Sergeant Hullum was at attention by the door when the General shuffled up the rough dirt path and across the grass, and fingered his temple by way of salute. The General shook his head, admonishing; Hullum’s pleasant expression wavered.
As the General pulled himself up the stone veranda steps, Hullum said, “Lieutenant Deluca was looking for you, sir—I mean—well, he was looking for you, that’s all.”
“Looking?” said the General. A light fog was starting to drape in over the shoulder of the ridge and would probably be gone in an hour or so.
Deluca wanted to relate something to the General, Hullum explained, then asked whether the General would receive him in the study, as he often did. The General nodded stiffly, then slipped inside the creaking doors without reply.
Of all the things you could do to pass the time, the best was cards. Prior to his exile the General hadn’t been so fond of card games, but solitude will turn your likes and dislikes on their heads. You think of time as really meaning something until it’s all you have. There’s a difference, after all, between passing time and time passing you. He thought, for instance, of all those war councils and diplomatic liaisons in the Mason Room at the Presidential Palace, so named because there had once been a president in that country before the General ousted him. He’d kept every appointment he ever made, to the best of his recollection, because he’d always understood that time only means anything when you impose a structure on it—in other words, when it’s made up of appointments. Each inter-appointment period spent waiting for the next one. Now there were no appointments, now he spent every moment in a state of waiting. The only appointment he was waiting for was the last one, the one you didn’t come back from.
All this being why he passed so much time these days playing cards, both with the men in the garrison and by himself, dredging up the patience games his brother used to play when he contracted tuberculosis as a child. The men had brought over a thick, scratched-up mahogany table that now leaned slightly in the middle of the study on which he’d taught his gaolers quadrille with a deck of tattered, salt-coarse, comically small playing cards. The thing about the men was they bored easily. The General, however, was the type who could focus on any one thing for as long as necessary. In his own estimation, it was what made him an effective commander and governor.
Though the table had always leaned, now it was really wobbly. The General kept sticking thin volumes under one of the legs only to have need of them later and be left with a tilting table once again. At those times he imagined it was the room that was tilted, rather than the table itself. He’d taken off his jacket and hat and polished leather belt, now only in his shirtsleeves and trousers undone to give his gut some breathing room. The study smelled sort of musty these days, even when he kept the door open, and the windows rattled with the constant gust, and the floors were always slightly damp. He groaned into the secondhand chair at the card table and shuffled, mulling over the Deluca thing. Of the men it was Lieutenant Deluca he was friendliest with. They’d struck up a rapport during the course of an almost accidental series of English lessons, which was doubly odd since Deluca was Italian by birth. But no gaoler nor any of his attendants had ever left a message that he was looked-for, and it bothered him.