One Damn Thing After Another

by Nicolas Freeling

  “It is finished. It is for no special purpose. I shall make a little report – like this –” slipping out a memo pad and uncapping a pen, “for the authority, if desired. Stating that upon cursory examination your physical health appears to me good, and that according to my observations your psychological condition is equally sound and balanced. You have a reservation to make?”

  “None.” He signed his name and tore the sheet off. He gave her a very slight, quiet smile.

  “You would like to make your home in Argentina?” he asked politely.

  “I haven’t seen much of it yet. I should like to be rather better placed to do so.”

  “We shall hope for that,” with formal courtesy.

  She had not seen the Indian-man come in. He was standing there looking at her, lizard-face saying nothing. He held a few sheets of typescript.

  “This is a summary of the questions put to you and the answers given. Further a brief statement, to the effect that you make no claim upon the help of the State, in accomplishing the purposes of your visit, which is set forth there, in that paragraph. The State, likewise, places no obstacle in your path – there – but takes no responsibility for the success or otherwise of your enterprise – there. Initial the copies and sign them, please. It is useless to ask me whether or no your attempt can be crowned with success: I do not know. Good. That is in order. If the physician has no more to ask you,” collecting the other piece of paper, “I shall reaccompany you.”

  Arlette had thought, innocently, that she would be let go now. No such thing. She was brought back to her cell and wordlessly locked up in it. It is never any use asking Spaniards when such or such a thing is due to happen. Much the same, apparently, hereabouts.

  Chapter 31

  How to keep the city in peace

  It was, roughly, the middle of the night. How near the middle she could not tell: she had been deeply asleep and not dreaming. The old guard had awakened her by making a soft whistling noise that penetrated gradually. Her cell door stood open, but with his usual kindness he had not switched the harsh cell light on. She saw him in silhouette, from the corridor light. She felt like a Hopi Indian, Emerging into the Fourth World from those hollow reeds in which they had been preserved from the flood that had engulfed the Third World. The silhouette she saw was very likely the god, Masaw. He is the Guardian of the Fourth World.

  She crept out of her warm nest, in her vest and knickers, and stood tousled and sleepy on the floor. “Come,” he said.

  In the office stood a young man in his late twenties, good-looking and very smart in the uniform of a naval officer, with a lock of hair that fell forward on his forehead, like James Bond. He had his lips pursed in a tiny soundless whistle and a permanent half-smiling expression. On one of the metal-tube chairs he had arranged her Lanvin suit, and he was busy with it, shaking out creases and brushing with a clothes-brush. He looked at her with a quizzical kind of expression and said, “This will do very nicely. I beg your pardon; Lynch, Lieutenant Miguel Lynch. Have you stockings, Señora? And her shoes,” to the old guard. “Look, I suggest you have just a quick wash, comb your hair you know. Don’t put on much make-up. Just enough, you know, to look pleasant.” He stood, watching her, while she woke herself up with cold water. He handed her a comb when she was ready for it; as she wanted pins for her hair he had each one ready. He was obviously used to girls, dressing. His half smile did not vary: he handed her her bra, her stockings, her skirt, jacket, shoes. He gave her shoulder a last flip with the clothes brush where there was a hair, and a scrap of fluff, and said, “There; you look very nice,” almost with gallantry. “You don’t need a bag. Don’t smoke; the General doesn’t like it. Let’s go, shall we?” She followed, without speaking, without thinking.

  In the street he had a Mercedes car, black and shiny and official-looking, with a driver in plainclothes who wasn’t Juan Manuel Fangio but looked, anyway from the back, not unlike. The car had white venetian blinds, and these were down. From inside she could see nothing of the streets, but the ride was not long. They got out at a large building, at a side door: it conveyed nothing to her.

  At the door was a soldier with a submachine-gun, who saluted smartly: Lieutenant Lynch was a familiar figure. He led her up flights of bare-sounding wooden stairs.

  “After eight, the lifts are cut off to save power.” They popped through a service door on to a carpeted passage.

  “Nourri dans le sérail vous en connaissez les détours.”

  “That’s right,” with his ever-ready smile.

  There was another sentry in the passage. They went through an anteroom, through a splendid ministerial office there for show – or press conferences – and what looked to be the aides-de-camp’s room beyond. Lynch stopped at an inconspicuous door like that of a dressingroom or cloakroom, signed her to pause, slipped through it without knocking.

  Arlette felt she was past caring. Plainly another general, or was it an admiral – there were presumably dozens of them, or what was the word ‘junta’ about? Some goddam secret-police chief, for whom Palmer was only a front, very likely, commanding some bleak penal settlement in the Land of Fire to which she was presumably destined.

  Lynch held the door open for her, and slid out deftly. A biggish room, barish. An officer sat writing at a plain wooden table. He did not raise his head, but said with colourless courtesy, “Sit down then, Señora.” He was reading down a typed report, annotating in the margin. The walls held shelving, and the shelving was full of files. The window was covered with a venetian blind. The desk lamp was an ordinary metal bureau lamp, the ceiling fixture standard office issue. This must be some secretarial filter, a staff captain commanding paperwork.

  He scribbled his initials, pushed the file to one side, raised his head, and Arlette recognized the Chief of the State.

  Remarkable people have remarkable heads. It is to be presumed that even if you were whipped out of your jail cell in the middle of the night – decidedly confused and perturbed and feeling none too bright – you would still recognize the extraordinary beauty of such a face as Chou en Lai or Sadat. You do not need to be a sculptor. Of most others you would probably say that you needed more time to improve the acquaintance. Arlette was never able to say whether or no General Valentin de Linares was a remarkable person, a mediocre one, or what. She was not given the time for more than the most conventional of masks, the sad, sallow and saturnine visage of ten thousand Spanish army officers. One would be inclined, after, to add caricatural features that were not there at all (like a gold crucifix on a neck-chain and an Errol Flynn moustache), simply because the convention requires them.

  He lost no time.

  “I have interested myself in the business which, as you told General Renard, brought you here.” He did not look like Philip the Second, but had certainly some of the habits of the Prudent King.

  “I have had, not without some trouble, this young man identified and interrogated.” Mm. What had happened to her in the last three days was unremarked upon. “I do not wish that any person seeking refuge here – and make no mistake, it is a shore of refuge – should be persecuted. Such a person, the purity of whose motives could be shown, has the right to freedom from interference by outside interests.”

  These were very tedious, very boring remarks, thought Arlette. He looked suddenly at her.

  “You gave Colonel Palmer an account of your business. You entertained General Renard with aspects of your personality. Tell me something of your ideas.” At this moment Arlette did not think him a mediocre personage, but that might have been sheer vanity.

  “I think that men and women ought to be equal,” she said. When, after all, would she get another such opportunity? “And I don’t mean the sort of crude feminism that abounds everywhere. I believe that no man, however gifted, is complete without a woman. It is a secret. One does not write the biography of Madame de Gaulle or Hendrickje Stoffels. Conversely, without a man, and I mean one man, a woman is not entirely sterile, but I
do not believe she’ll ever amount to anything much.”

  The General’s eyebrows had gone up a bit, but he smiled without condescension.

  “You are not satisfied with the tale of Eve and the apple?”

  “Hardly. It sounds to me a tale invented by men, who have always been adept at getting tales believed.”

  “You are not satisfied with Christianity? You would prefer, perhaps, an Earth Mother?”

  “God forbid. A man as a fertilization principle, what a barbaric notion. I hope to die in my faith, just like you. I admit to being a bit heterodox, that’s all. A world run by men, General, has not done us very much good, so far. Or even further, since we’re plainly in the last stages of decadence.” At that he nodded. “We might have just a ghost of a chance still. In the family, but not as it has been, either male- or female-dominated. That is not marriage which is only a union of the flesh, said Saint Somebody. I want a king and a queen upon the throne, and no more popes or ayatollahs.”

  “It will be difficult to achieve,” said the general, seriously.

  “Very. I’ve not got a lot of hope, but it’s the only one we have.”

  “And if it fails?”

  “Then the end of the world is very close upon us.”

  “When I think of it, as I do very frequently, I agree.”

  “The Indians say, with atomic bombs. Conventionally likely. It doesn’t matter much. We have tortured and abused the world we were given: the earth will revenge itself, and the air, and the sea.”

  “As you say, it does not matter much. But have you thought, of the Last Judgment?” Philip the Second, the Prudent King, thought much of the Last Judgment. “Christ, as he told us, will come again but in majesty, to judge the living and the dead.”

  “I think he’ll spend some time – whatever time means – showing us the incredible obstinacy and stupidity with which we disregard most of what he said the first time, and the imbecility with which we misunderstood the rest.”

  “He was, however, a man.”

  “He could hardly be a hermaphrodite.”

  “Why then, according to your reasoning, did he not marry and found a family?”

  “Oh come, General! Our Father who art in heaven!”

  “He called himself however the Son of Man.” The General seemed quite to enjoy a spot of theology at this hour of the night.

  “It’s awkward,” agreed Arlette, “to marry off a Blessed Trinity. You’ll agree though it wouldn’t have done, to leave earthly descendants, and go popping off into heaven and just leaving them.”

  “Your view of matters does not lack merit,” said the General, “but I fear that earlier and more rigidly orthodox times would have given you short shrift.”

  “Oh yes – burned as a witch. It could still happen. France becomes more and more intolerant of anything outside the party line. Will you tell me the difference, General, between Fascism and Communism?”

  “Exactly. There isn’t any.”

  “It is left to women, I think, to discover an alternative.”

  “I am going to bear in mind,” said the General, “what you have told me. I must not lose sight of the matter that brought you here,” politely, picking up a piece of paper. “We have sifted the matter, with some thoroughness. Weight and measure, you know, is what maintains the town in peace.” Is that what you call it, putting me for three days out of circulation? A troublesome woman. A Spanish phrase: Peso y medida mantienen en paz la villa. Well. But keep quiet, woman. This isn’t the Last Judgment.

  “The young man’s account of himself is not very satisfactory. I propose to have him put on the plane. Pederasts!” with gloom; “I should like to put them all on a plane.”

  “But where to? To contaminate Antarctica, and doubtless corrupt the penguins?” He paid no attention to her frivolities, which was as well.

  “In your company,” finishing and initialling the annotation.

  “I am not welcome, in Argentina?”

  “You will be, and I hope to be there, to welcome you. Your ideas are a little heterodox: we are, as you are aware, a backward country. We make progress. It is an interminable labour, with interminable details.”

  “General, General – that’s not what is needed. We must have a totally new design.”

  “I am aware of that,” he said sadly, “but I fear that for a grand design, none of us is man enough. Until,” he added, “Christ comes again.”

  “We will have tried to do our best.”

  ‘I try not to forget the parable of the talents.” He held out a hand, fine-boned. “Au revoir, Madame.”

  “General, I’m sorry, but you forget that I’m still in jail.”

  “That can very easily be remedied,” ringing the bell. “Miguel,” holding out the paper to Lieutenant Lynch, “will you take pains to see that this lady is made comfortable.”

  It was curious, and to be sure amusing, to see how the head night porter of the grandest hotel in Buenos Aires offered dignified capitulation under honourable terms – rather when you came to think of it like Marshal Pétain – to Lieutenant Lynch.

  “This lady is the guest of the government. A good room. You are, I daresay, very full. But you will find one.”

  “Of course.”

  “Her luggage will be sent.”

  “I will have the buttons – I will look after it myself.”

  “Some nice fruit. We have some good local champagne.”

  “To be sure.”

  “I am afraid it is rather late. La señora will not wish to be disturbed in the morning.”

  “I have made a note.”

  “I’ll ring you, with details of your flight and so on. And I’ll have a car sent.” It had turned into an Arabian night.

  “Thank you,” said Arlette timidly.

  “A very nice room,” said the desk-general with unction. His uniform was a great deal grander than that of General Valentin de Linares and he had ribbons upon his impressive breast. He had a splendid head of thick silvery hair, and Arlette felt that with a minimum of encouragement he would tell about his War against Bolshevism on the Russian front.

  “I am rather hungry,” she said.

  “The floor-waiter,” – mozo is a low word, not at all applicable – “will make himself a pleasure to serve Madame without delay.”

  She was brought up into a tower from which, like Rapunzel, she let down her hair. There was a grand glittering view of the harbour and from here at least no smell. The River Plate, which really is a frightful sewer, was from here midnight-blue velvet, and smelled like Schiaparelli. The airconditioning worked by pressing a button. The window opened by pressing a button. The curtains drew by pressing a button. She made foam for herself in the bath; she washed her hair in Formula Carita. The Argentine champagne promoted reckless fantasies. She made a large hearty meal.

  Strange to be picking up where she had left off – with overeating. Strange that one’s single taste of Buenos Aires nightlife should be sterilized and solitary, exactly like one’s taste of Buenos Aires jails. This was really very funny. Would Lieutenant Lynch, who had made honourable amends, perceive just how appropriate it was? And if the jail had been cockroach-infested and vile, would it have made any difference?

  Whether you got put in jail, or put in the St Regis Tower, you were disposed of. Both were ways of maintaining the city in peace.

  Chapter 32

  Que tiene capa, escapa

  “Jesus,” said the young man reverentially, “you seem to have a pretty good graft.” He wouldn’t stay reverential long: in fact he was already shifting on his seat, staring vengeful at the back of the cops who had brought him and had gone to turn his passport over to the marechaussée at the immigration desk, who were putting a lot of ominous rubber stamps in it. Nobody had asked for Arlette’s passport.

  The airline girls did not quite know what to make of it either. She had been brought by an official car, and they hadn’t needed much telling to treat her with consideration. Her booking had
been changed to first-class at no extra charge, and they knew what that meant. Whereas this boy wasn’t just an undesirable alien being deported, but looked it, which is much worse. His jeans smelt, and he scratched from time to time. And here he was in first-class, even if only as courtesy to the lady, and plainly under her wing.

  Arlette, who was nearest to the jeans, was thinking she’d have to wash her hair again, and with ‘Marie-Rose’ at that. Did it exist still, that sinister bottle with a picture of a nice lady scrubbing a horrid little boy and ‘See how they run’ printed underneath? She hadn’t seen ‘Marie-Rose’ since she was a little girl at the village school, but ever since long hair came back in, the dear lady was doing a roaring trade.

  The boy at first was extremely aggressive.

  “I don’t want to know what you did or how you did it. Typical bourgeois interference.”

  “Your family –”

  “Fuck my family.”

  So she kept her mouth shut.

  A few hundred kilometres, a few thousand – one didn’t go counting them – mellowed him slightly. Drinks helped.

  “I don’t usually drink. But since it’s all free … Not bad either, for airline stuff. They want to make a good impression, you see …”

  “Oh I see.”

  “You can still get good stuff cheap, if you know where to look. You’ll have seen nothing but a few tourist traps. Nothing.”

  “No, alas.”

  It got better.

  “You know, they are pretty good. I don’t know whether you believe all that bullshit about the maricones. I’m not, myself, pederast, in case you hadn’t realized.”

  “I had, in fact.”

  “Not that I have to apologize, either way. Police of course do what they want, use the flimsiest pretext or invent one if they can’t find one handy. Anything’ll do. When it pleases them – to suck up to you with your fucking embassy connections – all those people who were at Normal-Sup with my ever-goddammed papa.”

  “You are mistaken, as I hope to show you before we reach Paris.”