Free The High Place by Geoffrey Household Page A

neither read nor write, doubled and doubled and doubled again this unex­pected capital by
buying horses and selling them to the cavalry.
    Meanwhile Juan was receiving a first-class formal education, and, in spite of it, developing his principles; after the death of his father he lived up to them, and simply gave his capital away.
What to? Anything but the Church, he said. And it took him a fair time. He explained that people were always paying him back with interest. His magnanimity must have been catching.
    When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he made his way to Barcelona and enlisted in a communist formation. He rose swiftly to command of a company, and impressed on it his own belief that the
only value of human life was to prepare the way for the next generation. They died, he told us (apolo­gizing for the word) like saints. He also convinced his company that the dictatorship of
the proletariat, or of anyone else, was a quite unnecessary stage on the way of the generations, and so was shot in the back while defending Madrid by a political sergeant attached to him for that
very purpose. His men had dealt with the sergeant, inserting into his person a detonator with a length of slow fuse. This Juan regretted, for the detona­tor did nothing to prove which of them
was the better com­munist. Moveover, the bullet had missed his spine by a centi­metre, and his heart by—Juan held up a finger and thumb that might have admitted between them a grain
of barley.
    From hospital he passed into the camps of the defeated across the Pyrenees, and so to forced labour in East Prussia. He was liberated by the Russians who exhibited him as a rescued
comrade—his proletarian goodness would have impressed the most jaundiced secret policemen—and allowed him to see something of their state. To him, a Spaniard bred on variety, it seemed
the negation of all human values. The public parks, he said, infuriated him; every one in every big town was exactly the same, with the same statue in the middle. He couldn’t get over his
horror of mass-produced amenities.
    During the long years of war he had been ready to accept, after all, the infallibility of the Kremlin, but now the fires of his youth burned again, and more fiercely than ever. In the Ukraine,
seething with hopeless rebellion and discontent, he joined a guerilla band of some five thousand men and women who fought their way to the Carpathians and reached them four hundred strong. Then
they separated, and Juan with a few others infiltrated into the American zone of Austria. There, he said, he had been persuaded to join the colony of Kasr-el-Sittat by a certain Eugen Rosa.
    I preserved the poker face of a bad actor, which could have been recognized as such twenty yards away; but fortunately Juan Villaneda was looking at Ashkar, not at me. The captain leaned forward
and poured some more wine. He was intent and courteous, and I could have sworn he had never heard of Eugen Rosa. He had been caught cleverly and completely off his guard, but it was simply not in
his Levantine nature to show surprise.
    Ashkar effortlessly ignored the end of Juan’s life story and picked up the beginning. He asked him if he hadn’t at least missed the smell of stables when he decided to give his
posses­sions away. When Juan admitted that about the only envy left to him was envy of other people’s horses, Ashkar, who loved to behave like a prince when he could, at once offered to
mount him on anything he liked whenever he chose.
    In spite of the ghost of Eugen Rosa, the captain declared, as soon as Juan had left, that there was a man with whom he could do business. He went so far as to call him a natural leader. When I
asked him if he didn’t think Villaneda too eccen­tric for command, he replied in a self-satisfied tone that men answered to the heart, not to the head.
    Soon after this meeting, responsibility for the Syrian affairs of Kasr-el-Sittat divided itself naturally and well, with