CHAPTER XIV
THE REVOLUTION IN HONDURAS
I started in haste for Honduras, but haste achieved nothing in these lands.
One of the eccentricities of the average Central-American republic is that the traveler has little difficulty in entering the country, yet having entered, finds his departure balked by countless formalities. Apparently the government is eager to welcome any one, but if it can discover that the visitor is a rapscallion, is determined to add him to the permanent population.
Slipping into Salvador through the back yard, I was not required even to display a passport. On the day preceding my intended departure from the Capital, I learned that I must call upon the Secretary of Foreign Relations, and convince His Excellency of my respectability before I should be permitted to leave.
A pretty señorita in the outer office of the State Department ceased powdering her nose to listen to my plea.
“Cómo no? Why not, señor? If you will kindly return the day after to-morrow—”
She smiled sweetly in dismissal, and having settled the matter in the favorite Latin-American fashion, reopened her vanity case, upon the mirror of which was pasted the photograph of her sweetheart, who seemed even more important than this affair of State. Gringo-like, I persisted.
“How about to-day?”
“Impossible, señor. The Secretary is in conference. And the Sub-secretary has gone home.”
“Where does he live?”
“Quién sabe? Who knows, señor?”
Evidently annoyed at my insistence, she finally discovered a clerk who professed that he did know. He wrote out the address for me: “Numero —, Calle 10 Poniente.” It was only the middle of the morning, but it was already fairly hot in San Salvador. I hiked through sun-blanched streets, only a few of which were numbered. At length I asked a policeman for directions. He glanced at my perspiring forehead, and assured me that I was now at the Tenth Street Poniente.
So I knocked at the proper number, and inquired of a servant whether His Excellency were at home. I learned that he was. A colored gentleman in pajamas rose from a hammock in the patio, and shook hands very cordially. Not to be outdone in politeness, I made an elaborate speech, emphasizing my regret at having to leave his delightful country, and begging that he would do me the favor to grant permission.
“The permission is yours, señor!”
“Do I not require your visé on my passport?”
“Not mine, señor, but that of the Sub-Secretary of Foreign Relations. I am only an humble employee of the street-cleaning department. But muchas gracias for your visit. Always my house is yours, at Numero —, Seventh Street Poniente.”
When I did reach the Tenth Street Poniente, it was to discover that the address given me at the State Department was wrong. His Excellency lived somewhere else. But at last, after four hours of a house-to-house canvass, I found him. Having obtained the necessary visé, I caught the first train to La Unión, on the Gulf of Fonseca, from which one could look across a strip of blue water and see the hills of Honduras itself.
“How soon can I catch a boat?” I inquired.
The citizens of La Unión shrugged their shoulders.
“Perhaps the day after to-morrow, señor, or the day after that. But quién sabe? In the meantime you had better visit the local commandante to secure permission.”
As a matter of fact, the boat did not leave for several days.
La Unión was the usual type of Central-American port town—a colorless, uninteresting little city, with numerous buzzards hopping about its mud-flats, as hot as blazes, and devoid of entertainment.
I was welcomed at a small hotel with an inquiry as to whether I possessed a watch. No one knew the time. But since it was growing dark, the proprietor assumed that it was nearing the hour for supper. A slatternly maid brought out some tableware that had barely survived the last earthquake, and served the usual Central-American meal of beans, rice, beans, chicken, beans, coffee, and more beans.
On the hotel wall a notice proclaimed that this establishment was preferred not only by tourists, but by people of good taste. Its principal attraction seemed to be Berta, its beautiful bar-maid. Berta, although a rather dark-complexioned young person, had a pleasant smile that revealed the whitest of teeth. She took great care of those teeth. At five-minute intervals, she rinsed them with a glass of water, and expectorated upon the bar-room floor. The town bachelors spent most of their idle hours—about sixteen each day—whispering sweet nothings to Berta, to which she smiled roguishly but shook her head. Such was her popularity that she had never learned to open a beer bottle. Whenever a patron wished a drink, Berta had only to glance toward the group of idlers, and some energetic young man would step forward to open the bottle by chewing off the top.
Berta was studying English. She would sit on the counter, with a book before her, reciting: “Wan, too, tree, fo-ur, fivvy, sixxy, ay-it, tenny.” The proprietor’s wife sat beside her in a large armchair, examining my photographs with untiring interest. She was rather stout, and inclined either to head-ache or stomach-ache or both. She fanned herself with a palm-leaf fan, and groaned, and exclaimed from time to time, “Ay! What heat it is making to-day!” She would hold up each photograph, and inquire, “What is this?” The inscription was written on the back of each, but the Señora did not read Spanish, much less English. Berta always interpreted for her, with fantastic results: “A tee-pee-cal stritty sinny een Gua-te-ma-la.” Then she would smile again, and the scowls of the local swain would suggest that if the boat did not sail pretty soon for Honduras, the village buzzards would have a change of diet.
When the launch did leave for Honduras, there was further formality. It was scheduled to depart a las nueve en punto—at nine o’clock sharp—with much verbal emphasis on the sharp. A squad of Salvadorean soldiers manned the dock, and halted me at my approach. My baggage was placed in the office, and the door locked, and I was motioned to a bench. Stevedores were loading the diminutive vessel with a set of dilapidated furniture, which did not appear worth transporting from one place to another, but which was being appraised by a pompous official, and duly taxed, while its owner waved his hands and proclaimed that he was being robbed. Official and owner finally adjourned to the governor’s residence to settle the dispute, and did not reappear until nearly noon.
Meanwhile the passengers waited. Cargo difficulties having been adjusted, the pompous official called each of us to the office in turn, collected a small fee, and took our names and histories. He then compiled a list, and sent it away to be typewritten for presentation to the commandante of police. After another hour or two, the list reappeared, covered with huge red seals, and flowing signatures. There followed next a minute inspection of baggage, which, in other lands, occurs only when one enters the country. My notes aroused suspicion. The inspector examined each page, pretending to read it. Was I carrying away the country’s military secrets? The eight barefoot soldiers gathered closer, and glared suspiciously. These secrets were important.
But at last we were permitted to embark, still with formality. The soldiers lined up before the gangway. The official read our names from the list, and we embarked one by one, surveyed by the accusing eyes of authority. The captain of the launch took the wheel, and jangled a bell as a signal to the engineer three feet behind him; the engineer jangled another bell to let the captain know he had understood the signal correctly. And we were off for Honduras, visible just across the bay—at some hour of mid-afternoon en punto.
It was a brief voyage, through island-dotted waters alive with pelicans and seagulls, to Amapala, the one Honduranean port of entry on the Pacific, situated upon a volcanic island.
Another official glanced idly at my passport, and waved aside my baggage without examining it. Several weeks later, when I departed, the same official was to raise as much rumpus as the Salvadorean authorities had raised, but to-day he offered no difficulties. Within a few minutes, we were all back in the launch, chugging toward the mainland, to San Lorenzo, where commenced the automobile road to the Honduran capital.
Arriving too late to catch the daily truck, we settled ourselves for the night. San Lorenzo was merely a ramshackle village of thatched huts in the jungle, a village in keeping with Honduras’ reputation as the most backward country in Central America.
Two Chinamen, however, had opened a neat little hotel there, and were ready for business. And there was entertainment in plenty, for Hop On and Hop Off, co-proprietors of the establishment, were engaged in discharging their native servant. The Honduranean, a big, niggerish-looking fellow with murder in his eye—in both eyes, to be accurate—was objecting to being discharged. He kept slouching from table to table, picking up dishes, and smashing them on the floor. Hop On and Hop Off were going frantic with rage at each new act of vandalism, but neither of them was of heroic stature, wherefore they resorted to strategy rather than force. They had taken shelter behind two doors at opposite ends of the dining room, and would pop out from concealment one at a time to shout curses at their erstwhile employee. No sooner would the Honduranean rush at one with his knife, than the door would slam shut in his face, while the other door opened and the other Hop screamed curses from the opposite wall. Finally, tired with the exertion, the big native accepted his discharge as final, and strolled outside to tell his troubles to the rest of the village, which had assembled to watch the excitement.
They were all ugly-visaged fellows. They lacked the gentle suavity of the neighboring peoples. They might have been no taller than Size B Irishmen, but after one had dwelt among the Lilliputians of Guatemala, they looked like giants. A taint of negro blood was evident in their features, for Honduras—which has a long strip of coast upon the Caribbean—was in past years a favorite refuge for run-away slaves from the West Indies, and its population to-day is the most heterogeneous in Central America. Little tufts of goat-like whiskers on chin and cheek did not add to their personal beauty. Altogether, this was the least charming race I had yet discovered on my travels.
Having accepted his discharge as final, the servant picked up an ax, and seated himself cross-legged on the ground before the hotel, hoping apparently that the Chinamen might venture outside into the gathering dusk. They continued, however, to revile him from the security of their two heavy doors, until the audience tired and drifted away, whereupon the quarrel seemed to die from lack of interest, and the Honduranean himself, having tossed the ax away with a gesture of disgust, wandered off down the street.
Supper was finally served on such tableware as remained unbroken. The village prostitute, aged sixteen, then took the center of the stage, and recited for our benefit the story of her life. While unfortunates in most lands prefer not to air their sorrows publicly, those of Latin America find a certain dramatic pleasure in so doing. For the next two hours the assembled guests heard the tale of her marriage to the handsome Sebastiano, of Sebastiano’s sudden death in an earthquake, and of the long succession of gentlemen who had consoled her for Sebastiano’s demise. Then some one bought her a drink, and she vanished into the night.
Later, the Honduranean returned, this time with a shot-gun. Thereupon the Chinamen bolted their doors, and everybody retired to bed.
I was awakened at 4 a.m. by a great pounding upon my door.
Bill, a husky American truck-driver, was going up to Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, and desired company. The business-like Chinese were already on the job with breakfast. We ate it in grouchy early-morning silence, and drove off toward the mountains through an inky-black fog.
“I know every inch of the way,” consoled Bill. “There’ll be no trouble unless somebody takes a shot at us, or blows up a bridge. They haven’t started yet, but they’re likely to, any minute. Somebody cut the telegraph wires last night.”
From time to time, as we raced through the darkness, stern voices called upon us to halt. From the road ahead a group of hard-faced natives would emerge into the glare of our searchlights, covering us with rifles. They were the federal soldiers, barefoot and tattered, with nothing to distinguish them from revolutionists. They examined my passport, ransacked the cargo in search of arms or ammunition, and finally permitted us to continue.
Eventually the sun made its appearance, revealing the most broken of landscapes. The name “Honduras” means depths, and the land is well named. A forty-five degree slope was considered fairly level here. On such grades, the peasants had built their patches of cornfield. Even these patches were infrequent, for the whole tumbled country seemed to go straight up or down. The road itself scaled precipitous heights, and twisted around narrow cliffs, where the least mistake of a chauffeur might send a car tumbling over and over into infinity. It was all ruggedly beautiful, particularly as we climbed into the coolness of six thousand feet above the sea, where the hills were covered with pines, but it was a cruel country—such a country as discourages agriculture and effectually prevents the transportation that might open up its vast store of mineral wealth—a country suited only for warfare and revolution. And from the time of the conquest revolution has been its principal product.
Bill, however, who had lived here for something over a decade, loved both the country and its people.
“They’re all right, if you know how to handle ’em. Take that boy of mine up there on the cargo. Mighty good boy. I got ’im tied up with rope just now. Came in drunk and kinder ugly last night. But he’s comin’ out of it. I’ll buy him a bracer at the next stop, and he’ll be all right. Best boy on the road.”
Bill spoke always with conviction. He finished off each sentence with ejaculations suitable only to the pulpit. Then he spat.
“I wouldn’t go home for a million dollars. Can’t stand the damned sissies back there. Give me roughnecks! I ain’t got much use for them society fellows. I’ve got a brother in Minneapolis. He was a regular guy when we was kids. Could lick anybody in school. But he made a lot of money and married one of them fiddle-ly-diddle-lies, and went all to pieces. I came home to see him two years ago. He met me at the station with a big car, all dressed up in a fur overcoat, and he says, ‘Bill, you’re just in time for luncheon.’ I looked at him. I says, ‘I guess you mean lunch, don’t you?’ He took me to a regular mansion. Out came the fiddle-ly-diddle-ly. He says, ‘Mable, may I present my long-lost brother from Honduras?’ Christ! Why couldn’t he say, ‘Bill, meet the old woman’? She holds out her hand, way up in the air, like they do in the movies, and says, ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’ God!”
He gave the wheel a violent twist, and we shot around a mountain cliff. He drove along a narrow precipice with one wheel almost hanging over the rugged gulch below.
“They took me down to ‘luncheon.’ One of them big English stiffs in a boiled shirt came out and gave us each a little cup of soup and a cracker. I just looked at my brother. ‘Joe,’ I says, ‘ain’t this lime-juicer goin’ to give us nothin’ to eat?’ He says, ‘We’ll have dinner in the evening; you’ll soon get accustomed to it.’ ‘Accustomed hell!’ I says; ‘to-night I’ll be down in a restaurant, gettin’ a regular feed. I’ll be eatin’ corn-beef and cabbage, same as you used to eat. I ain’t sore at you, Joe, I’m disappointed. You was a regular guy before you got them society ideas. But you don’t make a sissy out of me. I’m goin’ straight back to Honduras.’”
He drove along the precipice with savage relish. Presently, as we passed a little native farm in a rugged valley, he called my attention to it.
“That’s where my wife comes from. No fiddle-ly-diddle-ly for me. She’s an Indian—pure-blooded Indian—but she’s white—whiter’n you are—and a damned good wife, too. We don’t take luncheon in our house. We eat lunch. Luncheon! Christ!”
No one having shot at us from the hills or blown up a bridge, we raced into Tegucigalpa in the early afternoon.
Every one in the Capital was awaiting the revolution, but the city remained unperturbed.
It was an old, weatherbeaten town. A river wandered through it, bordered by high cement walls, and spanned by an aged stone bridge of many arches. The streets were hilly. Sidewalks might be level, but after one had followed them for a certain distance, one was apt to find himself ten feet above the driveway, sometimes able to descend by a flight of steps, but usually forced to jump or retrace his way. The houses were aged and bullet-scarred. If any of them had been constructed within the past forty years, the climate had quickly given it an appearance of venerability.
The central plaza was unattractive. There were a few palms and much purple bougainvillea, but they were surrounded by a rickety railing green with mildew, and interspersed with unattractive monuments. The buildings facing the plaza were of nondescript architecture. On one side was a yellowed cathedral, with several varieties of weeds sprouting in niches originally intended for images of the saints. On another was a row of arched portales, of flimsy wooden structure, housing several courtrooms, a barber shop, a fashionable club, and a number of cheap saloons. On the other two sides were stores.
The most imposing edifice in the city was the Presidential Palace. It stood upon the river bank, towering above massive ramparts like an ancient feudal castle. From its loop-holed walls machine-guns could sweep the old Spanish bridge. And from its windows the president could maintain a watchful eye upon the National Treasury across the street—a dilapidated old building whose contents at the moment consisted principally of a national debt.
FROM HIS PALACE THE PRESIDENT COULD WATCH THE TREASURY TO SEE THAT NO ONE STOLE THE NATIONAL DEBT
Why any one should fight for possession of this city, with its depleted finances, was a mystery later explained.
“The government took in eight million pesos last year,” said a well-posted American resident, “and only spent five million, yet it describes itself as penniless, and pays only the soldiers and police, keeping such employees as the school teachers waiting six months for their salaries. Three million pesos, almost half the country’s receipts, have disappeared. That’s why everybody is constantly squabbling for the presidency of the republic. That’s why Tegucigalpa remains the most ramshackle capital in Central America.”
The current political controversy was but a typical incident in the history of Honduras.
The term of President Rafael López Gutiérres had come to an end. During his two and a half years of office, he had weathered thirty-three insurrections. He was ready to retire. But his fellow politicians, although they had already prospered to the extent of three million pesos, demanded that he follow the Central-American custom of turning over his office to one of their own group, in order that their prosperity might continue. And the President gave his support to his personal friend, Bonilla.
At the elections recently held, there had arisen two other candidates, Carías and Árias. Through some oversight, the President had allowed a few of their supporters to help in the counting of the ballots. As a result, Carías led with fifty thousand votes, Árias following with thirty-five thousand, and Bonilla (the presidential favorite) bringing up the rear with only twenty thousand. And although Carías led, he failed to receive the absolute majority required by the Constitution to insure his election. It therefore devolved upon Congress to choose one of the three. And Congress favored Árias. To sum up the situation, the people preferred one candidate, Congress another, and the President another.
A revolution appeared inevitable. The President had declared martial law. Soldiers were everywhere. One could distinguish them from civilians because they carried rifles, and because when there were two or more of them they marched one behind the other in the center of the street, sometimes in cadence. A few had blue uniforms, a few had khaki; most of them wore whatever garments they happened to be wearing when drafted. Many were soldiers of fortune from neighboring countries—professional scrappers called in by a President who knew that his people were against him. They would stop me on the street occasionally to ask that I lend them a peseta—twenty-five cents—until pay-day, but they impressed me as a doubtful risk.
The city was ablaze with election slogans, scribbled with chalk upon every doorway—“Viva Árias!”—“Viva Carrías!”—“Muerto Bonilla!” Translated into “Live Árias,” “Live Carrías,” and “Death to Bonilla,” they seemed indicative of the earnest nature of Central-American political campaigns. All three candidates were now in the city. Each had a troop of his followers living at his residence for protection. One, who was stopping at the principal hotel, was surrounded by twenty armed gunmen, who sat about the bar-room and the lobby, scanning everybody who entered, and ready to take a precautionary shot at a member of another party. Each had spies watching the others, to see that they did not slip out of town to some assembly-point in the mountains. Some day, one of them would do it. In the meanwhile, the President in office kept a close eye on all three. From time to time a detachment of soldiers would come marching through town, bringing to prison a party of conspirators caught hatching insurrections in the neighboring villages.
The American Minister, Franklin Morales, was holding daily conferences at the Legation, bringing the candidates together in an effort to reach an agreement. Each took turns making speeches about his love of Honduras, his aversion to bloodshed, and his earnest hope that the muddle might be solved peacefully. When asked for a specific suggestion as to the solution, each seemed to think that it could be most satisfactorily achieved by the withdrawal of the other two candidates.
Meanwhile, every one in Tegucigalpa ripped up the boards of his floor, brought out the rifle and ammunition secreted for such an emergency, and waited for the fireworks. And the time-scarred old Capital seemed to be saying to itself: “Another revolution can’t do me any harm.”
But when I inquired as to just when the fireworks would start, it developed that a revolution was as undependable as transportation facilities had been.
“Who knows, señor? Perhaps the day after to-morrow, perhaps the day after that. Quién sabe?”
I settled at a small hotel, where one enjoyed the advantage of intimate association with a native family.
There were only two other guests, but the family was multitudinous. A young man had fallen in love with the landlady’s daughter, and married her, and had brought so many relatives of his own to live at his mother-in-law’s expense, that they filled all the rooms, until there was space only for three boarders. Just how they all managed to exist on the trifling income of the establishment was an unfathomable mystery, but they contrived somehow not only to feed and clothe themselves, but also to keep a servant.
She was an anemic little girl in a tattered linen dress. She was always smiling as she raced from one room to another to answer a summons. Everybody seemed to take fiendish delight in calling for her. The cry of, “Petrona! Petrona!” echoed across the patio from morning until night. Even the parrot had adopted the slogan, and throughout his waking hours would screech, “Petrona!” And Petrona, always cheerful, obeyed each call.
One of the other guests was a married lady, whose husband had sent her to Tegucigalpa to keep her out of the way of an expected battle elsewhere. With the extreme faithfulness of Latin-American wives, she locked herself in her room, to which Petrona brought her meals. She emerged only to wash baby clothes at the hotel pump, or to scream instructions to her numerous progeny in the patio—a noisy little brood of future revolutionists who paid no heed to her many injunctions.
The other guest was a Spaniard, who had just come up from Nicaragua to bring twenty-four prize game-cocks for Sunday’s rooster fight. He was a tall, horse-faced, loquacious individual, who talked continuously at the table, mostly in subtle smut. He was an artist at the use of double entente, and had raised vulgarity above the level of pure nastiness, so that it was now quite suitable for dinner-table conversation in the presence of ladies. He was a jovial person, predisposed toward the singing of love songs, to which he could wave time with his knife and never spill a bean. If his game-cocks won on Sunday, he was planning to hire an airplane and fly home to Nicaragua. He intended to load it with beautiful women, and sail as close as possible to the romantic tropical moon.
His roosters were tied to stanchions in the patio. They were continually glaring at one another, flapping their wings, crowing challenges, and straining at the cords that held each of them by the foot. Whenever the Spaniard ceased his vigilance, one of the married lady’s children was certain to unloose a bird, and watch him peck a neighbor to death. But on Saturday the survivors were sent to the arena, packed into individual compartments in a large wooden box, and thereafter the hotel was peaceful. The box disappeared down the street on the shoulders of a peon, accidentally inverted, so that the game-cocks stood on their heads—an indignity which should have made them scrapping mad for the morrow.
The revolution not having materialized, I went to the cock-fight. It was held in a back yard, where a rude board shack had been improvised. There was a dirt-floored ring, surrounded by a four-foot wall, and overlooked by a rickety grand-stand and a still more rickety bleachers.
The ring was already thronged with natives, each holding a rooster in his arms, and shoving it at another fellow’s rooster in order to provoke the martial spirit. The birds were fluttering, blinking beady eyes at other birds, and clucking loudly to express their irritation. Back against the adobe rampart of the establishment were some forty other prospective contestants, each in an individual cage, crowing noisily as though he would proclaim himself the father of the largest egg ever laid in Honduras.
There was much delay. It seems that the gentlemen in the ring were trying to match their birds, but each desired to pair off his own with one that could be easily licked. There was much argument, much waving of hands, much indignant protest. At length it was settled. A little fat man beside me commenced sawing off the spurs from a rooster’s legs, and fitting thereon two sharp curved blades of steel. At the money counter—a rough wooden board presided over by a tall stony-faced man with heavy black eyebrows and the general air of the professional gambler—there was great excitement. Men crowded about it, shouting, “Two pesos on the red one!” “One peso on the gallina!”
The umpire—a well-dressed, impressive-looking individual who had once held office in the Honduran cabinet—inspected the steel gaffs, and the fight commenced. The two owners released their birds, and withdrew. For a moment both cocks eyed one another. Then, in apparent indifference, they turned away, and pecked unconcernedly at the ground, strolling around the ring as though neither saw the other. They walked clumsily, bothered by the long blades they carried. Occasionally they stopped, raised their heads, and crowed. Then they resumed their pecking at the earth, hunting imaginary worms. This, however, was all bluff, designed to throw the adversary off his guard. Quick as a flash one turned and flew at the other. They met in mid-air with a great flurry of feathers. Back they drew, crouching. Then they were at it again, clawing and pecking until the world became saturated with flying rooster.
The spectators went frantic with joy. They screamed applause. They shouted advice at the contestants.
Again the cocks drew back, crouching. A wild yell went up from the stands. I could observe nothing, but these fellows were experts, and they saw the end before it came. For suddenly, without warning, one of the cocks toppled upon its side, gushing blood from its trembling beak. In a flash the other was upon it, pecking triumphantly at its head. And the crowd poured into the ring.
There were other combats. The intermissions were long, and marked always with much bickering. The fight might end in a minute; the intermission was always at least a half hour. After the roosters were paired there was delay for the fixing of the gaffs, delay for the betting, delay while each owner brought in another cock to peck his fig