The Gate

He went down the stairs and along the corridor and out through the doors at the front of the old building into the heat.

It hit him on the top step like a hand. Ninety degrees, the man on the traffic station had said, by noon, and it was past noon, and the car park lay white and flat below the steps with the air above it shaking, and the cars in their rows with the sun on their roofs, and beyond them, at the far end, the wire fence and the gate and the flat roof of Mr Obi’s hut and the black car with the flag.

He had seen it all morning through the third high window, small and far off, like a thing at the bottom of a pond. It was not small now. It was a long way across a hot car park, and he went down the steps into it.

Castellanos was a step behind him on his left. The Private Secretary was a step behind him on his right, with the pale blue folder under his arm. His mother had stopped at the top of the steps, in the shade of the doorway, and stayed there; he had heard her stop, and had not looked round.

There were people at the windows. He did not look at them either. He knew they were there, the way you know the sun is on your neck. Most of the sophomores had gone to lunch. Some had not. Some of the seniors were in the windows of the glass block. Mrs Delahunt was at her window by the front door, behind the WELCOME sign. Somewhere above and behind him, at a window on the first floor, there would be Theo.

He walked across the car park between the rows of cars.

---

Mr Obi came out of the hut as he reached the gate.

He came out in his shirtsleeves, without the clipboard, and stood on the inside of the gate, where he had stood all morning, and looked at Frederick.

He looked at him the way he looked at him every afternoon at a quarter past three, through the window of the hut. As though he had never seen him before in his life.

“Pass,” said Mr Obi.

Behind him, Frederick heard Castellanos breathe out through his nose, very slightly, which was the nearest Castellanos came to laughing on duty.

He took his pass out of his blazer pocket, from among the cards and the lemon, and held it up.

Mr Obi looked at it. At the photograph. At Frederick. At the photograph again. For exactly as long as he had looked at it every afternoon for three and a half years, and on the thirty-first of October, and in February on the afternoon of a box called CHARTER 1974, and this morning at the car window at a quarter past eight.

He handed it back.

“Mr Hanover,” said Mr Obi.

“Thank you, Mr Obi.”

Then Mr Obi took hold of the gate and rolled it back on its rail. Not eighteen inches. Not the width of a mug. All the way, the whole width of it, the width it opened for the buses on sports day, until it stopped against its post with a clang that went across the car park and came back off the front of the old building, and he stood beside it.

---

On the other side of the gate, on the pavement, in the last inch of shade against the wall of the hut, Don Ignacio Anchorena stood up off Mr Obi’s kitchen chair.

He did it slowly. One hand on the back of the chair, the folder in the other, against his chest. He had been sitting on that chair, Frederick thought, for something over two hours, in a dark suit, in ninety degrees, at seventy-one. His white hair was flat with sweat at the temples. His face was very red, and very still, and his collar was wet, and his tie was done up to the top.

He did not come through the gate. He stood in it. On the line of the rail, where the gate would have been if it had been shut, with the pavement behind him and the school in front.

He bowed.

From the neck, not deeply, as he had bowed to Dr Brooks through the wire and to Mr Obi over a mug. As he had bowed in the Blue Drawing Room on the second of May at the end of the table when the Plate’s oath was taken. But he had bowed then to the book, and he bowed now to Frederick, and held it for a moment longer than he needed to, and straightened.

“Majestad.”

“Don Ignacio.”

“I have held the Plate,” said Don Ignacio, in Spanish, “for three hours.” His voice was hoarse. He had not, the Private Secretary had said, spoken all morning except to say the one thing. “As I said I would. I didn’t know, on Saturday, that it would be a joke in such poor taste.”

---

He held out the folder.

“From Colonel Rodolfo Iriarte, commanding the First Infantry, the Patricios, at Palermo. Received at the High Commission by facsimile at ten minutes to ten this morning, New Westminster time. Addressed to Your Majesty by name. A letter of two pages, and an instrument of one.” He did not let go of it yet. “I have not let it out of my hand, Majesty, since ten o’clock. I have not let it into your school. I would not carry it through a door. It is not mine to carry; it is the colonel’s, and I am the Plate’s, and I would not be seen to carry the colonel’s paper to the King through any door at all. So I have stood here with it, where anybody could see that I was standing with it and not carrying it.” He paused. “And Mr Obi has given me tea. Without milk. Which did not matter.”

Then he let go.

Frederick took the folder. It was hot from being held against a man’s chest for three hours. The leather was soft and old and had initials on it in faded gold, not Don Ignacio’s: H. C., for the High Commission, and under it a date, 1910.

He opened it.

---

The letter was two pages, typed, in Spanish, the facsimile grey and slightly smeared, with a crest at the top that he knew from the cards, the Patricios’ badge, and a signature at the bottom in what had been blue ink, reproduced in grey.

Majestad,

The First Infantry of the Army of the River Plate, which was raised in 1806 to defend this city, and has sworn its oath to the Crown since 1813, and to Your Majesty since the thirty-first of October, addresses Your Majesty directly, because there is nobody else left to whom it can.

He read it.

It was not a stupid letter. He had thought it would be. It was a long, careful, rather old-fashioned letter, written, he thought, by a man who had read a great deal of history and believed every word of it. It said that the Crown in the Plate stood on the refusal of 1976, and that the bill to be read in Congress tomorrow would end that refusal by making the King’s representative a politician chosen by the same people who had cheered the junta’s World Cup. It said that the government had refused to oppose it, out of cowardice called principle. It said that the Army had sworn to the King and not to the President of the Council, and that it was keeping its oath by asking the King to keep his. It asked the King to dismiss the government, dissolve Congress before the second reading, and govern the Plate through his Viceroy, directly, until elections could be held in a year without the shadow of the ballot over the Crown. It said that the Army would return to its barracks the moment the King signed. It said that not one shot would be fired. It said that the colonel had asked the Viceroy to receive him and had been refused, and that he did not blame the Viceroy, who was an old man and a judge and had done what judges did.

It ended:

We have waited fifty-three years for a King who would refuse as his father refused. We ask Your Majesty to refuse now. Viva el Rey.

Rodolfo Iriarte, Coronel.

---

The instrument was one page.

It was laid out the way the Plate’s instruments were laid out; he had seen a dozen of them in the pale blue box since the second of May. The Plate’s arms at the head. And under them, in large type:

JORGE V, por la gracia de Dios, Rey del Río de la Plata.

He looked at his own name in someone else’s type.

Whereas (in Spanish) the government of Doña Florencia Arrieta no longer enjoys the confidence of the Crown; and whereas the Congress of the Nation has been summoned to consider a measure contrary to the constitution of the Crown; We do hereby dismiss the said government, and dissolve the said Congress, and declare that until a new Congress shall be elected We shall exercise the government of the United Provinces through Our Viceroy.

And at the bottom, two lines. The first, ruled, empty, with a small typed word under it, JORGE R. The second, ruled, empty, with a word under it, Refrendado. El Virrey.

Two blank lines.

He read the letter again. All of it. Then the instrument again. All of it. Twice, because he was standing at a gate in front of the man who had held it for three hours, and because of the man at the desk at the corner of the pink house, and the man who had sat there before him and had not signed, and done the crossword in English.

The car park was very quiet. Mr Obi stood beside the gate. Castellanos stood a step behind on his left, the Private Secretary a step behind on his right. Don Ignacio stood on the line of the rail.

Frederick closed the folder.

---

“Don Ignacio.”

“Majestad.”

“I’ve been advised by the President of the Council,” said Frederick, in Spanish, “to return the colonel’s instrument to him, by your hand, unsigned. I’m doing that.” He held the folder out. “Would you send it back to him, please. And the letter. Tell him the King has read both.”

Don Ignacio looked at the folder. He did not take it at once.

“Twice, Majesty?”

“Twice.”

“I’ll tell him twice.” He took it. He held it against his chest again, in both hands, the way he had held it all morning, the way you hold a hat. “Is there anything else Your Majesty wishes me to tell him?”

Frederick thought about it.

He thought about a colonel in a barracks at Palermo who had read a great deal of history and believed every word of it, and had written to a newspaper on the fourth and been spoken to on the fifth, and had waited for the three hours when the King could not be reached, and had brought twelve armoured cars into a square and pointed every one of them at the sky. Who had sent his proclamation up to the Viceroy by the officer of the guard before he read it, out of courtesy. Who had written viva el Rey.

It’s not your business to tell him first.

“No,” said Frederick. “Nothing else.”

Don Ignacio looked at him for a long moment, red-faced, wet at the collar, seventy-one, at the gate.

“In 1976,” he said, “I was eighteen, Majesty. My father was a lawyer with an office on the Avenida. I was there on the twenty-fifth of March, at his window, and I watched the soldiers shut the gates of the Casa Rosada with the Viceroy inside, and I went home that night and was sick.” He paused. “I’ve waited fifty-three years too. Not for that.” He bowed again, from the neck. “For this. Which is much smaller, and better.”

---

He turned and went to his car. The driver had the back door open for him. He got in, carefully, one foot and then the other and then a hand on the top of the door and then the rest of him, with the folder held flat against his chest, and the driver shut the door, and the air the door moved lifted the flag on the wing, the sky blue and the white and the sun in it, out from its staff for a moment, and let it fall.

The car pulled away along the road towards the river.

Mr Obi looked at his kitchen chair, empty on the pavement, and at the mug on the ground beside it.

“Three sugars,” said Mr Obi. “He takes three sugars. I asked him. He said in the Senate they gave him four.” He picked up the mug. “I said, that’s politics for you.”

---

Along the road from the other direction, from the bus stop, where Kimura’s grey car was still half on the verge, a small white car was coming, fast, a little too fast for a school, with something written on its door in blue that he could not read at that distance, and a woman driving it with her elbow out of the window.

It slowed at the gate. It stopped where the black car had been.

The woman got out. She was young and dark-haired and out of breath, in a linen jacket, with a lanyard round her neck, and she got a long black case out of the back seat and stood with it in her hand and looked at the open gate, and at Mr Obi, and at the sign on the hut, NO VISITORS, and then past Mr Obi at Frederick, and her mouth opened.

“The Corporation, sir,” said the Private Secretary.

Mr Obi looked at the woman. He looked at the case. He held out his hand.

“Pass,” said Mr Obi.