The Bridge in the Jungle by B Traven

Author:B Traven [Traven, B]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

21

At this moment many women uttered a shrill, plaintive wail full of reproach.

That wail, which pierced the blackness of the night as if it meant to break through and rise to the sun in the sky, swelled until all the women fell in. Then it sank and became a low moan. The women wrapped a piece of cloth, be it a rebozo, a black veil, or a shawl, around their heads. Their faces hidden, they wept bitterly.

It was no longer only the death of the Garcia woman's child that they bewailed. By his untimely death the little boy had become every mother's baby. Only a mother knows how a mother feels. No one else, not even God in heaven with all His immaculate wisdom, with all His stern serenity, can feel as a mother does when her baby has been taken away from her.

The Garcia held her baby in her left arm against her breast. With her right hand she squeezed his wet and already shrivelled little hands.

Perez stole away from her. He no longer wished to be seen by her, as though he were guilty of an unforgivable crime.

A middle-aged Indian walked up to the mother, bowed his head, and spoke to her. She handed him the little body; he received it very gently. Then he stepped back a few paces. Resolutely and unsentimentally, like an old country doctor, he now grasped the kid firmly by his feet and held him up with the head hanging perpendicularly. He shook the body several times. Only watery blood dripped out of the kid's mouth.

The body was already stiff. In spite of the weight of the body hanging by its feet, the knee joints stretched very little.

While the kid still hung upside down, a thick bruise became visible on the forehead above the left eyebrow. The nose and mouth were swollen and the upper jaw was partly smashed in.

I went near and lifted his head slightly because I wished to see his eyes by the light of a lantern. Holding his head in the palm of my hand, I felt, with the tip of my middle finger, a little hole in the back of his skull. I turned the head round to the light, and from its size I decided that this hole was caused by a fairly thick nail.

The Indian who was holding the body by its feet winked at another man. This man pressed the little body between his hands, moving from the belly down to the chest inch by inch. Even then surprisingly little water came out of the kid's mouth. Yet there was still that trickling of thin blood.

Huge pearls of tears formed in the eyes of the mother, and when her eyes could not hold them any longer, they tumbled down, running down her cheekbones, over the corners of her mouth, down her chin, finally dropping upon her breast. They fell upon the flowers she had fastened on her dress slightly above her heart.

She snorted as though

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