Mr Tench got two glasses out of a cupboard under the bench, and wiped off traces of sand. Then they went and sat in rocking-chairs in the front room. Mr Tench poured out.
‘Water?’ the stranger asked.
‘You can’t trust the water,’ Mr Tench said. ‘It’s got me here.’ He put his hand on his stomach and took a long draught. ‘You don’t look too well yourself,’ he said. He took a longer look. ‘Your teeth.’ One canine had gone, and the front teeth were yellow with tartar and carious. He said, ‘You want to pay attention to them.’
‘What is the good?’ the stranger said. He held a small spot of brandy in his glass warily – as if it was an animal to which he gave shelter, but not trust. He had the air, in his hollowness and neglect, of somebody of no account who had been beaten up incidentally, by ill-health or restlessness. He sat on the very edge of the rocking-chair, with his small attaché case balanced on his knee and the brandy staved off with guilty affection.
‘Drink up,’ Mr Tench encouraged him (it wasn’t his brandy). ‘It will do you good.’ The man’s dark suit and sloping shoulders reminded him uncomfortably of a coffin, and death was in his carious mouth already. Mr Tench poured himself out another glass. He said, ‘It gets lonely here. It’s good to talk English, even to a foreigner. I wonder if you’d like to see a picture of my kids.’ He drew a yellow snapshot out of his note-case and handed it over. Two small children struggled over the handle of a watering-can in a back garden. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘that was sixteen years ago.’
‘They are young men now.’
‘One died.’
‘Oh, well,’ the other replied gently, ‘in a Christian country.’ He took a gulp of his brandy and smiled at Mr Tench rather foolishly.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Mr Tench said with surprise. He got rid of his phlegm and said, ‘It doesn’t seem to me, of course, to matter much.’ He fell silent, his thoughts ambling away; his mouth fell open, he looked grey and vacant, until he was recalled by a pain in the stomach and helped himself to some more brandy. ‘Let me see. What was it we were talking about? The kids . . . oh yes, the kids. It’s funny what a man remembers. You know, I can remember that watering-can better than I can remember the kids. It cost three and elevenpence three farthings, green; I could lead you to the shop where I bought it. But as for the kids,’ he brooded over his glass into the past, ‘I can’t remember much else but them crying.’
‘Do you get news?’
‘Oh, I gave up writing before I came here. What was the use? I couldn’t send any money. It wouldn’t surprise me if the wife had married again. Her mother would like it – the old sour bitch: she never cared for me.’
The stranger said in a low voice, ‘It is awful.’
Mr Tench examined his companion again with surprise. He sat there like a black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay, poised on his chair. He looked disreputable in his grey three-days’ beard, and weak: somebody you could command to do anything. He said, ‘I mean the world. The way things happen.’
‘Drink up your brandy.’
He sipped at it. It was like an indulgence. He said, ‘You remember this place before – before the Red Shirts came?’
‘I suppose I do.’
‘How happy it was then.’
‘Was it? I didn’t notice.’
‘They had at any rate – God.’
‘There’s no difference in the teeth,’ Mr Tench said. He gave himself some more of the stranger’s brandy. ‘It was always an awful place. Lonely. My God. People at home would have said romance. I thought: five years here, and then I’ll go. There was plenty of work. Gold teeth. But then the peso dropped. And now I can’t get out. One day I will.’ He said, ‘I’ll retire. Go home. Live as a gentleman ought to live. This’ – he gestured at the bare base room – ‘I’ll forget all this. Oh, it won’t be long now. I’m an optimist,’ Mr Tench said.
The stranger asked suddenly, ‘How long will she take to Vera Cruz?’
‘Who?’
‘The boat.’
Mr Tench said gloomily, ‘Forty hours from now and we’d be there. The Diligencia. A good hotel. Dance places too. A gay town.’
‘It makes it seem close,’ the stranger said. ‘And a ticket, how much would that be?’
‘You’d have to ask Lopez,’ Mr Tench said. ‘He’s the agent.’
‘But Lopez . . .’
‘Oh yes, I forgot. They shot him.’
Somebody knocked on the door. The stranger slipped the attaché case under his chair, and Mr Tench went cautiously up towards the window. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ he said. ‘Any dentist who’s worth the name has enemies.’
A faint voice implored them, ‘A friend,’ and Mr Tench opened up. Immediately the sun came in like a white-hot bar.
A child stood in the doorway asking for a doctor. He wore a big hat and had stupid brown eyes. Behind him two mules stamped and whistled on the hot beaten road. Mr Tench said he was not a doctor: he was a dentist. Looking round he saw the stranger crouched in the rocking-chair, gazing with an effect of prayer, entreaty. . . . The child said there was a new doctor in town: the old one had fever and wouldn’t stir. His mother was sick.
A vague memory stirred in Mr Tench’s brain. He said with an air of discovery, ‘Why, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?’
‘No, no. I’ve got to catch that boat.’
‘I thought you said . . .’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Oh well, it won’t leave for hours yet,’ Mr Tench said. ‘They’re never on time.’ He asked the child how far. The child said it was six leagues away.
‘Too far,’ Mr Tench said. ‘Go away. Find someone else.’ He said to the stranger, ‘How things get around. Everyone must know you are in town.’
‘I could do no good,’ the stranger said anxiously: he seemed to be asking for Mr Tench’s opinion, humbly.
‘Go away,’ Mr Tench commanded. The child did not stir. He stood in the hard sunlight looking in with infinite patience. He said his mother was dying. The brown eyes expressed no emotion: it was a fact. You were born, your parents died, you grew old, you died yourself.
‘If she’s dying,’ Mr Tench said, ‘there’s no point in a doctor seeing her.’
But the stranger got up as though unwillingly he had been summoned to an occasion he couldn’t pass by. He said sadly, ‘It always seems to happen. Like this.’
‘You’ll have a job not to miss the boat.’
‘I shall miss it,’ he said. ‘I am meant to miss it.’ He was shaken by a tiny rage. ‘Give me my brandy.’ He took a long pull at it, with his eyes on the impassive child, the baked street, the vultures moving in the sky like indigestion spots.
‘But if she’s dying . . .’ Mr Tench said.
‘I know these people. She will be no more dying than I am.’
‘You can do no good.’
The child watched them as if he didn’t care. The argument in a foreign language going on in there was something abstract: he wasn’t concerned. He would just wait here till the doctor came.
‘You know nothing,’ the stranger said fiercely. ‘That is what everyone says all the time – you do no good.’ The brandy had affected him. He said with monstrous bitterness, ‘I can hear them saying it all over the world.’
‘Anyway,’ Mr Tench said, ‘there’ll be another boat. In a fortnight. Or three weeks. You are lucky. You can get out. You haven’t got your capital here.’ He thought of his capital: the Japanese drill, the dentist’s chair, the spirit-lamp and the pliers and the little oven for the gold fillings: a stake in the country.
‘Vamos,’ the man said to the child. He turned back to Mr Tench and told him that he was grateful for the rest out of the sun. He had the kind of dwarfed dignity Mr Tench was accustomed to – the dignity of people afraid of a little pain and yet sitting down with some firmness in his chair. Perhaps he didn’t care for mule travel. He said with an effect of old-fashioned ways, ‘I will pray for you.’
‘You were welcome,’ Mr Tench said. The man got up on to the mule, and the child led the way, very slowly under the bright glare, towards the swamp, the interior. It was from there the man had emerged this morning to take a look at the General Obregon: now he was going back. He swayed very slightly in his saddle from the effect of the brandy. He became a minute disappointed figure at the end of the street.
It had been good to talk to a stranger, Mr Tench thought, going back into his room, locking the door behind him (one never knew). Loneliness faced him there, vacancy. But he was as accustomed to both as to his own face in the glass. He sat down in the rocking-chair and moved up and down, creating a faint breeze in the heavy air. A narrow column of ants moved across the room to the little patch on the floor where the stranger had spilt some brandy: they milled in it, then moved on in an orderly line to the opposite wall and disappeared. Down in the river the General Obregon whistled twice, he didn’t know why.
The stranger had left his book behind. It lay under his rocking-chair: a woman in Edwardian dress crouched sobbing upon a rug embracing a man’s brown polished pointed shoes. He stood above her disdainfully with a little waxed moustache. The book was called La Eterna Mártir. After a time Mr Tench picked it up. When he opened it he was taken aback – what was printed inside didn’t seem to belong; it was Latin. Mr Tench grew thoughtful: he shut the book up and carried it into his workroom. You couldn’t burn a book, but it might be as well to hide it if you were not sure – sure, that is, of what it was all about. He put it inside the little oven for gold alloy. Then he stood by the carpenter’s bench, his mouth hanging open: he had remembered what had taken him to the quay – the ether cylinder which should have come down-river in the General Obregon. Again the whistle blew from the river, and Mr Tench ran without his hat into the sun. He had said the boat would not go before morning, but you could never trust these people not to keep to time-table, and sure enough, when he came out on to the bank between the customs and the warehouse, the General Obregon was already ten feet off in the sluggish river, making for the sea. He bellowed after it, but it wasn’t any good: there was no sign of a cylinder anywhere on the quay. He shouted once again, and then didn’t trouble any more. It didn’t matter so much after all: a little additional pain was hardly noticeable in the huge abandonment.
On the General Obregon a faint breeze became evident: banana plantations on either side, a few wireless aerials on a point, the port slipped behind. When you looked back you could not have told that it had ever existed at all. The wide Atlantic opened up; the great grey cylindrical waves lifted the bows, and the hobbled turkeys shifted on the deck. The captain stood in the tiny deck-house with a toothpick in his hair. The land went backward at a low even roll, and the dark came quite suddenly, with a sky of low and brilliant stars. One oil-lamp was lit in the bows, and the girl whom Mr Tench had spotted from the bank began to sing gently – a melancholy, sentimental, and contented song about a rose which had been stained with true love’s blood. There was an enormous sense of freedom and air upon the gulf with the low tropical shoreline buried in darkness as deeply as any mummy in a tomb. I am happy, the young girl said to herself without considering why, I am happy.
Far back inside the darkness the mules plodded on. The effect of the brandy had long ago worn off, and the man bore in his brain along the marshy tract, which, when the rains came, would be quite impassable, the sound of the General Obregon’s siren. He knew what it meant: the ship had kept to timetable: he was abandoned. He felt an unwilling hatred of the child ahead of him and the sick woman – he was unworthy of what he carried. A smell of damp came up all round him; it was as if this part of the world had never been dried in the flame when the world spun off into space: it had absorbed only the mist and cloud of those awful regions. He began to pray, bouncing up and down to the lurching slithering mule’s stride, with his brandied tongue: ‘Let me be caught soon. . . . Let me be caught.’ He had tried to escape, but he was like the King of a West African tribe, the slave of his people, who may not even lie down in case the winds should fail.
CHAPTER 2: The Capital
The squad of police made their way back to the station. They walked raggedly with rifles slung anyhow: ends of cotton where buttons should have been: a puttee slipping down over the ankle: small men with black secret Indian eyes. The little plaza on the hill-top was lighted with globes strung together in threes and joined by trailing overhead wires. The Treasury, the Presidencia, a dentist’s, the prison – a low white colonnaded building which dated back three hundred years – and then the steep street down past the back wall of a ruined church: whichever way you went you came ultimately to water and to river. Pink classical façades peeled off and showed the mud beneath, and the mud slowly reverted to mud. Round the plaza the evening parade went on – women in one direction, men in the other; young men in red shirts milled boisterously round the gaseosa stalls.
The lieutenant walked in front of his men with an air of bitter distaste. He might have been chained to them unwillingly – perhaps the scar on his jaw was the relic of an escape. His gaiters were polished, and his pistol-holster: his buttons were all sewn on. He had a sharp crooked nose jutting out of a lean dancer’s face; his neatness gave an effect of inordinate ambition in the shabby city. A sour smell came up to the plaza from the river and the vultures were bedded on the roofs, under the tent of their rough black wings. Sometimes, a little moron head peered out and down and a claw shifted. At nine-thirty exactly all the lights in the plaza went out.
A policeman clumsily presented arms and the squad marched into barracks; they waited for no order, hanging up their rifles by the officers’ room, lurching on into the courtyard, to their hammocks or the excusados. Some of them kicked off their boots and lay down. Plaster was peeling off the mud walls; a generation of policemen had scrawled messages on the whitewash. A few peasants waited on a bench, hands between their knees. Nobody paid them any attention. Two men were fighting in the lavatory.
‘Where is the jefe?’ the lieutenant asked. No one knew for certain: they thought he was playing billiards somewhere in the town. The lieutenant sat down with dapper irritation at the chief’s table; behind his head two hearts were entwined in pencil on the whitewash. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘what are you waiting for? Bring in the prisoners.’ They came in bowing, hat in hand, one behind the other. ‘So-and-so drunk and disorderly.’ ‘Fined five pesos.’ ‘But I can’t pay, your excellency.’ ‘Let him clean out the lavatory and the cells then.’ ‘So-and-so. Defaced an election poster.’ ‘Fined five pesos.’ ‘So-and-so found wearing a holy medal under his shirt.’ ‘Fined five pesos.’ The duty drew to a close: there was nothing of importance. Through the open door the mosquitoes came whirring in.
Outside the sentry could be heard presenting arms. The Chief of Police came breezily in, a stout man with a pink fat face, dressed in white flannels with a wide-awake hat and a cartridge-belt and a big pistol clapping his thigh. He held a handkerchief to his mouth: he was in distress. ‘Toothache again,’ he said, ‘toothache.’
‘Nothing to report,’ the lieutenant said with contempt.
‘The Governor was at me again today,’ the chief complained.
‘Liquor?’
‘No, a priest.’
‘The last was shot weeks ago.’
‘He doesn’t think so.’
‘The devil of it is,’ the lieutenant said, ‘we haven’t photographs.’ He glanced along the wall to the picture of James Calver, wanted in the United States for bank robbery and homicide: a tough uneven face taken at two angles: description circulated to every station in Central America: the low forehead and the fanatic bent-on-one-thing eyes. He looked at it with regret: there was so little chance that he would ever get south; he would be picked up in some dive at the border – in Juarez or Piedras Negras or Nogales.
‘He says we have,’ the chief complained. ‘My tooth, oh, my tooth.’ He tried to find something in his hip-pocket, but the holster got in the
way. The lieutenant tapped his polished boot impatiently. ‘There,’ the chief said. A large number of people sat round a table: young girls in white muslin: older women with untidy hair and harassed expressions: a few men peered shyly and solicitously out of the background. All the faces were made up of small dots. It was a newspaper photograph of a first communion party taken years ago; a youngish man in a Roman collar sat among the women. You could imagine him petted with small delicacies, preserved for their use in the stifling atmosphere of intimacy and respect. He sat there, plump, with protuberant eyes, bubbling with harmless feminine jokes. ‘It was taken years ago.’
‘He looks like all the rest,’ the lieutenant said. It was obscure, but you could read into the smudgy photograph a well-shaved, well-powdered jowl much too developed for his age. The good things of life had come to him too early – the respect of his contemporaries, a safe livelihood. The trite religious word upon the tongue, the joke to ease the way, the ready acceptance of other people’s homage . . . a happy man. A natural hatred as between dog and dog stirred in the lieutenant’s bowels. ‘We’ve shot him half a dozen times,’ he said.
‘The Governor has had a report . . . he tried to get away last week to Vera Cruz.’
‘What are the Red Shirts doing that he comes to us?’
‘Oh, they missed him, of course. It was just luck that he didn’t catch the boat.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘They found his mule. The Governor says he must have him this month. Before the rains come.’
‘Where was his parish?’
‘Concepción and the villages around. But he left there years ago.’
‘Is anything known?’
‘He can pass as a gringo. He spent six years at some American seminary. I don’t know what else. He was born in Carmen – the son of a storekeeper. Not that that helps.’
‘They all look alike to me,’ the lieutenant said. Something you could almost have called horror moved him when he looked at the white muslin dresses – he remembered the smell of incense in the churches of his boyhood, the candles and the laciness and the self-esteem, the immense demands made from the altar steps by men who didn’t know the meaning of sacrifice. The old peasants knelt there before the holy images with their arms held out in the attitude of the cross: tired by the long day’s labour in the plantations they squeezed out a further mortification. And the priest came round with the collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return – except a little sexual indulgence. And that was easy, the lieutenant thought, easy. Himself he felt no need of women. He said, ‘We will catch him. It is only a question of time.’