(1941) The Forgotten Village Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE

  Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, JOHN STEINBECK grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez. He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and TheLog from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV:A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), TheWinter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), TheActs of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals ofTheGrapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

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  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1941

  Published in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright John Steinbeck, 1941 Copyright renewed John Steinbeck, 1968 All rights reserved

  Film Credits:

  THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE

  Story and script by John Steinbeck

  Directed and produced by Herbert Kline

  Co-Director and Director of PhotograPhy: Alexander Hackensmid

  Music by Hanns Eisler

  Narration by Burgess Meredith

  Co-Producer: Rosa Harvan Kline

  Production Manager: Mark Marvin

  Assistant Director:Carlos Cabello

  Cameraman: Agustin Delgado

  Assistant Cameraman: Felipe Quintanar

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15944-6

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  PREFACE.

  In the making of a film about a Mexican village we were faced with many problems, some of which were foreseen and some of which were met and overcome in the field while the picture was in production. A great many documentary films have used the generalized method, that is, the showing of a condition or an event as it affects a group of people. The audience can then have a personalized reaction from imagining one member of that group. I have felt that this is the more difficult observation from the audience’s viewpoint. It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving. In The Forgotten Village we reversed the usual process. Our story centered on one family in one small village. We wished our audience to know this family very well, and incidentally to like it, as we did. Then, from association with this little personalized group, the larger conclusion concerning the racial group could be drawn with something like participation. Birth and death, joy and sorrow, are constants, experiences common to the whole species. If one participates first in these constants, one is able to go from them to the variables of customs, practices, mores, taboos, and foreign social patterns. That, at any rate, was our theory and the pattern in which we worked.

  The working method was very simple, and yet required great patience. A very elastic story was written. Then the crew moved into the village, made friends, talked, and listened. The story was simple: too many children die- why is that and what is done about it, both by the villagers and by the government? The story actually was a question. What we found was dramatic—the clash of a medicine and magic that was old when the Aztecs invaded the plateau with a modern medicine that is as young as a living man. To tell this story we had only to have people re-enact what had happened to them. Our curandera was a real “wise woman,” one who practiced herbology and magic in the village; our teacher was a real teacher in the government school; our doctors real doctors; our mother a real mother who had lost a number of children. If they moved through scenes with sureness and authority it was because they had been through them many times before when no cameras were there. Such a method requires, above all else, patience, tact, and genuine liking for the people. The last we had, but we were not always successful in the first two. Mistakes were made, feuds started, quarrels precipitated which had to be settled and quenched with more patience and tact.

  The villagers themselves were handsome and courteous and friendly; they had great dignity and flair and they were very poor, unbelievably poor. They lived in a social-religious frame which was part Aztec, part sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic, and part the thrusting toward social betterment which has been Mexico’s drive for the past fifty years. We did not editorialize, attack, or defend anything. We put on film what we found, only arranging it to make a coherent story.

  The most difficult problem of all was the method of telling the story to an American audience. Sound recorded on the scene was impracticable: the village was inaccessible to sound equipment. Dialogue was out of the question, even in Sp
anish, since many of the older people spoke little Spanish; they used the Indian language of their ancestors. The usual narrative method did not seem quite adequate. It was decided finally to use the method of the old story-teller—a voice which interpolated dialogue without trying to imitate it, a very quiet voice to carry the story only when the picture and the music could not carry it; and, above all, a spoken story so natural and unobtrusive that an audience would not even be conscious of it. Such were the methods employed in making The Forgotten Village. A curious and true and dramatic film has been the result.

  JOHN STEINBECK

  THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE

  Among the tall mountains of Mexico the ancient life goes on, sometimes little changing in a thousand years. But now from the cities of the valley, from the schools and laboratories, new thinking and new techniques reach out to the remote villages. The old and the new meet and sometimes clash, but from the meetings a gradual change is taking place in the villages.

  This is a story of the little pueblo of Santiago on the skirts of a hill in the mountains of Mexico. And this is the story of the boy Juan Diego and of his family and of his people, who live in the long moment when the past slips reluctantly into the future.

  One morning, in the dawn, before the work in the fields had begun, Juan Diego took his mother, Esperanza, to visit the Wise Woman of Santiago. The mother was heavy toward birth, and she wished to know early whether it would be boy or girl child, beautiful or ugly, fortunate or damned. He carried the mother toward the hillside where the curandera lived.

  Trini, the Wise Woman, welcomed them to her little stone house where she merchandised in herbs and amulets and magic. “Come in, come in, come seat yourself,” said Trini. “I’ll give you the future, black or white. I’ll cast it in the black and white corn.”

  The Wise Woman sat before the mother and she said, “Pick out the corn; black for your boy children, white for the girls.” Then Trini blessed the corn. She took it and chanted, “Corn of our lives, gift and giver, food of the body, feed thou now the mind and the memory. Speak to this mother.”

  And she traced the future in the corn of prophecy. “Boy child,” she said, “born living and strong.” Trini cast the corn again and traced again. “You are indeed the mother of luck. Your boy child will be beautiful and fortunate.... Now you will pay for the fortune?”

  Juan Diego brought in a chicken for payment. “It is a skinny chicken for a fat fortune,” the Wise Woman said. And the mother paid extra for so fine a prophecy.

  Then the Wise Woman gave her a gift without payment, a bird of luck ... to ease the pains and prod the fortune on; a humming-bird dressed in colored magic thread.

  The mother and Juan Diego came back into the village of Santiago with their great good news—with the prophecy and the magic bird of luck. “A boy child it will be. A child of beauty.... Beauty and fortune and a boy.... Trini has promised—a boy.... My child will be a man child, handsome and lucky. See, I have the bird of fortune.”

  And the whole village was glad for Esperanza. They came to their home where the children were, and Esperanza told the little girls, “You will have a little brother, a new little brother.”

  In the hot, white light of the morning, Juan Diego went to the corn-field, for it was late and the work went on without him.

  He went first to his father with the news.

  “You will be the father of a new son, my father.” The father said, “It is good to have sons who can work in the corn. God is good, I have already three good sons: little Paco, Juan Diego, and Carlos. Now I will have four.”

  But the corn cannot wait for birth or death. The corn is life itself, holy and clean. With corn they rent the land the corn grows on. With corn they buy clothing and salt and chilies.

  The animals will eat the stalks. Father and sons, mother and daughters, will eat, will sell, will live—the corn. The ripe and yellow corn cut and piled and carried, loved and prayed for. When there is corn there is life. When the corn is gone—only hunger and sorrow. For the corn is life itself.

  Bound into bundles, a big bundle for the father and a big bundle for Juan Diego. Carlos has a smaller load, and even little Paco as much as he can carry. Everyone must eat and everyone must have his burden, even Paco.

  “It is heavy,” the father said, “but soon I will have a new son.”

  They bore the corn down from the mountain fields and into the pueblo of Santiago on the skirts of the hill, and they took the corn first to the house of the landowners, for the owners had first choice of half the crop.

  “You are the lucky one!” said the owners. “Four sons! Imagine that! You are a great man, Ventura.”

  They divided the corn: this to us and that to you. The father protested the division, as he always did. And Juan Diego cried, “We should have more of our own corn now! There will be one more mouth to feed. We should have more of our own corn now.”

  The owners said to Ventura, “What does a boy know of men? Come, we will drink to this son and to many more. That is how men do. You are a great man.”

  Then Juan Diego called his brothers to go to school, for the day was passing. And they left the men to do as great men do.

  The boys came to the school yard and were prepared for learning.

  It is easier to learn with a clean face; clean ears can hear more truly.

  And Juan Diego talked to his friend the schoolteacher.

  They began the day with a song about their beautiful land: El frutero del Sur,

  El frutero llego;

  Nadie vende la fruta

  Como la vendo yo.

  Fruta del trópico quiero

  Nadie la puede encontrar:

  Piñas, papayas y mangos

  y plátanos llevarán,

  Piñas, papayas y mangos

  y plátanos llevarán.

  Late in the afternoon the whole family prepared the corn, for the next day was Market Day at a near-by town. They must sell their corn. They talked about the next day at the market. There would be music at the market, they knew, and shows and sweets for the children, gossip and news for the father and mother. The corn would be sold and a little money coming in. Market Day is a good day for everyone.

  The mother called them to the evening meal; they were excited by the day that had passed and for the day that was to come.

  Very early in the morning, the people started off for the market.

  Little streams of people from the villages swelled to a river on the main roads. And the roads led the people to the market towns.

  Chilies and beans and corn. The people bargained with the mother for the corn. Paco was sick with a stomach cramp and he stayed with the mother.

  But the others walked among the wonders of the market. Hats and ropes and handkerchiefs, all for sale, all bargained for. Belts and pots and rice, and toys of the country.

  And little shows

  for thrown pennies.

  But Paco was sick and did not love the market. And they tried to cheer him up.

  They tempted him to health with a new hat.

  But Paco was sick. Paco was very sick

  In the night Paco was sick and cold, and Juan Diego warmed him and watched over him.

  The Wise Woman came to cure him, in the morning. Trini came with herbs and magic.

  “It is the airs,” she said, “the bitter airs. They have gone to live in his stomach. I will prepare an ancient cure. My grandfather had it from his grandfather and he from his.

  “Here the herb, and here the egg. The evil airs love the egg. I will draw them, trap them with it.”

  “Be patient, Paco,” the mother said, “you will soon be well.”

  “Come to the egg. Come, little pains, into the egg,” said Trini.

  “Now I have them caught in the egg. I will show you. See—there they are. Now he will be well.”

  Juan Diego walked through the village and he heard the talk at the well, heard how the children were sickening with the same pain as little Paco had. Th
e women were frightened for the children.

  Juan Diego went to see his friend the teacher, the only man in Santiago who had been to the outside world. And Juan Diego said, “You know many children are sick.” “I know it,” the teacher said. “They say it is in the air, the evil little spirits,” Juan Diego said.

  “No, I think it is the water,” the teacher said. “I think the germs are in the pueblo well. I can try to help, but I do not know enough. I can only try to help them.” And he gathered his medicines and his books.

  Paco was stiff with pain. And he was fevered. The mother said, “Trini is curing him. She has an ancient cure.” “But her cures are not good!” the teacher cried. The mother said, “You are kind, but we do not like these new things. Trini will cure him if God permits.”

  “It is not the airs, my mother,” Juan Diego said. “Here in the doctor book it tells of the germs, the little animals that cause it.” “The airs or little animals, what difference?” the mother asked. “Trini knows. She will cure it. She has an ancient cure. Here she is now. Paco will soon be well.”