The Reign of Greed | Page 3

large crowd of passengers
toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer,
almost round, like the tabú from which she derived her name, quite
dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and grave from
her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great affection in that
region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she bore
the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing
something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was not a

steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable, which,
when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly contented
itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer
was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate,
she might even have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as
she had been, under the inspection of Reverendos and Ilustrísimos....
Bathed in the sunlight of a morning that made the waters of the river
sparkle and the breezes rustle in the bending bamboo on its banks, there
she goes with her white silhouette throwing out great clouds of
smoke--the Ship of State, so the joke runs, also has the vice of smoking!
The whistle shrieks at every moment, hoarse and commanding like a
tyrant who would rule by shouting, so that no one on board can hear his
own thoughts. She menaces everything she meets: now she looks as
though she would grind to bits the salambaw, insecure fishing
apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of giants
saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight toward the
clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures, karihan, or
wayside lunch-stands, which, amid gumamelas and other flowers, look
like indecisive bathers who with their feet already in the water cannot
bring themselves to make the final plunge; at times, following a sort of
channel marked out in the river by tree-trunks, she moves along with a
satisfied air, except when a sudden shock disturbs the passengers and
throws them off their balance, all the result of a collision with a
sand-bar which no one dreamed was there.
Moreover, if the comparison with the Ship of State is not yet complete,
note the arrangement of the passengers. On the lower deck appear
brown faces and black heads, types of Indians, [1] Chinese, and
mestizos, wedged in between bales of merchandise and boxes, while
there on the upper deck, beneath an awning that protects them from the
sun, are seated in comfortable chairs a few passengers dressed in the
fashion of Europeans, friars, and government clerks, each with his puro
cigar, and gazing at the landscape apparently without heeding the
efforts of the captain and the sailors to overcome the obstacles in the
river.

The captain was a man of kindly aspect, well along in years, an old
sailor who in his youth had plunged into far vaster seas, but who now
in his age had to exercise much greater attention, care, and vigilance to
avoid dangers of a trivial character. And they were the same for each
day: the same sand-bars, the same hulk of unwieldy steamer wedged
into the same curves, like a corpulent dame in a jammed throng. So, at
each moment, the good man had to stop, to back up, to go forward at
half speed, sending--now to port, now to starboard--the five sailors
equipped with long bamboo poles to give force to the turn the rudder
had suggested. He was like a veteran who, after leading men through
hazardous campaigns, had in his age become the tutor of a capricious,
disobedient, and lazy boy.
Doña Victorina, the only lady seated in the European group, could say
whether the Tabo was not lazy, disobedient, and capricious--Doña
Victorina, who, nervous as ever, was hurling invectives against the
cascos, bankas, rafts of coconuts, the Indians paddling about, and even
the washerwomen and bathers, who fretted her with their mirth and
chatter. Yes, the Tabo would move along very well if there were no
Indians in the river, no Indians in the country, yes, if there were not a
single Indian in the world--regardless of the fact that the helmsmen
were Indians, the sailors Indians, Indians the engineers, Indians
ninety-nine per cent, of the passengers, and she herself also an Indian if
the rouge were scratched off and her pretentious gown removed. That
morning Doña Victorina was more irritated than usual because the
members of the group took very little notice of her, reason for which
was not lacking; for just consider--there could be found three friars,
convinced that the world would move backwards the very day they
should take a single step to the right; an indefatigable Don Custodio
who was sleeping peacefully, satisfied with his projects; a prolific
writer