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The Three Sentinels
Geoffrey Household
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter One
That coast had none of the exhilaration of savagery. The spent swell of the Pacific broke on the beach in parallel lines with the regularity of a vast body radiating into empty space. Above the high tidemark of some long-forgotten storm the grey-brown sand turned to grey-brown soil with no clear line of demarcation; and this barren plain extended inland for a couple of miles until the first ridge of the Andes sprang from it so exactly that in places a builder’s set square could have been pushed into the angle. It was a coast forbidding habitation, resembling some imaginary reconstruction of Permian landscape; but not even the most desperate of amphibians would have attempted to experiment upon that still and utterly waterless land.
The desolation curiously affected those who were at ease in it. They regarded their home, so far as it permitted itself to be loved at all, with the proud perversion of islanders. Their irrigated patch in the midst of the dry detritus of sea and mountains was as startling and unnatural as the white esplanades, further along the coast, of the sea birds’ colonies. The green became a symbol of protection. So perhaps was white to the gulls.
The ridge which rose from the coastal plain was barren as it had been before the coming of the oil company except for the black road which swept up it in three long legs forming an easy gradient for the monstrous truck-loads of drill-pipe and casing. Here and there a boulder, loosened from the crest by wind, stood immovable among packed gravel though to the eye off balance. The only lump of organic life, vaguely black and white, where Rafael Garay squatted on the hillside with his arm around his son, adjusted itself to gravity with more ease.
Immediately below him were the white-washed, red-roofed cottages of the labour lines dotted by cans and pots of dusty flowers. Further north a green strip of cultivated land ran along the coast protected by groves of eucalyptus where at last it met the desert. To the south was the company town, the sheds, dumps and wharves of the port and two breakwaters against which the Pacific, every twenty seconds, spurted its spray to precisely the same height. Beyond the port, after a green interlude of sports grounds, the desert returned made still more desolate by acres of concrete in which were set the power station, the refinery and the shining metal masses of the tank farm. There all evidence of human life ended except for some shacks close to the garbage-strewn beach left over from the very early days of the Company.
Rafael Garay had left his bed at first light, resentful of the unaccustomed responsibilities of leadership. To be in the midst of talk was inspiring; it clarified the thought of the speaker as well as that of the committee or audience which listened. But between the talking of yesterday and the talking of today, so much of it unnecessary, one felt the need of self-forgetfulness. That was why he had tiptoed out of his house to the refreshment of dawn.
He had not realised that the big eyes of his son were open and watching him. When he reached his perch on the ridge and turned round the beloved figure was trotting up doggedly after him. He ran down and lifted the boy in his arms with passionate Latin paternity. It was needless to ask him why he had followed. The boy remained at his side, silent and half asleep.
Far out over the melancholy crawlings of the Pacific, clouds had become radiant though the shore was still held under the Cordillera’s overpowering shadow. In the half-world a cock crew. There was a stirring in the nearest group of houses: the susurration of a hive of men and women laying aside their blankets and lighting fires. Underlying this faint chant of human sounds was the distant drone of the overflow from the Charca: a thin column of water arching down from the wall of the reservoir into the pool which fed the irrigation channels a hundred feet below. Rafael was suddenly exasperated by the blankness of this smooth, inverted triangle of concrete which blocked the mouth of the only ravine. Colourless in the dawn it advertised the will, finance and technical intelligence of the Compañía Petrolífera Cabo Desierto. Without it neither the cultivated land nor the future he planned for himself and his fellows were possible. He knew that. Still, such power was indecent.
Peace? There wasn’t any peace apart from the boy. The calm of the port below him was that of a corpse. Two of the Company’s tankers were tied up far away in the Capital, idle. The third rode high at the off-shore buoys. No oil flowed except from the tank farm to the power station. And for all this he, Rafael Garay, was largely responsible. He admitted to himself that a man who killed could not expect peace. It was enough to be satisfied that one was in the right.
He was a carpenter, and by trial and error had become a craftsman. The obstinate genes of Basque ancestors had persisted through passive wombs of Indian and Negro mothers, but he was, to a European eye, black. Since all his society was coloured in darkish shades of brown he was unconscious of any major difference. As for his native Indian blood, he insisted without any evidence at all that he was the descendant of princes. That was the Spaniard in him.
Whatever order he was given he could carry out promptly and even wisely; but for all his pride he could not feel the equal of these technicians who created a home in the desert, who drilled beneath the Andes for four kilometres and controlled with such exactitude the ferocities of pressure that oil could be turned on and off as if it were water. They thought of everything before it happened. That was it. If you could think of a thing before it happened you were one of them.
He was not in the least jealous of the pay and privileges of these experts whose bungalows were just over the crest of the ridge behind him. Most of them were British; some were from his own and neighbouring republics. All were the same in the essential, seeming to have been born among machinery. How was it possible that men could know so much when they were careless of so much? They even kept acres of grass cut short and wasted their time playing with balls on it instead of feeding it to animals. Some could hardly speak Spanish or work with their own hands. Yet their technology formed a gulf more impassable than that between landowner and peón. There the gulf was merely a difference in income; in all which mattered, dignity and humanity, the peón was the equal of his employer.
He envied only superior knowledge. If it depended on him, there would be no limit to the earnings of men who could do what these had done. No, what he resented was the smooth and cruel world of their creation in which a man was well-meaningly treated as a unit in a mass. Twenty years ago you could fight the Company; now the Company did not seem to be there to fight. The Company approved of the State, and the State of the Company, and men found that between the pair of them they had forfeited all their rights. Cared for like expensive cattle! If you fatten them up you have the right to drive them to market.
The boy in his own way was also reviewing a problem: that though the world was uniformly satisfying there were things in it which ended. He was seven years old and promised to have the same square, powerful face as his father. His skin was much whiter, and he would have passed as a boy from the south of Spain if it had not been for the exceptional grubbiness, unnoticed by a father’s eye, of his blue shirt and once-white cotton trousers.
‘What is death?’ he asked suddenly.
The que
stion startled Rafael. He knew that the boy, deep down, mourned for his mother without words either spoken or clearly thought; yet this single bubble bursting at the surface seemed so obviously derived from his own thoughts of the killing of the Company.
‘Man, one moment one is here. The next moment one is not.’
‘But could you die now? Here?’
He was about to answer: yes. But what the devil? A kid must not be left with a thought like that. Deprived of a mother, he couldn’t be allowed to believe that he might have no father.
‘No, that is impossible,’ Rafael answered, begging whatever powers might be listening to pay no attention to his reply.
‘Why?’
‘Because I have so much to do.’
‘Me, too. Every day I have much to do.’
‘Indeed?’
‘More than when our mother was here.’
‘How? You used to help her.’
‘But now I do anything I like. They say: “let him alone, poor kid! He has no mother.”’
He imitated in miniature the tone and rhythm of some kindly voice intervening in his favour.
‘Don’t you miss her then?’
That was too solemn and forlorn a thought to be answered at all. The boy countered it with another question.
‘They say she was murdered. Who killed her?’
No one. By God, that was the trouble! How easy if there had been any single person who had killed her, if there had been, for example, a boss who could be killed himself or even a boss who would weep at his mistake and beg and be granted forgiveness! But what had killed her was the Company, the State, the Union, the slimy cleverness of a lot of whore’s spawn upon none of whom could be placed the sole responsibility.
Up to a point a man of good will could have no complaint. The Company had drilled their three stupendous wells. The whole field had taken pride in the joint triumph of the Three Sentinels which could, it was said, produce two million tons of oil a year for thirty years. So it was reasonable that the Company should decide to close down the old bailing and pumping wells in the shallow field and dismiss eight hundred and seventy men. Clearly there was no longer work for them. But Cabo Desierto was more than an oil field; it had become a home, a pueblo like any other with its own shops and streets and taverns and a mayor.
Of the eight hundred and seventy some four hundred had been willing enough for a change. Either they were young men who were eager to see the rest of the republic and cared no more for one place than another, or they were Indians resigned to obey. But four hundred and seventy petitioned the Company to be allowed to stay. They were prepared to pay rent for their houses, their share of the communal lands and their water. Impossible, the Company said. Yet they could have made a living from the land—poor, but at least as good as any peasant holding up in the Cordillera. That too was reasonable, wasn’t it? They refused to go. Why should they go?
Then the Company sent for a señorito from the Ministry of Labour to talk to them. He spoke very well—that must be admitted—but like a schoolteacher to children. There was work for all, he said, in the forests or on the new roads or in the steel mill which was being constructed in the south. The country had need of all its faithful sons, and wages would be no less.
‘But this faithful son wants to stay where he is. Look, man! Cabo Desierto is our home.’
That was Gil Delgado. His father had been an immigrant from Aragon in Spain and Gil was argumentative like all of them. A mastermind but without manners even to his mates.
The señorito from the Ministry explained with much patience that there would be no homes in Cabo Desierto if the Company had not made them.
‘And there would be no homes from Chile to Mexico,’ Gil had said, ‘if the Spaniards had not made them. But that does not mean that we must all go and live in China.’
Yet the only answer he got was that the Company could not keep four hundred and seventy extra hands who must be fed though there was no work for them. The State had need of labour and the Company had not. Four hundred and seventy men must do what they were told by the eight million citizens of the country. That was democracy.
The delegate of the Union agreed with him. He agreed with everybody. He admitted that it was all very hard, but the Company had been correct and the Union would see that the State was generous. He was so eloquent that he sprayed spittle on his coat where it shone in the sun like piss on a palm leaf.
Rafael was not immediately concerned, for he was one of those to be retained. Not for his own value. He knew that. The carpenters’ shop would have less work now that there was little rigging to be done. No, it was for Catalina that the Company held on to him. Catalina helped Dr. Solano in the hospital. She had only a bit of training in first aid and midwifery, but she was an angel. How many times had the women cried out that they would not be touched till Catalina came! The world had few women like Catalina.
It had been an open meeting down at the port where he and Gil had first protested against this nonsense. Rafael was just as angry and saw no reason why he should not open his mouth as wide as Gil Delgado.
‘What rights have we then?’ he shouted.
‘You know very well,’ replied the little crook in collar and tie with all the courtesy of his dirty trade. ‘You have the right to elect your government, to a minimum wage and to support in time of unemployment. The State is your father. We are no longer in the old days when the Company could ship out its men to starve.’
‘But to how much liberty have we a right?’
It appeared that they had a right to all the liberties of a good citizen, and the man from the Union had made another fine speech, asking for his name and addressing himself to Don Rafael, though what in the name of God he had really said no one could remember afterwards. So the men elected a committee and chose Gil and Rafael to negotiate for them. Not because they were experienced. Just because they were the two who had spoken out.
He and Gil were treated very smoothly as if they were men of consequence, and they were not suspicious. There were telegrams and telegrams and then the Ministry proposed that the four hundred and seventy should go to the Capital in the Company’s launches and see for themselves what was offered—the conditions of work, the wages, the housing.
The men agreed at once. Were they not human? A little travel at no expense with wives and children left behind at Cabo Desierto. Of course they agreed! And the Company promised to bring back any who were not contented. No shadow of doubt about it!
‘You are trembling,’ the boy said. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing! Nothing!’ Rafael answered, his voice unsteady.
‘Have I asked what a man should not?’
‘No, no, beloved. I have my thoughts. That is all.’
The jobs which were offered were jobs; a man’s preference was of no importance. The Ministry wished to distribute their cattle neatly—a herd here and a herd there—according to whether they were born on the coast or in the mountains. So the men became excited and insisted on the promised right to return to Cabo Desierto while they made up their minds. There in the Capital they had no one to fight for them and, worse still, no one they could fight. Either launches were not available or there were papers to sign which were not ready or secretaries at the Ministry were busy. It was then that he, Rafael, began to be angry, for he had given it as his opinion that the Company could be trusted. Not the Ministry, of course. All of them knew that every politician, however sympathetic, was a liar.
The whole field met in the plaza where there was talk of a strike, but the plaza was too small. Crowds were jammed in the side streets yelling that they could not hear the speakers and overturning vehicles in their way. Thereafter they met in the sports ground, marching out in good order from the town, their own town which was like no other town. What was Cabo Desierto but themselves? It was not right to trick fellow citizens into leaving when they did not want to leave.
In old days the Company had been afraid of nothing, neither the State no
r its men nor the devil, but now it was flapping like an old hen with a truck at its tail. They had not known it was screeching, too, until they saw sixty armed police disembarking at the port. And this when they had been told that there were no launches available for their comrades!
The Company should have had more sense than those fools in the Capital for whom Cabo Desierto was a home of ogres in a fairy tale. A ledge of criminals they called it. Was a decent citizen a criminal just because there was no road or railway to his town? And what was the use of sixty policemen among fifteen hundred oil workers with their knives and spanners?
Well, it had been made very plain to the police that they should keep out of the dispute as best they could. A little blood in the gutters, yes, but thank God no one had been killed! And after the police had returned to their station in the customs shed Cabo Desierto gave them no more trouble.
So all was quiet. But the riot had frightened some women. Women, when their men are away, will believe anything. God only knew what chit-chat went on amongst them. They had no more sense than animals. The group which had caused the trouble were the poorest of all, living in the dirty shacks beyond the port, whose husbands, being unskilled, were among the four hundred and seventy stuck in the Capital. It was incredible what some decent men would marry. Nothing in their heads but bed and chatter! One couldn’t say much for priests and their fancy dress, but at least they gave such women some sense.
Yet he had no right to be angry with them just for the sake of Catalina. Men are what they are and women are what they are, and when you know what they are it is criminal to take away their husbands and send for the police. A pitiable panic! And they kept their secret as if they were still living in some trapped tribe. Jesus! Would you believe it? A party, all from one lane behind the refinery, went off by land with their children to join their husbands.
That could be done by men who were strong and well-provided and sure of not losing the track which wound and climbed through sixty waterless miles of giant foothills where wind and the trickling gravel could wipe out all sign of it. But for them, impossible! And it was a day before any sensible Christian knew where and when they had gone.
The Three Sentinels Page 1
