“What was the little thing which impressed Morote? He has told me just enough to make me guess the rest wrong.”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t know. He came to see me when the Citadel was building. Privately, of course. At my house.”
Miro exchanged glances with Felicia. It was she, really, who had persuaded Morote to speak frankly. She had treated him as an intellectual — which he wasn’t — and convinced him that they were all in the same vague camp of good will. God knew whether that ancestry of hers hadn’t counted too! Morote was at least three-parts Indian.
“There was serious trouble about overtime,” Miro went on. “Pablo Morote couldn’t get any sort of honest dealing out of the contractors. He was being forced to call a strike with the probability that the dockers and railwaymen would come out in support. And that meant — or so he thought — that the government would arrest the leaders. I didn’t see how they could. But Morote reminded me that the Emergency Act of 1952 had been allowed to lapse but had never been repealed. Both sides were ready for a showdown. With violence, if necessary.”
“You might have had to fire?”
Miro avoided the question.
“They were all working very well and cheerfully. And they had a first-class case for overtime. Legally, there was a shade of doubt. Contractors after all know how to draw contracts. But it was the principle of the thing. A few pesos.”
“What did you do?”
“Faulted the concrete,” he laughed. “It was on the borderline anyway. And I had absolute powers as an inspector. What happened was exactly what I expected. So I told the crook that the munificent bribe which he could afford to offer me would be paid to his labor . . . Or else. It wasn’t very much when distributed as overtime. But it created a precedent and saved Morote’s face.”
“The men knew?”
“No. But Morote had to. His advice has been a great help to me ever since. About his people. What they thought and how they thought. One doesn’t like to depend entirely on the reports of civil police.”
“You have your own agents then?” Gil Avellana asked with a dryness of tone which seemed to hide either surprise or uneasiness.
“Neither agents nor the funds for them. But I am easily accessible.”
“Permit me to say what I think of you. You are very much of an aristocrat.”
Miro laughed.
“It’s true my father was a big landowner,” he said. “But he was middle class of the middle class.”
“I meant it in the Spanish sense — that you treat all men as if they had your own self-confidence.”
“I have learned that here. For six generations, Don Gil, the Kuceras were valets and stewards. Czechs — under the Hapsburg Empire — were in one way rather like the Basques. The most trustworthy servants of the nobility were as likely as not to be Czechs. One generation of landowning does not overcome such a background. My heredity — if there is such a thing — is to serve and obey. I am not sure that I understand your mystique of aristocracy.”
“My mystique, as you call it, is for people who feel a truth without being able to analyze it. Look! If I were trying to explain it to a North American, I should ask him: What are the qualities which fascinate you in the “western”? Simplicity of character. Independence. Individual standards rather than mass standards. Honesty. Uncalculating hospitality. I am not holding up the poverty and violence of a cattleman’s life as anything to be cherished. I am merely saying that I, as a traditional Latin American, would find it easier to talk to him than to the average wage-slave of a modern city, and far easier to respect him. For want of a better word, I call his qualities aristocratic.
“Such qualities have nothing to do with political democracy. They can exist with it or without it. But they have a great deal to do with social equality, and they are part of our Spanish inheritance. Without them, we are doomed to become North Americans, revering status and social conformity rather than character.
“The people feel that this is happening, whether they like it or not. I try to express what they feel. I shall not get their support by lecturing to them on economics. They know that Vidal is creating an industrial proletariat. Nobody likes that, least of all a people — primitive, if you like — with a natural sense of the dignity of the individual. At the same time Vidal forces on us an elite of great wealth and no morality. That is why I emphasize nobility of character. The peon has it, and Vidal’s managers do not.”
“Wealth is justified by taste, Gil, not morality,” Juan protested.
“Your standards are entirely European and smell horribly of the nineteen twenties, Juan. They might be a debating point again in fifty years’ time. For the moment they are irrelevant to the question we have to solve: Is it or is it not my social duty — today — to produce, to consume, to make as much difference as possible between myself and people who have less money? In North America with its infinite gradations of social class that is more a passing phase than a problem. Here it is very much a problem. Vidal has forced us through what economists call the industrial takeoff. He has the Barracas in exchange for it. He has given us a new sort of poverty without pride. His cure is to hope, and to bankrupt Guayanas by accepting international charity.
“Now for our own policy: Halt industrialization! We cannot afford the imports to create Vidal’s state. Guayanas is a small country. It hasn’t the limitless possibilities, the infinite credit of Brazil. We shall slow down the process by high interest rates, heavy profits tax and a generous minimum wage. Putting the engine into reverse will create unemployment, but we shall be ready for it. No chromium-plated desks and Coca-Cola for us! Pumps, tractors and the people back to the land, which at last will be theirs!”
“And God help the Ateneo!” Juan added.
“The Ateneo represents the Latin America that was. You know as well as I do that when the Ateneo has become too incompetent or too tyrannical, we have always taken action — the Fonsagradas, the Avellanas, the Valdéses. We imposed whatever the country needed at the moment: democracy or clericalism or simply financial integrity. Now we are going to impose a very large dose of Socialism — from the top, not from the bottom. The older landowners will be terrified. But we are the traditional leaders, and they would rather follow us than hang on in terror of being expropriated without compensation.”
“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 c
ould 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]
IT 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 a
ctive 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.
Thing to Love Page 5
