Capricorn and Cancer

by Geoffrey Household

  I replied that of course he had my permission, and asked if the party was for his customers.

  ‘Buy, buy my jams and jellies!’ he called like a street vendor. ‘Very cheap, my jams and jellies!’

  ‘But calm, Don Francisco!’ I begged him.

  ‘Yes, my daughter. I shall not leave out the customers. But I want the President of the Republic if he will come. The generals and the admirals and all the Children of the Sun! What joy, what joy is Spanish America!’

  ‘Would it not be better to give the party on shore?’

  ‘Dearest—’ he used such words most improperly, but as he was a foreigner I forgave him, ‘—dearest, it would indeed! But the fact is that in Peru I cannot give a party because I am not allowed to pay for anything.’

  That must, I thought, be due to some misunderstanding. The Peruvians are no more hospitable than the rest of us. We all entertain a foreign visitor as well and as long as we can; but eventually—at any rate in commercial circles—he is allowed to pay.

  I asked him if he would let me suggest some delicate way of returning hospitality. He insisted that it was utterly impossible. And off he went again upon his love for our Americas, as eloquently as any politician upon Independence Day. The long glass at his side was frequently refilled by the steward, who had orders to watch it and take it away when it was empty. He called that being refuelled in the air.

  I refused to have my curiosity deflected.

  ‘But why, Don Francisco,’ I persisted, ‘are you not allowed to pay for anything in Peru?’

  ‘Because, little one,’ he answered superbly, ‘I am descended from the conqueror Pizarro and the daughter of the Inca Atahualppa.’

  ‘So at last I know why you wear a bath towel instead of trousers,’ I replied, pretending to believe him and throwing back the ball.

  Such was his usual dress in the morning—a bath towel and an old tweed coat. The first time he appeared in my presence like that I intended to show myself a little cold, but a moment later I was giggling childishly at the look the captain gave him.

  We went to dinner—he at the officers’ table, and I, by preference, alone. When I had finished, I waited on deck for him. It was his habit to sit on for half an hour over his wine, amusing himself if none of the officers remained to amuse him. That was, he said, an English ceremony.

  As it was our last evening and still he did not come, I went down to my cabin for a book, but he was not in the saloon. On my return, as I passed the ship’s office, I saw the purser standing in the doorway and pounding his fist into his hand with one of those clumsy gestures of northerners who do not know by nature how to gesticulate. Don Francisco, who was opposite him in the passage, must have been much angrier than he appeared; but he only smiled down at the purser and swayed a little at the knees.

  The purser was shouting in English. He was a man without manners, as I think the Nazis must have been—nothing but a white uniform buttoned too tightly over bad temper. He had twice been rude to me. You will not believe it, but he made me declare that my disfigurement was not infectious. He resented the presence of a single woman among males.

  There is no dignity in the English language when men are excited. The Purser was swallowing hard, and croaking:

  ‘Jam, jam, ja-a-am! Jam, jam, ja-a-am! Here you will not sell your ja-a-am! No and no! I forbid you to give your party. The Naarden is a German ship, not a grocery shop!’

  Naturally I passed them as quickly as I could, and did not watch until I was sure they could not see me. Don Francisco was being very mischievous. Evidently he had given up all hope of obtaining his request. He had no interest at all in calming the purser. He smiled and weaved his tall body over him like a snake above a fat frog. He patted him on the shoulder and warned him that he should be careful, that after a heavy dinner in the tropics a man of his build might easily have a stroke. And when the purser began to insult the English in general, he waved him back into the office with the gesture of one who shoos away a fly.

  I was sitting in the darkness of the boat deck when Don Francisco joined me. After we had talked a little while, he said to me that curiosity killed the cat. The proverbs of his people are coarser than our own.

  I answered with dignity that if it had been I who wished to talk to the purser, I should not have approached him at that hour. Everyone knew that he liked to shut himself up in his office after his over-solid evening meal. He even had a notice of Verboten on his door.

  Don Francisco admitted humbly that I was perfectly right, and that indeed the purser, unlike the majority of men, was less approachable after dinner than before. For that reason he himself had been particularly tactful, he said, and had knocked his forehead three times upon the purser’s counter and kissed the ground.

  And then, at last permitting himself some slight loss of self-control, he began to curse the purser for an unbelieving, unimaginative Kraut—which means, I think, a cabbage. And after swearing like a gaucho, though most delicately changing the words, he translated some English oaths. At any rate they were quite unlike our own and far less reasonable. It is permissible to guess at the parentage of someone who has insulted you, but you cannot anticipate the fate of his soul.

  ‘And what astonishes me,’ he declared, ‘is that I damn the man so thoroughly and he is none the worse.’

  ‘Thank God for his mercies!’ I answered.

  He lay back in his chair and laughed.

  ‘Well, it is true one would have to be careful. To phrase a curse which is meant so that it can be distinguished from a curse which is not—I do not know how my ancestors managed it.’

  ‘Pizarro? Or his Inca princess?’ I asked—for you know how I adore the ridiculous, and I wanted him to recover his temper and entertain me.

  ‘Neither,’ he replied. ‘From them I am descended on my mother’s side. On my father’s side we were always witches. Life is like that. To the rich comes more money. Upon the improbable it pours improbabilities. In my club there is a man who has the hereditary right to undress the bishop of his diocese and wash him in the River Thames. In winter he trains elephants. Why not? To him it is all perfectly natural.’

  One’s breath is taken away by such flights of fancy. All I could find to say was that the bishop must be glad his friend had another occupation in winter.

  Don Francisco answered that the bishop could be washed on demand, whatever the weather, and that I must not put any faith in the common illusion that the English were influenced by common sense. They always preferred the fantastic to the practical.

  ‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘in England everything that has ever existed still exists. That is the kind of people we are. There was once a chief witch in Hereford. Therefore there is still a chief witch in Hereford. And I, who have the honour to be at your feet, am he.’

  ‘So it is due to your charms that we buy the Hereford cattle?’

  ‘Not forgetting the jams and jellies.’

  ‘And we part tomorrow and you have never shown me yourself flying upon a broomstick.’

  ‘For that,’ he said, ‘one needs a familiar spirit—if it has ever been done, which I doubt.’

  ‘Dear Don Francisco, is there any spirit which is unfamiliar to you?’

  He kissed my hand. It always delighted him when I enjoyed this sort of tennis with words, though I myself would wonder afterwards if I had not been too bitter.

  ‘Have you never heard that the soul must be fed as well as the body?’ he asked. ‘And, believe me, the sustenance it prefers is alcohol in moderation. Far better that than to take oneself too seriously and always be whispering Down, Fido! to something which would be happier in hell!’

  ‘And without Fido?’ I laughed. ‘Nothing to show me? Nothing at all?’

  ‘I am not in practice,’ he replied. ‘I am a traditional figure-head—a mere administrator. Old women’s tricks are all I know. Like curing—perhaps—of warts.’

  Little sister, I did not answer anything. I do not think I even looked at
him.

  ‘That is all it is, you know,’ he said. ‘A giant wart which lives on you because it has no other home. I could take it away, if you believed.’

  I recovered myself at once, and told him that it was not a subject which my most intimate friends were permitted to discuss with me.

  He was quite unconcerned by my rebuke. He stood over me, grinning as if he had just thought of still greater riches of impertinence.

  ‘All the same, I want it,’ he said. ‘Do you give it to me?’

  I answered passionately that I gave it to him with my whole heart. I do not quite know what I meant. But I was so sincere I could have struck him.

  I am ashamed to tell you what happened. I can only say that I was fascinated by him and quite helpless; and the indignity was so swift. He spat on his finger and touched my disfigurement. Then he spat to the four points of the compass and did something with his hands in the darkness which I could not distinguish.

  ‘And now, my daughter, it is good-bye,’ he said. ‘You are outraged by me, and would not speak to me in the morning even if we had time to talk. I shall leave the ship early with the customs launch, and as the purser will not let me give my party I shall not return.’

  I could not trust myself to speak. I stared at him as one stares at a lover who has forgotten decency.

  ‘Remember it is not what friends say at parting which matters,’ he told me, ‘but what they think about each other afterwards. Half I have done for you; the other half depends on your belief.’

  Conchita, I awoke in the morning utterly disgusted with myself. There might be some excuse for him, but I had not been drinking. What I had spoken of, and what I had allowed—all humiliated me.

  I looked out of the porthole of my cabin. Two miles away were the low houses and docks and sands of Callao, the port of Lima. The customs launch was just leaving the Naarden, and Don Francisco was in it as he said he would be. It was the first time I had ever seen him well dressed. Immaculate, with a flower in his buttonhole.

  When I came on deck, the ship was alongside the quay. I was most courteously saluted by a captain of police who addressed me by my name. He astonished me by saying that in case I wished to land and visit Lima a room in the best hotel had been reserved for me. He also presented to me the compliments of Don Francisco Jones y Harborough, who regretted that he was unavoidably prevented from escorting me since he had been commanded to accompany the Vice-President of the Republic on a visit to Cuzco.

  Was I never to escape from his lunacy? I thanked the captain and remarked, controlling my voice as best I could, that it was not my custom to interrupt my travels at the request of foreigners.

  ‘But Don Francisco does not count as a foreigner!’ he exclaimed. ‘He is a descendant of Francisco Pizarro and Atahualppa’s daughter. There are only two of them left, and the other is old and in Spain and will die childless.’

  Who could have guessed that he was telling the truth? I went back to my cabin, with all my emotions shattered. The mirror faced me. As you know, I have trained myself not to notice a mirror any more than you, Conchita, the pavement under your feet. But the man’s bad taste had made me conscious of that loathsome mark. And then, hating him and in tears, I suddenly realised that never would he have forgotten his courtesy and tenderness unless he believed in himself. What I believed I could not be sure.

  That night, little sister, while the ship remained in harbour, I slept sweetly. I went to breakfast early. But no, I did not go to breakfast at all! I went no further than the door of the saloon. The purser was eating alone, and fingering a black mark on his cheek. I rushed back to my cabin, telling myself that I was a romantic fool. But the lower fragment of my growth had gone, and the skin was red like that of a healthy scar.

  I packed, and I fled to the room in Lima which Don Francisco had so thoughtfully reserved for me. I remembered his words: that it lived on me because it had no other home. I could not go on to Panama. How could I ever have met the purser’s eyes during a whole week—the week that has just passed—while hour by hour I was returning so eagerly to my mirror?

  4

  Six Legs Are Welcome

  IT’S no good waving at them. Take this one, for example! She’ll get bored with crawling up my arm in a moment, and fly off. For twenty-seven days in the month there’s just the usual mixture of insects, and on the twenty-eighth, for no reason at all, one species gets completely out of hand and fills up all the available air.

  No, I don’t know what these are called—apart from their Indian name. Odd-looking creatures, aren’t they? Six legs. Red and black Asdic. And about an inch and a half of torpedo tube in the stern. That’s only a flying ant in your gin. Just pick it out! There you are—neither of you one penny the worse!

  We’ll go inside in another half hour when the mosquitoes come on duty. But you needn’t pay any attention at all to these fellows. They’re just satisfying their curiosity with only one day to do it in, perhaps.

  Well, yes, there are limits. I quite agree. I don’t hold with those Buddhist chaps who won’t squash a cockroach in case it turns out to be their defunct mother-in-law. I’ve no fellow feeling for any of the little pests. But if it hadn’t been for them I should be half-way through a life sentence now instead of farming this wonderful place. A man can never quite forget a bit of luck like that. It’s bound to influence him. Let me get you another glass! That one’s drowned herself. Weak heart, probably.

  Live and let live—that’s all I say. This bit of Paraguay belongs to them quite as much as to me. I’d better tell you the story. I haven’t listened to myself speaking my own language for more than a year. And it will stop you imagining that something is crawling down the back of your neck when all you need, like the rest of us, is a haircut.

  I was a mechanic in Argentina then, repairing tractors and managing the power plant and refrigeration on a big estancia up in the north-east corner of Corrientes. That’s a strip of real white man’s country—in between the marshes of the Paraná and the forests of Misiones. I liked the life and the people. Took to it from the start, like so many other Englishmen.

  The nearest town was Posadas, where the train ferry crosses the Paraná from Paraguay to Argentina. I used to go there three or four times a year to keep an eye on the discharge of any of our machinery from the river steamers, and arrange for its transport up-country. You could drive a truck from Posadas to the estancia—just—but it was more comfortable to ride.

  Posadas was not much of a town. A lot of dim lights, but no bright ones except the railway coaches and the Estrella de la Banda. The Estrella was a far better joint than you would have expected to find in a little river port, not at all the usual pulpería with a couple of half-witted girls in a dusty corner and drunks sleeping it off outside the door. Posadas had a small floating population of travellers between Paraguay and Argentina—some of them men of distinction or money, or even both—and Don Luis, who owned the Estrella, found it worth his while to feed them decently and provide entertainment. There were plenty of first-class passengers who made a point of staying the night, whenever they had to cross the Paraná, just in order to visit Don Luis’s joint.

  He was a big buck of an Italian—padded shoulders, local politics and all—but he was born in the pampa and he flattered himself that he was an Argentine of the Argentines. Anyone who addressed him as Luigi instead of Luis was safer the other side of the river. I knew him well enough to dislike him thoroughly. He didn’t suspect it. You can go on detesting a man for years in Spanish so long as you have good manners. That’s quite impossible in English.

  There was a north wind blowing on that last visit of mine to Posadas. Just like today. It always brings the damp heat and the insects. And thirst. The boat from Buenos Aires had not arrived; so, instead of the drinks with the captain which I had been looking forward to, I went into the Estrella de la Banda. You could trust Luis’s whisky. I’ll say that for him.

  It was early, and the place had not got going. Luis had
a new girl.

  ‘That’s a little beauty!’ I said to him.

  She was not my sort, he told me. She was meant for travelling senators and so forth.

  ‘She’s only a mestiza,’ I said. ‘What’s so special about her?’

  He whispered to me what was special about her. I didn’t believe him. But one of those senators off the international train might possibly want to believe him.

  I sat down beside her. She wasn’t more than seventeen, and she was wearing a frock of innocent respectability just like any young girl at her first party—except that it was black. She had the wide, gentle face of the Indian, with eyes far apart and hair growing low on the forehead; but her mouth and her nose and all the rest of her were Spanish of the loveliest. I couldn’t get much out of her but si, señor and no, señor. Very haughty indeed. Full of conventional little parlour tricks. She wouldn’t touch anything but lemonade. The line would have gone over very well in Buenos Aires, but I thought she was overdoing it for Posadas where we all liked a bit of slap-and-tickle with, say, the third round of drinks.

  I spent an hour with her and then cleared out. I told Don Luis he was right—that she wasn’t at all the sort for a hardworking man.

  All the same I could not get her out of my mind. Her face was so selfless and serious, too comfortable for a place like the Estrella de la Banda. Not that there aren’t some perfect beauties about in cabarets, as well as in shops and offices. But her type was different. I’ve often thought about it since, and I can’t put it better than this. You did not feel she was bothering about being loved. She wanted to love. Her name was Rosalinda Torres. But I couldn’t guess much from that. Rosalinda sounded professional. On the other hand they do like, out here in the backwoods, to give their daughters high-sounding names.

  There was no steamer next day, so I had nothing to do but hang around in the heat and slap at all the life coming down on the north wind, just like you chaps who travel for pleasure. By the evening my curiosity was greater than ever. I call it curiosity. But I thought I would be quite ready to take it to another table if young Rosalinda showed no interest in it.