Thing to Love

by Geoffrey Household

  Avellana’s voice began to come through again in waves of varying intensity which made it sound like the voice of a prophet from outer space. To judge from the sentences which were intelligible he was speaking of his economic policy. The unknown technicians who were jamming the broadcast seemed to be choosing this passage to show their obedience to Vidal’s instructions, knowing that it was the part of the speech with least appeal to listeners.

  “It is an astonishing thing, Enrique,” said Juan sadly, “that the mass of the people will never trouble to understand an economic program although those are the only government measures which can have an effect on every hour of their daily lives.”

  “And I entirely agree with them! I have had the problems of industrial takeoff explained to me by Professor Carrillo, by Vidal himself and by the economic experts at the Foreign Office. They were all perfectly clear. They all disagreed with each other. And worse still I never could remember their arguments next day. Economists are like nuclear physicists. You have to take the stuff on trust and hope to God that the one who is believed will be the one who is right.”

  “You claim to have raised the standard of living, Gregorio Vidal,” the deep voice of the radio commented. “You have filled the shops with goods. You have offered to Guayanas the luxuries of North America. And the money is there to buy them. It is there for your industrialists, your contractors, your shopkeepers, your bankers and businessmen. It is there for the new middle classes. The faster they spend, the more pesos they have. But what is the peso worth? When you came to power a kilo of bread cost two pesos. It now costs eleven — an increase of 450 per cent. But the daily wage of the peon and the worker has doubled. Merely doubled.

  “Have patience, you tell us — patience while Guayanas enters the twentieth century! Or is it the twenty-first we should wait for? I tell you we would rather have the nineteenth century, when, God knows, there were rich and poor, but the poor did not starve. Gregorio Vidal, you have made of Guayanas two nations. And in the name of the poorer of the two, I declare war on you. The revolution has failed. The civil war begins.

  “Brothers, from the new front of that war I have good news for you. Sixth Division has landed at Rubayo. Twentieth Cavalry have ridden in from the llanos to their support. My government and I, with our faithful Twelfth Cavalry, march north to join them, abandoning Siete Dolores to the enemy. You, Vidal, I warn that if you take revenge upon the innocent whose only crime was to believe in me, your supporters in the north shall pay for it.

  “To you, Major General Kucera, I say: Meet us on the llanos! Come up and meet the horsemen of Guayanas, and destroy us if you can! The food of our horses is under their feet. The food of our men is slung on their saddles. You, you will need your whole Division to guard your transport and your petrol points.

  “And now, for a moment, I, Gil Avellana, appeal to the sister States of Latin America. If you are puzzled and uncertain, I ask you to judge me by my ancestors. The Avellana who fought with Bolívar was a Hidalgo of Spain. In spite of that he gave his life to free this southern continent from the colonialism of Spain. The Avellana who speaks to you now is a landowner. But he, too, leads you to liberty from the colonialism of the United States — more subtle than the other since it is foreign to our way of life. I ask you to help me. I will accept help wherever I can get it.”

  “And that,” said Henry Penruddock, “is just the surest way to supply Vidal with all the arms, aircraft and volunteer pilots that he can possibly require.”

  Juan switched off the radio and returned to his chair.

  “You are indeed an old friend, Enrique.”

  It seemed to the consul quite timeless, that unbroken partnership of favors given and received, of marveling at Juan, of reproaching him because he never took his power and his imagination seriously enough to use them. He was perfectly capable, like his father, of destroying a dictator and refusing to take one unnecessary life, capable even of waving his sword to the complete satisfaction of the most theatrical of his followers; but he would then have gone home laughing and left to somebody else the sorting out of the inevitable mess. Well, until these bloody insanities were settled, Juan would have to search hard for anything to laugh at. His slenderness, as he crossed the room, no longer seemed to be a still unconsumed surplus of the nervous energy of youth. It was the leanness of age.

  “For what exactly this time?” Henry Penruddock asked.

  “For not saying: ‘I told you so.’”

  “I never did tell you so, Juan. I merely thought that it was unwise to tempt the United States to take a hand in our private affairs. But you might have been right. And Avellana had done the damage already.”

  “Enrique, I thought this would be a revolution like any other. I did not see that it might become a duel between foreigners.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “For a start I shall offer my house to the International Red Cross. A pointed gesture that I disapprove of both sides.”

  “Be careful with your gestures, Juan. Vidal is bound to win.”

  “Vidal cannot win, Enrique. He has the whole country against him — by which I mean: too big a minority against his own minority. What alarms me is the price that Gil may have to pay for victory.”

  “I was always afraid of his fanaticism.”

  “You always found our politics intolerable when they were not corrupt.”

  “Nonsense, Juan! You went out of power a poorer man than when you went in.”

  “But my colleagues didn’t.”

  “At least the members of the Ateneo are tolerant of each other’s faults.”

  “The Ateneo died with the speech we have just heard.”

  “Ateneos should be immortal, Juan. We now call ours the Establishment — which sounds, I must admit, like a pet name discreetly given by elderly citizens to their favorite bawdy house. But in fact it has no premises at all and it is thus impossible to smash the windows while fighting for democracy.”

  “No one has ever fought for democracy, Enrique — not in the whole history of the world. They have given their lives to defend their economic interests or their religious beliefs.”

  “Well, thank God this isn’t a religious conflict — yet.”

  “On the contrary, that is just exactly what it is.”

  “The Church seems to be sitting on the fence with its usual skill,” said Henry Penruddock, a little puzzled. “I hear it is split much as the country — the hierarchy for Vidal and the village priests for Avellana.”

  “The Church is pitying, but neutral. None of its special interests is affected. So it is busy rendering to Caesar. It cannot be expected to see that the issues are profoundly divine. The conflict is between my son-in-law’s duty to God and Avellana’s duty to the Neighbor. I foresee that I may be feeling for your hand in the darkness, Enrique. I hope it will be there?”

  “Always, Juan.”

  Juan de Fonsagrada sauntered out into the deep-shaded street with his normal air of taking a stroll in his own private park where at any moment some delightful group of friends might be expected. He courteously raised his exquisite Panama hat in acknowledgment of the salute of the municipal policemen at the gate of the British Consulate and raised it again to the plain-clothes operative across the road who was carefully looking away from him.

  His mood was heavy, compounded of guilt and possible futures, uneasy and intrusive, through which wandered his two overwhelming loves, Guayanas and Feli, lost to each other and combined into one single ghost only in their distrust of him. But he would have considered himself disgraced if that mood had been in any way visible to his public. As Vice President or the victim of revolution, as a near bankrupt or a self-styled peddler of patent medicines, he had never seen any reason to change that manner adopted in his thirties — when he had felt a little ashamed of the too eccentric geniality of his twenties — which by now was as integral a part of San Vicente as the house behind the Alameda.

  Before Avellana’s appe
al to the country he had not been dissatisfied with Miro’s startling victory, partly because he couldn’t help taking a pride in such clean efficiency, partly because he knew that Gil Avellana was destined, however peremptory his present defeat, to be the next President of Guayanas. A couple of years in exile wouldn’t do him any harm. After that he might even be prepared to let bygones be bygones and make use of the first-class servants of the State, including Miro, with whom Gregorio Vidal had presented him.

  But he was appalled by this speech, by this obstinate refusal to accept disaster, by this brilliant decision — almost certainly of Pedro Valdés — to abandon Siete Dolores and retreat into the llanos. The pattern of revolution did not fit. This was a bitter resistance movement, a sort of Chinese march to the impenetrable. The wild plains had changed little since the Spaniards first discovered them except for a railway to Hermosillo, the provincial capital. Beyond Hermosillo and its meat factories was nothing but heat, the villages and camps of the llaneros and innumerable streams and rivers winding through the grass. It was horseman’s country. Twelfth and Twentieth Cavalry could recruit their losses over and over again from the llaneros, always ready in war or revolution to live on the slender rations of a Tartar horde and to show as little mercy.

  The highlands of Los Venados, the Indian province and political stronghold of the Fonsagradas, lay to the north of the llanos. Warm, soft and fertile, with the forest invading its eastern valleys and rainfall no more violent that the frequent April showers of temperate Europe, it was a paradise and likely to remain so until pressure of population and some other Vidal built a modern road or a railway to reach it. He had looked forward to spending the last years of his life there with Miro and Felicia.

  Not much chance of that now. What was he thinking? Ah yes, that at last he had an unimpeachable excuse for favoring Gil Avellana. Vidal, the Chamber, the Ateneo, possibly Miro and certainly dear Feli knew very well that the one thing the Fonsagradas would not allow was fighting in their country. He could not be expected to tell the caciques and the local politicos that they were to oppose Avellana by force. Gil would have to use the province as a base, but operations would pass it by. It had killed the horses of the conquistadores, and its climate was still a perplexing problem for the Army vets. As for Fifth Division, communications would be long enough already without climbing into a world where motor transport would use up more petrol to establish a petrol point than it would ever get out of the pump. Yes, it would be perfectly plain to San Vicente that he personally was compelled to remain on the very best of terms with Avellana, whom Los Venados accepted because it couldn’t do anything else.

  He followed the narrow, dark gray street to the great gate in the blank wall and rang the bell. Pancho let him in, shifting his feet in an ape-dance of impatience to express his indignation.

  “But to speak like that of Don Miro, padrón!”

  “You’ve been listening too, have you? I owe you an apology, Pancho. We should have listened together.”

  “The Señoritas Agueda and Vita permitted me —”

  “They did, did they? I hope you were discreet, Pancho.”

  “Padrón, what things you say! And I who would kill for them!”

  “You are old-fashioned, Pancho. We do not kill for girls any more, but for ideas. And what they are doesn’t matter when Russia and the United States will always claim that we are killing for their dear sakes.”

  “But it was sweeter to live in the days of Don Cayetano.”

  “It was. God knows it was! In years to come they will speak of the days of my father as a golden age. Even the peons were happy. But I wish Don Gil did not believe it so simple to make the present into the past.”

  “I am no longer on the side of Don Gil. After the family had sheltered him, to speak so of the Captain General! I am disgusted!”

  “Well, you’d better be on his side, Pancho, because I am.”

  “Let them fight among themselves, padrón! Sometime our day will come.”

  That dream, too, was mixed up in this damnable business. He was sentimentally supposed by his people to share it. He did not. An Indian renaissance implying some sort of apartheid for the small minority of pure white blood was ridiculous. It denied the great Christian triumph of Spanish civilization, the absolute irrelevance of color. On the other hand a difference of color, except in such states as Paraguay and modern Mexico, too often implied a difference of class. If Avellana and Valdés were to carry their social revolution anywhere near the dictatorship of the proletariat, it would mean the dictatorship of the Indian and three-quarter Indian. He wondered how far Pablo Morote was just a militant trades-unionist and how far he was aware that he was avenging the Spanish Conquest.

  Juan went slowly up the steps into his darkened house and entered his study. He sat reluctantly at his desk. It was not a place where he normally considered politics. Politics were inspired by contacts at the Ateneo, in the Chamber and on the street. One rarely needed pencil and paper to work out the interests of parties and personalities. Instinct and a sense of history had been enough.

  Enough till now. It was all the fault of that neat, efficient little crook, Vidal, who had attracted the go-ahead capitalists and speculators from both parties, leaving the traditional reds to stew in their old anticlerical liberalism and the traditional whites so disorganized that half of them were following Gil into the modern world and the other half sitting on their estates among the cows and cockroaches loathing Vidal and Avellana equally, but completely powerless to provide any convincing opposition to either.

  There was no way out, no possibility of reconstituting the checks and balances of political life which existed before Vidalismo. The civil war would be fought out, and the worse the agony of it, the more certain Avellana was to win. He had a creed against a nothing. But wait a minute! That had been true up to the Battle of Cruzada. It wasn’t true any longer. Vidal had become irrelevant. The fight, as he had told Enrique, was Avellana versus Miro with equal idealism on either side.

  Very well, then. Having got that into a new perspective, he would act just as he had impulsively decided. The house to the International Red Cross. Stocks of drugs on hand, or at sea or to be flown in, would be distributed equally to both sides. On the face of it, ridiculous! The regimental surgeons of Fifth Division had access to everything they could possibly need. But the gesture allowed some hope of supplying Avellana’s forces. They would be appallingly short of medical supplies. He was prepared to bet that the two cavalry divisions had no more than enough for a couple of weeks’ peacetime sick parades.

  He had been aware for some time of raised voices and a slammed door. That was perhaps to be expected after listening to the radio, since Agueda had been cheering Miro in the streets — reasonably enough, when she had just begun an evidently entrancing affair with young Irala — and Vita, like all her university friends, was a convinced Avellanista.

  He sent for them. The silent discharge of feminine fury across his study was so potent that it ought to have been detectable by eye in clothes disheveled and hair electrified, and by nose in an outpouring of disturbed perfume. But except that Vita and Agueda did not look at each other, there was nothing to be observed but two neat young technicians in their working clothes.

  “I am compelled, Don Juan, to . . .”

  “I cannot stay, Don Juan.”

  “Daughters, daughters! Not like this! Sit down!”

  Agueda sat down opposite the desk with cold dignity.

  “With your permission, Don Juan,” said Vita with a savage glance at Agueda’s exasperatingly crossed legs, “I will not sit down.”

  “It is true that anger in a woman is more effective when she is standing up. In the theater, as I have often observed . . .”

  Vita sat down.

  “You have come to tell me, children, that neither of you will work in my house any longer so long as the other remains?”

  “It is impossible, Don Juan.”

  “For a Chilean to hav
e the impertinence —”

  “Fortunately I am not remaining here myself, or my heart would break with the emptiness of the house.”

  “Don Juan, I hate to go, but it’s impossible.”

  “Don Juan, you must understand.”

  “Or perhaps I will take over your flat to remind me of you, and of our charming relationship which has been somewhat mystifying to the world outside our patio, but very simple to ourselves. That on occasion there has been a pretty squeak of ‘No, Don Juan,’ or ‘I beg of you, Don Juan’ I am not denying. Indeed I think on this our last day I should apologize to you, because obedience, however reluctant, was still possible. Let me assure you, my dears, that you are both of most faultless and exciting loveliness. You compete with my memories as an Olympic champion of today destroys the records of the past. My astonishing high-mindedness has been due to the purest aestheticism. I have set all my life so high a value upon the intolerable beauty of the act of procreation that I cannot now bear to involve myself in a situation where the enthusiasm of my partner would be markedly less than my own. I observe that only your invariable courtesy prevents you from bursting into giggles. May I ask you to leave matters of state to Gil Avellana and Miro Kucera, and instead of looking at each other with such bitter loathing to remember how often you have laughed together at me?”

  The two girls exchanged a flicker of a glance and at once looked away. He observed that the corners of Vita’s delicious mouth were unsteady and that his red-haired Agueda had set her lips into the tight bunch of a fourteen-year-old.

  “Good! Now that communication has been established, or, if this is an overstatement, that at least I am being used as a telephone exchange, I have a proposal to make to you. I am handing over the house to the Red Cross, so you will cease to be my Public Relations officers.”