loosed on the girl a colossal thrashing. The two laborers ended up alone in a friendly chat, and as a result they agreed to live together, to which end the seducer moved in with the original couple. This was economical and fairly sensible. But since the other worker seemed to really like the lady—something rare in that fraternity—Cayé offered to sell her to him for a revolver with ammunition, that he himself would get from the store. Despite this straightforwardness, the deal came near the point of falling through, because at the last minute Cayé asked for a meter of rope tobacco in addition, which seemed excessive to the other mensú. The sale was finally closed, and while the fresh new couple settled into their hut, Cayé conscientiously loaded his .44, then setting forth to end the rainy afternoon drinking mate at their place.

III

Autumn was coming to an end, and the sky, till now in steady drought broken by five-minute squalls, was finally churning up into constant bad weather, humid to the point of stiffening the workers’ backs.