Thing to Love (28 page)

“Or perhaps I will take over your flat to remind me of you, and of our charming relationship which has been somewhat mystifying to the world outside our patio, but very simple to ourselves. That on occasion there has been a pretty squeak of ‘No, Don Juan,' or ‘I beg of you, Don Juan' I am not denying. Indeed I think on this our last day I should apologize to you, because obedience, however reluctant, was still possible. Let me assure you, my dears, that you are both of most faultless and exciting loveliness. You compete with my memories as an Olympic champion
of today destroys the records of the past. My astonishing high-mindedness has been due to the purest aestheticism. I have set all my life so high a value upon the intolerable beauty of the act of procreation that I cannot now bear to involve myself in a situation where the enthusiasm of my partner would be markedly less than my own. I observe that only your invariable courtesy prevents you from bursting into giggles. May I ask you to leave matters of state to Gil Avellana and Miro Kucera, and instead of looking at each other with such bitter loathing to remember how often you have laughed together at me?”

The two girls exchanged a flicker of a glance and at once looked away. He observed that the corners of Vita's delicious mouth were unsteady and that his red-haired Agueda had set her lips into the tight bunch of a fourteen-year-old.

“Good! Now that communication has been established, or, if this is an overstatement, that at least I am being used as a telephone exchange, I have a proposal to make to you. I am handing over the house to the Red Cross, so you will cease to be my Public Relations officers.”

“Your what, Don Juan?” Agueda asked.

“I borrow a phrase from the Managerial Society. It seems to fit very well your entertaining of my political and diplomatic friends, of insistent journalists and of my customers.”

“Clients, Don Juan,” Vita corrected him.

“Clients, I should say. But at the same time you are both competent technicians. You know, as I do not, the difference between penicillin and sulfa drugs. You pay some attention to the noughts on the label of an ampoule, whereas I am constitutionally unable to believe there is any important difference between ten million and one million whether pesos or animalculae. If you are willing, you can each of you go to the Army of her choice, continuing to draw your salaries from me and reporting to me the needs of the regimental aid posts in simple words that I and the warehouse man can understand.

“I suggest that you, my lovely Agueda, should join Fifth Division's Field Hospital. In the llanos they will find they need a pathologist. You, my perfection of a Vita, will serve the horsemen
of Avellana by organizing the women of Los Venados and trying to get some conception of a sterile dressing into their heads. Do what you can. Your presence will restrain the fouler language of the overworked military surgeons. My name will ensure you authority among the people. Is it agreed?”

“But can you get on without me — us, Don Juan?” Agueda asked.

“In a twilight, yes.”

“And this is not because . . . I mean, we could try to work together for you.”

“No, not because you both showed at last how strongly you felt. But it seemed a good opportunity to propose to you what I was already thinking.”

“And all you want of me is really to let you know what drugs the Division needs and how you can help?” Agueda asked uneasily.

“All. Tell me nothing that I should not know. If in doubt, ask Salvador Irala or any other ruthless mercenary.”

“Don Juan, be serious! When shall I go?”

“We shall have time to talk it over.”

Agueda got up, for that was as near as Juan ever came to ending a conversation. As she left the study, her glance at Vita puzzled him. There was no enmity or rivalry in it. And, whatever it meant, it concerned him and not themselves.

“Now, my dear Vita, you must get off tomorrow before my private routes to Los Venados are closed. I can be of little use to Fifth Division unless my English suppliers can fly to Guayanas something the Americans cannot — which is most unlikely. But we can save lives and needless suffering for the Avellanistas.”

“You weren't fair. Agueda saw that too. She wasn't eager to go, Don Juan.”

“Why the devil not? I have no doubt the affection of Captain Irala makes up in quality what it may lack in permanence.”

“When the general and Doña Felicia came to the house, you never needed your — Public Relations officers.”

“It was far too difficult to explain to my daughter without one of my speeches which nobody believes.”

“Perhaps Agueda thought you would be without so many things you love.”

“It is an extraordinary thing that two young women who at one moment are prepared to kill each other will combine at the next for purposes of motherhood.”

“Well, you need it.”

“It's the last thing I need. And you should know by now it can't be done.”

“And you were jealous of Salvador.”

“I was not. I envied him his youth.”

“Why? Why do you think that without youth there can be no beauty?”

“You should be in the Chamber, my perfection. They invariably attack me by quoting immortal words which I have entirely forgotten.”

“When shall I see you again?”

“At dinner.”

“You know I meant — after Los Venados.”

“When you enter San Vicente with Avellana.”

“You think that is certain, Don Juan?”

“Yes, if the youth of Guayanas continues to have faith in him.”

“And you? Will you be in the government?”

“That depends who governs.”

“We don't want his generals.”

“The alternative might be Miro.”

“That's worse still! . . . I am sorry, Don Juan.”

“Oh, my son-in-law would be the first person to agree with you!”

“But he is responsible.”

“Vita, it was I who mixed the explosives. It was Pilar Avellana who put in the detonator. It was Ledesma who pressed the switch. I think that Miro's fire brigade should have let the dust settle before charging in. I think that perhaps they should have realized they were too few to put all of it out. But God help this world if men are going to stop doing what they conceive to be their duty because there aren't enough of them! Remember that, when you are surrounded by hatred of my dear son-in-law.”

CHAPTER XV

[
December 20
]

F
ELICIA WAITED
for her husband. What sort of man would come to her she did not know. Death, power, triumph and now insult must surely end the long-protracted honeymoon, converting it into a different kind of closeness or no closeness at all. It was not the strain of the fighting which she feared. That was an easy extension of his personality. He believed in himself as an expert professional, as a craftsman who could visualize his limited purpose and exquisitely handle his human raw material to achieve it. He would even play the conquering hero beautifully, if he had to, and see right through the pose.

The trouble was his self-questioning, even when there was no conceivable room for doubt. He would have been impressed by Avellana's damnable, cruel lies. He would wonder if they were not true. After the broadcast she had called him immediately at his Cumana Headquarters, blazing with anger, weeping with love and anger into the telephone. He had considered it his duty to comfort her. He had been reasonable — his invariable reaction when deeply hurt. Miro hardly ever showed emotion when he himself was under attack. Pettiness, carelessness, crookedness — those could sting him out of his calm, but not an honestly held opinion. That he could believe for a moment in Avellana's honesty
appalled her. It would be the end of all sanity in government if leaders took seriously all that was said about them by their enemies.

Far down beneath the balcony the pavement of the shady side of the street was suddenly sprinkled with idlers and police. An escort of a dozen motorcyclists grew from fast-moving dots to steel-helmeted points standing smartly by their machines. Miro's staff car stopped at the entrance, followed by two scout cars from poor Calixto's shattered squadrons. It was not a strong enough escort for the journey from Cumana into San Vicente. His staff should have overruled him and insisted on more protection.

She waited behind the door like a child and flung it open as soon as she heard his fencer's steps, so decided yet curiously light, come down the passage.

“Queridita
, how lovely you are!”

“Miro, Miro! Miro!”

The door was shut and she stood back from his arms. He was different. Only twelve days, and he was different. He looked thinner and his eyes had sunk. The deep blue was the color of the sea at the entrance to a cave or under the sun-filtering thatch of a fisherman's boathouse. And so fit, so poised in energy. An engine of steel, stopped but still throbbing. A race horse at the tapes. A drawn sword. She poured out to herself the similes of passion until she heard herself crying them incoherently aloud.

The midday dusk of their bedroom restored a peace of before the revolution. She insisted to herself, as if the wish were really possible, that nothing ever should open the closed shutters to the sun and the street.

“After all that,” she said. “After all that. . . .”

“There is no need to be anxious.”

“No. I think I meant that after so much, if I were a man, I should feel this so little. Triumph, and the worship of your men and the people.”

“We aren't really made like that, Feli. We separate our lives into two halves. They don't join.”

“But power. And life and death. And speed. And here there is only a flat in San Vicente and me.”

“Feli, if you mean what I think you mean, it's blasphemy. It's as if you were to ask me how I would deploy the armor behind this breast to attack the other.”

“How would you?”

“Like this.”

“No! . . . It was you who said it. Now explain!”

“I said it was blasphemy.”

“But you said it. So the two lives did join.”

“There is only one, Feli. You.”

“And that isn't true either. After twelve days, twelve such days as you have had, what am I?”

“Beloved, if you were any other woman, I should say you were jealous of my profession.”

“I am not. I am proud of it. But of your success? Am I? Perhaps. A little. But oh, Miro, it isn't really that I am jealous. I am afraid!”

“Alma de mi vida
, the worst that could happen would be exile.”

The stupidity of men! And anyway it wasn't the worst that could happen.

“It's not that, Miro. You have won. And you will win if there's any more of it. It's just that when a whole country needs you, when you have to answer its need . . .”

“When all this is over, I retire,” he answered bluntly. “I don't think the Fonsagrada estate is practical any longer. But we'll find something to keep us going.”

And that, too, was absurd! As if he could ever walk out! For years there would not be such safe tranquillity that he could. His sense of duty would insist that he could not abandon Guayanas to some immediate and disastrous future like a military dictatorship of that barbarian Rosalindo Chaves or a return to Ateneo government.

Miro growing old and losing his power to love. Miro ordering, ordering. Miro caught up in complexities, no longer the genial head of something that could grin at her and salute her. She remembered how she had withdrawn from the image of herself as a Caudillo's vulgar wife on a sort of nineteen-twentyish Mexican march. But in fact how much more intimate a relationship that
would have been than a resigned partnership in face of her rivals: Guayanas, the Army, the elaboration of government.

“That broadcast,” she said. “He tried to hurt you. He tried to destroy you.”

“He succeeded — for a little while. But then I saw it was a military weapon like any other.”

“A dirty, filthy weapon even for a Communist.”

To her intense surprise Miro laughed.

“I suppose we have to call him one. But we must remember that he isn't. And I hope Avellana remembers that at La Joya I wasn't a bloodthirsty mercenary — only a government servant who told him quite frankly what was going to happen.”

“I hate him as I've never hated anyone.”

“So did I. So does the Division. They are so angry they may get out of my control. But coming here, Feli, I thought about it. Cars or railways — whenever I travel, I see things more clearly.”

He let it go at that. There was no point confessing that when he had started from Cumana at five that morning he could hardly bear to face her. Ever since Avellana's broadcast he had been quite unable to suppress his misgivings. The picture of him as an unprincipled mercenary could be true.

His secret, obstinate doubt had been unmoved by the Division's outburst of reassurance and affection. He could not even be comforted by the instant, warm, indignant messages from Mario Nicuesa and Rosalindo Chaves, almost identical in tone though it was most unlikely they could have concerted what they were going to say. Mario was entering Siete Dolores from the southeast and was already at Los Milagros when Avellana announced that Twelfth Cavalry had pulled out from the Quebradas Pass. Rosalindo with a powerful column of all arms had crossed the Jaquiri and was racing north in order to confine the remains of Sixth Division to their beachhead wherever they landed. The broadcast showed that he would be too late.

He had thought that his officers' image of him must be of an imperturbable leader always gently forcing them into being something they would never have been if left to their own inclinations, always imitating them with such ape's skill — or was it just ordinary
courtesy? — that a mongrel example was formed which they could imitate back again. How could they know, all of them apparently, that he was oversensitive?

Since they did, he had to discount their too emphatic reassurance. That went for Feli, too. She would never admit there could be any aspect of truth at all in Avellana's accusations. He would find her in the same mood as when she telephoned. It was proof of her love, but not of her judgment. Such empty, passionate resentment would drive him into seeing the other side more clearly than ever, and instead of comforting him reinforce his sense of shame.

His mood had still been black as the villages along the road to San Vicente began to thicken, to grow tattered ornamental trees, to become the suburbs. At the tram terminus, where the highway became a street, anciently paved, potholed, and lined by the whitewashed shacks of the poor, it was market day. The booths and piles of vegetables left little room for anything but the clumsy maneuvers of two turning trams. He halted the escort, which — naturally enough after battle — was being too brutally impatient. Then he was recognized, but not at all as a mercenary and murderer speeding through his adopted country with a heavily armed guard to protect him. The people crowded round his car, tossing into it their hard-won ears of corn, their pimientos and limes, patting the guns of the scout cars as if they had been prize stallions. Well, Calixto's regiment had certainly fertilized the Escala — not that these particolored clowns cared; they were always ready to cheer a startling military victory, especially if it had taken place at a safe distance from San Vicente.

But cynicism could not endure. Clowns? The simple market-folk were friendly and their vivas sincere; they seemed to know why they were cheering. He was reminded of his reception that afternoon before the campaign when he was on his way to the Chamber. San Vicente had shown unmistakably that it was weary of having governments, good or bad, supplied by kind permission of the armed forces.

No, the whole country was not with Avellana — and only if it was could he claim that the mercenary Kucera had overridden
the will of the people by force. The very poor? But here in the sunlit squalor of this tram terminus it was evident that so long as you had a roof of red tiles over your head it was possible to support Vidal. Perhaps in the Barracas, where roofs were of grass and bits of linoleum and scraps of packing cases, it was not. Yet even there Avellana was not the only possible leader. Morote was hesitant. And what about the dozen or more of Basilio Ferrer's toughs who came from the Barracas, and that fellow Menendez?

The issue was simple, and they knew it, here and in the Division and in San Vicente. The issue was legality versus political adventure. He was not Vidal's mercenary. He was the mercenary of something bigger. Vidal's tame Yankees would probably call him the mercenary of democracy. But it was not that either; his respect for democracy was very qualified. He remembered something that Paco Salinas had said:
Why look for excuses? They don't want any from you
.

“How long before it is all over?” Felicia asked.

“That depends how decisive Don Gregorio will be. What sort of mood is he in?”

“Overwhelmed. Surprised. It's to be a very formal reception this afternoon. The best he could do at short notice.”

“He wanted to give a banquet for all field officers of the Division,” Miro laughed. “I had to explain they were scattered over half the country. Rosalindo might be in action any moment. These politicians don't put any value at all on speed. We aren't going to polish our buttons and stuff fish in aspic while Valdés has time to organize. What is Juan doing?”

“Running for cover and lending the house to the Red Cross.”

“Did he admit his secret interview with Vidal?”

“Half. He talked to me as if I were a dirty old man in the Ateneo, and said a President always needed some private relaxation in times of distress.”

“That shut you up!” Miro chuckled. “Juan is incredible. I wonder those girls of his don't protest at being used as a smoke screen!”

“Miro!”

“Well, that's what they are. They give a glamorous air of irresponsibility to all his most important intrigues. What's he doing with them?”

“He is sending the one with the dyed hair to your Headquarters with his compliments,” Felicia replied coldly, “and the dark one who pretends to be an intellectual has cleared out.”

“Avellana's Florence Nightingale, I suppose. Or is she to share his discomforts more intimately? Well, thank God Don Gregorio hasn't yet ordered me to escort Juan to the Citadel! But that and worse could happen if I don't finish quickly. Get Concha to work on the President if you can. Have you seen her?”

“Nearly every day. Don Gregorio wanted you to drive straight to the Palace and stay talking till the reception. It was Concha who told him you would have to come home and bath and change first. I hadn't thought of anything so simple. She said he had a romantic view of soldiers. Even generals came home covered with dust and blood.”

“Bless her! Then I will put on full uniform. After the reception I shall have to spend the whole afternoon in the Ministries. But that will give me an excuse to come home again and change.”

“You must go back tonight?”

“Yes. Headquarters move tomorrow.”

When his car circled the Glorieta and halted in front of the Palace steps, he was glad of his gold lace and aiguillettes. Battle dress and steel helmet would have been out of keeping, would have emphasized the ultimate superiority of the soldier over all this black and white with its sashes of office and colored buttons in the lapel. He walked up the steps between the two lines of the Presidential Guard, now carefully screened and reinstated, towards Don Gregorio's dramatically outstretched hand. Behind him were representatives of the High Court, the Cabinet and the Chamber with their wives. A slight stirring at the back showed where Feli, who could have parked her Mercedes in the inner courtyard only half a minute before he arrived at the front, was insinuating herself among the guests.

Fanfare of trumpets . . . Champagne . . . Speeches of welcome
which went on interminably. They condemned Avellana's policy — which could be done convincingly only by an economist. They praised Fifth Division's conduct of the campaign — which could be understood only by a professional soldier. They flattered Vidal with bubbles of froth which called up a clear image of the filthy mess of detergent in the streams below the washhouses of the suburbs. A better example for the enemy than poor Coca-Cola! Why spend money importing detergents when Guayanas made excellent soap?