The Gulliver Fortune

by Peter Corris

  Yolanda left him. She was worried about the health of both her husband and her father, and about her son's social and psychological condition. She had understated the case to Eduardo: Juan had become a rebel on all fronts—in manners, morals, politics and hygiene. Men are fools, she thought. If only we could do without them.

  Eduardo worked, reading and making notes, until his eyes ached. His head throbbed and his throat and mouth were dry from smoking. He poured himself a glass of water and sat back in his chair. He tried to keep his mind on matters of policy and administration, but he found it impossible. As often happened, he recalled one of the last conversations he had had with Ferdinand La Vita. It had taken place in Paraguay during Ferdinand's exile. They had drunk a lot of wine and Eduardo asked the question again.

  "Why, Tio? Why take a boy you scarcely knew halfway across the world?"

  Ferdinand's hair and moustache were white; his skin had turned sallow and was stretched thin across the bones of his face. He was in his sixties but looked older; the hand holding the wineglass trembled a fraction. "Un experimento," he said.

  "I don't understand."

  "I wanted to find out whether it was possible for two strangers to love each other. No ties of blood, no common language, no obligations. If I did the best I could for you, would you do your best for me? Would it work out?"

  "It has, Tio."

  "Sí. You must remember this lesson—if you treat people well, they will treat you well."

  "Not always, Tio."

  "No, not always. People are not machines—they do not always do what they are designed for until they break down. But generally. And the reverse is true, generally."

  Eduardo nodded and poured more wine. His mother and father had been dead for more than thirty years; they were a memory with no substance. He could not recall a word from their mouths or a movement they had made; they were fixed in his mind like still, faded pictures. And he had suffered no loss, never felt betrayed by life because of this man. If have a son, he thought, will I do as well?

  Well, you have the son. How is it going? Eduardo reached for a file and pledged himself. After this meeting, Juan comes first.

  He returned home tired and depressed. More concessions than firmness; more losses than gains. Yolanda stood at the door, her face streaked with tears.

  "I have been trying to telephone you for an hour. Where have you been?"

  "Drinks," Eduardo said wearily. "After the meeting. Very boring. Yolanda, what . . ."

  "Juan has been arrested." Her voice trembled and sobs shook her. "They say he has killed a man with a knife."

  37

  "Why, Juan? Why?"

  Juan shrugged. "It was political."

  "Explain that, please," Eduardo said.

  "You would not understand."

  Eduardo fought down his resentment and anger. To be told after two decades of political lift that he would not understand something political was galling. But the boy was seventeen.

  "You must try to make me understand. You'll have to make a lawyer understand and he will have to do the same to a court. It's important. Why not start with me?"

  "Have you got a cigarette, Papa?"

  These were the first non-aggressive words Juan had spoken during the interview. Eduardo passed his son a cigarette and matches through the grille that separated them. It would not have been allowed at the Prison Centrale in La Paz, but Eduardo's influence had secured Juan's removal to a gaol at Sucre. It was a newer institution with a more enlightened management, but still bad enough. Eduardo knew that prisoners had to harden themselves to survive the system, and the hardening was the chief contributing factor to recidivism. He watched Juan light his cigarette with a rock-steady hand and he knew that the hardening had begun.

  Juan passed the matches back through the grille. "Thanks." He blew smoke over his father's head.

  They sat in a small room divided down the middle by a long bench with chairs on either side. The heavy grille, on a metal frame, extended from the centre of the bench up to the ceiling. Influence again had secured Eduardo a special interview; ordinarily the room would have held ten prisoners and their visitors. Nevertheless, a guard stood only a few feet behind Juan, and his pistol holster was unfastened.

  "Tell me, son," Eduardo said.

  Juan puffed. "We were drunk and arguing about politics. He spoke well of the Americans."

  "For that you stabbed him?"

  The shrug again. "It was his knife."

  Juan leaned forward. "You weren't armed?"

  "No. But if I'd had a gun I would have shot him. He is . . . was an informer for the militia. He hangs around with the miners and the students but he betrays them. Perhaps he is a policeman himself."

  "An agent provocateur?"

  "I don't know."

  "I don't understand how you could have . . . stabbed him, knowing these things about him. If he is a paid informer his opinions are of no consequence. He is not even worth arguing with, let alone killing."

  "I didn't know it then, Papa. I know it now. I was told in the other place." There was a slight tremble in Juan's voice as he mentioned the Prison Centrale. The memory of it seemed to unnerve him slightly. "They can't hang me."

  "No. At least we have done away with that barbarity. But are you saying he attacked you with the knife?"

  Juan shook his head. "He pulled it out, but I took it from him. I was drunk and wild."

  "It was a workers' bar, wasn't it? The witnesses will support you."

  "We were at a table with some men I did not know. They could have been denunciantes, like him."

  "The knife was his. That helps."

  Juan butted his cigarette on the benchtop, as a thousand prisoners appeared to have done before. "It depends where the knife is now. It was an ordinary kind of knife. I . . ."

  Eduardo passed him another cigarette. "Co on."

  "I've carried one like it at times. Papa, I'm sorry for bringing this on you. How is Mama?"

  "Brave and ready to help you in any way she can. But your grandfather Borota has died. She is very upset."

  "He didn't know . . . ?"

  Eduardo shook his head. "Nothing of this, thank God."

  "God!" Juan snorted.

  "Well, I'm with you there. Juan, I think we can getthe charge reduced to manslaughter, and your youth will help. But you'll have some time in prison. Perhaps here, perhaps worse.

  Juan nodded. "There are comrades in prison, it's not so bad. And, forgive me, Papa, but the system you serve cannot last for very much longer."

  Eduardo stared at his son. Dark stubble sprouted on his chin and cheeks and his hair was long and lank. He registered that one of Juan's large white teeth was chipped in the front, giving him an older, more experienced look. His son was a man, and he scarcely knew him. The guard moved forward and touched Juan on the shoulder. The boy gave his father a short salute with his arm bent in front of his chest and his fist clenched.

  Juan was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for the crime of manslaughter. As Eduardo had expected, his youth was taken into account but his claim to have been unarmed was viewed sceptically by the court. By the end of the trial, through which Juan had shown increasing contempt and defiance, Eduardo was unsure on the point himself. Yolanda was distraught; she visited Juan in the Sucre penitentiary and was appalled by his attitude.

  "He has no remorse," she told Eduardo. "He feels no guilt, no shame. No, that's not true. He regrets having made us suffer, but that is all."

  Eduardo did not tell her of the psychological changes which imprisonment brings. He had seen it many times in his legal work—the protective barrier built up of defiance, self-justification and egotism. Remorse and guilt would be seen as weak places in the wall and denied.

  The publicity given to Juan's case had had an ambivalent effect on Eduardo's career. Initially he had suffered vilification as the parent of such an animal, but in time the mood had changed. The Minister whose son was paying the price demanded by the l
aw without favouritism or special treatment became a useful symbol for the party.

  Dr Paz returned to power in 1960 and Eduardo and Yolanda considered their options while the President was deliberating over the composition of his government.

  "You wanted me to resign," Eduardo said. "I could do it now."

  Yolanda's face was serious. She had aged markedly since the day of Juan's arrest. Still handsome, she seldom smiled now and appeared to find all questions grave and weighty. "You are in good standing?"

  Eduardo nodded. "Better than ever. I worked hard through all our trouble. It was the only way I knew to stay balanced. Some good things happened. My department presents Victor with fewer problems than most of the others."

  "What is he likely to offer you?"

  Eduardo shrugged. "The toughest, possibly. The economy."

  Yolanda shuddered at the thought of the workload such a job would involve—the long hours, the meetings, the telephone calls at all hours of the day and night. Eduardo was sixty and looked that and more: he had lost weight and no longer moved vigorously. His cigarette cough was alarming and he was often short of breath. She tried to remember when they had last made love and could not; it had been before the trouble with Juan. She loved him still, but another instinct was stronger. "Whatever it is, you will have to take it."

  Eduardo reached for a cigarette and stopped. His doctor had warned him to cut down, had mentioned emphysema and some signs of heart weakness. "I know," he said. "I know I must."

  The notion that Juan had been treated like any other citizen who had broken the law was a fiction. He was lodged in a medium-security institution in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Six hundred kilometres southeast of the capital, situated in the temperate lowlands, the place held few hardened criminals. To Santa Cruz went the husbands who had killed their adulterous wives, delinquent professionals, dishonest priests and foreign-born offenders awaiting arrangements that would take them out of the country. It was Eduardo's influence which had permitted Juan's placement in Santa Cruz. If that influence was withdrawn, the chances were good that the boy would be transferred to a tougher penitentiary. And there was the question of parole to be worked on by Eduardo, slowly and quietly. He was tired and had had his fill of government, but he knew as well as Yolanda that Juan's sentence was his sentence also.

  Juan settled in at Santa Cruz after an initial period of rebellion, which brought him spells in solitary confinement and withdrawal of privileges. Santa Cruz is the richest agricultural district in Bolivia and, with unpaid labour to draw upon, the prison was easily made self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables and dairy produce. The inmates worked the farm, hoeing, weeding, picking, milking, maintaining and repairing fences and equipment. For many, the fat, defaulting lawyers and soft-handed school teachers, this was a torture. They fought for jobs as bookkeepers and cooks; anything that would keep them out of the sun and rain.

  Juan gloried in the farm work. He became proficient in all branches of it and his thin frame filled out with the abundant food and constant exercise. He chopped wood for recreation and set himself the seemingly impossible goal of doubling a prisoner's daily fruit and bean picking quota.

  "Why do you do this?" Jose Ramirez, Juan's cellmate, asked him. "They won't make you a trusty, you're just a kid."

  "I don't want to be a trusty," Juan said. "I don't want to join the oppressors."

  Ramirez chuckled as he rolled a cigarette. He was a railway official who had taken bribes from freight companies. Ramirez had taken small bribes, but his superiors had taken large ones, and he was the scapegoat. "It is political?"

  "Sí. political. Now be quiet, please. I want to read."

  Juan was supplied with books by his father to supplement the small holdings in the prison library. Like educated prisoners everywhere, he read law books, but Juan's literary diet included political works that would normally be disapproved of in prison. He read Proudhon, Machiavelli and Gramsci, and C. Wright Mills in English, a language none of the prison officials knew. He was thus able to get some radical texts past them but his attempts to read Marx, Engels and Mao Tsetung failed—even a mono-linguistic bureaucrat could recognize those names. But his subscriptions, again facilitated by his father, to English and American magazines—the New Statesman, the New Republic and others—helped to supply the lack.

  "We live like peasants here, do we not?" he said to Ramirez after lights out.

  Ramirez was still smoking, even in the dark. "Less wine and no fat women to fuck, but yes, if you like, peasants."

  "And what is an educated, radicalized peasant?"

  "A freak," Ramirez said.

  "No. A revolutionary."

  "Oh, God."

  "Do you know what Castro did?"

  "I know, but you are going to tell me again."

  "With a handful of men he regained his liberty and the liberty of the Cuban people. With a handful!"

  "They must have been an exceptional lot."

  "Yes. Do you know about 'Che' Guevara?"

  "Refresh my memory."

  "He was from the middle class, like me. He was of mixed parentage, Irish and Spanish. I am English and Spanish. That man is a hero."

  Ramirez sighed. "Juan, you are young. You have only eight years to serve—with your father to help, probably four. You are educated, you speak well, you look good. It's no disgrace in this country to have been in gaol. You should be thinking ahead—you could be a union leader, a politician, a big man in La Paz."

  "I will burn La Paz to the ground if I have to," Juan said.

  38

  The prison was a simple structure—a grey concrete block surrounded by an asphalt exercise yard. The yard was fenced with watchtowers at each corner. The administration section, workshops and infirmary were located at the east end of the block. The kitchen and eating hall, guards' quarters, rest rooms and armoury were in the centre and prisoners were housed in three tiers of cells in the western section. The farm covered seventy-five hectares, most of which was cleared, both for cultivation and to remove possible hiding places. When the prisoners worked outside they were supervised by armed guards in teams of two and three.

  Juan dreamed of escape.

  "You're crazy," Ramirez told him. "You don't even have to shave every day. You've got your whole life ahead of you. If they catch you trying to escape they'll shoot you. And for what?"

  "A revolutionary has an obligation to try to escape, like a prisoner of war."

  "Loco," Ramirez said. He peered at the young man sitting in shadow in the corner of the small cell. It was late afternoon, when the daylight was dying and before the electricity was turned on. "Where are you from? I mean your family. You don't look Spanish or mestizo."

  "My father is English. I told you that."

  "Ah, that accounts for it." Ramirez tapped the side of his head. "English. Loco."

  Eduardo La Vita continued to serve in the MNR government but he found himself increasingly at odds with its aims. Juan Lechin, Vice-President of Bolivia and leader of the mineworkers' union, was becoming increasingly disaffected. Dr Paz had hinted that he wanted the constitution amended to permit him to serve a second successive term. The lawyer in Eduardo bridled at this and the progressive reformer in him worried at Paz's increasing leniency towards the army.

  "It is becoming intolerable," Eduardo told Yolanda. "I don't know how much longer I can continue."

  "The parole?"

  "Coming, possibly. A slow process."

  Yolanda devoted herself to her husband's mental and physical comfort, attempting to help him to remain at his post until Juan was released. Sometimes she felt that she was in a race in which the finishing line receded with every forward movement she made. Eduardo worked hard and slept badly, and continued to smoke too much and eat too little.

  When Yolanda returned from a visit to Santa Cruz, she was shocked to find Eduardo at home during office hours. He sat by the living room window in an easy chair. A cigarette burned unnoticed in an ashtray beside him.
>
  "You haven't . . . ?"

  "No, no, of course not. Two days' leave. I can hardly breathe sometimes. I got a lungful of petrol fumes in the street and I had a collapse." He paused for breath. "I'm all right now. How is the boy?"

  Yolanda could see that he was far from all right. In pyjamas and dressing gown he appeared shrunken; the cords in his neck stood out and his hair had lost colour and texture—it lay white, flat and lank across his skull. She stubbed out the cigarette and rested her hand lightly on Eduardo's shoulder. The bones felt fragile. "He is physically very well," she said. "Taller and stronger. He is a wonderful-looking man. Eduardo, it has been four years. He is a man."

  "But what kind of a man?"

  Yolanda removed her hat and gloves; she made coffee and brought the cups into the living room. Eduardo had lit another cigarette. He was staring out the window at the tall white house opposite. Its dark shutters banged in a wind that promised a late-afternoon squall. Yolanda handed Eduardo a cup. "He is very well informed," she said. "A student of politics."

  Eduardo grimaced and drank some coffee.

  "He appears to think that big changes are coming."

  "Change is always coming. That is not very profound."

  "He expects a coup. He thinks the army will take control."

  "He could be right. What does he hope to gain from that?" Eduardo coughed once, lightly, then a gust of coughing overtook him. He struggled against it. "An amnesty?"

  Yolanda reached out to touch his face. "You must rest, querido."

  "No, tell me."

  "He is in touch with people who want the coup to happen. Revolutionaries. Cubans. Eduardo, I think he plans to escape."

  Eduardo's hand shook and he dropped the cup. Before it hit the floor he was convulsed by a fit of coughing. The coughs racked him, jerked him upright and shook him in long, shuddering spasms. He collapsed into the chair and was still. Yolanda grasped his wrist and probed for the pulse but felt nothing. Her hand closed around the thin wrist, and her head fell forward into her husband's lap.

  Juan took the news of his father's death stoically as, he imagined, behoved a true revolutionary. He grieved for his mother, who visited him soon after the funeral, but he was scarcely able to talk to her. He welcomed her news that she was going to Paraguay.