Thing to Love (2 page)

“But the trust — God knows I'm complimented! — the trust is too great.”

Vidal wondered if he had been sufficiently explicit. Yet Miro Kucera must have picked up enough finesse in fourteen years of life in Guayanas to understand that where energy was scarce it should be rewarded. His opponents might call that “corruption” if they liked. It was not. It was a means of buying action. True, in this case he was only trying to reinsure a loyalty which he had never yet had to buy; but the principle was the same.

There was no very definite reaction from the general. He would, he said, think it over. He considered that the reorganization of the whole army was not urgent. As for Fifth Division, he could assure the President that nothing more for the moment was needed. His colonels were still inexperienced in the use of all the material they had.

Miro Kucera, indeed, was thinking it over as he strode along the wide central corridor of the Palace between mirrors and potted palms. The vehement beat of his own steps surprised him as his booted feet left the carpets, hit the stone flags of the great terrace and carried him out of dusk into the crash of the sunshine, blazing from both the sky and the Pacific. Impassively he received the general salute of the Presidential Guard, then corrected himself and followed his normal, more friendly custom. He never passed a guard which had been turned out for him without a smile and a word. He did not inspect it. That would have been officious and a waste of time. He greeted it.

The courtesy was an effort. He was tingling with shame. He felt dirtied and embarrassed by Vidal's implication that his loyalty would be more assured if he took a hidden commission on purchases for the army. It was not of course the first time that he had been offered a bribe. How could it be? But those attempts to influence him had come from armament and motor salesmen, from building contractors, from clothing manufacturers. None of
them had managed to leave with him a taste of dishonor. Business morality did not affect him. It was out of his world.

As he settled himself into his staff car and was driven north along the new coast road to the Citadel, Miro helplessly tried to analyze the reason for his angry disgust. It was not as if there were any complications to be feared. The President and his agents would see to it that the commission was well hidden, unprovable, and so delicately credited to him in Zurich or New York that one could think of it as an irregular raise of pay — to be refused, of course, but with a laugh.

Then was it that his pride was injured by the suggestion that his loyalty could be improved? Perhaps it could. His unquestionable, hitherto unquestioned, duty was to the State, which had offered him a home, rewarded him, encouraged him to give a service that he loved to give. But the State, till the next election, was Vidal. So his offer could hardly be considered an insult, when the man justifiably needed his support and the Managerial Society believed in such incentives. Understanding all that, why should he feel he wanted a bath? He got the answer at last. It was not he who had been put up for sale, but his Division. And that was unforgivable. Fifth Division was a proud, professional body. It was trained to be out of politics, out of the Latin-American vicious circle. Its interest was in the art of war. His officers could not be bought.

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?”