The Secret of El Gringo

Just outside Acapulco, on the road to Mexico City, is a little garden restaurant called El Parque Cachu. Its proprietor, a grey little man known to his neighbors as el gringo, hid his Nordic blue eyes behind dark glasses as he served beer and tacos in the shade of his cashew trees.

When the neighbors got too curious about el gringo's big library, his Mexican wife apologized: "He's a rare one. He doesn't like to make friends. He mostly just works in the restaurant or at his desk."

Man with a Mission. To El Parque Cachu one day last month came Luis Spota, an aggressive, 25-year-old reporter from Mexico City. Friendly Luis Spota managed to penetrate the old man's rock-like reserve. They talked of many things, but not of the mysterious author B. Traven, the secret of whose identity had baffled a generation of admirers--including his publishers. Traven's books--sea, stories and Mexican adventure novels laced with bitter comments on the futility of modern man--have had a tremendous following in Latin America and in Europe. In the U.S. he was virtually unknown until his Treasure of the Sierra Madre was made into a splendid movie.

"Find out who Traven is," Spota's editor had once told him, "and you will be a great reporter." From that day, Luis Spota had been a man with a mission. When he finished his stay at El Parque Cachu, Spota went back to Mexico City and wrote a strange and wistful story. It appeared last week in the magazine Manana.

The story proved beyond a doubt that el gringo was born in Chicago of Swedish parents 58 years ago; that he had lived in Mexico since 1913; that he had once worked in the Tampico oilfields. It proved that his name was Berick Torsvan--and that he was B. Traven.

On the Trail. In his pursuit of Traven, Spota had got almost nowhere until last year. Then, during the filming of Treasure, Director John Huston was confronted one day by a little grey man who called himself Hal Croves. He was Traven's secretary, he said, come in response to Huston's call for advice from the author. Huston guessed that Croves was Traven himself.

When he said so, Croves flinched and began to make the wildest suggestions about the film. "Traven in contact with people," Huston said afterwards, "disintegrates and becomes ridiculous. And he is intelligent enough to know that he is ridiculous." When Huston's story was published (TIME, LIFE, Feb. 2), Croves denied it in caustic letters to both magazines.

Mexican Producer Luis Sanchez Tello, an associate of Huston's, later bumped into Croves in San Antonio, Tex., and at Croves's urgent request lent him $100. The loan was repaid by check. Spota never learned who had signed the check. But he discovered that Croves had been traveling on a U.S. passport, and that the check had been sent from Acapulco.

Spota hurried there, and by some sharp questioning compiled a list of some 50 Americans who might have been drawing checks on Acapulco banks. One of them was Berick Torsvan, the proprietor of El Parque Cachu.

Journey's End. Spota had been searching the Mexican government's files on European immigrants for years. Now he tried the U.S. file--and promptly turned up a record of Torsvan that included his full name: Berick Traven Torsvan Torsvan. After he had bribed a servant to let him read el gringo's mail, Spota was convinced: Torsvan was Croves, and Croves was Traven.

He went back to the restaurant, and confronted the proprietor. The old man flushed. At first he insisted that B. Traven was a cousin. When Spota persisted, he offered to write a psychological study of B. Traven in return for the reporter's silence. Then he shouted that B. Traven was really several writers, that he himself had contributed only anecdotes.

"In Tampico," he added in the next breath, "it bothered me that they called me 'the Swede,' and I began to call myself Traven. Some publisher in Munich added the B." Finally Reporter Spota had proved his case, had his story. He left as el gringo pleaded: "Go away and let me alone."

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