Juanito continued to stare downward.
Joseph sat down beside him. “My father is dead,
Juanito.”
“I am sorry, my friend.”
“But I want to talk about that, Juanito, because you
are my friend. For myself I am not sorry, because my father is here.”
The dead are always here, señor. They never go away.”
“No”, Joseph said earnestly. “It is more than that. My
father is in that tree. My father is that tree! It is silly, but I want to
believe it. Can you talk to me a little Juanito? You were born here. Since I
have come, since the first day, I have known that this land is full of ghosts.”
No, that isn’t right. Ghosts are weak
shadows of reality. What lives there is more real than we are. We are like
ghosts of its reality. What is it, Juanito? Has my brain gone weak from being
two months alone.”
“The dead, they never go away”, Juanito repeated. Then
he looked straight ahead with a light of great tragedy in his eyes. “I lied to
you, señor. I am not Castillian. My mother was Indian and she taught me
things.”
“What things?”, Joseph demanded.
Father Angelo would not like it. My mother said how
the earth is our mother, and how everything that lives has life from the mother
and goes back into the mother. When I remember, señor, and when I know I
believe these things, because I see them and hear them, then I know I am not
Castillian nor caballero. I am Indio.”
“But I am not Indian, Juanito, and now I seem to see
it.”
Juanito looked
up gratefully and then dropped his eyes, and the men stared at the
ground. Joseph wondered why he did not try to escape from the power that was
seizing upon him.
After time Joseph raised his eyes to the oak and to
the house-frame beside it. “In the it doesn’t matter, he said.
(John Steinbeck, To
a God Unknown, London, Gorgi Books, 1969, p. 27-28).
