The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo & Ilan Stavans (translator) & Harold Augenbraum (translator)

The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo & Ilan Stavans (translator) & Harold Augenbraum (translator)

Author:Juan Rulfo & Ilan Stavans (translator) & Harold Augenbraum (translator)
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Classics, Caribbean & Latin American, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction, Literary Collections, General
ISBN: 9780292725836
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 1950-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


But the thing broke down completely when the train derailed on Sayula Hill. Had that not happened, perhaps Pedro Zamora and El Chino Arias and El Chihuila and many others would still be alive, and the revolt would have continued along a good path. But Pedro Zamora got under the government’s skin with the train derailment at Sayula.

I can still see the lights of the erupting flames that rose up from where they stacked the dead. They pushed them together with poles or rolled them like tree trunks down to the bottom of the hill, and when the pile grew big, they poured gas on it and set it on fire. The wind carried the stench far away, and days later you could still smell the odor of charred dead.

A bit before, we didn’t know exactly what would happen. We had scattered horns and cow bones along a long stretch of the tracks, and, if this weren’t enough, we had bent the rails apart where the train would enter a curve. We did this and waited.

Dawn was beginning to make things light. One could see almost clearly the people crowded together on the roofs of the cars. One could hear some of them singing. Men’s and women’s voices. They passed in front of us still half shadowed by night, but we could see that it was soldiers with their cookies. We waited. The train didn’t stop.

Had we wanted, we could have shot at it, because the train was going slowly and it was huffing and puffing, as if it wanted to get up the hill by grunting. We could even have chatted with them for a while. But things turned out differently.

They began to realize what was happening when they felt the carriages swerve and the train sway as if someone were shaking it. Then the engine went backward, dragged off the track by the heavy cars full of people. It let out a few hoarse, sad, and very long whistles. But no one could help it. It kept sliding backward, dragged down by a train you couldn’t see the end of, until there was no land left and, listing sideways, it fell to the bottom of the ravine. Then the carriages followed, one after the other, fast, each of them falling, in order, to the bottom. Afterward everything was quiet, as if everyone, including us, had died.

That’s how it happened.

When the survivors began to come out of the splintered cars, we left, cramped by fear.

We remained in hiding for several days; but the Federales came to remove us from our hideout. They gave us no peace; not even enough to chew a piece of jerky in peace. They made it so that our hours of sleeping and eating would come to an end, and day and night would be the same. We wanted to reach Tozín Canyon; but the government got there before us. We skirted the volcano. We climbed the highest mountains and there, in that place known as Camino de Dios, once again we found the government shooting to kill.



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