He nodded, and stroked her hair.
He very much wanted to cry.
And until I met her, I didn’t think there was such a thing as love.
[THREE]
Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo
Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province
1220 3 May 1943
Cletus Frade, deep in thought, sat at the crest of a gentle rise astride Julius Caesar, a very large, magnificently formed black stallion. His mind jumped from one thought to another.
Next week this time, I’ll be a married man.
Why did I give in to Claudia and that damned Jesuit and agree to have that goddamned Juan Domingo Perón at my wedding? A dirty old man who fucks little girls doesn’t belong at a goddamn wedding.
By now Ashton’s in Rio de Janeiro. I really hope I was right, and that he’ll be on the next Panagra flight down clutching a diplomatic passport in his hand. I need him.
Jesus, this place isn’t only enormous, they haven’t touched the potential. All they do with it is raise enough food to feed themselves and let the cattle graze until they’re ready to be slaughtered. That takes two years, maybe longer. This is farmland, not grazing land. What I should do is put in some feed crops. I can probably produce marketable beef in fourteen months.
God, I wish Uncle Jim was here. He’d really know what to do with this place.
There’s an airport at Bariloche, and what’s supposed to be the best resort hotel in Argentina. There’s no reason I can’t take Dorotéa there in the Lodestar.
It’s too far to drive. It would take two days. It’s twenty hours or something on the train. I can fly the Lodestar out there in four hours.
And if I go there in the Lodestar and something happens here, I can get back in a hurry.
Tragedy in Argentina. On the day after his marriage, Marine Aviator with Wings of Gold C. Frade flies himself and bride into a rock-filled cloud…
Enrico Rodríguez, astride a sorrel with brilliant eyes, his Browning shotgun cradled in his arm, was also deep in thought.
Julius Caesar, now docilely munching grass, had been el Coronel’s favorite, and vice versa. Whenever anyone else tried to mount him, he was unruly, often successfully throwing the stranger. He had even tried to throw Señor Cletus the first time he mounted him.
He had not. Señor Cletus was almost as fine a horseman as his father. And Julius Caesar now seemed to understand he had a new master. At the stables, Enrico had stood stock-still while Señor Clete threw the sheepskin saddle and the hornless Recado saddle on the horse, and even when Señor Cletus had tugged hard at the tack, shortening the stirrups to the length norteamericanos preferred (for reasons Enrico did not understand), Julius Caesar had allowed it.
It usually took two men to get a saddle on Julius Caesar.
Enrico was not surprised that Señor Cletus had come out here to think. El Coronel also often rode slowly out onto the pampas under God’s wide blue sky and stopped somewhere just to think. The longer he was around Señor Cletus, the more he saw how much he was like el Coronel.
In the important things.
There was not much of a physical resemblance. In these Señor Clete favored his mother.
Enrico took pleasure in the thought that el Coronel and Señor Clete’s mother were together again in heaven with the blessed angels, and with Mariana Maria Dolores taking care of them there, as he was now taking care of Señor Clete in this life.
He believed that God always had a purpose, although that purpose had not been clear to him when God let those filthy bastards cut Mariana Maria Dolores’s throat in Señor Guillermo’s house by the Hipódrome.
And God’s purpose had not been clear, either, when He let those filthy bastards kill el Coronel in the car. And he had had real trouble trying to understand why God had not let him die with el Coronel. Or even instead of him.
Now he knew. God in his infinite wisdom had put a baby in the belly of Señor Clete’s blond woman. She wasn’t a real Argentine, but she was half Argentine. As Señor Clete was half Argentine. Their baby would be entirely Argentine.
And that meant that Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo would go on as before, becaus
e it was now Señor Clete’s home, where he would be married, where his baby would be born; and he would not return to the United States of America, and Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo would not be sold to strangers. Señor Clete would stay here and be el Patrón, as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him had been el Patrón, taking loving care of the people of Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo.