Tango (2 page)

‘Not very well.’

‘No, but for
un Inglés.
’ She turned her hand, heavily beringed. ‘I am Ines. This is Theresa.’

William introduced himself and they shook hands. Theresa’s hand was firm but quickly withdrawn. He talked rapidly to Ines, who asked many questions. Yes, she knew the English Bookshop, now
renamed Britbooks by the parent company in London. What did it mean, Britbooks, and why had they changed? If William did not like it, why had he agreed? Surely he could paint it out and put back
the old name that everyone knew? And why did they not sell so many books now, why was there so much paper, so many envelopes? What did wholesale mean? Why did he leave London to come and be manager
here when London was so much bigger a city? Was he married? Why had he no children?

They ate as fast as they talked, like everyone else. All around them chunks of meat were being pushed into mouths, great slabs sizzled on the fire, even greater slabs and sides, inches thick and
feet across, hung waiting to be cooked. The air was thick with smoke and voices. Sally had never been to the covered market, though he had once tried to tell her about it. She had gone vegetarian
about a year before.

William kept talking. Ines needed everything explained, which was useful at that moment but made him suspect that she was boring. He wanted to talk to Theresa, but she ate and said nothing.
Perhaps she was boring, too, in a different way. Sometimes she looked round, but not as if for anyone in particular. Perhaps it was he that was boring. Once or twice, though, he felt her eyes upon
him but when he looked up her eyelids were lowered and she too was pushing meat between her lips.

More wine came. He asked Ines what she did but didn’t listen to the reply because he was thinking of how he had never been unfaithful to Sally. Maybe he was afraid or maybe he had never
really wanted to. Whatever it was that Ines was explaining, it didn’t sound like very much. She kept repeating the words for ‘sometimes’ – ‘
de vez en
cuando
’. He had never seriously considered having an affair. He wasn’t doing so now; he wasn’t even talking to her.

The voices around them quietened. Ines whispered to Theresa and they both looked away. Others did the same. The source of the growing silence was something he couldn’t see. Heads and
shoulders turned and he got off his stool and stood. Both women had their backs to him.

It was a group of military men wearing olive greens and caps with long peaks. Three or four carried sub-machine guns with exaggerated nonchalance, the others puffed at fat cigars and wore beards
like young Castros. They walked slowly, smiling and greeting people. At their head, young, handsome and hatless, was the new president, General Calvaros. He looked as if he had stepped out of his
own newspaper photographs, slim and smiling, a sensitive, intelligent face marred by a loose undisciplined mouth. Educated in England and Sandhurst-trained, he and his junta of colonels had seized
power about a year before from the corrupt but elected Liberal Democrats. The putsch was now called a revolution but it had never had popular support. Nor had it met with real opposition apart from
certain sections of the press, at first.

The party disappeared behind Ines’s bush of hair as she turned to William.

‘The general, our new president,’ she said, smiling hugely.

The group continued to move slowly, stopping to talk to people. They had at first promised elections within months once certain economic measures had been taken, necessary because of the widely
acknowledged corruption and inadequacy of the previous administration. There was less talk of that now, though; rather, the talk was of the new political party, the People’s Party, which had
been formed by the junta. Elections would be held when arrangements were complete. The old Liberal Democrat leaders would be released when their financial positions had been fully investigated and
accounted for.

William waited for the group to reappear from behind Ines’s hair. Yes, there was no doubt. President Calvaros walked with his hands clasped behind his back and grinned with impersonal
goodwill, like any British Army officer at any military open day. His cohorts kept reaching out to shake hands with and good-naturedly slap surprised onlookers. The guards were relaxed and pleased
with themselves. Yet despite the good humour and jokes a silence surrounded the junta’s advance. Talk ceased at their approach, people were fearful in their presence, subdued when they had
passed.

Ines turned her head again and whispered: ‘The president is walking with his colonels to meet the people.’

‘I had heard that he does this.’

She looked pleased. ‘He likes to meet people.’

Behind the president was a tall calm man whose smile showed teeth as large as but more regular than Ines’s. Ines whispered to Theresa.

The president stopped by Theresa and spoke. William watched the back of her head as she replied.

‘Also on Wednesdays?’ the president asked.

‘Yes.’

The president’s smiling young eyes moved to Ines. ‘You, too. I have seen you at the same place.’

‘Yes, I am there also.’

‘I will come again.’

His eyes moved to William. ‘William Wooding.’

‘Carlos.’

‘What are you doing here?’

William explained. The whole party stopped and looked at him. He stumbled in his Spanish, partly because the sentences he tried to form were interspersed by memories of Carlos at school in
Shropshire: Carlos pale and reluctant on the rugby field, crying in a maths lesson. He had long wondered if it could be the same man but the name was common and many of the officer class had been
educated in Europe or America. There was no mistaking the vulnerable mobile mouth, though, nor the hazel eyes of his English mother. He remembered helping Carlos with his English prep in return for
chocolate.

‘I am pleased you are bringing business to our country,’ Carlos said when William had finished.

William inclined his head. ‘As you brought some to mine.’

‘But your company must not bleed us. You must give as well as take.’ Carlos spoke more loudly than before.

‘At present we take nothing. We put money in.’

‘Neither do we want your charity. Remember that.’ Carlos looked about him. ‘We ask no charity of anyone. Only honest dealing, non-interference and the chance to achieve social
justice.’

His escorts nodded to the crowd. The tall man looked at Carlos who looked back at William, smiled and switched into English.

‘Actually, I enjoyed my time in England. People were kind to me. I think I was popular, especially with women. You were not always so fat?’

‘No, I wasn’t. It’s since coming here.’

‘But you were always quite fat.’

‘I suppose I was.’

‘See you.’

He spoke the words as if they were chic or daring, and moved on.

The tall man stopped before William. ‘I am sorry,
señor
, I did not hear your name.’

He spoke with courteous deliberation. When William had introduced himself the man shook hands, once, very firmly.

‘I am pleased to have met you,
Señor
Wooding. My name is Manuel Herrera.’

The presidential party left. Cigars were re-lit, wine poured, conversation began again. A number of people stared at William.

‘You know the president?’ asked Ines, wide-eyed.

‘We were at school together in England.’

‘And he remembers you?’

‘So it seems.’ He caught Theresa’s eye. ‘Who was the man, the tall one?’ he asked her across Ines.

‘Manuel Herrera.’

‘Is he part of the junta – of the government?’

‘Yes, he is one of the colonels. But he was trained in Cuba.’

She spoke slowly, perhaps for his benefit. He wanted to go on talking but quite suddenly they were leaving, their steaks unfinished.

‘What do you do?’ he asked hurriedly, addressing both. ‘Where do you work?’

They hesitated.

‘We are singers,’ replied Ines. They both said ‘
chau
’ and left.

William went back to his steak. His appetite returned with eating. When he paid, the bald
padrón
took his money.

‘
Gracias, señor.
And the
señoras?
’

‘Have they not paid?’

The
padrón
smiled with his head on one side. ‘
Señor
, you are far from England.’ He held out his hand.

The office was above the shop and that afternoon William continued his task of cleaning the window-panes. Having sorted out the stock, the filing system, the records and the
stores, this was all that was left for him to do when there was no Ricardo, no telephone and no customers. Every five minutes or so he picked up the telephone to see if it had come on again.
Meanwhile, by turning his creaking wooden swivel chair – with arms, a definite improvement since in London he had had an uncomfortable modern contraption with no arms – he could reach
each of the twelve small panes in the bow window by his desk. He cleaned them with an old shirt he had found in the ‘complaints’ file, scratching with his fingernail at every speck of
ingrained grime. Ten panes were now spotless. In the cold sunlight of the street below was a solitary stall laden with hundreds of oranges; by it a huddled figure sipped the inevitable maté
from a gourd. No one went and no one came. Farther up the street was the wreck of a 1930s Dodge saloon, rusty and lopsided with one headlight hanging loose like a disgorged eye. Unlike the
orange-seller, it had not been there yesterday.

From downstairs came the sound of the two shopgirls giggling. They often giggled. At first he had thought it was at him, then that it was because Ricardo flirted with them. Now he had concluded
that they simply giggled. There was little else to do. It was over fifty years since the London company had set up the English Bookshop with its small paper mill and packaging factory out of town.
For most of that time the operation had run quietly into the ground, largely unnoticed by London. The Britons who had been sent to manage it had been either misfits or casualties of the greasy pole
that led some to the Board. Several had been re-treads looking for a quiet life.

None had retired. All had died in harness, usually of heart attacks or strokes brought on, it was said, by too much eating and drinking. Stress was not thought to be a factor, although one had
had his final moments in a bordello. Wicks, William’s immediate predecessor, had actually reached retirement age alive but had then refused to retire, refusing also all summonses to return to
London. Dixon of Personnel had been sent out to see him but something had gone wrong; Dixon had stayed three weeks instead of three days, had returned in order to resign and get divorced and was
now said to be living with a dance-hall girl in La Paz. Wicks had died shortly afterwards in the usual way.

The Board’s attention had thus been drawn to the operation. Because decline had been gradual, people had become accustomed to the idea of losses that were only now, suddenly, seen to be
significant. This coincided with a fashion for restructuring, rationalising and retrenching, and a review of the company’s operations worldwide. At the same time the military take-over had
brought in laws forbidding the withdrawal of capital and compelling foreign-owned businesses to employ local people at managerial level. This was a popular move which meant that many younger sons
of members of the People’s Party were now possessed of more money and status without having to do anything for it. It was part of what the government called ‘democratic
socialism’. The result was that William had to employ managers at the mill and the factory and have Ricardo as his deputy.

He had been sent out with a simple brief: get a grip of the operation, turn it round and make it pay or it would be wound up, capital transfer difficulties notwithstanding. He had been selected,
he was told, because he was a relatively young man still at the point of his career where he could make his name if he wanted; it was his big chance. Afterwards he had discovered from one of the
clerks in Personnel that he was the fifth person to have been asked. The previous four had turned it down because it was seen as a dead end, perhaps not only metaphorically. Also, it was far from
England and a foreign tongue had to be learned.

For William, though, there was the romantic appeal of running a book-shop, something he had always thought he would like even though it wasn’t in Marlborough or Norwich or Harrogate and
even though there was a mill and a factory attached. Further, it meant escape from daily humiliation by British Rail, a sentence otherwise destined to last – according to his way of measuring
age – from now, Thursday lunch-time, until retirement at Sunday lunch-time, followed by death by Sunday evening. Sally, whose job was teaching English as a foreign language, had been keen on
the idea at first but had become less enthusiastic as the time approached. Now that they were there he couldn’t tell whether she was happy or not; she didn’t say much.

There was a shout from below followed by thundering on the stairs. Ricardo entered with his usual rush, his young face bursting.

‘You know the president?’

It was not often that William could impress or surprise Ricardo. ‘Well, yes, though we haven’t seen much of each other for some years.’

‘But he speaks to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Also Manuel Herrera. Already you are a famous man.’

Ricardo spent so little time at his desk that whenever he sat at it he did so with relish. He would pick up the papers, shuffle them, move them from one tray to another, sign a few, then tip his
chair back on its hind legs, put up his feet and talk.

‘How’s business?’ He always tried to make it sound like a technical question.

‘So-so.’

‘You were trying to telephone someone?’

‘The factory. Still no dialling tone.’

‘Give up. There’s no one there anyway. They’ve all gone home.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re all striking. Today is cold; they want to go home.’

William replaced the receiver. ‘How did you know I had seen the president?’