Central American Anecdote

THE BRIDGE IN THE JUNGLE--B. Traven--Knopf ($2.50).

Gales, a businesslike American in the middle of a Central American jungle looking for alligators, came upon a little Indian village by the side of a river. People said that he had once been interrupted when he was just on the point of raising an Indian from the dead, which gave him a useful reputation. He got to know the Indians in the village: the master of a pump station which pumped water through the jungle to a railroad depot; the pump master's wife, an aristocrat because she owned pots and pans; a young, handsome Indian named Perez; the Garcia family--old Garcia with a silky beard and a taste for music, his young wife, his eldest son, Manuel, home on a holiday from the Texas oil fields, his youngest son, Carlos.

One night the pump master bought two cases of beer, four cases of soda water and gave a dance in his front yard. The musicians got lost in the jungle but Garcia played the fiddle. It was a dark night. Manuel had brought Carlos a pair of tight, shiny shoes as a present from Texas. Carlos, used to running barefoot, slipped on a narrow bridge and fell into the river. When the boy was missed, the women wailed, the men put a consecrated candle on a piece of wood, let it float to midstream. Where it stopped, Perez dived and brought up the body. They took it to the Garcias' little hut, dressed it in a shoddy blue sailor-suit, put a crown of gold paper on its head.

Two mornings later, after the mourners had shot off fireworks, got drunk, said how beautiful the dead boy looked, the body had hideously decomposed. A violin and a guitar played mournfully It Ain't Gonna Rain No More as they started in procession. At the cemetery the drunken schoolmaster, pronouncing a funeral oration, fell into the grave. Nobody laughed. A row of buzzards sat on the fence like undertakers. The violin and the guitar played Yes, We Have No Bananas.

The Author of The Bridge in the Jungle is undoubtedly an American. Beyond that, he is one of publishing's minor mysteries. Knopf conspicuously omits biographical notes from the jackets of "B. Traven's" books. Guesses have ranged from the suggested, that here is a modest author, to, that here is a pseudonym used to avoid damaging the writer's reputation in some solemn field. The books themselves give few clues. They are written in a dry, travel-talk style, as awkward and as full of irrelevant observations as a letter home.

"B. Traven's" first two books, The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, were published in the U. S. only after they had been published in virtually every country in Europe. Both together sold 4,000,000 copies in Soviet Russia. The Death Ship sold more than 250,000 in Germany before it was black-listed by the Nazis.

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