The Three Sentinels

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘I have come to give you back the water pistol, Don Mateo, because for two days I have not been to school.’

  ‘How was that, Chepe?’

  ‘I was looking for Lorenzo in the old field.’

  ‘But why there?’

  ‘He used to go up at night to find … to find what I had. You know.’

  ‘And do you think he found it?’

  ‘Not when my father and I saw him there.’

  Mat did not immediately press his questions. There was no hurry, and he must not alarm the boy or send him away with an uneasy sense that he had been disloyal. Cabo Desierto was infected by quite enough disloyalty without spreading it to the innocent.

  ‘And school, Chepe?’

  ‘I can add numbers.’

  ‘How much is that and that and that?’ Mat asked, dealing out three piles of small coins on his desk.

  ‘Two and six … and four. Twelve, Don Mateo.’

  ‘Well done! Take them!’

  ‘My father would not like it.’

  ‘He is very right. I am sorry. But it pleases me to give and I have no one to give to.’

  ‘You must get married and have a son, Don Mateo. Or are you too old?’

  ‘That could be, Chepe.’

  ‘I saw Sr. Thorpe. He stopped to talk to me.’

  ‘For Sr. Thorpe we are all one family.’

  ‘He said it was all right to kill people who were no use.’

  Mat considered this. It was clear that Thorpe had been respectfully led into conversation, but he couldn’t possibly have said anything of the sort.

  ‘We are all of use, Chepe.’

  ‘Am I?’ he asked—there was a note of puzzlement or anxiety.

  ‘Of course. You will be a fine, brave person like your father and mother.’

  ‘Were Sr. Thorpe and that Sr. Gateson looking for Lorenzo too?’

  Careful now! Rafael might have put him up to that question. But Mat knew what in fact the pair had been doing: merely deciding where the new power plant should be when the refinery had covered the site of the present one.

  ‘They had not a thought of Lorenzo, Chepe. Any way your father has the explosives now.’

  ‘I don’t think he has, Don Mateo. I could not show him the place.’

  ‘So you saw somebody hide it?’

  ‘Yes. Under boards.’

  A hole and a cover of some sort. Mat remembered Pilar’s conjecture—inferred from something said or not said by the women—that Birenfield visited the old field alone at night. There were boards all over the place and the man could presumably use a hammer and nails.

  ‘I see. But what took Lorenzo there?’

  ‘We think he was supposed to know where it was, but he didn’t.’

  Another gap in the guesswork filled up. Birenfield was secretive, over-secretive, and rightly determined that the Company and its top executives should not be involved. But somebody in Cabo Desierto had to know where the explosives were hidden, and what better man than the silent, devoted Lorenzo?

  This at last explained why Mrs. Gateson on that first night asked what he thought of Lorenzo. She expected that he had been told in London—by Dave Gunner?—that Lorenzo was a key man; her question was a hint, simply to give herself importance, that she was in the secret. Very possibly she had learned at one of those morning sessions in Mrs. Birenfield’s bedroom how the General Manager proposed to break the boycott, and a good half of what Gateson knew might well have come to him through his wife rather than his boss.

  ‘Thank you, Chepe. Tell Don Rafael that I am always ready to talk to him.’

  ‘I will. If we were not enemies, he would ask you to honour our house.’

  ‘We may not be enemies for ever. Who knows?’

  Pilar Alvarez gently took the boy as far as the head of the stairs. She returned in a mood that was far from gentle and wiped the genial smile off Mat’s face.

  ‘You send me crazy!’

  ‘I’ve been told that before, Pilar.’

  ‘By every secretary you ever had I should think.’

  ‘What’s the matter now?’

  ‘You build bridges everywhere except where you should.’

  ‘This isn’t a bridge. It’s a hobby.’

  ‘I know! But let it be thought you are using the son to spy on the father.’

  ‘That’s just what I am trying to avoid, Pilar. I don’t want to upset either of them.’

  ‘But there is gossip!’

  ‘To hell with it!’

  ‘You don’t understand. You should see yourself when you talk to the boy. Have you ever looked at a woman as you look at him?’

  ‘Damn it, Pilar, a woman is not a child!’

  ‘For you, no! Never!’

  He was quite unable to guess what had annoyed her. She was not a woman to mind Chepe being invited to the General Manager’s office or escorting him to the stairs past popped-out, curious faces. It must be that she resented the preposterous touch of scandal. You could bet your life that Mrs. Gateson or some other idle, oil-fired female was at the bottom of it. Ignorant as well as idle surely? Or was there really some truth in the vicar-choir boy relationship which Sunday papers were so fond of? It was difficult to see where the fun came in.

  Prejudice, more of class than colour, was responsible. If Chepe had been one of those neat, emptily noisy children who played on the lawns of the executive ghetto and were educated by two imported governesses from nine to one, his choice of any one of them would have added to his popularity. Dear, kind Uncle Mat! Such a pity he never married! A lot of jealousy, of course, would have been stirred up because he had unaccountably preferred to toss a cricket ball at one rather than another, and accompanied by chatter that the mother of this paragon had played her cards very well. But no one would have found anything in the relationship which demanded explanation.

  The bond between himself and Chepe was admittedly hard for them to understand. Indeed it couldn’t be explained at all unless he gave away what had happened on that first night of his arrival. Without the key to it, this intimacy between the General Manager and the seven-year-old son of an obstinate, black carpenter was perhaps bound to be a little suspect up on the hill. Down below it wasn’t. Rafael Garay himself, passionately proud of his son, seemed to consider the friendship partly comical, partly flattering, without any influence on the boycott one way or the other. Probably that view was shared by his comrades. They all knew Chepe when he took wings.

  According to Pilar, his admiration for the boy was too transparent. And why not? He remembered that interview with Henry and Dave Gunner when he got the job, and how his triumph had been soured a little by the thought that there was no one dependent on him to share it or profit by it. Well, there never would be and meanwhile he would do what he pleased. When the chokes of the Three Sentinels were opened again and few lives lost in the process or, likely enough, none at all, Gateson and his party would hesitate to invent any more Sunday paper conjectures even at the most private table of their Country Club.

  Chapter Nine

  Cabo Desierto, like a frontier village, observed the manning of positions on both sides of the line, each party ready for defence, neither willing to attack. Rafael Garay’s mass meeting had the discipline of supreme self-confidence but did not overflow the plaza. Gil Delgado and the committee needed no meeting; their influence over the field spread by word of mouth. The minority in favour of no surrender was isolated though still admired.

  As the field waited for a clash which did not come, anxiety was chiefly among the neutrals: the municipal council, the shopkeepers, the market, the clerks. In the taverns under the colonnade confident prophecies dried up. Their futility was too apparent. Action was for the General Manager alone. London had agreed to his proposals and only he could transmute paper into fact.

  Except for the militants, men remained curiously aloof, disassociating themselves from both parties unless the issue was presented to them with all its oratory, threats and excitement.
Work on the lands was more energetic than ever. For some it was a sullen refuge from the necessity to make up their minds; for others the burst of industry was a farewell, largely subconscious, to this gallant effort at living in the way of their ancestors. At dawn they picked up their tools cursing, but in the evening put them away with satisfaction. A man could see the result of what he had done. The older workers were very much aware of this. They remembered that when a well came in even the unskilled had known some sort of fulfilment.

  As the company plane swooped in from the sea, banked over the town and disappeared behind the refinery, Mat was sitting on the terrace of the little town hall, enjoying a municipal drink with the doctor and the mayor and looking down on the length of the main street. All the faces between the plaza and the port turned upwards as if ranks of white, orange and brown flowers had suddenly opened in the sun. That was not normal. The company plane was hardly worth a glance, and the only likely comment on its arrival was abuse of the blasted noise which disturbed a peaceful evening.

  It was vivid proof of the tense mood of expectation. But expectation of what? Nothing much could be expected of the return of Captain González, and it was most unlikely that the Government, holding its collective breath like Cabo Desierto, was about to take any action whatever. Expectation was presumably for some impossible link—bomb or letter or a winged President of the Republic—between the unlimited sky and Rafael Garay stubbornly on the ground.

  The Mayor, like most of his fellow citizens, at once turned for distraction to a minor problem.

  ‘Legally we should be holding the elections,’ he complained. ‘But what am I to do till this is over?’

  ‘It’s of no importance. You will be returned unopposed.’

  ‘But my council, Don Mateo!’

  ‘I will get González to certify a state of emergency. Elections can’t be held.’

  ‘Is that constitutional?’

  Little that any of them were doing was strictly constitutional. But the Mayor’s question was not, Mat decided, as absurd as it seemed. When a man had authority without power, he was sensitive on the point of where it came from. That was about all one could say for democracy, and it was quite a lot.

  ‘Policemen and doctors cannot be argued with,’ Dr. Solano remarked. ‘When we say it’s an emergency, it is.’

  ‘González does nothing but knows everything,’ the Mayor grumbled.

  ‘Except his own men,’ Solano added.

  Mat gave him a quick glance. It was plain that Luis Solano knew the reason why the women bolted in secret from the shacks and had kept silent, common sense backing up the Hippocratic oath. His brown eyes were calm and non-committal as usual, but there was a thin smile under the moustache. Curious that so many Latin-American doctors should grow moustaches! Perhaps it was as far as they dared to move from the dignified medical beards of their fathers; perhaps a moustache helped to stiffen an upper lip too sensitive to pity.

  ‘Why don’t you both come up the hill and dine with me?’ Mat asked.

  ‘Now that would delight me. Your society and the cooking of Amelia!’ the Mayor exclaimed. ‘But papers await my signature. My evening is not my own. For me the office, the marital couch and in the morning back to work!’

  It was the marital couch which mattered and all Cabo Desierto knew it, though no one would have punctured the mayoral myth of pressure of business. The dear, old boy, conforming to the tradition of comic opera, had been caught with his pants down—literally, it was said—in the back room of his wife’s pretty dressmaker. Thereafter if he did not go straight home he was accused with formidable ululations of making a fool of himself again. The Mayoress would have telephoned Amelia to see if he were really at Don Mateo’s house—an unbearable humiliation for the elected head of the community.

  Mat and Luis Solano stayed with him until the lights came on in the plaza, listened for a full ten minutes to his reluctant good-byes and drove up to the General Manager’s house where Mat suggested that they should wait in the garden.

  ‘I did not warn Amelia and, since it’s you, she’ll insist on at least an hour’s cooking.’

  ‘This is magnificent,’ Solano said, standing at the west window.

  A full moon revealed Mat’s imagined world curve more desolately than the sun, and a breeze off the sea carried faint and continuous moaning of surf as if the spinning of the earth were audible.

  ‘Yes, but it makes me feel alone in space.’

  ‘You don’t like that?’

  ‘Too near reality. It’s a pity about the Mayor.’

  ‘He’s so ashamed of himself that he can’t see he has doubled his popularity.’

  ‘Natural enough if he hasn’t any peace at home!’

  ‘It will wear off. It’s only that she is feeling like your space traveller—and noise is the remedy.’

  Pepe with a lamp and bottles led them down through the terraces to the pool and announced before retiring that dinner would be in half an hour which it certainly would not.

  ‘So you knew why the women set off on their march?’ Mat asked.

  ‘Yes. But I was not sure that you did.’

  ‘I have wondered whether to tell Garay. It was the State which sent those blasted police.’

  ‘But it was the Company which delayed returning the men. Let it stay at that and don’t complicate things! You must never allow Garay to feel like a cornered animal.’

  Darkness outside the ring of light was absolute. The land, dense and comfortable under its green growth, silenced the Pacific and shut off the moon.

  ‘You weren’t afraid at first to be alone here?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘No, Luis. In a sense I had come home.’

  ‘The best move you ever made was to dismiss the police guard. It lowered the temperature.’

  ‘I had nothing to lose. It wasn’t the same for others with wives and children. They felt that police were better than darkness. Jane Thorpe warned me.’

  ‘They have never quite forgiven you. I don’t want to tell you the latest libel, but you ought to know it.’

  ‘I do know it. The bronze boy and all that.’

  ‘Bronze?’

  ‘Anything but black iron or pale stone. I could have found his colour among my timbers once.’

  ‘Mateo, you had a happy childhood.’

  ‘I did—after my father and I were left alone.’

  ‘Your mother died young?’

  ‘No. Gave us hell and then cleared out.’

  ‘So that is why you never married!’

  ‘Is it? That’s never occurred to me. There was always a new job. Or war. Or something. I don’t know where my life has gone. But I’ve enjoyed myself. Would you believe that I have never taken a sleeping pill or a tranquilliser?’

  ‘That’s only because you use alcohol very skilfully. What about women?’

  ‘I have always been able to give satisfaction.’

  ‘To give?’

  ‘That’s more than half the fun of it.’

  ‘You must have created a good deal of unhappiness, Mateo.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Haven’t women loved you?’

  ‘I suppose so. Perhaps I never stopped long enough to find out. They get desperate so easily.’

  ‘I think you want to give but only on condition that you are not possessed.’

  ‘Christ, no! I possess myself. Stop trying to analyse me and drink up, Luis! You’re here to sew the bits back on to casualties.’

  ‘And also to give advice when I know the facts.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I recommend an affair with Pilar.’

  ‘Pilar. I’m not going to be run by Pilar!’

  ‘She might want to give, too. You aren’t the only one.’

  ‘Bloody charity! I’ll be sixty before I know it.’

  ‘With nothing.’

  ‘With the devil of a lot, my lad, if I can get the Three Sentinels flowing.’

  ‘I didn’t mean money.’


  ‘Nor did I. Don’t you count memories, Luis?’

  ‘Yes, if you have somebody of your own to tell them to.’

  ‘If I didn’t know Pilar would rather die first, I’d say she had put you up to this.’

  ‘You don’t realise how fond of you we are, Mateo. About half the town has put me up to this.’

  What islands we all were! A man saw only the merest outline of the picture his society made of him. Mat knew that he was liked, yes, but not to such an extent that Cabo Desierto would lovingly plan for his private future like a bevy of retired midwives. Warmth flowed round him; it was embarrassing and could affect his judgment. And a lot of nonsense that was I His judgment had been affected by warmth, his own and theirs, since he landed on the quay.

  ‘Let’s go up and bully Amelia,’ he suggested. ‘She’s always flattered by a head poking round the kitchen door even when she wants to throw something at it.’

  The evening spread out in a lake of restfulness. Amelia surpassed herself. Luis Solano laid off the personal questions and entertained him with stories of his compatriots and their initial distrust of foreign doctors—which turned quickly to such exaggerated confidence that they preferred to be treated at the Company’s miniature hospital and refused to be flown to the Capital unless Solano protested his absolute ignorance.

  He thought that typically British, but Mat was sure he was wrong. It was just another example of the isolation of Cabo Desierto, always on the defensive and proud of itself. Luis was a fearless and admirable general practitioner, but that was not the point. He belonged to them. He, too, was a prisoner between the ocean and the Andes.

  Next morning Mat had some difficulty in meeting those aristocratic eyes of Pilar, but was in genial form for González who came up to headquarters to report on his journey to the Capital. The Captain was unusually straightforward. For once he had been given definite instructions and was sure of powerful backing. He had seen his contact in the Union and delivered Mat’s ultimatum that the explosives must be removed. It was accepted—with some relief, González thought—but there were still difficulties. The cache was on the old field and only two people knew exactly where: Lorenzo and the expert who was to undertake the demolition of the Charca’s gates.