‘Aunt Augusta, that had nothing to do with me.’
‘Rather a pity,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘under the circumstances.’
Wordsworth came into the room wearing the butcher’s apron in which I had first seen him in the flat above the Crown and Anchor. Then his services in washing up had been recognized and praised, but I could tell they were taken for granted now.
‘Chop finished?’
‘We will have our coffee in the garden,’ my aunt said grandly.
We sat down in the meagre shade of a banana tree. The air was sweet with orange and jasmine, and the moon swam palely in the pale blue daylight sky. It looked as worn and thin as an old coin, and the craters were the same colour as the sky, so that one seemed to be looking through holes at the universe behind. There was no sound of traffic. The clip-clop of a horse belonged to the same ancient world of silence.
‘Yes, it’s very peaceful,’ my aunt said, ‘only an occasional gunshot after dark. The police are sometimes trigger-happy. I forget whether it’s one lump or two.’
‘I wish you would tell me a little more, Aunt Augusta. I can’t help being puzzled. This big house and no furniture … and Wordsworth here with you.’
‘I brought him from Paris,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘I was travelling with rather a lot of ready money – nearly everything I had left, though I kept enough in Berne to pay for your ticket. A frail old lady like myself needed a bodyguard.’ It was the first time I had ever heard her admit to being old.
‘You could have taken me with you.’
‘I wasn’t sure about your attitude to certain things. You were rather shocked, you remember, about that gold bar in Istanbul. What a pity General Abdul made a mess of the affair. We could have done now with the twenty-five per cent.’
‘Where has all your money gone, Aunt Augusta? You haven’t even a bed to sleep in.’
‘The mattresses are perfectly comfortable, and I have always found a soft bed enervating. When I arrived here poor Mr Visconti was in a very low state. He was living on credit in a really horrible little hotel. All his money had gone on his new passport and bribes to the police. God knows how Dr Mengele manages, but I expect he has a numbered account in Switzerland. I only arrived just in time. He was sick too, poor fellow, from living mainly on mandioca.’
‘So you gave him your money a second time, Aunt Augusta?’
‘Of course, what do you expect? He needed it. We bought this house for a song (someone was murdered here twenty years ago and people are very superstitious) and what was left has been well invested now. We have a half share in a very promising enterprise.’
‘A Dakota by any chance?’
My aunt gave a little excited giggle. ‘Mr Visconti will tell you all about it himself.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He meant to be back yesterday, but there has been a lot of rain and the roads are very bad.’ She looked with pride at the empty shell of her house. She said, ‘You won’t know this place in a week’s time. When the chandeliers are hung in the hall, and the furniture arrives. I so wanted it to be ready before you came, but there were delays in Panama. A lot always depends on Panama.’
‘And what about the police?’
‘Oh, they won’t interfere with an established business,’ my aunt said.
All the same another day passed and Mr Visconti had not returned from wherever he was. My aunt slept late on her mattresses, Wordsworth was busy cleaning, and I walked around the town. Preparations were in progress for some festival. There were decorated cars of pretty girls parked at street corners. Outside the cathedral and the military academy, which faced each other over the little memorial tank, squads of soldiers goose-stepped. There were pictures of the General everywhere – sometimes in uniform and sometimes in civilian clothes looking like the amiable well-fed host of a Bavarian bierstube. There had been unpleasant stories in Buenos Aires about his early rule – enemies tossed out of aeroplanes into the jungle, bodies washed up on the Argentine shore of the two great rivers with their hands and feet bound with wire, but there were cheap cigarettes on the street and cheap whisky in the stores and no income tax to pay (so my aunt had told me) and even the bribes were not unreasonable if one were doing well and could pay regularly, and the oranges lay under the trees hardly worth the bother of gathering when they were threepence a dozen in the market, and everywhere there was the smell of flowers. I hoped that Mr Visconti’s investment would prove a success. There were worse places than this to end one’s days.
But when I returned home the second evening Mr Visconti was not there, and my aunt was having a bitter argument with Wordsworth. As I crossed the lawn I could hear her voice sounding hollowly from the empty hall at the head of the garden steps. ‘I am not your bebi gel, Wordsworth, any more. Understand that. I have kept enough money for you to return to Europe …’
‘Ar no wan yo money,’ Wordsworth’s voice replied.
‘You’ve taken plenty of my money in the past. The CTCs you’ve had from me and all my friends …’
‘Ar tak yo money them times because you lov me, you slip with me, you lak jig-jig with Wordsworth. Now you no slip with me, you no lov me, I no wan your damn money. You give it him. He tak everytin you got. When you got noting at all, you come to Wordsworth, and ar work for you and ar slip with you an you lov me and you lak jig-jig all same last time.’
I stood at the bottom of the steps. I couldn’t turn my back and walk away. They would have seen me.
‘Don’t you understand, Wordsworth, all that’s finished now I have Mr Visconti back. Mr Visconti wants you to go, and I want what he wants.’
‘He be feared of Wordsworth.’
‘Dear, dear Wordsworth, it’s you who should be afraid. I want you to leave me now – today – don’t you understand that.’
‘Okay,’ Wordsworth said, ‘ar go. You ask me an ar go. Ar no feared of that man. But you no slip with me no more an ar go.’ My aunt made a movement as though she wished to embrace him, but Wordsworth turned away from her and came down the steps. He didn’t even see me, though I was only a step away. ‘Goodbye, Wordsworth,’ I said and held out my hand. I had a fifty-dollar note, concealed in it. Wordsworth looked at the note but he didn’t take it. He said, ‘Goodbye, Mr Pullen. Man, darkness deepens, sure thing, sure thing, she no abide with me.’ He pressed my left hand which was moneyless and went off down the garden.
My aunt came out on to the steps to see the last of him.
‘How will you do without him in this big house?’ I asked.
‘Staff are easy to come by and much cheaper than Wordsworth with all his CTCs. Oh, I’m sorry for poor Wordsworth,’ she added, ‘but he was only a stop-gap. Everything has been a stop-gap since Mr Visconti and I were separated.’
‘You must love Mr Visconti a great deal. Is he worth it?’
‘To me he is. I like men who are untouchable. I’ve never wanted a man who needed me, Henry. A need is a claim. I thought that Wordsworth wanted my money and the comfort I gave him at the Crown and Anchor, but there’s not much comfort for anyone here and you saw how he wouldn’t even take a CTC. I’m disappointed in Wordsworth.’ She added as though it were relevant, ‘Your father was pretty untouchable too.’
‘All the same I found your photograph in Rob Roy.’
‘Perhaps he wasn’t untouchable enough,’ she said, and she added with venom in her voice, ‘Think of the little school-teacher and “Dolly, darling” and dying in her arms.’
The house was twice as empty now that Wordsworth had gone and we were alone. We ate our evening meal almost in silence, and I drank too much of the heavy sweet medicinal wine. Once we heard the distant sound of a car and my aunt went at once to the big windows which gave on to the garden. The single globe on the enormous ceiling hardly stretched that far, so that she looked slim and young in her dark dress, and in the obscurity I would never have taken her for an old woman. She quoted at me with a scared smile,
‘She only said, “The night is dre
ary,
He cometh not,” she said.’
She added, ‘Your father taught me that.’
‘Yes, I learnt it from him too – in a way. He turned down that page in Palgrave.’
‘And no doubt he taught it to Dolly darling,’ she said. ‘Can’t you imagine her reciting it over the grave in Boulogne like a prayer?’
‘You are not untouchable, Aunt Augusta.’
‘That’s why I need a man who is. Two touchables together, what a terrible life they always make of it, two people suffering, afraid to speak, afraid to act, afraid of hurting. Life can be bearable when it’s only one who suffers. It’s easy to put up with your own suffering, but not someone else’s. I’m not afraid of making Mr Visconti suffer. I wouldn’t know how. I have a wonderful feeling of freedom. I can say what I like, and it will never get under that thick dago skin of his.’
‘And if he makes you suffer?’
‘It’s only for a little time, Henry. Like now. When he doesn’t come and I don’t know what’s keeping him, and I fear …’
‘There can’t be anything seriously wrong. If there had been an accident you would have heard from the police.’
‘My dear, this is Paraguay. I am afraid of the police.’
‘Then why do you stay here?’
‘Mr Visconti hasn’t all that much choice. I daresay he might be safe in Brazil if he had enough money. Perhaps when he’s made a fortune, we can move there. Mr Visconti has always wanted to make a fortune, and he believes he can at last make one here. He has come close to making a fortune so many times. There was Saudi Arabia and then there were the Germans …’
‘If he makes one now he won’t have very long to enjoy it.’
‘That’s not the point. He’ll die happy if it’s there. Stacked gold bars. (He has always had a fancy for gold bars.) He’ll have done what he set out to do.’
‘Why did you want me to come, Aunt Augusta?’
‘You are the only family I have, Henry – and you can be of great use to Mr Visconti.’
It was not an idea which appealed to me greatly.
‘I can’t speak a word of Spanish,’ I said.
‘Mr Visconti wants somebody he can trust to keep the books. Accounts have always been his weak point.’
I looked around at the empty room. The bare globe flickered with an approaching storm. The packing-case scratched hard against my thigh. I thought of the two mattresses and the dressing-table upstairs. The books didn’t seem to need very much accounting. I said, ‘I planned to leave after I had seen you.’
‘Leave? Why?’
‘I was thinking that perhaps it’s almost time I settled down.’
‘What else have you been doing? For far too long.’
‘And married I was going to say.’
‘At your age?’
‘I’m not nearly as old as Mr Visconti.’
A gust of rain splashed against the windows. I began to tell my aunt about Miss Keene and of the evening when I had nearly proposed to her.
‘You are suffering from loneliness,’ my aunt said. ‘That’s all. You won’t be lonely here.’
‘I really think Miss Keene loves me a little. I get a bit of pleasure from the thought that perhaps I could make her happy.’ I was arguing without conviction, waiting for my aunt’s denial, and even hoping for it.
‘In a year,’ my aunt said, ‘what would you two have to talk about? She would sit over her tatting – I didn’t realize that anyone still tatted – and you would read gardening catalogues, and then when the silence was almost unbearable she would begin to tell you a story of Koffiefontein which you had heard a dozen times before. Do you know what you’ll think about when you can’t sleep in your double bed? Not of women. You don’t care enough about them, or you wouldn’t even consider marrying Miss Keene. You will think how every day you are getting a little closer to death. It will stand there as close as the bedroom wall. And you’ll become more and more afraid of the wall because nothing can prevent you coming nearer and nearer to it every night while you try to sleep and Miss Keene reads. What does Miss Keene read?’
‘You may be right, Aunt Augusta, but isn’t it the same everywhere at our age?’
‘Not here it isn’t. Tomorrow you may be shot in the street by a policeman because you haven’t understood Guaraní, or a man may knife you in a cantina because you can’t speak Spanish and he thinks you are acting in a superior way. Next week, when we have our Dakota, perhaps it will crash with you over Argentina. (Mr Visconti is too old to fly with the pilot.) My dear Henry, if you live with us, you won’t be edging day by day across to any last wall. The wall will find you of its own accord without your help, and every day you live will seem to you a kind of victory. “I was too sharp for it that time,” you will say, when night comes, and afterwards you’ll sleep well.’ She said, ‘I only hope the wall hasn’t found Mr Visconti. If it has I will have to go out and look for it myself.’
5
THE far-off murmur of great crowds woke me next morning; I thought at first that I was back in Brighton and that the sea was turning the shingle. My aunt was already up and had prepared breakfast with grapefruit picked in the garden. From the town came snatches of music.
‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s the National Day. Wordsworth warned me, but I had forgotten. If you go into town carry something red.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s the colour of the governing party. The Liberal party is blue, but it’s unhealthy to carry blue. No one does.’
‘I haven’t got anything red.’
‘I’ve got a red scarf.’
‘I can hardly wear a woman’s scarf.’
‘Stuff it in your breast pocket. It will look like a handkerchief.’
‘Won’t you come into town with me, Aunt Augusta?’
‘No. I must wait for Mr Visconti. He will come today for sure. Or at least he’ll send a message.’
I needn’t have been shy of wearing the scarf. Most men in the street wore red scarves round their necks, and many scarves were printed with a picture of the General. Only the bourgeois confined themselves to a handkerchief, and some to a handkerchief barely on display at all but pressed in the hand and showing only through the knuckles – perhaps they would rather have carried blue. There were red flags everywhere: you would have thought the town had been taken over by the Communists, but red here was the colour of conservatism. I was held up continually at street crossings by processions of women in red scarves carrying portraits of the General and slogans about the great Colorado party. Groups of gauchos came riding into town with scarlet reins. A drunk man fell out of a tavern door and lay face down in the road with the General’s genial face spread over his back as the horses picked their way across him. Decorated cars carrying pretty girls with scarlet camellia blossoms in their hair went by. Even the sun looked red through the morning mist.
The movement of the crowd edged me towards the Avenue of Mariscal Lopez where the processions were passing. Across the road were stands reserved for the government and the diplomats. I could recognize the General taking the salute, and the stand next door must have been that of the American Embassy, for in the back row I could see my friend O’Toole pressed into a corner by a stout military attaché. I waved to him and I think he must have seen me because he gave a shy smile and spoke to the fat man at his side. Then a procession passed and I lost sight of him.
It was a procession of elderly men in shabby suits – a few were on crutches and some had lost an arm. They carried banners representing their old units. They had fought in the Chaco war, and once a year, I suppose, they had this moment of pride. They looked more human than the colonels who followed them, standing upright in their cars, in dress uniforms with gold tassels and epaulettes, all with black moustaches and all quite indistinguishable; the colonels looked like painted skittles waiting for a ball to bowl them over.
After an hour I had had enough of watching and walked into the centre of town,
to the new skyscraper hotel, to buy an English-language newspaper, but there was only a five-day-old New York Times. A man spoke to me in a confidential voice before I went into the hotel; he had a distinguished intellectual air; he might have been a diplomat or a university professor. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said.
‘Any US dollars?’ he asked me rapidly, and when I shook my head (for I had no desire to break any local currency laws) he walked away. Unfortunately when I emerged again from the hotel with my newspaper he was back on the opposite pavement and failed to recognize me. ‘Any US dollars?’ he whispered. I said ‘No’ again and he glared at me with an air of disgust and disdain, as though I had been playing a childish practical joke.
I walked back towards the edge of town and my aunt’s house, interrupted at street corners by the tag end of processions. A palatial house covered in banners bore a number of scarlet placards; it was probably the headquarters of the Colorado party. Stout men in city suits who sweated in the morning sun climbed up and down the wide steps wearing red scarves. One of them stopped and demanded, or so I supposed, what I wanted. ‘Colorado?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Are you American?’
I was glad to find someone who spoke English. He had the face of an amiable bulldog, but he needed a shave.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m English.’
He gave a short bark which did not sound amiable at all, and at that moment, perhaps because of the heat, the sun and the scent of flowers, I was overcome by a fit of sneezing. Without thinking I drew my aunt’s red scarf from my breast pocket and blew my nose. It was most unfortunate. I found myself sitting on the pavement without knowing how I got there, and my nose streamed with blood. Fat men surrounded me, all of them in dark suits and all with faces of bulldogs. Others like them appeared on the balcony of the Colorado house and looked down at me with curiosity and disapproval. I heard the word ‘Ingles’ repeated often, and then a policeman yanked me to my feet. Afterwards I was to think how lucky I had been; if I had blown my nose near a group of gauchos I might well have received a knife in the ribs.
Travels With My Aunt Page 23