Córdoba

“Majesty. Florencia Arrieta.”

She said it in Spanish, fast, as if she had been holding it in her mouth for two hours, and then, before he could answer, in the same breath:

“I’m in the Governor’s dining room in Córdoba, at the end of a table for twenty, under a portrait of your great-grandfather, who is looking at me as though I’ve come to dinner without being asked. The Minister of Defence is on my left. The Governor is on my right. The Governor is a Justicialist, Majesty, and has told me twice since lunch that he will vote for the elected-Viceroy bill tomorrow if it kills him, and that he will personally shoot anybody who tries to stop me voting against it. He doesn’t own a gun. He has given me his dining room and his telephone and a plate of sandwiches, and he’s been very kind.” A breath. “I’m sorry it took so long to reach you.”

“I’m sorry I was in an examination.”

“Don’t be.” She said it at once. “Don’t ever be. It was the best thing that could have happened, and I’ve said so to the Cabinet, and the Cabinet agreed with me, which it doesn’t.”

---

He had met her once. In February, in the small study, for forty minutes, on her one visit as President of the Council to the King’s Regent, when he had been allowed to sit in, as he had sat at the Privy Council, without a voice. She had been short and quick and broad-shouldered, in a dark red suit, with grey hair cut very close and reading glasses pushed up on top of it, and she had talked faster than anybody he had ever heard, and had stopped, at the end, at the door, and looked at him for the first time, and said in English, you’re taller than your photographs, which is a relief, because the photographs make you look as if you’d blow away.

He could see her now. At the end of a table for twenty, under a portrait, with the glasses on top of her head.

“Tell me,” he said.

---

She told him.

Fast, the way the Private Secretary told things, but not flat. Nothing she said was flat. Nine of her fourteen ministers on the telephone since half past twelve their time; three more in their offices in the city, behind the roadblocks, who could not be reached; two at home, who could. The Chief of the Army Staff, at the Ministry of Defence building, which the colonel’s men were holding, had been allowed to telephone her at one o’clock, which was the colonel’s courtesy, she said, and she supposed she should be grateful for it. He had said that the Army would not move against the colonel by force, because he would not have soldiers firing on soldiers in the Plaza de Mayo while there was any other way; and that the Army would not join him either, not one more unit, because the oath was to the King, and the King had not spoken, and the Viceroy had.

“He said the Viceroy has,” said Arrieta. “Twice. He was very particular about it.”

The Navy in its bases. The Air Force in its bases. The two ships in the Caribbean, which she knew about, because the Minister of Defence had told her about the wardroom four times. Every Governor of every province had telephoned her by one o’clock to say that he recognised the government of the President of the Council, including the Governor of Buenos Aires province, who disliked her more than anybody alive.

“And this one,” said Arrieta, “the one on my right, who gave me his dining room. He’s from the other party. He wants the Viceroy elected. And when my car came off the airfield at a quarter past twelve he was standing on the steps of this house in his shirtsleeves to meet me, and he said, Señora Presidenta, this is Córdoba, the Crown came here by a treaty and not by a siege, and nobody comes to Córdoba with tanks to tell a government to go.” She paused. “I think he’d been practising it on the steps. It was very good.”

Frederick thought of the card. 1820. The Treaty of Córdoba. The interior accepts the Crown.

“That’s why you went there,” he said.

“I went there because it was the furthest place the provincial aeroplane could reach without stopping,” said Arrieta. “But yes. Also that.”

---

“Majesty,” she said. “I’m going to give you advice now. Formally. As your President of the Council. Is your Private Secretary in the room?”

“Yes.”

“Good. He’ll want to write it down. He has the face of a man who writes things down.”

The Private Secretary, standing by the desk, had a pencil in his hand already and a card from his breast pocket, and did not look up.

“I advise Your Majesty,” said Arrieta, and her voice changed. It slowed. It became, he thought, the voice she used in the House of Deputies when she was reading something into the record that she wanted to be read back to her later in exactly those words. “First. That Your Majesty decline to treat Colonel Iriarte’s letter as a petition requiring an answer, the colonel not being a person entitled to petition the Crown in arms. Second. That Your Majesty return the instrument which accompanies it, unsigned, by the hand of the High Commissioner, who received it. Third. That Your Majesty make a statement, today, as soon as it can be arranged, by the River Plate Broadcasting Corporation, of Your Majesty’s support for Your Majesty’s Viceroy and for Your Majesty’s government.”

The Private Secretary’s pencil moved. Then stopped.

“That’s the advice,” said Arrieta, in her ordinary voice. “The Corporation has a woman at the High Commission in New Westminster. She can be at your school with a car and a line in twenty minutes. I’ve told them to send her. I’ve told them to wait for your Private Secretary’s word.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Thank you.”

“And I have a draft,” said Arrieta. “Of the statement. The Cabinet has seen it. Do you want it?”

“Yes.”

---

She read it to him.

It was three paragraphs. It was in Spanish, and it was good; he could hear that it was good, the way you can hear that a piece of music is good even when it is not the piece you want to hear. The first paragraph said that the King had learned at noon, New Westminster time, of the events in Buenos Aires. The second said that the King’s government in the Plate was the government of the President of the Council, which had the confidence of the House of Deputies, and that the King’s Viceroy had acted throughout with the King’s full confidence. The third said that the King called upon all those who had sworn their oath to him to return to their duty, and that the law of the Plate would take its course.

When she had finished there was a pause.

“It’s good,” said Frederick.

“It’s what a government says,” said Arrieta. “It’s what my government would say. Every word of it is true and every word of it is mine.” She paused. “You don’t like it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. I’ve been in politics for thirty years, Majesty. I can hear a man not liking something down a telephone line from Córdoba.” A pause. “Tell me what you’d say.”

---

He thought.

He thought of the square on the laptop, the twelve vehicles with their guns pointed at the sky and the men sitting on top of them in the sun with their helmets off, sharing water. He thought of the sixty in dark blue in front of the arch. He thought of the white line along the barrier at the north side, and the people behind it, the office workers with their jackets off and the boys from the Colegio Nacional and the man with the dog, standing, for an hour, waiting to find out whether the King was with them.

He thought of the man at the window that did not open.

And he thought, for no reason he could have given, of Señora Ruiz, in February, in the fourth period, with the inspector at the back of the room and his stopwatch, and the two verbs on her board with a line between them.

SER. Lo que eres. The bones. What does not change.

ESTAR. Cómo estás. The weather. What you happen to be for the moment.

He had sat in the second row that morning and decided that you could not estar King. It sounded wrong, like a wrong note. Being King was not where you were for the moment. You ser King, in the bones, and that was the end of it; and he had been right, and it had taken him the rest of the day to find out how right.

But there was one thing a King could estar. He had not seen it in February. He saw it now. Not what he was. Where he stood, today, and next to whom.

“El Rey está con su Virrey,” said Frederick.

---

The line was quiet.

He could hear, faint, in the Governor’s dining room in Córdoba, a plate being put down, and a man clearing his throat, and somebody, the Minister of Defence perhaps, saying something very low, and being hushed.

“That’s all?” said Arrieta.

“That’s all.”

“Five words.”

“Yes.”

“Está,” said Arrieta, slowly. “Not es.”

“Not es. I’m not saying what the King is. Everybody knows what the King is. That’s what the colonel’s saying. He’s saying what the King is, and what he’s for, and what he ought to do because of it.” He looked at the square. “I’m saying where I am.”

The line was quiet again for a long time.

“That’s not the sentence I’d have written,” said Arrieta.

“Is it wrong?”

“No.” She said it slowly, the way she had said the advice. “No, it isn’t wrong. It leaves out the government.”

“Should I put you in?”

He heard her think. He could hear it. He could hear her taking the glasses down off the top of her head and putting them on and taking them off again, though he could not possibly have heard that, nine thousand kilometres away, and was sure he had.

“No,” said Arrieta. “No. Don’t put me in.” A breath. “The Viceroy is my government’s appointment and he’s your representative, and he’s in the house on the square, and everybody can see him. If you’re with him, you’re with us; nobody in the Plate will need that explained. And if you say the government, then the colonel’s soldiers will hear Arrieta, and half of them don’t like me, and that’s their right; I don’t need them to like me, I need them to go back to barracks. If you say su Virrey, they hear the old man at the window. They swore to the King. Let them hear the King standing next to the one man in the square they can see.” She paused. “And it leaves them a way home. It doesn’t say rebels. It doesn’t say duty. It doesn’t say what will happen to anybody. It says where the King is. They can walk back to Palermo under that sentence without anybody having to say they were wrong.”

“The colonel was wrong.”

“The colonel was wrong, and the courts will tell him so, and it’s not your business to tell him first.” A pause. “That’s advice too.”

“Yes.”

---

“Majesty,” said Arrieta. “I advise you formally, as your President of the Council, to make the statement you’ve just proposed. That sentence. In Spanish. And nothing else. Not a word in English after it, not a word about the government, not a word about the colonel.” He heard the Private Secretary’s pencil move again. “And I withdraw my draft. It was a good draft. I’ll have it framed.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I’ve just been out-written by a boy of sixteen in a school office, and I’m going to have to tell the Cabinet.” But her voice had changed, a little. “Majesty. Before you go.”

“Yes.”

“When they rang me at ten,” said Arrieta, “the Minister of Defence came down the corridor and opened my door without knocking, which he has never done, and said Florencia, get in the car. And I said why. And he told me. And the first thing I said, before I said anything about my government, or the Plate, or the colonel, I said, does the King know?” She paused. “And he said, the King is in an examination until noon, and nobody can reach him. And I sat at my desk for a moment, and I thought, thank God.”

He did not say anything.

“Because then it was ours,” said Arrieta. “Do you see? For three hours it was ours. The Viceroy’s and mine and the Army’s and the Plate’s. Nobody could say the King had been rung up in New Westminster and told what to do. Nobody could say the British had done it, or the Americans, or the Household. Whatever happened between ten and one in Buenos Aires today happened in Buenos Aires, between the people of the Plate and the man in the house on the square.” She breathed. “And now you’re going to say five words, and it’ll be the King’s too. But it’ll have been ours first.”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“Go and say it,” said Arrieta, and the line clicked, and went.