THE NATIVE
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apparently shifted from its dream of a lift to a yearning for some
cooler spot in the shade. The tropical sun was burning as though it
had been focused on us by some diabolic lens, and while we were
not ready to abandon our project for the day, we felt we had to
get to the sidelines to think things over.
.As
we sat under a tree by the side of the road, debating the haz–
ards and possibilities of making the trip on our own, we noticed a
man plowing an adjacent field. I had, of course, heard of primitive
methods of farming in more backward parts of the world, but now
I found myself shrinking from the shame and the sorrow of seeing an
old, bony ox laboring to pull a tree trunk along the ground, and a
dark, shrunken man coaxing him from behind with a long switch.
The unwieldy plow bumped ahead, inch by inch, getting caught in
the earth every few minutes, while the farmer, with an air of timeless–
ness and infinite patience, alternately prodded the ox and disengaged
the tree when it got stuck. We watched the farmer and his primitive
machine crawl back and forth for about fifteen minutes, wondering
how long he could stand the pounding of the sun. Suddenly he
stopped, unhitched his ox from the plow, and led it to the shade of a
nearby tree. Then he began to walk toward us at the same lethargic
pace he had been plowing. His face was darkly gnarled and seamed,
like an old apple tree, but it was shining with a steady smile that
seemed to bypass his hard, weatherbeaten features. As he approached
us we greeted him in Spanish, but he did not reply. Instead he began
to gesticulate passionately, like an army signaler with an urgent mes–
sage, and to talk rapidly in a deep guttural tongue. He kept pointing
to his ox and to the field he had been working, his desperate grunts
punctuating the insistent movements of his arms.
This continued for five or ten minutes, and, to tell the truth,
I was just as bewildered as I was fascinated by his frantic but genial
efforts to communicate with us. By this time I had lost all hope of
being able to understand him, for it was clear that he knew no
Spanish and that he was trying to talk to us in some old Indian
dialect. But Edna, who has a talent for comprehending the incom–
prehensible, seemed to be responding to the rhythm of his gestures
and his voice, and her sympathetic smile blended with his in a con–
versational rapport, .as though they had been speaking the same
language.
