“There at that table with the flyers.”
“Which one?”
“With the very brown face; the cap over one eye. Who is laughing now.”
“He is fascist?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a closest I see fascist since Fuentes del Ebro. Is a many fascist here?”
“Quite a few from time to time.”
“Is drink the same drink as you,” said John. “We drink that other people think we fascists, eh? Listen you ever been South America, West Coast, Magallanes?”
“No.”
“Is all right. Only too many oc-toe-pus.”
“Too many what?”
“Oc-toe-pus.” He pronounced it with the accent on the toe as oc-toepus. “You know with the eight arms.”
“Oh,” I said. “Octopus.”
“Oc-toe-pus,” said John. “You see I am diver too. Is a good place to work all right make plenty money only too many oc-
“Did they bother you?”
“I don’t know about that. First time I go down in Magallanes harbor I see oc-
“How big was he, John?”
“I cannot say absolutely because the glass in the helmet make distort a little. But the head was big around more than four feet any
“All right,” I said.
I was watching the man at the table. His name was Luis Delgado and the last time I had seen him had been in 1933 shooting pigeons at Saint Sebastian and I remembered standing with him up on top of the stand watching the final of the big shoot. We had a bet, more than I could afford to bet, and I believed a good deal more than he could afford to lose that year, and when he paid coming down the stairs, I remembered how pleasant he was and how he made it seem a great privilege to pay. Then I remembered our standing at the bar having a martini, and I had that wonderful feeling of relief that comes when you have bet yourself out of a bad hole and I was wondering how badly the bet had hit him. I had shot rottenly all week and he had shot beautifully but drawn almost impossible birds and he had bet on himself steadily.
“Should we match a
“You really want to?”
“Yes, if you like.”
“For how much?”
He took out a notecase and looked in it and laughed.
“I’d say for anything you like,” he said. “But suppose we say for eight thousand pesetas. That’s what seems to be there.”
That was close to a thousand dollars then.
“Good,” I said, all the fine inner quiet gone now and the hollow that gambling makes come back again. “Who’s matching who?”
“I’ll match you.”
We shook the heavy five-peseta pieces in our cupped hands; then each man laid his coin on the back of his left hand, each coin covered with the right hand.
“What’s yours?” he asked.
I uncovered the big silver piece with the profile of Alfonso XIII as a baby showing.
“Heads,” I said.
“Take these damned things and be a good man and buy me a drink.” He emptied out the notecase. “You wouldn’t like to buy a good Purdey gun would you?”
“No,” I said. “But look, Luis, if you need some money—”
I was holding the stiffly folded, shiny-heavy-paper, green thousandpeseta notes toward him.
“Don’t be silly, Enrique,” he said. “We’ve been gambling, haven’t we?”
“Yes. But we know each other quite well.”
“Not that well.”
“Right,” I said. “You’re the judge of that. Then what will you drink?”
“What about a gin and tonic? That’s a marvelous drink you know.”
So we had a gin and tonic and I felt very badly to have broken him and I felt awfully good to have won the money, and a gin and tonic never tasted better to me in all my life. There is no use to lie about these things or pretend you do not enjoy winning; but this boy Luis Delgado was a very pretty gambler.
“I don’t think if people gambled for what they could afford it would be very interesting. Do you, Enrique?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to afford it.”
“Don’t be silly. You have lots of money.”
“No I haven’t,” I said. “Really.”
“Oh, everyone has money,” he said. “It’s just a question of selling something or other to get hold of it.”
“I don’t have much. Really.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I’ve never known an American who wasn’t rich.”
I guess that was the truth all right. He wouldn’t have met them at the Ritz bar or at Chicote’s either in those days. And now he was back in Chicote’s and all the Americans he would meet there now were the kind he would never have met; except me, and I was a mistake. But I would have given plenty not to have seen him in there.
Still, if he wanted to do an absolutely damn fool thing like that it was his own business. But as I looked at the table and remembered the old days I felt badly about him and I felt very badly too that I had given the waiter the number of the counterespionage bureau in Seguridad headquarters. He could have had Seguridad by simply asking on the telephone. But I had given him the shortest cut to having Delgado arrested in one of those excesses of impartiality, righteousness and Pontius Pilatry, and the always-dirty desire to see how people act under an emotional conflict, that makes writers such attractive friends.
The waiter came over.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I would never denounce him myself,” I said, now trying to undo for myself what I had done with the number. “But I am a foreigner and it is your war and your problem.”
“But you are with us.”
“Absolutely and always. But it does not include denouncing old friends.”
“But for me?”
“For you it is different.”
I knew this was true and there was nothing else to say, only I wished I had never heard of any of it.
My curiosity as to how people would act in this case had been long ago, and shamefully, satisfied. I turned to John and did not look at the table where Luis Delgado was sitting. I knew he had been flying with the fascists for over a year, and here he was, in a loyalist uniform, talking to three young loyalist flyers of the last crop that had been trained in France.
None of those new kids would know him and I wondered whether he had come to try to steal a plane or for what. Whatever he was there for, he was a fool to come to Chicote’s now.
“How do you feel, John?” I asked.
