Days of Your Fathers

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘When we had got down to five thousand, and stopped for lunch, I began to remember I wasn’t the British Minister at all, but we had some more champagne at lunch and it kept us going. I stroked Doña Clara’s hand and filled up my notebook with lunch and dinner engagements for the four days we should have to wait in Guayaquil before the boat left. I gathered that half a dozen of Clara’s intimate friends were going north with us too, and she made me promise I’d be particularly polite to them on board. I let her think I was going back to London to settle my affairs before taking up the new post. As a matter of fact I was booked to Panama, and hadn’t the faintest idea what I’d do when I got there.

  ‘At sea level we cleaned ourselves up and slept for a bit. It was hot as hell. We were running through nigger villages and cocoa and banana plantations, and the sweat was rolling off us so thick that if you’d put a match to it, it would have lit. When we woke up we bought a couple of pineapples off a little yellow girl and ate them and felt better. But the better we felt, the worse it was. I had nothing to lose myself, but by this time I loved Anastasio like a brother and I saw trouble ahead.

  ‘At last he asked straight out what the hell we were to do now. We had both been thinking that on and off since lunch, but it was all right so long as neither of us said it. We could keep going if you see what I mean.

  ‘I said I didn’t know what we were to do – that the best thing would be for me to disappear as soon as we reached Guayaquil. Anastasio started to jump up and down. The heat was getting on his nerves. He said it wouldn’t solve anything if I just vanished.

  ‘“Muy bien!” I replied. “But you’ll have to explain some time.”

  ‘“I won’t!” he said. “I can’t! Jorge” – he took my hand between two of his and fondled it just as I’d been doing to Doña Clara – “for the love of God, don’t let me down!”

  ‘Of course you can’t realise what a stew we were in. You haven’t met Doña Clara. Look at that picture! A self-important snob of a woman who would never let him forget that he’d once made a fool of her – let alone that fact that he’d come home without his socks. And the worst of it was that she was damned lovely. It just meant that if he confessed she’d have a double hold on him for the rest of his life.

  ‘I said I’d do anything he liked – fall ill for the next four days in Guayaquil and miss the boat. But no – he wouldn’t have it. I’d have the best doctors in Guayaquil and Clara at my bedside with a nurse’s uniform and a big red cross on her shapely bosom. She wouldn’t miss such a chance to be noble.

  ‘Well, by now we were halfway across the marshes, running into Duran where you take the ferry for Guayaquil, and Doña Clara was trying on her picture hat. Before we’d had time to decide anything we were in Duran station, and a dozen of Clara’s friends and Anastasio’s politicos were there to meet us. He had to introduce me as the future British Minister, and that was that. We crossed the river to Guayaquil in the President’s private launch, and I was popular with the politicos, though I say so myself. The fact is, I think I missed my career. If a man can represent his country well when he’s suffering from an evil conscience and a hangover he ought to be pretty damned good on a plain working day.

  ‘We all pleaded tiredness after the journey, and except for a short reception at their house I didn’t have to act any longer. Of course Clara wouldn’t let me go to a hotel but insisted on putting me up. They had a house at Guayaquil as well as Quito and God knows where else. I went to bed at eight and slept like a log and didn’t wake up till five in the morning, when I found Anastasio sitting by my bedside with a coffee-pot and some fruit-salts and the air of a family doctor watching his patient come round from the anaesthetic.

  ‘He had that light in his eye. Quiet triumph, but a little unsure how I would react. Of course I asked him if he’d thought of anything. He shook his head and said he had, but that I wouldn’t like it. Then he addressed me as earnestly as if I’d been leading the opposition in the senate. He put the problem very neatly: (a) I couldn’t wait for the boat. If I did I should be entertained by all Guayaquil, and the President and Pennyfather would get to hear of it; (b) I couldn’t just vanish, or Clara would smell a rat. So that we were left with (c) – that I must cease to be the British Minister openly and for good and sufficient reasons.

  ‘Well, that was all right, given the reasons.

  ‘“Did you ever take a bribe, Jorge?” he asked.

  ‘“Not from a friend,” I told him – and that was true.

  ‘“Well, you have to take one from me,” he went on, “and report to your government that it’s not worth while to open a legation at Quito, and you won’t accept the post.’

  ‘I saw what he was after, but I couldn’t see how it would help. True enough, he could say that for political reasons he didn’t want a British Legation at Quito, and that he had bribed me to report against it and that I’d cleared out at once. But it didn’t help. He could say it – but there was no proof of the bribe and no proof of the story. It wouldn’t deceive a child, let alone Doña Clara.

  ‘Still, the idea had possibilities, and I sat up in bed and considered them over the coffee. And then I saw how we could get out of the jam – he with honour and I with profit.

  ‘I told him that the wisest thing was for me to take a bribe that everyone could see, and not to run away. Then he could tell his story and stand a chance of being believed.

  ‘“Give me land,” I said to him straight. “I like your country and you and your friends. I’ll stay here. I’ll keep my mouth shut. And this is what will happen. Doña Clara will believe you, and so will Riobamba. Pennyfather and your own foreign ministry will say that there was never any proposal to appoint a British Minister and that the whole rumour is ridiculous – which is just what they’d have to say if it were true. And they won’t sound convincing, because there’s me and my land to prove that you paid a good price for something – if it wasn’t for refusing the British Legation, what was it for?”

  ‘I felt a bit ashamed, for it sounded like blackmail. And in a way it was. Only I knew he wouldn’t take it so. And I meant just a house and a few acres. I never expected all this.’

  Trevithick waved his hand apologetically around the polished beauties of the dining-room.

  ‘But Anastasio was wild with gratitude. It’s funny, but do you know I think he was complimented that I wanted to live in his country – quite apart from the fact that I’d shown him the way out of the mess. He threw a dressing-gown at me and ran me down to the library, where he pulled out all his deeds and maps and photographs. I tell you, he might have conquered the country himself, he was so generous with it.

  ‘What he offered at first wasn’t what I wanted. He kept on insisting on coffee and cocoa and quinine and all the things I could grow that would make me rich. I told him that I was sick of trying to make money, that I wanted to settle down. Then he showed me this place. I could see it was pretty much what I had dreamed of, but too big. I hadn’t any capital, I couldn’t stock it.

  ‘“I’ll make you a sporting offer, Jorge,” he said. “Take the place as it stands. It’ll feed you and your men and keep a roof over your heads. And if you can’t make that estancia pay its own running expenses, then you’re an hijo de puta who ought to live in the same back street as your mother.

  ‘I was short with him after that insult. I told him I’d forgotten more about grass farming than he ever knew, and I accepted the place. At nine o’clock he took me down to his lawyers and made out a deed of gift then and there – everything on the land moveable and immoveable as they say. I couldn’t know it included this furniture and a volcano and the beginnings of the best dairy herd in Ecuador, could I?’

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘But what did people say?’

  ‘Exactly what I prophesied. And I called the ranch “La Embajada” to encourage them a bit. And those who didn’t believe our story started a rumour that Anastasio had bought me off because he didn’t dare let me travel on the same boat wit
h his wife. So I had her portrait painted and hung it up to let them have a bit of evidence on their side as well. Of course that was long ago. I think everybody knows the real truth now – except Doña Clara.’

  No Police in the Cemetery

  The return of the Conde de Villanueva to his ancestral home had not been as gay and pleasurable as he expected. In his little town of Lazalaya, in the sun-striped Café Moderno to which he had looked forward through months of darkened New York bars, even in the office of the mayor who had always treated him with a fatherly affection in which there was no room for formal respect, he had been received with cold courtesy. Added to that, there was upon his desk a note from the Civil Governor of the Province demanding his immediate presence.

  He really couldn’t blame them. The price offered by a Hamburg tourist agency for a strip of his foreshore had so pleasantly surprised him that he cabled his acceptance and signed the documents without remembering his own romantic view of geography. His education had left him permanently muddled between the points of the compass. Eagerly following in his school books the westward track of the conquistadores, the Pacific, the Philippines and even India appeared to him obviously west of Spain, the world east of Spain stopping somewhere about the Persian Gulf. His mental block was a mere question of semantics and impossible to refute; but on the dry land of a surveyor it was a nuisance, a disease, a curse. He believed that he had sold the eastern headland when he had actually sold the western.

  The mistake hurt his pride – not his ancestral pride which hardly existed, but his self-respect as an enterprising young businessman with a taste for public relations. And he was appalled to find how irrevocably his error had grown. The foundations of a luxury hotel and the terracing of the approach road were already recognisable on the headland. The walls of a single-storied service wing – staff quarters, laundry, store-rooms and garage – were awaiting the roof. Bustling about the whole disaster with Teutonic efficiency was the able Herr Carl Kuchler who had chosen the site and would be ready within a year to receive the hotel coaches full of citron-blooming compatriots impatient to toast their white navels and patronise the Mediterranean.

  On his third day home Gil de Villanueva obeyed the summons of the Civil Governor. Official displeasure was easier to face than all those unofficial silences. He drove to the provincial capital and parked his car with a final cavalier gesture in the space reserved for the Governor himself.

  The Palace restored his faith in himself and his society. It was entirely unfitted for the enlightened, modern administration of a province. The Ministry of the Interior wished, he knew, to build a glass-and-concrete block of government offices, whereupon the Ministry of Tourism, always eager to turn the useless and beautiful into a superb hotel, would have gladly taken over the Palace. But nobody – thank God! – had yet had the heart to change its traditional function.

  This treasure of Spanish baroque, its crumbling yellow stone combining elegance with power, had even affected the Governor’s appearance. The distinguished twentieth-century lawyer, who had never been gravely disturbed if some remains of his lunch were visible on his waistcoat in the afternoon, was now all courtly and fastidious. He wore the same perfectly cut black suits that he had always worn, but he treated the cloth as if it were lace and black velvet. He had suppressed the grey-and-black moustache which gave him a certain air of authority in the clubs and cafés of Madrid, and now showed an austere and scholarly upper lip. When he was annoyed – and at the moment he was very annoyed indeed – the lip was as long as if it had been painted by El Greco.

  He frowned upon the young man, the far too self-satisfied young man, sitting opposite his tremendous desk of olive wood and mahogany. Both were dwarfed by the sheer space of the Governor’s office and its lofty stone walls hung with tapestries and pictures, some of them in place since the reign of Philip III, some lent by the paternal State.

  ‘As a grandee of Spain you ought to be ashamed of yourself!’ Don Baltasar announced. ‘Because of your continued absence from your estates, irresponsible attorneys have been able to sell to a speculator the land promised by your father to the Municipality of Lazalaya.’

  ‘Nobody could regret it more than I do, Excellency. If your colleagues of the Law – excuse me, your former colleagues – could ever draw up a conveyance making it clear exactly what one is selling, it wouldn’t have happened.’

  The Count appeared completely unimpressed by his surroundings. The casual air of good breeding, which he could no more help than his distinctively Spanish narrow face and slim physique, contained neither disrespect nor undue reverence. He was in fact thinking that the grave magnificence framing Don Baltasar would have suited his own tastes and appearance a great deal better; it was a pity that he could not consider the arts of government as anything but a joke.

  ‘I am prepared to grant that under the influence of feminine and other distractions you did not read the conveyance with due care,’ said the Civil Governor severely. ‘But what you have done is to allow a lousy German tourist agent to put up a hotel where the Municipality proposed to build a mole and a fish market whenever they could raise the capital. You, the Conde de Villanueva, have broken a contract!’

  ‘There was nothing in writing, was there?’

  ‘In dealing with your father it was not necessary to put anything in writing. And he was not, I will again impress on you, an absentee landlord.’

  ‘Your Excellency talks as if we still owned half the province instead of just a farm at Lazalaya.’

  ‘The principle is the same.’

  ‘With respect, it is not the same. My father fed and educated his family by running a small estate with extreme efficiency. Myself I am a disaster as a farmer. So I leave the management to a bailiff and meanwhile sell sherry in New York, thereby adding to the country’s exports. And I refuse to be called an absentee landlord,’ Gil went on, adding a calculated warmth to his defence. ‘If I am, why don’t you people expropriate me? Exactly! Because it isn’t worth the trouble for four hundred hectares of land upon which, I may point out, the labourers are known to be well paid, happy, well-housed – and no monkey business with the social security. I also remind you that on my last visit I was publicly congratulated by the local Syndicate of Agricultural Workers.’

  ‘They were all as drunk as owls,’ replied the Civil Governor, ‘and so were you.’

  ‘The ancient democracy of Spain …’

  ‘I can do without a lecture on politics. The point is you sold it.’

  ‘Your Excellency should not have allowed it.’

  ‘I wasn’t asked. It all went through the Ministry of Tourism.’

  ‘Lack of liaison, I shall complain to the Chief of State through my Syndicate.’

  ‘You haven’t got a Syndicate.’

  ‘I have. Employees of the Wine Industry. And if it hasn’t enough nuisance value, I’ll stand for the Municipality of Lazalaya. I’m sure to be elected, however much you try to cook the returns.’

  ‘I do not cook the returns.’

  ‘And your Excellency will find himself governing Guinea with only two retired generals for company.’

  ‘I tell you I never had a chance to intervene,’ Don Baltasar insisted, picking up a symbolic file and slapping it with his other hand.

  ‘I accept your word. I am glad you have the decency to apologise.’

  ‘It is not an apology.’

  ‘Well, it sounded like one. Am I, once and for all, an absentee landlord?’

  ‘In spirit, no.’

  ‘That will do, Excellency. I am now prepared to help.’

  ‘I wish you would stop calling me Excellency.’

  ‘You started it, my dear uncle, by addressing me as Conde de Villanueva. The least I expected was exile and a fine.’

  ‘You know very well, Gil, that my powers are limited.’

  ‘To whatever you can get away with. Why don’t you compel this Kuchler to sell the land back to the Municipality?’

  ‘Because
I can’t and should be sacked if I tried. I must remind you that it is deliberate Government Policy, executed in practice by the Ministry of Tourism, to turn Spain into a holiday camp for all Europe. Foreign Exchange, the Family, Employment …’

  ‘I don’t see all the males of Lazalaya becoming waiters.’

  ‘Nor do I! Nor do I!’ said the Civil Governor, making the considerable circuit of his desk and putting an arm round the shoulders of his nephew. ‘All I can suggest is that you show a sense of responsibility in future, and by active cooperation with your decent fellow citizens endeavour to revive in them some respect for the family. I need not say that I am entirely at the disposition of the Municipality of Lazalaya.’

  Gil de Villanueva drove slowly back along the excellent road which was – economically speaking – the cause of all the trouble. It had been built by his grandfather in the days of family prosperity, and for a long generation had been used only by mule carts and the Villanueva automobile. Lazalaya had never had any reason for existence except that it existed.

  The road and the rapid increase of fast and efficient transport had at least suggested that the town ought to be originating traffic rather than receiving it at a dead end. Fish was the answer – an imaginative answer, since Lazalaya had always ignored the sea. The coast was grim and rocky without a sheltered anchorage. Still, only two miles away, there was a shallow cove where a small and active community of inshore fishermen worked their rowing boats from a semicircular beach and supplied by donkey and pack basket the town and its surrounding villages. Given a breakwater of a hundred metres to protect the cove from the prevailing south-easterly winds, Lazalaya could become the only fishing port on a long, inhospitable shore.

  Civil War had prevented the development; then lack of capital. Neither Lazalaya or the Villanuevas had any money. The central and provincial governments were fully occupied by more essential schemes. Meanwhile the road had attracted Herr Kuchler and a few adventurous tourists – at any rate to the extent that it was now safer to ride a donkey on the right rather than down the middle.