The Honorary Consul

Graham Greene - The Honorary Consul

Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag. Doctor Plarr found himself alone at that hour except for the one sailor who was on guard outside the maritime building. It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

The rails, the cranes, the maritime building-these had been what Doctor Plarr first saw of his adopted country. The years had changed nothing except by adding the line of smoke which when he arrived here first had not yet been hung out along the horizon on the far side of the Paraná. The factory that produced it had not been built when he came down from the northern republic with his mother more than twenty years before on the weekly service from Paraguay. He remembered his father as he stood on the quay at Asunción beside the short gangway of the small river boat, tall and grey and hollow-chested, and promised with a mechanical optimism that he would join them soon. In a month-or perhaps three-hope creaked in his throat like a piece of rusty machinery.

It seemed in no way strange to the fourteen-year-old boy, though perhaps a little foreign, that his father kissed his wife on her forehead with a sort of reverence, as though she were a mother more than a bedmate. Doctor Plarr had considered himself in those days quite as Spanish as his mother, while his father was very noticeably English-born. His father belonged by right, and not simply by a passport, to the legendary island of snow and fog, the country of Dickens and of Conan Doyle, even though he had probably retained few genuine memories of the land he had left at the age of ten. A picture book, which had been bought for him at the last moment before embarkation by his parents, had survived-London Panorama-and Henry Plarr used often to turn over for his small son Eduardo the pages of flat grey photographs showing Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and a vista of Oxford Street filled with hansoms and horse-drawn cabs and ladies who clutched long skirts. His father, as Doctor Plarr realized much later, was an exile, and this was a continent of exiles-of Italians, of Czechs, of Poles, of Welsh, of English. When Doctor Plarr as a boy read a novel of Dickens he read it as a foreigner might do, taking it all for contemporary truth for want of any other evidence, like a Russian who believes that the bailiff and the coffin maker still follow their unchanged vocations in a world where Oliver Twist is somewhere imprisoned in a London cellar asking for more.

At fourteen he could not understand the motives which had made his father stay behind on the quay of the old capital on the river. It took more than a few years of life in Buenos Aires before he began to realize that the existence of an exile did not make for simplicity-so many documents, so many visits to government offices. Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted. The Spanish language was Roman by origin, and the Romans were a simple people. machismo-the sense of masculine pride-was the Spanish equivalent of virtue. It had little to do with English courage or a stiff upper lip. Perhaps his father in his foreign way was trying to imitate machismo when he chose to face alone the daily increasing dangers on the other side of the Paraguayan border, but it was only the stiff lip which showed upon the quay.

The young Plarr and his mother reached the river port at almost this hour of the evening on their way to the great noisy capital of the republic in the south (their departure having been delayed some hours by a political demonstration), and something in the scene-the old colonial houses, a crumble of stucco in the street behind the waterfront-two lovers embracing on a bench-a moonstruck statue of a naked woman and the bust of an admiral with a homely Irish name-the electric light globes like great ripe fruit above a soft-drink stand-became lodged in the young Plarr’s mind as a symbol of unaccustomed peace, so that, at long last, when he felt an urgent need to escape somewhere from the skyscrapers, the traffic blocks, the sirens of police cars and ambulances, the heroic statues of liberators on horseback, he chose to come back to this small northern city to work, with all the prestige of a qualified doctor from Buenos Aires. Not one of his friends in the capital or his coffeehouse acquaintances came near to understanding his motive: he would find a hot humid unhealthy climate in the north, they all assured him of that, and a town where nothing ever happened, not even violence.

“Perhaps it’s unhealthy enough for me to build a better practice,” he would reply with a smile which was quite as unmeaning-or false-as his father’s expression of hope.

In Buenos Aires, during the long years of separation, they had received one letter only from his father. It was addressed on the envelope to both of them, Seńora e hijo. The letter had not come through the post. They found it stuck under the door of their apartment on a Sunday evening about four years after their arrival when they returned from the cinema where they had watched Gone With the Wind for the third time. His mother never missed a revival, perhaps because the old film and the old stars made civil war seem for a few hours something static and not dangerous. Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh bobbed up again through the years in spite of all the bullets.

The envelope was very dirty and crumpled and it was marked “By Hand,” but they were never to learn by whose hand. It was not written on their old notepaper, which had been elegantly stamped in Gothic type with the name of the estancia, but on the lined leaves of a cheap notebook. The letter was full, as the voice on the quay had been, of pretended hope-“things,” his father wrote, were bound to settle down soon; it was undated, so perhaps the “hope” had been exhausted for a long time before the letter arrived. They never heard from his father again; not even a report or a rumour reached them either of his imprisonment or of his death. He had concluded the letter with Spanish formality, “It is my great comfort that the two whom I love best in the world are both in safety, your affectionate husband and father, Henry Plarr.”

Doctor Plarr could not measure himself exactly how much he had been influenced to return to the small river port by the sense that here he would be living near the border of the country where he had been born and where his father was buried-whether in a prison or a patch of ground he would probably never know. He had only to drive a few kilometres northeast and look across the curve of the river. He had only like the smugglers to take a canoe… He felt sometimes like a watchman waiting for a signal. There was of course a more immediate motive. Once to a mistress he had said, “I left Buenos Aires to get away as far as possible from my mother.” It was true she had mislaid her beauty and become querulous over her lost estancia as she lived on into middle age in the great sprawling muddled capital with its fantastic architecture of skyscrapers in mean streets rising haphazardly and covered for twenty floors by Pepsi-Cola advertisements.

Doctor Plarr turned his back on the port and continued his evening promenade along the bank of the river. The sky was dark by now so that he could no longer distinguish the plume of smoke or see the line of the opposite bank. The lamps of the ferry which linked the city to the Chaco approached like an illuminated pencil at a slow-drawn wavering diagonal as it fought through the current moving heavily south. The Three Marys hung in the sky like all that was left of a broken rosary chain-the cross lay where it had fallen elsewhere. Doctor Plarr, who every ten years, without quite knowing why, renewed his English passport, felt a sudden desire for company which was not Spanish.

There were only two other Englishmen, so far as he was aware, in the city, an old English teacher who had adopted the title of doctor without ever having seen the inside of a university, and Charley Fortnum, the Honorary Consul. Since the morning months ago when he had begun sleeping with Charley Fortnum’s wife, Doctor Plarr found he was ill at ease in the Consul’s company; perhaps he was plagued by primitive sensations of guilt; perhaps he was irritated by the complacency of Charley Fortnum who appeared so modestly confident of his wife’s fidelity. He talked with pride rather than anxiety of his wife’s troubles in her early pregnancy as though they were a kind of compliment to his prowess until Doctor Plarr was almost ready to exclaim, “But who do you suppose is the father?”

There remained Doctor Humphries… though it was still too early to go and find the old man where he lived at the Hotel Bolivar.

Doctor Plarr found a seat under one of the white globes which lit the river front and took a book out of his pocket. From where he sat he could keep his eye on his car parked by the Coca-Cola stall. The book Doctor Plarr carried with him was a novel written by one of his patients, Jorge Julio Saavedra. Saavedra, too, bore the title of doctor, but it was an authentic title, for twenty years ago he had been awarded an honorary degree in the capital. The novel, which had been Doctor Saavedra’s first and most successful, was called The Taciturn Heart, and it was written in a heavily loaded melancholy style, full of the spirit of machismo.

Doctor Plarr found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time. These noble and uncommunicative characters in Latin-American literature seemed to him too simple and too heroic ever to have had living models. Rousseau and Chateaubriand were a greater influence in South America than Freud-there was even a city in Brazil named after Benjamin Constant. He read: “Julio Moreno would sit for hours in silence, on those days when the wind blew continuously from the sea and salted their few hectares of dry earth, shrivelling the rare plants which had survived the last wind, his chin in his hands, his eyes closed as though he wished to live only in some hidden corridor of his nature from which his wife was excluded. He never complained. She would stand beside him for long minutes, holding the mate gourd in her left hand, and when he opened his eyes Julio Moreno would take it from her without a word spoken. Only a relaxation of the muscles around the stern and unbeaten mouth appeared to her like an expression of thanks.”

Doctor Plarr, who had been brought up by his father on the works of Dickens and Conan Doyle, found the novels of Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra hard to read, but he regarded the effort as part of his medical duties. In a few days he would have to take one of his regular dinners with Doctor Saavedra at the Hotel Nacional and he must be ready to make some comment on the book which Doctor Saavedra had so warmly inscribed “To my friend and counsellor Doctor Eduardo Plarr, this my first book to show him I have not always been a political novelist and to disclose, as I can only do to a close friend, the first fruit of my inspiration.” Doctor Saavedra was in fact far from taciturn, but Doctor Plarr suspected he regarded himself as a Moreno manqué. Perhaps it was significant that he had given Moreno one of his own Christian names…

Doctor Plarr had never caught anyone else reading in the whole city. When he dined out he saw only books imprisoned behind glass to guard them from humidity. He never met anyone unawares reading by the river or even in one of the city squares-except occasionally El Litoral, the local paper. There were sometimes lovers on the benches or tired women with shopping baskets, or tramps, but never readers. A tramp would proudly occupy a whole bench. No one cared to share the bench with a tramp, so unlike the rest of the world he could stretch at full length.

Perhaps reading in the open air was a habit he had acquired from his father who always took a book with him when he went farming, and in the orange-scented air of his abandoned country Doctor Plarr had got through all the works of Dickens except Christmas Tales. People when they first saw him sitting on a bench with an open book had looked at him with keen curiosity. Perhaps they thought it was a custom peculiar to foreign doctors. It was not exactly unmanly, but it was certainly foreign. The men here preferred to stand at street corners and talk, or sit drinking cups of coffee and talk, or lean out of a window and talk. And all the time, while they talked, they touched each other to emphasize a point or just from friendship. In public Doctor Plarr touched nobody, only his book. It was a sign, like his English passport, that he would always remain a stranger: he would never be properly assimilated.

He began to read again. “She herself worked in an unbroken silence, accepting the hard toil, like the bad seasons, as a law of nature.”

Doctor Saavedra had enjoyed a period of critical and popular success in the capital. When he began to feel himself neglected by the reviewers-and still worse by the hostesses and the newspaper reporters-he had come to the north where his great-grandfather had been governor and where he was shown the proper respect due to a famous novelist from the capital, even though there were probably few people who actually read his books. Strangely enough the mental geography of his novels remained unaltered. Wherever he might choose to live now, he had found his mythical region once and forever as a young man, the result of a holiday which he had taken in a small town by the sea, in the far south near Trelew. He had never encountered a Moreno, but he had imagined him very clearly one evening in the bar of a small hotel, where a man sat in melancholy silence over a drink.

Doctor Plarr had learned all this in the capital from an old friend and jealous enemy of the novelist, and he found the knowledge of Saavedra’s background of some value when he came to treat his patient who suffered from bouts of voluble manic-depression. The same character appeared again and again in all his books, his history changed a little, but never his strong sad silence. The friend and enemy, who had accompanied the young Saavedra on that voyage of discovery, had exclaimed scornfully, “And do you know who the man was? He was a Welshman, a Welshman. Who has ever heard of a Welshman with machismo? There are a lot of Welshmen in those parts. He was drunk, that was all. His weekly drunk when he came in from the country.” A ferry left for the invisible shore of scrub and swamp, and later the same ferry returned. Doctor Plarr found it difficult to concentrate on the taciturnity of Julio Moreno’s heart. Moreno’s wife left him at last with a casual labourer on his land who had youth and good looks and some facility in talking, but she was unhappy in the city by the sea where her lover remained unemployed. He soon became habitually drunk in bars and garrulous in bed, and she felt a nostalgia for the long silences and the dry salt ruined earth. So back she came to Moreno, who made room for her without a word at the table where he had prepared a meagre dinner, and afterward he sat mutely in his customary chair with his chin in his hands while she stood beside him holding his mate gourd. There were still another hundred pages to come, though the story, it seemed to Doctor Plarr, might well have ended there. However Julio Moreno’s machismo had not yet found full expression, and when he indicated to his wife, in the fewest possible words, his decision to visit the city of Trelew, Doctor Plarr felt quite certain of what would happen there. Julio Moreno would encounter the labourer in a bar of the city and then there would be a fight with knives, won of course by the younger man. Hadn’t his wife, when he left, seen in Moreno’s eyes “the expression of an exhausted swimmer who surrenders to the dark tide of his ineluctable destiny”?

It could not be said that Doctor Saavedra wrote badly. There was a heavy music in his style, the drumbeats of destiny were never very far away, but Doctor Plarr sometimes had a longing to exclaim to his melancholy patient, “Life isn’t like that. Life isn’t noble or dignified. Even Latin-American life. Nothing is ineluctable. Life has surprises. Life is absurd. Because it’s absurd there is always hope. Why, one day we may even discover a cure for cancer and the common cold.” He turned to the last page. Sure enough Julio Moreno’s life blood was draining away between the broken tiles on the floor of the Trelew bar and his wife (how had she got there so quickly?) stood by his side, though for once she was not holding a maté gourd. “A relaxation of the muscles around the hard unbeaten mouth told her, before the eyes closed on the immense weariness of existence, that he found her presence welcome.”

Doctor Plarr closed the book with a bang of irritation. The Southern Cross lay on its crosspiece in a night which was full of stars. No towns or television masts or lighted windows broke the flat horizon. If he went home might there still be the danger of a telephone call? When the time had come to leave his last patient, the finance secretary’s wife who was suffering from a touch of fever, he was determined not to go home before the early morning. He wanted to keep away from the telephone until it was too late for any unprofessional call. There was one particular possibility, at this hour on this day, of being troubled. Charley Fortnum, he knew, was dining with the Governor who needed an interpreter for his guest of honour, the American Ambassador. Clara, now she had overcome her fear of using the telephone, might easily call him and demand his company, with her husband out of the way, and he had no wish to see her on this Tuesday night of all nights. His sexual feeling was anaesthetized by anxiety. He knew how likely it was that Charley would return unexpectedly early; for the dinner would certainly, sooner or later, be cancelled for a reason he had no right to know in advance.

Doctor Plarr decided that it was better to keep out of the way until midnight. The Governor’s party would have surely dispersed by that time, and Charley Fortnum would be well on his way home. I am not a man with machismo, Doctor Plarr reflected ruefully, though he could hardly imagine Charley Fortnum coming at him with a knife. He got up from the bench. The hour was late enough for the professor of English.

He did not find Doctor Humphries, as he expected, at the Hotel Bolivar. Doctor Humphries had a small room with a shower on the ground floor with a window opening on the patio which contained one dusty palm and a dead fountain. He had left his door unlocked and this perhaps showed his confidence in stability. Doctor Plarr remembered how at night his father in Paraguay would lock even the internal doors of his house, the bedrooms, the lavatories, the unused guest rooms, not against robbers but against the police, the military and the official assassins, though they would certainly not have been deterred long by locked doors.

In Doctor Humphries’ room there was hardly space for a bed, a dressing table, two chairs, a basin and the shower. You had to fight your way through them as though they were passengers in a crowded subway. Doctor Plarr saw that Doctor Humphries had pasted a new picture on the wall, from the Spanish edition of Life, showing the Queen perched on a horse at Trooping the Color. The choice was not necessarily a mark of patriotism or nostalgia: patches of damp were continually appearing on the plaster of the room and Doctor Humphries covered them with the nearest picture which came to hand. Perhaps however his choice did show a certain preference for wakening with the Queen’s face rather than Mr. Nixon’s on the wall. (Mr. Nixon’s face would surely have appeared somewhere in the same number of Life.) Inside the small room it was cool, but even the coolness was humid. The shower behind the plastic curtain had a faulty washer and dripped upon the tiles. The narrow bed was pulled together rather than made-the bumpy sheet might have been hastily drawn over a corpse, and a mosquito net hung bundled above it like a grey cloud threatening rain. Doctor Plarr was sorry for the self-styled doctor of letters: it was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will-if such a man existed-would have chosen to await death. My father, he thought with disquiet, must be about the same age as Humphries now, and perhaps he survives in even worse surroundings.

A scrap of paper was inserted in the frame of Humphries’ looking glass-“Gone to the Italian Club.” Perhaps he had been expecting a pupil and that was the reason why he had left his door unlocked. The Italian Club was in a once-impressive colonial building across the road. There was a bust of somebody, perhaps of Cavour or Mazzini, but the stone was pockmarked and the inscription no longer readable; it stood between the house, which had a stone garland of flowers over every tall window, and the street. Once there had been a great number of Italians living in the city, but now all that was left of the club was the name, the bust, the imposing facade which bore a nineteenth-century date in Roman numerals. There were a few tables where you could eat cheaply without paying a subscription, and only one Italian was left, the solitary waiter who had been born in Naples. The cook was of Hungarian origin and served little else but goulash, a dish in which he could easily disguise the quality of the ingredients, a wise thing to do since the best beef went down the river to the capital, more than eight hundred kilometres away.

Doctor Humphries was seated at a table close to an open window with a napkin tucked into his frayed collar. However hot the day he was always dressed in a suit with a tie and a waistcoat like a Victorian man of letters living in Florence. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles; probably the prescription had not been revised for years, for he bent very low over the goulash to see what he was eating. His white hair was streaked the color of youth by nicotine, and there were smears of nearly the same color on his napkin from the goulash. Doctor Plarr said, “Good evening, Doctor Humphries.”

“Ah, you found my note?”

“I’d have looked in here anyway. How did you know I was coming to your room?”

“I didn’t, Doctor Plarr. But I thought somebody might look in, somebody…”

“I had been going to suggest we have dinner at the National,” Doctor Plarr explained. He looked around the restaurant for the waiter without any anticipation of pleasure. They were the only clients.

“Very kind of you,” Doctor Humphries said. “Another day, if you’ll let me have what I believe the Yankees call a rain check. The goulash here is not so bad, one grows a little tired of it, but at least it’s filling.” He was a very thin old man. He gave the impression of someone who had worked a long while at eating in the hopeless hope of filling an inexhaustible cavity.

For want of anything better Doctor Plarr, too, ordered goulash. Doctor Humphries said, “I am surprised to see you. I would have thought the Governor might have invited you… he must need someone who speaks English for his dinner tonight.”

Doctor Plarr realized why the message had been stuck into the looking glass. There could have been a last-minute slip in the Governor’s arrangements. It had happened once, and Doctor Humphries had been summoned… After all there were only three Englishmen who were available. He said, “He has invited Charley Fortnum.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Doctor Humphries said, “our Honorary Consul.” He underlined the adjective in a tone of embittered denigration. “This is a diplomatic dinner. I suppose the Honorary Consul’s wife could not appear for reasons of health?”

“The American Ambassador is unmarried, Doctor Humphries. It’s informal-a stag party.”

“A very suitable occasion one might have thought for inviting Mrs. Fortnum to entertain the guests. She must be accustomed to stag parties. But why does the Governor not invite you or me?”

“Be fair, doctor. You and I have no official position here.”

“But we know a lot more about the Jesuit ruins than Charley Fortnum does. According to El Litoral the Ambassador has come here to see the rums, not the tea or the maté crop, though that hardly seems likely. American ambassadors are usually men of business.”

“The new Ambassador wants to create a good impression,” Doctor Plarr said. “Art and history. He can’t be suspected of a take-over bid there. He wants to show a scholarly interest in our province, not a commercial one. The secretary of finance has not been invited, even though he speaks a little English. Otherwise a loan might have been suspected.”

“And the Ambassador-doesn’t he speak enough Spanish for a polite toast and a few platitudes?”

“They say he is making rapid progress.”

“What a lot you always seem to know about everything, Plarr. I only know what we read in El Litoral. He’s off to the ruins tomorrow, isn’t he?”

“No, he went there today. Tonight he returns to B. A. by air.”

“The paper’s wrong then?”

“The official program was a little inaccurate. I suppose the Governor didn’t want any incidents.”

“Incidents here? What an idea! I haven’t seen an incident in this province in twenty years. Incidents only happen in Cordoba. The goulash isn’t so very bad, is it?” he asked hopefully.

“I’ve eaten worse,” Doctor Plarr said without trying to remember on what occasion.

“I see you’ve been reading one of Saavedra’s books. What do you think of it?”

“Very talented,” Doctor Plarr said. Like the Governor he didn’t want any incidents, and he recognized the malice which remained alive and kicking in the old man long after discretion had died from a lifetime’s neglect.

“You can really read that stuff? You believe in all that machismo?”

“While I read it,” Doctor Plarr said with care, “I can suspend my disbelief.”

“These Argentinians-they all believe their grandfathers rode with the gauchos. Saavedra has about as much machismo as Charley Fortnum. Is it true Charley’s having a baby?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s the lucky father?”

“Why not Charley?”

“An old man and a drunk? You’re her doctor, Plarr. Tell me a little bit of the truth. I don’t ask for a very big bit.”

“Why do you always want the truth?”

“Contrary to common belief the truth is nearly always funny. It’s only tragedy which people bother to imagine or invent. If you really knew what went into this goulash you’d laugh.”

“Do you know?”

“No. People always conspire to keep the truth from me. Even you lie to me, Plarr.”

“Me?”

“You lie to me about Saavedra’s novel and Charley Fortnum’s baby. Let’s hope, for his sake, it’s a girl.”

“Why?”

“It’s so much more difficult to detect the father from the features.” Doctor Humphries began to wipe his plate clean with a piece of bread. “Can you tell me why I’m always hungry, doctor? I don’t eat well, and yet I eat an awful lot of what they call nourishing food.”

“If you really wanted the truth I would have to examine you, take an x-ray…”

“Oh no, no. I only want the truth about other people. It’s always other people who are funny.”

“Then why ask me?”

“A conversational gambit,” the old man said, “to hide my embarrassment while I help myself to the last piece of bread.”

“Do they grudge us bread here?” Doctor Plarr called across a waste of empty tables, “Waiter, some more bread.”

The only Italian came shuffling toward them. He carried a bread basket with three pieces of bread and he watched with black anxiety when the number was reduced to one. He might have been a junior member of the Mafia who had disobeyed the order of his chief.

“Did you see the sign he made?” Doctor Humphries asked.

“No.”

“He put out two of his fingers. Against the evil eye. He thinks I have the evil eye.”

“Why?”

“I once made a disrespectful remark about the Madonna of Pompeii.”

“What about a game of chess when you have finished?” Doctor Plarr asked. He had to pass the time somehow, away from his apartment and the telephone by the bed.

“I’ve finished now.”

They went back to the little over-lived-in room in the Hotel Bolivar. The manager was reading El Litoral in the patio with his fly open for coolness. He said, “Someone was asking for you on the telephone, doctor.”

“For me?” Humphries exclaimed with excitement. “Who was it? What did you tell them?”

“No, it was for Doctor Plarr, professor. A woman. She thought the doctor might be with you.”

“If she rings again,” Plarr said, “don’t say that I am here.”

“Have you no curiosity?” Doctor Humphries asked.

“Oh, I can guess who it is.”

“Not a patient, eh?”

“Yes, a patient. There’s no urgency. Nothing to worry about.”

Doctor Plarr found himself checkmated in under twenty moves, and he began impatiently to set the pieces out again.

“Whatever you may say you are worried about something,” the old man said.

“It’s that damn shower. Drip, drip, drip. Why don’t you have it mended?”

“What harm does it do? It’s soothing. It sings me to sleep.”

Doctor Humphries began with a king’s pawn opening. “KP4,” he said. “Even the great Capablanca would sometimes begin as simply as that. Charley Fortnum,” he added, “has got his new Cadillac.”

“Yes.”

“How old’s your home-grown Fiat?”

“Four-five years old.”

“It pays to be a Consul, doesn’t it? Permission to import a car every two years. I suppose he’s got a general lined up in the capital to buy it as soon as he’s run it in.”

“Probably. It’s your move.”

“If he got his wife made a Consul, too, they could import a car a year between them. A fortune. Is there any sexual discrimination in the consular service?”

“I don’t know the rules.”

“How much did he pay to get appointed, do you suppose?”

“That’s a canard, Humphries. He paid nothing. It’s not the way our Foreign Office works. Some very important visitors wanted to see the ruins. They had no Spanish. Charley Fortnum gave them a good time. It was as simple as that. And lucky for him. He wasn’t doing very well with his mate crop, but a Cadillac every two years makes a lot of difference.”

“Yes, you could say he married on his Cadillac. But I’m surprised that woman of his needed the price of a Cadillac. Surely a Morris Minor would have done.”

“I’m being unfair,” Doctor Plarr said. “It wasn’t only because he looked after royalty. There were quite a number of Englishmen in the province in those days-you know that better than I do. And there was one who got into a mess over the border-the time when the guerrillas went across-and Fortnum knew the local ropes. He saved the Ambassador a lot of trouble. All the same he was lucky-some ambassadors are more grateful than others.”

“So now if we are in a spot of trouble we have to depend on Charley Fortnum. Check.”

Doctor Plarr had to exchange his queen for a bishop. He said, “There are worse people than Charley Fortnum.”

“You are in bad trouble now and he can’t save you.”

Doctor Plarr looked quickly up from the board, but the old man was only referring to the game. “Check again,” he said. “And mate.” He added, “That shower has been out of order for six months. You don’t always lose to me as easily as that.”

“Your game’s improved.”

Doctor Plarr refused a third game and drove home. He lived on the top floor of a block of yellow flats which faced the Paraná. The block was one of the eyesores of the old colonial city, but the yellow was fading a little year by year, and anyway he couldn’t afford a house while his mother was alive. It was extraordinary how much a woman could spend on sweet cakes in the capital.

As Doctor Plarr closed his shutters the last ferry was approaching across the river, and after he got into bed he heard the heavy thunder of a plane which was making a slow turn overhead: it sounded very low, as though it had lifted off the ground only a few minutes before. It was certainly not a long-distance jet overflying the city on the way to Buenos Aires or Asunción-in any case the hour was too late for a commercial flight. It might, Plarr thought, be the American Ambassador’s plane, but he had never expected to hear that. He turned off the light and lay in the dark thinking of all the things that could so easily have gone wrong as the noise of the engine faded, beating south, carrying whom? He wanted to lift the receiver and dial Charley Fortnum, but there was no excuse he could think of for disturbing him at that hour. He could hardly ask: did the Ambassador enjoy the ruins? Did the dinner pass off well? I suppose at the Governor’s you must have had some decent steaks? It wasn’t his habit to gossip with Charley Fortnum at that hour-Charley was an uxorious man.

He turned his light on again-better to read than worry, and as he knew now what the ending would be without any possibility of mistake, Doctor Saavedra’s book proved, a good sedative. There was little traffic along the river front; once a police car went by with the sirens screaming, but Plarr soon fell asleep with the light still burning.

He was awakened by the telephone. His watch stood at exactly two in the morning. He knew of no patient likely to ring him at that hour.

“Yes,” he asked, “who are you?”

A voice he didn’t recognize replied, with elaborate caution, “Our entertainment was a success.”

Plarr said, “Who are you? Why tell me that? What entertainment? I’m not interested.” He spoke with the irritation of fear.

“We are worried about one of the cast. He was taken ill.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“We are afraid the strain of his part may have been too great.”

Never before had they telephoned him so openly and at such a suspect hour. There was no reason to believe that his line was tapped, but they had no right to take the smallest risk. Refugees from the north were often kept under a certain loose surveillance in the border region since the days of the guerrilla fighting, if only for their own protection: there were cases of men who had been dragged home to Paraguay across the Paraná to die. There had been an exiled doctor in Posadas… Because he was a man of the same profession the doctor’s example had been present often in Plarr’s mind since the plans for the entertainment were first disclosed to him. This telephone call to his apartment could not be justified except in a case of great urgency. One death among the entertainers-by the rules they had set themselves-was to be expected and justified nothing.

He said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. You have the wrong number.” He replaced the receiver and lay looking at the telephone as though it were a black and venomous object which would certainly strike again. It did two minutes later, and he had to listen-it might be an ordinary patient’s call. “Yes-who are you?”

The same voice said, “You have to come. He may be dying.”

Doctor Plarr asked with resignation, “What do you want me to do?”

“We’ll pick you up in the street in exactly five minutes. If we are not there, then in ten minutes. After that be ready every five minutes.”

“What does your watch say?”

“Six minutes past two.”

The doctor put on a pair of trousers and a shirt; then he packed a briefcase with what might be required (a bullet wound seemed the most likely trouble) and ran lightly down the stairs in his socks. He knew the noise of the lift was audible through the thin walls of every flat. By two ten he was standing outside the block and at two twelve he went in again and shut the door. At two sixteen he was watching a second time in the street and a two eighteen he was back inside. Fear made him furious. His liberty, perhaps his life, seemed to lie in hopelessly incompetent hands. He knew only two members of the group-they had been at school with him in Asunción-and those who share one’s childhood never seem to grow up. He had no more belief in their efficiency than he had when they were students; the organization they had once belonged to in Paraguay, the Juventud Febrerista, had effected little except the death of most of the other members in an ill-advised and ill-led guerrilla action.

Indeed it was that very sense of amateurism which had persuaded him to become involved. He hadn’t believed in their plans, and to listen to them was only a mark of friendship. When he questioned them about what they would do in certain eventualities the ruthlessness of their replies seemed to him a form of play acting. (They had all three taken minor parts in a school performance of Macbeth-the prose translation did not make the play more plausible.)

Now, as he stood in the dark hall, watching intently the luminous dial of his watch, he realized he had never for a moment believed they would reach the point of action. Even when he had given them the precise information they required of the American Ambassador’s movements (he had learned the details from Charley Fortnum over a Long John) and supplied them with the drug they needed, he still didn’t believe that anything would really happen. Only when he woke that morning and heard Léon’s voice, “The show goes on,” did it occur to him that perhaps these amateurs might after all be dangerous. Was it Léon Rivas who was dying now? Or Aquino?

It was two twenty-two when he went outside for the third time. A car swerved round the block and stopped, the engine running. A hand waved to him.

As far as he could tell in the light of the dashboard, he didn’t know the man at the wheel, but his companion he was able to guess at in the dark by the line of the thin beard which outlined the jaw. It was in a police station cell that Aquino had grown his beard and had begun to write his poetry, and it was in the cell too that he had developed a hungry passion for chipá, those doughy rolls made out of mandioca, that can only be properly appreciated after semi starvation. “What went wrong, Aquino?”

“The car would not start. Dust in the carburettor. That was it, Diego? And then there was a police patrol.”

“I meant who is dying?”

“Nobody, we hope.”

“Léon?”

“He is all right.”

“Why did you telephone? You promised not to involve me. Léon promised.”

He would never have consented to help them if it had not been for Léon whom he had missed almost as much as his father when he and his mother left on the river boat. Léon was someone whose word he believed that he could always trust, even though his word seemed later to have been broken when Plarr heard that Léon had become a priest instead of the fearless abogado who would defend the poor and the innocent, like Perry Mason. In his school days Léon had possessed an enormous collection of Perry Masons stiffly translated into classical Spanish prose. He lent them carefully, one at a time, to selected friends. Perry Mason’s secretary Delia was the first woman to arouse Plarr’s sexual appetite.

“Father Rivas told us to fetch you,” the man called Diego said.

He continued to call Léon Father, Doctor Plarr noticed, though he had broken a second vow when he left the Church and married, but that particular broken promise was not one which worried Plarr, who never went to Mass except when he accompanied his mother on one of his rare visits to the capital. Léon, it seemed to him, was struggling back from a succession of failures toward the primal promise to the poor he had never intended to break. He would end as an abogado yet.

They turned into Tucumán and then into San Martin, but Doctor Plarr after that tried to avoid looking out. It was as well not to know where they were going. If the worst happened he wanted to betray as little as possible under interrogation.

They were driving fast enough to attract attention. He asked, “You are not afraid of the police patrols?”

“Léon has them all mapped out. He has studied them for a month.”

“But tonight-surely it’s a little bit special.”

“The Ambassador’s car will have been found in the upper Paraná. They will be searching every house on the border, and they will have warned them in Encar-naci6n across the river. There will be road blocks on the road to Rosario. The patrols here must have been cut. They need the men elsewhere. And this is the last place they will look for him with the Governor waiting at his house to take him to the airport.”

“I hope you are right.”

For a moment, without meaning to, Doctor Plarr raised his eyes as the car lurched round a turning, and he saw on the pavement a deck chair containing a stout elderly woman whom he knew, as he knew the small open doorway behind her-her name was Seńora Sanchez and she never slept before her last customer had gone home. She was the richest woman in town or so it was believed.

Doctor Plarr said, “What happened about the Governor’s dinner? How long did they wait?” He could imagine the confusion. One couldn’t telephone to a lot of ruins.

“I do not know.”

“Surely you had somebody on the watch?”

“We had enough on our hands.” He was back with the amateurs; it seemed to Doctor Plarr that the plot would have been better written by Saavedra. Ingenuity, if not machismo, was distinctly lacking.

“I heard a plane. Was it the Ambassador’s?”

“If it was, it must have gone back empty.”

“You seem to know very little,” Doctor Plarr said.

“Who is hurt?”

The car drew suddenly and roughly up on the margin of a dirt track. “We get out here,” Aquino said. After Doctor Plarr had left the car he heard it being backed a few yards. He stood still, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dark, until he was able to see by starlight the kind of place they had brought him to. It was part of the bidonville which lay between the city and the bend of the river. The track was almost as wide as a city street, and he could just see a shack made out of dried mud and old petrol cans hidden among the avocados. As his sight cleared he began to make out other huts standing concealed among the trees, like men in ambush. Aquino led him on. The doctor’s feet sank more than ankle deep in mud. Even a jeep would have to pass slowly here. There would be plenty of warning if the police made a raid. Perhaps after all they were amateurs of some intelligence.

“Is he here?” he asked Aquino.

“Who?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, there are no microphones in the trees. The Ambassador, of course.”

“Yes, he is here all right. But he has not come round after the injection.”

They moved as quickly as they could along the mud track, passing several dark huts. The silence seemed unnatural-not even a child crying. Doctor Plarr paused to recover breath. “These people,” he whispered, “they must have heard your car.”

“They will not talk. They think we are smugglers. Anyway you can imagine-they are no friends to the police.”

Diego led the way down a side turning where the mud was even deeper. It had not rained for two days, but in this barrio of the poor the mud lay permanently until the dry season was well advanced. There was nowhere for the water to drain, and yet, as Doctor Plarr knew well, the inhabitants had to walk as much as a mile in order to find a tap which gave water fit for drinking. The children-he had treated many of them-were big-bellied from protein deficiency. Perhaps he had been many times down this very track-it was indistinguishable from all the others; he had always needed a guide when he visited a patient here. For some reason The Taciturn Heart came back to his mind. To fight for one’s honour with knives over a woman, that belonged to another, an absurdly outdated world, which had ceased to exist except in the romantic imagination of writers like Saavedra. Honor meant nothing to the starving. To them belonged the more serious fight for survival.

“Is that you, Eduardo?” a voice asked.

“Yes, is that you, Léon?”

Somebody held a candle up long enough for him to reach the threshold. Then the door was closed quickly behind him.

In the light of the candle he saw the man whom they still called Father Rivas; Léon looked as thin and immature in his T-shirt and jeans as the boy he had known in the country across the border. His brown eyes were too big for his face, the large ears set almost at right angles to his skull made bun resemble one of the small mongrel dogs which haunted the barrio of the poor. There was the same soft fidelity in the eyes and a vulnerability in the protruding ears. He could have been taken in spite of his age for a shy seminarist.

“You have been a long time, Eduardo,” he complained softly.

“Ask your driver Diego about that.”

“The Ambassador is still in a coma. We had to give him a second injection. He was thrashing around too much.”

“I told you a second shot would be dangerous.”

“Everything is dangerous,” Father Rivas said gently, as though he were in the confessional warning someone against the temptation of proximity.

While Doctor Plarr unpacked his briefcase Father Rivas went on, “He is breathing very heavily.”

“What will you do if he stops breathing altogether?”

“We shall have to change our tactics.”

“How?”

“We shall have to announce he was executed. Revolutionary justice,” he added with an unhappy grin. “Please, I beg you, do all you can.”

“Of course.”

“We do not want him to die,” Father Rivas said. “Our job is to save lives.”

They went into the only other room, in which a bed had been improvised out of a long wooden box-he couldn’t see clearly what kind of a box-with a few blankets spread over it. Doctor Plarr heard the deep uneven breathing of the drugged man, like someone struggling awake from a nightmare. He said, “Bring the light closer.” He bent down and looked closely at the flushed face. For a long moment he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he laughed from the shock of what he had seen. “Oh Léon,” he said, “you have taken up the wrong profession.”

“What do you mean?”

“You would do better to go back to the Church. You are not made to be a kidnapper.”

“I do not understand. Is he dying?”

Doctor Plarr said, “You needn’t worry, Léon, he’s not going to die, but this isn’t the American Ambassador.”

“Not…”

“This is Charley Fortnum.”

“Who is Charley Fortnum?”

“Our Honorary Consul,” Doctor Plarr said in the same tone of mockery which Doctor Humphries had employed.

“But that is impossible,” Father Rivas exclaimed.

“Charley Fortnum’s veins run with alcohol, not blood. The morphine I gave you would have acted more gently on the Ambassador. The Ambassador is afraid of alcohol. They had to provide Coca-Cola for the dinner tonight. So Charley told me. He will be all right in a little while. Leave him to sleep it off,” but before he had time to leave the room the man on the wooden box opened his eyes. He stared at Doctor Plarr and Doctor Plarr stared back at him. It was as well to know for certain whether he were recognized.

“Take me home,” Fortnum said, “home,” and then his body lurched sideways into a deeper sleep.

“Did he recognize you?” Father Rivas asked.

“How would I know?”

“If he recognized you it would complicate matters.”

Somebody lit a second candle in the outer room, but no one spoke; it was as though they all waited to catch a suggestion in another man’s eyes as to what should be done now. At last Aquino said, “This will not please El Tigre.”

“It’s really rather comic,” Doctor Plarr said, “when you think of it. That must have been the Ambassador’s plane I heard, and he was in it. On the way back to Buenos Aires. I wonder how the Governor’s dinner went without an interpreter.” He looked from one face to another, but no one smiled in return.

There were two men in the room who were unknown to him, and for the first time he noticed a woman who lay asleep on the floor in a dark corner-he had mistaken her for a poncho which someone had dropped. One of them was a Negro with a pockmarked face, the other an Indian who spoke up now. He couldn’t understand the words-they were not Spanish. “What is he saying, Léon?”

“Miguel thinks we ought to put him into the river to drown.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said the police would be interested in a body found three hundred kilometres away from the car.”

“The idea’s absurd,” Doctor Plarr said. “You can’t murder Charley Fortnum.”

“I try not to think in those terms, Eduardo.”

“Is killing a matter of semantics to you now, Léon? I remember you were always good at semantics. You used to explain the Trinity to me in the old days, but your explanation was more complicated than the catechism.”

“We do not want to kill him,” Father Rivas said, “but what can we do? He saw you.”

“He won’t remember when he wakes. He always forgets things completely when he’s drunk.” Doctor Plarr added, “How on earth did you make such a mistake?”

“That I must find out,” Father Rivas replied, and he began to talk again in Guaraní.

Doctor Plarr took one of the candles and went back to the doorway of the other room. Charley Fortnum looked quite peacefully asleep on the box, just as though he were in his own great brass bedstead at home, where he lay always on the right side near the window. A sense of fastidiousness made the doctor choose the left side, near the door, when he slept in it himself with Clara.

Charley Fortnum’s face as long as he had known him had always been a little flushed. His blood pressure was high and he was too fond of whisky. He had passed sixty, but his thin hair retained a soft and mouse like tint like a boy’s, and his colouring to the unprofessional eye gave a false impression of health. He looked like an out-of-doors man, a farmer. Indeed he had a camp about fifty kilometres from the city, where he grew a little grain and mate. He liked trundling from field to field in an old Land Rover which he called Fortnum’s Pride. “Off for a gallop,” he would say, grinding at the gears, “hi-yup.”

Now he suddenly raised his hand and waved it. His eyes were closed. He was dreaming. Perhaps he thought he was waving to his wife and the doctor, as he left them on the verandah to deal with dull medical business. “Women’s insides,” Charley Fortnum had said once. “Never understood them. One day you must draw me a diagram.”

Doctor Plarr went quickly back into the outer room. “He’s all right, Léon. You can dump him safely by the road somewhere for the police to find.”

“We cannot do that. He may have recognized you.”

“He’s fast asleep. Anyway he would say nothing to hurt me. We are old friends.”

“I think I know what must have happened,” Father Rivas said. “The information you gave us-it was quite correct up to a point. The Ambassador came from Buenos Aires by car, he spent three nights on the road because he wanted to see the country, and the Embassy sent a plane from Buenos Aires to bring him back after his dinner with the Governor. All those details were correct enough, but you never told us your Consul was going with him to the ruins.”

“I didn’t know. He told me about the dinner-that was all.”

“He did not even go in the Ambassador’s car. At least we would have grabbed both of them then. He must have taken his own car and then have left while the Ambassador was still lingering around. Our men were only expecting one car to pass. Our outpost flashed the signal when it went by. He had seen the flag.”

“The Union Jack, not the Stars and Stripes. He hadn’t even the right to fly that.”

“In the dark you cannot see clearly and he had been told about the diplomatic number plate.”

“It was CC not CD.”

“The letters look much the same in the dark on a moving car. You cannot blame him. Alone in the dark-frightened probably. It could have happened to me or you. A fatality.”

“The police may not know what has happened to Fortnum yet. If you release him quickly…”

Doctor Plarr, in face of their attentive silence, felt as though he were pleading before a tribunal. He said, “Charley Fortnum’s no good to you as a hostage.”

“He is a member of the diplomatic corps,” Aquino said.

“No, he isn’t. An Honorary Consul is not a proper Consul.”

“The British Ambassador would have to intervene.”

“Of course. He would report the affair home. Just as he would for anyone British. If you kidnapped me or old Humphries it would be much the same.”

“The British will ask the Americans to bring pressure on the General in Asunción.”

“You can be sure the Americans will do nothing of the kind. Why should they? They don’t want to anger their friend the General for the sake of Charley Fortnum.”

“But he is a British Consul.”

Doctor Plarr began to despair of ever convincing them of how unimportant Charley Fortnum was. He said, “He had not even the right to put CC on his car. He was in trouble for that.”

“You knew him well, I think?” Father Rivas said.

“Yes.”

“And you liked him?”

“Yes. In a way.” It wasn’t a good sign that Léon already spoke of Fortnum in the past tense.

“I am sorry. I can understand how you feel. It is always much easier to deal with strangers. Like in the confessional box. I used to hate it if I recognized a voice. One can be harsh so much more easily to a stranger.”

“What can you gain by holding him, Léon?”

“We came over the border to do a job. There are a lot of our people who would be discouraged if nothing happened. In our situation something must always happen. Even the kidnapping of a Consul is something.”

“An Honorary Consul,” Doctor Plarr corrected.

“It will be a warning to people who are more important. Perhaps they will take our next threat seriously. That is a small tactical point gamed in a long war.”

Doctor Plarr said, “So I suppose you’ll be prepared to hear the stranger’s confession and give him absolution before you kill him? Charley Fortnum’s a Catholic, you know. He’ll appreciate having a priest at his deathbed.”

Father Rivas said to the Negro, “Give me a cigarette, Pablo.”

“He will be even glad of a married priest like you, Léon,” Doctor Plarr said.

“You were willing enough to help us, Eduardo.”

“In the case of the Ambassador, yes. His life wouldn’t have been in any danger. They would have given way. In any case an American… he’s a combatant. The Americans have killed plenty of men in South America.”

“Your father is among those we are trying to help-if he is still alive.”

“I don’t know whether he would have liked your method.”

“We have not chosen our method. They have reduced us to this.”

“What on earth can you ask in return for Charley Fortnum? Perhaps a case of real Scotch?”

“For the American Ambassador we would have demanded the release of twenty prisoners. For a British Consul I think we shall have to halve the bill. That is up to El Tigre.”

“Where the hell is your El Tigre?”

“Only those in Rosario are in touch with him until the operation is finished.”

“I suppose his schedule did not allow for mistakes. Or for human nature. The General can kill the men you name and say they died years ago.”

“We have been through that argument many times. If they kill them our demands will be greater next time.”

“Léon, listen to me. If you can be sure that Charley Fortnum will remember nothing, surely…?”

“How could we ever be certain? You have no drugs to wipe out memory. Does he mean so much to you, Eduardo?”

“He’s a voice in the confessional box which I have recognized.”

“Ted,” a familiar voice called to bun from the inner room. “Ted.”

“You see,” Father Rivas said, “he knows you.”

Doctor Plarr turned his back on the tribunal and went through the doorway. “Yes, Charley,” he said, “here I am. How do you feel?”

“God awful, Ted. What happened? Where am I?”

“You had an accident with your car. Nothing serious.”

“Are you going to take me home?”

“Not yet. You must lie quiet for a while. In the dark. You’ve got a bit of concussion.”

“Clara’s going to be anxious.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll deal with Clara.”

“You mustn’t upset her, Ted. The child…”

“I am her doctor, Charley.”

“Of course, old man, I’m a bloody fool. Will she be able to see me?”

“In a few days you’ll be going home.”

“A few days! Have you a drink with you, Ted?”

“No. I’m going to give you something better-to make you sleep.”

“You are a good friend, Ted. Who are those men out there? Why do you have to use a torch?”

“There’s a power cut. When you wake up it will be daylight.”

“You’ll look in and see me?”

“Of course.”

Charley Fortnum lay still for a moment and then asked in a voice which must have carried clearly into the other room, “It wasn’t really an accident, Ted, was it?”

“Of course it was an accident.”

“The sunglasses… what happened to the sunglasses?”

“What sunglasses?”

“They were Clara’s,” Charley Fortnum said. “She liked those sunglasses. I shouldn’t have borrowed them. Couldn’t find my own.” He raised his knees toward his chest and settled on his side with a long sigh. “It’s the measure that counts,” he said and lay still like an aged embryo which had failed to get born.

In the other room Father Rivas sat with his chin on his crossed fingers and his eyes closed. He might be praying, Doctor Plarr thought as he came back into the room, or perhaps he was only listening carefully to the words of Charley Fortnum as he once used to listen in the confessional to the voice of a stranger in order to decide what penance…

“What blunderers you are,” Doctor Plarr accused him. “What amateurs!”

“On our side we are all amateurs. The police and the soldiers are the professionals.”

“An Honorary Consul, alcoholic at that, in place of an Ambassador.”

“Yes. And Che took photographs like a tourist and left them around. At least no one here has a camera. Or keeps a journal. We learn from our mistakes.”

“Your driver will have to take me home,” Doctor Plarr said.

“Yes.”

“I will come back tomorrow…”

“You will not be needed any more, Eduardo.”

“Perhaps not by you, but…”

“It is better if he does not see you again before we decide…”

“Léon,” Doctor Plarr said, “you can’t be serious about this. Old Charley Fortnum…”

Father Rivas said, “He is not in our hands, Eduardo. He is in the hands of the governments. In the hands of God too, of course. I do not forget my old claptrap, you notice, but I have never yet seen any sign that He interferes in our wars or our politics.”