Thing to Love (9 page)

“Don Gil, my duty to Guayanas is much simpler than yours. I am not, if you like, so civilized. I have taken pay and therefore I must serve.”

Avellana was silent. He seemed to be impressed and trying hard to understand. Miro blamed himself for being unable to make this simple confession of faith earlier. The fascination of the man had muddled him. But now there seemed some hope of compromise — though God only knew what form it could take.

“But what do you serve?” Avellana asked.

“Not Vidal. The State. I have given my oath to serve the State.”

“Suppose I and my friends were the State next month?”

“Until you are, I must be at the orders of the existing government.”

“You exaggerate our politics,” Avellana replied, smiling. “Revolution is not a thing of bloodshed and barricades. The will of the people expresses itself in an act of violence, short and decisive.”

“I understand that. Juan has lectured me very clearly. But if I declared for you I shouldn't feel myself your man of honor.”

“Honor is to follow one's convictions, Don Miro, not to go against them. You won't find a man in Guayanas to understand you.”

“The Division will,” Miro replied confidently.

“You mean — you mean you will oppose me by force?”

“Without knowing your plans I cannot say. But as garrison commander I am responsible for the peace of San Vicente, and bound to obey orders.”

“Be neutral, General,” Avellana appealed. “Put up any pretense you like, but be neutral!”

“We have already agreed that it's impossible.”

“Very well. Then I am faced by the honor of a mercenary. Apparently it can contemplate civil war without shrinking. I cannot. And Vidal dare not. So there will be no point at which you can intervene. You will thank me for that, for I presume neither you nor your famous Division want to massacre your fellow countrymen. But you realize that when I am President I shall be compelled to demand your resignation?”

“Of course.”

What a judge of character Juan de Fonsagrada was! He must have foreseen, in spite of his son-in-law's sympathy for Avellana, that sooner or later clash was going to come. It might have come later — too late to act — if only Pilar's indiscretion had not forced on this interview. Fifth Division could have been kept — well, if not in ignorance, at least in such a mess of contradictory, half-suspicious orders from Vidal that it could only accept a hopeless situation.

“Shall we go back to the house?” Avellana asked.

“If you permit, Don Gil, I think I will stay here a little.”

Miro Kucera, left alone by the black, slow water of the irrigation channel, had no doubt where his duty lay, and it was little good to complain that his choice had been forced. At least he now had room for maneuver.

Automatically he found himself beginning to treat the coming crisis as a military problem. Political intrigue was not his line of country and he knew it. But what and where was the main threat to his defense? No doubt about that. A rising of Avellana's supporters in San Vicente could be squashed instantly and decisively. A General Strike could not.

Speed, then. The attempt to isolate Morote and defeat him must go in at once, that very night. For that he needed Feli. Feli was like a secret weapon. On the very rare occasions when such weapons had really existed, they were never decisive; but they disorganized the enemy.

Whether she would agree with his conception of his duty he could not tell. However intimate a marriage, one couldn't prophesy
the strength of political convictions in a crisis. He knew Feli's opinion of revolution: that it was time Latin-American politicians grew up. Hardly fair on Gil Avellana, who could not get Vidal out any other way. Still, she herself had said that the proper time for him to marshal public opinion was before the last election, not long after it.

He went back to the house. The hall was still lively. From outside the window he was able to watch Pedro Valdés. For the first time he noticed that his geniality was very controlled. Even when he drank, the deep eyes were intent. Morote was not with him. From the lights in other windows he gathered that Juan had gone to bed and Avellana was in his study. The light in his own room was not on. Feli, then, was probably in the upstairs drawing room with Pilar.

He found her there, reading while Pilar placidly embroidered an altar cloth.

When they had said good night and were in the empty passage Miro asked: “Do you know where Morote is? I have to see him before he talks to Gil.”

“He has gone over to the village, I believe.”

“Alone?”

“Probably. It's the last place to find Carrillo; and Pedro was still downstairs when I left. How did it go with Gil?”

“Badly. That's why I wanted a word with Morote. But it's difficult. I hoped he would be here, and that together we . . .”

“I'll go down with you. With the great man in the village they will all be half drunk, and once you join them you'll have to stay. And you won't have a chance to talk unless I cut him out of the herd for you.”

“You'd better change, then,” said Miro, reluctant to take so startling a vision into whatever drinking den Morote was patronizing.

“Of course not! You don't understand them. But
you
should change. Remind Morote of his everyday life, not this — unreality.”

He was startled by the word. Avellana and his intentions seemed very real indeed. But he saw what she meant. Reality
for Morote was the squalor of the Barracas, the daily fight of the dock laborer to keep his children just above the starvation line. Obviously he recognized the necessity for political and economic planning. Yet the haze of smoke and ideas in Avellana's study must often have seemed to him less effective than direct action.

Miro quickly changed from grandfather Avellana's silks and baggy trousers, giving them a look of regret as they lay on the bed. His success was, he had no doubt, due to the ease with which he had learned to assume protective coloring; but there were limits. In national costume he was an imposter.

“It would be better if we are not seen,” he suggested.

Feli put on a dark cloak over her white and gold.

“Gil is bound to know tomorrow that we were there,” she said.

“Tomorrow we shall have gone. But I don't want him to have a chance to interfere tonight. How Morote chooses to explain tomorrow is his business.”

They went out by the empty terrace and vanished into the darkness of the plain. At the end of the long avenue were a few very faint lights. The distant tinkle of a guitar was a surer sign that the village was awake. Then there was silence. The guitar had changed hands, for the two deep opening chords which again decorated the night had been slashed unmistakably by the broad thumbs of Morote.

On the way Miro explained to Feli as much as it was essential for her to know. There was no need to argue for or against Avellanismo.

“Did you guess he was planning revolution in a matter of weeks?”

“No. Papá has been very discreet. He knew that I would pass anything on to you.”

Miro squeezed the fingers which were linked with his.

“What I want to do is to stop it,” he said. “It's too dangerous. Morote's presence here — Well, it's clear that one of Avellana's weapons, if he has to use it, could be a General Strike. If I can persuade Morote that he has a lot to lose, we might all have more time to think.”

“But you loathe Vidal.”

“I come home and complain about him. It isn't quite the same thing.”

In the little plaza, which was hardly more than a dusty crossing of lanes, Morote and a dozen peons sat at a candlelit table outside the tavern. Many more stood or squatted in the darkness. Though drink was flowing freely at the table and voices occasionally rose in a clatter of noise, the party seemed to have an undercurrent of melancholy. The infinite space of the Americas pressed too closely upon a couple of candles and one oil lamp in the shop.

The men at the entrance to the plaza moved aside to let the new arrivals pass. It was in a silence not quite of resentment, but of regret; what had promised to be an unforgettable night with the leader of the poor, whose name had been in newspapers, was bound to be changed for the worse by this man and woman from the benevolent but awkward world of the estancia.

Feli at once produced a different order of silence by giving her greetings in the Indian language. This was unexpected and inexplicable, especially since she spoke it a deal better than the mestizos of the estancia for whom Spanish was the language of every day. Then she was recognized. Feet shifted in the soft dust. The shadowed faces of women — though there had been no obvious communication with them — appeared at doors and windows. A whisper hissed across the plaza from mouth to mouth, its two last syllables like a ripple breaking on rock:

“La de Fonsagrada! La de Fonsagrada!”

Pablo Morote looked up and saw them, greeting them with a forced heartiness.

“Hola, friends! And what brings you down here?”

“To take a cup and listen to you,” Miro replied casually.

The tavernkeeper was already out of his shop with two stools. Miro shook a number of hands and sat down with Felicia.

He had wanted to bring Feli — the secret weapon — to bear, but it would never have occurred to him to take her down to the village if she hadn't suggested it. And she was right. If he had come alone he would not have been able to detach Morote. Empty politeness, empty exclamations would have gone on hour after hour until he finally walked back to the house with everybody
protesting that he shouldn't go and everybody hoping to God he would.

But the atmosphere which Feli created was almost courtly. She did not interfere with conventional amusement. She merely took the dullness of convention out of it. This was not twentieth-century Guayanas; it was fifteenth-century Spain. Or was it, he wondered, fifteenth-century Guayanas? How Indian was Morote? What reality had the Fonsagradas' influence? It seemed incredible that Juan, the boulevardier, could command the respect — and probably twice as much of it — which Feli was getting.

None of these men of mixed blood considered Feli as any sort of royalty to whom allegiance was due. But she was, he supposed, a personification of old stories, of superstitions, of folk history. In a near future — whether Avellana's or Vidal's — Guayanas would be integrated into one people among whom, as in Mexico, the proportion of white blood in an Indian or Indian blood in a white mattered to nobody. But meanwhile the conquerors still dominated, and the Fonsagradas were, in a way, all that remained of the conquered. So Feli's presence was more exciting for them than even that of Morote. He himself did not count at all. He was merely an officer from San Vicente.

She leaned forward to applaud a singer, and let her cloak fall back. The sun on her forehead, which had been a mere delightful decoration, its native workmanship quite possibly unrecognized, took on an unmistakable meaning when combined with her frock. They saw that she was deliberately glorying in her descent.

A few minutes later she asked: “Give me a moment of your time, Don Pablo.”

It was an order from the priestess. The whole plaza wanted to obey. It looked as if Feli and Miro were going to be accompanied up the avenue and back to the house by a procession. Both of them were helpless. It was Morote who raised his hand and imposed common sense.

“I shall be back shortly,
compañeros
. Nothing more than a moment for the affairs of Doña Felicia!”

Miro detected that Morote, for all his courtesy, was suspicious.
Well, he had reason to be. To be dragged off on Feli's mysterious business, to be forced into watchfulness when he had been mellow with drink was hardly fair. As they walked away he wondered for the hundredth time at the contrast between the two Indian races which nobody could explain except by wild conjecture. One saw the fine-drawn, straight-nosed, golden face which both Feli and her father had preserved — as well as that trumpeter — what was his name? — ah, Menendez — and the dark, broad-nosed, Mongol face of Morote which could well have belonged to an Eskimo or a Japanese peasant. Yet there was no trace left of any social difference between them.

When the village was again only a glow in the night, but now, since more candles had been lit, a little brighter than before, Felicia said: “I am so sorry, Don Pablo. But it was urgent. We had to speak to you.”

“I have nothing to say, Doña Felicia,” answered Morote. “Speak to the Chief!”

“I have,” Miro said.

“Then what do you want with me?”

“We are by no means in accord, Don Gil and I.”

Morote at once realized the vital importance of his own curious intimacy with the general, and dropped his guard.

“But that was what I told them! Look, I said, what is the use of plans while we cannot be sure what Miro Kucera will do? And so the Chief has at last asked you what you want?”

“Don Pablo, do you know how my husband can be bought?” Felicia asked.

Morote shrugged his shoulders.

“Nor does anybody else,” she said.

“Good! That is what I suspect. At the same time — this is not in my power, but for example — wouldn't you wish to be commander in chief?”

“Not in the least, friend! I shouldn't last a year.”

“If the generals tried to remove you, they would have to reckon with me.”

“Thank you, Don Pablo. But that is not the way to run an
army. We should arrive at a postition when every time an officer wanted a private talk with me he would be searched by a Morotista at the gate!”

Morote laughed. It was clear that this picture pleased him, and did not seem improbable.

“Well then, let us put it that you want nothing! So in what do you disagree with the Chief? I never feel that I have much influence with him, but I will do my best.”