The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven

girl comes in,” he said, referring to Señora Doux, who was barely thirty, “just keep on cleaning baking tins. She has to poke her nose into everything, but if you’re busy she won’t notice that you don’t know the trade. She won’t come down here now, though, because the old man’s up there with her, and they don’t often get around to wasting time on that! It beats me that they find any time or thought for it at all, but I don’t suppose their minds are really on it while they’re at it. They’re more likely to be thinking about us and wondering if we’re beating up an egg or two for ourselves. Good idea. We’ll do it now.”
    He took some eggs, broke them in businesslike fashion, gave them a quick whisk, added some butter, and popped them into the oven, producing a baked omelet. After we finished it off, I learned how to clean the baking sheets. It wasn’t as simple as it sounds, but something that had to be learned properly. Then I had to weigh off flour, which must be done exactly. Then I had to break five hundred eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. If you went about this in mother’s way, it would take a week; here, I had to break and separate the five hundred eggs in about twenty minutes, and if the slightest trace of yolk got into the whites there would be culinary complications.
    Later I learned to look after the dough-mixing machines, keep the oven fires going, set the dough for bread and rolls, ice the small cakes, cut the flan puddings and prepare them for decoration, wash the pots and pans, wipe off the tables, sweep the bakehouse, crush the sugar for the icing, prepare the icing, and do many other things. I learned them all bit by bit; that way, one can learn anything. There’s absolutely nothing that you can’t learn if you go about it one step at a time.
    Saturday arrived — pay day. But there was no pay. “Mariana, tomorrow,” said Señor Doux. Sunday was the busiest day of the week, but when it came to paying wages, Señor Doux explained that he never paid wages on Sunday. “Mariana.” But on Monday he didn’t pay because he hadn’t been to the bank.
    On Tuesday there wasn’t enough money in the till because he had spent the money he’d brought from the bank for supplies. On Wednesday, the waiters got paid first; on Thursday he had no money on hand and couldn’t pay the bakers. On Friday he couldn’t be found; whenever anyone went to look for him they were told he’d just gone to his flat and didn’t want to be disturbed. By Saturday two weeks’ wages were due, but then his outgo was so heavy because he had to buy supplies for Sunday, “the busiest day,” and besides this the banks closed at noon on Saturday. “Mariana,” he said; but tomorrow was Sunday, and he never paid wages on Sundays. “Mariana,” he recited; but on Monday he didn’t go to the bank. And so it went on.
    I had been there three weeks when I got my first pay; and then I was paid not for three weeks but for one week. It went on and on like this, with Señor Doux always being weeks and weeks in arrears with the wages. But we couldn’t be fifteen minutes behind in our work; if we were, there was hell to pay, for customers expected their bread and pastries on the dot, like clockwork. We had to put in fifteen, sixteen hours a day, and sometimes as many as twenty-one. Señor Doux took this for granted; he also took it for granted that he paid wages when it suited him, and not when they fell due.
    The master baker had four months’ wages owing him. He couldn’t have left the place even if he’d wanted to, for Doux would have taken months to pay off the balance. As for the rest of us, there was no other work to be found, and even if there had been, we had no time to go and look for it. By the time we’d finished in the bakehouse it was usually late after-. noon and often evening, and places of work where we might have inquired for a job were already closed. We just had to stick it out at the