Thing to Love (4 page)

“If you are in a mood to describe antibiotics as patent medicines . . .”

“My dear Enrique, the Indians were using molds to cure wounds before Columbus.”

“I don't believe it.”

“It says so in my propaganda.”

“Which you wrote.”

“American advertising is too convincing for us. We need a touch of poetry in order to believe.”

“Juan, I do not mind your taking trade as a joke,” said the consul very seriously. “Ever since I have known you, you have taken everything as a joke. But you must not endanger your dignity.”

“My very dear Enrique, all my life I have adjusted my personality to its environment. Dignity has no longer any place in trade. Do you observe that our young men of good family, who are all occupied in selling each other something, can afford dignity? Certainly not! Very well. You have been good enough, though with some hesitation . . .”

“I hadn't realized you were so —”

“Broke. Yes. That increased my obligation. You used your influence to obtain for an old friend some fabulously profitable agencies. And assured by you, the manufacturers, and even the doctors that these mysterious substances really do what is claimed for them, I, on my part, have lent to them my name. But it is also my duty to push sales. Am I at my age to rush feverishly in a sports car from bar to bar? No! That is too much to ask. Am I then to adopt the style of those British salesmen who, when I observed them from the seat of government, appeared to me to have been trained in a Bond Street funeral parlor? Again, no!”

“There are no funeral parlors in Bond Street,” said the consul.

“They probably call it something else. Turkish bathmen and bespoke embalmers. But, as I was saying when your passion for
fact led you to interrupt me, Enrique, too formidable a dignity in my life or my publicity would be disloyal to my suppliers. On the other hand I cannot be expected to trot like an anxious knife-grinder between the secular and religious hospitals or to spend my evenings at a cabaret table, vainly appealing to the salesmen of my United States competitors that they should leave me enough wine and women for the entertainment of my faithful apothecaries. . . . I therefore endeavor, not without success, to emulate youth, while preserving the discretion of my age and position.”

“There were some rhythms in that one,” Henry Penruddock said, “which reminded me of your great speech of resignation.”

“Very likely. The Chamber, too, had accused me of a lack of dignity. Enrique, I have employed a most adorable red head.”

“For God's sake! Too conspicuous!”

“Nonsense, my dear fellow! She is a Chilean. Diploma and all.”

“What sort of diploma?”

“Pathology — and I really cannot be expected to ignore it because of the color of her hair. The excitement which she inspires in my customers — or would indeed in you, Enrique — is purely a matter of my progressive internal organization.”

“Well, so long as one of these gossip writers on the papers —”

“He can't. My dear Enrique, did you ever know a really glossy office, one of the glass-walled glories of Vidalismo, which did not deliberately employ pretty girls for the delectation of customers?”

“I don't think that's the way they would like it put,” said the consul cautiously. “And anyway your ideas for the entertainment of clients go rather beyond —”

“My Vita and my Agueda, like the stars of cabaret and the receptionists of advertising agents, arouse hopes which they have no intention of fulfilling. Can I help it if the customers break away from my parties in order to watch demonstrations in the laboratories?”

“I think I'd better have a look at her on Saturday.”

“Make it tonight, Enrique. On Saturday I am entertaining my dear daughter Felicia and her husband. It's seldom I can get them to myself.”

CHAPTER III

[
October 24
]

O
NLY ONE OF
the major general's orders was rarely obeyed. True, it was not exactly an order. He had merely mentioned as a point of etiquette that it was not customary to pay military honors to the wives of officers. Nothing, however, could prevent the guard from presenting arms to Doña Felicia whenever she drove into the Citadel to fetch her husband.

The motives of Fifth Division depended on the sum of the personal tastes of officers and men, and therefore could not be analyzed. The salutes which she acknowledged — always more gaily than she thought — were partly an affectionate tribute to her husband; partly they represented the satisfaction of the mestizos, who made up the vast majority of the Army, that the general should have married into the only ruling family which took pride in its Indian blood; and partly they were a gallant compliment to Doña Felicia herself.

She was a woman in the full splendor of her thirtieth year — a little taller and a lot slimmer than most of her contemporaries. She had the fine-drawn features of her father set upon a small head which carried, regardless of changing fashion, a luxurious chignon of black hair coiled at the back of her delicate neck. The immediate desire of any man — which, too, may have been reflected in
the spontaneous crash of military courtesies — was to let loose that supersensual, that positively Biblical hair. The color of her skin could not be described in words without destroying it by too exact definition; but it had been done to perfection by the chief gardener of the municipality, who named a rose of his own breeding
Rugosa Fonsagrada
. The petals were honey-colored, flushed with pink. He never needed to explain the origin of the name to any citizen of San Vicente.

But this had been nine years earlier. San Vicente had not seen so much of her since Juan de Fonsagrada had ceased, among shattered glass and the rape of matronly tramcars, to be an active politician. Since then, most of Felicia's time had been passed between the Indian provinces and Europe, dissatisfied with both. Meanwhile, the line of chairs outside the Ateneo had speculated, with more imagination than sound gynaecology, upon the reasons why their town beauty waited for a husband. The appreciable number of younger members who had in their time proposed to her found it hard to admit that the inadequacy, if any, was their own.

The fact was that she did not admire Guayanas as much as it admired her. She resented its lack of purpose; and this impatience was all the stronger because she loved her home — its closed and easy social life, its distances, its exasperating history which could not be disentangled from that of the Fonsagradas themselves. She never for a moment wished that she had been born a man; but she did wish, quite impersonally, that Juan had had a son instead of an only daughter.

Felicia Kucera drove slowly across the immense parade ground of the Citadel, pulling up to allow a squad of recruits, their gray-green uniforms soaked with sweat, to march across her front. She was startled by the harsh command
Eyes Left!
and found herself staring into forty brown faces, cruel and rigid with fatigue, not one of them daring to smile.

This community stare had been easier to meet when she was merely a twenty-year-old daughter standing by Vice President Fonsagrada. While remaining reasonably feminine, one impressed upon one's features a look of calm, national pride, as if receiving
some tedious prize at the university. These wholly irregular honors were more difficult. They made her feel like the wife of an old-fashioned Caudillo, riding along with a ragged column, herself dressed in the remains of showy vulgarity, helping to cook the dinners and care for the wounded; they did not seem to go with sea-green linen and a white Mercedes. And one couldn't respond like a film star with dazzling smile and a stage gesture. Nor could one adopt a queenly graciousness, since all this nonsense was unofficial. So she usually let her mood dictate her reply, even though it might at times border on shyness or bravado.

On this occasion — for she was happy — she called out “Good evening,
paisanos!”
and watched the set faces flicker with pleasure at a word which was more genial and intimate than its strict meaning of “fellow countrymen.”

Playing the Caudillo's wife? Well, that was no odder than being married to a soldier — about the least likely destiny she had ever expected. But then, before Miro, she had never met a soldier who cared more for his men than for the color of his breeches. Or, if she had, she had been too prejudiced to discover it.

How absurd to look at a man's trade for reasons why one fell in love with him! Yet was it? She was aware that she admired professionalism — that quality which was so common among cultured society abroad and so much more rare, though growing fast, in Guayanas. But in that case why hadn't she chosen from the university or one of Vidal's efficient Americanized, civil engineers? Any of them would have satisfied her reaction from her dear, brilliant, dilettante father.

She answered that fleeting question with a flash of interior amusement. How on earth could those slick moneymakers on their way to a belly and the Ateneo be compared with Miro? Her father thought they could. Or pretended to. He insisted that military gentlemen had the facade of power without the reality. That might be true. But men were too fond of these neat generalizations. A façade of power became the thing itself. A woman felt most real when she had accepted every possible aid from artificiality.

Her husband was in the shade of the trees: large, competent, always good-humored. He was surrounded by a group of overalled
officers — boiler-suited officers in San Vicente! — inspecting a piece of lethal machinery which was entirely unfamiliar to her. She knew exactly what had happened. He had been standing on the veranda of his office waiting for her to arrive, and had then strolled over informally to the group. Within his own headquarters he was quite incapable of waiting without doing something. Rendered a little self-conscious by all those questioning, interested eyes which she had passed since entering the main gate, she wondered whether the soldiery gave him credit for any passion that was not professional. They seemed to hold it as an article of faith that only Latins . . . Or was it possible that, for their hero, they invented legends?

“What brought you out here?” he asked when she had picked him up. “I thought we were going to meet at Juan's.”

“I telephoned because I didn't want you to drive up to the house in your staff car, all official and pennant flying.”

“Why not?”

“Pancho told me that Gil Avellana was there.”

“I see. Yes. Well, I suppose it does look better, though nobody is likely to think you kidnaped me.”

Miro settled into his seat as they passed through the San Vicente Gate. The Avenida Gregorio Vidal stretched ahead white and temptingly straight, but partly unfinished, for seven kilometers as far as the outskirts of the capital. Feli's driving had the national bravura. She was accustomed to cover the distance in four and a half minutes. His own trained driver was well content with five. But that was a point he never mentioned. He adored the touch of Latin recklessness in her character — also in silence, for she considered herself a coolly educated woman who had little in common with an excitable nation.

When two oxcarts and the stretch of potholes were safely behind and the Mercedes had accepted the pace of the city traffic, he remarked:

“It's absurd that the commander of the San Vicente Garrison cannot meet the leader of the opposition without arousing alarm and despondency.”

“Then make it seem absurd, Miro. You could.”

“Feli, I am the commander of a division, not of heaven and earth.”

“In the United States a general isn't expected to avoid Democrats because Republicans are in power,” she said.

“Generals in the United States don't start revolutions.”

“They wouldn't in Guayanas if they weren't bored.”

“Well, I don't think we're bored in the Citadel,” Miro said, “not if young Irala and my colonels are typical. And I've convinced them all that playing politics is a waste of time. I like Gil Avellana. He's a woolly thinker, but fanatically honest. A change from the Managerial Society.”

“You've been snorting about that phrase for the last three days, Miro. What happened?”

“Nothing,” he answered, reluctant to tell her of the insult — to her it would seem a stupid lack of discrimination rather than an insult — which had been offered to him when he last saw the President. “It reminds me that I am one of his managers. I have to admit it. I am a technician with my finger on the nearest thing to an atomic bomb in a group of countries that doesn't have one. But I prefer dealing with dear old Jesús-María, who wants to fill up jeeps with hay and still thinks battles are won by the cavalry and a sense of glory. Avellana would probably agree. I must educate him about cavalry at any rate.”

Felicia drove slowly through the narrow streets and busy pedestrians of the old city. Between the stalls of a vegetable seller and a potter — both Indians — she turned right, bumping over large squares of stone, ancient and now irregular. The lane ran between two blank walls into a small plaza and then under an archway to the Alameda. Halfway along the right-hand wall was a formidable and expressionless double gate. Miro got out and rang the bell.

The discreet placing of this town house of the Fonsagradas was largely due to accident. When it had been built, in the first half of the eighteenth century, it stared with delicate insolence across a primitive Alameda at the Casa Consistorial. The Church, forever scuttling in and out of its administrative headquarters, had disliked the gaiety of the house — a flaunting of Paris rather than a submission to Toledo — but had not feared it. The dictator
Orduñez, however, after exiling Juan's father, had still further slighted the liberal family by rebuilding the east side of the Alameda right across the front of the house. Its baroque facade was lost forever. Its only gate was the old stable door.

The unforeseen result of this autocratic gesture was that it became nearly impossible for the dictator's police spies to keep any real control on visitors to the house, for they never could find out from what shops or cellars there were entrances. As for the gate, it was never used if anyone were watching it; nor was there any obvious connection between the house and the Indians who were always half asleep in the shade of the grimy walls at the two ends of the lane.

When Juan's father had defeated and imprisoned the dictator — and discreetly failed to prevent his escape right into the hands and knives of an angry crowd — he had not accepted the Chamber's grateful offer to pull down fifty meters of the offending Alameda. For a politician the house was far too useful as it was, and a great deal cooler than before. He had contented himself with bricking up the bolt-holes.

Miro Kucera was disappointed that his pull on the massive iron handle was followed by a discreet buzzing rather than the harsh clang of the old stable bell. He had liked that bell. It always reminded him of the happy evenings when he first realized that Juan de Fonsagrada was going to welcome him as a son-in-law, for he had been doubtful whether that lighthearted warmth was due to genial acceptance of the beloved daughter's choice or genuine liking.

The double gate was opened by Juan's porter. Pancho's old-fashioned black-and-yellow waistcoat, his flat nose and receding, wrinkled forehead made him look like a benevolent circus ape. His more dangerous humanity was in the proud eyes and the smile he reserved for those he loved.

“Electric bell, now, my General,” he said. “Very modern! A man has to pass his whole day listening for it.”

Felicia drove into the courtyard. She too regretted the disappearance of the bell, which, throughout her childhood, had announced
that the peace of the house was always alive, and ready to accept, for good or ill, the excitements of San Vicente.

“He'll be employing a receptionist soon with a desk full of flowers and white telephones,” she said.

“Well, there she is!”

Through the half-open door of what used to be the harness room and now masqueraded successfully as the office of a minor but valued executive an attractive auburn-haired girl could be seen, busy checking a stock sheet. In the courtyard outside was a mess of crates and straw. Evidently a shipment of drugs and chemicals had just arrived from England.

“Dyed,” Felicia said.

“On the law of averages?” her husband asked. “Or are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.”

Juan de Fonsagrada descended the semicircle of wide stone steps which led down from the house, embraced his daughter and son-in-law and looked proudly over the signs of trade and profit which disfigured his courtyard.

“What does
she
do?” Felicia asked.

“Agueda? A trained pathologist, my dear.”

“You don't need a pathologist.”

“So she tells me. Meanwhile she is taking over publicity. That hair has the most astonishing effect on journalists.”

Felicia laughed. She gave her father full credit for his perfect manners. Ever since her mother had died when she was a child, she had found herself from time to time in what might — with any other father — have been embarrassing situations. But he had always managed to leave her with a reasonable possibility that her suspicions were wrong.

“The new laboratory,” said Juan with a wave of his hand towards a perfect little stage set of spotless white on the other side of the courtyard. Beyond the impressive foreground of refrigerators and racks of test tubes, a white-coated girl, pale-skinned and with hair as black as Feli's own, was bending over a sink.

“But I see you still have Vita,” said Felicia with some distaste.

“Invaluable, my dear. Somebody has to look after the laboratories.”