Tales of Adventurers (10 page)

The soft splash of Gino’s oars recalled them to sanity. They stared after him into the calm blackness of the sea. They could hear him; they could see the twin phosphorescent puddles of the
oars receding into the distance, but the boat itself was invisible. Their fear of this isolation was extreme. All quarrels forgotten, they drew together on the balcony. The lights of the little
town glittered half a mile away. The villas were nearer, but their lit windows were so scattered over the coastal plain that they only increased the sense of loneliness. In the girls’ minds,
and indeed in fact, they were castaways; it mattered nothing that their island was joined to all Asia by only a dozen planks.

They crept downstairs and turned up the lights in the kitchen. All day they had not had the energy to eat. There were bread and vegetables and a few eggs. Fish there was none, for Gino never
kept it overnight. Miriam again turned cook. They ate in silence, exhausted and hopeless.

The effort of cooking and feeding did them good. Their washing-up extended itself spontaneously from the plates to Gino’s revolting kitchen. They were six women who had seldom had goods of
their own to scrub and polish. Not one of them would have done a stroke of work for Gino, but this was for themselves. The silence, the closed door, the sea around and under impressed on them that
it was for themselves.

By morning the unconscious communal spirit of discipline was dead. No one made breakfast. They drifted down to the café and drifted back into the bedrooms to continue the interminable
discussions. At least they were all calmer. One of the commissionaires had a touch of sunburn; it made her pudgy face look firm and elastic.

At ten Tatiana took command and persuaded Miriam to the kitchen. It was clean as they had left it. On the table were two flat baskets, a yard in diameter, piled with fish, among them a dozen
fat, expensive soles. Tatiana, pacified by this industry, observed that Gino had eaten nothing. Outside on the jetty his indifferent back was towards them, hunched over the rod. Patronizingly she
offered him a cup of coffee and the last of the bread. He accepted without pleasure or surprise, and thanked her. His words were formal Arabic courtesies, meaning nothing: phrases by which two
human beings could converse for minutes without the need of any thought at all. She asked him what to do with the fish. Gino shrugged his shoulders. If people came to eat, they ate it; if they
didn’t, nobody ate it. He landed a red mullet and paid no further attention to Tatiana.

For all their working lives Tatiana and Miriam had depended on manager or proprietor. His was the responsibility, theirs the obedience. Even Tatiana’s Russian liveliness was purely
professional. Her plan for living was to make the clients spend in return for her wages and commission. Her future was a succession of engagements at third-class cabarets. Her firm faith, founded
on nothing, was that they would become first-class cabarets before she was too old.

The boss of the moment might be inefficient or exacting, lecherous or contemptuous, broke or miserly or generous; but the boss he was. He did not merely live, as they, between four walls from
nine in the evening to three in the morning. He was in the mysterious outer world of contracts, arrangements, recommendations. Looking at Gino’s back, it was evident to Tatiana and Miriam
that they were, for the first time, without a boss, and that Gino was in their own world of helpless resignation. He might as well have been the ghost of a fisherman sitting outside his own back
door.

Even this understanding of Gino did not move them to any constructive plan. Indeed their angry chatter reached new depths of futility. All former schemes, however wild, had depended on Gino
being forced to do something. They had at last realized that nothing would force him to do anything.

It was the fish that made the plan. There it lay, in quantity, luxurious. Alongside the baskets was the empty bread bin. Without need of imagination, the economic problem solved itself. Two of
the commissionaires put on aprons of sacking and Gino’s shoes – for their own had the high heels of their vocation – and shuffled off to the town with the fish baskets upon their
heads. They returned at midday, weary, humiliated, miserable, but with bread and groceries and money over. Fresh sole was fifty piasters a kilo on the market. The girls were all ignorant of common
commerce, and amazed.

Day after day passed while they ate and slept well, and fussed frantically to get themselves away. Gino wandered through and among them on his own plane, occasionally cooking, always unseeing,
and, after a while, unnoticed. Those who could write with ease wrote letters to the Alexandria agency, to cabaret proprietors in Beirut and Cairo, to old admirers, to anyone they had ever known
with money to lend or employment to offer. The only result of all that fevered, impractical planning, that seesaw of hope, those hysterical visits to the post office to insist that letters had been
lost, was that Elena the Greek was lent a pound by her sister. They tried to plan how it should be spent, but the island imposed its own solution. The pound immediately went on soap and a
washtub.

The town returned to its winter peace, Gino and his girls had provided a week of scandal, conjecture and conversation, and a week was all they were worth. Nobody bothered them. They bothered
nobody. On the island they were brown, healthy and rested, but neither knew nor felt the improvement. They were dull with fear of poverty, illness and starvation, and, when they thought, they had
no hope; but they had little time to think. The island was their taskmaster.

Organization grew, though they intended none. Tatiana, by reason of her education, was general manager. Miriam was assistant cook. Elena the Greek, who had a passion for neatness perhaps
inherited from that unknown Chinese ancestor, expended it upon the crusted dirt of Gino’s hidden corners. Two of the commissionaires were becoming known in a more friendly fish market. The
third was washerwoman. To all the girls their life seemed inactive and frustrated, for they were unaware of their achievement. Their only comfort was the superb fish supper that Gino often made for
them. He seemed to enjoy their appreciation. He said nothing, but his body undulated graciously as he set the dish upon the table.

At the end of October the first storm roared down the Mediterranean and over the town. With Gino’s island it merely played, for wind and sea were diverted by the sheltering promontory to
the north. The wind was neither cold nor convincing; it whistled merrily round the ill-fitting eaves and slammed the bedroom doors. The sea, excitedly sucking and splashing, managed to wet three
steps of Gino’s jetty that had been dry all the summer. Gino lit the iron stove in the café, packing it with cut driftwood. Where the plates were thin with age and the blacking worn
away, the stove glowed red and comforting.

Wind, sea and fire emphasized the passing of time. Tatiana revolted. She shouted that they could not stay, that winter was coming, that this could not go on. She crashed a plate upon the floor
and earned a reproachful look from Elena. They all listened while she cried and cursed; they had no answer to her repeated question of what they were to do. They looked at her, disconcerted by her
vehemence, as if she were destroying some feminine, delicately poised, illusive truth. In the silence the washerwoman spoke.

“Here we eat,” she said.

The comment was unanswerable. It referred to the present, that present in which the commissionaires had learned through timeless suffering to exist; yet in its profundity was hidden an
illimitable future. If they wished, on Gino’s island they might eat forever. The warmth of the stove blended serenely with the warmth of the food within them. The storm was for others, not
for them. Their dreams changed in that moment: those vague intentions which supported the lonely, personal life of each battered individual. They were back in the field of women – of
eagerness and the possibility of love, of industry and of abounding health. They even had a willing servant, who asked only to remain, unresisting, upon his island. Impulsively Tatiana began the
new world by a single act of creation. She rose from the table to give Gino orders for the morrow.

T
HE DEATH
of General Covadillas? Yes, of course there was something that didn’t come out in the papers. He died of a
fit of laughter. When five of his political opponents escaped from jail and forced a pilot to fly them out of the country with a gun at the back of his neck and then shot him by mistake just as he
had taken off, Covadillas was so amused that he had a stroke. That was the only fact about the story which wasn’t public knowledge.

Assassination? Now look here, old man – I know who you are and all that, but I earn my living in this country and I don’t want to be expelled for offending the national dignity. If
they like to say the general was murdered, it has nothing to do with us. The general was a cattleman, and he didn’t approve of the oil interests. And there’s the motive, and who am I to
contradict the voice of the people? When North, South or Central Americans decide that a myth is worth believing, you just have to let them believe it.

Good Lord, no!
I
don’t believe it! I know most of the oil executives out here, and in fact they rather admired the general. As dictators go, he was a gentleman. A trifle ruthless,
of course. But most of his competitors turned up at his funeral and dropped tears. One of thankfulness to one of sorrow, and that’s as much as any of us can expect.

The funeral was a wonderful show. There was the old boy laid out on ice in the cathedral – oldest Christian building on the American continent, they say – with eight tall lancers,
all plumes and pennons, round the bier, like weeping willows providing shade for a horticultural exhibit.

I’m the resident correspondent for a group of British newspapers. It’s hard to get anything at all printed about this happy country, but just to please my friends here I have to try.
I was wandering round the cathedral after visiting hours, hoping to get a touch of atmosphere, when in came a newspaperman from New York insisting that he must take a few shots for the world.

It was the word
world
that flattered them – though it may have been the name of his paper. We feel a bit out of the world down here and, instead of thanking God for it, we take it
as a reproach. So they propped Covadillas up for his photo and shoveled away some flowers and moved the candles. The dean told the lancers to look sorrowful, and preached them such an impromptu
sermon on the nation’s loss that they wept buckets. Then the reporter flashed his shots and strolled out – whipping off his hat again when he suddenly remembered where he was –
and the old boy was eased back to a more comfortable position on the ice. It takes an American to understand Americans.

Well, I couldn’t compete with that. A quarter inch of space was the utmost my papers would give to Covadillas’ funeral. It wasn’t news. After all, nobody can plant a statesman
as magnificently as we can ourselves – as we’ll know very well if we are ever buried in Westminster Abbey and have any bit of us left that isn’t too bewildered to be
impressed.

So I decided that my only chance of persuading the Republic that the London dailies knew it existed was to describe the quiet country ceremony. Editors would at least be interested. It’s a
queer thing about the English – like the general, they all want to be planted in two different places, and one of them is usually in the country.

Covadillas, you’ll remember, had asked that, whatever the politicians did with his body, his heart should be buried on the
estancia
at Manzanares where he was born. He had no
illusions about all the pomposities of Church and State. That was why the people who loved him really did love him.

Manzanares is eight hours from the capital on a line that goes wandering up over the savanna to nowhere in particular. It has one train a day; and that I took, the morning before the ceremony,
in order to avoid the crowd on the funeral special which was traveling up that night with a load of bigwigs and personal friends, and leaving again in the afternoon.

Now that I’ve got as far as this, I’d better tell you the rest. After all, you’re sailing tomorrow. My dear fellow, the evidence for assassination was overwhelming! It’s
a revolting story. Ha! Ha! Ha! Just plain revolting!

When I got to Manzanares, I found that there was no village at all. There was a patch of dust on the plain, where stood the station, two iron huts and the
fonda,
and no landmark but the
railway which cut the visible world into two exact semicircles. It was obvious that no one could lose his heart to a station, so I made some inquiries. The
estancia
and its chapel turned
out to be over that featureless horizon, and seven miles away. There must have been other
estancias
over other bits of horizon, for dirt tracks radiated away from the station into the
purple haze of the evening.

The
fonda
was the usual drink-shop plus general store plus hotel. It was owned by the stationmaster, an old Hungarian immigrant called Timoteo who had been there for the last thirty
years and made himself pretty comfortable. He had sunk an artesian well, and installed some very classy pale-green sanitary ware – which must have been left on his hands when one of the local
cattlemen went bust. In spite of the blowing dust and corrugated iron and the feeling of being all alone at the center of an invisible world, the
fonda
was an oasis of civilization. I
gladly took a room for the night.

Timoteo was overpleased to see me. There was no doubt that he was harassed and in need of help, like those chaps in ghost stories who have been all alone till the stranger pulls the doorbell. At
the time I put down his manner to alarmed anticipation of the next day. The guests were to have a light breakfast on the train and start straightaway for the
estancia,
but Timoteo was sure
to be overwhelmed by politicians demanding drinks in a pious whisper.