The Gulliver Fortune

by Peter Corris

  "Sí," said La Vita, also a reader. He stood, and his head was not far below the level of the planking. "But we are not pirates. I'm tying the boat to the embarcadero. Climb up and I'll pass the bags to you."

  Edward went up the ladder and hauled the bags after him. He was a sturdy boy, already strong like most Gulliver males and none of the bags—his own cheap suitcase, La Vita's valise and leather bag—gave him any trouble. He had expected La Vita's bags to weigh more and was troubled. "Mr La Vita, I . . ."

  La Vita hauled himself onto the rough wharf, "Tio," he said.

  "Tio. I'm afraid."

  La Vita opened his valise and took out the Webley. "Don't be afraid, Eduardo. This place is nothing to us. We are looking for something muy grande, much bigger."

  "What?" Edward whispered.

  "You will see. Remember, this place was settled by los presidarios, the prisoners, and we are free men."

  "Men?" Edward said.

  "Sí." La Vita took his bags; he made a loop with apiece of rope and slung the valise over his shoulder. This left him a free hand for the revolver. He jabbed it in the direction of the lights and the noise washing down to the wharf from the streets above. "Avanzar!" he said.

  Ferdinand La Vita's mother had been a member of the Fochsted family. This meant that she was born into immense wealth, for the Fochsteds were one of the three families who controlled the Bolivian tin mining industry. Like the Patinos and Arameyos, the other tin plutocrats, the Fochsteds never lived in Bolivia and few members of the family ever visited the country. Isabella was an exception. After a French education she had gone on a tour of what her governess and chaperone, Mme Duroc, called 'le monde nouveau'. Her travels had taken her to Bolivia, where she met Jose La Vita, a teacher at the San Andres School in La Paz.

  "Il est un socialiste, Isabella," Mme Duroc said.

  "Il est beau," said Mlle Isabella, whose school reports had all noted that she was 'strong-willed'.

  She was married to Jose in La Paz on 8 May 1879. Mme Duroc was dismissed from her post by Isabella's father when news of the wedding reached Madrid in November. She was unconcerned, having found a husband herself, a wine merchant who attended the wedding. In February 1880, Isabella La Vita was delivered of a nine-pound male child who was christened Ferdinand Luis after his maternal and paternal grandfathers. The former was not placated; Jose La Vita was stabbed to death in a tavern fight within weeks of his son's birth. No culprit was apprehended and low-life characters in La Paz remained drunk for weeks after the affray.

  The widowed Isabella La Vita returned to Spain with her infant son. Life continued normally among the expatriate land and mine owners. At little more than twenty years of age, Isabella's emotional, social and intellectual development had been frozen by the power her family exerted. She went into a mental and religious retreat, leaving her son to be raised by his grandfather. When Ferdinand La Vita was fourteen years of age the money spent on his upkeep and schooling amounted to twenty-five per cent of Bolivia's annual national spending on education.

  Looking back, La Vita could discern no sign that he had ever spared a thought for anyone but himself before he turned twenty-four. He excluded family, to whom duty and loyalty were ingrained from birth. He loved his quiet, withdrawn mother and his stern, commanding grandfather but, he later realized, this was an unthinking love. There was no room in it for criticism. Similarly, the love he received was automatic and unearned, and the only obligation it carried was that he should not bring disgrace on the family.

  In 1904, after spending several years at various universities, including the Sorbonne and Cambridge, without taking a degree, La Vita followed in his mother's footsteps to Bolivia. He would later claim that it was his name that drew him there, as someone named Washington might be drawn towards the District of Columbia. Certainly there was no more sinister motive; he had been told that his father was a scholar who had died of consumption when Ferdinand was an infant. This romantic image had satisfied La Vita. He had no thoughts of revenge. He arrived unannounced in La Paz by way of Lima with money in his pocket, a normal level of curiosity, and with his libido high after a month of arduous travel that had afforded him no amorous opportunities.

  He put up in a tavern that had been recommended to him by a Peruvian who dealt in coffee. "An interesting place," the Peruvian had said. "Good wine, good beds and women to go in them, at a good price."

  "From what I have been told," La Vita said, "that is not unusual. What makes this place interesting?"

  "Colourful characters," the Peruvian said. "Gamblers, banditos, or men pretending to be such. Do you carry a pistola?"

  "Of course."

  "Put it in your baggage. In this place you may be challenged to use it."

  La Vita stayed several days in the tavern. When he emerged he was a changed man. He had learned nothing new from the whores he had slept with but a great deal from an old, alcoholic rufian who had told him a long and involved twenty-four-year-old story about a schoolmaster who had enjoyed visiting the tavern to spend time with the mine foremen and other workers. "His name was the same as yours," the drunk said.

  "A common name here, surely?" La Vita said.

  "Not so common. And this was an uncommon man and an unfortunate one."

  La Vita was eyeing a dark woman pouring wine for one of the pseudo-banditos and only half listening. "How so?"

  "An assassination was arranged. Very sad. He was newly married with an infant son. Poor hombre, he had married above him—this is as great a misfortune as marrying below."

  "An assassination?"

  The old ruin tilted his glass. "You are interested in my story, señor?"

  La Vita signalled to the dark woman to bring the wine jug. When his glass had been filled the man resumed, glancing around him to make sure he was not overheard. "You have the look of an educated man, señor. Perhaps you are a priest?"

  La Vita smiled and shook his head.

  "Still," the man said, "the learning is the thing. You understand that I am making a confession." He was very drunk and mumbled the last few words.

  "A confession?"

  "I shared in the money. I helped. Blood money from the Fochsteds."

  La Vita had prepared himself for a fanciful story and the request for a certain number of pesos, but the name shocked him. "When did this happen?"

  "It was when the pig Daza was replaced by the pig Campera."

  La Vita had read up on Bolivian history. He identified the year as 1880. Thoughts of women and wine were swept from his mind. He questioned the old drunk closely but he would respond only when his glass was filled, and he was very soon incapable. Ferdinand La Vita slept not at all that night. The next day he made enquiries around the town, very discreetly, not identifying himself, backing off at the least sign of inquisitiveness. He learned nothing to confirm the drunk's story of an assassination but he positively identified Jose La Vita, the murdered schoolteacher, as his father. A photograph taken of the staff members of the San Andres school in 1878 left no room for doubt.

  "I don't like this place, Tio," Edward said.

  They were tramping up a steep street away from the docks. There seemed to be a public house on every corner and from most of them came a stream of abuse directed at the foreigner and the child.

  "Neither do I," La Vita said. He sniffed. "It stinks. I like the mountains. The air is clean there."

  Edward was tired and close to tears. "Carl would know."

  "Know what, Eduardo?"

  "If there are mountains in Australia."

  La Vita patted the boy's shoulder. They reached a broad street where the gas lights dispelled the dark. La Vita saw lighted shop windows along the street, some imposing buildings to the left and more light beyond them. "There's the city," he said. "Don't worry, Eduardo. We're not staying here. We're going to Bolivia. That's where the real mountains are."

  A tram rattled down the hill. Edward watched it, fell into step with La Vita and felt better on the downward grade. Th
ey walked by a park, gaslit and ghostly. He drew closer to the man.

  "How long will we stay here?"

  "Not long. I am expecting to get some good news."

  Edward yawned and shifted his bag from one hand to the other. "What news?"

  La Vita glanced at him. Edward favoured his father, his oldest brother and his sister; he was dark and strongly built, with a thick lock of hair falling in his face. He looked older than his ten years.

  "I am waiting for the news that someone has died," La Vita said. "Can you understand?"

  Edward considered the question. He was not quick and intuitive like Jack and Susannah, or gifted with a swift, analytical brain like Carl; he thought slowly and usually found more questions.

  "My mother and father died. How can dying be good news, Tio?"

  "Evil people also die," La Vita said. "Fortunately."

  34

  Eduardo La Vita, as he became known, soon knew the story by heart. He knew that after Ferdinand La Vita had discovered the secret of his birth and the treachery of the Fochsteds he had been drawn into radical politics in Bolivia. Supporting the tin miners and the landless Indian peasants, he had become a thorn in the side of the government—a petitioner for the release of prisoners, a character witness, a raiser of funds from sympathizers in other parts of the world. He turned his expensive education against those who had provided it, becoming a writer of newspaper articles and pamphlets that criticised a system in which only literate males, amounting to less than ten per cent of the population, had a voice in the formation of the national government.

  "Finally, I had to go into hiding," La Vita told Edward.

  "Why, Tio?"

  "My grandfather put a price on my head. He did not want to, but I left him no choice. I was trying to destroy him."

  Eduardo nodded and watched the horizon. The conversation was one of a great many that took place on the tramp steamer carrying La Vita and Eduardo across the Pacific to Chile. La Vita told the ships' officers, and the other passengers that he had been investigating the possibilities of coffee planting in Australia and was returning to make his report.

  "What's your opinion on that, sir?" the more commercially minded would ask. La Vita would smile without replying.

  As the voyage progressed, La Vita told Eduardo how it was in Bolivia where the few had everything and the poor had nothing. The boy had seen poverty in Whitechapel and things he could scarcely understand—men pulling carriages—in Colombo. He asked if conditions were worse in Bolivia than in Colombo.

  "Worse," La Vita said, "the people in Ceylon have land, they can work their gardens and live in the open air. The tin miners live and die in hell, and the Indians have no land."

  Eduardo came to understand that La Vita was returning to fight for the rights of the poor of Bolivia. "I have inherited money," he said. "My grandfather tried to have me killed and forced me to wander the world penniless. But in the end he would not leave me a pauper. This is the stupid pride of the hidalgo."

  Fighting for the rights of the poor had little appeal for the ten-year-old, but La Vita's description of the beauties of Bolivia and his stories of the excitement to be found there were thrilling. As any boy would, Eduardo had been impressed by the pistol, especially when La Vita had said that he would have to use it to rob a bank if there was no telegram for him in Sydney. But there had been a telegram, with the news of the death in Madrid of La Vita's grandfather. Money, good beds, food and boat tickets had followed.

  "Would you really have robbed a bank, Tio?" Edward asked.

  La Vita shrugged. "It would have been nothing new for the pistol. Have you heard of Butch Cassidy, Eduardo?"

  "No, Tio."

  "He gave me this pistol in the Grand Hotel in La Paz, to keep safe for him. I never saw him again, or the other one."

  "Who?"

  "Harry, the Sundance Kid."

  "Who are they?"

  "Americans. Outlaws. I met them several times in Bolivia. They robbed banks and mines, which was good, but they spent all the money on themselves, which was bad. I tried to interest them in politics, but it was no use. Ignorant men."

  "Will I meet them?"

  La Vita laughed. "Not if things go well. I am not an outlaw and I don't intend to be one, but the government may force it on me."

  "And me. Being a bandito would be fun."

  "You will be at school. Being a bandito is only a slow way of dying."

  The boy sighted the Chilean coast within a few minutes of this exchange, which helped him to remember it, to recall the exact words. They stayed with him, to be laughed about or cried over, for many years.

  From Valparaiso they travelled north to the railhead at Antofagasta. Here they boarded a train which climbed east, away from the coast, traversing Chilean territory, up through the mountains to the Bolivian border and on to the Antiplato. For Eduardo the time passed quickly, in a haze of heat followed by biting cold. He remembered it later as a time of cigar smoke irritating his nose, and hot, peppery food burning his mouth. The broad-faced, flat-nosed Indians spoke languages he could not comprehend and this accelerated his grasp of the Spanish La Vita spoker.

  La Vita watched the boy closely as the train skirted the large Uyuni salt marsh.

  "What's the matter, Tio?"

  "How do you feel, Eduardo?"

  "Hungry."

  La Vita laughed and hugged him. "You will be a good Bolivian. You don't suffer from the soroche, the height sickness. Some of the people who come up here . . ." La Vita grinned and drew on his cigar. "Let us say they are happy to go back down again."

  Nothing gratified Eduardo more than winning La Vita's approval and, as this happened easily, he was mostly happy. He grieved for his mother and father and sometimes missed his brothers and sister. For Jack he had no fears and his respect for Carl's brain closed off the thought that any harm might have come to him. Susannah had been like a sister to Mary Welcome. Interested in his surroundings and well cared for himself, he naturally imagined similar circumstances for the others.

  He gave a lot of thought to La Vita. His mentor smiled and laughed a great deal, which was good. Eduardo was puzzled that the smiles came even when serious matters were being discussed. Even when he was playing cards, a matter apparently of the greatest seriousness, to judge from the faces of most of the players, La Vita was good-humoured. Eduardo noted that La Vita did most things—ate, drank, played cards—in moderation. The exception was his behaviour towards women. To Eduardo, brought up in the inhibited ways of the English, La Vita's courtesies towards women old and young seemed excessive. Only when the company of a woman was involved did La Vita indicate to him that Eduardo might take himself off somewhere for a time.

  "Tio," Edward said after La Vita had reluctantly parted company with a young widow who left the train at Oruro, "are you married?"

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "Haven't you noticed? I like women too much to be content with one."

  "What about children?"

  "Do you mean have I got any? None to my knowledge."

  Eduardo was confused. "No, I mean, I . . ."

  "I understand you. Excuse me, Eduardo, I was making a silly joke. You mean do I want my own children?"

  "Sí."

  "No, I do not. One half of my blood is Fochsted, and I do not want to bring any more Fochsteds into the world."

  35

  Ferdinand La Vita bought a house in one of the valleys below the city of La Paz. In this fashionable residential district he surrounded himself with liberal-minded people and plunged into political work. Eduardo attended the San Andres school, along with the sons of the Spanish landowners not wealthy enough to live in Europe, and of the rich mestizos who were happy to be big fish in a small pond. It was a time of massive adjustment for the boy, who heard radical opinions argued out with much table thumping at home and conservative political, social and religious doctrines preached at school.

  Two instincts guided him in childhood—to please La
Vita and to stay out of trouble. He quickly mastered enough of the Catholic ritual to avoid being conspicuous at school and at obligatory religious ceremonies but, like his mentor, he was a total sceptic.

  "It's all make-believe, isn't it, Tio?" Eduardo proposed after he returned from school with an account of a particularly terrifying hellfire sermon from one of the priests.

  "Yes," La Vita said. "That's a good way of putting it. Interesting, though, don't you think?"

  Eduardo smiled and nodded. He did not find it interesting. All instruction at the school that was not taught by rote—mathematics, chemistry, grammar—was slanted in a religious direction. The only interesting things about religion, to his eyes, were the processions and festivals of Holy Week in which people dressed in their brightest clothes and marched and danced down the Prado, the steep main thoroughfare of La Paz. La Vita informed him that the brightest moments on these occasions had more to do with the old religion of the Indians than Spanish Catholicism.

  Indians came to the house sometimes and talked and smoked with La Vita and his friends. Eduardo found it impossible to equate these calm, quiet people with the 'benighted, godless savages' described in the texts that celebrated the Christianization of South America. The depiction of England as a country of lost souls amused him. He kept silent, but he knew better.

  La Vita permitted Eduardo's presence at his table when such things were being discussed and kept him at a distance only at certain points during a serious love affair. Eduardo was encouraged to contribute to political discussion and to observe flirtation.

  "Why are there no schools for freethinkers?" Eduardo asked during a dinner party in which the main subject up for discussion was Bolivia's neutrality in the Great War.

  "There will be," a white-bearded guest replied, "by the time of your children, Eduardo."

  "Why will it take so long to happen?"

  "It's the Bolivian way. When you are minister for education you can change things."

  In fact, Eduardo would have had more interest in being minister for the army. Military matters became his obsession—history, personalities, equipment, insignia. He was nine months younger than the century and when he turned eighteen he made preparations to go to the United States to enlist. In 1917 Bolivia had abandoned its neutrality in favour of a guarded support for the Allies. Eduardo's intentions were applauded. The armistice was a grave disappointment to him.