Thing to Love

by Geoffrey Household

  CHAPTER IX

  [December 5]

  IT WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT, and the wings of the Air Force trucks were already hot to the touch. The drivers and their mates lazed on the ground, smoking endless cigarettes with the entire content of men who had found themselves unexpectedly with nothing to do. It was typical of the Army, they agreed, to load their trucks with a tremendous show of speed and efficiency, and then to marshal them on the Citadel parade ground in the neat lines of a car-park and give no further sign of life. The troops moved smartly about the leisurely business of the garrison, indifferent to this invasion of aliens. For the men of the convoy they were at least something to watch. For the Air Force officers, dividing their curses between Fifth Division and the Holy Family, they were an added exasperation.

  The officers of the garrison — those of them who were concerned with the move — were in a fury of shame and frustration. Outside Headquarters Colonel Rosalindo Chaves, commanding the First Infantry Brigade and in charge of the operation, had the honor to tell the Division provost marshal, the transport officer, the Q staff and Major Ferrer of the Field Company of Engineers exactly what he thought of them. They were not to talk to him about bad luck! Fifth Division was above bad luck! This was the sort of thing expected of the Army, fifty years ago. It was the kind of incompetence which made Latin America the laughing stock of every civilized Army. . . .

  Because the Air Force officers were within earshot, he said all this in a low, strangled voice which did not carry more than a hundred yards. The effort suffused his dark face with blood till it was the color of a well-polished mahogany table. He was a terrifying sight — short, squat, savage, his thin black mustache hanging over the corners of his wide Indian mouth and emphasizing the downward curve of the fleshy, mobile lips.

  The officers scattered as he ordered the convoy away at once, out of the San Vicente Gate and by the new road to the airfield. One after another, like machine-gun bursts merging into the full clatter of battle, the engines roared and the loaded Air Force trucks began to move off the parade ground. Chaves waited till the whole close-packed column was in line and at last passing out of the Citadel. Then he loosed one final comment on the excretory processes of God Almighty, stamped through Headquarters and strode to the general’s door. Half-unconsciously, he found himself inside the office and stood fiercely to attention as if to apologize for so abrupt an entry.

  All was quiet within. General Kucera was reading a mimeographed manual, Air Force Weapon Training. Captain Irala was withdrawn behind his typewriter.

  “I don’t see how we could help it, Rosalindo,” said Miro mildly.

  “Help it! Jesús, no! We couldn’t help it, once it had happened! But it never ought to have happened, if that son of a black whore, Basilio Ferrer, who has the fornicating impertinence to call himself a major of engineers — and God help this Division if it ever has to depend on the Field Company! — hadn’t run his ten-ton lorry into the ditch and tried to pull it out with a chain round the central pier of the old cotton mill. Anyone could have told him the thing was rotten, if he’d had the sense to ask! We’ve been using it to train your Combat Groups in house-to-house fighting for the last three months. A hundred tons of bricks all over the old road! And when half the convoy has worked its way round that mess, one of their drivers tries to get airborne on a lump of concrete and instead of pushing him out of the way Ferrer lays out enough chain to hold the Blessed Virgin herself in hell and pulls that blasted ten-tonner into the gap. I’ve got the recovery vehicles out and two companies breaking their hearts with shovels, and now Ledesma has lost his temper — by God, he’d have learned to control himself if we had had the training of him! — and you tell me he has ordered the blocked half of the convoy to turn round and return to the airfield. If you would only leave road control to Q and Provost, instead of issuing a lot of contradictory orders . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Rosalindo. I know I’m out of practice on this sort of thing. But it was the President’s order that the whole move had to be arranged personally between Ledesma and me.”

  “Ledesma doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.”

  “Well, you can’t expect me to run a medical school. Have a drink, Rosalindo, and reduce the blood pressure!”

  Colonel Chaves hung up his cap and relaxed, while Salvador Irala busied himself with glasses and light conversation.

  “I was going very close to taking you out and putting you against a wall,” said Chaves.

  “Bravely he bared his breast! Not another statue in the Alameda, Colonel?”

  “On the walls of the cookhouse latrine and whitewashed before inspection. Well, thank God it’s all over now! As soon as the lot I’ve just sent off by the new road is back on the airfield, Ledesma can send us the rest.”

  “By the way, Rosalindo,” Miro said, “you’re sure Ledesma hasn’t started to send them up the new road already?”

  “Of course I’m sure. You’re handling it here.”

  “Salvador?”

  “My General?”

  “You did pass on to Colonel Chaves Ledesma’s last message?”

  “Which one, my General?”

  “That he was starting the empty convoy up the new road just as fast as he could pull them back from the old road.”

  “No, I didn’t say so in so many words. Ledesma was a little incoherent, if you remember, my General. You told me to tell the colonel to clear this lot before Ledesma started the rest up the new road, but you didn’t say he had.”

  Colonel Chaves bounded out of his seat.

  “But the devil take my mother and yours! They can’t pass on the new road! It’s single-line traffic, where the surface isn’t finished.”

  “I think there is a hoodoo on this place today,” said Miro despairingly.

  “Hoodoo! All I say is, Chief — and I am not a man who likes to put things strongly! — I say, thank God there are only a few of us who know what’s going on!”

  “You feel I am responsible, Rosalindo?”

  “Perhaps I am mistaken, but if you ask me . . .” Colonel Chaves began.

  “At a Court of Inquiry, it would be difficult to put the blame on anyone else, wouldn’t it?”

  “Difficult? Why difficult? I’ll take it, so long as you understand what I’ve had to put up with.”

  “I do indeed, Rosalindo,” Miro said, giving him his best imitation of a Latin embrace, which was all the more charming for its clumsiness. “And let us hope that my next orders for you will be a little more interesting. Now, my advice to you is to let the Air Force sort out the mess themselves. They don’t seem to appreciate all we’re doing for them.”

  Chaves looked from his general’s affectionate face to the innocent eyes of his A.D.C. and back again.

  “You’ll pay me for this, Miro,” he said, using the off-duty intimacy of the second person singular. “Half the Air Force trucks for First Brigade, and don’t you forget it!”

  “Hombre! Ask Jesús-María! If it depended on me . . .”

  “And what doesn’t depend on you? . . . Well, put it that I’ve guessed wrong! If you want me, I shall be in the mess reading the newspapers. Have you seen that they begin to call Avellana a ‘red’ when he believes in more saints than a priest’s washerwoman? And that makes me a ‘white,’ when I don’t believe there’s any God at all and no worse devils than you and that one!”

  Chaves recovered his hat, punctiliously saluted his general, and poked out two fingers at Captain Irala as if to avert his evil eye.

  “They could manhandle the stuff from the loaded convoy to the empty one.” suggested Salvador when the door was shut.

  “They could. But the trucks will be jammed nose to tail if I know them, and that means that the front half of the convoy will have to go back in reverse. And it’s half-past eleven now. They can’t shift the bombs. They might be able to arm a flight of fighters if they don’t go crazy first.”

  “Suppose Ledesma puts it off till tomorrow?”

 
“If he does, Salvador, it’s proof of his loyalty. He daren’t put it off if he means to land at Lérida. The squadrons are fueled and the ring of officers who are in the know must have been widened. One leak, and Vidal will order us on to the airfield. Ledesma’s security problem is impossible. No, he daren’t put it off.”

  The telephone was silent. No more protest, hot fury and cold insults came through from Ledesma. It was obvious that he suspected deliberate sabotage. Or was it obvious? He might have given the convoy up as hopeless and reserved his energy for the far more pressing decisions on the ground.

  Miro’s own nerves began to fray. He felt like an actor whose audience has walked out. A dozen nightmarish effects of his deceit, all of them wildly unlikely but possible, insisted on his consideration. His own dismissal was the least of them. That, he knew, would be a bitter blow — unless it came from the hand of Avellana — but Feli and the Fonsagrada estate would soon soften it.

  He tried to stick firmly to the common sense of his original decision: that the demonstration over Vergara would end the revolution, whether the planes were armed or not, and that he himself was able to refuse the arms whereas Vidal was not.

  But as yet it was impossible to say that to the President; and the President had taken the place of Ledesma on the other end of the telephone. He could not be tortured as the marshal had been; in fact torture was the other way round. Vidal continually demanded reports. Every half-hour he tried to catch his garrison commander out in some inconsistency. Never before had Miro known him really angry, so there was no evidence on which to judge his manner. Certainly he was polite — by nature he couldn’t be anything else — but his voice was unsteady and he permitted himself an icy irony. Doubt was there too. Vidal had his own nightmare to contend with. What would be his position if the Air Force was entirely loyal, but Fifth Division was about to change sides and declare for Avellana? Miro longed to tell him to talk to his wife. But presumably he had. One couldn’t imagine him suffering the agonies of that morning without asking for reassurance. And if still she had not admitted her wise interference with the wheels of government, it was not Miro’s business to do so.

  At lunchtime he stayed in his office, for once thankful to get rid of Salvador Irala, before whom a façade of cool certainty had to be maintained. He sprang from his chair the moment his A.D.C. was out of the room, drummed his fingers on the window, then on Irala’s desk. His eye fell on the papers upon which Salvador had been concentrating, effacing himself so far as possible. It was a poem to some blasted girl called Agueda. He observed, before he looked conscientiously away, that her hair was red-gold and that Danaë, the sun and the flames of hell were all working overtime. Miro felt an unanalyzable mixture of anger and appreciation. After all, Salvador had had nothing to do but refrain from comment. He gave a bark of laughter which shamed and shocked him as if he had caught himself talking aloud. He sat down again, pressing his own immobile, uniformed weight into the chair, conscious of his solidity and allowing it to take command of his mood.

  The telephone buzzed. He picked it up unwillingly. But it was Rosalindo Chaves speaking from the mess.

  “Carancho or Caudón have taken off.”

  Miro dashed en to the veranda and leveled his field glasses. There, away to the northeast, were the specks climbing steeply into the air. Well, Ledesma hadn’t sent up his fighters first as he had said he was going to. But that meant nothing. He might be holding them back in the hope of getting some ammunition.

  He strolled over to the mess, trying to look as if nothing at all could surprise him.

  They were all outside, watching the sky.

  Somebody put a glass of manzanilla into his hand. He drained it and handed it back.

  “What’s the course?” he asked.

  Captain Irala was sitting in the open window of the anteroom with telephone to his ear and notebook on the table in front of him.

  “I’m holding A.A. defense,” he said. “A private alert. All reports to the mess.”

  Invaluable poet! No one else was in a position to know the vital importance of close contact with the Citadel’s radar screen.

  “Taking off to the north,” he reported a few seconds later.

  The specks of the first bomber squadron vanished from sight. The second could just be seen.

  “Turning,” Salvador reported. “Close formation. Course south. Looks as if they were coming over San Vicente.”

  Another minute and there was no doubt about it. The two squadrons swept past the Citadel three or four miles to the east and over the capital. That, Miro was certain, had never been in Ledesma’s orders or even proposed to the President. Since the demonstration was unexpected, it would alarm the populace.

  “Course now?”

  “Southeast.”

  “Lérida or Vergara?”

  His officers all turned their heads to him. The question opened up an abyss of speculation, of news that might come, of orders that might be received and given.

  “Vergara. Fighters taking off now.”

  They remained in sight, turning west and then roaring low over the sea. One flight peeled off from the formation and screamed straight at the Citadel.

  There were various detachments in sight of the mess, and it was his troops whom Miro watched, not the deafening, terrifying projectiles overhead. Nobody broke or took cover. He observed that the crew of an old Bofors gun, training in a corner of the parade ground, was making a perfectly cool effort — naturally impossible — to follow the target. He made a mental note to ask for their names. By and large the response to a simulated surprise attack was not bad.

  “Ledesma is saying what he thinks of us,” he remarked.

  The faces around him were a little set and pale. The flight had swooped on the mess and parade ground, and the blast of the jets from the steep climb had been a physical shock, insulting as a smack across the face.

  “Condor squadron taking off,” said Salvador.

  “Course as soon as possible, please.”

  The Dakotas lumbered away inland without passing over San Vicente. Salvador put down the telephone.

  “Lérida.”

  “I’ll have some lunch now if you’ve left any,” Miro said. “Gentlemen, those of you who are concerned with the support of the civil power should reinforce all posts and patrols. The usual discretion except at the university, where there is no need to hide your strength. The guard on the Chamber will pay special respect to your elected representatives. Elsewhere you will confine yourselves to co-operation with civil police if required. There will be a staff conference at twenty hours unless I cancel it personally.”

  Miro lunched with a sense of well-being. His air of ease was no longer assumed; it was his normal relaxation. Uncertainty was over, and his plans were ready for that impossible situation in which, as Don Jesús-María had said, the legal government and its loyal garrison could only accept defeat. At any moment the Vergara radio would inform Guayanas, with a professional thrill in the announcer’s voice, that the Air Force had declared for Avellana.

  He drove down the Avenida Gregorio Vidal and into the Palace courtyard. He was told that the President was at the Chamber, holding a Cabinet meeting. That must mean that he now knew of Ledesma’s perfidy. Of course he did. He would have had reports of the ground staff marching into the Dakotas of Condor squadron, even if he had no news as yet from Siete Dolores.

  As Miro walked out of the Palace, a single plane came fast and low over San Vicente, showering manifestoes on roofs and streets. He hesitated. Should he return to the Citadel? Not necessary. He had a Rosalindo Chaves on the spot. Vidal had no one. Even Doña Concha would be saying I told you so.

  On a hot current of air from the Glorieta a scrap of paper started up the steps — an impudent white imp with its tail cocked up following confidently in the path of the students and perhaps quite as dangerous. Miro picked it up, observed at the foot the name of Jesús-María de Hoyos y Alarcón and read it with the faint smile, compounded of
deference and disrespect, with which he was accustomed to receive the old warrior’s General Orders. It had been coarsely and quickly run off by some small Vergara printer — probably during the twenty-four hours after Ledesma had got his all-clear from the President.

  The splendid example of the Air Force under its enlightened marshal had made it possible for the will of the people to prevail. . . . The Army too declared for President Avellana. . . . The glory of Guayanas and its history demanded an end to foreign influence . . . the corruption of Vidalismo . . . social justice . . . the nobility of the underprivileged. The armed forces, with their traditional chivalry, had drawn their swords in the defense of the Republic, only to return them to their scabbards when her liberty was restored.

  It all seemed a little out-of-date. Gil Avellana and his Brain Trust must have raised their eyebrows but allowed Jesús-María to have his way. An old-fashioned pronunciamiento was no longer the way to impress the sophisticated citizens of San Vicente. As connoisseurs of public emotion they would appreciate the flavor but require more body.

  As he got into his car to drive to the Chamber, he had a sudden anxiety lest he too had been politically inept. No need to bother about the Citadel, but what would the troops in town do? They might assume that he would obey Jesús-María. Had he trusted too blindly to their indoctrination? Could it be that they didn’t know what their commander thought and intended? There had never been an opportunity for heroics. Perhaps he ought to have made it.

  The car turned into the buzzing Alameda. There were groups on the pavement, groups in the road, heads down, reading the leaflets. Then, starting from one single woman, assumptions became reality. He noticed her near the dark arch which led to the Fonsagrada house. As their eyes met he recognized that pathologist of Juan’s. She dramatically tore up the piece of paper in her hand and stamped on it. In a clear contralto voice which cut through the animated mumble of conversation like a silver trumpet in a dancehall she cried:

  “Viva Vidal! Viva el Generalisimo Kucera!”

  The crowd took it up. An Infantry Company crossing the Alameda to relieve and double the posts on the public buildings broke discipline and cheered with the rest.