Thing to Love

by Geoffrey Household

  “Anyway you used to hang out of your window and listen.”

  “Only because Papá told me I was too young. Did he play under your window too, Pilar?”

  “Yes. It was so beautiful.”

  “He had a regular round like an organ-grinder,” Juan said.

  “I don’t know why you always have to laugh at lovely old customs, Juan,” Pilar replied with soft indignation.

  Morote, delighted to show that he could surpass his company in at least one social accomplishment, took the guitar from Valdés. His broad thumbs and low, harsh voice carried back the history of Guayanas in song after song to Lima and Madrid.

  Naturally he did not know when to stop; but the general, content to bask in that proud and melancholy culture which was half his and would be the birthright of his children, could have listened all evening. He was warm with love for those millions of mestizos who made up Guayanas and his Division. Spanish and Indian — what mixture in the world had produced so promising a people? They had a right not to be put off century after century with slight improvements on the same old thing. Gil and his land reforms, whether economically sound or not, at least offered justice.

  Felicia, watching her husband, murmured obviously sincere encouragement. As for Valdés and the Avellanas, if they felt impatience they were far too courteous to show it. All of them knew that it was his guitar-playing which had carried Morote out of the rut of his fellow dock laborers and first proved to him that he could command an audience.

  Beltrán Carrillo, however, took advantage of too short an interval, when the thick hand was again raised over the strings, to say: “Shall we go?”

  Miro was surprised that one born and bred in San Vicente could be so abrupt. Carrillo always looked so thoroughly of the capital — a flabby, middle-class Latin-American businessman with nothing much to show that he didn’t run a prosperous men’s wear shop except his long, clean-shaven upper lip. But intellectuals . . . Well, he had noticed before that in the urgency of their thoughts they did not consider themselves bound by the ordinary rules of politeness.

  Morote laid down the guitar, exchanging a curious glance with the general. It was quite impossible to translate. Doubt? Regret? A turning for appreciation to the one person he had fascinated?

  “It’s to talk in the air,” he murmured.

  The four men drifted away to Gil Avellana’s study, where, as Miro knew very well, they had been discussing the future of Guayanas for most of the weekend. When Felicia and Pilar had also gone into the house to change, he lay back in his chair trying to translate that last remark. To talk in the air — did it mean that for Morote, nothing counted but direct action, or was he affected by the mood of the moment and suggesting that reality was not in politics but in the emptiness of the sierra and an act of creation? Primitive poet though he was, that seemed unlikely. For Morote power was reality. Then did he mean that continual talk was futile against such a practical politician as Vidal? It was indeed, without — did Morote mean without Fifth Division?

  That was not a question to ask Juan, silently occupied with a cigar and the ice tinkling in his long glass. Miro understood the leader from the Barracas better than his father-in-law — who considered him as a sort of ghost out of the future — or the Ateneo, who were terrified of him.

  “This basket chair,” said Juan, “with its broad arm and a hole for the glass, died out fifty years ago. Yet I expect you could buy such a chair in any New York department store.”

  “What about it?” the general asked cautiously.

  He realized that Juan, on the move to somewhere with his usual Indian approach, was feeling for a flank. He never attacked from the front. If he had ever had a serious objective, in politics or war, he would have been a formidable opponent.

  “I was only thinking, Miro, that our friends in the smoke-filled room — except that Valdeski doesn’t smoke — carry their anti-Americanism too far. North America revives things. Look at their Latin-American architecture! Basket chairs, patios, our dances and our music! But in resurrecting a good thing, you lose its simplicity. Gil hates that, but doesn’t see that it applies to him too.”

  “People have been regretting the loss of simplicity for the last ten thousand years,” the general said.

  “But they won’t give up hope of recovering it. Hitler was certainly trying to recover simplicity. Lenin, too, I think. The Vidals of this world don’t make such a damned silly mistake. But I ruminate, Miro, like an old ram in too rich a pasture. Didn’t you say you were enjoying this?”

  “I am.”

  “Why? Why more than San Vicente?”

  It was not enough to say that everybody preferred open country to a town. Besides, everybody didn’t. Juan himself could seldom be extracted from a town.

  “Freedom. Light. I don’t know. Would you understand it if I said that in San Vicente I feel limited? Not in my work. Not in social life. But . . . Well, it may be just the heat.”

  “I’ve never noticed you minded it.”

  “I don’t. Sweat seems to keep me fit. Why do I prefer country to town? Read any schoolgirl’s essay for the answer. What’s so urgent about it?”

  “You’ll have to give up the Army eventually, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you mind very much?”

  “Not now. I wouldn’t have liked it without Feli. But I have always known I could get no further. It’s unthinkable to have a foreign immigrant at the top of things. A few more years, and I’ll be commanded by someone who is now one of my colonels. If I can give Guayanas the right one, my job is over.”

  “Business?”

  “I suppose so,” said the general without enthusiasm.

  “You won’t like living in San Vicente all the time.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “Miro, it’s an extraordinary thing. Having started work for the first time in my late fifties, I find that I enjoy it.”

  Miro received this casual remark with a noncommittal grunt. Juan was enjoying work. He took to it as a thoroughly amoral, entertaining sport much as other men of his age, having despised ball games all their lives, developed a passion for golf. All the same, he was hardly likely to recommend with nineteenth-century solemnity the virtues of industry. Or did he still believe that soldiers were idle?

  “To make money out of amusement seems to me quite unparalleled,” Juan went on. “But there it is. So I propose to continue to be entertained throughout my sixties and seventies. Meanwhile I begin to find myself with liquid cash for investment. A rarity. The capital structure of the Fonsagradas was always to sell a lot of cows in order to buy another lot of cows. But that is beside the point. I impress upon you, Miro, that I am enjoying myself merely to assure you that I shall not give up selling patent medicines for some time to come. In fact, my coffin will be borne to the Cathedral upon the shoulders of deeply ululating wholesale druggists — not, as I had long assumed, in the barbaric and dignified silence of caciques of the blood.”

  “General applause,” said Miro. “The benches were in tears.”

  “So they should be. But you I have failed to move. And this, although I have always observed, Miro, that tears are most easily drawn from an audience when it has not the foggiest notion what the orator is talking about. I propose to restore the house of the Fonsagradas.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “Not the town house. The estancia, in Los Venados. I see no reason why it should not be provided with a new roof and modern plumbing. The hardest task will be to expel a number of excellent families who are at present using the Great Hall as a communal dwelling house, and to rehouse them on the estate.”

  “I didn’t know you had any estate.”

  “I haven’t. I sold it all except the home pastures.”

  “The garden?”

  “There isn’t any. No, about twelve or fifteen square miles with nothing much on them and no income. But very well watered. We shall need a road of course. The production I
have in mind cannot be moved on heads and pack animals. But there are no engineering difficulties. Now, I suggest that when you retire you could go and imitate Gil Avellana and Valdeski. A man who can make Indians into soldiers should have no trouble in training them to use land intelligently. Government favor we can be sure of — well, whatever happens. The initial capital we have, and it is not likely to grow less. That was why I approached the project, possibly rhetorically, by way of the hedonistic values of commerce. Now, Miro, you are already my beloved son-in-law and most sympathetic friend. You are bound in the course of nature to be my heir. So what about developing our property meanwhile, holding yourself in readiness of course to come to the aid of your country in the highly improbable event of war? Would you like it?”

  Miro was staggered by the impact of Juan in the unexpected role of patriotic agriculturist, but his response to such generosity had to be frank.

  “Immensely,” he answered. “It is the life I would choose. But what does Feli think?”

  “I haven’t asked her, my dear son. I wanted to be sure of your own tastes first. Hers I know. She cherishes all the family traditions. So she will welcome my proposal — on condition that she can play the social democrat.”

  “But my retirement might be still some years away,” said the general doubtfully.

  “There is no hurry. The road first. And then the house. It’s some years before we shall have to bother Henry Penruddock to get us contracts for whatever the hell they eat in England. But I want you to know that the estancia is there for you at need.”

  At need. So that was it. The slight stress on the word enabled Miro to follow his father-in-law’s thought all the way from basket chairs. But he did not think that this political jockeying for position was likely to affect him urgently. Fifth Division was just as ready to serve under Avellana as Vidal.

  Juan was right about Feli. She too was in love with the atmosphere of La Joya. There were as many lives going on as in a medieval monastery. While he and Juan sat in complete privacy on the terrace and Avellana in his study discussed with his friends the future of Guayanas, while the women were chatting and changing in the wholly modern luxury of the bedroom floor, the superintendents in their own quarters, the servants and cooks at their business, the hall reached out into the plains and gathered to itself scattered individuals who had passed the day in work or travel over the immensities of Avellana’s land. It was theirs for what they wished as long as they liked. It had little comfort beyond benches and tables and a few high chairs, but an air of immense hospitality. There was wine and something casual to eat while waiting for the evening meal.

  Here was the source, still healthily flowing, of the Avellana mystique — a classless society, bound together by common values of patience and generosity. As a way of life it was over, now that vehicles were rapidly replacing horses and the younger generation had become accustomed to paying for a night’s lodging. As a political ideal it was possibly valid, though only families like the Avellanas had the money to establish co-operatives and small-holdings and still keep up an incongruous magnificence of tradition; Feli and he couldn’t possibly afford it. What then remained? Possibly that remainder was what Avellana was after. A quality of selfless service, which he chose to call aristocratic, was to be imposed by example and propaganda upon a people which had a natural taste for it.

  When Felicia joined them, agriculture and politics vanished completely from his thoughts. She had developed a variety of Rosa Fonsagrada in which the pink glow was entirely dominated by gold. He guessed the motive. If the men were going to glorify their traditions and ancestry by fancy dress, so was she. The frock of white and gold he knew; but on the two occasions when she had worn it in San Vicente he had assumed that its odd simplicity was Parisian. Now, however, worn with heavy gold earrings and on her black hair a half circlet of gold with a gold sun in the center, all of Indian workmanship, it was perfectly clear that the dress had been deliberately designed on the lines of the Indian smock.

  “And whom is the Priestess of the Sun to sacrifice this evening?” asked Juan, always appreciative of any feminine change of personality.

  “Nobody,” she laughed. “There’s too much black around.”

  “Only Pilar.”

  “Not Pilar. Them. Whatever they wear, don’t you feel it ought to be black?”

  “In God’s name, why?” asked her father, startled.

  “They are so serious.”

  “You don’t look frivolous yourself. Pablo Morote is quite likely to fall down and worship.”

  “Very good for him. I shall be a change from Gil, Miro and Karl Marx.”

  “We too have been serious.”

  Felicia glanced quickly at her husband. Seeing him relaxed and genial she said nothing.

  To Miro’s surprise Juan developed his plan then and there. It was unlike him to want an answer to anything in a hurry. And it was obvious from Feli’s response that he had never before discussed with her the resurrection of the estancia in Los Venados.

  “Would you enjoy it?” she asked her husband.

  “You know I would.”

  “Yes. You have been so happy for these three days. We have all felt it.”

  “You’ve married my daughter and married the Army, Miro,” Juan said. “Now marry the country!”

  “You are anxious for me to retire?”

  “Not in the least. I just want you to feel free to do so whenever you wish. I am a very simple character, Miro. I like to avoid complications.”

  Felicia stared at her father. It was a most astonishing claim.

  “Complications, my dear daughter, are what a man thinks they are. When I am merely making an artistic arrangement of life as our excellent hostess does of flowers — doubtless the only accomplishment which a despairing convent was able to teach her — then I am not afraid of complications. But if they are emotional I dislike them.”

  “If it’s a question of the estate and you have got involved with that woman with the dyed hair . . .” Felicia began.

  “It is not dyed, my dear.”

  “How do you know it isn’t?”

  “There are times, Feli, when I wish your dear mother was still alive to answer your girlish questions. It is the three of us whom I wish to preserve from — well — shall I say the possibility of mutual reproaches?”

  “Juan, how deeply are you engaged to Avellana?” Miro asked directly.

  “I am like a public bath attendant, Miro. My business is on the edge. I have no intention of plunging into the streets. You will find me under the awnings of the Ateneo steadying the nerves of my fellow members. I shall remind them how very peaceful our revolutions are. However much one fears they may bring the millennium, they never do. How many have you lived through, Feli?”

  “I haven’t any idea. Five at least up to Vidal. Or do you count risings in the provinces?”

  “Vidal was fairly elected,” Miro said.

  “His first term, yes. His second, possibly. But our recent elections, Miro, have put him in the awkward position of being unable to sack the civil governors because they know what happened to the votes of the opposition. Vidal has become a fixture — not the type to deserve the attentions of our excitable populace, far from a dictator, yet very difficult to remove by a vote.”

  “Are you sure he would be? The minority which trusts Vidal must be nearly as large as the minority which wants Avellana. And majorities — they are just a noise.”

  “And that, my son, is soldier’s arrogance! No political party is ever more than a tiny minority. It is a seed. Its business is to create a plant when soil and season are favorable. And it doesn’t in the least matter if the plant dies down afterwards.”

  “The best thing about Avellana,” Felicia said, “is that he has never been in politics at all. There won’t be any more Managerial Society.”

  “There will,” said Miro. “But I admit it is the manner which counts. Sometimes I don’t even see a bribe — at first.”

&
nbsp; Juan caught the half-humorous flash of the dark blue eyes and translated it correctly.

  “Miro, you penetrate a fog most admirably, but tend to discover blank walls at the end of it. Give me credit for knowing you. The surest way of making you refuse my proposal would be to attach any conditions to it. I’m not offering you an inducement to join Avellana. I am suggesting a possible future so that you may feel entirely free. . . . Don’t they ever dine in this place?” he added impatiently. “When I was a politician we did our business in town.”

  “But you were never a nationalist,” said Felicia.

  “Nor is Gil Avellana. He merely dresses in that gallant and outdated costume in order that we may forget his depressingly efficient economics.”

  “Now do you see why I told you they are all dressed in black?”

  “I wish you would not say it, Feli, and I do not see. Why doesn’t that damned woman get them out of there?”

  When, however, Pilar joined them on the terrace she showed no inclination to take such unwomanly responsibility in spite of Juan’s broad hints. Evidently it was inconceivable for her to remind her husband, even by the most tactful and indirect of methods, that it was nearly half-past ten.

  “You and the general should both be in there helping them,” she said severely.

  Juan instantly tried to conjure away this disastrous remark into fantasy.

  “My mathematics, Pilar, would be little help. If I could multiply with certainty I should have governed this country. But being able only to add and subtract, I contented myself with the minor post of Vice President.”

  “I tried to teach him to use a slide rule,” said Felicia, forcing her fixed smile to have some life in it. “In your convent, Pilar, didn’t it often seem extraordinary to you how little parents knew?”

  But Pilar refused to be sidetracked.

  “It has nothing to do with arithmetic,” she replied. “They are drawing up the manifesto.”

  Miro remained sunk in his chair, solid, unmoved and showing no sign of his momentary indignation. He would have been surprised to realize that both Feli and his staff knew very well the meaning of that serene immobility.