The Three Sentinels (2 page)

Of the eight hundred and seventy some four hundred had been willing enough for a change. Either they were young men who were eager to see the rest of the republic and cared no more for one place
than another, or they were Indians resigned to obey. But four hundred and seventy petitioned the Company to be allowed to stay. They were prepared to pay rent for their houses, their share of the
communal lands and their water. Impossible, the Company said. Yet they could have made a living from the land—poor, but at least as good as any peasant holding up in the Cordillera. That too
was reasonable, wasn’t it? They refused to go. Why should they go?

Then the Company sent for a señorito from the Ministry of Labour to talk to them. He spoke very well—that must be admitted—but like a schoolteacher to children. There was work
for all, he said, in the forests or on the new roads or in the steel mill which was being constructed in the south. The country had need of all its faithful sons, and wages would be no less.

‘But this faithful son wants to stay where he is. Look, man! Cabo Desierto is our home.’

That was Gil Delgado. His father had been an immigrant from Aragon in Spain and Gil was argumentative like all of them. A mastermind but without manners even to his mates.

The señorito from the Ministry explained with much patience that there would be no homes in Cabo Desierto if the Company had not made them.

‘And there would be no homes from Chile to Mexico,’ Gil had said, ‘if the Spaniards had not made them. But that does not mean that we must all go and live in China.’

Yet the only answer he got was that the Company could not keep four hundred and seventy extra hands who must be fed though there was no work for them. The State had need of labour and the
Company had not. Four hundred and seventy men must do what they were told by the eight million citizens of the country. That was democracy.

The delegate of the Union agreed with him. He agreed with everybody. He admitted that it was all very hard, but the Company had been correct and the Union would see that the State was generous.
He was so eloquent that he sprayed spittle on his coat where it shone in the sun like piss on a palm leaf.

Rafael was not immediately concerned, for he was one of those to be retained. Not for his own value. He knew that. The carpenters’ shop would have less work now that there was little
rigging to be done. No, it was for Catalina that the Company held on to him. Catalina helped Dr. Solano in the hospital. She had only a bit of training in first aid and midwifery, but she was an
angel. How many times had the women cried out that they would not be touched till Catalina came! The world had few women like Catalina.

It had been an open meeting down at the port where he and Gil had first protested against this nonsense. Rafael was just as angry and saw no reason why he should not open his mouth as wide as
Gil Delgado.

‘What rights have we then?’ he shouted.

‘You know very well,’ replied the little crook in collar and tie with all the courtesy of his dirty trade. ‘You have the right to elect your government, to a minimum wage and
to support in time of unemployment. The State is your father. We are no longer in the old days when the Company could ship out its men to starve.’

‘But to how much liberty have we a right?’

It appeared that they had a right to all the liberties of a good citizen, and the man from the Union had made another fine speech, asking for his name and addressing himself to Don Rafael,
though what in the name of God he had really said no one could remember afterwards. So the men elected a committee and chose Gil and Rafael to negotiate for them. Not because they were experienced.
Just because they were the two who had spoken out.

He and Gil were treated very smoothly as if they were men of consequence, and they were not suspicious. There were telegrams and telegrams and then the Ministry proposed that the four hundred
and seventy should go to the Capital in the Company’s launches and see for themselves what was offered—the conditions of work, the wages, the housing.

The men agreed at once. Were they not human? A little travel at no expense with wives and children left behind at Cabo Desierto. Of course they agreed! And the Company promised to bring back any
who were not contented. No shadow of doubt about it!

‘You are trembling,’ the boy said. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing! Nothing!’ Rafael answered, his voice unsteady.

‘Have I asked what a man should not?’

‘No, no, beloved. I have my thoughts. That is all.’

The jobs which were offered were jobs; a man’s preference was of no importance. The Ministry wished to distribute their cattle neatly—a herd here and a herd there—according to
whether they were born on the coast or in the mountains. So the men became excited and insisted on the promised right to return to Cabo Desierto while they made up their minds. There in the Capital
they had no one to fight for them and, worse still, no one they could fight. Either launches were not available or there were papers to sign which were not ready or secretaries at the Ministry were
busy. It was then that he, Rafael, began to be angry, for he had given it as his opinion that the Company could be trusted. Not the Ministry, of course. All of them knew that every politician,
however sympathetic, was a liar.

The whole field met in the plaza where there was talk of a strike, but the plaza was too small. Crowds were jammed in the side streets yelling that they could not hear the speakers and
overturning vehicles in their way. Thereafter they met in the sports ground, marching out in good order from the town, their own town which was like no other town. What was Cabo Desierto but
themselves? It was not right to trick fellow citizens into leaving when they did not want to leave.

In old days the Company had been afraid of nothing, neither the State nor its men nor the devil, but now it was flapping like an old hen with a truck at its tail. They had not known it was
screeching, too, until they saw sixty armed police disembarking at the port. And this when they had been told that there were no launches available for their comrades!

The Company should have had more sense than those fools in the Capital for whom Cabo Desierto was a home of ogres in a fairy tale. A ledge of criminals they called it. Was a decent citizen a
criminal just because there was no road or railway to his town? And what was the use of sixty policemen among fifteen hundred oil workers with their knives and spanners?

Well, it had been made very plain to the police that they should keep out of the dispute as best they could. A little blood in the gutters, yes, but thank God no one had been killed! And after
the police had returned to their station in the customs shed Cabo Desierto gave them no more trouble.

So all was quiet. But the riot had frightened some women. Women, when their men are away, will believe anything. God only knew what chit-chat went on amongst them. They had no more sense than
animals. The group which had caused the trouble were the poorest of all, living in the dirty shacks beyond the port, whose husbands, being unskilled, were among the four hundred and seventy stuck
in the Capital. It was incredible what some decent men would marry. Nothing in their heads but bed and chatter! One couldn’t say much for priests and their fancy dress, but at least they gave
such women some sense.

Yet he had no right to be angry with them just for the sake of Catalina. Men are what they are and women are what they are, and when you know what they are it is criminal to take away their
husbands and send for the police. A pitiable panic! And they kept their secret as if they were still living in some trapped tribe. Jesus! Would you believe it? A party, all from one lane behind the
refinery, went off by land with their children to join their husbands.

That could be done by men who were strong and well-provided and sure of not losing the track which wound and climbed through sixty waterless miles of giant foothills where wind and the trickling
gravel could wipe out all sign of it. But for them, impossible! And it was a day before any sensible Christian knew where and when they had gone.

Another day passed without news, and then the Superintendent himself set out after them with four good fellows and his own wife and Catalina. The women would listen to her, and the doctor told
her what to do if they and their children were dying of thirst.

A coward, the General Manager, with his telegrams! Nothing but telegrams for the help of the army and a plane. Anyone could have told him that the poor martyrs would hide because they were
afraid of being sent back. Meanwhile the Superintendent found them in a rocky cove—seventeen of them dead and the rest giving the children sea water to drink because they cried.

They had no longer the strength to walk. The only way to save them was by sea, and that was almost beyond hope even for the men of the port who could handle a boat in any surf. Somehow they got
those helpless women off, but Catalina was drowned and two men pulped on the rocks trying to save her.

Yes, and after that there was a tanker at once to take the four hundred and seventy men back to Cabo Desierto. But not to work! No, friends, not to work! The Union refused to back the boycott.
It told the unwanted men that they must go and that then it would get higher wages for the rest. Its leaders were not going to draw on the funds which kept them living in the cafés of the
Capital. But workers in the country sent what they could and there were contributions from oil fields in all Latin-America. Everyone had to tighten his belt a hole, but not yet two. It was a
miracle what Cabo Desierto could achieve when all were working full time on the communal lands.

So much discipline and activity—and still there remained his son’s question.

‘Look.’ Rafael told him. ‘We are not God Almighty to share out the blame. But the Company killed her, and it is on the Company that we avenge her.’

The office of the Compañía Petrolífera Cabo Desierto in London Wall had served the Company for the thirty-five years of its life and in an old-fashioned
way was still luxurious, panelled in light oak, furnished with green leather chairs of great comfort, decently spacious and designed to appeal to the financier or shareholder or fellow oilman who
might have, regrettably, to wait. The buying of the Company’s stores and the selling of its products was carried on across the river at Bermondsey. There, too, the waiting-room had changed
little. It was furnished for commerce rather than finance and still uncomfortable.

The sole occupant of the green leather chairs would have suited London Wall or Bermondsey equally well. He might have been a sales manager or geologist back from abroad, spare, tall, in his
early fifties, with a face once bronzed but now yellowish from lack of sun and the forgotten illnesses of his youth. It was a classless face, having little in common with the firm mouth and
professionally kindly expression of the soldiers and colonial administrators. The grey eyes were indeed kindly, but ironical; they had watched rather than accepted, seen through rather than
overseen. An employer—a real intelligent tycoon out of the top drawer—could never be quite sure that such a mouth, disturbingly mobile and compassionate, would not smile at what was
serious or let loose in the solidity of the board room the outrageous bitter laughter of its unstable habitations.

Matthew Darlow felt himself out of place in London Wall. Bermondsey was all he expected. Presumably they did not know that he would gladly have taken a job as chief clerk—even as a night
watchman if it came to that. When he met Henry Constantinides he had fortunately been a little drunk. Not as in old days! The price of alcohol now limited him to an occasional beer. A few gins and
some wine with dinner, which had once been as normal an intake as the bread on his plate, produced in these days a vulgar self-confidence, followed in the loneliness of his bedroom by a depth of
melancholy which he had to discipline himself to ignore.

Two years before, he could still tell any promising acquaintance what he wanted. Now, however delicately he put his request, it sounded in his own ears as if he had shouted: ‘for
Christ’s sake give me a job!’ But that genial night in a friend’s house had temporarily restored the sense of belonging to his normal world. When Henry Constantinides had asked
him what he was doing he answered casually that he had practically retired but might be open to any interesting offer. Henry had looked him over carefully, said little and asked for his telephone
number. Mat Darlow didn’t think he had been taken in for a moment. Still, the references for half his life had been demanded and the invitation to call at London Wall had come.

He was used to humble waiting in offices—a poor end to more than thirty highly enjoyable working years in which he had always served his masters better than himself. The
Compañía Petrolífera Cabo Desierto had been his second employer and his first love. For five years his job as Secretary and Assistant to the General Manager had been wholly
satisfying. The concentration of human beings where they had no right to be provided his character, even then that of a fascinated observer, with interests which married into his daily work. Texan
drillers and the hybrid labourers of the coast equally rejoiced him by their departure from the norms of European behaviour. And the Company had been generous with local leave. One could jump on a
launch to the Capital for the asking.

Why had he left them? Well, would anyone really want to spend his life between Cabo Desierto and London? That answer was instant, yet followed by sour self-approach. Irresponsible! Too many
employers just for the sake of curiosity. If only he had stopped then, at the beginning, the exasperating pattern of his life!

But at twenty, thirty, even forty, one could not foresee the need for some sort of security at fifty. Security was like death. Obviously it would happen, and obviously you didn’t know how.
After Cabo Desierto had come Central America; after that, the Congo. All training for each other. It was odd how Spanish civilisation taught a man to be on easy terms with any people of any colour.
You were conditioned to profound respect for the individual though you might have none at all for his way of life. In the end white men not black had tired his taste for Africa; they did not want
to understand or they understood too scientifically. It was depressing, when he came to think of it, that he had refused careers from sheer impatience with the stupid, whether they were plain
inhuman or, to his mind, over-earnest.