World, the World

by Norman Lewis

  Gonzalez: Two fugitives had taken refuge in it. They fired at us from the window.

  Judge: And having broken down the door, what happened?

  Gonzalez: There was an exchange of shots and we killed both of them.

  Judge: Did you kill the child also?

  Gonzalez: No sir.

  Judge: Two witnesses have testified that you personally murdered Maria Gallardo, a grandmother, with two shots in the head. Why did you do that?

  Gonzalez: I was ordered to execute her for military rebellion by Sergeant Cepa.

  Judge: But how can a woman aged seventy-three engage in military rebellion?

  Gonzalez: That’s a question I can’t answer, sir. The sergeant decides what is military rebellion and what isn’t.

  My impression of Gonzalez was that he was a cunning fellow who set out to appear stupid in the hope of shifting the blame from his shoulders to those of the sergeant, but he was unsuccessful in this, for both he and José Cano were found guilty and sentenced to death. Gonzalez shrugged his shoulders and Cano shook his head as if in disbelief, apart from which neither showed any sign of emotion. There was a brief outburst of weeping which came almost as a surprise in these remarkably calm and subdued surroundings, and a middle-aged woman with two children was hastily led from the court.

  Wandering with Scott later through the stone entrails of the Cabana Fortress we found ourselves in the Zona Social where campáneros of mixed rank wearing scrupulously pressed uniforms mingled in an atmosphere as sedate as a vicarage fête, sipping delicately from small coffee cups, and smilingly discussing the past achievements and future promise of the new order.

  Scott had made some allusion to the possibility of meeting someone in this place, and while he was scanning the faces in the vicinity something like a hush fell. Heads were turned in a nearby group and conversation was broken off, as a tall, thin, uniformed man came into view. This was the man Scott was to see, Herman Marks, the executioner, who had rung Scott’s office and asked for the meeting.

  Marks clearly knew Scott by sight. A hesitant smile came and died out, leaving flecks of saliva at the corners of his lips. I noticed his hands trembling slightly, the ordinary face of a man who does extraordinary things, and the butt of the biggest pistol I’d ever seen sticking out of its holster.

  He thanked Scott twice for coming. ‘I know it’s a bother,’ he said, ‘but it’s something I sure appreciate. It kind of hurts when people question your sincerity. I mean, you’re liable to begin to ask yourself, for Chrissake why am I doing this? I don’t see I’m called upon to justify an essential service I’m performing on behalf of the community. Not least when I can assure you one hell of a lot of forethought and effort goes into it.’

  ‘How did you, an American, come to be with the rebels, Herman?’ Scott asked him respectfully.

  ‘You can say I was attracted by the ideals of the revolution,’ Marks said. ‘I guess I felt I had to do something to be of use in some way. Before I came out here I worked in the accounts department of Mac’s and I had this feeling I needed to get involved in a cause … Tell you something, though, Edward, too much paperwork comes into this. Most of it is paperwork. Well, I guess I have to drag myself away. I’m on call in a coupla minutes.’

  Whenever I could I attended the political rallies held in the Plaza Civica. Not only to pick up titbits of political news but for the sheer pleasure of listening to Castro talk. In my opinion he was the greatest orator since Demosthenes, and I much enjoyed the faintly hypnotic effects of these entertainments. Castro’s interminable speeches contained frequent quotations from Burke, Rousseau, Juvenal and even Shakespeare, and were liberally seeded with wisecracks and jokes. When I inadvertently mentioned my admiration in the hearing of Enrique Oltusky, a member of Castro’s inner circle, I was promptly sent a large collection of Castro’s printed speeches. It may also have been the reason why I was thereafter allocated a place as near the podium as it was possible for a foreigner to get. It was a concession that had disadvantages. A speech of Fidel’s normally started at round about 10 pm, and could last until well past midnight. For an audience packed like sardines and unable to leave until the end, this could foster painful emergencies. On one occasion when I was present Fidel commented on a growing restlessness in the vicinity of the podium. ‘I see some of you are becoming fidgety,’ he said. ‘I would recommend drinking less in advance of such occasions as this.’

  On my last attendance at a Plaza Civica rally I took the Boston psychiatrist along, and although I warned him of this problem he felt sure he could manage. In a recent article published under his name in the New York Times he had mentioned that Castro frequently appeared in public wearing two watches on his wrist. It was a habit, he believed, that could reliably be taken to indicate that a crisis was on the way. Sure enough, on this occasion there were the two watches, and he said jokingly someone should ring Washington and tell them to put the air command on alert.

  It was certainly a time when relations with the United States were at a low ebb. Nevertheless Fidel was on exceptional form and was much amused to be able to describe attempts on his life, all of them ineffective, and all of them absurd. He loved to display at these meetings the apparently innocent objects that contained lethal devices. These included a hollowed-out pack of cards firing a poisoned dart but with a range of only a foot or two, and a dog that would blow up when patted. On this occasion he told the crowd about an exotic sea-shell, also containing an explosive charge. Several had been left on the sea-bed in an area where he was accustomed to go snorkelling. ‘I happen to know something about shells’ Castro told the guffawing crowd. ‘These came from the Pacific. We can raffle them if you think it worthwhile.’

  Now, with the crowd really with him, he turned to his political views. ‘They say I’m a communist,’ he told them. He held up a bulky edition of Das Kapital. ‘I’ve read just a few pages of this book,’ he said, ‘and I must finish it some time.’ Some of them took this as a joke, but others were worried. I looked round for my psychologist friend to get his views, but he was not there. He’d neglected my warning in our visit to a bar before going to the meeting, and I could only conclude that he’d been under pressure and had made his escape.

  Thereafter Cuba and the United States drew rapidly apart. The Cuban Agrarian Reform Law expropriated land holdings in excess of 3,000 acres and the American United Fruit Company possessed almost one hundred times this limit. Compensation was rejected and an American trade embargo was imposed, with crippling effect. To survive, Cuba was forced to turn to Russia for its oil, but in doing so Castro was obliged to declare that he had become a communist. Eventually the fiasco of the failed US-sponsored invasion of the Bay of Pigs took place. It was preceded by a purge of all suspect foreigners living in the country, and Edward Scott spent some days in prison before they put him on a plane for England. The story was that a CIA agent, parachuted in and picked up by the police, had been found to be carrying a list of useful contacts, of which Scott was said to be one. He had left his life behind in Cuba, and after this disappeared from sight.

  Chapter Nine

  I BECAME TIRED OF London, although by no means tired of life, and although Dr Johnson’s celebrated views on this subject might have been reasonable when the milkmaids were still milking their cows in Drury Lane, I cannot believe his enthusiasm would have been rekindled by a revisit to his old haunts in the immediate post-war. For several years I lived in Orchard Street overlooking Selfridges where windows opened on traffic noise obliterating all other sounds. It must have been in 1959 when Selfridges began the expansion of their food department just across the road. A substantial area of their premises was to be rebuilt, in preparation for which equipment that can hardly have changed in design since the Middle Ages went into action and existing walls were knocked down by a huge metal ball swung at the end of a chain. This was done rapidly but many weeks were required to drive piles deep into the London clay to support the weight of the huge new building that
followed. Once placed in position, the pile was struck a tremendous blow by a steel driver, which had been hoisted aloft by a chain for some fifty feet before its release. The shock-waves of the concussions occurring at intervals roughly five minutes apart caught up the flimsy building I inhabited in such a way that it regularly gave an upwards jerk of possibly a twentieth of an inch. Work went on for twelve hours a day, starting usually at 7 am, and after a month I decided to move.

  It was about this time that I learned through my solicitor that I had long since been divorced according to Mexican law and that my ex-wife had forthwith taken a husband. I therefore married Lesley, an old friend who had been helping me to organise my books. We decided to look for a house in a calm area of the countryside with reasonable access to the capital. I have always believed that, despite evident disadvantages, the attractive lifestyles of the past were frequently protected by abusive governments, the malarial mosquito and bad communications. It was this last factor that drew my attention to East Anglia where the London and North Eastern Railway held would-be commuters at its mercy with the slowest, dirtiest and least reliable trains—not only in this country but, short of the Balkans, probably in any other part of Europe. A prime example of this brake on the loss of the charm of the past was the London-Colchester line. No urban dwellers in their right mind ever considered migrating to Essex, in consequence of which house prices were about half those south of the Thames. By way of compensation, also, I found main roads quiet enough to drive on, and lanes along which I could stroll for hours on end without being passed by a car. Fish still swam in unpolluted streams, and the woods and glades were full of the songs of birds. Among the more unusual animals were a number of abandoned cats, transformed into efficient hunters with the lean, muscled bodies of their ancestors and narrow heads. Prospecting for a house I surveyed slovenly flatlands littered with the shacks that slum-dwellers of Latin America might have knocked together overnight. It was to the sour poetry of these landscapes that I was most attracted, even more so to settlements where they reared chickens and sold car spare-parts by the sticky wildernesses of the esturial rivers of this county. Had I been here to write about Essex, no landscape could have been more suitable or inspiring, but most of my writing was to be dedicated to overseas experience, so I continued my search in other directions.

  In the end I found a house to suit on the edge of the Essex plain where the rise and fall of the land began. A few patches of ancient woodland remained, and there had always been enough money about to provide tidy villages and the occasional thousand-acre estate with its big house and those who supported its activities submissively but without servility. Our house—The Parsonage—had been up for sale, cheap, for two years and no-one had wanted it. You couldn’t live in a place like Finchingfield without a car, for there was only one bus a day to the nearest station eight miles away, and, as was to be expected, a high percentage of the villagers had never visited the capital.

  The house was the oldest in the neighbourhood, technically a medieval hall-house, and a builder who had worked on the restoration of local churches pointed out what he believed to be thirteenth-century bricks. A precursor of this building is described in the Doomsday Book as the ‘priest’s house opposite the church’. In the period of its recent abandonment tiles by the hundred had showered into the garden, calling for the replacement of the roof, and beetles of a rare kind continued to live on what sustenance they could derive from oak beams which might have been five hundred years old. The builder scraped and tapped around the holes they had left, then examined the powdery detritus left by the chewing of ancestral beetle-jaws at the time, perhaps, of the Wars of the Roses. ‘They’re still there,’ he said, ‘but why bother? Whatever you do this house will outlast you and a few generations of your descendants.’ He held a nail against the wood and struck at it with a heavy hammer, the nail bent but left no more than a mark on the beam. He was also the local undertaker, lured easily by his profession into sardonic philosophising on matters of time and eternity. At a later stage in our happy relationship he mentioned that what remained of attractive churchyard plots had been spoken for but there were always ways of stretching a point when it came to a good friend.

  In the large garden cats, descendants of those previous owners had left behind, roamed among the chin-high nettles; and a collection of species roses had become an Amazonian thicket. On the day of my arrival, a flood left by the turbulent rivulet at the bottom of the garden was subsiding and a snipe prodded at the uncovered mud. There were snipe, too, in the ditch separating the garden from that of the adjacent vicarage. Primroses by the thousand, uncultivated snowdrops and the occasional spotted orchid grew undisturbed under the yews in the vicarage glebe land. Close to the vicarage itself a magnificent grove of these trees screened the view of the pond by which the Puritan divine Stephen Marshall had sat to compose his sermons, with the red kites of his day swooping on his ducklings, and reminding him of the devil snatching up souls.

  The area was rich in wild life, favoured by a stream grandly named the Pant River running through the garden, the water meadows and a number of dense thickets in the vicinity. Little attempt had been made to look after either my garden or the large garden of the adjacent house, and much of what once had been neatly clipped hedges with even an occasional attempt at topiary had been stifled by the natural growths of the area, greatly to the benefit of birds and butterflies, and the occasional badger or fox. The bird population, shortly to be cut in half by the introduction of pesticides, was exceedingly rich and varied, and included what must have been the last of a family of Butcher birds, which have since become extinct in this country. These continued for several years to nest in one of our thickets, in which—to the astonishment of friends taken to see them—they established their larder of food surplus to their immediate requirements, such as moths, caterpillars and even nestling birds, which they impaled on the thorns.

  The builder, chiselling away at suspect wood, drew my attention to the only vestige of the presence of the previous occupant—a pair of frames containing stained and faded prints of what appeared to be Tudor dignitaries. He had heard some story, he said, of the important people who had once lived in the house, although he had no idea who they were.

  I found this surprising. The house consisted of a hall and four ground-floor rooms, five bedrooms, and an attic into which servants would have been crammed in earlier days, although the window was blocked up and the room had evidently remained unused for many years. It was the kind of dwelling a priest, or subsequent parson would have occupied in a reasonably prosperous living, although outstandingly unsuitable for the accommodation of a peer of the realm in any period. Upon examination these two dignitaries turned out to be Philip Howard, the first Earl of Arundel, and his son Thomas. A Catholic convert eventually beatified by the Pope as ‘a renowned confessor and martyr’, Philip comes out rather as a kind of holy madman. Having openly confronted Elizabeth I on a number of occasions and fallen under suspicion of intriguing with plotters, he was committed to the Tower for undertaking the celebration of a secret Mass and twenty-four hours of continuous prayer—for the Spanish Armada’s success. For this he was tried for high treason and sentenced to death. The sentence was not carried out as he was eventually taken ill after dinner and died in a manner suggesting that he had been poisoned.

  Meanwhile, Philip’s son Thomas was born at the Parsonage, where his mother Anne had been ordered into close confinement by the Queen. The Second Earl of Arundel grew up to be a great and in many ways extraordinary man, who relinquished his family religion to become a Protestant ‘out of natural leanings to a simple and unadorned ritual’. He has been described as a gruff scholar, who managed to offend Charles I, among others, by his forthright manner and the plain dress he insisted on wearing at court. Nevertheless, after two periods of house restraint and a brief spell in the Tower, he was back in favour and of all things appointed general of the force sent against the invading Scots. It turned out that alt
hough he knew a good deal about art he was weak on military strategy, and as a result he was easily defeated, with the temporary loss of Newcastle. Recovering from this setback, he was advanced to the lord high stewardship of the Royal Family, and sent in this capacity on a diplomatic mission of extreme importance to the Austrian emperor in Vienna. His report on this venture produced a shift in foreign policy, for thereafter France substituted for the house of Austria as England’s most valuable ally. Thomas Howard was also to become the greatest of English collectors of antiquities. He kept agents in Italy, France and Greece to buy for him the best of whatever treasure was brought to light.

  His mother Anne’s incarceration at the Parsonage was a strict one and when the Queen learned that she had received a visit from another Howard, Lady Margaret Sackville, a messenger was sent with the order that she was to leave next morning. Anne had some fame as a practitioner of fringe medicine. In a book published locally in the twenties it was reported that medicinal plants of great rarity raised by her from seed still flowered on the steep slopes of the churchyard hill, and in sheltered nooks of the lane leading to the house. Of these I have found no trace.

  My arrival in Finchingfield in the early sixties coincided roughly with the abrupt ending of an era. The village had suffered in the past from the poor-laws and the plague but otherwise things remained much as they were. Thirty years earlier, the majority lived in chocolate-box cottages with a short walk, whatever the weather, to the garden dry-drop. Next came the Elsan, and then, with a row of sterile and monotonous-looking council houses, the first bathrooms. The Second World War, followed by labour shortages, snuffed out the last ashes of feudalism, but otherwise the class structure remained inviolate. A week or two after settling in, I watched the local hunt in action, charging like a mounted Mongolian horde through the villagers’ gardens and flowerbeds, and disposing of the surplus of village cats.