 | CHAPTER SEVEN Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad |  |
7. CHAPTER SEVEN
"MRS. GOULD was too intelligently sympathetic not
to share that feeling. It made life exciting, and she
was too much of a woman not to like excitement. But
it frightened her, too, a little; and when Don José
Avellanos, rocking in the American chair, would go so
far as to say, "Even, my dear Carlos, if you had failed;
even if some untoward event were yet to destroy your
work — which God forbid! — you would have deserved
well of your country," Mrs. Gould would look up from
the tea-table profoundly at her unmoved husband
stirring the spoon in the cup as though he had not heard
a word.
Not that Don José anticipated anything of the sort.
He could not praise enough dear Carlos's tact and
courage. His English, rock-like quality of character
was his best safeguard, Don José affirmed; and, turning
to Mrs. Gould, "As to you, Emilia, my soul" — he would
address her with the familiarity of his age and old
friendship — "you are as true a patriot as though you
had been born in our midst."
This might have been less or more than the truth.
Mrs. Gould, accompanying her husband all over the
province in the search for labour, had seen the land
with a deeper glance than a trueborn Costaguanera
could have done. In her travel-worn riding habit, her
face powdered white like a plaster cast, with a further
protection of a small silk mask during the heat of the
day, she rode on a well-shaped, light-footed pony in the
centre of a little cavalcade. Two mozos de campo,
in white embroidered calzoneras, leather jackets and
striped ponchos, rode ahead with carbines across their
shoulders, swaying in unison to the pace of the horses.
A tropilla of pack mules brought up the rear in charge of
a thin brown muleteer, sitting his long-eared beast very
near the tail, legs thrust far forward, the wide brim of
his hat set far back, making a sort of halo for his head.
An old Costaguana officer, a retired senior major of
humble origin, but patronized by the first families on
account of his Blanco opinions, had been recommended
by Don José for commissary and organizer of that
expedition. The points of his grey moustache hung far
below his chin, and, riding on Mrs. Gould's left hand,
he looked about with kindly eyes, pointing out the
features of the country, telling the names of the little
pueblos and of the estates, of the smooth-walled
haciendas like long fortresses crowning the knolls above
the level of the Sulaco Valley. It unrolled itself, with
green young crops, plains, woodland, and gleams of
water, park-like, from the blue vapour of the distant
sierra to an immense quivering horizon of grass and sky,
where big white clouds seemed to fall slowly into the
darkness of their own shadows.
Men ploughed with wooden ploughs and yoked oxen,
small on a boundless expanse, as if attacking immensity
itself. The mounted figures of vaqueros galloped in
the distance, and the great herds fed with all their
horned heads one way, in one single wavering line as far
as eye could reach across the broad potreros. A spreading
cotton-wool tree shaded a thatched ranche by the
road; the trudging files of burdened Indians taking off
their hats, would lift sad, mute eyes to the cavalcade
raising the dust of the crumbling camino real made by
the hands of their enslaved forefathers. And Mrs.
to the soul of the land in the tremendous disclosure
of this interior unaffected by the slight European veneer
of the coast towns, a great land of plain and mountain
and people, suffering and mute, waiting for the future
in a pathetic immobility of patience.
She knew its sights and its hospitality, dispensed with
a sort of slumbrous dignity in those great houses presenting
long, blind walls and heavy portals to the wind-
swept pastures. She was given the head of the tables,
where masters and dependants sat in a simple and
patriarchal state. The ladies of the house would talk
softly in the moonlight under the orange trees of the
courtyards, impressing upon her the sweetness of their
voices and the something mysterious in the quietude
of their lives. In the morning the gentlemen, well
mounted in braided sombreros and embroidered riding
suits, with much silver on the trappings of their horses,
would ride forth to escort the departing guests before
committing them, with grave good-byes, to the care of
God at the boundary pillars of their estates. In all
these households she could hear stories of political
outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in
the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed
in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of
the country had been a struggle of lust between bands
of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and
uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on all the
lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of
officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration
without law, without security, and without justice.
She bore a whole two months of wandering very well;
she had that power of resistance to fatigue which one
discovers here and there in some quite frail-looking
women with surprise — like a state of possession by a
major — after much display of solicitude for the
delicate lady, had ended by conferring upon her the
name of the "Never-tired Señora." Mrs. Gould was
indeed becoming a Costaguanera. Having acquired
in Southern Europe a knowledge of true peasantry, she
was able to appreciate the great worth of the people. She
saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of burden.
She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures
upon the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with
their white clothing flapping about their limbs in the
wind; she remembered the villages by some group of
Indian women at the fountain impressed upon her
memory, by the face of some young Indian girl with a
melancholy and sensual profile, raising an earthenware
vessel of cool water at the door of a dark hut with a
wooden porch cumbered with great brown jars. The
solid wooden wheels of an ox-cart, halted with its shafts
in the dust, showed the strokes of the axe; and a party
of charcoal carriers, with each man's load resting above
his head on the top of the low mud wall, slept stretched
in a row within the strip of shade.
The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left
by the conquerors proclaimed the disregard of human
labour, the tribute-labour of vanished nations. The
power of king and church was gone, but at the sight of
some heavy ruinous pile overtopping from a knoll the
low mud walls of a village, Don Pépé would interrupt
the tale of his campaigns to exclaim —
"Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for
the Padres, nothing for the people; and now it is everything
for those great politicos in Sta. Marta, for negroes
and thieves."
Charles talked with the alcaldes, with the fiscales,
with the principal people in towns, and with the
districts offered him escorts — for he could show an
authorization from the Sulaco political chief of the day.
How much the document had cost him in gold twenty-
dollar pieces was a secret between himself, a great man
in the United States (who condescended to answer the
Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of
another sort, with a dark olive complexion and shifty
eyes, inhabiting then the Palace of the Intendencia in
Sulaco, and who piqued himself on his culture and
Europeanism generally in a rather French style because
he had lived in Europe for some years — in exile,
he said. However, it was pretty well known that just
before this exile he had incautiously gambled away all
the cash in the Custom House of a small port where a
friend in power had procured for him the post of sub-
collector. That youthful indiscretion had, amongst
other inconveniences, obliged him to earn his living
for a time as a café waiter in Madrid; but his talents
must have been great, after all, since they had enabled
him to retrieve his political fortunes so splendidly.
Charles Gould, exposing his business with an imperturbable
steadiness, called him Excellency.
The provincial Excellency assumed a weary superiority,
tilting his chair far back near an open window
in the true Costaguana manner. The military band
happened to be braying operatic selections on the plaza
just then, and twice he raised his hand imperatively for
silence in order to listen to a favourite passage.
"Exquisite, delicious!" he murmured; while Charles
Gould waited, standing by with inscrutable patience.
"Lucia, Lucia di Lammermoor! I am passionate for
music. It transports me. Ha! the divine — ha! —
Mozart. Si! divine . . . What is it you were
saying?"
Of course, rumours had reached him already of the
newcomer's intentions. Besides, he had received an
official warning from Sta. Marta. His manner was
intended simply to conceal his curiosity and impress
his visitor. But after he had locked up something
valuable in the drawer of a large writing-desk in a distant
part of the room, he became very affable, and
walked back to his chair smartly.
"If you intend to build villages and assemble a
population near the mine, you shall require a decree
of the Minister of the Interior for that," he suggested
in a business-like manner.
"I have already sent a memorial," said Charles
Gould, steadily, "and I reckon now confidently upon
your Excellency's favourable conclusions."
The Excellency was a man of many moods. With
the receipt of the money a great mellowness had descended
upon his simple soul. Unexpectedly he fetched
a deep sigh.
"Ah, Don Carlos! What we want is advanced men
like you in the province. The lethargy — the lethargy
of these aristocrats! The want of public spirit! The
absence of all enterprise! I, with my profound studies
in Europe, you understand —"
With one hand thrust into his swelling bosom, he
rose and fell on his toes, and for ten minutes, almost
without drawing breath, went on hurling himself
intellectually to the assault of Charles Gould's polite
silence; and when, stopping abruptly, he fell back into
his chair, it was as though he had been beaten off from
a fortress. To save his dignity he hastened to dismiss
this silent man with a solemn inclination of the head
and the words, pronounced with moody, fatigued condescension
—
"You may depend upon my enlightened goodwill
it."
He took up a paper fan and began to cool himself with
a consequential air, while Charles Gould bowed and
withdrew. Then he dropped the fan at once, and
stared with an appearance of wonder and perplexity at
the closed door for quite a long time. At last he
shrugged his shoulders as if to assure himself of his disdain.
Cold, dull. No intellectuality. Red hair. A
true Englishman. He despised him.
His face darkened. What meant this unimpressed
and frigid behaviour? He was the first of the successive
politicians sent out from the capital to rule the
Occidental Province whom the manner of Charles
Gould in official intercourse was to strike as offensively
independent.
Charles Gould assumed that if the appearance of
listening to deplorable balderdash must form part of the
price he had to pay for being left unmolested, the obligation
of uttering balderdash personally was by no means
included in the bargain. He drew the line there. To
these provincial autocrats, before whom the peaceable
population of all classes had been accustomed to
tremble, the reserve of that English-looking engineer
caused an uneasiness which swung to and fro between
cringing and truculence. Gradually all of them discovered
that, no matter what party was in power, that
man remained in most effective touch with the higher
authorities in Sta. Marta.
This was a fact, and it accounted perfectly for the
Goulds being by no means so wealthy as the engineer-in-
chief on the new railway could legitimately suppose.
Following the advice of Don José Avellanos, who was a
man of good counsel (though rendered timid by his
horrible experiences of Guzman Bento's time), Charles
gossip of the foreign residents there he was known
(with a good deal of seriousness underlying the irony)
by the nickname of "King of Sulaco." An advocate of
the Costaguana Bar, a man of reputed ability and good
character, member of the distinguished Moraga family
possessing extensive estates in the Sulaco Valley, was
pointed out to strangers, with a shade of mystery and
respect, as the agent of the San Tomé mine — "political,
you know." He was tall, black-whiskered, and discreet.
It was known that he had easy access to ministers,
and that the numerous Costaguana generals were
always anxious to dine at his house. Presidents
granted him audience with facility. He corresponded
actively with his maternal uncle, Don José Avellanos;
but his letters — unless those expressing formally his
dutiful affection — were seldom entrusted to the Costaguana
Post Office. There the envelopes are opened,
indiscriminately, with the frankness of a brazen and
childish impudence characteristic of some Spanish-
American Governments. But it must be noted that at
about the time of the re-opening of the San Tomé mine
the muleteer who had been employed by Charles Gould
in his preliminary travels on the Campo added his small
train of animals to the thin stream of traffic carried
over the mountain passes between the Sta. Marta upland
and the Valley of Sulaco. There are no travellers
by that arduous and unsafe route unless under very
exceptional circumstances, and the state of inland
trade did not visibly require additional transport
facilities; but the man seemed to find his account in it.
A few packages were always found for him whenever he
took the road. Very brown and wooden, in goatskin
breeches with the hair outside, he sat near the tail of
his own smart mule, his great hat turned against the
humming day after day a love-song in a plaintive key,
or, without a change of expression, letting out a yell at
his small tropilla in front. A round little guitar hung
high up on his back; and there was a place scooped out
artistically in the wood of one of his pack-saddles where
a tightly rolled piece of paper could be slipped in, the
wooden plug replaced, and the coarse canvas nailed on
again. When in Sulaco it was his practice to smoke and
doze all day long (as though he had no care in the world)
on a stone bench outside the doorway of the Casa
Gould and facing the windows of the Avellanos house.
Years and years ago his mother had been chief laundry-
woman in that family — very accomplished in the matter
of clear-starching. He himself had been born on
one of their haciendas. His name was Bonifacio, and
Don José, crossing the street about five o'clock to call on
Doña Emilia, always acknowledged his humble salute
by some movement of hand or head. The porters of
both houses conversed lazily with him in tones of grave
intimacy. His evenings he devoted to gambling and
to calls in a spirit of generous festivity upon the peyne
d'oro girls in the more remote side-streets of the town.
But he, too, was a discreet man.
| CHAPTER SEVEN Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad | |