“What’s going on?” Payanés tried to raise his voice over the shouting as he entered the dining hall, beginning to feel carried along by the wave of a collective anxiousness that he had been unaware of until now. “Who can tell me what’s going on?” he insisted, in the middle of the melee of rice balls whizzing overhead to end up splattered on the wall.
If he had been more experienced, he might have guessed that the redoubled blood flow, the ants’ nest of expectations vibrating in the air, and the sparkle in the men’s eyes were the announcement of the arrival of the great rebellion, which returned cyclically to involve Tora in its fury, like summer in other hemispheres.
“What’s going on?” asked Sacramento in his quieter, convalescent tone.
“We’re fed up with this shitty food,” responded a man who was actively involved in the fray.
“But why today and not before, if we eat the same thing every day?”
“These gringos think they’re smart,” came the answer. “Again today, lunch is just brown sugar in hot water and rice balls. It’s not even fit for prisoners, hermano, they have no right.”
“At least in here we get rice balls. Out there they don’t even have that…,” said Sacramento.
His words came from a world that was before the loss of candor, but that wasn’t how they sounded. Just the opposite, they provoked ire and mistrust and the other men yelled at Sacramento, calling him a scab, a sellout, and a strikebreaker, and in the midst of the tumult they might have broken his skull if old Lino el Titi Vélez hadn’t stepped in. Lino el Titi was a leader of earlier strikes who still wore the crown of his faded union glory.
“I will vouch for this boy. His words are innocent and do not come from ill will,” said Lino el Titi vehemently, whose love and extracurricular life had transpired entirely among the bars and beds of La Catunga, and so he had known Sacramento from the days when he was a baby with no one to change his diapers and had to teach himself how to walk, grabbing hold of the brickwork on a corner of Calle Caliente.
“You’re content with very little,” he said to Sacramento when the others had moved away. “Even the dogs won’t eat these rice balls. The other day I gave one to a hungry stray that sniffed it and turned up his nose at it. What do you think they eat in the manager’s dining hall? They give the gringos eggs and milk, and fruits and vegetables, hot, healthy food that you could really use, boy, because this jungle is sucking up your soul.”
“Well, it’s true that the balls are pretty damn bad,” acknowledged Sacramento. “But what if the gringos get mad and decide not to toss us even the balls?”
“They can’t starve us to death because they need us to work,” Lino el Titi told him, before disappearing into the din of the minuscule battle.
Payanés, who had heard the dialogue, grabbed a ball of rice in his right hand. He did it just to participate in the fun, just because, with the shyness and remorse of a child who has stolen an apple. But he was immediately overcome with a powerful urge to throw it with all his might, he, a responsible and peaceful man, unassuming and well intentioned toward authority, who until now had felt only gratitude for the opportunity to work given him by those foreign bosses who smiled down from their photographs and decided his fate from their pool with blue reflections in their walled neighborhood. If before he felt only gratitude and submission, suddenly today, with that ball of rice in his hand and sensing the pulsing indignation of the others, he found more than enough reason to fuel his own. For the first time, he realized that the world, kind perhaps for others, had reserved a hostile face for him, and he decided that he wanted things to be different, he, Payanés, who knew how to block out suffering with such valor, or, depending on how you looked at it, with such cowardice. He, who looked down upon the complainers, who didn’t know discontent, who disdained pain to such a degree that he was incapable of detecting it even when it was inflicted upon him, who didn’t allow himself to dream except when he was asleep. Today, he suddenly allowed himself to be swept along by the furor and began to resent deep in his bones the chronic dampness of his hammock on those suffocating jungle nights, nights so short they afforded no rest. And he detested the loneliness of his endless days among so many men who, despite the crowded conditions, couldn’t keep one another company. He felt a tiredness that he had never allowed himself to feel before, and for the first time since he had left his distant city of Popayán, he allowed himself the luxury of longing for those people that he hadn’t seen since.
“Well, yes, damn it. I’m fed up too,” he admitted. All of a sudden he felt like demanding repayment from life for all the hardships and pettiness he’d had to endure, and throwing in the face of the Tropical Oil Company all the aches that the excessive work had burned into his muscles, driven until they cramped, and the deafening noise of the machines that cluttered his skull and dried out his thoughts, and the galley slave routine that he had so good-naturedly accepted, and above all the black weight of that sky that surrounded him every night far from the embrace of that girl who wouldn’t tell him her name but who made him a promise at the river, and he hated the fat men reeking of alcohol who were at that very moment kissing her on the neck, and he also hated, with a rebellious poison, those foreign bosses he had never even seen, and he blamed them for the heavy absence he felt and for the unsatisfied waiting he had to endure as he paid thirty days of forced labor for the dream of a single encounter of love. Then he tightened his hand on the ball of rice and threw it against the photograph on the wall with the fury of someone taking a step toward the galvanized lands of risk, knowing that there is no turning back.
What Payanés did not realize, not even at the instant that his ball smashed against míster Maier’s undaunted smile, was that he was living the first moments of what from then on would be the forever famous rice strike, the fifth and most violent of the so-called primitive, or heroic, strikes by the Tora union, which regained its strength when it was least expected, meaning when the projectiles had died down, spirits had calmed, and the rice scattered all over the floor made the dining hall look like a church vestibule after a wedding.
It was then that a belligerent and vociferous group who weren’t ready to call it quits on the ruckus, among whom were several maintenance workers — famous for their excesses — clustered around Brasco, the North American engineer who held the post of general supervisor and who was the only manager willing to mix with the Colombian workers and maintain any kind of personal relationship with them.
Too skinny and way too tall, Brasco experienced problems with the coordination of his own height: He walked as if perched on stilts and was unable to prevent his neck and arms from undulating as they stuck out from the collar and sleeves of his baggy shirt. He had already been warned by his superiors about the danger of not maintaining distances, and they had even told him they would cancel his health insurance policy if he persisted in his habit of visiting local brujos and healers. But he refused to imprison himself in that exclusive world of norteamericanos that he considered a concentration camp. That’s why he would join the workers at lunchtime and sometimes late at night, when they sat around a pot of coffee, under a riot of stars and cicadas, to tell stories of ghosts and spirits who wander around doing things that an Anglo-Saxon like him found improbable.