Summary:
The Bridge in the Jungle is a novel about the tragic death of Carlos, an 8 or 9 year old (no age is given) hyperactive Mexican boy, and the aftermath of his mother's overwhelming grief for him, sometime in the early 20th Century in a very poor village deep in the jungle. (The lack of specific details are intentional, as I shall discuss below.) The narrator is an American man staying in the village while looking for alligator skins and bird feathers to sell in the U.S.. He observes the little boy's brother, who works in the oil industry in Texas and has just returned for the weekend, give his little brother brand new shoes. Carlos is overjoyed to wear them since all the villagers but the pump master's wife wear threadbare rags for clothes. This is the little boy's first pair of shoes, much less shiny new American ones. While sitting outside in the village with his host, both waiting for an outdoor party, the narrator hears an ominous splash that is Carlos falling to his death off the treacherous bridge, a bridge that has no railings. The remainder of the novel depicts the grief of the young mother - a grief that reaches the suffocating proportions of Greek tragedy - and her villagers' genuine support.
Described in minute detail by the narrator, the villagers - who have
turned over every stone in the woods, dived many times in the river, and
ridden to nearby villages to find Carlos - turn to an old man who
requests a perfectly flat piece of wood and a stout candle. He then
meticulously fastens the candle to the wood and carefully launches this
raft of mystical exploration and recovery on the river. Every villager
watches this ceremony with rapt attention. It is truly a riveting
passage, for the raft travels under its own power from the river bank
against the current, meandering slowly towards the bridge where it
finally stops, despite the current, under the bridge, the only place no
diver has yet looked:
"The board in the meanwhile has wandered
farther under the bridge, but always in a right angle to the fifth post.
Now it is under the middle of the bridge. From here it sails towards
the fourth post, though only for about a foot. And here it stops
as if it were nailed to the water. It does not mind the current nor the
light breeze that sweeps softly across the surface of the river. The
manner in which the board has halted is entirely different from that in
which it stopped before. Now and then it trembles slightly, as if
something were breathing against it from below. But it no longer whirls.
... The board begins softly to dance as if impatient. It seems
that it wants to be relieved of its torture. It wriggles, swings about
itself, though it does not move as much as two inches. One might think
it is trying to go down to the bottom."(page 110-1)
A villager dives and retrieves Carlos and hands his body to his mother:
"With
an indescribable nobility and solemnity, and in his eyes that pitiful
sad look which only animals and primitive people possess, he steps
slowly forward. And Perez, the man whose daily task it is to fell the
hard trees of the jungle and convert them into charcoal, lays that
little water-soaked body in the outstretched arms of the mother with a
tenderness that makes one think of glass so thin and fragile that a
single soft breath could break it."
(page 113)
The
villagers, in a procession that is tragicomic, take Carlos' body to the
graveyard where a well respected teacher, now drunk from all the mescal
others have offered him, gives an eulogy that suggests Christ's Sermon
on the Mount. However, with inverted symbolism, this sermon is for, not
by, Jesus and is delivered by a drunken priest-figure who is so drunk he
falls into the open grave. To Traven's credit he introduces this
farcical moment to emphasize how none of the villagers, much less the
author, and, consequently, the reader, laughs at a decent man trying his
best to honor Carlos. It is truly a most moving finale to a most moving
book.
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