Juan Rulfo, "The Fields on Fire"

  “Big up Petronilo Flores!”
    The shout came bouncing off the massive walls of the gulley right up to where we were. Then it broke apart.
 For a bit, the wind blowing from under us brought up all these voices piled up, making a racket like what falling water makes when it runs over rocks.
    Right then, coming out from down there again, another shout bent through the turns in the gulley. It bounced off those massive walls like before and arrived at us just as loud:
    “Big up our general Petronilo Flores!”
    We looked at each other.
    The Bitch got up slowly, took the bullet out the chamber of his carbine and put it in a pocket in his shirt. Then he got himself over to where the The Four were and said to them: “After me lads, let’s see what bullocks we can have!” The four Benavides brothers went behind him, heads down: only The Bitch went out back-straight, half his lanky body poking out the ridge.  
    We stayed up where we were, not for shifting. We were lined up at the foot of the ridge, pinned belly-up like iguanas warming ourselves in the sun.
    The stone ridge wound up and down and up and down about the hills, and them lot, The Bitch and The Four, went winding as well like their feet were tied up.
We watched them disappear like that from out our eyeline. After a bit we turned our face to have another look that way and we saw the low branches of those soap plants that gave us fuck-all shade.
    It smelt of them and all: of a shadow heated up by the sun. Of rotten soap plants.
    You could feel the midday slump. .
    The racket from down below kept overflowing from out the gulley to jerk us awake, so we couldn’t get any shuteye. And even though we wanted to listen out, our ears proper focussed, all we heard was that racket: a whirl of whispers like listening from far away to the droning sound that wagons make on the cobbles.
    Right then a shot went off. The gulley echoed the noise like it was bouncing off the walls. That woke everything up: the totochilos went flying, them colourful birds we’d been seeing messing about in the soap plants. Then the crickets, that’d been asleep with the midday, they also woke up, filling the land with their creaking.
      “What were that?” asked Pedro Zamora, still half-asleep from his nap.
    Then The Chihuila got himself up and went up behind them lot that that’d fucked off, dragging his carbine like it were a branch.
      “I’ll have a look” he said, also disappearing off like them others.
    The creaking from them crickets got so loud we went deaf so we didn’t notice when they turned up over there. At least we remembered they were already here, just opposite us, all of them clueless. They looked like they were off on a walk, dressed smart for somet else and not all this.
    We rolled over and had a gander through our sights.
    The first lot went by, then the second and then more of them, their body bent forward, hunchbacked by tiredness. Their face shone with sweat, like they’d had a dip in the water when they went past the stream.
    They kept on coming.
    The signal went off. You heard a long whistle and the shooting started down below, where The Bitch had gotten off to.
Then it got here.
  It was a piece of piss. They almost filled up the hole in the sights with how many of them there were, so it were like letting off at them up close and making them shit-scared before they died without them barely realising.
    But this only lasted for a bit. Well probably for the first and second volley. The gap in the sights was emptied out pretty sharpish, so that someone peeping through only saw them that were lying in the middle of the road, half-bent, as if someone had basically thrown them there.
The survivors disappeared. They turned up again later, but for now they weren’t there.
    We had to wait for the next volley.
    A few of us shouted, “Big up Pedro Zamora!”
    They came back from the other side, almost like a secret: “Dear Lord save me! Save me! Baby Jesus help me!”
    The birds went past. A load of thrushes crossed over us toward the hills.
    The third volley came at us from behind. It burst out from them, making us skip over to the other side of the ridge, further up to the deadens we’d done in.
    After that the race started, through the bushes. We felt the bullets stinging our heels, like we’d fallen into a nest of grasshoppers. A few times and getting closer every time, they’d be landing smack-bang in the middle of a group of us that would break up with the crackling bone sound.
    We legged it. We got to the end of the gulley and got down off there like we were throwing ourselves off.
    They carried on shooting. They still carried on shooting after we’d got up on the other side, on all fours, like coatis shit-scared of the light.
    “Big up our General Flores! Your mums are slags!” we shouted again. And the shout went out, bouncing like thunder in a storm, gulley underneath.

We stayed pinned down behind some big bastard rocks, still proper panting from our run. We just looked at Pedro Zamora, asking him with our eyes what’d happened to us. But he looked right back at us without saying out. It was like he didn’t get on with us anymore, or like our tongues had been turned into balls like them parakeets and it was hard work untying it to say out.
    Pedro Zamora carried on watching us. He was working it out with his eyes, with them eyes of his, all red, like he always had them open. He counted us one by one. He already knew how many of us there were from the lot that were there, but he still seemed unsure, so he went over us one time and again and again.
    We were missing a few: eleven or twelve not counting The Bitch or The Chihuila and them that they’d enlisted to come with them. With The Chihuila there was a good chance he had some soap plants between his legs, lying on his breech-loader in wait for the squaddies to come out.
    The Joses, The Bitch’s two lads, they were the first to stick their heads out, then their bodies. Eventually they got from one side to the other waiting for Pedro Zamora to say somet. And he said:
      “Another tight spot like that and we’re fucked.”
    Right then, grozzing like he’d swallowed a bellyful of rage, he went off at The Judges: “I know you’ve just lost your dad, but pull yourselves together, just pull yourselves together! We’ll carry on for his sake!”
    A bullet fired from well off got a flock of killdeer on the hillside opposite us to start flying. The birds dipped over the gully and swirled round to us; then, when they saw us they got scared, turned around shiny against the sun and filled the trees on the hillside opposite with their screaming.
    The Joses went back to the same place as before and squatted keeping quiet.
    We stayed like that all afternoon. When the night started to come down The Chihuila arrived with one of The Four. They told us they’d come from further down, from Smooth Rock, but they couldn’t tell us if the squaddies had already pulled out. All we knew was that everything seemed calm. Sometimes you could hear the coyotes howling.
      “Oy, Pidgeon!” Pedro Zamora said to me, “I’m giving you the job of going with the Joses to Smooth Rock to find out what happened to The Bitch. If he’s dead, well bury him. Same goes for the others. Leave the wounded out on top of somet so the squaddies can see them; just don’t bring anyone back.”
      That we did.
    And we left.
    You could hear the coyotes getting closer when we got to the pen where we’d been keeping the horses.
    There weren’t any horses anymore, just a skinny donkey that’d probably already been living there before we came. The squaddies had deffo nicked the horses.
    We found the rest of The Four behind some bushes, the three of them together, piled one on top of the other like they’d been left there in a heap. We lifted their heads up and shook em a bit to see if any of them would come to, but they were proper dead. There was another one of ours in the water with his ribs out like they’d had at him with a machete. And walking round the pen we’d find one here and another over there, almost all of them with a proper grimy face.
      “Well they finished off this lot, that goes without saying” said one of the Joses.
    We started to look for The Bitch, not worrying about anyone else until we found the fucking Bitch.
    We didn’t find him.
    “They must have nabbed him” we thought. They must have nabbed him to show off to the government, but even so we kept looking all over, between the stalks. The coyotes carried on howling.
    They carried on howling all night.

A few days after, when we were in Armería, we managed to meet that Petronilo Flores again as were crossing the river. We tried turning back but by then it were too late. It was like being executed. Pedro Zamora rode off, putting that spotty shortarse mule on a gallop, without a doubt the best animal I ever met. We were all in a herd behind him, bent over our horses’ necks. Goes without saying that there was a huge killing. I didn’t realise straight away cos I was drowning in the river under my dead horse, and the flow of water dragged us both well far up to some pool with barely any water and a load of sand.
    That were the last scrap we had with Petrolino Flores’ lot. After that we didn’t fight each other. To be fair, we didn’t fight anyone for a while, just staying on the move, keeping a low profile, that’s how the few of us who were left thought we’d get through it, flinging ourselves up on the hill to hide from whoever might be looking for us. So we ended up being such a tiny little group that no one was scared of us anymore. No one ran screaming “It’s Zamora’s lot!” anymore.
    It were calm again on the Great Plain.

But only for a bit.
    We spent about eight months hiding in that canyon at Tozín, where the Armería river runs between the cliffs for ages just to throw itself over the bank. We’d been hoping to let the years go by and make a comeback later, when no one had a clue who we were. We’d started keeping chickens and sometimes we went up in the mountains to look for deer. There were five of us, nearly four cos one of the Joses’ legs had gotten gangrene from a bullet they managed to get just under his arse from that time they shot at us from behind.
    So that’s how we were, starting to feel like we were a bit useless. We’dve probably gone soft if we didn’t know they wanted to hang us all.
    But then some bloke called Armancio Alcalá turned up, who was the one that wrote us messages and letters to Pedro Zamora.
    It was early in the morning, while we were keeping ourselves busy taking a cow apart, when we heard a whistle from a horn. It came from well off, from the way to the Plain. After a bit you could hear it again. It sounded like a bull groaning: high-pitched at first, then deep, then high again. The echo dragged it out further and further and brought it here up close, until the purring river drowned it out.
    And the sun was already about to come out when that Alcalá showed himself coming out the trees. He had two crossed belts on filled with .44 cartridges and a shit-ton of rifles arriving across his horse’s backside like in a trunk.
    He got off his mule. He gave us a carbine each and put the ones that were left back in his trunk.
      “Unless any of you’ve got anything urgent coming up today or tomorrow then you should all get yourselves ready to go to Saint Fortune. Pedro Zamora awaits you there. In the meantime, I’m going to go a bit further down and look for the Zanates. I’ll be back later.”
    He came back the day after, when it was already getting dark. And yeah, the Zanates came back with him. You could make out their dark faces in the afternoon dimness. There were another three who came with them who we didn’t know.
      “We’ll get horses on the way there” he told us. And we followed him.
    We saw that the farms were on fire well before arriving at Saint Fortune. The fire shot up higher from the barns on the estate, like a pool of paint thinner was burning itself out. Sparks flew and made rings in the dark sky making these big glowing clouds.
    We carried on walking straight on, enjoying the Saint Fortune illuminations. It was like someone had told us that we had a job to do over there, like to pick off anyone that were left standing.
    But we hadn’t even got there when we saw the first few trotting out on horses out the commotion. They had rope tied to the front of the saddle and were dragging these guys along who they’d caught, and a few of them still walked on their hands every now and then but there were other guys whose hands had already given up on them, dragging along their slumped heads We watched them go past. Pedro Zamora came from further down with a lot of people on horses. Way more than ever before. That bucked us up.
It bucked us up seeing that long line of lads crossing the Great Plain again, like in the good old days. Like at the start, when we’d come up out the ground like old thistle shook by the wind to scare the shit out of everyone living round the Plain. There’d been a time like that once. And now it looked like it were making a comeback.

From there we set off for Saint Peter. We set it on fire and then took the road to Petacal. It was that time of year when the corn was already for picking so you could see the plants all dry and bent by the blustery wind that blew over the Plain around then. It looked well pretty walking by seeing the fields on fire, seeing nearly all the Plain made into nout but hot coal in that there fire, with the smoke wriggling over, that smoke that smelt of grass and honey cos the lightshow had gotten to the estuaries and all.
    And from out the smoke came us, like scarecrows with our sooty faces, driving cows from here and there to bring them together somewhere and take their skins off. That was our job now: selling cow skins.
    Because, as Pedro Zamora told us: “We’ll make this revolution with rich people’s money. This revolution of ours demands weapons and funds that they’ll pay for. And even though we don’t have a flag to fight under right now, we should still set ourselves to hoarding up money, that way when the army comes, they’ll see just how hard we are” that’s what he told us.
    And when the army did finally arrive they set off killing us again like before, though not as easily. Now you could tell from a mile off that they were afraid of us.
    But we were afraid of them and all. We only had to hear them from out their camp or the hooves of their horses hitting the paving of some road where we were lying in wait to ambush them and it’d feel like we were gagging on their balls down our throats. When we watched them go past we almost felt as if they were watching us out the corners of their eyes, saying “Now we can smell them” and just not paying us any mind.
    That’s how it seemed anyway, because out the blue they would throw themselves on the ground, taking cover behind their horses and holding out against us there, until others got closer to us little by little, trapping us like chickens in a pen. After that we knew we weren’t gonna last long carrying on like that, even though there were loads of us. 
   And it’s like, now it wasn’t like how it was with that lot under General Urbano, the first lot they’d thrown our way who got scared just by shouting and big hats, that lot who’d been dragged from their farms by force to fight us and who ran off after only seeing a few of us. They’d already been finished with. Others came afterwards, but this last lot were the hardest. Now there was this Olachea with some hardened, mad bastards and mountain men brought from Teocaltiche with Tepehuane Indians mixed in, mop-haired Indians used to not eating for days. We’d sometimes spend hours spying on one of them with our eyes wide open, not blinking, waiting for them to pop their head out to let fly one of them long 30-30 bullets that’d shatter a spine like breaking a rotten tree branch.
    Goes without saying it were easier falling on the farms instead of ambushing the army. It were cos of that that we scattered out, and with an handful here and another there we did more harm than ever, always legging it, giving them an hard kick and then legging it like gormless donkeys.
    So like, whilst the jasmine farms were being burnt round the edge of the volcano, others of us would come down rapid on the groups of soldiers, dragging branches of that needle bush and making them think there were loads of us, hidden behind clouds of dust and the yelling we had as our weapons.
    The better squaddies’d stay quiet and wait. One time we were making our way from one side to the other, and like that they were some going ahead and some going behind like fuckwits. And from here you could see the bonfires on the open field, these big fires like when they burn out the forest to clear it out. From here we’d see the fire from the little villages and the farms if it were light or dark, and sometimes from the bigger towns like Tuzamilpa and Zapotitlin, lighting up the night. The lads from Olachea headed out for there on a forced march, but when they arrived Totolimispa started burning, which was nowhere near, like way behind them.
    It looked pretty from where we were. Coming out sharpish from that tangle of whitetrees when the squaddies had already left with their war wages, we could see them cross the open, empty Plain, nothing in their way, like they’d dived in the deep, bottomless water of that great big horseshoe that the Plain was, shut in by the mountains.

We burned down Custecomate and had a game of bullfighting there. Pedro Zamora loved that bull game.
    The squaddies had fucked off to Autlán looking for somewhere they called Purification, cos they reckoned we’d come from some nest of crims round there. So they’d left us alone in Cuastecomate.
    There we had the pieces to play the bullfighting game. They’d left about eight soldiers behind cos they’d forgotten them, and on top of that we had the agent and foreman from the estate. There were two days of bullfighting.
    We had to make a round little pen like the kind they use to keep goats, which was the ring. And we sat around the barrier to keep in the bullfighters, who’d leg it soon as they saw the shiv Pedro Zamora wanted to skewer them with.
    The first eight young squaddies lasted us an afternoon. Those other two lasted till the next. That lanky foreman took the longest out of them – built like a sugar cane he were – he wobbled about for a bit before giving in. And then you had the agent who died after. He were a shortarse and a bit gormless: he didn’t even try to get out the way of the knife. He died quietly, almost without moving and as if he’d wanted to get stabbed. But that foreman he took some work.
    Pedro Zamora had given them all a blanket, which was how they, or at least the foreman, had managed to keep clear of the shiv, cos he had this thick, heavy blanket; well as soon as he knew what he’d been signed up for, he kept rattling the blanket against the shiv whenever it came straight for him, so he kept up his passes until Pedro Zamora got knackered. Now it was obvious how knackered he’d gotten from going around menacing the foreman, without being able to put a few tears in the back of his jacket. And he lost his patience. He let things carry on as they were for a bit and, out of nowhere, instead of coming straight on like bullfighters do, he tried to tickle this bloke from Cuastecomate with the shiv, making him change the cape over to his other hand. That foreman didn’t seem to realise what’d happened, cos he still went a fair while shaking this blanket up and down like he were trying to scare off some wasps. It were only when he saw his blood spurting out his waist that he stopped moving. That shit him up so he tried to cover the hole that’d been made through his sides with his fingers, and all the colour came out of him in a single jet leaving him more and more pale. Afterwards he got tied up in the middle of the pen looking at all of us. And there he stayed until we hanged him, cos otherwise he’dve taken a long time dying.
    After that, Pedro Zamora played the bull game more often, whenever he got the chance.
    Back in them days pretty much all of us were “lowlanders”, from Pedro Zamora downward; afterward we were joined by people from other places: them blonde Indians from Zacoalco, lanky and they had like cottage-cheese faces. And them others from that cold country they called Mazamitla who were always going about wrapped in their blankets like as if it were sleeting. That lot fed themselves on heat, so Pedro Zamora ordered them to guard the way through the Volcanoes, way high up, where there were nout but pure sand and rocks cleaned by the wind. But those blonde Indians soon took to Pedro Zamora and didn’t want to be parted from him. They were always stuck to him, making shade for him and doing all the other orders he wanted them to do. Sometimes they’d nab the best girls there were from the towns so he could take care of them.
    I remember it all pretty well. The nights we spent in the mountains, walking without making a peep and really wanting to get a kip, when the squaddies were already right up our arses. I still see Pedro Zamora with his purple cape rolled up on his shoulders making sure no one were lagging behind.
      “Oy, you, Pitasio, put some spurs on that horse! And don’t you fall asleep on me, Reséndiz, I need someone to have a chat with!”
    Yeah, he looked after us. We’d go walking in the dead middle of the night, eyes shocked out of sleep and thoughts gone; but he, him who’d look after us all, would speak to us so we’d raise our head. We felt those proper open eyes of his, that didn’t sleep and were used to seeing at night and telling us apart in the darkness. He’d count us all, one by one, like he were counting money. Afterwards he’d go to our side. We’d hear the trotting of his horse and we’d know that his eyes were always alert; so we’d all, not moaning about the cold or how tired we were, quiet, follow him like the blind.

But the thing we had going for us completely came apart after we took that train off its tracks on the hill at Sayula. If that hadn’t happened, Pedro Zamora and Chinese Arias and The Chihuila and all the rest of them might still be with us, and the commotion might have settled down on the right track. But Pedro Zamora pricked the government’s feathers with that train derailing at Sayula.
    I still see the lights from the fires flaring up over where they piled up the dead. They’d gathered them together with shovels or made them roll like logs to the bottom of the hill, and when the mountain got big, they drenched it in fuel and set it on fire. The smell carried on the air from well off, and days after you could still smell that reek of burned dead.
    Just before we didn’t have a clue what were gonna happen. We’d sprinkled cow horns and bones on a long stretch of the track and, just in case that wasn’t enough, we’d opened the rails where the train would go to move into the bend. We did that and waited.
    The early morning was starting to light things up. Now you could make out the people bunched up on the carriage roofs pretty clearly. You could hear a few of them singing. There were men’s and women’s voices. They went past facing us still a bit shadowy in the night, but we could tell they were squaddies out with their birds. We waited. The train weren’t for stopping.
    If we wanted to we’dve shot at it, cos the train was going slow and panting like it wanted to get up the hill just by groans. We’dve had our chance after chatting with them a bit. But it turned out different.
    They started realising what was happening to them when they felt the carriages swinging, rattling the train like someone was giving it a shake. Then the engine went back on herself, dragged and off the track by those heavy carriages full of people. She gave off a few pained and sad and long whistles. But no one helped her. She carried on backwards, dragged by that train you couldn’t see the end of, up to where the ground ended and going sideways she fell to the bottom of the gulley. Then the carriages followed her, one after the other, at full speed, all of them lying in their place down there. Afterward everything stayed silent like as if everyone, us as well, had died.
    So that’s how that went.
    When the survivors started to come out the carriage bits, we fucked off from there, cramping from how afraid we were.
    We stayed hidden a few days; but the squaddies came to pull us out our hiding spot. Now they didn’t leave us in peace; not even to have a chew on a bit of jerky in peace. They had us giving up on bedtime and dinner time, and had it so days and nights meant the same to us. We wanted to get to that canyon at Tozin; but the government got there before we did. We went round the edge of the volcano. We trekked up to the highest point and there, in that place they call God’s Way, we found the government shooting to kill again. We felt like they were dropping bullets down on us, in tight bursts, heating the air around us. And they tore every single rock we hid ourselves behind to shreds like it were a lump of dirt. Afterward we thought them carbines were machine gunners with how they were now shooting above us and how they left one of us looking like a sieve; but then we reckoned there were a lot of soldiers, for miles, and all we wanted to do was leg it from them. Whoever of us could run went for it. The Chihuila stayed behind at God’s Way, squatting behind a strawberry tree, with his blanket wrapped around his neck like he was fending off the cold. He were watching us as we all scattered to split the dying between us. And he seemed to be laughing at us, with his teeth on show, red from the blood.
    That scattering we did did a lot of us right; but it fucked over others of us.  It were weird that we didn’t see any of us hanging from the feet from some pole along some road. They’d stay there till they went old and wrinkly like skins that hadn’t been tanned.
The vultures’d eat their insides, taking out their guts, till all that were left were the skin. And cos they’d hang them like high up, there they’d stay keeping watch of what way the wind were blowing for days on end, sometimes months, sometimes now nout but shreds of pants bustling with the wind like someone had put them out to dry. And you’d feel seeing it there like it were bound to happen any time now.
    A few of us made progress to Big Hill and dragging ourselves like vipers we’d spend our time looking at the Plain, at that dirt from down there where we’d been born and lived and where now we were waiting to get ourselves killed. Sometimes even the shadow of the clouds would shit us up.      We’d’ve been happy to tell everybody we weren’t up for fighting anymore so that they’d leave us in peace; but, cos of how much trouble we’d made from one place to another, people had gone off us so all we’d done was make enemies for ourselves. Even the Indians from up there didn’t like us anymore. They said we’d killed their poor animals. And now they have guns the government gave them and they’ve ordered them to kill us soon as they see us.
    “We don’t wanna see yous; but if we see yous we’ll kill yous.”, they told them to say.
     It was cos of things like that we were running out of land. Now there was hardly a bit left to us to be buried in by them. So the last of us decided to scatter, each one reserving a different place.

I hanged about with Pedro Zamora for five years. Good days, bad days, five years of that. After that I didn’t see him again. They say he fucked off to Mexico over a bird and that they killed him there. Some of us were waiting for him to make a comeback, like he’d show up again any day now to get us to rise up in arms again: but we got sick of waiting. He’s still not come back. They killed him there. Someone who was in prison with me told me that they’d killed him.
    I got out of prison three years ago. They did me for a lot of crimes; but not cos I’d hung about with Pedro Zamora. That they didn’t know. They nabbed me for other stuff, amongst other things for the bad habit I had of having my way with girls. Now one of them lives with me, maybe the best and most lovely out of all the women in the world. It were her who was there, just outside the prison, waiting since God knows when for them to let me out.
      “Pidgeon, I’ve been waiting for you!” she said, “I’ve waited for you for a long time!” Then I thought she’d been waiting for me to kill me. Then like in a daydream I remembered who she was.
    I was taken back to feeling the cold water from that storm that’d been falling on Telcampana, that night that we’d gone in and massacred the town. I was pretty sure her dad were that bloke we’d put to rest when we were on our way out; who one of us had shot a bullet hole in his head whilst I threw his daughter over the seat of my horse and gave her a few knocks on the head so she’d calm down and not carry on biting me. She were a girl of about fourteen years, pretty eyes, who gave me a lot of trouble and was a proper piece of work breaking in.
      “I’ve got one of your sons” she told me afterwards. “He’s here”. And she pointed with her finger at a tall kid with embarrassed eyes:
      “Take your hat off, so your dad can see you!” and the kid took off his hat. He were the spitting image of me and had a bit of a shady look. A bit of that had to have come from his dad.
      “He’s called Pidgeon as well,” said the woman again, her who’s now my wife. “But he’s not a crim or a murderer. He’s a good lad.”
    I hanged my head.

Translated from the Spanish by John White