“They’ve deserved it all right!” said Paolo.
“You think so? But they work. Only they have nothing else to do but make money.”
“Then let them give it to me.”
“Good! Or to me. But you have to take it, and you cannot. Look at what happened the other day! Some fool plants a bomb in the Racing Club. They find it. They laugh. They plant one in the Workers’ Circle. Yours doesn’t go off. Theirs does. Consider the moral!”
“That’s what you always say, Manuel. Well, perhaps we sometimes use the wrong weapons. But now we have a new one.”
“What is it?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you. You won’t talk, nor the Englishman either. At every main corner in Viña del Mar and on the streets of Valparaiso we put a comrade. Mostly the Indian comrades, you understand. When a car stops, he sticks his hand into his shirt, and what he catches he throws—zat!—on to the cushions. I myself have planted one with these hands, compañeros, in the car of the Minister of Finance. When it breeds he can return the compliment. Until then, the gain is mine.”
Toby leaned back and shouted with laughter. This impotent minority, left by Moscow to their own devices, had found a far more powerful means of terrifying the rich than their fellow minorities squeaking slogans at Marble Arch or in Union Square.
Manuel did not laugh. He realised, as Toby did not, the irresponsible deadliness of the revolutionary weapon. There was plenty of sporadic typhus among the Indians to the south of Concepción.
“But it is childish!” he declared angrily. “Couldn’t you have stopped that, Paolo?”
“We share with them what we have,” answered Paolo sullenly. “Is there a better way to remind the rich of the existence of the poor?”
“Yes,” said Manuel. “There is. You cannot ever win by violence. Even Lenin was amazed when he won in Russia. In no other country was it possible. In no other country has the government ever been so inept, corrupt, incapaz— ” he shot into the last word all the contempt he felt for the sloppy thinkers, the incapable of action. “Elsewhere violence is met with violence, and the middle classes win. They must win. You can see it here in Chile. There is simplicity here, and better logic than Karl Marx. Bombs are met with bombs, arms with arms. There is no fascism, no majesty of the law. What one side does, the other does. And the people are content—or would be, if you gave the unions a chance to function. You haven’t a hope, Paolo.”
“Mexico—” began Paolo.
“Mexico is not communist. Socialist, yes! Nearly as socialist as France or England. It’s not communism to kick the priests out of Mexico. It’s common sense. Tell me, Paolo—why do you want communism?”
“In order that the poor may have their share of the wealth, Manuel amigo” answered Paolo, a little cowed by the burst of rapid fire directed at him.
“Very fine! And who will make the laws?”
“Those elected by the people.”
“But in fact they do not make such laws. Here and in Argentina, in France and the United States, there is pure democracy. But there are rich and poor.”
“Claro, hombre! And therefore the revolution must begin by a dictatorship.”
“Good. Would you wish to have a man such as I as that dictator?”
“You? It would be a happy state that had you at the head of it,” Paolo answered affectionately. “And I don’t say that because we are friends. It is true. But you aren’t interested in politics. You are too gentle. You have honour.”
“So you want to be ruled by men without gentleness or honour?”
“I didn’t say that. I only said that a man such as you would not get to the top. You could, but you would not, Manuel. Here in the house they call you an infeliz! ”
“Do they?” Manuel murmured, surprised. “Well, I am glad!”
The three sat in silence for a moment, overcome by a fleeting sense of isolation. The dirty rooftop was an oasis of peace between two worlds. The fierce and concentrated life of the Casa del Corregidor was borne continually to their ears by the clatter of cooking vessels, the cries of children, the piercing, unhappy laughter of women; but through the gaps between the tubs of flowers their eyes were ever on a city, ships and the busy sea—a view diffuse, distant and therefore beautiful.
Toby rolled over the palate of his mind the precious word infeliz. It meant unfortunate, almost the poor in spirit of the Sermon on the Mount; it suggested that a man was ineffectual in the practical business of getting on in this world, but implied as a corollary that he did not want to. The Spanish world called a man infeliz with a friendly laugh, never with a sneer; it was understood that he was kinder, more charitable, more honourable than self-interest could possibly demand. Manuel and Albert Whitehead—they were both infelices in their way, and the salt of the earth.
“But you admit,” Manuel went on, “that under the dictatorship of the proletariat, just as under a democracy, you would not be governed by the sort of man by whom you wish to be governed?”
“Hombre! It’s always the man who can talk who gets to the top.”
“Yes. So what do we gain, you and I and this Englishman, by a communist revolution?”
“But you never told me you were an anarchist,” said Paolo, disappointed at the thought of all the arguments they had missed.
“A little, yes. Because I am a Spaniard. It’s in the race,” Manuel answered. “They all disgust me—communist politicos, or fascist or democratic. They neither know your needs nor care about them. You can only be happy when you are ruled by men who do know your needs and do care about them.
“On an estate that is possible. There are landowners in Argentina and Chile who live to serve their dependents. I suppose there are also a few in Europe.
“Can we carry the same system into trade and industry? Yes, by paternalism. But paternalism is offensive. No self-respecting worker can accept dependence on the good will of a man whose real interest is profit. He can only allow his life to be ordered by men whom he trusts, who are known to care for human effort, known to despise money. How can we find such men? How can we make them into a ruling class?”
He turned to Toby.
“Do you remember what we discussed last night, Tobal?”
“Coño! ” Toby exclaimed. “How shouldn’t I?”
“I told you it was possible. It is possible. Listen!”
Manuel began to talk in an even swift voice that imperceptibly caught up his hearers into the highlands of Mexico while they still contemplated the Pacific. An hour passed. He told them of Lara, of the gold, of his escape to Mazatlan and his penniless departure from Vera Cruz.
“It was hard to lose it, you understand. It made me mad for a time,” he said. “Altogether unbalanced. I dreamed of that fortune on the hillside. Have you ever handled gold?”
“I’ve looked at it,” Toby answered. “Stacks of it. I was in a bank once.”
“Well, you will know then how it seems more than money. It has a value … as if a spiritual value. One desires money for what it will buy. One desires gold for itself as well as what it will buy. I longed for it. I worked like a lunatic until I had money to go back. Pineapples in Cuba. Válgame Dios! The sight of a pineapple will spoil my dinner for me to this day!
“I went back to Mexico when they were cleaning up the revolution of ’29. Lara was already shot and the country disorganised. It looked like my moment. I took no risks this time. I went in as an Argentine citizen; Hipolito Saenz, commercial, of Calle Corrientes 20, Buenos Aires. There’s a Hindu in Panama who can do you any American passport. They are good but dear. This Saenz bought horses in Torreón. They were good horses, and they were commandeered by the damned captain of a mountain battery halfway to Durango. They were paid for on the spot and a train most courteously stopped for Señor Saenz, commercial, of Buenos Aires, to take him
back to Torreón. Each time that I go to Mexico I find them more law-abiding. When you go after that gold,” he said to Toby, “you’ll find them as progressive as the United States.”
“I? Is that what you want?”
“Of course. But let me go on. Señor Saenz, commercial, bought more horses in Torreón. Into the sierra again, and traveling and camping where not Lara himself would have thought of looking for a man. Well, he was seen—by a patrol of police. Jesús! One might think the mountains of Mexico were a highway. They arrested him on suspicion of prospecting for minerals without a licence and took him to Durango—not all the way, for he had no intention of being questioned and photographed at Durango. Señor Saenz, commercial, escaped with one horse and a rifle. They cornered him, but they were only five, and he knew those hills. When three had been wounded, the other two carried them away and left him in peace. Señor Saenz vanished—they had his passport—and five days later Manuel Vargas got over the Rio Grande into the United States. That, too, cost money. Again I had nothing left.
“Bueno! The rest you can guess. I earned a living by many trades. I was yacht steward, printer, salesman, clerk. I did not know what I wanted. Then I came to Valparaiso and stayed here. I saw that it was foolish to live my life saving money in order to get more. There was no difference between the man who sweats and saves to be a millionaire and me sweating and saving to reach my gold. So I became a waiter. It was Lara’s nickname for me—El Camarero. It was a natural calling for me to choose, and I respect it as I have told you.”
“But, man! To leave a fortune like that!” exclaimed Paolo.
“It had cost me years of discontent and violence at the end of them. Here I had food, wine and friends. And serenity. What did it matter whether I was rich or not? But now—”
Manuel got up, paced the length of the roof and whipped round on them. Toby started. Something of Manuel’s energy he knew, yet he had not placed him as much more than an odd intellectual waiter with surprising swiftness in action. But this man who faced him, half crouching in the corner of his peaceful hanging garden, was obviously El Camarero, the revolutionary who had governed the redoubtable Lara, who had now gone far beyond Lara in his revolt against society.
“Now I have what I was made for! I hate this struggle for power and money, as you do, Paolo. It is shouted at us: Get on! Get on! Bosses, newspapers, politicians, schoolmasters, they all shout it. Arrive! Get on! Have money and you will be content! You communists are right. You do not teach the people to envy wealth. You teach them to despise wealth.
“But you are futile. Through violence or through democracy the mass of the people will beat you, must beat you. To hell with your class-consciousness! To hell with your revolution for the sake of a minority! To hell with all your ideas except this—you despise wealth. Revolution isn’t the only way to force that thought on the world, Paolo. You know some history. You know what men did in Italy in the Dark Ages when civilisation was collapsing under their eyes. We can do the same. We can found and enter a monastery, and train abbots enough to cover Europe with monasteries. We must make a ruling class, Tobal says, and perhaps we can. But to serve and to teach that is our immediate object. Not to attack the capitalist system, but to attack the ideals that have made it. You are a man who thinks for himself, Paolo. Every communist outside Russia is. You are men who dare to tell the mass they are fools and will suffer persecution for what you believe to be true. You are nobles. Stop looking at Moscow. They understand nothing outside Russia and will force you to play a losing game. Join us, Paolo! Here are two of us. Be the third.”
“But I am not religious,” Paolo answered unhappily. “For me religion is all lies. A bad joke. Forgive me, but that is how I think.”
“You haven’t understood, compañero. We are not concerned with a God or a life after death. Believe in them if you wish. Or do not believe in them if you wish. For me it is the same. I only ask you to love your neighbour—if Impe wished also to love something she called God, that wouldn’t matter to us any more than it does at present.”
“I am there,” said Paolo. “You wish to found an order of friars like the Jesuits. Is that it?”
“Like the Franciscans. That is it.”
“Man! Don’t come to me with distinctions! What do I know? Jesuits or Franciscans or plain sons of bitches, they are all one to me. Good! You think we can do more with monasteries than with violence. Perhaps. I do not know. But I have confidence in you, Manuel. Now, I am willing to be a friar provided there is no religion. But will there be women?”
“Of course! You needn’t separate yourself from Impe and the children. And Tobal and I and the rest of us who are unmarried will amuse ourselves as we see fit.”
“Outside the walls,” said Toby. “Or there will be jealousy. And that would wreck us.”
“You are right, amigo. And outside the walls there must be two rules which I think you and I keep already. No companion should give himself to any one woman for long, and he must treat her with the same kindliness and loyalty with which he would treat a man.”
“It doesn’t seem to me wise to go with the whores,” said Paolo, shaking his head. “Perhaps I am ignorant, but where they are, there is desire for money.”
“We needn’t depend on them, Paolo,” said Toby. “In these days women in most countries are as free as men.”
“Only among communists,” answered Paolo firmly.
“No, compañero!” Toby laughed. “Everywhere! Look! The monks of the Middle Ages had women enough, but their vows protected both them and their girls. It was accepted that there could only be temporary pleasure for the man and the woman, and never anything more. There are plenty of fair women who will put up with that condition, and even be glad of it. We shall not have to buy love.”
“You would forbid marriage?” asked Manuel.
“No. I would not forbid anything. The first duty of the companions is to avoid intolerance. Do What You Like was written over the door of the Abbaye de Thélème. It wasn’t necessary to add so long as you do not offend another brother. Some of us will be married when we join the order. Why not? But the woman must be worthy of the man and acceptable on her merits. Very few of us, I think, will want to marry after joining the order.”
“And if anybody should?”
“Every case on its own merits. Expulsion from the monastery but not from the order, perhaps. There will be plenty of work outside the walls, Manuel. You yourself talked of emissaries with bare feet and a flagon of wine.”
“Then we agree with each other in the main,” said Manuel. “There is little more to discuss until we have the gold and more companions. I will be at your hotel to-morrow afternoon, Tobal. I will get your coat from Rosario and say you forgot it in the Muelle de Flores. That will give me an excuse to come up to your room.”
The three emptied their glasses and picked their way down the much encumbered staircase. At Paolo’s invitation Toby turned with him into his tenement. Impe had returned from her excursion and the two elder children were back from school. The room was packed with humanity. The smell of cooking oil, the sickly reek of two young infants, the old layers of unwashed perfume upon Rosario, struggled vainly to depart through the only window that would open; but the space was largely filled by the bodies of the two elder boys, squirming delightedly as they dangled a putrid fish on the end of a string before the faces of the passers-by two storeys below.
“Sit down, señor inglés,” said Impe, removing a basin and two drying diapers from the best chair. “As you see,” she added with a smile and an unashamed shrug of her shoulders, “we live like animals. But everyone is welcome here. I think you have never been in so poor a house?”
“In many poorer,” he lied courteously. “For here you are all fed and happy.”
“Thanks to the Sacred Heart—” began Impe.
“No, woman!” declared Paolo fiercely. “I would not take a cent fro
m them nor a piece of bread, and well you know it!”
“I am not talking of the fathers, bruto!” answered Impe with dignity. “But of the Sacred Heart of Our Lord who heard my prayers. “It is not always as now,” she explained to Toby. “Paolo was six weeks without work. We suffered—you cannot imagine. And there were the children. If it had not been for friends and Manuel, we should have died here.”
“Why talk of it? It is past,” grumbled Paolo.
“A man is so ashamed,” said Toby, “though God knows he has no reason to be. The shame is as bad as the hunger.”
“There is something in that,” Paolo replied, “although I had not thought of it before. But the worst is the hunger of these others.”
“And now? Is the job safe?”
“For some months. We are re-vetting the coast road. And as I have experience with concrete, they have made me a foreman. When it is finished I do not know what there will be. Perhaps you will be ready for us. But do not let us look forward.”
Rosario, feeling that the conversation was becoming morbid, began to entertain the room with her plans for the future. Toby was able to throw an occasional jest into the common pot while his thoughts, now doubly stimulated, raced away on a current of their own. Poverty alone did not cause misery, for a man could cut his coat to suit the cloth, and the poorest of coats, at any rate in the temperate world of sun and cheap wine, need not be unpleasant. Anxiety was the curse of the wage earner; the terror of unemployment killed every noble instinct in human beings, unless, like Paolo and Impe, they were able to thrust it out of their minds. There was no proof that communism could take it away from more than a minority; even that much it could only do after first creating a new class of poor and then allowing them to die.
But the leader of any small community, whether manor, industry or union, could completely free it of anxiety if he so wished. Manuel’s ideal was to make him wish. He meant to attack the whole modern philosophy of success; to bring about a revolution through the man in the street, not through the politicians who danced up and down on his inert body. He wanted to appeal to the mass of Europeans, naturally irreligious, naturally pleasure-loving, commendably weary of politics, but with an instant appreciation of nobility wherever they found it and a perfectly clear idea, that they did not often dare to express, of the futility of the genteel and the emptiness of making money.
The Third Hour Page 27
