# Nostromo/Part Three/Chapter 5

V
DURING the night the expectant populace had taken possession of all the belfries in the town in order to welcome Pedrito Montero, who was making his entry after having slept the night in Rincon. And first came straggling in through the land gate the armed mob, of all colors, complexions, types, and states of raggedness, calling themselves the Sulaco National Guard, and commanded by Señor Gamacho. Through the middle of the street streamed, like a torrent of rubbish, a mass of straw hats, ponchos, gun-barrels, with an enormous green-and-yellow flag flapping in their midst, in a cloud of dust, to the furious beating of drums. The spectators recoiled against the walls of the houses, shouting their vivas! Behind the rabble could be seen the lances of the cavalry, the "army" of Pedro Montero. He advanced between Señores Fuentes and Gamacho, at the head of his Llaneros, who had accomplished the feat of crossing the paramos of the Higuerota in a snow-storm. They rode four abreast, mounted on confiscated Campo horses, clad in the heterogeneous stock of road-side stores they had looted hurriedly in their rapid ride through the northern part of the province; for Pedro Montero had been in a great hurry to occupy Sulaco. The handkerchiefs knotted loosely around their bare throats were glaringly new, and all the right sleeves of their ​cotton shirts had been cut off close to the shoulder for greater freedom in throwing the lazo. Emaciated graybeards rode by the side of lean, dark youths, marked by all the hardships of campaigning, with scrips of raw beef twined round the crowns of their hats and huge iron spurs fastened to their naked heels. Those that in the passes of the mountain had lost their lances had provided themselves with the goads used by the Campo cattlemen—slender shafts of palm fully ten feet long, with a lot of loose rings jingling under the iron-shod point. They were armed with knives and revolvers. A haggard fearlessness characterized the expression of all these sun-blacked countenances; they glared down haughtily with their scorched eyes at the crowd, or, blinking upward insolently, pointed out to each other some particular head among the women at the windows. When they had ridden into the Plaza and caught sight of the equestrian statue of the king dazzlingly white in the sunshine, towering enormous and motionless above the surges of the crowd, with its eternal gesture of saluting, a murmur of surprise ran through their ranks. "What is that saint in the big hat?" they asked each other.
They were a good sample of the cavalry of the plains with which Pedro Montero had helped so much the victorious career of his brother the general. The influence which that man, brought up in coast towns, acquired in a short time over the plainsmen of the republic can be ascribed only to a genius for treachery of so effective a kind that it must have appeared to those violent men, but little removed from a state of utter savagery, as the perfection of sagacity and ​ virtue. The popular lore of all nations testifies that duplicity and cunning, together with bodily strength, were looked upon, even more than courage, as heroic virtues by primitive mankind. To overcome your adversary was the great affair of life. Courage was taken for granted. But the use of intelligence awakened wonder and respect. Stratagems, providing they did not fail, were honorable; the easy massacre of an unsuspecting enemy evoked no feelings but those of gladness, pride, and admiration. Not, perhaps, that primitive men were more faithless than their descendants of to-day, but that they went straighter to their aim and were more artless in their recognition of suc- cess as the only standard of morality.
We have changed since. The use of intelligence awakens little wonder and less respect. But the ignorant and barbarous plainsmen engaging in civil strife followed willingly a leader who often managed to deliver their enemies bound, as it were.. into their hands. Pedro Montero had a talent for lulling his adversaries into a sense of security. And as men learn wisdom with extreme slowness, and are always ready to believe promises that flatter their secret hopes, Pedro Montero was successful time after time. Whether only a servant or some inferior official in the Costaguana legation in Paris, he had rushed back to his country directly he heard that his brother had emerged from the obscurity of his frontier commandancia. He had managed to deceive his gift of plausibility the chiefs of the Ribierist movement in the capital, and even the acute agent of the San Tomé mine had failed to understand him thoroughly. At once he had ob​tained an enormous influence over his brother. They were very much alike in appearance, both bald, with bunches of crisp hair above their ears, arguing the presence of some negro blood. Only Pedro was small- er than the general, more delicate altogether, with an apelike faculty for imitating all the outward signs of refinement and distinction, and with a parrot-like talent for languages. Both brothers had received some elementary instruction by the munificence of a great European traveller, to whom their father had been a body-servant during his journeys in the interior of the country. In General Montero's case it enabled him to rise from the ranks. Pedrito, the younger, incorrigibly lazy and slovenly, had drifted aimlessly from one coast town to another, hanging about counting-houses, attaching himself to strangers as a sort of valet-de-place, picking up an easy and disreputable living. His ability to read did nothing foi; him but fill his head with absurd visions. His actions were usually determined by motives so improbable in themselves as to escape the penetration of a rational person.
Thus, at first, the agent of the Gould Concession in Sta. Marta had credited him with the possession of sane views, and even with a restraining power over the general's everlastingly discontented vanity. It could never have entered his head that Pedrito Montero, lackey or inferior scribe, lodged in the garrets of the various Parisian hotels where the Costaguana legation used to shelter its diplomatic dignity, had been devouring the lighter sort of historical works in the French language, such, for instance, as the books of Imbert de Saint Amand upon the Second Empire. ​ But Pedrito had been struck by the splendor of a brilliant court, and had conceived the idea of an existence for himself where, like the Duc de Morny, he would associate the command of every pleasure with the conduct of political affairs and enjoy power supremely in every way. Nobody could have guessed. that. And yet this was one of the immediate causes of the Monterist revolution. This will appear less incredible by the reflection that the fundamental causes were the same as ever, rooted in the political immaturity of the people, in the indolence of the upper classes and the mental darkness of the lower.
Pedrito Montero saw, in the elevation of his brother, the road wide open to his wildest imaginings. This was what made the Monterist pronunciamiento so unpreventable. The general himself probably could have been bought off, pacified with flatteries, despatched on a diplomatic mission to Europe. It was his brother who had egged him on from first to last. He wanted to become the most brilliant statesman of South America. He did not desire supreme power. He would have been afraid of its labor and risk, in fact. Before all, Pedrito Montero, taught by his European experience, meant to acquire a serious fortune for himself. With this object in view he obtained from his brother, on the very morrow of the successful battle, the permission to push on over the mountains and take possession of Sulaco. Sulaco was the land of future prosperity, the chosen land of material progress, the only province in the republic of interest to European capitalists. Pedrito Montero, following the example of the Duc de Morny, meant to have his share of this pros​perity. This is what he meant literally. Now his brother was master of the country, whether as President, Dictator, or even as Emperor—why not as an Emperor?—he meant to demand a share in every enterprise in railways, in mines, in sugar estates, in cotton-mills, in land companies, in each and every undertaking as the price of his protection. The desire to be on the spot early was the real cause of the celebrated ride over the mountains with some two hundred Llaneros, an enterprise of which the dangers had not appeared at first clearly to his impatience. Coming from a series of victories, it seemed to him that a Montcro had only to appear to be master of the situation. This illusion had betrayed him into a rashness of which he was becoming aware. As he rode at the head of his Llaneros he regretted that there were so few of them. The enthusiasm of the populace reassured him. They yelled "Viva Montero!" "Viva Pedrito!" In order to make them still more enthusiastic, and from the natural pleasure he had in dissembling, he dropped the reins on his horse's neck, and with a tremendous effect of familiarity and confidence slipped his hands under the arms of Señores Fuentes and Gamacho. In that posture, with a ragged town mozo holding his horse by the bridle, he rode triumphantly across the Plaza to the door of the Intendencia. Its old, gloomy walls seemed to shake in the acclamations that rent the air and covered the crashing peals of the cathedral bells.
Pedro Montero, the brother of the general, dismounted into a shouting and perspiring throng of enthusiasts m whom the ragged Nationals were pushing back fiercely. Ascending a few steps, he surveyed the large crowd ​ gaping at him and the bullet-speckled walls of the houses opposite lightly veiled by a sunny haze of dust. The word "PORVENIR," in immense black capitals, alternating with broken windows, stared at him across the vast space; and he thought with delight of the hour of vengeance, because he was very sure of laying his hands upon Decoud. On his left hand, Gamacho, big and hot, wiping his hairy, wet face, uncovered a set of yellow fangs in a grin of stupid hilarity. On his right, Señor Fuentes, small and lean, looked on with compressed lips. The crowd stared literally open-mouthed, lost in eager stillness, as though they had expected the great guerrillero, the famous Pedrito, to begin scattering at once some sort of visible largesse. What he began was a speech. He began it with the shouted word Citizens!" which reached even those in the middle of the Plaza. Afterwards the greater part of the citizens remained fascinated by the orator's action alone-his tiptoeing, the arms flung above his head with the fists clinched; a hand laid flat upon the heart; the silver gleam of rolling eyes; the sweeping, pointing, embracing gestures; a hand laid familiarly on Gamacho's shoulder; a hand waved formally towards the little, black-coated person of Señor Fuentes, advocate and politician and a true friend of the people. The vivas of those nearest to the orator, bursting out suddenly, propagated themselves irregularly to the confines of the crowd, like flames running over dry grass, and expired in the opening of the streets. In the intervals, over the swarming Plaza brooded a heavy silence, in which the mouth of the orator went on opening and shutting, and detached phrases—"The happiness of ​the people," "Sons of the country," "The entire world" (el mundo entiero)—reached even the packed steps of the cathedral with a feeble, clear ring, thin as the buzzing of a mosquito. But the orator struck his breast; he seemed to prance between his two supporters. It was the supreme effort of his peroration. Then the two smaller figures disappeared from the public and the enormous Gamacho, left alone, advanced, raising his hat high above his head. Then he cove himself proudly and yelled out, "Ciudadanos!" dull roar greeted Señor Gamacho, ex-peddler of the Campo, Commandante of the National Guards.
Up-stairs, Pedrito Montero walked about rapidly from one wrecked room of the Intendencia to another, snarling incessantly:
"What stupidity! What destruction!"
Senor Fuentes, following, would relax his taciturn disposition to murmur:
"It is all the work of Gamacho and his Nationals;", and then, inclining his head on his left shoulder, would press together his lips so firmly that a little hollow would appear at each corner. He had his nomination for Political Chief of the town in his pocket and was all impatience to enter upon his functions.
In the long audience-room, with its tall mirrors all starred by stones, the hangings torn down and the canopy over the platform at the upper end pulled to pieces, the vast, deep muttering of the crowd and the howling voice of Gamacho, speaking just below, reached them through the shutters as they stood idly in dimness and desolation.
"The brute!" observed his Excellency Don Pedro ​Montero through clinched teeth. "We must contrive as quickly as possible to send him and his Nationals out there to fight Hernandez."
The new Géfé Politico only jerked his head sideways and took a puff at his cigarette, in sign of his agreement with this method for ridding the town of Gamacho and his inconvenient rabble.
Pedrito Montero looked with disgust at the absolutely bare floor and at the belt of heavy gilt picture-frames running round the room, out of which the remnants of torn and slashed canvases fluttered like dingy rags.
"We are not barbarians," he said.
This was what said his Excellency, the popular Pedrito, the guerrillero skilled in the art of laying ambushes, charged by his brother at his own demand with the organization of Sulaco on democratic principles. The night before, during the consultation with his partisans, who had come out to meet him in Rincon, he had opened his intentions to Señor Fuentes:
"We shall organize a popular vote, by yes or no, confiding the destinies of our beloved country to the wisdom and valiance of my heroic brother, the invincible general. A plebiscite. Do you understand?"
And Señor Fuentes, puffing out his leathery cheeks, had inclined his head slightly to the left, letting a thin, bluish jet of smoke escape through his pursed lips. He had understood.