Chapter 4

When I went up on deck after breakfast we were already approaching Asunción. Red cliffs were honeycombed with caves. Half-ruined huts stood at the very edge of the cliff and naked children with the pot-bellies of malnutrition stared down on us as the boat passed, moving like an overfed man who picks his slow way home after a heavy meal, giving little belches on the siren. Above the huts, like a medieval castle dominating some wretched village of mud and wattle, stood the great white bastions of Shell.

O’Toole came and stood beside me as the immigration officers arrived on board. He asked, “Can I be of any help? Give you a lift or anything?”

“Thank you very much, but I think I shall be met.”

The steerage passengers were going ashore. He said, “If you want any help at any time… I know most of the ropes. You’ll find me at the embassy. They call me a second secretary. It’s convenient.”

“You’re very kind.”

“You are a friend of Lucinda…” he said. “Katmandu seems a hell of a long way off. Maybe some mail will have come in.”

“Is she a good correspondent?”

“She writes me picture postcards,” he said. He leant forward on the rail. “Isn’t that your friend?” he asked.

“What friend?”

I looked at the steerage queue on the gangway and saw Wordsworth.

“The man who spoke to you on shore.”

I said, “All coloured men look very much alike to me at that distance.”

“It’s not often you see an African here,” he said. “I guess it’s your friend.”

When at last the formalities were over and I stood beside my luggage on the corner of a street named after Benjamin Constant, I looked around awhile in vain for Wordsworth. Families exchanged greetings and drove away in cars. The Czech plastics manufacturer offered me a lift in his taxi. A small boy wanted to clean my shoes and another tried to sell me American cigarettes. A long colonnaded street, which sloped uphill in front of me, was full of liquor shops, and old women sat against the wall with baskets of bread and fruit. In spite of the dirt and fumes of old cars, the air was sweet with orange blossom.

Somebody whistled, and I turned to see Wordsworth getting out of a taxi. He lifted my two heavy suitcases as though they were empty cardboard boxes. “Ar look for friend,” he said, “too plenty humbug here.” I had never before been driven in quite such a decrepit taxi. The lining was torn and the stuffing leaked out of the seat. Wordsworth punched at it to make it more comfortable. Then he made motions to the driver which the man seemed to understand. “We drive aroun a bit,” Wordsworth said. “Ar wan to see if they lef us alone.” He looked out of the window, while the taxi ground and shook. All the other taxis which passed us were smart enough, and sometimes the drivers shouted what I took to be insults to our old man, who had a white moustache and a hat without a crown.

“Suppose we’re not left alone,” I said, “what do we do?”

“We tak bloody good care,” Wordsworth said vaguely. “You seem to have chosen the oldest taxi.” Soldiers were goose-stepping in front of the cathedral, and a very early tank stood on a plinth up on the greensward. The orange trees were everywhere, some in fruit and some in blossom. “He good friend of mine.”

“You talk Spanish?” I asked.

“No. He don know no Spanish.”

“What does he talk?”

“He talk Indian lingo.”

“How do you make him understand?”

“Ar give him smokes,” Wordsworth said. “He lak pot.” Except for the skyscraper of a new hotel, it was a very Victorian town. One soon ceased to notice the cars – they were an anachronism; there were mule carts and sometimes men on horses, there was a little white castellated Baptist church, a college built like a neo-Gothic abbey, and when we reached the residential quarter I saw big stone houses with bosky gardens and pillared porticos above stone steps which reminded me of the oldest part of Southwood, but in Southwood the houses would have been split into flats and the grey stone would have been whitewashed and the roofs would have bristled with television masts. In place of the orange and banana trees, I would have seen neglected rhododendrons and threadbare lawns.

“What is the name of my aunt’s friend, Wordsworth?” I asked.

“Ar don remember,” Wordsworth said. “Ar don wanta remember. Ar wanta forget.”

A little crumbling house with corinthian pillars and broken windows was called SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE on a board which had been split by the seasons, but, however tumbledown the houses, the flowers were everywhere. A bush of jasmine blossomed with white and blue flowers on the same bush.

“We stop here,” Wordsworth said and he shook the driver’s shoulder.

It was an enormous house with a great untidy lawn which ended in a dark green fuzz of trees, a small wood of banana, orange, lemon, grapefruit, lapacho. On the two sides visible to me through the gates wide stone steps led up to separate entrances. The walls were blotched with lichen and were four stories high.

“It’s a millionaire’s house,” I said.

“You jus wait”, Wordsworth replied.

The iron gates were rusty and padlocked. Worn pineapples were carved on the gateposts, but the gates, draped with barbed wire, had lost their dignity. A millionaire may once have lived there, I thought, but no longer.

Wordsworth led me round the corner of the street and we approached the house from the back through a little door which he locked behind him and through the grove of sweet-smelling trees and bushes. “Hi!” he called to the great square block of stone, “hi!” and got no response. The house in its solidity and its silence reminded me of the great family tombs in the cemetery at Boulogne. This was a journey’s end too.

“Your auntie she got a bit deaf,” Wordsworth said. “She no young no more, no more.” He spoke regretfully, as though he had known her as a girl, and yet she had been over seventy when she picked him up outside the Grenada Palace. We went up one flight of stone steps and into the hall of the house.

Paved with cracked marble, the big hall was unfurnished. The windows had been shuttered and the only light came from a bare globe in the ceiling. There was no chair, no table, no sofa, no pictures. The one sign of human occupation was a mop which leant against one wall, but it might have been left there a generation ago by someone hired to tidy up after the furniture-removers had departed.

“Hi!” Wordsworth shouted. “Hi! Mr. Pullen be here,” and I heard the click of high heels along a passage overhead. A flight of pink marble stairs rose to the first floor, and at the head of them my aunt appeared. The light was too dim to see her clearly, and it may have been my imagination which read into her voice an older, more tremulous tone than I had remembered. “Why, Henry,” she said, “you are welcome home.” She came slowly down the stairs, and perhaps it was the bad light which caused her to clutch at the banister. “I am so sorry,” she said, “that Mr. Visconti is not here to greet you. I had expected him yesterday.”

“Mr. Visconti?”

“Yes,” my aunt said, “Mr. Visconti. We are happily reunited. Did you bring the picture safely?”

“Ar got it,” Wordsworth said, holding up his new suitcase.

“Mr. Visconti will be relieved. He was afraid of the customs. You look well, Henry,” she said, kissing my cheek and leaving on the air a smell of lavender. “Come, let me show you your room.” She led me up to the first landing, which was as bare as the hall, and opened a door. This room at least contained a bed and a chair and a cupboard, though nothing else. My aunt may have thought some explanation was needed, for she said, “The furniture will be arriving any day now.” I opened another door and saw a room which was empty except for two mattresses laid together on the floor and a dressing-table and stool that looked new. “I have given you the bed,” my aunt said, “but I couldn’t do without my dressing-table.”

“Is this your room?”

“Sometimes I miss my Venetian glass, but when the curtains go up and the furniture arrives… You must be hungry, Henry. Wordsworth will bring your bags. I have a little meal prepared.”

I could no longer be surprised by the furnishing of the dining-room – an immense room which had been lit once by three chandeliers; the wires sprouted like weeds out of holes in the ceiling. There was a table but no cloth, and the chairs were packing-cases. “It’s all a little rough,” my aunt said, “but when Mr. Visconti returns you will see how soon we shall get things in order.” The meal came out of tins, and there was a sweet red wine of local origin which tasted like an evil medicine of childhood. I thought of my first-class ticket on the boat with shame.

“When Mr. Visconti is back,” Aunt Augusta said, “we plan to give you a party. A house like this is made for parties. We shall have a barbecue with an ox roasted whole in the garden, and there will be coloured lights in the trees, and music, of course, for dancing. A harp and a guitar – that is the fashion here. The polka and the galop are the national dances. I shall invite the Chief of Police, the Jesuit Provincial (for his conversation of course), the British Ambassador and his wife. The Italian Ambassador, no – it would not be tactful. We must find some pretty girls for you, Henry.” A splinter from the packing-case scratched my thigh.

I said, “You will need a little furniture first, Aunt Augusta.”

“That goes without saying. I regret that I cannot ask the Italian Ambassador – he is such a handsome man, but under the circumstances… I shall have to tell you something, Henry, that only Wordsworth knows…”

“Where is Wordsworth now?”

“In the kitchen. Mr. Visconti prefers us to eat alone. As I was going to say, Henry, when you interrupted me, Mr. Visconti has taken to an Argentine passport and he is known here as Mr. Izquierdo.”

“I am not altogether surprised, Aunt Augusta.” I told her how the two detectives had searched her flat. “General Abdul is dead, by the way.”

“I rather expected that. Did they take anything away?”

“Nothing except a picture postcard from Panama.”

“Why did they want that?”

“They thought it might have something to do with Mr. Visconti.”

“How absurd the police always seem to be. The card must have been sent by Monsieur Dambreuse. I met him on the boat going out to Buenos Aires. Poor man, he had aged a great deal. I didn’t even recognize him until he began to tell me about his metallurgical company and his family in Toulouse.”

“And he hadn’t recognized you?”

“That is not so surprising. In those days, when we were living at the Saint James and Albany, I had black hair, not red. Red was Mr. Visconti’s favourite colour. I kept red especially for him.”

“The police were acting for Interpol,” I said.

“It’s absurd of them to treat Mr. Visconti like a common war criminal. There are lots of such men hidden around here. Martin Bormann is just across the border in Brazil and the unspeakable Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz is said to be with the army near the Bolivian border. Why doesn’t Interpol do anything about them? Mr. Visconti was always very kind to Jews. Even when he had those dealings with Saudi Arabia. Why should he be chased out of the Argentine, where he was doing quite well in the antique business? There was an American in Buenos Aires who made the most impertinent inquiries, Mr. Visconti told me. Mr. Visconti had sold a picture to a private purchaser in the States, and this American, who claimed to be a representative of the Metropolitan Museum, said the picture had been looted…”

“Was the man’s name O’Toole by any chance?”

“It was.”

“He’s here in Asunción now.”

“Yes, I know that. But he is not finding people so cooperative here. After all, the General has German blood.”

“He was with me on the boat and he told me he was doing social research.”

“That’s quite untrue. Like the Metropolitan Museum. He’s in the CIA.”

“He’s Tooley’s father.”

“Tooley?”

“The girl on the Orient Express.”

“How very interesting. I wonder if that could be of any use to us,” my aunt reflected. “You say he was on the boat with you?”

“Yes.”

“He may have been following you. Such a fuss about a few pictures. I seem to remember that you and his daughter became great friends on the train. And there was all that business of the pregnancy…”

“Aunt Augusta, that had nothing to do with me.”

“Rather a pity,” Aunt Augusta said, “under the circumstances.”

Wordsworth came into the room wearing the butcher’s apron in which I had first seen him in the flat above the Crown and Anchor. Then his services in washing up had been recognized and praised, but I could tell they were taken for granted now.

“Chop finished?”

“We will have our coffee in the garden,” my aunt said grandly.

We sat down in the meagre shade of a banana tree. The air was sweet with orange and jasmine, and the moon swam palely in the pale blue daylight sky. It looked as worn and thin as an old coin, and the craters were the same colour as the sky, so that one seemed to be looking through holes at the universe behind. There was no sound of traffic. The clip-clop of a horse belonged to the same ancient world of silence.

“Yes, it’s very peaceful,” my aunt said, “only an occasional gunshot after dark. The police are sometimes trigger-happy. I forget whether it’s one lump or two”.

“I wish you would tell me a little more, Aunt Augusta. I can’t help being puzzled. This big house and no furniture… and Wordsworth here with you.”

“I brought him from Paris,” Aunt Augusta said. “I was travelling with rather a lot of ready money – nearly everything I had left, though I kept enough in Berne to pay for your ticket. A frail old lady like myself needed a bodyguard.” It was the first time I had ever heard her admit to being old.

“You could have taken me with you.”

“I wasn’t sure about your attitude to certain things. You were rather shocked, you remember, about that gold bar in Istanbul. What a pity General Abdul made a mess of the affair. We could have done now with the twenty-five per cent.”

“Where has all your money gone, Aunt Augusta? You haven’t even a bed to sleep in.”

“The mattresses are perfectly comfortable, and I have always found a soft bed enervating. When I arrived here poor Mr. Visconti was in a very low state. He was living on credit in a really horrible little hotel. All his money had gone on his new passport and bribes to the police. God knows how Dr. Mengele manages, but I expect he has a numbered account in Switzerland. I only arrived just in time. He was sick too, poor fellow, from living mainly on mandioca.”

“So you gave him your money a second time, Aunt Augusta?”

“Of course, what do you expect? He needed it. We bought this house for a song (someone was murdered here twenty years ago and people are very superstitious) and what was left has been well invested now. We have a half share in a very promising enterprise.”

“A Dakota by any chance?”

My aunt gave a little excited giggle. “Mr. Visconti will tell you all about it himself.”

“Where is he?”

“He meant to be back yesterday, but there has been a lot of rain and the roads are very bad.” She looked with pride at the empty shell of her house. She said, “You won’t know this place in a week’s time. When the chandeliers are hung in the hall, and the furniture arrives. I so wanted it to be ready before you came, but there were delays in Panama. A lot always depends on Panama.”

“And what about the police?”

“Oh, they won’t interfere with an established business,” my aunt said.

All the same, another day passed and Mr. Visconti had not returned from wherever he was. My aunt slept late on her mattresses, Wordsworth was busy cleaning, and I walked around the town. Preparations were in progress for some festival. There were decorated cars of pretty girls parked at street corners. Outside the cathedral and the military academy, which faced each other over the little memorial tank, squads of soldiers goose-stepped. There were pictures of the General everywhere – sometimes in uniform and sometimes in civilian clothes looking like the amiable well-fed host of a Bavarian Bierstube. There had been unpleasant stories in Buenos Aires about his early rule – enemies tossed out of airplanes into the jungle, bodies washed up on the Argentine shore of the two great rivers with their hands and feet bound with wire, but there were cheap cigarettes on the street and cheap whisky in the stores and no income tax to pay (so my aunt had told me) and even the bribes were not unreasonable if one were doing well and could pay regularly, and the oranges lay under the trees hardly worth the bother of gathering when they were threepence a dozen in the market, and everywhere there was the smell of flowers. I hoped that Mr. Visconti’s investment would prove a success. There were worse places than this to end one’s days.

But when I returned home the second evening Mr. Visconti was not there, and my aunt was having a bitter argument with Wordsworth. As I crossed the lawn I could hear her voice sounding hollowly from the empty hall at the head of the garden steps. “I am not your bebi gel, Wordsworth, any more. Understand that. I have kept enough money for you to return to Europe…”

“Ar no wan yo money,” Wordsworth’s voice replied.

“You’ve taken plenty of my money in the past. The CTCs you’ve had from me and all my friends…”

“Ar tak yo money them times because you lov me, you slip with me, you lak jig-jig with Wordsworth. Now you no slip with me, you no lov me, I no wan your damn money. You give it him. He tak everytin you got. When you got noting at all, you come to Wordsworth, and ar work for you and ar slip with you an you lov me and you lak jig-jig all same last time.”

I stood at the bottom of the steps. I couldn’t turn my back and walk away. They would have seen me.

“Don’t you understand, Wordsworth, all that’s finished now I have Mr. Visconti back. Mr. Visconti wants you to go, and I want what he wants.”

“He be feared of Wordsworth.”

“Dear, dear Wordsworth, it’s you who should be afraid. I want you to leave now – today – don’t you understand that?”

“O.K.,” Wordsworth said, “ar go. You ask me an ar go. Ar no feared of that man. But you no slip with me no more an ar go.” My aunt made a movement as though she wished to embrace him, but Wordsworth turned away from her and came down the steps. He didn’t even see me, though I was only a step away.

“Good-bye, Wordsworth,” I said and held out my hand. I had a fifty-dollar note concealed in it. Wordsworth looked at the note but he didn’t take it. He said, “Goodbye, Mr. Pullen. Man, the darkness deepens, sure thing, sure thing, she no abide with me.” He pressed my left hand, which was moneyless, and went off down the garden.

My aunt came out on to the steps to see the last of him.

“How will you do without him in this big house?” I asked.

“Staff are easy to come by and much cheaper than Wordsworth with all his CTCs. Oh, I’m sorry for poor Wordsworth,” she added, “but he was only a stop-gap. Everything has been a stop-gap since Mr. Visconti and I were separated.”

“You must love Visconti a great deal. Is he worth it?” 308

“To me he is. I like men who are untouchable. I’ve never wanted a man who needed me, Hertry. A need is a claim. I thought that Wordsworth wanted my money and the comfort I gave him at the Crown and Anchor, but there’s not much comfort for anyone here and you saw how he wouldn’t even take a CTC. I’m disappointed in Wordsworth.” She added as though it were relevant, “Your father was pretty untouchable too.”

“All the same, I found your photograph in Rob Roy.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t untouchable enough,” she said, and she added with venom in her voice, “Think of the little schoolteacher and ‘Dolly, darling’ and dying in her arms.”

The house was twice as empty now that Wordsworth had gone and we were alone. We ate our evening meal almost in silence, and I drank too much of the heavy sweet medicinal wine. Once we heard the distant sound of a car and my aunt went at once to the big windows which gave on to the garden. The single globe on the enormous ceiling hardly stretched that far, so that she looked slim and young in her dark dress, and in the obscurity I would never have taken her for an old woman. She quoted at me with a scared smile:

 

“She only said, ‘The night is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said.”

 

She added, “Your father taught me that.”

“Yes, I learnt it from him too – in a way. He turned down that page in Palgrave.”

“And no doubt he taught it to Dolly darling,” she said. “Can’t you imagine her reciting it over the grave in Boulogne like a prayer?”

“You are not untouchable, Aunt Augusta.”

“That’s why I need a man who is. Two touchables together, what a terrible life they always make of it, two people suffering, afraid to speak, afraid to act, afraid of hurting. Life can be bearable when it’s only one who suffers. It’s easy to put up with your own suffering, but not someone else’s. I’m not afraid of making Mr. Visconti suffer. I wouldn’t know how. I have a wonderful feeling of freedom. I can say what I like, and it will never get under that thick dago skin of his.”

“And if he makes you suffer?”

“It’s only for a little time, Henry. Like now. When he doesn’t come and I don’t know what’s keeping him, and I fear…”

“There can’t be anything seriously wrong. If there had been an accident you would have heard from the police.”

“My dear, this is Paraguay. I am afraid of the police.”

“Then why do you stay here?”

“Mr. Visconti hasn’t all that much choice. I daresay he might be safe in Brazil if he had enough money. Perhaps when he’s made a fortune, we can move there.

Mr. Visconti has always wanted to make a fortune, and he believes he can at last make one here. He has come close to making a fortune so many times. There was Saudi Arabia and then there were the Germans…”

“If he makes one now he won’t have very long to enjoy it.”

“That’s not the point. He’ll die happy if it’s there.

Stacked gold bars. (He has always had a fancy for gold bars.) He’ll have done what he set out to do.”

“Why did you want me to come, Aunt Augusta?”

“You are the only family I have, Henry – and you can be of great use to Mr. Visconti.”

It was not an idea which appealed to me greatly.

“I can’t speak a word of Spanish,” I said.

“Mr. Visconti wants somebody he can trust to keep the books. Accounts have always been his weak point.”

I looked around the empty room. The bare globe flickered with an approaching storm. The packing-case scratched hard against my thigh. I thought of the two mattresses and the dressing-table upstairs. The books didn’t seem to need very much accounting. I said, “I planned to leave after I had seen you.”

“Leave? Why?”

“I was thinking that perhaps it’s almost time I settled down.”

“What else have you been doing? For far too long.”

“And married, I was going to say.”

“At your age?”

“I’m not nearly as old as Mr. Visconti.”

A gust of rain splashed against the windows. I began to tell my aunt about Miss Keene and of the evening when I had nearly proposed to her.

“You are suffering from loneliness,” my aunt said. “That’s all. You won’t be lonely here.”

“I really think Miss Keene loves me a little. I get a bit of pleasure from the thought that perhaps I could make her happy.” I was arguing without conviction, waiting for my aunt’s denial, and even hoping for it.

“In a year,” my aunt said, “what would you two have to talk about? She would sit over her tatting – I didn’t realize that anyone still tatted – and you would read gardening catalogues, and then when the silence was almost unbearable she would begin to tell you a story of Kofiefontein which you had heard a dozen times before. Do you know what you’ll think about when you can’t sleep in your double bed? Not of women. You don’t care enough about them, or you wouldn’t even consider marrying Miss Keene. You will think how every day you are getting a little closer to death. It will stand there as close as the bedroom wall. And you’ll become more and more afraid of the wall because nothing can prevent you coming nearer and nearer to it every night while you try to sleep and Miss Keene reads. What does Miss Keene read?”

“You may be right, Aunt Augusta, but isn’t it the same everywhere at our age?”

“Not here it isn’t. Tomorrow you may be shot in the street by a policeman because you haven’t understood Guaraní, or a man may knife you in a cantina because you can’t speak Spanish and he thinks you are acting in a superior way. Next week, when we have our Dakota, perhaps it will crash with you over Argentina. (Mr. Visconti is too old to fly with the pilot.) My dear Henry, if you live with us, you won’t be edging day by day across to any last wall. The wall will find you of its own accord without your help, and every day you live will seem to you a kind of victory. ‘I was too sharp for it that time,’ you will say, when night comes, and afterwards you’ll sleep well.” She said, “I only hope the wall hasn’t found Mr. Visconti. If it has I will have to go out and look for it myself.”