Thing to Love (34 page)

She talked to Miro on the direct line from the Palace to Advance Headquarters and managed to tell him of Morote's conditions in phrases that only he would understand. Then she repeated the actual words:
I shall march with Avellana unless
. . .

It was a shock to him. She could tell that from his momentary silence, could see the light go out of the kindly eyes as they began to look inward, balancing probabilities and courses of action.

“But Don Gregorio was right to give you what you wanted?” she asked anxiously.

“Right? That's for him to say. If he could keep the country quiet while I took my time, he won. If he couldn't, then he was right to gamble. Either way, I take his orders, not Morote's. Feli darling, I must speak at once to the Ministry of Defense.”

“Doña Concha is here. Tell her whatever you want to say to the Ministry.”

“To her?” he asked in surprise. “Well, I suppose she may as well know.”

Felicia could make little of the long conversation, for she was distracted by the sudden revelation — though she was long accustomed to it — of how firmly Miro believed that power rested with the official holder of it. Well, after all, within an Army it did.

“Always the lack of men, Feli,” Concha said, putting down the telephone. “He wants a decision whether he should reinforce the guards on the P.O.W. camps and arms depots, or send troops to San Vicente. I begged him to tell the ministry of Defense what they should decide. He said that he would try to be ready for both, and that the offensive would have to be suspended. Don
Gregorio must understand that he could operate only on interior lines. Do you know what he meant?”

“Yes, I think so. The hinge of the fan is San Vicente. If it sticks, the fan won't open or close.”

“Then he should hit them across the head with it! To put off the offensive because Morote chooses to bluff — I have no patience with such caution!”

During the next few days, however, caution was the last impression which San Vicente gained of the Captain General. All along the Alameda Feli was stopped and congratulated by enthusiastic friends. The real truth was that Miro had begun a desperate effort to take all heart out of the Avellanistas in order to release troops for the policing of San Vicente. The merest amateur could appreciate his daring handling of long-range groups far out in the emptiness of the llanos. The few foreign correspondents and the flamboyant national press had been profoundly impressed by his simplicity and confidence, his maps and his press conferences. They had no need to exaggerate. When they did, she could detect the mischief of Salvador Irala.

Vidal, too, seemed to be triumphant. Felicia could nearly forgive him for running away. Perhaps he had spotted after all the decisive point at which his management should be applied, for the expected Russian note was delivered to the United Nations and fell flat. Since the front pages blazed the victory of a single Division without any foreign intervention at all, Don Gregorio could treat accusations with contempt; he even permitted an extract from the Russian protest to be printed in Guayanas. Feli suspected that his refusal to censor it was due less to boldness than to vanity. If there were no mention of the note, there would be no opportunity for his public to appreciate the good sense and patriotism of his reply. Meanwhile Lérida kept its secret — kept it, but dared not use it. The volunteers could not be brought embarrassingly to life so soon after their existence had been denied.

On the morning of Friday, February 26, the posters were on the streets. Small, fuzzily printed in red on the cheapest paper, the city was still obscenely gay with them even after the police had
torn or defaced the hundreds which they could easily reach. But their number saturated the defense, proving — and the arrests confirmed it — that they had not been distributed by any restricted fast-moving, militant body but by the students, the industrial workers, the unemployed of the Barracas, each man and woman taking three or four leaflets and waiting for an opportunity.

The United States of America, realizing the unpopularity of the right-wing government of President Vidal, has chosen to solve the crisis by interference in the internal affairs of Guayanas. It has reinforced the white guards of Vidal with “volunteers” for the Air Force
.

The anti-imperialists of the peaceful world denounce the warmongering of a clique of American leaders, and call upon the people of Guayanas to unite in opposition to the forces of reaction
.

Strike now!

Do not wait to be bombed and machine-gunned in the streets!

Peons and Workers of Guayanas, take your rightful place in the world! The arms of your brothers are open to receive you
.

The city seemed less noisy. Felicia was not sure whether the timbre of voices, the racket of commerce, the snarling of horns at indifferent pedestrians were in fact slightly muted or whether it was she who imagined that everyone was trying to listen. The ripple along the terrace of the Ateneo, as bald heads or gray turned anxiously towards waiters, towards new arrivals, towards politically unlikely friends, had died away to a flat calm, each table thoughtful and sufficient to itself. On the other side of the Alameda, though her flowery fellow townswomen still idled pleasantly from shop to shop, their foraging for luxuries which they seldom had any immediate intention of buying had lost its air of purpose. They were like parrots before a thunderstorm; colors and chatter were much as usual, but movement was less impetuous. She noticed no increase of trade in the expensive groceries, yet up the alleys and under the yellow archways, where provisions were sold
from sacks, and cellophane wrappings were considered a trick of Vidalismo to pass off poor quality, there were small crowds at the entrances to the dark and cavernous stores.

On Saturday morning, with a frightening absence of any announcement or any organization voluble enough to concentrate police, the General Strike began. The port was out solid. The men and women of the Barracas remained in their shanties. Factories were half empty after the lunch break. Railways and power plants lost only their unskilled labor. Remembering Morote's warning Felicia stayed at home till the afternoon when the quiet of the city — no shots, no wailing of police sirens — tempted her out into the streets.

She returned quickly, feeling too conspicuous. She did not recognize her own countrymen. The crowds of the very poor kept clear of the public buildings and the Alameda, doing nothing which would justify dispersal by force. This unnatural discipline could not last. It would explode, she knew, at the first imagined spark.

She returned quickly to her flat and dressed in darker clothes. While she was absent, the guard on the building, normally playing interminable games of cards out of sight of the basement, had been doubled and had built a little redoubt of sandbags around a machine gun. She was on the point of ordering the men away. Her possessions were not worth a human life. But then there were Miro's possessions too in the flat — his papers, his personal treasures. She contented herself with telling the sergeant in charge of the post that the flat would be empty and that if he had to think twice about his tactics — he flashed an amused and appreciative smile at this military correctitude — he need not consider her personal safety. She noticed that he wore a slipper on one foot. The Citadel was down to drawing on its convalescents.

She sent her maids away to safety and packed a small case with her jewels and Miro's valuables. There were no taxis about. The drivers knew too well that their fate in revolution was to be commandeered by one side and set on fire by the other. She walked to the Palace nearly unrecognized and quite unmolested, avoiding the still objectless gatherings of Avellanistas. A few glimpses of the Alameda showed her that the banks, the shops and the Ateneo
were shuttered. It was lined with police. She wondered if thin lines were right, remembering Miro's heavily armed and isolated posts, inconspicuous but at close quarters terrifying. The only small, compact groups were those of the Barracas.

In the courtyard of the Palace were six Saracens which had been recovered from the Escala de los Ingleses and repaired in the workshops of the Citadel. The tall mestizos of the Presidential Guard looked reasonably formidable. They had exchanged lances and plumes for steel helmets and automatic rifles. One company was in the courtyard. The other was in position between the Glorieta and the Palace steps.

She found the Presidenta alone in the Little Salon, filling its delicate emptiness with her tense and solid presence. She was standing like a man, her legs apart, dominating the two telephones on the writing table in front of her.

“Feli, you should not be here,” Doña Concha said decisively. “Can you reach the Fonsagrada house?”

“Of course. But I am in no danger.”

“Then you're the only person in San Vicente who is not. And if you think, my girl, that people who haven't got a hat are going to sweep it off and say ‘Pass, Doña Felicia' because a dozen bare-arsed savages want to set you up as an idol with a pendant of tiger's teeth between your pretty little breasts, you have never been more wrong in your life. Your father's house is neutral ground. Go to it.”

“Doña Concha, I am not neutral,” she answered sharply. “If you wish, I will go to the Citadel.”

“Look, child! There are two things I must preserve for Miro: the Citadel and you. I have given orders — that is to say, I have seen them signed and dispatched — that it is to be held at all costs. If I let you loose there, you'd lead that handful of men out into the streets. I know them and you.”

“And why not? If the Communists get control of this —”

“Feli, I am not an old woman in the United States. This is a rising of our fellow countrymen who have no patience with Gregorio because they have not enough to eat while he transforms the
country. It is Avellana who will have to deal with the Communists if he wins.”

“What do the police think?”

“When the Cabinet are for provoking an incident and striking hard, the police say it is dangerous and that somewhere the university has arms; when the Cabinet has decided to wait, the police beg them for action. Oh, if Miro were here!”

They heard the Saracens rumble out of the courtyard into the dusk and went to the back of the Palace to see what was happening. Four had gone. Two were left. Sections of the Guard Company were moving to strongpoints, leaving a reserve in the courtyard.

There was a formal volley of fire from the direction of Police Headquarters and then a succession of sounds so planned and deliberate, though their meaning could not be guessed in precise detail, that Feli felt an insane association with some tail-coated conductor leading an oratorio of insurrection. The tattoo of the Saracens' guns was cut off by sharp explosions and a sudden glare which lit the outlines of the city roofs between the Palace and the Alameda. Bursts of automatic fire — and again the police rifles — gave way to the woodwind of cries. At last massed human voices, their hoarse anger softened by the intervening buildings, swelled into an opening chorus of monotonous, mechanical power.

“O God, what have any of us done to deserve such hatred?” Feli exclaimed.

“Hatred is soon over. It is love which does the damage in this world,” Concha replied. “Yet what sort of a life would we have without it? Come! I have told them I shall be in the President's office. Come, Feli! Don't stand there thinking!”

The portraits on the paneled walls looked down on them with exaggerated masculinity, some ready to seize command and get a statue in the Alameda, others prepared to surrender with such artificial dignity that they would get the statue just the same. That, too, was the mood of the defenders in the city. The Presidenta was a woman and had no existence. When the police and the Ministry of the Interior and the lieutenant colonel commanding the Presidential
Guard remembered to call her, they gave comfort — very shortly. She had to cross-question them with the forcefulness of a fishwife before she could get a picture that was anywhere near the truth.

Hour after hour the impression of chaos increased until the reports became more frequent. Too frequent now. They were coming to Concha for advice. They were clinging to anyone who would take responsibility. But it wasn't command they wanted. They were using her as a mother, whose sharp or soothing words would justify more bloodshed.

And all this, she thought ironically, for Gregorio, whom she was popularly supposed to beat! A comic postcard of her dubious domination. If she had any such magnificence at all, it was that of some tough old maid using all her efficiency to see that her pet dog took first prize at every show. She should have had a husband like Miro — Miro, the only Vidalista of any dynamic drive with whom she had never attempted to establish a close relationship. It was a shyness ridiculous in a woman of fifty, but it had to be preserved. Miro would never have suspected its cause, but Feli might. And that would be an unbearable humiliation.

The little militarized fool was enjoying this — taking messages, keeping up the morale of the President's secretaries and staff, in continual touch with the Command Post of the Guard, using her influence at the Citadel to see that reports came direct to the Palace as well as to the Ministry of Defense. The wrong woman for Miro. She was too easily overwhelmed by her love of him. It was quite certain that before he chose his side she had approved of Avellana's program. If she had persuaded him to keep out . . . Well, call it jealousy, but the beauty and devotion of some savage, slim-bellied greyhound were not enough.

She wondered if any of these men who went on fighting from habit or from loyalty or — like the civil governor who had just gallantly cleared a route to the north and escaped by it — from sheer fright had any idea of what pattern there might be in the chaos. Were Feli and her tame Americans right and a Lenin was at work somewhere in the flying darkness and dust where the street lamps had been shot out? It wouldn't be Pablo Morote. He controlled
nothing any longer. He and his port workers had destroyed the four Sacarens with petrol bombs and were now battling for their lives around Police Headquarters.