The next morning it was a saint’s day; there should have been heavy traffic. I went out early on the job, but after only a few hours I gave up. The situation was far too abnormal for my findings to be valid. The city had closed up like a clam. Outside the churches — even outside the great cathedral — there were far fewer people than usual coming from Mass; many of them wore mourning bands or had even put on formal mourning complete. Overnight, slogans had been scrawled up on walls, condemning Sam Francis and the National Party; when I went into the market district, where a saint’s day should have produced an extra-heavy crowd, I found only half as many people as usual. The window of a store had been smashed in, and there were signs that there might have been rioting. A peasant’s ramshackle vegetable barrow had been overturned; someone had unsuccessfully tried to set the wooden frame on fire. The little bar where Fats had stood me a drink was closed, and wooden slats from fruit crates had been nailed over the windows. The walls nearby were spattered with the traces of thrown fruit and eggs.
Under the brilliant sun, Ciudad de Vados was as still and as enigmatic as a package with a tick in it. Like such a package, though, it was certain that either the fuse would fizzle out — or there was going to be an explosion.
The tension contended with the heat; from both at once the people of the city sweated rivers.
XI
Despite Guerrero’s death, Vados was going ahead with his garden party; Angers told me that public enthusiasm for the local champion who had won the Caribbean chess tournament was nearly as strong as the public anger at Guerrero’s death, so they had agreed to give him his reception regardless.
I had a good view of the city by night as we drove to the television center. On the way to Presidential House I had a still better one by day. Very probably Vados had had his — or nominally the incumbent’s, which meant his — home located where it was because of the splendid panorama it commanded over the city.
It was a vast white building, backed on the mountainside, at a ninety-degree angle from the airport on the landward side of the city. An airliner on one of the Caribbean routes was nosing down for a landing as I approached the main gates, but its noise was hardly more than a whisper.
Police in summer uniform, on guard at the gates, swung carbines from their shoulders as I came up the road. I wondered for a moment why I had been selected for that honor, since the cars ahead of me had not. Then I realized that they bore senior officers in dress uniform, conspicuous enough to guarantee themselves.
I pulled up at the gate and showed my invitation card to the nearest guard; he waved down his companion’s gun and gave me a snappy salute before telling me to carry on. I drove on up the drive.
Marquees and tables had been set out on a hundred-yard-square lawn before the house. Steeply banked flower beds bordered the lawn on three sides; in the middle of the left-hand side was an ornamental cascade, and opposite it was a small pavilion in which a military band was playing a waltz. At the house end of the lawn was a wall running parallel to the central portico of the house; at either end of the wall a flight of steps descended to lawn level, flanked by pots of trailing, brilliantly flowered creepers. At the other end was a long pergola, also swarming with flowers, and behind that an avenue shaded by trees. There were perhaps four hundred people already present.
I noticed that between the avenue of trees and the limit of the Presidential estate was a double fence of high wire netting, screened from view inside by the trees, but briefly visible as one passed the gatehouse. The sun glinted on a searchlight glass aligned to illuminate the whole space between the two rows of fencing.
A policeman directed me to park my car on a hard tennis court adjacent to the house; here another policeman directed me to go down onto the lawn. At the head of each of the creeper-decked flights of steps stood still other policemen, who courteously checked invitation cards a second time and ticked names off on a list. The one who checked my card gave me a hard, searching look, as though memorizing the face of a potential assassin.
At first I could see no one I recognized. A waiter offered me a tray of drinks; I took something that looked promising, selected a canape from another tray, and wandered around the lawn trying not to look more bored than I could help. This was probably far too formal an affair for me to enjoy.
Looking about me, I realized that there was a good cross section of the Vadeano upper crust here. The most conspicuous and colorful were not by any means the women, who mostly wore pastel frocks that vied with each other to be exquisitely simple. By contrast, the senior officers formed a group as gorgeous as butterflies — the army in pale gray decorated with red and gold, the navy in white encrusted with gold, and the air force in skyblue, silver, and bronze.
Then I spotted the first face I recognized — a man with a load on his mind, plainly, for he was the center of a group that included three astonishingly lovely women and was not even trying to be affable. Miguel Dominguez, the lawyer.
I was wondering at his presence when a voice hailed me in English, and I turned to see Donald Angers arriving together with Seixas and, presumably, their respective wives. The thin angularity of Angers made a comedian-contrast with the vast, white-clothed bulk of Seixas.
Seixas greeted me enormously, slapped me on the back, and offered me one of his black Brazilian cigars. Angers waited patiently for him to finish and then presented me to his wife — a faded, sandy-haired Scotswoman with slightly protruding teeth, who wore her expensive dress badly. I noticed that she kept darting little glances at Señora Seixas, who was nearly as big as her husband, with a great trembling bosom and thick white arms ajangle with bracelets, but who moved with the grace of a former dancer and carried her plain blue frock magnificently.
We talked, of course, about Guerrero’s death. Seixas went into considerable detail about what ought to be done to Sam Francis, while his wife shook with suppressed amusement and Mrs. Angers debated whether she ought to voice her disapproval or not.
In the middle of a sentence Seixas threw up an arm dramatically toward the steps and then slapped his forehead and turned away as though about to spit.
Descending the steps were two gray-haired men, very much alike. One of them — the older of the two — seemed to be well-known, for he was bowing to both sides in acknowledgment of greeting, and as soon as he came down on the lawn was surrounded by friends.
“That is a bit thick!” exclaimed Angers with a frown. “I think Vados is going to overreach himself one of these days with his pose of tolerance.”
“Well, he is very famous, dear,” said his wife timidly.
“Famous or not doesn’t matter,” said Angers. “It’s the principle of the thing. It doesn’t seem quite right in view of the situation.”
I’d never expected to hear a word from Angers against his much-respected President. “Excuse my ignorance,” I said. “Whom are you talking about?”
“That fellow who just arrived. His name’s Felipe Mendoza. He’s a writer — supposed to be the Latin American William Faulkner, so they say. Writes sordid novels about the peasants. I can’t read the stuff. But he trades on his reputation to publish scurrilous articles about the government, and the other day he attacked Seixas here in the most disgraceful manner.”