Thing to Love (6 page)

“Have you got to call it Socialism,” Felicia asked, “when you are trying to make a nation of peasant proprietors?”

“No, but I won't hide the truth. I want a Guayanas in which the peon owns or rents the land he works. The State must give it to him. The State must provide the capital for him or his co-operative, and organize the marketing. So for you and your husband I am not afraid to call my revolution Socialist. For others, I stress my objective, not the means of attaining it. That is why I wear national costume. That is the value of my mystique, as you call
it, of aristocracy. In his manners and his ideals there is no difference between the peon and myself. Let him be as free to show what he is as I am.”

“The Marxists would probably call you a Fascist,” said Miro.

“Let them! Morote sometimes does. It's quite untrue. But the name can do me nothing but good in Wall Street.”

Miro Kucera wished to God that he really did have an Intelligence service which could supply him with situation reports more accurate than the misconstructions of Vidal, the exaggerated nonsense of the police, the ironies of Irala and his father-in-law. Without a firsthand picture of what was going on it would be difficult to explore the possible futures. The struggle for power between Avellana and Vidal was all in the day's work and would not affect the indoctrination of Fifth Division. That had gone deep. The attitude of the troops towards their politicians was correctly neutral, not to say cynical. But Morote's intentions — whatever they were — could play the devil with morale. Maintenance of order during a General Strike was unfair to Fifth Division, without special training. It was bad enough if they had to police elections.

Feli could talk of setting an example, but all the same it was difficult to visit the headquarters of the opposition, whatever generals might be free to do in Europe and the United States. Should he ask Vidal's permission to go to La Joya? It would be given, but on implied conditions which forced him into the false position of the President's spy. On the other hand, if permission was not asked at all the typewriters of the security police would be overheated with the news that General Kucera was conspiring with Gil Avellana.

Perhaps the right card to play was extreme military formality. He would ask Don Jesús-María for leave. The old boy might not be up-to-date with anything later than the magazine rifle, but he knew the devil of a lot about politics from the standpoint of the Army and the Ateneo. He would understand that the commander of the San Vicente garrison wanted a foot in both camps. Not quite the same thing as setting an example, but very wise from the point of view of the Army. The approval of the Captain General was certain.

CHAPTER IV

[
November 2
]

I
T WAS WITH
a supreme sense of restfulness that Miro Kucera lay back in his basket chair on the terrace of La Joya and watched the brown shadow of the Cordillera race across the treeless plain towards the green of alfalfa and lucerne which surrounded the house and looked in so much emptiness like a carpet of moss. This long weekend seemed to him the final, crowning homecoming. In spite of his work, in spite of his love of Feli and her country, he still felt himself, in his rare moods of frustration, the foreign expert. His union with the active life and daily business of Guayanas was complete; but his union with the land itself, the land at leisure rather than at work, its abundance rather than its offices and parade grounds, had been emotionless, a thing of maps and military journeys.

He did not, to his surprise, feel in the least ridiculous dressed in that gay and easy
cholo
costume which had belonged to Gil Avellana's grandfather. All his fellow guests wore it except Juan, who admitted no connection between beef and clothes beyond those the well-dressed boulevardier would wear in a Paris restaurant. Even Pablo Morote was dressed for fiesta, as if he had never left his native pueblo. He too was resting, under the influence of Avellana, in a Guayanas of the past.

The general sympathized profoundly with Avellana's creed, but wondered if it could not best be put over by example and propaganda. The ballot box was the wrong place to deposit what was a movement — almost a religion — cutting through the middle of all traditional party lines. Morote, a Socialist, trusted him. Then there was Pedro Valdés, once a conservative of conservatives, whom the Ateneo had now nicknamed Valdeski. He was giving away his undeveloped land like a Tolstoi, and organizing agricultural colonies on it with the enthusiasm of a Khrushchev. Even Juan, the old-fashioned liberal who believed in nothing at all but laissez-faire, seemed to have faith, so far as he was capable of any, in Avellana.

Oddest of all was that he had the university — pretty well all of its eager youth and a good half of its responsible professors, among them Beltrán Carrillo, the economist. Carrillo ought to have sympathized with Vidal; yet it was he who insisted that Vidal was heading straight for Communism by creating wealth in which the mass of the people had little share. He wanted to check the fast creeping inflation of the currency, tax heavily and honestly, and spend to the last cent on education and agriculture.

The Avellanistas might be right; but for sheer practical ability Vidal probably beat the lot of them, though they considered him almost a traitor — not to Guayanas, but to its way of living. Vidal, of course, dismissed Avellana and his ideas with the single, scornful remark that he wanted to put the clock back. It was not wholly true. He wanted to stop the clock for a bit and put in a new movement.

Juan de Fonsagrada slipped into the chair alongside his son-in-law.

“Enjoying it?” he asked.

“Yes. It's still another thing to love.”

“You should have seen it thirty years ago. Nothing had changed since the seventeenth century. Where's Felicia?”

Miro pointed to the single-storied buildings of the estancia and beyond them the village of the peons, a checkerboard of white walls and red-tiled roofs covering twenty acres with squares and oblongs.

“Over there, with Doña Pilar.”

“God, that woman!”

“She seems harmless,” said Miro lazily.

“My generation of women were all like that. Whatever the husband does is right and marvelous. When he's caught with his girl it's: ‘Oh, my dear, but you know what men are like!' When he skips to the United States with a sizable cut of the gold reserve, it's ‘Well, my dear, you know he had to think of the children!' And if he's rude to the Church, he's so intellectual and will be very different when he's sixty. I find it a bore, Miro.”

“Fortunately you had the bringing up of Feli.”

“Feli is a very spirited thoroughbred, my son, but do not underrate her heredity. For her you are always right.”

“As a father-in-law who couldn't be more familiar with us both —” Miro began.

“Oh, I didn't mean slight differences about cooking and souped-up carburetors. I meant that deep down you are always right. And she's worse than the others. They, after all, accept their men with resignation. Feli glories in you. She is quite unaware of it, but she would kill for you. When you have a mistress —”

“I have no immediate —”

“I know it isn't immediate. But when, as I was saying, you take a mistress she will decide that you love the girl, that so noble a character as yours could hardly do anything else. And she'll make such a nuisance of herself with her twentieth-century ideas of personal liberty that you'll be thoroughly glad when she returns to the sixteenth and poisons your little friend without any qualms at all.”

“Juan, your imagination —”

“The thought of Pilar led me astray, Miro. She encourages her husband in his infidelities by remaining obstinately unaware of them. But let us give her her due. As a President's lady that opulent bosom — black lace, I think, don't you? — will be extremely imposing. She will ensure for Gil the neutrality of an otherwise disapproving Church. And the Ateneo will invent for her sayings of inspired stupidity, which she well might have uttered but in point of fact did not.”

The profiled figure of Doña Pilar appeared in the archway of the main courtyard. Even at that distance and in the beginning of dusk her proportions, immensely maternal rather than matronly, had a certain nobility as she stopped to engage Felicia in voluble conversation. Miro watched the two women approach the house along the broad, grassed avenue between young trees and the new irrigation channels. He always loved to see his wife coming towards him. She moved so lightly, the line of her utterly feminine from pointed breasts to slim legs yet always suggesting some renaissance gallant with feather in cap and his first sword at side. The marked contrast between Felicia and the older woman set off the pair of them.

“Felicia was reading, so I took her to look at the pigs,” Doña Pilar explained when they reached the terrace.

“She never did show enough interest in politics,” Juan answered with impenetrable courtesy.

“And pigs are so important now. Gil says that if every Indian had a pig there would be no more malnutrition.”

“What's the Indian going to feed it on?”

“Oh, there is always so much waste in a house!”

Felicia's eyes blazed at her father, who was evidently preparing to continue his own entertainment indefinitely. She liked her hostess — more especially since they were the only two women among men of very decided character. Pilar was exactly the right wife for Gil Avellana, and an excellent lazy mother to her children. Since men pretended to admire the quality of cowlike imperturbability, it was all the more unfair to expose her limitations. Felicia suspected that the conventional masculine image of the ideal wife was some sort of obliging sultana in command of a harem. But they could hardly expect this mythical — and surely rather tiresome? — bedfellow to have active intelligence as well.

Miro quietly and efficiently drew his father-in-law's fire.

“It is a pity,” he said, “that pigs taste of bananas on the coast and nothing at all in the highlands. A smokehouse in every village might help.”

“No fuel, my son, unless we surpass the wildest triumphs of Vidalismo and lay pipelines for the curing of Prague hams.”

“I think Gil would prefer to use the sun,” said Doña Pilar with dignity.

And a very sensible remark, too, Felicia thought. Pilar did occasionally hit the nail on the head with bland unconsciousness. It was a pity that Gil, alone among his principal supporters, could count on such solidity at home.

When at last the four horsemen rode up to the terrace out of the dusk, dressed much as the companions of Bolívar but with the reserve of men compelled in spite of themselves to found their statecraft upon statistics instead of liberty and lances, she felt again that all except Gil were somehow incomplete. That dark, squat Morote — nobody had ever seen his wife. As likely as not she could only read and write with difficulty. And Carrillo's Julia, always busy with the university's rights-of-women or Pan-American committees, had the unfortunate gift of tiring — not boring, just physically tiring — anyone of either sex who talked to her for more than half an hour.

Valdés, unmarried, was at any rate socially easy. He disguised his fierce, celibate idealism by affecting an air of irresponsibility which had in his early youth been real. She had a feeling that having sown his wild oats, he should have entered the Church. Under cover of the exquisite manners of a fashionable priest, he could and would have been savagely fanatical.

Pedro Valdés picked up the guitar which lay on a huge table at one end of the terrace among the hats and magazines and riding switches, and strummed halfheartedly.

“I could play anything when I was twenty,” he said.

“You thought you could,” Felicia answered.

“Anyway you used to hang out of your window and listen.”

“Only because Papá told me I was too young. Did he play under your window too, Pilar?”

“Yes. It was so beautiful.”

“He had a regular round like an organ-grinder,” Juan said.

“I don't know why you always have to laugh at lovely old customs, Juan,” Pilar replied with soft indignation.

Morote, delighted to show that he could surpass his company in at least one social accomplishment, took the guitar from
Valdés. His broad thumbs and low, harsh voice carried back the history of Guayanas in song after song to Lima and Madrid.

Naturally he did not know when to stop; but the general, content to bask in that proud and melancholy culture which was half his and would be the birthright of his children, could have listened all evening. He was warm with love for those millions of mestizos who made up Guayanas and his Division. Spanish and Indian — what mixture in the world had produced so promising a people? They had a right not to be put off century after century with slight improvements on the same old thing. Gil and his land reforms, whether economically sound or not, at least offered justice.

Felicia, watching her husband, murmured obviously sincere encouragement. As for Valdés and the Avellanas, if they felt impatience they were far too courteous to show it. All of them knew that it was his guitar-playing which had carried Morote out of the rut of his fellow dock laborers and first proved to him that he could command an audience.

Beltrán Carrillo, however, took advantage of too short an interval, when the thick hand was again raised over the strings, to say: “Shall we go?”

Miro was surprised that one born and bred in San Vicente could be so abrupt. Carrillo always looked so thoroughly of the capital — a flabby, middle-class Latin-American businessman with nothing much to show that he didn't run a prosperous men's wear shop except his long, clean-shaven upper lip. But intellectuals . . . Well, he had noticed before that in the urgency of their thoughts they did not consider themselves bound by the ordinary rules of politeness.

Morote laid down the guitar, exchanging a curious glance with the general. It was quite impossible to translate. Doubt? Regret? A turning for appreciation to the one person he had fascinated?

“It's to talk in the air,” he murmured.

The four men drifted away to Gil Avellana's study, where, as Miro knew very well, they had been discussing the future of Guayanas for most of the weekend. When Felicia and Pilar had also gone into the house to change, he lay back in his chair trying to
translate that last remark. To talk in the air — did it mean that for Morote, nothing counted but direct action, or was he affected by the mood of the moment and suggesting that reality was not in politics but in the emptiness of the sierra and an act of creation? Primitive poet though he was, that seemed unlikely. For Morote power was reality. Then did he mean that continual talk was futile against such a practical politician as Vidal? It was indeed, without — did Morote mean without Fifth Division?

That was not a question to ask Juan, silently occupied with a cigar and the ice tinkling in his long glass. Miro understood the leader from the Barracas better than his father-in-law — who considered him as a sort of ghost out of the future — or the Ateneo, who were terrified of him.

“This basket chair,” said Juan, “with its broad arm and a hole for the glass, died out fifty years ago. Yet I expect you could buy such a chair in any New York department store.”

“What about it?” the general asked cautiously.

He realized that Juan, on the move to somewhere with his usual Indian approach, was feeling for a flank. He never attacked from the front. If he had ever had a serious objective, in politics or war, he would have been a formidable opponent.

“I was only thinking, Miro, that our friends in the smoke-filled room — except that Valdeski doesn't smoke — carry their anti-Americanism too far. North America revives things. Look at their Latin-American architecture! Basket chairs, patios, our dances and our music! But in resurrecting a good thing, you lose its simplicity. Gil hates that, but doesn't see that it applies to him too.”

“People have been regretting the loss of simplicity for the last ten thousand years,” the general said.

“But they won't give up hope of recovering it. Hitler was certainly trying to recover simplicity. Lenin, too, I think. The Vidals of this world don't make such a damned silly mistake. But I ruminate, Miro, like an old ram in too rich a pasture. Didn't you say you were enjoying this?”

“I am.”

“Why? Why more than San Vicente?”

It was not enough to say that everybody preferred open country to a town. Besides, everybody didn't. Juan himself could seldom be extracted from a town.