The great gates had been cleaned of rust and flung open; the chandeliers sparkled in the sala, lights were turned on in even the empty rooms, while coloured globes had been strung from tree to tree and over the boards of the dance-floor laid on the grass. On the terrace two musicians tuned a guitar and a harp. O’Toole was there, the Czech who had failed to sell two million plastic straws had brought his wife from the Hotel Guaraní, and suddenly I saw moving inconspicuously through the crowd and disappearing again as though into some warren in the garden the export-import merchant who had shared our table on the boat, grey and thin, twitching his rabbit nose. On the lawn the ox steamed and crackled on its iron frame, and the smell of roasting meat chased away the perfume of orange and jasmine.
My memories of the party are very confused, perhaps because I helped myself rather liberally to champagne before dinner. There were more women than men, as so often happens in Paraguay, where the male population has been reduced by two terrible wars, and I found myself on more than one occasion dancing or speaking with the beautiful Camilla. The musicians played mainly polkas and gallops, the steps of which were unknown to me, and I was astonished to see how my aunt and Mr Visconti picked them up on the spot by a kind of second nature. Whenever I looked among the dancers, on the lawn or in the sala, they were there. Camilla who could speak very little English tried in vain to teach me: it was too much a matter of duty on her part for me to respond. I said, ‘I am glad I am not in prison tonight.’
‘How?’
‘That young man over there put me in a cell.’
‘How?’
‘Do you see this plaster? That’s where he hit me.’
I was trying to make light conversation, but when there was a pause in the music she hastened away.
O’Toole was suddenly at my side. He said, ‘It’s a great party. Great. I wish Lucinda could have been here. She’d have found it great too. There’s the Dutch Ambassador talking to your aunt. I saw your British Ambassador just now. And the Nicaraguan. I wonder how Mr Visconti corralled the diplomatic corps. I guess it’s his name – if it is his real name. There’s not much to do in Asunción, and I suppose if you get an invitation from a guy called Visconti …’
‘Have you seen Wordsworth?’ I asked. ‘I half-expected him to turn up as well.’
‘He’ll be on the boat by now. They sail at six, as soon as it’s light. I guess he wouldn’t be very welcome here as things are.’
‘No.’
The guests were crowding to the steps of the terrace, clapping and crying ‘Brava’. I saw Camilla up there dancing with a bottle balanced on her head. Mr Visconti pulled at my arm and said, ‘Henry, I want you to meet our representative in Formosa.’ I turned and held out my hand to the man with the grey rabbit face.
‘We were on the boat together coming from Buenos Aires,’ I reminded him, but of course he spoke no English.
‘He handles our river-borne traffic,’ Mr Visconti said, as though he were talking about some great legal enterprise. ‘You will be seeing a lot of each other. Now come and meet the Chief of Police.’
The Chief of Police spoke English with an American accent. He told me he had studied in Chicago. I said, ‘You have a beautiful daughter.’
He made a bow and said, ‘She has a beautiful mother.’
‘She tried to teach me to dance, but I have no ear for music and your dances are new to me.’
‘The polka and the gallop. They are our national dances.’
‘The names sound very Victorian,’ I said. I had meant it as a compliment, but he moved abruptly away.
The charcoal under the ox was turning black, and there was little left of the ox but a skeleton. It had been a good dinner. We had sat on benches in the garden before trestle tables and carried our plates to the barbecue. I had noticed how a stout man who sat beside me refilled his plate four times with huge steaks. ‘You have a good appetite,’ I said.
He ate like a good trencherman in a Victorian illustration, with the elbows stuck out and the head well down and a napkin tucked in his collar. He said, ‘This is nothing. At home I eat eight kilos of beef a day. A man needs strength.’
‘What do you do?’ I asked.
‘I am the chief customs officer,’ he said. He pointed with his fork down the table to a slim pale girl who looked scarcely eighteen. ‘My daughter,’ he said. ‘I tell her to eat more meat, but she is obstinate like her mother.’
‘Which is her mother?’
‘She died. In the Civil War. She had no resistance. She did not eat meat.’
Now in the small hours I found him again beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me as if we were old friends. He said, ‘Here is Maria. My daughter. She speaks English good. You must dance with her. Tell her she must eat more meat.’
We walked away together. I said, ‘Your father says he eats eight kilos of meat a day.’
‘Yes. That is true,’ she said.
‘I don’t know your dances, I’m afraid.’
‘It does not matter. I have danced enough.’
We walked towards the trees and I found two chairs. A photo grapher stopped beside us and held up his flash. Her face was startlingly white and her eyes looked frightened in the glare. Then everything faded out and I could hardly see her. ‘How old are you?’ I asked.
‘Fourteen,’ she said.
‘Your father thinks you should eat more meat.’
‘I do not care for meat,’ she said.
‘What do you like?’
‘Poetry. English poetry. I like English poetry very much.’ She recited very seriously, ‘“Hearts of oak are our ships, Hearts of oak are our men.”’ She added, ‘And Lord Ullin’s Daughter.’ She said, ‘I cry often when I read Lord Ullin’s Daughter.’
‘And Tennyson?’
‘Yes, I know Lord Tennyson too.’ She was gaining confidence, finding an interest we shared. ‘He is sad also. I like very much sad things.’
The guests crowded the floor as the harpist and the guitarist played another polka: we could see beyond the terrace through the windows of the sala the ebb and flow of the dancers. I quoted Maud in my turn to the customs officer’s daughter: ‘“The brief night goes in babble and revel and wine”.’
‘I do not know that poem. Is it sad?’
‘It’s a very long poem, and it ends very sadly.’ I tried to remember some of the sad lines, but the only one that came to my mind was: ‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood’, which had little meaning out of context. I said, ‘If you like I will lend it to you. I have the collected poems of Tennyson here with me.’
O’Toole came towards us and I saw a chance of escaping, for I was feeling very tired and my ear hurt. I said, ‘This is Maria. She is studying English literature like your daughter.’ He was a sad and serious man. They would get on well together. It was nearly two in the morning. I wanted to find some unobtrusive corner where I could sleep a while, but half-way across the lawn I found the Czech in conversation with Mr Visconti. Mr Visconti said, ‘Henry, we have an offer.’
‘An offer?’
‘This gentleman has two million plastic straws which he would let us have at half the cost price.’
‘That’s nearly the whole population of Paraguay,’ I said.
‘I am not thinking of Paraguay.’
The Czech said with a smile, ‘If you could persuade them to drink maté through a plastic straw …’ He wasn’t taking the business discussion very seriously, but I could see that Mr Visconti’s imagination had taken wing – I was reminded of Aunt Augusta when she began to embroider one of her anecdotes. It was probably the sound of that very round de luxe number – two million – that had excited Mr Visconti.
He said, ‘I was thinking of Panama. If our agent there could get them into the Canal Zone. Think of all those American sailors and tourists …’
‘Do American sailors take soft drinks?’ the Czech asked.
‘Have you never heard,’ Mr Visconti said, ‘that
beer is much more intoxicating drunk through a straw?’
‘Surely that is only a legend.’
‘There speaks a Protestant,’ Mr Visconti said. ‘Any Catholic knows that a legend which is believed has the same value and effect as the truth. Look at the cult of the saints.’
‘But the Americans may be Protestants.’
‘Then we produce medical evidence. That is the modern form of the legend. The toxic effect of imbibing alcohol through a straw. There is a Doctor Rodriguez here who would help me. The statistics of cancer of the liver. Suppose we could persuade the Panama government to prohibit the sale of straws with alcoholic drink. The straws would be sold illicitly from under the counter. The demand would be tremendous. Remote danger is a great attraction. From the profits I would found the Visconti Research Institute …’
‘But these are plastic straws.’
‘We can call them cured straws; there will be articles showing that the cure is quite useless like filters on cigarettes.’
I left the two of them to their discussion. As I skirted the dance-floor I saw my aunt dancing the gallop with the Chief of Police: nothing seemed to tire her. The Chief’s daughter Camilla was in the arms of the customs officer, but the dancers had thinned out and a car with a CD plate was driving away.
I found a chair in the yard behind the kitchen where a few crates of furniture still remained unopened, and almost immediately I fell asleep. I dreamt that the rabbit-nosed man was feeling my pulse and telling Mr Visconti that I was dead of the fluke – whatever that might mean. I tried to speak out to prove that I was alive, but Mr Visconti commanded some shadowy figures in the background, in a jumbled phrase from Maud, to bury me deeper, only a little deeper. I tried to cry out to my aunt who stood there pregnant in a bathing dress, holding Mr Visconti’s hand, and I woke gasping for breath and for words and heard the sound of the harp and the guitar playing on.
I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly four. Sunrise was not far off, the lights had been turned out in the garden, and the flowers seemed to breathe their scent more deeply in the small chill of the dawn. I felt oddly elated to be alive, and I knew in a moment of decision that I would never see Major Charge again, nor the dahlias, the empty urn, the packet of Omo on the doorstep or a letter from Miss Keene. I walked down towards the little wood of fruit trees nursing my decision close to my heart – I think even then I knew there would be a price to pay for it. The dancers who remained must all be in the sala now, for the lawn was empty, and there were no cars left outside the gates so far as I could see, though I heard the sound of one receding down the road towards the city. Again lines from Maud came to mind in the early sweet-scented morning: “Low on the sand and loud on the stone the last wheel echoes away.” It was as though I were safely back in the Victorian world where I had been taught by my father’s books to feel more at home than in our modern day. The wood sloped down towards the road and up again to the back gate, and as I entered the little hollow I trod on something hard. I stooped down and picked the object up. It was Wordsworth’s knife. The tool for taking stones out of horse’s hoofs was open – perhaps he had meant to open the blade and in his hurry he had made an error. I struck a match and before the flame went out I saw the body on the ground and the black face starred with white orange petals, which had been blown from the trees in the small breeze of early morning.
I knelt down and felt for the pulse in the heart. There was no life in the black body and my hand was wet from the wound I couldn’t see. ‘Poor Wordsworth,’ I said aloud with some idea of showing to his murderer if he were anywhere nearby that Wordsworth had a friend. I thought how his bizarre love for an old woman had taken him from the doors of the Grenada cinema, where he used to stand so proudly in his uniform, to die on the wet grass near the Paraguay river, but I knew that if this was the price he had to pay, he would have paid it gladly. He was a romantic, and in the only form of poetry he knew, the poetry which he had learnt at St George’s Cathedral, Freetown, he would have found the right words to express his love and his death. I could imagine him at the last, refusing to admit that she had dismissed him forever, reciting a hymn to keep his courage up as he walked towards the house through the hollow in the little wood:
‘If I ask Her to receive me,
Will she say me nay?
Not till earth and not till heav’n
Pass away.’
The sentiment had always been sincere even if the changes in the words were unliturgical.
There was no sound except my own breathing. I closed the knife and put it in my pocket. Had he drawn it when he first entered the grounds with the intention of attacking Visconti? I preferred to think otherwise – that he had come with the simple purpose of appealing to his love once more before abandoning hope and that when he heard someone move among the trees he had drawn the knife hurriedly in self-defence, pointing at his unseen enemy the useless tool for horses’ hoofs.
I went slowly back towards the house to break the news as gently as I might to Aunt Augusta. The musicians were still playing on the terrace, they were tired out and almost falling asleep over their instruments, but when I entered the sala there remained only one couple – my aunt and Mr Visconti. I was reminded of the house behind the Messaggero where they had met after a long separation and danced together between the sofas while the prostitutes watched with amazement. They were dancing a slow waltz now and they never saw me enter, two old people bound in the deep incurable egotism of passion. They had turned off the lights, and in the big room illumined only from the terrace there rested pools of darkness between the windows. As they moved I lost their faces and found them again. At one moment the shadows gave my aunt a deceptive air of youth: she looked like the young woman in my father’s photograph pregnant with happiness, and at another I recognized the old woman who had faced Miss Paterson with such merciless cruelty and jealousy.
I called out to her as she went by, ‘Aunt Augusta,’ but she didn’t answer to the name; there was no sign that she even heard me. They danced on in their tireless passion into the shadows.
I took a few steps further into the room as they returned towards me, calling to her a second time, ‘Mother, Wordsworth’s dead.’ She only looked over her partner’s shoulder and said, ‘Yes, dear, all in good time, but can’t you see that now I am dancing with Mr Visconti?’
A flash-bulb broke the shadows up. I have the photograph still – all three of us are petrified by the lightning flash into a family group: you can see the great gap in Visconti’s teeth as he smiles towards me like an accomplice. I have my hand thrown out in frozen appeal, and my mother is regarding me with an expression of tenderness and reproof. I have cut from the print another face which I hadn’t realized was in the room with us, the face of a little old man with long moustaches. He had been first with the news, and Mr Visconti sacked him later at my insistence (my mother took no part in the dispute which she said was a matter to be settled between men), so Wordsworth did not go entirely unavenged.
Not that I have time to think of the poor fellow very much. Mr Visconti has not yet made a fortune, and our import-export business takes more and more of my time. We have had our ups and downs, and the photographs of what we call the great party and of our distinguished guests have proved useful more than once. We own a complete Dakota now, for our partner was accidentally shot dead by a policeman because he couldn’t make himself understood in Guaraní, and most of my spare time is spent in learning that language. Next year, when she is sixteen, I am to marry the daughter of the Chief of Customs, a union which has the approval of Mr Visconti and her parents. There is, of course, a considerable difference in our ages, but she is a gentle and obedient child, and often in the warm scented evenings we read Browning together.
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
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Travels With My Aunt Page 27
