Thing to Love (16 page)

He returned early to San Vicente and his flat, thankful to find it empty of journalists, minor diplomatists and United States businessmen, though he hoped it had not been empty for long.

There was no need to explore the full depths of the horror which, he knew, remained with Feli. The best psychiatry was to keep her steadily assured of his love and sympathy and to indoctrinate her, as if she had been some young and sensitive subaltern whose first battle had been of a brutality which he would never see again, with a sense of the inevitable.

That was easy, because he was sincere. He should never have gone down those steps, hypnotized by his own personality and the President's wish to play down military intervention; and it was his fault, too, that there had been no experienced officer present. He was still overwhelmed by pity for his once gay and always courageous Feli, who couldn't help what she had done. If it had been she who had gone down, he might easily have cleared those young lunatics from her body with one burst of automatic fire. And only she would have understood afterwards.

Her face had become a little thinner, and the soft yellow of the rose was more marked than the flush of pink. He adored this tenseness in her. To heal herself she was using energy of which she had only had an impatient awareness. She was employing all her charm and intelligence to form a pressure group in favor of Vidal among the international society of San Vicente. Especially she was seeking out and entertaining the North Americans, quite inexplicably with the benevolent approval of Juan. She was still in every way his unchangeable Feli, but the difference in her was that between a recoil spring on the armorer's bench and the same spring compressed and ready in its slot.

The flat was at the top of one of the most spectacular triumphs of Vidalismo, its wide balconies catching whatever air blew from the Pacific. Now in the calm before sunset it was very warm, but contained within its shuttered twilight a fresh essence of the open,
blazing sea. Feli, at ease in transparencies, was intolerably lovely. The new strength of her face suddenly and tempestuously reminded him of the fine-drawn change in it after their honeymoon.

When he had at last remembered that she was not some divine tropical mistress but his wife — with wonder, for that Latin relationship somehow, by its solidity, seemed to preclude the ecstasies of passion — Miro threw his boots after his discarded tunic, bathed, drank, became a respectable civilian and joined his cool and exquisite Feli on the balcony, while far below the street lights went on and chalked an intelligible map upon the blackboard of San Vicente.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“Very well. I like Jesús-María — as a man as well as a figurehead.”

“Will he give a lead to the Army?”

“He reminds me of a politician out of office. He can afford to give good advice because he hasn't to take responsibility for its effect.”

“Does that mean he is going to declare for Avellana?”

“Not if he can help it!”

“And the Division?” she asked.

“We take no orders except from the elected government. The troops have been taught that, day in and day out — and they will march on Siete Dolores whatever their politics. They understand discipline, you see. A colonel doesn't dispute my orders, however wrong he thinks them. But he is perfectly free to argue with me at the postmortem afterwards. And that goes all down the line. We are proud of our efficiency as a machine. Call it conceit — but the troops are quite clear in their minds. I'm the one who is least clear. Avellana could say openly that neither legality nor democracy is enough. It wouldn't make any difference to my stand, but I don't know the answer.”

“You . . . That is the answer!”

“What do you mean, Feli?”

“That you'd be a far better President than either Vidal or Avellana. If legality is not enough, go on and be it!”

“For God's sake, beloved!” Miro protested.

“What could stop you but yourself? So if you think it's wrong for you, it's just as wrong for Avellana.”

“No. Not quite so wrong. I have no policy to offer. He has.”

Miro heard his orderly's boots crossing the parquet floor of the room behind them and with a hardly perceptible movement of his chair changed his pose from that of adoring husband to commander. Unlike his fellow officers, he never kept military servants at his home in normal times, preferring to be served less reverently by Felicia's maids. But now Fifth Division had to be allowed to fuss. The orderly was permanently on the landing, two formal sentries were on the main door of the building and a heavily armed guard at the back of the stairs — ordered by the general to keep out of sight of the public and by the divisional provost marshal to keep, for God's sake, out of sight of the general.

The orderly presented a sealed note to Miro and withdrew.

“For you,” said Miro, handing it to Feli. “I don't know whether he was just being military or believes that wives have no right to private correspondence.”

“From Doña Concha,” she said, reading it. “She sent it through the guard commander at the Palace.”

“Why not telephone? Or has she been listening to my lectures on security?”

“She knows more about security than you do. What she says is that Don Gregorio will probably want you at a conference tonight. I am to use my influence to persuade you to call on her privately in the Little Salon beforehand.”

“Have you any idea what I am letting myself in for?”

“No. But it isn't like her. So pay attention to anything she tells you. They can say what they like about Concha, but she loves her husband.”

“Well, yes — as a little girl loves her guinea pig.”

“That isn't fair!” Feli replied with unexpected warmth.

It was, and true too. But he did not pursue the subject. Even his Feli was not free from the inexplicable feminine vice of feeling guilty for no reason. She could hardly believe that her love for him was girl-and-guinea-pig, but perhaps she was conscious that she had too warmly recommended obedience to Concha's wishes.

“Feli, my darling,” he said with his slow smile which always seemed to flash into affection at the tips before it subsided, “the night is ours till the Managerial Society says it isn't.”

“It will do that in the middle of dinner,” she replied. “We'll have something on the balcony now.”

As if she felt the urgency of the future pressing on them, she seemed to be packing into half an hour the quintessence of all the little peaceable things he so dearly loved in his adopted country: herself radiant in the cool of the young night, the pool of light on the table, the wine and the quick, delicate food surprisingly produced at a word by the two dark-plaited Indian maids. Under the gay fringe of the awning the lights of San Vicente glittered in rectangles and parallel lines which met and faded in the darkness of the plain. Away to the east was the Cordillera, just visible on a clear day, and beneath it the long valley of Siete Dolores.

The strip of darkness between San Vicente and the stars held his imagination. Out there was Gil Avellana, cut off from the world except for Lérida Airfield, and protected — if you could call it protected — by Twelfth Cavalry Division. But even cavalry could hold the road and railway through the Quebradas Pass. And if they held it long enough to attract other wavering divisions?

It was curious how Feli, whose eyes too were turned towards the east and who, he knew, had caught his thoughts — or he hers — spoke unforgivingly of “reds” and yet supposed that a mere exchange of shots, a little old-style marching and countermarching, the political maneuvering of Juan and the Ateneo would end the crisis, while he, who felt respect rather than hatred for Avellana, was watching darkness in terms of roads and bridges, of fire power, of his left flank in the air, of the launching — if he were ordered to do so — of a murderous mass of steel into the half-trained softness of the enemy. Speed. It was the only way — for that softness of clinging, overwhelming numbers could close around him.

The telephone rang. As he held it to his ear he had a sudden nightmare vision of himself as a lit typhoon-center in the midst of darkness, darkness underground where the line ran to the military exchange and back to Vidal in his office, darkness of Siete Dolores
between plain and stars. Vidal was, as ever, most courteous. Could Miro come round at ten? A private conference of vital importance. His compliments and excuses to Doña Felicia.

There were no sentries in the boxes of the Presidential Guard. The security of the President had, outwardly, been handed over to lounging civil police. Miro Kucera hoped that the plain-clothes men in the Glorieta and the side streets were more efficient. Not that it mattered. Out of sight, with a field of fire which covered the ancient stone terrace between those terrible steps and the entrance hall, were his own men. Never had it been so obvious to him that the power of the police depended ultimately on the fighting forces. Yet Fifth Division never considered itself the Praetorian Guard of Vidalismo.

He walked quickly down the noble central corridor of the Palace and turned left into a passage which led to the Little Salon. Heaven knew why it was called “Little” — probably because the main reception room of viceroys and Presidents had always been the great gallery over the main entrance. But the Little Salon was nearly as big. Its main windows faced the sea, looking down the steep glacis of the original fort: a slope which had defied the English pirates in its time and was now gay with sunk and hanging flower beds in the blue, yellow and white of the national flag of Guayanas.

On the other side of the Salon a tracery of arches, their pillars delicate as the architect's drawing, opened into the sixteenth-century patio which, it was said, surpassed its model: the courts of the Hospital of Santiago de Compostela. Doña Concha, solid in a solidly upholstered chair, formed — perhaps deliberately — the simple mass under one of the arches which was the only possible alternative to emptiness.

Miro kissed her hand, and she left it in his a moment longer than she had ever done at their more formal meetings. He sat down by her side and began to amuse her, until she was ready to declare herself, with an account of Don Jesús-María's after-lunch speech at the Citadel.

“Good! And I hope he enjoys the next time you entertain him
as much!” she said brusquely. “Now, Miro, we haven't much time. This sending for you by the back stairs like a king's mistress — you will have guessed that I don't agree with my husband's plans. Or Felicia will.”

Miro had not guessed anything of the kind in so many words. Felicia perhaps had implied it.

“I have a deep respect for your judgment, Doña Concha,” he said.

That was true, though he recognized that he did not know her well. Her influence upon the political managers was direct; they were afraid of her and in self-protection had saddled her with the stock comedy character of the stout woman who bullies her smaller husband. But with the police and the armed forces she had never openly interfered. In that traditionally male world she either trusted her husband's flair or allowed him, for the sake of his self-respect, to appear in complete command.

“Thank you, Miro. But why I asked you to come is that I have great respect for yours — in military matters. Do you know what Gregorio wants you for?”

“No sudden bad news, I hope.”

“Gregorio has been persuaded by Faustino Ledesma that the Air Force alone could frighten Siete Dolores into surrender. Do you think it possible?”

“I haven't heard his plans, Doña Concha. My first impression is that it could.”

“What is your frank opinion of Ledesma? Do you trust him?”

“He seems to me to have few ideas outside his trade. I doubt if he is the sort of man to be carried away by the revelation of the blessed Saint Gil,” said Miro drily. “Ledesma would be better as Works Manager in an aircraft factory than commanding our Air Force. But that's what we need — thoroughness on the technical side.”

“Has it occurred to you that he hates you, Miro?”

“Never!” exclaimed the general, amazed. “Why should he? We get on easily, and we are both — well, dedicated to our profession.”

“That is why. If Miro Kucera didn't exist, Ledesma would be the hero of all the young officers with modern ideas. He's jealous!”

“Sometimes I am, myself,” Miro replied easily. “I'd like a tactical Air Force under my own command. But Ledesma isn't petty.”

“If he was, would you ever see it?”

“Me? Perhaps not. I like to give men credit for honorable motives, Doña Concha. I find that so often it creates them.”

“It creates nothing at all but a higher standard of acting,” Concha replied sharply.

“For war that may be enough.”

“Well, for politics it isn't. What men like you do create, Miro, is a higher standard of perfidy. Men like my husband keep it within decent bounds. If Faustino Ledesma goes over to Avellana, it will not be because he cares whether Avellana or Vidal is President. It will be because he thinks that Ledesma should be boss.”

Miro doubted this reading of Ledesma's character; the emphasis on jealousy was too typically feminine. But as a possibility it was far too dangerous to be ignored. If Ledesma's squadrons took off from San Vicente and landed at Lérida, the Army would declare for Avellana. He remembered the words of Don Jesús-María: that the Army would welcome a position where San Vicente and Vidal could only accept defeat.

“Don Gregorio believes that Ledesma is loyal?” he asked.

“He
hopes
Ledesma is loyal. They like each other. And my husband made him and built up his Air Force for him.”

“What's the feeling among the air crews? What do the police report?”

“That they are bitter against the United States. In God's name why? Can anyone imagine Gregorio as a tool of Wall Street? Or is it the Pentagon they fear? I don't know and no more do they. Gregorio is a patriot. His friendly relations with Washington are only a confidence trick. You know that we live on their money, Miro. They offer it partly from idealism. We take it partly with the intention to repay. Like you, we give each other credit for decent motives and put on an act for the audience. But all these clever young people have no patience with it. If Ledesma gave the lead, his officers would take off and land at Lérida. Think of something, Miro! And don't come to me with the famous fairy tale that you have to obey orders!”