The Honorary Consul Page 5

  Doctor Plarr took an hour's siesta after lunch and then he returned to the Consulate on his way to some bedridden patients in the 'barrio popular'—if you could call what they lay on beds. He was agreeably surprised when the door was opened by Charles Fortnum himself. The Consul had spoken at their first meeting of having moments of melancholy. Perhaps he was suffering from such a moment now. He looked at the doctor with a frown which was defensive and puzzled as though an unpleasant memory stirred somewhere in his unconscious. "Yes?"

  "I'm Doctor Plarr."

  "Plarr?"

  "We met one night with Humphries."

  "Oh yes, did we? Of course. Come in." Three doors opened off a dark passage. From behind one of them there seeped the smell of unwashed dishes. Perhaps another indicated a bedroom. The third stood open and Fortnum led him in. A desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a safe, a colored reproduction of An-nigoni's portrait of the Queen with a crack in the glass—that was about all. And the desk was quite bare except for a stand-up calender which advertised an Argentinian tea.

  "I'm sorry to disturb you," Doctor Plarr said. "I looked in this morning..."

  "I can't always be here. I have no assistant. There are a lot of official duties. This morning... yes, I was with the Governor. What can I do for you?"

  "I've brought some documents I want witnessed."

  "Show them to me."

  Fortnum sat heavily down and began to open a number of drawers. From one he pulled a blotting pad, from another paper and envelopes, from a third a seal, a ballpoint pen. He began to arrange them on the desk as though they were chessmen. He reversed the position of the seal and the pen—perhaps inadvertently he had put the queen on the wrong side of the king. He read the documents with apparent care, but his eyes betrayed him—the words obviously meant nothing to him—then he waited for Doctor Plarr to sign. Afterward he stamped the papers and added his own signature, Charles Q. Fortnum. "A thousand pesos," he said. "Don't ask about the Q. I keep it dark." He offered no receipt, but Doctor Plarr paid without question.

  The Consul said, "I've got a splitting headache. You know how it is—the heat, the humidity. This is a damnable climate. God knows why my father chose to live in it and die in it. Why didn't he settle in the south? Anywhere but here."

  "If you feel that way, why don't you sell up and go?"

  "Too late," the Consul said, "I'm sixty-one next year. What's the good of doing anything at sixty-one? Have you any aspirin in that case of yours, Plarr? "Yes. Have you some water?"

  "Just give it me as it is. I eat the things. They work quicker that way." He chewed up the aspirin and asked for another.

  "Don't you find the taste disagreeable?"

  "You get accustomed. I don't like the taste of water here either if it comes to that. My God, I do feel like hell today."

  "Perhaps I ought to take your blood pressure."

  "Why? Do you think there's something wrong?"

  "No, but a check is always good at your age."

  "It's not my blood pressure that's wrong. It's life."

  "Overworked?"

  "I wouldn't exactly say that. But there's a new Ambassador—he bothers me."

  "What about?"

  "He wants a report on the maté industry in this province. Why? Nobody drinks maté in the old country. Never heard of it probably, but I'll have to work for a week, driving around on bad roads, and then those fellows at the Embassy wonder why I have to import a new car every two years. It's my right to have one. My diplomatic right. I pay for it myself and if I choose to sell it again it's my concern not the Ambassador's. Fortnum's Pride is more reliable on these roads. I charge nothing for her, and yet I'm wearing her out in their service. What a lot of mean bastards they are, Plarr, at the Embassy. They even question the rent I pay for this office."

  Doctor Plarr unpacked his briefcase.

  "What's all that nonsense?"

  "I thought we agreed to take your blood pressure."

  "Then we'd better go into the bedroom," the Consul said. "It wouldn't look good if my maid came in. The news would be all over the city in no timethat I was a dying man. And then the bills would pour in."

  The bedroom was almost as bare as the bureau. The bed had been disturbed during the siesta hour, and a pillow lay on the floor beside an empty glass. A photograph of a man with a heavy moustache in riding kit hung above the bed like a substitute for the Queen. The Consul sat on the rumpled coverlet and bared his arm. Doctor Plarr began to inflate the rubber band.

  "Do you really think there's something wrong about these headaches?"

  Doctor Plarr watched the dial. He said, "I think there's something wrong in drinking so much at your age." He let the air run out.

  "Headaches run in the family. My father had terrible headaches. He died suddenly. A stroke. That's him up there. He was a great horseman. He tried to make me one too, but I couldn't bear the stupid brutes."

  "I thought you told me you had a horse. Fortnum's Pride, wasn't it?"

  "Oh, that's not a horse, that's my Land Rover. You'll never catch me on a horse's back. Tell me the worst, Plarr."

  "These contraptions never tell the worst—or the best. All the same your pressure's a bit high. I'll give you some tablets, but couldn't you cut down the drink a little?"

  "That's what the doctors were always saying to my father. He told me once he might have been paying a lot of parrots for squawking the same thing. I suppose I must take after the old bastard—except for the horses. They scare me stiff. He used to be angry about that. He said, 'You've got to conquer fear, Charley, or it will conquer you.' What's your other name, Plarr?"

  "Eduardo."

  "I'm Charley to my friends. Mind if I call you Ted?"

  "If you must."

  Charley Fortnum sober had arrived at the same stage of intimacy which he had reached on the last occasion, though by a longer route. Doctor Plarr wondered how often, if their acquaintance continued, they would have to tread the same path before they arrived on the last lap at Charley and Ted.

  "You know there's only one other Englishman in this city. A fellow called Humphries, an English teacher. Met him?"

  "We were all together one night. Don't you remember? I saw you home."

  The Honorary Consul looked at him with an expression of near fear. "No, I don't. Not a thing. Is that a bad sign?"

  "Oh, it happens to all of us sometimes if we are drunk enough."

  "When I saw you outside the door, I did think for a moment I remembered your face. That's why I asked your name. I thought I might have bought something from you and forgotten to pay. I'll have to go a bit steadier, won't I? For a while, I mean."

  "It wouldn't do you any harm."

  "I remember some things very well, but I'm like the old man—he used to forget a lot too. Do you know once—I'd fallen off my horse, it got up suddenly on its hind legs—just to test me, the beast I mean. I was only six, it knew I was only a kid, it was right by the house, and my father was sitting there on the verandah. I was scared in case he might be angry, but what scared me worse was I could see when he looked down at me, where I lay on the ground, that he didn't even remember who I was. He wasn't angry at all, he was puzzled and worried, and he went back to his chair and took up his glass again. So I went round the back to the kitchen (the cook was always a good friend of mine), and I left the bloody horse. Of course I understand now. We had that much in common. He forgot things when he was drunk. Are you married, Ted?"

  "No."

  "I was once."

  "Yes, so you told me."

  "I was glad when we split up, but all the same I wish we'd had a child first. When there's no child it's generally the man's fault, isn't?"

  "No. I think the chances are about even."

  "I'd be sterile anyway, wouldn't I, by now?"

  "Of course not. Age doesn't make you sterile."

  "If I had a child I wouldn't try to make him conquer fear like my father did. It's part of human nature, isn't it, fear? If you conque
r fear, you conquer your human nature, too. It's a bit like the balance of nature. I read in a book once that, if we killed all the spiders in the world, we would all of us be suffocated under the weight of flies. Have you got a child, Ted?"

  The name Ted had an irritating effect on Doctor Eduardo Plarr. He said, "No. If you want to call me by a Christian name I wish you'd call me Eduardo."

  "But you are as English as I am."

  "I'm only half English and that half is in prison or dead."

  "Your father?"

  "Yes."

  "And your mother?"

  "She's living in B. A."

  "You're lucky. You have somebody to save for. My mother died when I was born."

  "It's not a good reason to kill yourself with drink."

  "That's not the reason, Ted. I only mentioned my mother in passing, that's all. What's the good of a friend if one can't talk to him?"

  "A friend doesn't make a good psychiatrist."

  "You sound a hard man, Ted. Haven't you ever loved anyone?"

  "That depends on what you call love."

  "You analyze too much," Charley Fortnum said. "It's a young man's fault. Don't turn up too many stones is what I always say. You never know what you'll find underneath."

  Doctor Plarr said, "My job is to turn up stones. Guesswork is not much good when you make a diagnosis."

  "And what's your diagnosis?"

  "I'm going to give you a prescription, but it won't do you any good unless you cut down on your drinking."

  He went back into the Consul's office. He was irritated by the sense of time wasted. He could have seen three or four patients in the poor quarter of the city during the time he had spent listening to the self-pity of the Honorary Consul. He walked out of the bedroom and sat down at the desk and wrote his prescription. He felt the same sense of wasted time as when he visited his mother and she complained of headaches and loneliness while she sat before a plate heaped up with éclairs in the best tea shop of Buenos Aires. She always implied that she had been deserted by her husband—because a husband's first duty was to his wife and child and he should have fled with them.

  Charley Fortnum put on his jacket in the next room. "You aren't going, are you?" he called.

  "Yes. I've left the prescription on the desk."

  "What's the hurry? Stay and have a drink."

  "I have patients to see."

  "Well, I'm your patient too, aren't I?"

  "You are not the most important of them," Doctor Plarr said. "The prescription isn't renewable. You'll have enough tablets for a month, and then we'll see."

  Doctor Plarr closed the door of the Consulate with a sense of relief, the relief he always felt when he finally left his mother's apartment after a visit to the capital. He hadn't enough time available to waste any of it on the incurable.

  2

  Nearly two years passed before Doctor Plarr visited for the first time the establishment which was so ably run by Señora Sanchez, and then it was not in the company of the Honorary Consul. He went there with his friend and patient, the novelist, Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra. Saavedra, as he himself explained over a plate of tough beef at the Nacional, was a man who believed in following a very strict discipline. An observer might have guessed so much from his appearance, which was neat, of a uniform gray, gray hair, gray suit, gray tie. Even in the northern heat he wore the same well-cut double-breasted waistcoat that he used to wear in the coffee houses of the capital. His tailor there, he told Doctor Plarr, was English. "You wouldn't believe it, but I haven't had to buy a new suit in ten years." As for the discipline of work, "I write five hundred words a day after my breakfast. No more no less," he said, not for the first time.

  Doctor Plarr was a good listener. He had been trained to listen. Most of his middle-class patients were accustomed to spend at least ten minutes explaining a simple attack of flu. It was only in the 'barrio' of the poor that he ever encountered suffering in silence, suffering which had no vocabulary to explain a degree of pain, its position or its nature. In those huts of mud or tin where the patient often lay without covering on the dirt floor he had to make his own interpretation from a shiver of the skin or a nervous shift of the eyes.

  "Discipline," Jorge Julio Saavedra was repeating, "is more necessary to me than to other more facile writers. You see I have a demon where others have a talent. Mind you I envy them their talent. A talent is friendly. A demon is destructive. You cannot conceive how much I suffer when I write. I have to force myself day after day to sit down pen in hand and I struggle for expression... You will remember in my last book, that character, Castillo, the fisherman, who wages an endless war with the sea for such a small reward. In a way you might say that Castillo is a portrait of the artist. Such daily agony and the result—five hundred words. A very small catch."

  "I seem to remember Castillo died from a revolver shot in a bar defending his one-eyed daughter from rape." "Ah yes, I am glad you noticed the Cyclops symbol," Doctor Saavedra said. "A symbol of the novelist's art. A one-eyed art because one eye concentrates the vision. The diffuse writer is always two-eyed. He includes too much—like a cinema screen. And the violator? Perhaps he represents this melancholy of mine which descends for weeks at a time, when I struggle for hours to do my daily stint."

  "I hope you find my tablets give you some help."

  "Yes, yes, they help a little, of course, but sometimes I think it is only the daily discipline which saves me from suicide." Doctor Saavedra, with his fork suspended on the way to the mouth, repeated, "Suicide."

  "Oh come, surely your faith won't allow you...?"

  "In those black moments, doctor, I have no faith, no faith at all. 'En una noche oscura'. Shall we open another bottle? This wine from Mendoza is not wholly bad."

  After the second bottle the novelist revealed another rule of his self-imposed discipline, his weekly visit to the house of Señora Sanchez. He explained that it was not merely a question of keeping his body calm so as to prevent important desires coming between him and his work: from his weekly visit he learned a great deal about human nature. In the social life of the city there was no contact between the classes. How could dinner with Señora Escobar or Señora Vallejo provide him with any insight into the life of the poor? The character of Carlota the daughter of Castillo, the heroic fisherman, was based on a girl he had met in the establishment of Señora Sanchez. Of course she had two eyes. She was indeed remarkably pretty, but when he came to write his novel he found her beauty gave her story a false and banal turn: it fitted ill with the bleak severity of the fisherman's life. Even the violator became a conventional character. Pretty girls were being violated all the time everywhere, especially in the books of his contemporaries, those facile writers of undoubted talent.

  At the end of dinner Doctor Plarr was easily persuaded to accompany the novelist on his disciplinary visit, though he was tempted more by curiosity than sexual desire. They left their table at midnight and set out on foot. Though Señora Sanchez was protected by the authorities it was better not to leave a car outside in case an inquisitive policeman noted the number. Such an addition to one's police file might one day prove undesirable Doctor Saavedra wore pointed highly polished shoes and gave the impression of hopping when he walked because he was a little pigeon-toed. One half expected to see bird marks left behind on the dusty pavement.

  Señora Sanchez sat in a deck chair outside her house knitting. She was a very stout lady with a dimpled face and a welcoming smile from which kindliness was oddly lacking, as though it had been mislaid accidentally a moment before like a pair of spectacles. The novelist introduced Doctor Plarr.

  "I am always glad to welcome a medical gentleman," Señora Sanchez said. "You will appreciate how well my girls are looked after. I employ your colleague Doctor Benevento, a most sympathetic man."

  "So I have heard. I have not met him," Doctor Plarr said.

  "He comes here on Thursday afternoons and all my girls are very fond of him."

  They pas
sed through the narrow lighted doorway. Except for Señora Sanchez in her deck chair there were no exterior signs to differentiate her establishment from the other houses in the respectable street. A good wine, Doctor Plarr thought, needs no bush.

  It was a house very different in character from the clandestine brothels he had occasionally visited in the capital where small rooms were darkened by closed shutters and crammed with bourgeois furniture. There was a pleasant country air about this house. An airy patio about the size of a tennis court was surrounded by small cells. Two open doors faced him when he had taken a seat, and he thought the cells looked gayer, cleaner, and in better taste than Doctor Humphries' bedroom at the Hotel Bolivar. Each possessed a little shrine with a lighted candle which gave the tidy interiors the atmosphere of a home rather than of a place of business. A group of girls sat at a table apart, while two talked with young men, leaning against the pillars of the verandah which surrounded the patio. There was no sign of hustling—it was obvious Señora Sanchez was strict about that; here a man might take his time. One man sat alone over a glass, and another, dressed like a 'peón', stood by a pillar, watching the girls with an unhappy, envious expression (perhaps he hadn't the means to buy even a drink).

  A girl called Teresa came immediately to take the novelist's order ("Whisky," he advised, "the brandy is not to be trusted"), and afterward sat down with them unasked "Teresa comes from Salta," Doctor Saavedra explained leaving his hand in her care like a glove in a cloakroom She turned it this way and that and examined the fingers as though she were looking for holes. "I am thinking of setting my next novel in Salta."