Thing to Love Read online

  He passed under the veranda into the even twilight of his office. His working life seemed to be a continual flight from one pattern of shade to another. Well, it had to be. Yet over that one point he was not and never could feel himself a Latin American. Patio, tree, colonnade — a townsman could pretty well live all his days without ever entering the sun at all or ever noticing that he did not. Miro, however, grew weary of these exquisitely patterned darknesses. He was a man of the light.

  “Anything in, Salvador?” he asked.

  Captain Salvador Irala, who had sprung to attention as his chief entered, relaxed with conscious grace.

  “The Captain General wishes to be informed how many mules equal one jeep.”

  “For the love of God, what a question!” Miro exclaimed. “For what purpose, in what country? And are we to assume that the jeeps are fueled by mule or the mules are fed by jeep?”

  “I don’t know, my General,” answered Irala. “The impact of science upon Don Jesús-María is always disconcerting. But I have drafted a reply for you to sign. You regret you have no statistics. You suggest very politely that for the glory of the Republic he should take the requisite number of mules and jeeps and experiment. You would be deeply grateful if he would communicate to you in due course the results of his research.”

  “Your tact is incredible, Salvador. I would never have thought of that.”

  “And this is a case just come in. Morale. Referred to you as garrison commander.”

  “Women, gambling, officers improperly dressed in public places . . .” the general grumbled. “Processions. I am entirely unfitted to be a military policeman, and I wish they’d appoint somebody else and let us get on with training the Division.”

  “But you must admit we should lose a lot of laughs.”

  “Salvador, I cannot imagine why you became a soldier.”

  “Because, my General, I am young. And when one is young, one looks for someone to follow, to love and — within reason — to respect. I felt that my devotion to the Managing Director of Transatlantic Insurance and the President of Caribbean Film Distributors, both of whom were eager to reward my ability with sacks of pesos, would be qualified. I therefore decided to remain in the Army.”

  “Hm, well . . .” said Miro, quite unable to make a proper Latin answer to this merry declaration of devotion. “Well, I’m glad you did.”

  He took the file from Captain Irala and read the remarkable deal of paper which had been created since 6 A.M. that morning: a report of the guard commander; attestations of witnesses; and a letter from the lieutenant colonel of the Presidential Guard overflowing with patriotism and apologies.

  This attempt of a Corporal Menendez to insult the national flag had certainly upset his commanding officer. The splendid and stirring matutinal ceremony had been desecrated, but the Most Excellent General was assured that the Regiment was sound at heart. Menendez had been recruited from the Barracas, and therefore would be a Communist sympathizer if not a member of the Party. In accordance with standing orders, Trumpeter Corporal Menendez was being escorted to the Citadel for preliminary questioning by the garrison commander before proceeding to full interrogation by Military Security and court-martial. The lieutenant colonel again presented his excuses, and assured the general that the guard asked no better than to wipe out with their blood the insult offered to the flag, to the Army of Guayanas, and to the nation.

  It was Vidal’s personal order that within the Garrison of San Vicente all military charges affecting the security of the State should be investigated by the garrison commander. Fiery accusations of subversive activity had in the past too often led to bloodshed or excitable court-martial. It was a tribute to his common sense, Miro supposed, but a damned nuisance all the same. He must really talk to commanding officers in private and tell them that every time a drunken trooper declared his intention of cutting out the guts of the President, or swore — when he couldn’t reassemble his Hotchkiss — that the whole staff kept their whores on bribes from armament manufacturers, they should not consider it a Security case but deal with the offender rudely in the orderly room.

  This, however, was serious. Conviction, under Chap. XII, Subsection D (2), which — as the lieutenant colonel had officiously reminded him — seemed to cover spitting on the flag, could carry the death sentence.

  “How many Communists would you say there are in Guayanas?” he asked his A.D.C.

  “The police figures are fourteen thousand.”

  “Oh, the police!” Miro exclaimed contemptuously. “What’s your own opinion?”

  “Twelve hundred, my General,” replied Irala promptly.

  Miro looked up with a swift smile which invited his A.D.C. to go further.

  “Seven hundred,” said the captain, “are Negroes of the port who have got Marx mixed up with the millennium. Fifty are students at the university. It started when my brother threw a tomato at the Vice President of the United States. Why not? After all, you don’t get a chance to throw tomatoes at the United States very often. Then he got two hundred thousand pesos from Moscow just as an advance. They spent half of it on parties and the other half financed the teachers’ strike. There were some honeys among those teachers. My brother thought it would do them a world of good to have a couple of weeks off. But the damned fools couldn’t keep their mouths shut. So the police have got the lot of them down as Communists. That makes seven hundred and fifty. The remaining four hundred and fifty are former peons who now live in the Barracas, which is enough to turn anybody into a Communist.”

  The general thoughtfully considered his A.D.C.’s felicitous exaggerations. Humor delighted him, but it was his habit to subject it to close analysis. He usually laughed with his eyes.

  “One does not become a trumpeter of the guard,” he said at last, “unless one has respect for the Army.”

  “Alternatively,” suggested Irala, “one might become a Communist as a natural reaction from so much empty ceremonial.”

  “We’re not considering you,” said Miro, “but a very simple soldier. Probably more Indian than mestizo.”

  “Shall we have him in, my General? Or make them all wait till after lunch?”

  “Yes. Now. Better get it over.”

  Between his own troop sergeant and the R.S.M. of the Divisional Provost Company, Trumpeter Corporal Pepe Menendez marched up to the desk and made a sharp left turn to meet the formidable commander of the garrison. He was in such a blind state of panic that he might as well have been alone upon a mountaintop or in his grave; he was living entirely within the dark recesses of his own mind. General Kucera’s large face, with its pale, even tan, was to him an object as unconnected with a human being as the moon or a drumhead.

  In his ordinary daily life anything was possible to Pepe Menendez: the wildest human motives, the most astonishing behavior of saints and devils, the activities of an Intervener-General whom he understood to be God. There were no limits to what Pepe Menendez could believe, on the rare occasions when he considered what was possible and what was not. Even his nightmares therefore — and this in its unreality was equivalent to one — were less reasonable than those of a man with some education or at least a tradition of education. It would not have surprised him had Kucera executed him, paraded his ghost and ordered it to trumpet eternally before the Father.

  He heard the R.S.M. read the charge. It had nothing to do with the motives of his crime. Why should it? It was part of the curious and terrifying rite which was taking place over his body. He remained dumb in answer to the questions that were put to him. He was answering them in his mind, but it did not seem necessary or possible to speak aloud.

  Miro knew the type. Whether one was dealing with a Slovak peasant or a Guayanas mestizo, one had to break through the inarticulateness of fear. Once that had been done, the only problem was to make the primitive European say enough to explain himself and the Guayaneño say so little that something definite could be gathered from the flood of words.

  “Are you
married?” he asked.

  There was no reply.

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  His tone and smile implied that he had been a friend of the family when the trumpeter was in his cradle.

  “The general knew her?” inquired Pepe Menendez faintly.

  “Everybody in your pueblo knew her,” the general prevaricated. “A most honorable woman!”

  “She died five years ago.”

  “I am sorry indeed,” said Miro with solemn courtesy.

  “But my father is still alive,” added the trumpeter as if to soften the grief of his hearers.

  “Where does he live now?”

  It was a safe bet. The trumpeter would not have joined the regular Army at the end of his compulsory military service if he could have followed his father on the land or in the family means of livelihood.

  “When my mother died, we went to live in the Barracas.”

  North of the port, the Barracas stretched along the coast where a hundred years of San Vicente rubbish had been tipped. On this melancholy level ground, which fell so sharply to a beach of garbage that in a westerly gale the Pacific surf crashed directly against the slope of the tip, an ownerless shanty town had grown up where in straw huts or shelters of flattened cans nailed to scraps of packing cases lived two hundred thousand souls on the verge of starvation. For this nauseating squalor Vidalismo was held responsible — not quite fairly, since similar suburbs of the helpless had grown up outside many of the capitals of Latin America. The Barracas were partly due to a rising birthrate; partly to the fact that peons who could not or would not make a living on the land flocked to the imagined wages of the factories.

  “Did you and your father have any work?” the general asked.

  “Sometimes they let my father sweep the docks.’

  “And how were you allowed the honor of enlisting in the guard?”

  “The lance, my General . . .”

  There was no point in searching out the story behind that. Menendez might have learned to handle a lance as a boy on the llanos. Or he might have been paid some infinitesimal sum by a guardsman to polish equipment, and done it well. The more primitive they were, the more they loved and tended steel and found a cleanliness in death by steel. It was as if they had only recently graduated from obsidian to the knife, the machete and the lance.

  “Good!” Miro agreed. “Now tell me, Corporal, do you remember your oath? For what will you fight and, if need be, give your life?”

  “For you, my General.”

  “Yes, yes. But for what else?”

  The trumpeter corporal looked desperately at all the objects to his immediate front, and then met the amused eyes of Irala.

  “For the captain,” he said helpfully.

  “Do you not know the name of your country?”

  “Oh, yes, my General — Guayanas!”

  “And would you die for Guayanas?”

  “Oh, yes, my General, if you ordered it.”

  Captain Irala pulled at his short, black mustache to hide his laughter.

  “Your political opinions?”

  The trumpeter corporal was silent. He was under the impression that he had definite political opinions. He wanted a change of government. For what purpose he could not say. Before the representative of government in the person of the general his reasons seemed inadequate. But a change — that was very necessary.

  “Do you know what Communism is?”

  “Yes, my General,” the trumpeter replied eagerly — he felt he was on safe ground at last. “It is what they are accused of, when they live in the Barracas and are against the Church and the police. But I have never had trouble with the law, my General. My General, the sergeant will tell you that I am a good soldier. I do not say we have not had words. One cannot always please a sergeant. That is why he is paid more. But you will speak for me, Verecundo, is it not true?” he added, turning his head to the sergeant in appeal.

  “Eyes front!” the sergeant roared. His embarrassment at this use of his Christian name gave a purple patina to his dark bronze face.

  Miro permitted the party to stand at ease. It was obvious that truth was now on the way, but only to be reached in a less formal atmosphere. He wondered at the change in himself since he had learned how to handle this Army of primitive individualists. He would never be able to command European troops again.

  “Is it true that this man is a good soldier, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “Up to now I had no reason to complain,” the sergeant admitted.

  “Good! Now, Corporal, why did you spit upon the flag?”

  “I spat upon the ground, my General,” Menendez wailed.

  “At so solemn a moment?”

  “I did not think.”

  “That is no excuse. Why did you spit?”

  “I do not know, my General.”

  Pepe Menendez closed down desperately upon his secret for a moment. To lose his dignity was worse than to be shot.

  “I believe anything. I see everything,” said Miro impressively, his dark blue eyes fixed so fiercely upon the trumpeter that Pepe Menendez had not the slightest doubt that his thoughts were being read. “And it does not seem to me ridiculous. Between comrades there is nothing you cannot say.”

  “Well, it was like this,” stammered the trumpeter finally, in a rush. “The General knows that when one has blown there is a . . . a liquid in the trumpet, and it is . . . it is the custom to shake it out. Well, I shake it over the parapet, and . . . and according to where it falls . . .”

  Pepe Menendez faltered.

  “It is lucky or unlucky,” Miro guessed. “Go on, Corporal.”

  The trumpeter’s hand moved involuntarily to his chest. He let it fall. It was neither polite nor military to cross himself.

  “My General knows everything,” he murmured. “Only the third stone, only the third stone this morning. And that is bad. So I blew a little spit — so little that not the Blessed Virgin would have noticed it — to see if it would go farther. And God sent a great puff of wind. And even so, my General, it fell very far away from the flag. I swear I did not mean it, my General.”

  “You are alone when you blow the reveille?”

  “Always, my General.”

  “You are on duty every morning?”

  “For four months, my General.”

  “Is the guard short of trumpeters, Sergeant?”

  “No, Excellency. But this man Menendez is much better than any of the rest.”

  “I see. Trumpeter Corporal Menendez, I shall recommend to your commanding officer that you be reduced to the ranks and dismissed from the guard, of which you have shown yourself unworthy. You will be transferred to the Divisional artillery, where your interest in projectiles and their ranges may be of more service to yourself and the State.”

  Pepe Menendez was marched out. There was a slight swagger in his movements. He did not altogether understand the sentence. But he had been treated as a man by the great Caudillo — the leader, his leader.

  “A sentence of Solomon, sir,” said Irala, laughing. “It will be all over the Division by this evening.”

  “Well, I couldn’t dismiss the charge. One mustn’t let down the standards of the guard. They won’t be at all pleased with me as it is. But how the devil do they expect him to have a proper sense of dignity when he’s been blowing the reveille for four months without a break?”

  CHAPTER II

  [October 20]

  THE ALAMEDA WAS the social and political heart of San Vicente. Having reached accidental perfection, it had remained for seventy years without any rebuilding. Closing the vista at each end were the Chamber and the Palacio Municipal, ten minutes’ stroll apart. Between them, down the center of the avenue, ran a broad strip of garden, dominated by tall palms under which the chocolate-colored earth and the botanical experts of the Ministry of Agriculture had grown every spectacular evergreen of tropics and subtropics. On one side of this somber fairyland were the beribboned confectioners, the
glittering shopfronts of jewelers and luxury grocers, the women’s shops, and the women themselves. On the other side were the men, the banks, the law courts, the headquarters of civil governor and police — both housed in the immensities of the Casa Consistorial — and the Club Ateneo. This separation of the interests of each sex applied only to the moneyed class. The mass of the public swarmed where it pleased.

  The terrace of the Ateneo, raised two steps above the pavement and shaded by a deep awning, stretched for fifty yards along the Alameda. In the cool of the evening a well-spaced row of chairs and tables held all the influential masculine society of San Vicente — the senators, the bankers, the principal merchants and any big landowners who happened to be in town. All were well-dressed and almost all were over forty, but family counted for as much as money. Some of those apparently prosperous citizens who from time to time put in an appearance on the terrace were unlikely to eat more that day than the saucer of shellfish presented with their drinks.

  Close to the entrance of the club were sitting two men in their fifties whose bearing was rather more lively than that of their quiescent fellow members. Juan de Fonsagrada was dark and lightly built. His straight, glossy hair still showed as much black as gray, and the bronze skin, though sagging at the jaw, was tight over the high cheekbones. Henry Penruddock had a round face, still of a russet-apple quality in spite of years in the subtropics, and a bald head surrounded by a halo of white hair. Though he certainly weighed half as much again as his companion, he carried his good barrel of a body without effort. One of his large shoes was in the hands of a ragged mulatto bootblack.

  “The Señor Consul has a tip for the races?”

  The bootblack spat accurately on the shoe and flourished his polishing rag. His conversation was quite uninhibited, for he felt himself as valuable a citizen as any of his customers, though taking a reasonable pride in their distinction.

  “You try farther along the line!” said the British consul general. “It’s twenty years since I made any money at the San Vicente races.”