The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories

by Geoffrey Household

  “The hotel’s all right,” I said, “considering—”

  “All right? You bet it’s all right! I bless that hotel. Good Lord, I—I turn to it to pray!”

  He looked at me sardonically, as if measuring how much curiosity so deliberate a statement had aroused.

  “Is that where you met Doña Clara?” I asked.

  “No. I met her just five hours before we got there—when the consul escorted me to the train. A polite man, the consul. He didn’t quite know where he stood, you see.”

  “With Doña Clara?”

  “With me. I was being shown the door—though I paid my own first-class fare and had my steamship ticket. He had word that I wasn’t to be allowed to tender for the army contracts.”

  “Rifles?”

  “God, no! Rubber goods. There’d been a bit of a stink about them in Bogotá. They were rotten, and unfortunately somebody opened the cases before I could put my next deal through at Quito. Pennyfather—that’s the consul—had had a letter, one of those marked confidential with the lion and the unicorn shouting secrets at each other across the top. He said he didn’t want to tell the War Ministry about me, but that he would if I didn’t clear out.

  “We were late arriving at the station. The consul had given me lunch. He was very friendly once it had been decided that I’d go quietly. He’d been in business himself.

  “You know the first-class coach that goes down to Guayaquil three times a week. It was the same one in those days—the same ten armchairs mounted on swivels so that you can turn round and talk to your three nearest fellow passengers. Like a little club for bishops and landowners.

  “There were only two travelers going down to the coast, though what with all the fuss and baggage it looked as if half Quito were traveling with them. Doña Clara was saying good-bye. Her servants were weeping—though I’ll bet they were glad to be rid of her—and her friends and her enemies and the stationmaster and the porters were rushing in and out of the coach. That woman and her stuff were all over the place.

  “Tucked away behind a pile of suitcases was her husband, Don Anastasio. He was taking his wife for a holiday by the same boat I was bound north on. He was the vice president of the republic at the time. There was a senator sitting on each arm of his chair and all their three heads were wagging together. They were pretending to be occupied with last-minute affairs of state, and actually protecting themselves against Doña Clara. I tell you there was more cackle going on round that first-class coach than the two others.”

  This was a good illustration, for the two coaches next to the locomotive were always crammed with Indians and mestizos, passengers overflowing on to the platform, onlookers overflowing into the train. The railway still held romance and a journey by it was an excuse for a family gathering. Even a traveler to one of the little country towns of the plateau, a day’s ride on a horse, was seen off by all his relations if he took the train.

  “The consul just had time to introduce me to the pair of them. I wasn’t popular with Doña Clara, but Don Anastasio was cordial. He was glad to see me. It meant he wouldn’t have to listen to his wife all the way to Guayaquil.

  “Pennyfather had no sooner seen me into the train than it jerked. You know that jerk. It’s the only way to clear the coaches of non-travelers. They don’t pay any attention to the conductor or the whistle or the station bell, but the false start tumbles them out like fleas off the back of a dog. The train travels about two feet and then stops. It doesn’t really leave for another thirty seconds.

  “Well, Doña Clara spent the thirty seconds bowing and smiling to all the human souls she had incommoded, and giving Pennyfather dirty looks. She didn’t pay much attention to small fry such as consuls. She liked ministers. And as Great Britain didn’t have a minister in Ecuador, she was all the more annoyed with Pennyfather. Besides, she thought it was pretty poor taste on his part to stick a friend on the train when she wanted it to herself.

  “You should have seen that coach when we pulled out of Quito. There wasn’t a seat and hardly standing room in the aisle. Two chairs were occupied by the vice president and his missus, three by her flowers, four by her baggage, and on the tenth she had a regular wardrobe of wraps and coats, with a damn great garden-party hat on top of the lot which I guessed she meant to put on five minutes before we reached Guayaquil. I didn’t like messing her things about, so I smiled at her sort of helplessly. But she looked clean through me. Don Anastasio caught my eye, and got up to clear the chair alongside his own.

  “‘Not that one,’ says she [Trevithick imitated the deep voice of a pompous woman and made me howl with laughter]. ‘You may move the flowers, Anastasio.’

  “Don Anastasio sighed—well, no! He’d never have dared to sigh in front of his wife. It would have started an argument. Put it this way. He looked as if he had sighed. The flowers were easy enough to move, but at the other end of the coach. She had banished me as far away as possible.

  “We moved them, and then Don Anastasio silently shook my hand. I couldn’t quite understand it at the time. He told me afterwards that the scent of all those flowers had reminded him of the innumerable funerals that a vice president had to attend. He was just keeping his mind off everything—trying to get away from Doña Clara and travel and the reproaches he’d have to listen to as far as Riobamba—and so he was open to the suggestion of funerals, if you see what I mean. He shook my hand quite automatically. I was the chief mourner.

  “Well, I returned his grip—with sympathy, for I was thinking of Doña Clara. He knew that all right. To cover his embarrassment he wiped up the damp patches which the flowers had left on the cream-colored upholstery, and spread his mackintosh for me to sit on. Then he patted me on the back—he was a great back-patter, Don Anastasio—and returned to his place.

  “I sat there, looking out of the window and watching Ecuador slide past. I wasn’t feeling very bright. You know how it is. If one has a few drinks and a good lunch and then gets on a train or boat—down come all the sins you’ve ever committed, and your last sin in particular. And, what’s worse, all the damn futility of living the way you do, or living at all if it comes to that. Hell! I’ve known men whose memories were fair stuffed with sins, and thought none the worse of them. We wouldn’t know what sin was if it weren’t for the priests and the lawyers. But we’d know futility all right. I tell you, I think sometimes that monkeys know all about futility. That’s why they’re always hopping after some mischief; they daren’t do nothing. I’m going to buy a monkey some day. It’s no good theorizing and reading about human beings. I sit here in the evenings and think I’ve solved the problems of the universe, but it’s all hot air. There’s no solid fact behind it. I must buy a monkey. I say, where was I?”

  “You were watching Ecuador slide past the window,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Well, I liked Ecuador—green and soft and warm. I was sick at being turned out of it. It reminded me of home. My father was a farmer—a gentleman farmer he called himself, but the only gentlemanliness I saw was when he used to swear at me and my brothers for running around with the village kids. I did a bunk when I was sixteen. South Africa, South America, New South Wales—always South Something-or-Other I’ve been in. Always running around to make a bit of money, enough to move somewhere else.

  “That’s what I was thinking as we joggled along the altiplano from Quito to Riobamba. It was a bad five hours,—I expect you’ve had ’em too,—but something came out of it. I discovered that all the time I had been wanting a farm without my father.

  “Of course I could have had a farm without my father any year in the last twenty when I was flush. But it hadn’t occurred to me. Farms and fathers—they went together in my mind. I saw they needn’t necessarily go together. And I knew where I wanted my farm, too. Up here. None of your tropics and deserts for me. I like grass.

  “I didn’t give my fellow passengers another thought. I didn’t
want to talk, nor did they. When we got to Riobamba I gave them a nod and strolled over to the hotel carrying my own bag. That seems unlikely, I know, considering all the boys in town earn their pocket money at the station. But they were busy struggling for Doña Clara’s baggage and, when they got it, arguing about who should carry what. She disorganized that station good and proper, and then put the hotel out of action by having everything she possessed taken up to her room. After that she abode by her stuff, like the chap in the Bible.

  “As soon as the hall was clear I made tracks for the bar to see if I couldn’t shake that depression. I had perched myself on a high stool before I saw Don Anastasio. He was hiding behind a palm tree at the side of the door into the hall, so that anyone looking through could honestly say they hadn’t seen him. He had a whiskey and soda in a pint glass on the table at his side. A good rich yellow it was, too. It was mixed about half and half—as I found out when I tasted the one he ordered for me.

  “Yes, he waved me into the next chair as soon as our eyes met. That’s why I bless that hotel. If I hadn’t come down to the bar just then, I might be—well, anywhere to-day. Clerking it in Costa Rica, for example, and stealing enough from my boss to get tight every night.

  “We had a couple of drinks together, and he asked me what I was doing in Ecuador and how I liked it. I couldn’t tell him the truth. He’d have laughed probably, but I was too ashamed of it myself. I’d never been ordered out of a country before, you see. I’d deserved it several times—plenty of times! But it hadn’t actually happened. It takes a fact to make my conscience work. I suppose that’s so for most people. We think ourselves bloody angels until the judge hands out a sentence of five years’ hard, and then we see what we really are.

  “I told Don Anastasio that I’d been up and down the coast for years without ever visiting Quito, and that I’d come up to have a look at it—which was true so far as it went. I said I liked it best of all the republics. That pleased him. And what pleased him still more was that I treated him with proper respect. He was a jolly fellow of about my own age, but that was no reason for forgetting he was vice president. Don’t think I’m a snob, but I’ve been knocking around South America long enough to enjoy calling a man Excellency if he’s entitled to it. And Don Anastasio was. He was one of the old sort, rich as they make ’em, and free and easy in his ways. He looked taller than his height, for he had a fine head on him with a wavy, pointed brown beard and a moustache that didn’t go up or down, but straight out to the sides in two soft even waves. Gallant—that’s the word for his face. A man you liked at first sight, with a twinkle in his eyes when he wasn’t looking at Doña Clara.”

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “Gone off as a diplomat. His party was thrown out in the last revolution, but he always gets a job. Everyone likes him, so they see that his missus has something to keep her quiet.

  “Well, after a bit he asked me if I’d care to join them at dinner. I said I feared the señora would be too tired for a guest. I thought, you see, that she’d probably object. I’d misjudged Don Anastasio there. He was much too polite to ask a chap to sit down with his wife unless he knew she would approve. He wasn’t afraid of her; he was just too damned courteous. It came to the same in the end.

  “Don Anastasio insisted. She had said, it seemed, that I looked very distinguished and that she was glad Pennyfather had introduced me. I expect that, like most women, she’d been piqued at my making no advances, though she was ready enough to snub me if I did.

  “She was very cordial at dinner. She let me know that she didn’t usually entertain people she met on trains, but was graciously pleased to make an exception. Doña Clara wasn’t inhospitable—so long as you showed you were impressed by her as a hostess. And that was easy. She was a beauty. The more exasperated with her you were, the more you wanted to wake her up. She made you understand how it is men can beat their wives when they wouldn’t beat a dog.

  “Don Anastasio got us talking about antiquities. I’m as interested in them in a casual way as you are, and when he said there were the foundations of a Quito temple in Riobamba I replied exactly what he wanted to hear—that I’d have liked to see them if only it had been daylight.

  “He was all set on showing me the temple anyway, and we marched off sedately after dinner with Doña Clara’s blessing and a couple of cigars. I don’t think she would have let him go so easily, but her woman’s instinct—you know, the one they pride themselves is never wrong—told her that I didn’t much want to go and that I’d soon lead the expedition back to the hotel and her. As a matter of fact I was thinking the same as her husband—that the night was young and that if there was anything to do in Riobamba we might as well do it.”

  “But is there a temple?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Things began to move too fast. I’ve thought about it once or twice since, but whenever I ride into Riobamba I’m marketing or seeing friends, and damme if I ever remember to find out.

  “Don Anastasio had never been on the loose in Riobamba and didn’t know the town. Well, you or I would have asked at the hotel desk, but the vice president went straight to the best authority—and that was the mayor. We hired a car and drove to his home and were told that he’d gone to the movies with his wife. So off we drove to the slush palace, and Don Anastasio hauls out the manager.

  “‘Flash a notice on the screen,’ he says, ‘to inform the alcalde that the vice president is outside and wishes to speak to him.’

  “The manager recognized Don Anastasio and didn’t hesitate. We waited in the car for three minutes or so, and out jumped the mayor like a bull into the ring—wild-eyed and blinking and so fast you’d have thought the doorman had stuck a dart into his bottom. He believed there was a revolution on.

  “Don Anastasio calmed the alcalde down, and let him have a full string of compliments. Then he said he wanted him for an hour on urgent business and that he’d better go in again and tell his wife not to wait.

  “But the alcalde wasn’t doing anything so easy. Not on your life! He was swelling with importance. He wrote a note to his wife, and told the manager to flash that on the screen. His stock was up. He’d have something to talk about for the rest of his life.

  “We put him in the car and the vice president explained that I was a distinguished Englishman just passing through the country, and that I’d said I hadn’t seen any pretty women in Ecuador. He was sorry he hadn’t met me in time to show me Quito, but here we were, still on the altiplano, and what about it? Of course I protested politely, but the alcalde was hurt. I gathered he was quite prepared to ring the church bells, declare a fiesta, and have a parade of beauty up and down the main street.

  “Don Anastasio put it to him that what we wanted was more discreet amusement than that. The alcalde thought for a bit, and then gave the chauffeur an address. It was his girl’s. He didn’t produce her and he didn’t invite us in; he just sent her off in another car to visit some of her pals. Then he helped us buy a case of champagne, gave us the keys of his country cottage, and said good-night. He could keep his mouth shut, that alcalde. He’s a senator now. Don Anastasio saw to that.

  “It was a pretty little house about half an hour out of town with a patio full of flowers and a big fireplace and everything we could want. We hadn’t had time for more than a bottle before the alcalde’s young woman drove up, dropped three of her girl friends at the front door, and ran away laughing to the car before we could get a glimpse of her.

  “You can imagine the rest for yourself. We woke up—”

  “I can’t imagine it,” I said.

  “Well, that’s right. Perhaps you can’t. Or rather you’d imagine something much better than they really were. For the fact is they were more Indian than white, and very solid.

  “You know how it is. These Spanish-Americans need women about before they’ll really let themselves go. And Anastasio let himself go as if he hadn’
t seen a woman or a guitar or a glass of wine in the last ten years. Lord, what a show! And every time he did anything particularly outrageous he’d clap me on the back and wish to God there were more Englishmen like me. He said they ought to appoint me British Minister to Ecuador. That was when I was showing the girls a dance I learned in Swaziland.

  “Well, when the case was nearly empty, I thought I’d lie down and have a sleep. The room was pretty hot. I remember dreaming I was an orchid on the coast of Esmeralda, and the rain was making me grow into a fine, feeling, embracing sort of vegetable. I lay awake for a second or two, and, damn it, it was raining—at least I thought it was. What was really happening was that one of the girls was watering me with a watering can. She was a gentle little creature. She couldn’t bring herself to chuck the lot over my head.

  “I squirted the last bottle of champagne at her, for I was feeling fine and thought she’d woken me up for purposes of her own. But then I saw that the chinks in the shutters weren’t as black as they should have been. It was dawn and we hadn’t more than half an hour to catch our train, if we had that. I made a dive for my watch, and saw we had thirty-five minutes.

  “Anastasio was fast asleep on the floor with one girl’s head on his knees and the other’s on his chest. It was a pretty sight. I mean, a really pretty sight. There he lay with their black hair squandered all over his body, and looking like Jupiter asleep with his cupbearers. However, I hadn’t time to go into that.

  “I watered him a bit with the watering can, and he sat up and laughed like hell.

  “‘Jorge de mi alma!’ he shouts. ‘El Ministro de la Gran Bretaña!’ remembering his last joke, as a man will when he wakes up with his liquor still on him, and the headache still an hour or two away.

  “I pointed out that we had just thirty-two minutes to get to Riobamba station. I didn’t mention Doña Clara. One shock was enough at a time.