Days of Your Fathers

by Geoffrey Household

  And then a woman! Always a woman behind every commotion, true? Her husband was away, so she left the door open for her lover. And in walked Sebastiano.

  The carter rose from the table, steadying himself with a hand upon my shoulder, unharnessed the mule and ordered:

  ‘Aupa, Sebastiano!’

  The mule obediently performed a curret and pawed the air as if trained in the Spanish Riding School. I could at last understand its apocalyptic pose against the water tank.

  ‘So you see,’ the carter went on, ‘she fled in panic slamming the door and my clever Sebastiano tried to cut his way out through the ceiling. That was enough to bring the roof down. Now it can be seen how they build houses for the poor!’

  The police, I gathered, had tended to approve his theory though it was hardly more believable than Pepe’s impromptu space fiction. I sympathised with them. Anyone possessed by Sebastiano was bound instinctively to be in favour of ascent from hell rather than descent from heaven.

  Estancia La Embajada

  The mound was so regular that I could have sworn it had been built by human labour; but standing on the summit, I found that it was no vast tomb which I had climbed; it was a neat, formal and miniature volcano with a passive crater in the centre where the black lava thrust its ridges and tumours through scanty turf. The hill stood on a plain of dark green pasture, some twenty square miles in extent, surrounded by steep slopes which, on the north, mounted to the snows and smoke-plume of Cotopaxi. The valley appeared to have a single owner, for it was well fenced and drained, and all the tracks converged upon a white-walled, red-roofed house marked on the map as ‘Estancia La Embajada’ – Embassy Ranch. The herds of dairy cattle and the low clouds washing the sides of the bowl suggested that I was on some farmer’s land in the Severn valley instead of a considerable estate ten thousand feet above the Pacific, with its own private volcano.

  It was late afternoon when I got down from this savage infant of a hill. The landmarks of the cordillera were blotted out, and grey tentacles of mist were feeling for the bottom of the valley. I did not fancy the long ride back to Riobamba. The path wound along the edge of a crater lake which had startled both me and my mule in sunlight – it looked and smelt like one of the more unpleasant hazards on the course of Pilgrim’s Progress – and was prohibitive when imagined under crawling vapour. I decided to ride over the estancia and ask for a bed.

  We plodded through the mist and two streams. A massive Holstein bull, coloured black and white like Cotopaxi, materialised out of a cloud and accompanied us for half a mile. Neither of us liked him. True, I knew that the lean beasts of real cattle country did not attack a mounted man; but I was doubtful whether this aristocrat imported from Europe would have heard of the local rule. The scent of a dairy came to my nostrils as we paced up the avenue of eucalyptus that led to the house, and when we arrived before the facade of round white arches two golden cockers barked and whined and leapt against their chains with the usual friendliness of spaniels to any newcomer. At the noise of this enthusiasm, effective as the growl of a watch-dog, a tall man in shirt-sleeves, corduroy breeches and gaiters came round the corner of the house. His face was bronzed and his hair dark and curly. He did not look like an Ecuadorian born. Possibly a Basque immigrant, I thought.

  ‘Buenas tardes, señor,’ I began. ‘Excuse this visit without ceremony, but …’

  He watched me keenly while I spoke.

  ‘A dirty evening,’ he interrupted cordially with a slight West Country burr in his voice. ‘We’ll gladly put you up if you care to stay the night.’

  ‘Are you English?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘Cornish,’ he corrected me.

  I put him down as a cowman or stud-groom imported by the owner of the estancia. It seemed odd that a man with all the earmarks of one fixed to his own soil should be earning wages in the heart of the cordillera.

  ‘Good Lord!’ What’s brought you out here?’ I asked impulsively.

  ‘A woman,’ he chuckled.

  He did not seem at all upset about her, seemed even to be mischievously waiting for some sympathetic remark from me.

  An Indian in a red poncho and wide-brimmed straw hat trotted out of the damp mist, driving before him a donkey and a llama both loaded with brushwood. He was moving in the wrong dimension. The Cornishman, the spaniels, the dairy scents and the dripping trees around the house had created a complete illusion of England. I should have been less surprised to see a boy on a bicycle delivering the evening paper.

  ‘Tu, Felipe!’ ordered the Cornishman. ‘Take the gentleman’s mule round to the stables. He is staying the night.’

  ‘Ahora mismo, patron,’ answered the peon respectfully.

  ‘You own this place?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course! Come in – come in!’

  His manners were more brusque and free than those of an Ecuadorian, but the voice of all Spanish America rang out hospitably with his own. He led me into the hall of the estancia, a magnificent room with white-washed walls and Indian rugs on a floor of patterned tiles. It was too large to look untidy, though freely scattered with the possessions of a man living alone and at ease. There was a heap of saddlery under the far window, and on a long table – rough and evidently made on the estate – boxes of soil and packets of seeds and fertilisers which suggested that he had been experimenting with grasses.

  ‘A fine place!’ I said.

  ‘Not bad is it? I don’t want anything better. No summer and no winter and the best pasture in Ecuador. You should see it on a fine day.’

  ‘I did, from the top of your hill.’

  ‘Prospecting?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘No. Idling. I saw the hill from the head of the valley, and thought it might have been built by the old Quitos; so I rode over to look at it.’

  ‘A-ah! I’ll be bound you did! And you’re not the first. George Trevithick’s my name,’ he added heartily, as if now satisfied by my credentials.

  I introduced myself in turn.

  ‘Well, it’s luck for me that you happened to feel a bit curious about my hill,’ he said. ‘It’s not often I get a chance to speak my own language.’

  As he knotted a scarf around his throat and settled a solid, well-cut tweed coat on his broad shoulders, I looked at him more closely. He was older than I had thought at first – a man in the middle fifties, bearing himself with a distinction that might, when he was younger, have been a raffish swagger, but was now the independence of one who had made his own laws for himself and found that they also appeared satisfactory to his fellows. I could not understand how I had mistaken him for the cowman. He was very obviously the estanciero.

  He poured drinks, and we discussed Cornwall and cattle till supper. On the top of the Andes, a hundred miles from the equator, his pedigree beasts were short-lived and inclined to curious failures of their natural instincts. But he was a born experimenter, and the butter and cheese showed a profit. The religious orders of Quito – priests clucked around the capital as thick as fat black hens on a chicken farm – were, he said, his best customers.

  A wizened mestizo in a white jacket showed us into the dining-room. It was exquisite. Plate, linen, glass and furniture would have done credit to a Spanish grandee. Over his seat hung the portrait of a woman in her early thirties: a full-bosomed commanding beauty with fiery brown eyes in an unintelligent face.

  ‘That’s her!’ he said, jerking an irreverent thumb over his shoulder towards the picture. ‘What do you think of her?’

  I couldn’t gather from his tone whether she was the chief love of his life from whom he had at last and proudly broken free, or merely some woman over whom he had triumphed.

  ‘She had a pretty good opinion of herself,’ I replied. ‘And I expect she was right.’

  ‘Ah, Doña Clara! Doña Clara!’ he chuckled.

  The cooking of the simple meal was excellent, and the estanciero was a good talker. Like so many exiles, he revelled in the expressiveness of his own language. He woul
d halt for a moment in his flow of eloquence, feel for the English word, taste it and hand it to me, as it were, on the tip of his tongue. He had the slow, rich humour of the West Countryman, but had lived too long in Latin America to have kept a West Countryman’s reserve.

  ‘If you’re idling,’ he said when we had reached the coffee, ‘why don’t you stay a few weeks?’

  ‘I wish I could. But I’m only idling for the weekend. I’ve been in Quito on business and I have to be down at Guayaquil the day after tomorrow to catch my boat. I’m staying three nights at Riobamba on the way to get some exercise and see a bit more of the plateau.’

  ‘Three nights at Riobamba!’ he laughed. ‘You must be the first person that has ever stayed more than one in that hotel!’

  An exaggeration, of course, but there can’t have been many. The train from Quito to Guayaquil stopped for the night at Riobamba, and the hotel lived on passengers who arrived at seven in the evening and left at six next morning. That one ate reasonably and slept in a clean bed was proof of the proprietor’s natural hospitality; he could neither reduce the number of his guests by a bad name, nor increase them by a good one.

  ‘The hotel’s all right,’ I said, ‘considering …’

  ‘All right? You bet it’s all right! I bless that hotel. Good Lord, I – I turn to it to pray!’

  He looked at me sardonically, as if measuring how much curiosity so deliberate a statement had aroused.

  ‘Is that where you met Doña Clara?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I met her just five hours before we got there – when the consul escorted me to the train. A polite man, the consul. He didn’t quite know where he stood, you see.’

  ‘With Doña Clara?’

  ‘With me. I was being shown the door – though I paid my own first-class fare and had my steamship ticket. He had word that I wasn’t to be allowed to tender for the army contracts.’

  ‘Rifles?’

  ‘God, no! Rubber goods. There’d been a bit of a stink about them in Bogota. They were rotten, and unfortunately somebody opened the cases before I could put my next deal through at Quito. Pennyfather – that’s the consul – had had a letter, one of those marked confidential with the lion and the unicorn shouting secrets at each other across the top. He said he didn’t want to tell the War Ministry about me, but that he would if I didn’t clear out.

  ‘We were late arriving at the station. The consul had given me lunch. He was very friendly once it had been decided that I’d go quietly. He’d been in business himself.

  ‘You know the first-class coach that goes down to Guayaquil three times a week. It was the same one in those days – the same ten armchairs mounted on swivels so that you can turn round and talk to your three nearest fellow passengers. Like a little club for bishops and landowners.

  ‘There were only two travellers going down to the coast, though what with all the fuss and baggage it looked as if half Quito were travelling with them. Doña Clara was saying goodbye. Her servants were weeping – though I’ll bet they were glad to be rid of her – and her friends and her enemies and the stationmaster and the porters were rushing in and out of the coach. That woman and her stuff were all over the place.

  ‘Tucked away behind a pile of suitcases was her husband, Don Anastasio. He was taking his wife for a holiday by the same boat I was bound north on. He was the vice-president of the republic at the time. There was a senator sitting on each arm of his chair and all their three heads were wagging together. They were pretending to be occupied with lastminute affairs of state, and actually protecting themselves against Doña Clara. I tell you there was more cackle going on round that first-class coach than the two others.’

  This was a good illustration, for the two coaches next to the locomotive were always crammed with Indians and mestizos, passengers overflowing onto the platform, onlookers overflowing into the train. The railway still held romance and a journey by it was an excuse for a family gathering. Even a traveller to one of the little country towns of the plateau, a day’s ride on a horse, was seen off by all his relations if he took the train.

  ‘The consul just had time to introduce me to the pair of them. I wasn’t popular with Doña Clara, but Don Anastasio was cordial. He was glad to see me. It meant he wouldn’t have to listen to his wife all the way to Guayaquil.

  ‘Pennyfather had no sooner seen me into the train than it jerked. You know that jerk. It’s the only way to clear the coaches of non-travellers. They don’t pay any attention to the conductor or the whistle or the station bell, but the false start tumbles them out like fleas off the back of a dog. The train travels about two feet and then stops. It doesn’t really leave for another thirty seconds.

  ‘Well, Doña Clara spent the thirty seconds bowing and smiling to all the human souls she had incommoded, and giving Pennyfather dirty looks. She didn’t pay much attention to small fry such as consuls. She liked ministers. And as Great Britain didn’t have a minister in Ecuador, she was all the more annoyed with Pennyfather. Besides, she thought it was pretty poor taste on his part to stick a friend on the train when she wanted it to herself.

  ‘You should have seen that coach when we pulled out of Quito. There wasn’t a seat and hardly standing room in the aisle. Two chairs were occupied by the vice-president and his missus, three by her flowers, four by her baggage, and on the tenth she had a regular wardrobe of wraps and coats, with a damn great garden-party hat on top of the lot which I guessed she meant to put on five minutes before we reached Guayaquil. I didn’t like messing her things about, so I smiled at her sort of helplessly. But she looked clean through me. Don Anastasio caught my eye, and got up to clear the chair alongside his own.

  ‘“Not that one,” says she (Trevithick imitated the deep voice of a pompous woman and made me howl with laughter). “You may move the flowers, Anastasio.”

  ‘Don Anastasio sighed – well, no! He’d never have dared to sigh in front of his wife. It would have started an argument. Put it this way. He looked as if he had sighed. The flowers were easy enough to move, but at the other end of the coach. She had banished me as far away as possible.

  ‘We moved them, and then Don Anastasio silently shook my hand. I couldn’t quite understand it at the time. He told me afterwards that the scent of all those flowers had reminded him of the innumerable funerals that a vice-president had to attend. He was just keeping his mind off everything – trying to get away from Doña Clara and travel and the reproaches he’d have to listen to as far as Riobamba – and so he was open to the suggestion of funerals, if you see what I mean. He shook my hand quite automatically. I was the chief mourner.

  ‘Well, I returned his grip – with sympathy, for I was thinking of Doña Clara. He knew that all right. To cover his embarrassment he wiped up the damp patches which the flowers had left on the cream-coloured upholstery, and spread his mackintosh for me to sit on. Then he patted me on the back – he was a great back-patter, Don Anastasio – and returned to his place.

  ‘I sat there, looking out of the window and watching Ecuador slide past. I wasn’t feeling very bright. You know how it is. If one has a few drinks and a good lunch and then gets on a train or boat – down come all the sins you’ve ever committed, and your last sin in particular. And, what’s worse, all the damn futility of living the way you do, or living at all if it comes to that. Hell! I’ve known men whose memories were fair stuffed with sins and thought none the worse of them. We wouldn’t know what sin was if it weren’t for the priests and the lawyers. But we’d know futility all right. I tell you, I think sometimes that monkeys know all about futility. That’s why they’re always hopping after some mischief; they daren’t do nothing. I’m going to buy a monkey some day. It’s no good theorising and reading about human beings. I sit here in the evenings and think I’ve solved the problems of the universe, but it’s all hot air. There’s no solid fact behind it. I must buy a monkey. I say, where was I?’

  ‘You were watching Ecuador slide past the window,’ I said.

&
nbsp; ‘Ah, yes. Well, I liked Ecuador – green and soft and warm. I was sick at being turned out of it. It reminded me of home. My father was a farmer – a gentleman farmer he called himself, but the only gentlemanliness I saw was when he used to swear at me and my brothers for running around with the village kids. I did a bunk when I was sixteen. South Africa, South America, New South Wales – always South Something-or-other I’ve been in. Always running around to make a bit of money, enough to move somewhere else.

  ‘That’s what I was thinking as we joggled along the Altiplano from Quito to Riobamba. It was a bad five hours – I expect you’ve had ’em too – but something came out of it. I discovered that all the time I had been wanting a farm without my father.

  ‘Of course I could have had a farm without my father any year in the last twenty when I was flush. But it hadn’t occurred to me. Farms and fathers – they went together in my mind. I saw they needn’t necessarily go together. And I knew where I wanted my farm, too. Up here. None of your tropics and deserts for me. I like grass.

  ‘I didn’t give my fellow-passengers another thought. I didn’t want to talk, nor did they. When we got to Riobamba I gave them a nod and strolled over to the hotel carrying my own bag. That seems unlikely, I know, considering all the boys in town earn their pocket-money at the station. But they were busy struggling for Doña Clara’s baggage and, when they got it, arguing about who should carry what. She disorganised that station good and proper, and then put the hotel out of action by having everything she possessed taken up to her room. After that she abode by her stuff, like the chap in the Bible.