Capricorn and Cancer

by Geoffrey Household

  The procession left the churchyard and started slowly round the plaza. It was led by riders, shouting, letting off firearms and mounted insecurely on the only mules the two pueblos possessed. Then followed Don José-Maria and his acolytes; then the Niño on the shoulders of the four bearers; then the faithful carrying candles in their hands—some of them with a candle between each pair of fingers, thereby obliging friends and relatives who had vowed to bear a candle in the procession but had been prevented from attending.

  Pisco soon realised that Don José-Maria had not only wished him to perform a religious penance, but had deliberately chosen him as a porter because of his strength and steadiness. The public thronged around the image, praying, kneeling, dancing, offering drink to the thirsty bearers. His three colleagues were soon none too steady on their feet and yielding to the small excitable sea of human beings which washed against them. He found himself in command of the party and entirely responsible, by quick anticipation of their erratic movements, for keeping the Niño in a fairly perpendicular position.

  Every few minutes the procession stopped at a house or corner, a patch of cultivation or a water channel which José-Maria blessed in Latin, afterwards freely and fervently translating the blessing into Quechua. He used the correct words of power and thus delivered his hearers from any temptation they might have to employ occasional pagan rites of their own. Pisco’s shoulder, though protected by a leather pad, ached abominably from the continual raising up and setting down of the image. He was still fasting and very thirsty. He began to accept some of the cups of maize spirit proffered to him on all sides.

  Up to the wall went the procession, with José-Maria almost dancing ahead. The crowd chanted whatever came into their heads, and sudden tenor voices threw their impromptu poems into the thin mountain air. Pisco cursed his companions, adjuring them for their pride in the Niño to stop trying to dance. He was completely absorbed by his job, a little affected by the prevailing hysteria, and gathering an obscure and obstinate affection for the Niño, which any man is bound to feel for an object that he is struggling to save from destruction.

  At last the procession returned to the church. The faithful dispersed to their houses and to food. The other three bearers and a few of his favourite parishioners went into the sacristy with José-Maria. Pisco was momentarily left alone in the church. He sat down on the altar steps and rubbed his shoulder.

  ‘You,’ he said to the Niño, ‘should be very grateful to me.’

  The exquisite little face laughed at him. The sailor cap was awry, and the Niño looked as if he had been enjoying the fun.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of that suit,’ said Pisco solemnly. ‘You are of the people. You have nothing to do with the present system. You understand us.’

  The Niño continued to smile. His face was nobly unconscious of the suit. He seemed to Pisco to be returning a diviner pity for his human one. Pisco felt very weary and very much alone.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘have nothing to do with the Church. They put things into your mouth that you never thought. I’ve seen the same thing myself. The priests and politicians and philosophers make us all say what we don’t really think.’

  The tears came up into his eyes. On a sudden impulse he rolled over on to his knees before the image, and whispered:

  ‘O Son of God, help us to make the earth as you would have it be.’

  2

  Heart in the Mouth

  THE death of General Covadillas? Yes, of course there was something that didn’t come out in the papers. He died of a fit of laughter. When five of his political opponents escaped from gaol and forced a pilot to fly them out of the country with a gun at the back of his neck and then shot him by mistake just as he had taken off, Covadillas was so amused that he had a stroke. That was the only fact which wasn’t public knowledge.

  Assassination? Now look here, old man—I know who you are and all that, but I earn my living in this country and I don’t want to be expelled for offending the national dignity. If they like to say the general was murdered, it has nothing to do with us. The general was a cattleman, and he didn’t approve of the oil interests. And there’s the motive, and who am I to contradict the voice of the people? When North, South or Central Americans decide that a myth is worth believing, you just have to let them believe it.

  Good Lord, no! I don’t believe it! I know most of the oil executives out here, and in fact they rather admired the general. As dictators go, he was a gentleman. A trifle ruthless, of course. But most of his competitors turned up at his funeral and dropped tears. One of thankfulness to one of sorrow, and that’s as much as any of us can expect.

  The funeral was a wonderful show. There was the old boy laid out on ice in the Cathedral—oldest Christian building on the American continent, they say—with eight tall lancers, all plumes and pennons, round the bier, like weeping willows providing shade for a horticultural exhibit.

  I’m the resident correspondent for a group of British newspapers. It’s hard to get anything at all printed about this happy country, but just to please my friends here I have to try. I was wandering round the cathedral after visiting hours, hoping to get a touch of atmosphere, when in came a newspaperman from New York insisting that he must take a few shots for the world.

  It was the word world that flattered them—though it may have been the name of his paper. We feel a bit out of the world down here and, instead of thanking God for it, we take it as a reproach. So they propped Covadillas up for his photo and shovelled away some flowers and moved the candles. The dean told the lancers to look sorrowful, and preached them such an impromptu sermon on the nation’s loss that they wept buckets. Then the reporter flashed his shots and strolled out—whipping off his hat again when he suddenly remembered where he was—and the old boy was eased back to a more comfortable position on the ice. It takes an American to understand Americans.

  Well, I couldn’t compete with that. A quarter inch of space was the utmost my papers would give to Covadillas’ funeral. It wasn’t news. After all, nobody can plant a statesman as magnificently as we can ourselves—as we’ll know very well if we are ever buried in Westminster Abbey and have any bit of us left that isn’t too bewildered to be impressed.

  So I decided that my only chance of persuading the Republic that the London dailies knew it existed was to describe the quiet country ceremony. Editors would at least be interested. It’s a queer thing about the English—like the general, they all want to be planted in two different places, and one of them is usually in the country.

  Covadillas, you’ll remember, had asked that, whatever the politicians did with his body, his heart should be buried on the estancia at Manzanares where he was born. He had no illusions about all the pomposities of Church and State. That was why the people who loved him really did love him.

  Manzanares is eight hours from the capital on a line that goes wandering up over the savanna to nowhere in particular. It has one train a day; and that I took, the morning before the ceremony, in order to avoid the crowd on the funeral special which was travelling up that night with a load of big-wigs and personal friends, and leaving again in the afternoon.

  Now that I’ve got as far as this, I’d better tell you the rest. After all, you’re sailing to-morrow. My dear fellow, the evidence for assassination was overwhelming! It’s a revolting story. Ha! Ha! Ha! Just plain revolting!

  When I got to Manzanares, I found that there was no village at all. There was a patch of dust on the plain, where stood the station, two iron huts and the fonda, and no landmark but the railway which cut the visible world into two exact semi-circles. It was obvious that no one could lose his heart to a station, so I made some enquiries. The estancia and its chapel turned out to be over that featureless horizon, and seven miles away. There must have been other estancias over other bits of horizon, for dirt tracks radiated away from the station into the purple haze of the evening.

  The fonda was the usual drink-shop plus general store plus hotel. It wa
s owned by the stationmaster, an old Hungarian immigrant called Timoteo who had been there for the last thirty years and made himself pretty comfortable. He had sunk an artesian well, and installed some very classy pale-green sanitary ware—which must have been left on his hands when one of the local cattlemen went bust. In spite of the blowing dust and corrugated iron and the feeling of being all alone at the centre of an invisible world, the fonda was an oasis of civilization. I gladly took a room for the night.

  Timoteo was over-pleased to see me. There was no doubt that he was harassed and in need of help, like those chaps in ghost stories who have been all alone till the stranger pulls the door-bell. At the time I put down his manner to alarmed anticipation of the next day. The guests were to have a light breakfast on the train and start straight away for the estancia, but Timoteo was sure to be overwhelmed by politicians demanding drinks in a pious whisper.

  Well, I had a bath and an excellent meal, cooked and served by the mestiza staff, and shared by Timoteo’s tomcat: a great, friendly, short-haired beast who stood much higher on his fore legs than his hind, and looked like an amiable hyena. In a joint of that sort you’d have expected nothing but canned goods, but there were fresh fruit and vegetables and meat in plenty—good evidence that somewhere across the savanna was rich country which Covadillas could well have chosen as a resting-place for his spare parts.

  There was no one in the drink-shop. It was between paydays. So Timoteo and I took our glasses and settled down on the terrace. It was a night of black velvet, and there wasn’t a sound in the soft heat but the muffled thump of the electric power plant.

  Timoteo felt he should apologize for making his home at the centre of an empty circle. I asked who lived in the two iron huts. His staff. Two men in each hut. A stationmaster, he explained with patient dignity, could not be expected to load and unload trucks. I protested that such a thought had never occurred to me, that my question was mere idle curiosity, that I had noticed there was no sign of life in the huts—no light, no guitar, no woman complaining of the universe. Oh, he said, they had all gone off to collect the cars and buses from the neighbourhood and see that they got to the station in good time. It was obvious that Timoteo, as a former subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, still considered he should set an example to the weaker Latin brother. A stationmaster was a public servant; there could be no hitch allowed in his arrangements.

  After a while the thump of the power plant seemed to me to have developed a disturbing echo. I was about to suggest that we go and see if the big-end had broken, when the thump became a gallop—a real gallop, though still very distant. Timoteo listened and cheered up at once. He put his glass under his chair and took out a comb and swept the drooping grey hairs out of his mouth until his moustache looked decently stationmasterish.

  Four cavalrymen charged up into the light of the doorway, covered with dust and sweat and all in full-dress uniform, as if they’d just finished an old-fashioned battle. There were a captain, a sergeant and two troopers, themselves and their horses bristling with firearms. So much lethal modernity was incongruous with all that pale blue and gold.

  Timoteo trotted happily down the steps to meet them, and got a reception that startled him. The captain jumped off his horse and grabbed him by the shoulder.

  ‘Are you mad?’ he yelled. ‘Is it all right? I hold you responsible. You are responsible towards the State.’

  The captain feared he was going to be blamed for something, and was taking the initiative in shifting the blame on to Timoteo. Anyone who knows these people like I do could see that.

  ‘Of course it’s all right,’ Timoteo answered solidly. ‘You come a little late, captain.’

  ‘Late? By God, we knew nothing till a telegram two hours ago! How long have you had it?’

  ‘Since the day before yesterday,’ said Timoteo. ‘They sent it straight from the hospital.’

  The captain delivered a really eloquent speech on surgeons and hospitals and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He finished with a classic peroration on the virtues of General Covadillas—which gave me plenty of time to work out what had happened.

  The hospital, told to send Covadillas’ heart to Manzanares, had simply and sensibly sent it there. Meanwhile the Ministers had been so intent on preparations for the cathedral ceremony and on keeping their successors out of the treasury till the accounts had been cooked, that they forgot all about the heart; and when some wretched little clerk, probably with a salary of forty bob a week, remembered the blessed thing and went round to the hospital to enquire, he found it had been sent off by the daily train to Manzanares like any other parcel. No guards of honour. No fuss and bother. I repeat, it seemed to me remarkably sensible. But governments never like to do anything the obvious way.

  I said so to the captain when Timoteo introduced me—as representative of all the chief papers of Europe—and the captain seemed to think my point of view fresh and delightful. ‘Governments never like to do anything the obvious way,’ he kept on declaring and slapping his breeches. He changed over to the most complete geniality. That’s one reason why I love this country so much. They dramatize whatever they think they ought to feel; and then if you puncture the grand attitude—of course with the politest lace ruffles and the most delicate touch of the point—their Spanish horse sense gets the better of them and they roar with laughter. I don’t want my anatomy distributed. They can plant the lot right here where it has enjoyed itself, and good luck to it!

  There we were, surrounded by nothingness and with a secret of our own. It was an excuse for a party. The captain, once he had cooled down, was a delightful chap, and turned out to be a great-nephew of Covadillas. He was full of yarns about the old boy, and they rang true. The general’s character was simply incrusted with stories—generally of his unusual punishments. That accounted for his power. Not his cruelty, I mean, but his perverted sense of humour. Be an original, and you can do anything with the Spanish-American!

  The captain was patting Timoteo’s shoulder and telling him what a fine public official he was, and Timoteo liked it, and kept filling up their glasses. After thirty years in the country he still hadn’t got rid of his Central European conviction that a stationmaster is a long way below a cavalry officer. Then they decided all of a sudden that the world would be improved by imported lager, and went out to the refrigerator to collect bottles. The sergeant, the troopers and I stuck to wine.

  When the two came rolling back with their lager, their conversation was fragmentary. The captain asked if that was the way they had sent it up; and Timoteo replied that it was, and he had thought it best, the weather being warm, to keep it in the refrigerator. The captain said he didn’t think the surgeons had been complimentary to his great-uncle in using a plain wooden box, and Timoteo said a wooden box was all we got, anyway, and no absorbent packing in it at that.

  This aroused my curiosity, and when I went out to attend to the needs of nature I had a look at Timoteo’s refrigerator. The happy pair had left the door open. As I say, we were having quite a party. There was the wooden box, all right, just as it came from the hospital—except that Timoteo had wisely forced up the lid so that the cold could circulate round the contents. But what surprised me was that there were no contents.

  On my return I told Timoteo I had shut the refrigerator door—just in case he had left it open for any particular reason—and asked him where was the object of his lonely vigil. I had a feeling that the captain might have taken it out in order to hold it in one hand for appropriate gestures while he made a speech to the empty kitchen.

  ‘Hombre! In the box,’ Timoteo replied.

  ‘It isn’t,’ I said.

  The five men were on their feet in an instant, and all jammed in the doorway. Then they tumbled over their spurs into the kitchen and stared over each other’s shoulders into the refrigerator and swore that the heart must be in the box. But it wasn’t.

  The captain called his sergeant to attention, and asked him why he had been sitt
ing at drink when he should have been guarding the most precious possession of the nation. The sergeant saluted and turned to the troopers and insisted that they should repeat their orders—which, in loud military voices, they did. Timoteo, yielding to the Latin atmosphere, prophesied for us that he would no longer be stationmaster at Manzanares, but begging his bread and lifting loads among negroes in intolerable swamps. He was still developing the intolerable swamps, when he suddenly shut up and went pale yellow.

  He dropped on all fours, looking under the stove and the dressers, and calling:

  ‘Tsiu! Tsiu! Tsiu!’

  We stared at each other. I could feel the cold sweat outside and the wine inside trickling down, as it were, to my feet, and leaving me sober as—as a man in a nightmare.

  We swooped on the yard outside the kitchen window, and Timoteo snapped on the lights. The yard was empty; but in that tenth of a second before we realized its emptiness we were overtaken by infinity, by a vision of cause and complicated effect that could endure, I tell you, timelessly. We saw Timoteo’s tom-cat vanish, quick as the movement of the switch itself, from light into darkness with a shadow in his mouth.

  He had all the Americas before him, and night on his side. On the other hand, fine cat though he was, he couldn’t go very far with such a burden to carry.