Simon touched his right eye with his index finger. "I have seen it at
this moment. My father is a great and a brave man. He says that we
should bring _Companero_ Hall in at once."
The door leading to Tabio's room was opened by an armed army sergeant.
"The President will see you now," he said.
Hall followed Simon and Gonzales through the small corridor which took
them to the sick room. The shutters were opened, and the sun streamed
into the chamber, bathing everyone and everything in its gentle light.
Anibal Tabio was sitting up in bed, his hand raised in a familiar
gesture as he dictated to a secretary who sat on a stool near his
pillows.
"Neutrality," he was dictating, "neutrality is either abject surrender
to Hitler or an open admission of complicity with the fascist Axis or a
sinful combination of both..."
The swarthy Esteban Lavandero was, as always, at Tabio's side, his
fierce Moorish face twisted with pain and love. He stood behind the girl
secretary, one black hairy hand resting on the carved headboard of the
ancient bed, his ears cocked for every word which came from Tabio's pale
lips.
Tabio's wife and two doctors in white coats stood on the other side of
the bed. The prim white collar of her dark dress matched the streaks of
white in her long black hair. Her luminous _mestiza's_ eyes, swollen
from quiet weeping, were now bright and clear, and when Anibal Tabio
looked to his wife after turning a particularly telling phrase in his
speech her generous lips parted and she smiled at him the way she had
smiled to reward his earliest writings three decades ago.
"The great North American martyr to freedom, Don Abraham Lincoln, a man
of great dignity whose humor was the humor of the people from whose
loins he sprang, was a man who many years ago described such neutrality.
Lincoln was not a neutral in the struggle between slavery and freedom.
And when some fool insisted that most Americans were neutral in this
struggle, Lincoln replied with the anecdote of the American woman who
went for a walk in the woods and found her husband fighting with a wild
bear. Being a neutral, this woman stood by and shouted, 'Bravo, Husband.
Bravo, Bear.'
"And then, Lincoln said ..."
"Don Anibal," one of the doctors said, gently, "I must implore you ..."
The restraining hand of Tabio's wife made him stop.
"It is no use, doctor," Tabio smiled. "At a time like this, if a
President can speak at all, he must speak to his people. Tonight you
will type my speech, and tomorrow you can bring the microphone right
into this room, and right from my bed I shall talk to the people. If I
am to die in any event, it will not matter much. And if I am to live,
doctor, the speech will not kill me."
Simon, who was standing next to Hall in the doorway, whispered that
Tabio's eyes were too weak to distinguish them at that distance. They
started to walk toward the bed on their toes, and Hall, glancing at
Tabio sitting up in the old bed in a white hospital gown surrounded by
the burly Lavandero and his wife and son, was suddenly struck by the
similarity of the scene which was before him and the Dore engraving of
the death of Don Quixote. It was all there, even to the faithful Sancho
Panza figure of Lavandero, and at that moment Hall knew why Spanish
savants had for hundreds of years written scores of books on the true
significance of Cervantes' classic. Here were the two great impulses of
the Hispanic world, the fragile, gentle, trusting dreamer of great new
horizons and at his side the broad-backed practical man of earth who
threw his strength into the effort of implementing the dreams and making
them the new realities. Here was the visionary Juarez and the young
soldier Porfirio Diaz, when the warrior was still a man untainted by his
own betrayal of a people's dream. Here was the romantic poet Jose Marti
and one of his durable guerrilla generals, Maximo Gomez or Antonio
Maceo, whose white and black skins, blended, would have yielded a skin
the color of Lavandero's. (Was it any wonder, then, Hall thought in
those fleeting seconds before Tabio recognized him, that Tabio as a
young exile went to Cuba to write a biography of Marti while his
faithful fellow-exile spent the same months in Havana writing an equally
good study of Maceo?)
At that moment Tabio saw Hall. "_Viejo!_" he said, happily. "Mateo Hall,
a good friend and thank God never a neutral. Senorita, give him your
stool. Come, sit down, Mateo."
Hall took his hand, tenderly, for fear of hurting him. It was a thin
hand, bony and fleshless; cold, as though Death had already touched it.
"_Viejo_," Tabio said. He might have been genially scolding a favorite
child. "Say something, old friend, and don't sit there staring at me as
if I were already a corpse. Tell me about yourself, Mateo. We've come a
long way since Geneva and Madrid and the day they fished you out of the
ocean, eh?"
"It has been a long time," Hall said. "A very long time, Don Anibal. A
century."
Tabio smiled. "Time is of no matter. It is the present and the future
which counts, eh, _viejo_?"
"Of course, _ilustre_."
"My family and my good friends are afraid that I am dying," Tabio said,
smiling as if at some secret joke he wanted to share with Hall. "I am an
old dog. An old prison dog. Tell them, _viejo_, tell them that our breed
doesn't die so easily, no?"
Hall could only nod and pat the sick man's hand.
"Do I sound like a dying man?"
Hall swallowed hard, managed to grin. "You? What nonsense, Don Anibal! I
was at the Congress the other day. I watched you and listened to you
speak. It was a great speech, Anibal."
"It was not a great speech. But it was good because I spoke the truth.
And do you know, Mateo, that the truth is better than any great speech?"
Tabio was breathing with increased difficulty. He slumped back against
the pillows, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the doctors
quicken, and he turned to them and winked. "Not yet," he smiled. Meekly,
he allowed one of the doctors to hold a tumbler of colored liquid under
his mouth. He sipped some of it through a bent glass tube, then turned
to Hall again.
"Where were you sitting?" he asked.
"In the diplomatic box with Duarte and the Mexican Ambassador. Don't try
to talk to me, Anibal. Save your strength. I'll be here for a long time,
and when you're out of bed and on your feet again, perhaps we can have a
real visit and sit up all night talking as we used to talk."
"Mateo! You talk like a child. I will never be on my feet again. But
just the same," and he winked impishly at his wife, "I'm a long way from
dying."
"Of course you are," Hall insisted.
"There, you see?" Tabio said to everyone in the room. "Mateo can tell
you. He knows how tough our breed is. Tell me, Mateo, is it true that
the American Ambassador considers me to be the most violent Bolshevik
outside of Russia?"
Lavandero laughed, and Hall laughed, and when Tabio, laughing, turned to
his wife and son, they laughed too.
"He is such a pompous fool, that Ambassador. Oh, I am being terribly
undiplomatic, _viejo_, but to think of an old-fashioned bourgeois
reformer like me being compared to Lenin and Stalin! It is the height of
confusion. But if you ever meet him you can tell him that I admire
Stalin and the Russian people. Your Ambassador and I were together at a
State dinner the day the Nazis invaded Russia and he said that the
Soviets would be crushed in a month and that he was glad. I told him
then that the Red Army would destroy the Nazi war machine and I told him
that before the war was over the United States would be fighting on the
side of Russia and that therefore it was dangerous of him to say he was
glad so many Red Army soldiers were being killed. And you can tell him
that some day when I speak to Mr. Roosevelt again I will tell him what
the American Ambassador to our country said openly in June of 1941."
"Please, Don Anibal," one of the doctors begged, "you must save your
strength."
"For the speech," Lavandero added, quickly, motioning to Hall that it
was time for everyone but the doctors to leave the room.
Hall stood up, again patted the blue-veined hand of the President. He
watched Tabio, pausing to gain strength, mutely protesting with glazed
eyes the obvious stage directions of the doctors who ended this visit.
"I must go now, Don Anibal," Hall said, softly. "If you wish, I will be
back tomorrow or the next day."
"Matthew," Tabio said, and he began to address Hall in English, "you
were in Spain. You saw. Tell them it does not matter if one man lives or
dies. I have no fears for truth. I have come a long way on truth. Tell
them, _viejo_, tell them what a miracle truth is in the hands of the
people. You have but"--the words were coming with great difficulty--"you
have but to make this truth known...."
Tabio's jaw sagged open. He fell forward against his knees. The doctors
took him by the shoulders and moved him into a prone position. His eyes,
still open, stared at everything and nothing, glass now.
"_Carino mio!_" his wife sobbed, but at an unspoken order from one of
the doctors Simon led his mother to a chair in the corner and kept her
still. Lavandero, Gonzales and Hall left the chamber for the library.
"What happened to Anibal?" Lavandero asked Gonzales.
The doctor shook his head. "It is the end," he said. "Don Anibal will
never speak again."
"You lie!"
"No, Esteban." He turned to Hall. "His last words were to you,
_companero_."
"Christ Almighty!"
"For God's sake, tell me what happened to Anibal!"
"He fell into a coma. I think it is a stroke." Gonzales sat heavily in
one of the leather chairs, began to fumble in his pocket for another
adrenalin vial. His fingers began to become frantic in their impotence.
"I--I ..."
Hall caught his head as he started to collapse. He reached into the
doctor's pocket, found the adrenalin and used it.
"It is a stupid way to live," Gonzales said. "To have your life depend
always on your being a vegetable with a bottle. Thank you, _companero_.
Just let me rest here for a few minutes."
Throughout all of this, Lavandero stood over Tabio's table, staring down
at the jar of pencils with a dark, ugly face. He clenched opened
clenched opened clenched his fists, his fingers working to no definite
rhythm, and then he looked at his fists opening and closing and for a
few minutes it seemed as if he looked upon his own hands with loathing.
Then, straightening up, he put his hands in the pockets of his blue
jacket and turned to Hall and Gonzales. "This is no time to plan
personal violence," he said. "It would be exactly what the fascists
wanted."
"I am at your orders," Hall said. "I think you know that."
"I am counting on you."
"What do I do now?"
"Keep out of sight for a few hours. I think you should go to Gonzales'
house. I'll get you an official car and a chauffeur."
"I'm not alone," Hall said. He told Lavandero about Jerry and the death
of Androtten.
"_Madre de Dios_, take her with you! And keep her hidden." The sweat
pouring down his face betrayed Lavandero's excitement; his voice was
calm and steady. "I'll send an armed guard with you."
"I'll get the nurse," Gonzales said.
"No. Don't get up. Tell us where she is."
Lavandero had taken over. Later, Hall knew, the man would allow himself
to fly into a wild rage, but he would do it alone, where no one could
hear or see him. And Hall knew, also, that soon Lavandero would be
engaged in a battle with Gamburdo and the fascists for control of the
nation.
_Chapter fourteen_
The black Packard roared out of the subterranean garage of the
Presidencia, shot out to the Avenida de la Liberacion. Hall and Jerry,
in the back seat, looked behind them at the second Packard which carried
their convoy of guards. "They have enough tommy guns back there to blow
up anyone who makes a pass at us," he said. "And the two boys in the
front seat can throw plenty of lead."
"It's like a gangster movie," Jerry said.
"That shooting in your room this morning was no movie. I've never seen a
deader Nazi than the late Wilhelm Androtten, alias X."
"What's going to happen to us now, Matt?"
"Don't worry."
"I am worried. I want to know."
The two cars pulled up at the doctor's house. Maria Luisa, Gonzales'
fourteen-year-old daughter, met them at the door. "I am preparing some
sandwiches," she said. "Father said you were famished."
They waited in the living room while the girl worked in the kitchen.
"You're too hot in San Hermano," Hall said.
"Not yet. They don't know what happened to Androtten. I can just go on
being Ansaldo's nurse until ..."
"Forget it," he snapped. "This isn't for amateurs any longer. And you're
still an amateur, baby."
"Then what do you suggest I do?"
"You're going back to the States with a bodyguard on the next plane out
of here. You're waiting for me in Miami. I'll give you a letter to one
of the chiefs of Military Intelligence there. You'll be safe."
"How about you?"
"I'll meet you in two weeks. Three weeks at the outside."
"I won't do it, Matt. I'm staying here with you."
"But I won't be here all the time."
"Then I'll wait here for you."
"Baby, listen." He took out a package of American cigarettes, put one in
her mouth, lit it. "Ladies don't smoke in San Hermano. You can smoke
until you hear anyone coming. Then hand it to me. Now, sit down like a
good girl, and for God's sake, listen carefully. There's a job I've got
to do. It's my job alone. I've got to do it alone. I had an idea that
before I was through here I'd have to do it. But Tabio's last words were
spoken in English and they were to me, and baby, as soon as he stopped
talking I knew what I had to do."
Hall quoted the President's words about the power of Truth. "And he was
right," he said. "I remember what happened when I got out of the can in
Spain. I went back to Paris to get some rest. Tabio was in Geneva,
packing his things to go home. I found out he was still there and I went
to see him before he left. He was going home to run for President so
that this country shouldn't become a second Spain.
"I remember telling him that the thing which kept me alive in Franco's
prison was my feeling that a miracle would happen--that the little guys
in England and France would force the appeasers to sell guns to the
Republic, or that Russia would be able to fly some heavy bombers across
France for Madrid, or that Roosevelt would open his eyes and lift the
damned embargo, or anything. Any good miracle like these, even a tiny
one, would have saved the day. And I went to sleep every day sure that
each morning I'd wake up closer to the day this miracle would happen,
and that some morning I'd wake up and find that the people somewhere
outside of Spain had performed this miracle.
"I remember the way Tabio listened to me speak, and how when I was done
he said that the miracle I wanted all that time was that the truth
should get to the people. It was that simple. And he was dead right.
It's exactly what he did in his own country, and you know how the people
love him for it."