I had just passed his house when I saw him leave the outskirts of the town and come up the lane towards me. I greeted him, and he raised his hat to me with more than usual ceremony. Then he stood still. His regard was very formal, very severe. I wondered if I could have offended him in some way. He said to me:—
“Caballero, you will do me the honor of crossing swords with me.”
He threw back his cloak, and whipped a slender rapier out of the stick which he held in his left hand. Swiftly he performed the salute. The deadly little thread of steel was in line with my throat before I recovered from my surprise. Then I did quite a lot of thinking. Leisurely thoughts they seemed, but if his body had followed his arm in one instantaneous lunge I should still have had time to think them before I felt the hot sliding of the sword. I noticed that he was in earnest, and decided that I ought to look as fierce as he. I formed an entire little plan of jumping back and catching the point in my hand. I looked over his shoulder, and my eyes took a photograph of the massed houses on the outskirts of the town. I can still see it. The cinema was at the corner of the street. There was a big screen on the pavement in front of it. I read the lettering upon it, and had time to be vaguely surprised at seeing my own language. “for the honor of the queen,” it read. “For the Honor of the Queen.” … I understood. Don Macario had left the cinema, but his mind had not left its fairyland.
I stepped back, bowed to Don Macario, and raised my walking stick to the level of his sword.
“Señor de la Fuente,” I said, “you will allow me to observe that your sword is longer than my own. I know that you would not wish to accept that advantage. But I have a pair of swords at my lodgings, and if you will accompany me I will give you satisfaction.”
He put the rapier back into the hollow stick, and walked with me in silence towards the town. Several times he gave a little fluttering half-turn of his head, as if he would look at me. Several times he hesitated in his stride. We were into the town before he spoke to me.
“I think I will go home now,” he said. He was very timid and troubled.
“I will walk up with you,” I answered.
We talked all the way. True, he said little but “Yes” and “No,” but I made him say them often, and occupy his mind enough to say them in the right places. When I said good-bye to him he drew himself up, and looked at me with melancholy eyes. He had such dignity.
“I have no right, señor, to ask discretion of you,” he said, “but I do ask of you forgiveness.”
I gave him both, for I told what had happened only to Ramon, upon whom I knew I could rely. At first he was incredulous. Then he remembered the silver star under Don Macario’s lapel.
“Dios! You are right!” he said. “But what can we do for the poor man?”
I suggested a nursing home.
“He has no money,” said Ramon. “And—do you think his pride would endure it?”
“Shall we tell Padre Tomas?” I asked.
Ramon considered the Church as a sort of government office. He respected it highly, but he had no wish for its intervention in his private affairs, or those of his friends.
“I would remind you that Padre Tomas will know,” he said. “And—may I be pardoned—I think the help he can give is limited. You and I can do more. One of us or both of us must take Don Macario out every day, walk him around, get him interested in things. I will look after him for a week. It is better that he should not see you again just yet.”
Ramon kept his word. One day he drove him into Valladolid to see a bullfight. Another day he took him over the signal boxes of the junction. He told me it was far harder than explaining to a child. Don Macario might have stepped into the signal box out of the sixteenth century. Ramon could take nothing for granted in his explanations. He said that he spent half the time explaining that wires were not hollow and that electricity did not trickle along inside them, but ran—well, however it does run.
Don Macario insisted upon Ramon’s accepting some favor in return. Ramon protested, but at last accepted a few rose cuttings from the garden. It was clever, for he kept the old man late in the evening planting them for him. That was the only evening on which Don Macario missed his cinema performance. He would not leave until the last cutting was planted.
For the Honor of the Queen had been withdrawn long since, but there was a regular succession of Wild West dramas, one so like another that the distributors must have found it hard to devise a different poster for each of them. They held Don Macario’s imagination. But he had little time to indulge his imagination.
Later on, the pair of us began to take him with us for walks. He tired very quickly, so Ramon borrowed the innkeeper’s mule for him, a staid old beast that had once belonged to a fat abbot of Tarragona. That he might not feel embarrassed, we mounted a pair of mules ourselves, saying that our horses were lame.
We were returning to Ventas one afternoon, and were near the edge of the valley in which it lay. Ventas itself was hidden. Before and behind us stretched the desolate plateau: in color soft as gold, if gold could rust; in shape and outline forbidding, for the earth was alive with boulders. Groves of olive and eucalyptus marked the course of the streams. They ran over bare rock in narrow, shallow cañons, their waters darkened by the cover of the unshining leaves. There were mills among the trees, and the beating of the water wheels could be heard from far off. Houses there were few, perhaps one to every six square miles, and those were taverns where the passing carrier could halt his train of mules and wash the dust out of his throat. Neither more nor less was seen by Cervantes, and well he knew the effect of that fantastic loneliness upon the reason.
Ahead of us on the track we saw a party of countrymen jogging briskly along on donkeys which they were taking down to the town to be sold next day in the cattle market. They rode bareback and their legs nearly touched the ground. The golden dust eddied and swirled around the slender, tapping hoofs. There was a girl with them. She was evidently taking the opportunity to bring her vegetables to the town, for two huge panniers packed with green stuff hung on the flanks of the donkey. She sat on top of the lot, her legs sticking out parallel to the ground, since the pannier was too wide to allow them to bend at the knee. Her voluminous skirt covered the donkey, and under the load his back looked as broad as that of an elephant. The men were joking with her in deep, quiet voices, and her laughter and little shrieks of protest carried over them in a harsh treble.
Once she cried out very loud in simulated anger. Don Macario heard her. He rammed his heels into the abbot’s mule and urged it into a sedate canter. He was well ahead of us before we realized that we had better follow him closely, but then our mules refused all effort except a rapid walk. He cantered, shouting, into the midst of the group, and tried to catch the girl by the waist and swing her on to his saddlebow. “Saved!” he cried. “Saved!” He could not lift her, and she, while he was off his balance, swung her arm and caught him a back-handed blow which knocked him off his mule.
The men, with the swift understanding of peasants, recognized Don Macario for what he was, and knew that there was no easy explanation of this attack. They picked him up gently and set him on his mule again, calling the girl brute and savage. Before we could come up with him, Don Macario was over the lip of the valley and speeding downwards towards his house.
Ramon apologized to the men, but they would not hear of an apology, and begged him to excuse the girl. “God guard the caballero, your friend,” they said. “There is no fault. He had a touch of the sun, and which of us does not suffer at some time? But as for that girl …”
The poor girl was in tears. In truth nothing delighted her more than an attempt to carry her off. But the blow was the only method she knew of making her value appreciated, and though it was a hard one, it would not have upset a novio of the village. Ramon cheered her up, calling her “little one” and “pretty one,” and left her wondering whether she ought
not to hit him too.
Don Macario’s gate was locked when we came to it. There was no reply to our knocking. We rode on into Ventas, stabled the mules, and then with one accord walked out of the town and up the lane towards the white house. Before we came to it, Don Macario rode out of the gate. We called to him. He turned in the saddle and waved his hat to us with an ironical bow. Then he trotted up the hill.
He was a curious figure. The hat was a wide straight-brimmed cordobés, but he had twisted the brim into something resembling a broad Stetson. He wore no coat, but rode in his shirt with a wide belt at the waist. Over his thighs and down his legs were two wolf-skin hearth rugs. He had an old flintlock pistol in a homemade holster at his belt, and a length of clothesline, neatly coiled, hung down from the pommel of the saddle. The silver star glinted on his breast. The abbot’s mule trotted up the hill with mad determination. Some little boys followed, cheering. Ramon swore. Then he cried:—
“Look! … El Quixote del Cine!”
Don Macario was outlined against the setting sun. Two great red boulders reared up on either side of him. The mule plucked at a few scanty blades of grass, the heavy head lowered. But his rider’s back was straight and gallant as he looked down at the roofs of Ventas.
“Ay! He will find no Sancho Panza in these days,” said Ramon.
A little barefoot boy rode up to Don Macario on a tiny woolly donkey. His only garment was a shirt, and that was rucked up round his waist. His brown jolly legs hung down on either side, and drummed on the barrel of the donkey’s ribs. He halted his mount by Don Macario, and watched him for a while. Then we saw him reach up and tug at his belt. Don Macario patted his shoulder, and the two of them turned and rode over the skyline into the sun.
“It is for children!” said Ramon. There was no scorn in his voice.
ESTANCIA LA EMBAJADA
THE mound was so regular that I could have sworn it had been built by human labor; but, standing on the summit, I found that it was no vast tomb which I had climbed; it was a neat, formal, and miniature volcano with a passive crater in the centre where the black lava thrust its ridges and tumors through scanty turf. The hill stood on a plain of dark green pasture, some twenty square miles in extent, surrounded by steep slopes which, on the north, mounted to the snows and smoke plume of Cotopaxi. The valley appeared to have a single owner, for it was well fenced and drained, and all the tracks converged upon a white-walled, red-roofed house marked on the map as Estancia La Embajada—Embassy Ranch. The herds of dairy cattle and the low clouds washing the sides of the bowl suggested that I was on some farmer’s land in the Severn Valley instead of a considerable estate ten thousand feet above the Pacific, with its own private volcano.
It was late afternoon when I got down from this savage infant of a hill. The landmarks of the cordillera were blotted out, and grey tentacles of mist were feeling for the bottom of the valley. I did not fancy the long ride back to Riobamba. The path wound along the edge of a crater lake which had startled both me and my mule in sunlight—it looked and smelt like one of the more unpleasant hazards on the course of Pilgrim’s Progress—and was prohibitive when imagined under crawling vapor. I decided to ride over to the estancia and ask for a bed.
We plodded through the mist and two streams. A massive Holstein bull, colored black and white like Cotopaxi, materialized out of a cloud and accompanied us for half a mile. Neither of us liked him. True, I knew that the lean beasts of real cattle country did not attack a mounted man; but I was doubtful whether this aristocrat imported from Europe would have heard of the local rule. The scent of a dairy came to my nostrils as we paced up the avenue of eucalyptus that led to the house, and when we arrived before the façade of round white arches two golden cockers barked and whined and leapt against their chains with the usual friendliness of spaniels to any newcomer. At the noise of this enthusiasm, effective as the growl of a watchdog, a tall man in shirt sleeves, corduroy breeches, and gaiters came round the corner of the house. His face was bronzed and his hair dark and curly. He did not look like an Ecuadorian born. Possibly a Basque immigrant, I thought.
“Buenas tardes, señor,” I began. “Excuse this visit without ceremony, but—”
He watched me keenly while I spoke.
“A dirty evening,” he interrupted cordially with a slight West Country burr in his voice. “We’ll gladly put you up if you care to stay the night.”
“Are you English?” I asked in surprise.
“Cornish,” he corrected me.
I put him down as a cowman or stud groom imported by the owner of the estancia. It seemed odd that a man with all the earmarks of one fixed to his own soil should be earning wages in the heart of the cordillera.
“Good Lord! What’s brought you out here?” I asked impulsively.
“A woman,” he chuckled.
He did not seem at all upset about her, seemed even to be mischievously waiting for some sympathetic remark from me.
An Indian in a red poncho and wide-brimmed straw hat trotted out of the damp mist, driving before him a donkey and a llama both loaded with brushwood. He was moving in the wrong dimension. The Cornishman, the spaniels, the dairy scents, and the dripping trees around the house had created a complete illusion of England. I should have been less surprised to see a boy on a bicycle delivering the evening paper.
“Tu, Felipe!” ordered the Cornishman. “Take this gentleman’s mule round to the stables. He is staying the night.”
“Ahora mismo, patrón,” answered the peon respectfully.
“You own this place?” I asked.
“Of course! Come in—come in!”
His manners were more brusque and free than those of an Ecuadorian, but the voice of all Spanish America rang out hospitably with his own. He led me into the hall of the estancia, a magnificent room with whitewashed walls and Indian rugs on a floor of patterned tiles. It was too large to look untidy, though freely scattered with the possessions of a man living alone and at ease. There was a heap of saddlery under the far window, and on a long table—rough and evidently made on the estate—boxes of soil and packets of seeds and fertilizers which suggested that he had been experimenting with grasses.
“A fine place!” I said.
“Not bad, is it? I don’t want anything better. No summer and no winter and the best pasture in Ecuador. You should see it on a fine day.”
“I did, from the top of your hill.”
“Prospecting?” he asked coldly.
“No. Idling. I saw the hill from the head of the valley, and thought it might have been built by the old Quitos; so I rode over to look at it.”
“A—ah! I’ll be bound you did! And you’re not the first. George Trevithick’s my name,” he added heartily, as if now satisfied by my credentials.
I introduced myself in turn.
“Well, it’s luck for me that you happened to feel a bit curious about my hill,” he said. “It’s not often I get a chance to speak my own language.”
As he knotted a scarf around his throat and settled a solid, well-cut tweed coat on his broad shoulders, I looked at him more closely. He was older than I had thought at first—a man in the middle fifties, bearing himself with a distinction that might, when he was younger, have been a raffish swagger, but was now the independence of one who had made his own laws for himself and found that they also appeared satisfactory to his fellows. I could not understand how I had mistaken him for the cowman. He was very obviously the estanciero.
He poured drinks, and we discussed Cornwall and cattle till supper. On the top of the Andes, a hundred miles from the equator, his pedigreed beasts were short-lived and inclined to curious failures of their natural instincts. But he was a born experimenter, and the butter and cheese showed a profit. The religious orders of Quito—priests clucked around the capital as thick as fat black hens on a chicken farm—were, he said, his best customers.
A wizened mestizo in a white jacket showed us into the dining room. It was exquisite. Plate, linen, glass, and furniture would have done credit to a Spanish grandee. Over his seat hung the portrait of a woman in her early thirties: a full-bosomed commanding beauty with fiery brown eyes in an unintelligent face.
“That’s her!” he said, jerking an irreverent thumb over his shoulder towards the picture. “What do you think of her?”
I couldn’t gather from his tone whether she was the chief love of his life from whom he had at last and proudly broken free, or merely some woman over whom he had triumphed.
“She had a pretty good opinion of herself,” I replied. “And I expect she was right.”
“Ah, Doña Clara! Doña Clara!” he chuckled.
The cooking of the simple meal was excellent, and the estanciero was a good talker. Like so many exiles, he reveled in the expressiveness of his own language. He would halt for a moment in his flow of eloquence, feel for the English word, taste it and hand it to me, as it were, on the tip of his tongue. He had the slow, rich humor of the West Countryman, but had lived too long in Latin America to have kept a West Countryman’s reserve.
“If you’re really idling,” he said when we had reached the coffee, “why don’t you stay a few weeks?”
“I wish I could. But I’m only idling for the week end. I’ve been in Quito on business and I have to be down at Guayaquil the day after to-morrow to catch my boat. I’m staying three nights at Riobamba on the way to get some exercise and see a bit more of the plateau.”
“Three nights at Riobamba!” he laughed. “You must be the first person that has ever stayed more than one in that hotel!”
An exaggeration, of course, but there can’t have been many. The train from Quito to Guayaquil stopped for the night at Riobamba, and the hotel lived on passengers who arrived at seven in the evening and left at six next morning. That one ate reasonably and slept in a clean bed was proof of the proprietor’s natural hospitality; he could neither reduce the number of his guests by a bad name, nor increase them by a good one.
The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories Page 5
