The Honorary Consul Page 6

  Doctor Plarr said, "I hope your demon won't insist on grvinp her one eye."

  "You laugh at me," the novelist said, "because you have so little idea of how a writer's imagination works. He has to transform reality. Look at her—those big brown eyes those plump little breasts, she's pretty isn't she"—the girl gave a gratified smile and scratched his palm with her nail—"but what does she represent? I am not planning a love story for a woman's magazine. My characters must symbolize more than themselves. Now it 'has' occurred to me that with perhaps one leg..."

  "A girl with one leg could be more easily violated."

  "There is no violation in my story. But a beauty with one leg—don't you see the significance of that? Think of her halting walk, her moments of despair, the lovers who feel they do her a favor if they stay with her one night Her stubborn faith in a future which somehow will be better than today's. For the first time," Doctor Saavedra said, "I am proposing to write a political novel."

  "Political?" Doctor Plarr asked with some surprise.

  A cell door opened and a man came out. He lit a cigarette, went to a table and drank from an unfinished glass. In the glow of light, below the saint's shrine, Doctor Plarr could see a thin girl who was straightening the bed. She arranged the coverlet with care before she came out and joined her companions at their communal table. An unfinished glass of orange juice awaited her. The 'peón' by the pillar watched her with his hungry envy.

  "Don't you resent that man?" Doctor Plarr asked Teresa.

  "What man?"

  "The one over there who stands staring, doing nothing."

  "Let him stare, he does no harm, poor man. And he has no money."

  "I was telling you about my political novel," Doctor Saavedra spoke with irritation. He removed his hand from Teresa's grasp.

  "But I don't understand the point of one leg."

  "A symbol," Doctor Saavedra said, "of this poor crippled country, where we still hope..."

  "Will your readers understand? I would have thought something more direct. Those students last year in Rosario..."

  "If one is to write a political novel of lasting value it must be free from all the petty details that date it. Assassinations, kidnapping, the torture of prisoners—these things belong to our decade. But I do not want to write merely for the seventies."

  "The Spaniards tortured their prisoners three hundred years ago," Doctor Plarr murmured, and he looked again for some reason toward the girl at the communal table.

  "Are you not coming with me tonight?" Teresa asked Doctor Saavedra.

  "Yes, yes, all in good time. I am talking to my friend here on a subject of great importance."

  Doctor Plarr noticed on the other girl's forehead, a little below the hairline, a small gray birthmark, in the spot where a Hindu girl wears the scarlet sign of her caste.

  Jorge Julio Saavedra said, "A poet—the true novelist must always be in his way a poet—a poet deals in absolutes Shakespeare avoided the politics of his time, the minutiae of politics. He wasn't concerned with Philip of Spain, with pirates like Drake. He used the history of the past to express what I call the abstraction of politics. A novelist today who wants to represent tyranny should not describe the activities of General Stroessner in Paraguay—that is journalism not literature. Tiberius is a better example for a poet."

  Doctor Plarr thought how agreeable it would be to take the girl to her room. He had not slept with a woman for more than a month, and how easily sexual attention can be caught by something superficial, like a birthmark in an unusual position.

  "Surely you understand what I mean?" the novelist asked him severely. "Yes Yes. Of course."

  Docor Plarr was prevented by a certain fastidiousness from treading quickly in another man's tracks. What interval, he wondered, would he be prepared to accept? Half an hour, an hour—or merely the physical absence of his predecessor, who had already ordered himself another drink?

  "I can see the subject has no interest at all for you," Doctor Saavedra said with disappointment.

  "The subject... forgive me... I've drunk rather heavily tonight."

  "I was talking of politics."

  "But of course politics interest me. I'm a kind of politica1 refugee myself. And my father... I don't even know whether my father is alive. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he was murdered. Perhaps he is shut up in a police station somewhere across the border. The General doesn't believe in prisons for political offenders—he leaves them to rot alone in police stations all over the country."

  "That is exactly my point, doctor. Of course I sympathize with you, but how can I make art out of a man shut up in a police station?"

  "Why not?"

  "Because it is a special case. It is a situation which belongs to the nineteen seventies. I hope my books will be read, if only by discriminating readers, in the twenty-first century. My fisherman Castillo I have tried to make timeless."

  Doctor Plarr remembered how seldom he had thought of his father, and perhaps it was a sense of guilt because of his own safety and comfort which made him a little angry now. He said, "Your fisherman is timeless because he never existed." He regretted his words immediately. "I am sorry," he said. "Don't you think we ought to have another drink? And your charming companion—we are neglecting her."

  "There are more important subjects than Teresa," Saavedra said, but he surrendered his hand again into her keeping. "Isn't there a girl here who pleases you?"

  "Yes, there is one, but she has found another customer."

  The girl with the birthmark had joined the solitary drinker and they were proceeding together to her cell. She passed her former companion without a glance and he hadn't enough curiosity to look at his successor. There was something clinical in a brothel which appealed to Doctor Plarr. It was as though he were watching a surgeon accompanying a new patient to the operating theater—the previous operation had been successful and was already out of mind. Only in television dramas did emotions of love, anxiety or fear infiltrate into the wards. His first years in Buenos Aires, while his mother complained, dramatized and wept over his missing father's fate, and the later years when she became volubly content with sweet cakes and chocolate ices had given Doctor Plarr a suspicion of any emotion which was curable by means as simple as an orgasm or an éclair. The memory of a conversation—if you could call it that—with Charley Fortnum came back to him. He asked Teresa, "Do you know a girl here called María?"

  "There are several Marías," Teresa said.

  "She comes from Córdoba."

  "Oh, that one. She died a year ago. She was really bad, that one. Somebody killed her with a knife. He went to prison, poor man."

  "I suppose I had better go with the girl," Saavedra said. "I am sorry. It is not often I have an opportunity to discuss problems of literature with a cultivated man. In a way I would really much prefer to have another drink and continue our talk." He looked at his captive hand as though it belonged to someone else and he hadn't the right to pick it up.

  "There will be other opportunities," Doctor Plan-encouraged him, and the novelist surrendered. "Come, 'chica'," he said and rose. "You will wait for me, Doctor? I shall not be long tonight."

  "Perhaps you will learn a lot about Salta."

  "Yes, but there is always a moment when a writer has to say 'Enough.' One mustn't know too much." Doctor Plarr had the impression that Jorge Julio Saavedra under the influence of drink was beginning to repeat a lecture he had once delivered to some woman's club in the capital.

  Teresa pulled him by the hand. He rose reluctantly and followed her to where the candle burned below her statue of the Avila saint. The door closed on them. A novelist's work, he had once said sadly to Doctor Plarr, is never finished.

  It was a quiet evening at the establishment of Señora Sanchez. All the doors were open except the two which hid Teresa and the girl with the birthmark. Doctor Plarr finished his drink and left the patio. He was sure the novelist, in spite of his promise, would take his time. After all he had a decisio
n to make—whether the girl should lose her leg at the femur or the knee.

  Señora Sanchez was still plying her needles. A friend had joined her. She sat and knitted in a second deck chair. "You found a girl?" Señora Sanchez asked.

  "My friend did."

  "There was no one who pleased you?"

  "Oh, it wasn't that, but I drank too much at dinner."

  "You can ask your colleague Doctor Benevento about my girls. They are very clean."

  "I am sure they are. I shall certainly return, Señora Sanchez."

  But in fact more than a year passed before he did come back. He looked in vain then for the girl with the birthmark on her forehead. He was neither surprised nor disappointed. Perhaps it was the time of her period, but in any case girls in such establishments change frequently. Teresa was the only one he recognized. He stayed with her for an hour, and they talked about Salta.

  3

  Doctor Plarr's practice prospered. He never regretted leaving the harsh competition of the capital, where there were too many doctors with German, French and English degrees, and he had grown fond of the small city by the great Paraná River. There was a local legend that those who once visited the city always returned, and it had certainly proved true in his case. One glimpse of the little port with its background of colonial houses, seen for an hour one dark night, had drawn him back. Even the climate did not displease him—the heat was less humid than he remembered it in the land of his childhood, and when the summer broke up at last with an enormous eruption of thunder, he liked watching from the window of his apartment the forked flashes dig into the Chaco shore. Nearly every month he gave a dinner to Doctor Humphries, and sometimes now he would take a meal with Charley Fortnum who was always either sober, laconic, and melancholy, or drunk, talkative, and what he liked to term "elevated." Once he went out to Charley Fortnum's camp, but he was no judge of a mate" crop and he found the heaving motion of Fortnum's Pride as he was driven around hectare by hectare—Charley called it "farming"—so disagreeable that he refused the next invitation. He preferred a night at the Nacional when Charley would talk unconvincingly of a girl he had found.

  Every three months Doctor Plarr flew down to Buenos Aires and spent a weekend with his mother who was growing more and more stout on her daily diet of cream cakes and 'alfajores' stuffed with 'dulce de leche'. He could not remember the features of the beautiful woman in her early thirties who had said goodbye to his father on the river front and who wept continuously for lost love throughout the three days' voyage to the capital. Since he had no old photograph of her to remind him of the past, he always pictured her as the woman she had become with three chins and heavy dewlaps and a stomach which, outlined in black silk, imitated pregnancy. On the shelves of his apartment the works of Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra annually increased by one volume, and of all his books Doctor Plarr thought he preferred the story of the one-legged girl of Salta. After the first visit, he had lain with Teresa several tunes at the Sanchez house and he was amused to observe how far fiction deviated from reality. It was almost a lesson in the higher criticism. He possessed no close friends, though he remained on good terms with two former mistresses whom he had first met as patients; he was also on friendly terms with the latest Governor, and enjoyed his visits to the Governor's big mate plantation in the east, flying there in the Governor's private plane and descending on the lawn between two flower beds in time for an excellent lunch. At Bergman's orange-canning factory closer to the city he was an occasional guest, and sometimes he went fishing in a tributary of the Paraná with the director of the airport.

  Twice there were attempted revolutions in the capital which made big headlines in 'El Litoral', but on both occasions when he telephoned to his mother he found she knew nothing of the disturbances; she read no newspaper and never listened to the radio, and Harrods and her favorite teashop remained open through all the troubles. She told him once that she had been satiated forever with politics during their life in Paraguay. "Your father could talk of nothing else. Such undesirable people used to come to the house, sometimes in the middle of the night, dressed in any old clothes. And you know what became of your father." The last was an odd turn of phrase since neither of them knew anything at all—whether he had been killed in the civil war or died of disease or become a political prisoner under the dictatorship of the General. His body was never identified among the corpses which were sometimes washed up on the Argentine side of the river with hands and legs tied with wire, but his might well have been one of those skeletons which remained for years undiscovered after they had been tossed from planes into the Chaco wastes.

  Nearly three years after his first meeting with Charley Fortnum Doctor Plarr was drawn into a conversation about him by Sir Henry Belfrage, the British Ambassador—a successor to the man who had given the Honorary Consul so much trouble with the maté report. It was one of the periodic cocktail parties for the British colony, and Doctor Plarr, who happened to be in the capital on a visit to his mother, attended it with her. He knew nobody there by more than sight—at best a nodding acquaintance. There was Buller, the manager of the Bank of London and South America, Fisher, the Secretary of The Anglo-Argentinian Society, and an old gentleman called Forage who spent all his days at the Hurlingham Club. The Representative of the British Council was, of course, there too—his name for some Freudian reason Plarr always forgot—a pale frightened little man with a bald head who came to the party in charge of a visiting poet. The poet had a high-pitched voice and an air of being consciously out of place under the chandeliers. "How soon can we get away?" he was heard to shriek. And again, "Too much water with the whisky." It was the only voice in the room which carried any distance above the low continuous din like that of an aeroplane engine, and one naturally expected it to cry something more relevant, like "Fasten your seatbelts."

  Doctor Plarr thought Belfrage was only interested in making polite conversation when they found themselves alone together between a gilt-legged sofa and a Louis Quinze chair. They were far enough away from the hubbub around the buffet to hear themselves speak. He could see his mother firmly wedged in and gesticulating at a priest with a canap6. She was always happy with priests, and so he felt relieved of responsibility.

  "I think you know our Consul up there?" Sir Henry Belfrage said. He always referred to the northern province as "up there" as though he wanted to emphasize the vast length of the Paraná River winding its slow way down from those distant frontiers so far from the southern civilization of the Rio de la Plata.

  "Charley Fortnum? Oh yes, I do see him occasionally. But I haven't for some months. I've been busy—a lot of sickness."

  "You know—in a job like this—one always inherits a few 'difficulties' with a new post. Strictly between ourselves the Consul up there is one of them."

  "Really?" Doctor Plarr replied with caution, "I would have thought... " though he had no idea how he would finish the sentence if it were required of him.

  "There's nothing for him to do up there. I mean as far as we are concerned. Now and then I ask him to make a report on something—for the sake of appearances. I don't want him to think he's forgotten. He was useful once to one of my predecessors. Some young fool who got mixed up with the guerrillas and tried to do a Castro against the General in Paraguay. As far as I can see from the files we've paid for half his telephone bills and most of his stationery ever since."

  "Didn't he once help with some royals too? Guiding them round the rums?" - "There was something of that sort," Sir Henry Belfrage said. "Very minor royals as far as I remember. I oughtn't to say it, of course, but royalty can cause us an awful lot of trouble. Once we had to ship a polo pony... you have no idea of the complications 'that' involved, and it was during the meat embargo too." He meditated a while. "At least Fortnum could try a little harder to get on with the English colony up there."

  "As far as I know there are only three of us within fifty miles. The fellows with camps seldom come to the city."

 
"Then it shouldn't be difficult for him. You know this chap Jeffries?"

  "Do you mean Humphries? If you are thinking about the Union Jack episode—flying it upside down—do you know the right way up?"

  "No, but thank God I've got chaps who do. I wasn't thinking of that—that happened in Callow's time. The trouble now is that Fortnum seems to have made a most unsuitable marriage—according to this man Humphries. I wish he'd stop writing to us. Who is he?"

  "I hadn't heard about Fortnum's marriage. He's a bit old for it. Who's the woman?"

  "Humphries didn't say. In fact he was a bit ambiguous all round. Fortnum seems to have kept it a great secret. I don't take the story seriously, of course. There's no security involved. He's only an Honorary Consul. We don't have to investigate her. I just thought—if you happened to have heard anything... In a way an Honorary Consul is more difficult to get rid of than a career man. He can't be transferred. That word honorary... it's a bit bogus when you come to think of it Fortnum imports a new car every two years and sells it. He's not entitled to—he's not in the service—but I suppose he's pulled a fast one with the local authorities there. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't make more than my Consul does here. Poor old Martin has to toe the line. He can't go buying cars on his salary, nor can I. Unlike the Ambassador of Panama. My God, my poor wife's tied up with that poet. What's his name?"

  "I don't know."

  "I just wanted to say—Plarr isn't it?... As you live up there... I've never met this man Humphries... oh well, they send them here in droves."

  "Humphries?"

  "No, no. Poets. If they are poets. The British Council always say they are, but I've never heard of any of them. When you are back up there, Plarr, do what you can. You're someone I can trust to drop the right word... no scandal, you understand what I'm getting at. . . This fellow Humphries, he strikes me as the sort of man who might write home. To the F. O. After all it's no concern of ours whom Fortnum marries. If you could somehow tactfully tell this chap Humphries to mind his own business and not bother us. Thank God he's getting old. Fortnum, I mean. We'll retire him the first chance we have. Oh dear, look at my poor wife. She's trapped."