Atdtda35: In a dark, out-of-the-way restaurant, 986-988

[Paul Nightingale]

Frank meets Günther, trapped by ‘trouble’ elsewhere disrupting the railway
(top of 987). They first met in Tampico at the start of Ch45, which opens
with Frank insisting that ‘Mexican politics was not his business’ (637);
Günther, therefore, is a reminder of Frank’s ongoing failure to deal with
‘unfinished business in northamerica’. At the end of 66.3 Frank is ‘spending
more and more time down at the trainyard’ (986). Here, Günther says he is
‘haunt[ing] the train stations hoping to slip through a loophole in the laws
of chance’ (987). Frank has travelled south to arrive at this point; Günther
complains of an inability to travel south to return to Chiapas. In the
previous section we saw Frank at work; his departure was signalled, just
above the section break on 986, by his ready replacement by ‘somebody else’.
Here he describes himself as ‘[j]ust another unemployed Orozquista’ (987).

If his engineering skills were once useful to the Orozco cause, he is here
available for employment by Günther, who describes a relationship between
mechanisation and ‘the highly competitive market which coffee has become’,
in the process mocking any attachment to tradition where it cannot be made
profitable: ‘... as a northamerican you must be nostalgic for the days of
slavery ...’ etc. Moreover, modernisation means he will train others and
therefore do less work himself; in the previous section, of course, he took
the lead role on the train, remaining ‘after the rest of the crew jumped
off’ (984).

However, if the plantation is characterised by modernisation, tradition does
feature when Günther discusses violence ‘taking the more usual form of
either family vendettas or what some called “banditry” and others
“redistribution” ...’ etc (987): ‘insurgencies against the Madero regime’
have been, until recently, alien to Chiapas. And then Günther describes
events ‘[s]ince late last year’, confirming that Frank’s desire to be
elsewhere remains frustrated.