The Honorary Consul

PART TWO

1

It was easy for Doctor Plarr to remember the first time he met Charley Fortnum. The meeting occurred a few weeks after he had arrived in the city from Buenos Aires. The Honorary Consul was exceedingly drunk, and he had lost the use of both legs. Doctor Plarr was making his way up Bolivar when an elderly gentleman leaned from the window of the Italian Club and called to him for help. “The bloody waiter’s gone home,” he explained, speaking in English.

When Doctor Plarr entered the club he found a drunk man who seemed perfectly content-the only trouble was he couldn’t stand up, but this didn’t worry him at all. He said he was quite comfortable on the floor. “I’ve sat on worse things,” he said, “including horses.”

“If you’ll take one arm,” the old man said, “I’ll take the other.”

“Who is he?”

“The gentleman you see sitting here on the floor and refusing to get up is Mr. Charles Fortnum, our Honorary Consul. You are Doctor Plarr, aren’t you? Glad to meet you. I’m Doctor Humphries. Doctor of Letters, not medicine. We three, you may say, are the pillars of the English colony, but one pillar has fallen.”

Fortnum said, “The measure was wrong.” He added something about the wrong kind of glass. “You have to have the right sort of glass or you get confused.”

“Is he celebrating something?” Doctor Plarr asked. “His new Cadillac arrived safely last week, and today he’s found a purchaser.”

“You’ve been eating here?”

“He wanted to take me to the Nacional, but he’s much too drunk for the Nacional-or even my hotel. Now we’ve got to get him home somehow, but he insists on going to see Seńora Sanchez.”

“A friend of his?”

“Of half the men in this town. She runs the only good brothel here-or so they say. I’m not a good judge of that kind of thing myself.”

“Surely they are illegal,” said Doctor Plarr.

“Not in this city. We are a military headquarters-don’t forget that. The military don’t allow anyone in B. A. to dictate to them here.”

“Why not let him go?”

“You can see why-he can’t stand up.”

“Surely the point of a brothel is that one can lie down?”

“Something has to stand up,” Doctor Humphries said with unexpected coarseness and an expression of distaste.

In the end they lugged Charley Fortnum between them across the street to the little room which Doctor Humphries occupied in the Hotel Bolívar. There were fewer pictures on the walls in those days because there were fewer damp stains, and the shower had not yet begun to drip.

Inanimate objects change at a faster rate than human beings. Doctor Humphries and Charley Fortnum were not noticeably different men that night than they were now; a crack in the plaster of a neglected house grows more quickly than a line on a human face, paint changes color more rapidly than hair, and a room’s decay is continuous: it never comes to a temporary halt on that high plateau of old age where a man may live a long time without apparent change. Doctor Humphries had been established on the plateau for many years, and Charley Fortnum, though he was still on one of the lower slopes, had found a reliable weapon in the fight against senility-he had pickled in alcohol some of the high spirits and the naiveté of earlier days. As the years passed, Doctor Plan: could discern little alteration in either of his early acquaintances-perhaps Humphries moved more slowly between the Bolivar and the Italian Club, and sometimes he believed he could detect in Charley Fortnum increasing spots of melancholy, like mould, in his well-bottled bonhomie.

Doctor Plarr left Fortnum with Humphries at the Hotel Bolivar and went to fetch his car. He was living in the same flat in the same block that he inhabited now. Lights were still burning in the port, where labourers worked through the whole night. On a flat barge in the Paraná they had mounted a metal tower from which an iron rod pounded the bottom of the river. Thud, thud, thud, the noise reverberated like tribal drums. From a second barge lengths of pipe were extended, attached to some underwater engine which sucked the gravel out of the riverbed and sent it scuttling and rattling down the waterfront to an inlet half a mile away. The Governor, who had been appointed by the newest President after that year’s coup d’etat, was planning to deepen the port so that it might take ferries of greater draught from the Chaco shore and receive larger passenger boats from the capital. When, after a second military coup, this time in Cordoba, he was dismissed from office, the idea was abandoned, to the benefit of Doctor Plarr’s sleep. The Governor of the Chaco, it was said, had not been prepared to spend the necessary money to deepen his side of the river, and the passenger boats from the capital were already too large in the dry season to mount beyond the city where passengers had to be transferred anyway to smaller boats for the voyage to the Paraguayan republic in the north. It was difficult to judge who had made the initial mistake, if it was a mistake. The question Cui bono? pointed at no individual, since all the contractors had benefited and all undoubtedly had shared their benefits with others. The harbour works before they were abandoned had done a lot of good; they were responsible for a grand piano in one house, a new refrigerator in somebody’s kitchen, and perhaps in some small unimportant subcontractor’s cellar, where spirits had hitherto been little known, lay a dozen or two cases of the national Scotch. When Doctor Plarr returned to the Hotel Bolivar he found Charley Fortnum drinking strong black coffee made on a spirit ring which was installed on a marble-topped washstand, beside the soap dish and Doctor Humphries’ tooth glass. He had become a good deal more coherent, and it was all the more difficult to dissuade him from visiting Seńora Sanchez. “There’s a girl there,” he said. “A real girl. Not what you think at all. I’ve got to see her again. Last time I wasn’t in a fit condition…”

“You aren’t in a fit condition now,” Humphries said.

“You don’t understand me at all, do you? I only want to talk to her. We aren’t all bloody lechers, Humphries. There’s a quality about María. She doesn’t belong…”

“She’s a whore like all the rest, I suppose,” Doctor Humphries said, clearing his throat. Doctor Plarr was soon to learn that, whenever Humphries disapproved of a subject, his throat clogged with phlegm.

“And that’s where you’re both of you so bloody wrong,” Charley Fortnum said, although Doctor Plarr had not expressed an opinion. “She is different from all the others. She’s got a sort of refinement. Her family comes from Cordoba. There’s good blood in her or else I’m not Charley Fortnum. I know you think I’m a fool, but there’s something well… almost virginal about that girl.”

“And you’re the Consul here, honorary or not. You’ve no business to be seen in a low dive like that.”

“I respect the girl,” Charley Fortnum said, “I respect her even when I sleep with her.”

“It’s all you are capable of doing tonight.”

After a little more harsh persuasion, Fortnum allowed himself to be assisted to-Doctor Plarr’s car.

There he brooded in silence for a time, while his chin shook to the movement of the engine. “One grows old I suppose,” he said suddenly. “You are young. You don’t suffer from memories, regrets… Are you married?” he asked abruptly as they drove up San Martin.

“No.”

“I was married once,” Fortnum said, “twenty-five years ago-it seems a century now. It didn’t work out. She was an intellectual if you understand what I mean. She didn’t understand human nature.” He switched-by an association of ideas Doctor Plarr found it impossible, to follow-to his present condition. “I always feel a great deal more human,” he said, “when I’ve drunk just over half a bottle. A little less than half-that’s no use at all, but a little more… Of course the effect doesn’t last, but half an hour of feeling really good is worth some sadness afterward.”

“Are you talking of wine?” Doctor Plarr asked with incredulity. He couldn’t believe that Fortnum had been so moderate.

“Wine, whisky, gin, it’s all the same. It’s the measure that counts. There’s something psychological in the measure. Less than half a bottle and Charley Fortnum’s a poor lonely bastard with only Fortnum’s Pride for company.”

“Fortnum’s Pride?”

“My proud and well-groomed steed. But one glass over the half-bottle-any glass, even a liqueur glass, it’s just the measure that counts and Charley Fortnum’s quite himself again. Fit for royalty. You know I went on a picnic with some royals once among the rums. We had two bottles among the three of us, and it was quite a day, I can tell you, but that’s another story. Like Captain Izquierdo. Remind me to tell you one day about Captain Izquierdo.” It was very hard for a stranger to follow Charley Fortnum’s associations.

“Where’s the Consulate? Is it the next turning on the left?”

“Yes, but we could take the second or third just as well and make a little turn. I enjoy your company, doctor. What did you say your name was?”

“Plarr.”

“Do you know what my name is?”

“Yes.”

“Mason.”

“I thought…”

“That’s what they called me at school. Mason. Fortnum and Mason, the inseparable twins. It was the best English school In B. A. My career though was less than distinguished. A good word to get out so distinct… so well. The right measure you see. Not too much and not too little. I was never a prefect, and the marble team was the only one I made. Not recognized officially. We were a snobbish school. All the same the headmaster, not the one I knew, that was Arden-we called him Smells-well, this new man wrote me a letter of congratulation when I became Honorary Consul. I wrote to him first, of course, and told him the glad news, so I suppose he couldn’t very well ignore me altogether.”

“Will you tell me when we get to the Consulate?”

“We’ve passed it, old man, but never you mind. I’ve got a clear head. You just take another turn. First to the right and then left again. I’m in the sort of mood when I could drive like this all night. In sympathetic company. No need to pay attention to the one-way signs. Diplomatic privilege. The CC on the car. I can talk to you, doctor, as I can talk to no other man in this city. Spaniards. A proud people but they have no sentiment. Not as we English know it. No sense of Home. Soft slippers, the feet on the table, the friendly glass, the ever-open door. Humphries is not a bad chap-he’s as English as you or me, or is he Scotch?—but he has the soul of a-pedagogue. Another good word that. He always tries to correct my morals, and yet I don’t do much that’s wrong, not really wrong. Tonight, if I’m a little pissed, it was the fault of the glasses. What’s your other name, doctor?”

“Eduardo.”

“But I thought you were English?”

“My mother’s Paraguayan.”

“Call me Charley. Would you mind if I called you Ted?”

“Call me what you like, but for God’s sake tell me where the Consulate is.”

“The next corner. But don’t go expecting too much. No marble halls, no chandeliers and potted palms. It’s only a bachelor’s digs-a bureau, a bedroom-all the usual offices, of course. The best the buggers at home are ready to provide. No sense of national pride. Penny wise, pound foolish. You must come out to my camp-that’s where my real home is. Nearly a thousand acres. Eight hundred anyway. Some of the best maté In the country. We could drive there now-it’s only three quarters of an hour from here. A good night’s sleep and afterward-a hair of the dog. I can give you real Scotch.”

“Not tonight. I have patients to see in the morning.”

They stopped outside an old colonial house with Corinthian pillars; the white plaster gleamed in the moonlight. On the first floor a flagstaff projected and a shield bore the royal arms. Charley Fortnum swayed a little on the pavement, gazing up. “Is it true?” he asked.

“Is what true?”

“The flagstaff. Isn’t it leaning over a bit too much?”

“It looks all right to me.”

“I wish we had a simpler flag than the Union Jack. I hung it upside down once on the Queen’s birthday. I could see nothing wrong with the bloody thing, but Humphries was angry-he said he was going to write to the Ambassador. Come up and have a glass.”

“I must be getting home-if you can manage by yourself.”

“I promise you it’s real Scotch. I get Long John from the Embassy. They all prefer Haig there. But Long John gives you a free glass with every bottle. Very nice glasses, too, with the measures marked. Women, Men, and Shipmaster. I count myself, of course, a Shipmaster. I’ve got dozens of Long John glasses out at the camp. I like that name Shipmaster. Better than Captain which could be a mere military term.”

He had the classical difficulty with his key, but succeeded on his third attempt. Swaying on the doorstep he made a speech from under the Corinthian columns to Doctor Plarr who waited impatiently on the pavement for him to finish.

“It’s been a very agreeable evening, Ted, even if the goulash was damned awful. Good to speak occasionally the native tongue-gets rusty from unuse-the tongue that Shakespeare spoke. You mustn’t think I’m always as happy as this, but it’s the measure that counts. Moments of melancholy too when I’m glad of a friend’s company. And remember any time you need a Consul, Charley Fortnum’s only too happy to be of service. To any Englishman. Or Scotsman or Welshman for that matter. We all have something in common. All belong to the once United bloody Kingdom. Nationality’s thicker than water, though that’s a nasty term, when you think of it, thicker. Reminds you of things better forgotten and forgiven. Did they give you syrup of figs as a boy? Just walk straight up. Middle door on the first floor, but you can’t miss the big brass plate. Wants so much polishing you wouldn’t believe the hours of labour a brass plate needs. Grooming Fortnum’s Pride is nothing to it.” He slipped back into the dark hall behind, disappearing from sight.

Doctor Plarr drove home to the new yellow block and the noise of gravel grating up the pipes and the whine of the rusty cranes. It seemed to him, as he lay in bed and tried to sleep, that in the years to come he was unlikely to find much in common with the Honorary Consul.

Though Doctor Plarr was in no hurry to resume his acquaintance with Charles Fortnum, a month or two after their first encounter he received certain documents which had to be witnessed by a British Consul.

His first attempt to see the Consul was not successful. He arrived at the Consulate about eleven in the morning. The Union Jack fluttered from the dubious pole in the hot dry wind from the Chaco. He wondered why it was flying at all, until he remembered that the day was the anniversary of the armistice of one world war before the last. He rang the bell and soon he felt sure that an eye was watching him through a spy hole in the door. He stood well back in the sunlight to be inspected, and immediately a small dark woman with a big nose snatched the door open. She stared at him with the intense preoccupied gaze of a bird of prey which was accustomed to watch a point from far off for indications of carrion; perhaps she was surprised to find the carrion so close and still alive. No, she said, the Consul was not in. No, she was not expecting him. Tomorrow?… Perhaps. She couldn’t be sure about that. It hardly seemed to Doctor Plarr the proper way to run a Consulate.

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 coloured reproduction of Annigoni’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 calendar 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 time that 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 conquer 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 analyse 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 Seńora 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 grey, grey hair, grey suit, grey 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 Seńora 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 Seńora Escobar or Seńora 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 Seńora 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 Seńora 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.

Seńora 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,” Seńora 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 passed through the narrow lighted doorway. Except for Seńora 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 Seńora Sanchez was strict about that; here a man might take his time. One man sat alone over a glass, and another, dressed like a peon, 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.”

Doctor Plarr said, “I hope your demon won’t insist on giving 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 peon 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 grey 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.”

Doctor 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 theatre-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 Cordoba.”

“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 Seńora 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 decision to make-whether the girl should lose her leg at the femur or the knee.

Seńora Sanchez was still plying her needles. A friend had joined her. She sat and knitted in a second deck chair. “You found a girl?” Seńora 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, Seńora 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 favourite 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.”

“I’ll go and save her if you like.”

“My dear chap, will you? I daren’t. These poets are touchy brutes. And I always get their names mixed up. They arc like this fellow Humphries-they write home-to the Arts Council. I won’t forget this, Plarr. Anything I can ever do for you… up there…”

The doctor found himself with more work than usual on his hands when he returned to the north. He had no time for Humphries, that old troublemaker, and he was not interested in Charles Fortnum’s marriage-whether fortunate or unfortunate. Once, when some remark recalled the Ambassador’s words to him, he wondered whether Charley might possibly have married his housekeeper that hawk like woman who had opened the door when he visited the Consulate for the first time. A marriage like that seemed not improbable. Old men, like dissident priests, were frequently known to marry their housekeepers sometimes as a measure of false economy, sometimes from fear of a lonely death. Death to Doctor Plarr who was still in his early thirties, appeared in the guise of a fortuitous accident on the road or an unforeseen cancer but in the mind of an old man it was the inevitable end of a long and incurable sickness. Perhaps Charley Fortnum’s alcoholism was a symptom of his fear.

One afternoon, while the doctor was taking an hour’s siesta his bell rang. He opened the door and there was the hawk like woman, bristling yet again in the hope of carrion. He nearly took a chance and addressed her as Seńora Fortnum.

The guess would have proved mistaken. Seńor Fortnum, she said, had telephoned to her from the camp. His wife was ill. He wanted Doctor Plarr to drive out to the camp and visit her.

“Did he say what was wrong?”

“Seńora Fortnum has a pain in the stomach,” the woman replied with contempt. The marriage had obviously pleased her no more than it had pleased Doctor Humphries.

Doctor Plarr drove to the camp in the cool of the evening. The small ponds on either side of the highway looked like patches of molten lead in the last lingering light. Fortnum’s Pride was standing at the end of a mud road under a grove of avocados, the heavy brown pears the size and shape of cannon balls. On the verandah of the rambling bungalow Charley Fortnum sat before a bottle of whisky, a syphon and, astonishingly, two clean glasses. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said reproachfully.

“I couldn’t come earlier. What’s the trouble?”

“Clara’s been in a lot of pain.”

“I’ll go in and see her.”

“Have a whisky first. I looked in at her just now and she was asleep.”

“Thank you then, I will. I’m thirsty. There’s a lot of dust on the road.”

“Soda? Say when.”

“Right to the top.”

“I wanted to have a word with you anyway-before you went in. You’ve heard about my marriage I suppose?”

“The Ambassador told me.”

“Had he anything to say?”

“No. Why?”

“There’s been a lot of talk. And Humphries cuts me.”

“That’s lucky for you.”

“You see-” Charley Fortnum hesitated. “Well, she is very young,” he said. It was not clear whether he was excusing his critics or apologizing for himself.

Doctor Plarr said, “Lucky again.”

“She’s not twenty, and, you know, I won’t see sixty again.”

Doctor Plarr wondered if he had been summoned to advise the Consul on a less soluble problem than his wife’s stomach-ache. He drank to fill what he thought might be an awkward silence.

“That’s not the trouble,” Charley Fortnum said. (Doctor Plarr was surprised by his insight.) “I can manage things well enough so far… and afterward… there’s always the bottle, isn’t there? An old family friend. The bottle I mean. Helped my father too, the old bastard. I just wanted to explain about her. Otherwise you might be a bit surprised when you see her. She’s so very young. And shy too. She’s not used to this sort of life. A house like this and servants. And the country The country’s awfully quiet after dark.”

“Where does she come from?”

“Tucumán. Real Indian blood. A long way back of course. I ought to warn you-she doesn’t much care for doctors. She’s had a bad experience of them.”

“I’ll try to win her confidence,” Doctor Plarr said.

“This pain,” Charley Fortnum said, “it did occur to me it might be, you know, a child. Or something of the kind.”

“She doesn’t take the pill?”

“You know what these Spanish Catholics are like. Superstition, of course. Like walking under a ladder. Clara doesn’t know who Shakespeare is, but she’s heard all about the Pope’s what-do-you-call-it. Anyway I’d have to get the pills somehow through the Embassy. Can you imagine what they’d say? You can’t even buy them under the counter here. Of course I always wore a thing until we were really together.”

“So you bore the sin for her?” Doctor Plarr teased him.

“Oh well, my conscience has got pretty tough with age. Another little thing won’t do it any harm. And if she’s happier that way… When you’ve finished your whisky…”

He led Doctor Plarr down a corridor hung with Victorian sporting prints: riders falling into a stream, checked at a bullfinch, rebuked by the master. He walked softly on tiptoe. At the end of the corridor he opened a door just a crack and looked in. “I think she’s awake,” he said. “You’ll find me on the verandah, Ted, with the whisky. Don’t be long.”

One electric candle was alight below the statuette of a saint, a saint whom Doctor Plarr didn’t recognize, and he was reminded for a moment of the small cells that stood around the patio at the house of Seńora Sanchez, each with a votive candle. “Good evening,” he said to the head on the pillow. The face was so covered in dark hair that only the eyes were visible; they peered back at him, like a cat’s from a shrubbery.

“I don’t want to be examined,” the girl told him. “I won’t be examined.”

“I don’t want to examine you. I want to hear about your stomach-ache, that’s all.”

“It’s better now.”

“Good. Then I won’t stay long. May I turn up the light?”

“If you have to,” she said and brushed the hair away from her face. Below the hairline Doctor Plarr saw a small grey birthmark in the spot where a Hindu girl…

He said, “Whereabouts do you feel the pain? Show me.”

She turned the sheet down and indicated a place on her naked body. He put his hand out to touch her, but she moved her body away from him. He said, “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to examine you in Doctor Benevento’s way,” and he heard her catch her breath. Nonetheless she allowed him to press his fingers on her stomach.

“There?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “A little inflammation of the intestine, that’s all.”

“Intestine?” He could see the word was strange to her and frightening.

“I’ll leave some bismuth powder for you with your husband. Take it in water. If you mix some sugar with it, it doesn’t taste too bad. I wouldn’t drink whisky if I were you. You are more used to orange juice, aren’t you?”

She looked at him with a startled expression and whispered, “What’s your name?”

“Plarr,” he said, and added, “Eduardo Plarr.” He doubted whether she knew the surname of any man apart from Charley Fortnum.

“Eduardo,” she repeated, and this time took a bolder look at him. She asked, “I don’t know you, do I?”

“No.”

“But you know Doctor Benevento?”

“I’ve met him once or twice.” He stood up. “I don’t suppose those Thursday visits were very agreeable.” He added, before she could speak, “You aren’t ill. You don’t have to stay in bed.”

“Charley” (she pronounced the name as “Charlee” with an accent on the last syllable) “said I must stay in bed until the doctor came.”

“Well, the doctor’s come, hasn’t he? So there’s no longer any need…”

When he looked back from the door he saw she was watching him. She had forgotten to draw up the sheet. He said, “I never asked you your name.”

“Clara.”

He said. “Teresa was the only girl I ever knew there.”

Returning down the passage he thought of the statuette of Saint Teresa of Avila which had presided over his own exercises and the more literary ones of Doctor Saavedra. Presumably it was the friend of Saint Francis who now looked down on the bed of Charley Fortnum. He remembered the way he had seen the girl first as she straightened the sheets in her cell, bent like a Negress directly from the waist. He was accustomed by now to too many women’s bodies. When he first became the lover of one of his patients it was not her body which excited him but a slight stammer and a scent he didn’t recognize. There was nothing distinctive about Clara’s body, except for her unfashionable thinness, the smallness of her breasts, the immature thighs, the almost imperceptible mount of Venus. She might be nearly twenty, but she didn’t look more than sixteen-Mother Sanchez recruited them early.

He stopped before the print of a man in a scarlet coat on a runaway horse which had overridden the hounds; the master, purple in the face, was shaking a fist at the culprit, and beyond the hounds lay a vista of fields and hedgerows and a small stream lined by what he took to be willows, an unfamiliar foreign countryside. He thought with a sense of surprise: I have never seen a little stream like that. In this continent even the smallest tributaries of the great rivers were wider than the Thames in his father’s picture book. He tried the word “stream.” again on his tongue: a stream must have a strange poetic charm. You couldn’t call a stream the shallow inlet where he sometimes went to fish and where you couldn’t bathe for fear of sting rays. A stream had to be peaceful, gently running, shaded by willows, without danger. This land, he thought, is really too vast for human beings.

Charley Fortnum was waiting for him with the glasses refilled. He asked with uneasy jocularity, “Well, what’s the verdict?”

“Nothing. A little inflammation. There’s no reason for her to lie in bed. I’ll give you something she can take in water. Before meals. I wouldn’t let her drink whisky.”

“I didn’t want to run any risks, Ted. I don’t know much about women. Their insides and all that. My first wife was never ill. She was a Christian Scientist.”

“Before you bring me all the way out here another time, do have a word first on the telephone. I’m pretty busy at this time of year.”

“I suppose you think me foolish, but she needs an awful lot of protection.”

Plarr said, “I should have thought-in that sort of life-she would have learned to look after herself.”

“What do you mean?”

“She worked with Mother Sanchez, didn’t she?”

Charley Fortnum clenched a fist. A bubble of whisky hung on the corner of his lip. Doctor Plarr thought that he could almost see the blood pressure rise. “What do you know about her?”

“I never went with her if that’s what you are afraid of.”

“I thought you might be one of those bastards…”

“Surely you were one of those yourself. I seem to remember your telling me about a girl called María from Cordoba.”

“That was different. That was physical. Do you know I never touched Clara for months? Not until I was sure she loved me a little. We used to talk, that’s all. I went to her room, of course, because otherwise she would have been in trouble with Seńora Sanchez. Ted, you won’t believe me, but I’ve never talked to anyone about so many things as I have to that girl. She’s interested in everything I tell her. Fortnum’s Pride. The maté crop. The movies. She knows a lot about the movies. I was never much interested in them myself, but she always knows the latest dope about a woman called Elizabeth Taylor. Have you heard of her-and a fellow called Burton? I always thought Burton was a kind of beer. We even talked about Evelyn-that was my first wife. I can tell you I was pretty lonely before I met Clara. You’ll think it nonsense, but I loved her the first moment I saw her. Somehow from the first I didn’t want to do anything, not till she wanted it too. She couldn’t understand that. She thought there was something wrong with me. But it was real love, not brothel love I wanted. I don’t suppose you can understand that either.”

“I’m not quite sure what the word love means. My mother loves dulce de leche. So she tells me.”

“Has no woman ever loved you, Ted?” Fortnum inquired. A kind of paternal anxiety in his voice irritated Doctor Plarr.

“Two or three have told me so, but they had no difficulty in finding someone else after I said goodbye. Only my mother’s love of sweet cakes isn’t likely to change She will love them in sickness and in health till death do them part. Perhaps that’s the real true love.”

“You’re too young to be a cynic.”

“I’m not a cynic. I’m curious, that’s all. I like to know the meaning which people put on the words they use. So much is a question of semantics. That’s why in medicine we often prefer to use a dead language. There’s no room for misunderstanding with a dead language. How did you get the girl away from Mother Sanchez?”

“I paid.”

“And she was happy to leave?”

“She was a bit bewildered at first and frightened too. Seńora Sanchez was angry. She didn’t like losing her. She told her she wouldn’t have her back when I got tired of her. As if that would ever happen.”

“Life’s a long time.”

“Mine isn’t. Be frank, Ted, you wouldn’t give me ten more years would you? Even though I’ve knocked down a bit on the drink since I knew Clara.”

“What will happen to her afterward?”

“This isn’t a bad little property. She could sell it and go to Buenos Aires. You can get fifteen percent interest now without risk. Even eighteen if you take a chance. And you know I can import a car every two years… Perhaps five more cars to sell before I kick the bucket. I calculate that would mean another five hundred pounds a year.”

“She could eat sweet cakes with my mother at the Richmond.”

“No joking, would your mother consent to meet Clara one day?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t know what a difference Clara’s made to me.”

“You must have made quite a difference to her too,” Doctor Plarr said.

“When you get to my age you accumulate a lot of regrets. It’s not a bad thing to feel you’ve made at least one person a little happier.”

It was the kind of simple, sentimental and self-confident statement which Doctor Plarr found embarrassing. No reply was possible. It was a statement which it would be rude to question and impossible to confirm. He made his excuses and drove Home.

All down the dark country road he thought of the young woman in the great Victorian bed which had belonged, with the sporting prints, to the Honorary Consul’s father. She was like a bird which had been bought in the market in a makeshift cage and transferred to one at home more roomy and luxurious, equipped with perches and feeding bowls and a swing to play on.

He was surprised by the amount of thought he was giving the girl, who was only a young prostitute he had noticed once in the establishment of Seńora Sanchez because of her odd birthmark. Had Charley really married her? Perhaps Doctor Humphries had misled the Ambassador when he spoke of a marriage. Probably Charley Fortnum had taken a new housekeeper-that was all. If that were the case he would be able to reassure the Ambassador. A wife provided worse material for a scandal than a mistress.

But his thoughts were like the deliberately banal words of a clandestine letter in which the important phrases have been added between the lines in secret ink to be developed in privacy. Those hidden phrases described a girl in a cell leaning down to make her bed, a girl who returned to her table and picked up her glass of orange juice, as though she had been momentarily interrupted by a tradesman at the door, a thin body stretched out on Charley Fortnum’s double bed, with immature breasts which had never suckled a child. All three of Doctor Plarr’s mistresses had been married women, mature women proud of their lush figures which smelt of expensive bath oils. She must have been a good whore, he thought, to have been taken out by two men in succession with a figure like hers, but that was no reason why he should think of her all the way home. He tried to change the direction of his thoughts. There were two hopeless cases of malnutrition in the barrio of the poor, there was a police officer he was attending who would soon be dead of throat cancer, there was Saavedra’s melancholy and Doctor Humphries’ dripping shower, and yet try as he would his mind returned continually to that small hill of Venus-mount was a misnomer.

He wondered how many men she had known. Doctor Plarr’s last mistress, who was married to a banker called Lopez, had told him with some pride of his four predecessors-perhaps she was trying to arouse a sense of competition. (One of her lovers, he knew from another source, had been her chauffeur.) The fragile body on Charley Fortnum’s bed must have known hundreds. Her stomach was like the site of an old country battlefield where pale grass grew which had abolished the scars of war, and a small stream flowed peacefully between the willows: he was back in the passage, outside the bedroom, staring at the sporting prints and resisting the desire to return.

He braked sharply as he approached the road which led to Bergman’s orange-canning factory, and for a moment he contemplated reversing the car and driving back to the camp. Instead he lit a cigarette. I will not be the victim of an obsession, he thought. The attraction of a whorehouse is the attraction I sometimes find in trivial shopping-I may see a tie which momentarily attracts me, I wear it once or twice, then I leave it in the drawer and it becomes overlaid with newer ties. Why didn’t I try her out when I had the chance? If I had bought her that night at Seńora Sanchez’ she would be lying safely forgotten at the bottom of the drawer. Is it possible, he wondered, if a man is too rational to fall in love, that he may be reserved for a worse fate, to fall into an obsession? He drove angrily in the direction of the city where the reflection of the light lay flat along the horizon and the Three Marys hung on their broken chain in the sky overhead.

Some weeks later Doctor Plarr woke early. It was a Saturday and he had a few hours free. He decided to spend them in the open air with a book while the morning was still fresh; he preferred somewhere out of sight of his secretary who read only what she called serious books-those of Doctor Saavedra among them.

He chose a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges shared the tastes he had himself inherited from his father-Conan Doyle, Stevenson, Chesterton. Ficciones would prove a welcome change from Doctor Saavedra’s last novel which he had not been able to finish. He was tired of South American heroics. Now Doctor Plarr, sitting under the statue of an heroic sergeant-machismo again-who had saved the life of San Martin-was it a hundred and fifty years ago?—read with a sense of immense relaxation of the Countess de Bagno Regio, of Pittsburgh and Monaco. After a time he grew thirsty. To appreciate Borges properly he had to be taken, like a cheese biscuit, with an aperitif, but in this heat Doctor Plarr wanted a longer drink. He decided to call on his friend Gruber and demand a German beer.

Gruber was one of Doctor Plarr’s earliest friends in the city. As a boy he had escaped from Germany in 1936 when the persecution of the Jews was intensified. He was an only child, but his parents had insisted that he escape abroad, if only to save the name of Gruber from becoming extinct, and his mother baked a special cake for his journey in which to hide the few small valuables they were able to send with him-his mother’s engagement ring set with inconsiderable diamonds and his father’s gold wedding ring. They told him they were too old to make a new life in a strange continent and they pretended to believe that they were too old to be regarded as a danger by the Nazi state. Of course he never heard from them again: they had made their withered little plus two sign to that mathematical formula-the Final Solution. So Gruber like Doctor Plarr was a man without a father. He didn’t even possess a family grave. Now he kept a photographic store in the main shopping street of the city, which, with its overlapping signs and slogans stuck out over the sidewalks, had a Chinese look. He was an optician as well. “Germans,” he once said to Doctor Plarr, “always inspire confidence as chemists, opticians and photographic specialists. More people have heard of Zeiss and Bayer than of Goebbels and Goering, and even more people here have heard of Gruber.”

Gruber left his customer installed in the private section of his shop, where he worked on his lenses. There the doctor could see all that went on without being noticed himself, for Gruber (he had a passion for gadgets) had fitted a small internal television screen on which he was able to watch in miniature, as in a candid camera program, the customers outside in the shop. For some reason, which Gruber had never been able to explain, his shop attracted the prettiest girls in the city (no boutique could compete with Gruber), as though pulchritude and the practice of photography were linked. They came in flocks to receive their color prints and they examined them with cries of excitement, chattering like birds Doctor Plarr watched them while he drank his beer and listened to Gruber’s gossip of the province.

“Have you met Charley Fortnum’s woman?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“You mean his wife?”

“She can’t be his wife, surely? Charley Fortnum’s a divorced man. And there’s no remarriage here-it’s convenient for single men like me.”

“Didn’t you hear that his wife died?”

“No. I’ve been away. And when I saw him the other day he didn’t mention it.”

“He went off with this new girl to Rosario and got married there. So people say. Nobody really knows, of course.”

“That was an odd thing for him to do. It couldn’t have been necessary. You know where he found her?”

“Yes, but she’s a very pretty girl,” Gruber said.

“Oh yes, one of the best of Mother Sanchez’ lot. But one doesn’t necessarily have to marry a pretty girl.”

“Girls of that kind often make good wives, especially for old men.”

“Why old men?”

“Old men are not very demanding and girls like that are glad of a rest.”

The phrase “like that” irritated Doctor Plarr. After seven days he was still obsessed by the unremarkable body which Gruber had classified so easily. Now on the television screen he saw a girl who leaned across the counter to buy a roll of Kodachrome in the same way Clara had leaned across her bed at Seńora Sanchez’. She was more beautiful than Charley Fortnum’s wife, and he felt no desire for her at all.

“Girls like that are very content to be left alone,” Gruber repeated. “You know they count it good luck when they find a caller who is impotent or too drunk to perform. They have a native word for it here-I have forgotten the Spanish, but it means a Lenten visitor.”

“Have you been often to the Sanchez place?”

“Why should I? Look at the temptations I have to resist nearer home with all these charming customers of mine. Some of the films they bring me to develop are quite intimate, and when I hand the packet back to one, I can see the amusement in her eyes. He has observed that moment when the bikini slipped, she is thinking-and so I have. By the way, there were two men in here the other day who asked about you. They wanted to know if you could possibly be the Eduardo Plarr they knew years ago in Asuncion. They saw your name on those films I sent round to you on Thursday. Of course I said I had no idea.”

“Were they police agents?”

“They didn’t look like police agents, but of course it doesn’t do to take chances. I heard one of them call the other father. He didn’t look old enough to be his father and he wasn’t dressed like a priest, and that made me suspicious.”

“I’m on good terms with the Chief of Police here. Sometimes he calls me in when Doctor Benevento’s on holiday Do you think those men came from across the border? The General’s agents perhaps? But why should he be interested in me? I was only a boy when I left…”

“Talk of the devil,” Gruber said.

Doctor Plarr looked quickly at the television screen expecting to see two strangers reflected there, but all he saw was a thin girl in sunglasses of an exaggerated size-they might have been made for a skin diver. “She buys sunglasses,” Gruber said, “as other women buy costume jewellery. I’ve sold her at least four pairs.”

“Who is she?”

“You ought to know. You were talking about her just now. Charley Fortnum’s wife. Or girl if you prefer it.”

Doctor Plarr put down his beer and went into the shop. The girl was examining a pair of sunglasses and she was too absorbed to notice him. The lenses were coloured bright mauve, the rims were of incandescent yellow and the sidepieces were encrusted with chips of what looked like amethyst. She took her own glasses off and tried the new ones on, and immediately added ten years to her age. Her eyes were quite invisible: all he could see was his own mauve face mirrored back at him.

The assistant said. “We have only just received these from Mar del Plata. They are all the fashion there.”

Doctor Plarr knew that Gruber was probably watching him on the television screen, but why should he care? He asked. “Do you like them, Seńora Fortnum?”

She said, “Who…? Oh, it is you, Doctor, Doctor…?”

“Plarr. They make you look a lot older, but of course you can afford to add a few years.”

“They cost too much. I was only trying them on for fun.”

“Wrap them up,” he told the assistant. “And a case…”

“They have their own case, doctor,” she said, beginning to polish the glasses.

“No,” Clara said, “I cannot…”

“You can with me. I am your husband’s friend.”

“That makes it all right?”

“Yes.”

She gave a jump which he was to learn later was her expression of joy at any present, even a sweet cake. He had never known a woman accept a present so frankly, with less fuss. She said to the assistant, “Please, I will wear them. Put the old ones in the case.” In these glasses, he thought, as they left Gruber’s shop together, she looks more like my mistress and less like my younger sister.

“It is very kind of you,” she said, speaking like a well-brought up schoolgirl.

“Come and sit by the river where we can talk.” When she hesitated he added, “Nobody can recognize you in those glasses. Not even your husband.”

“You do not like them?”

“No. I don’t like them at all.”

“I thought they looked very rich and very smart,” she said with disappointment.

“They are a good disguise. That was why I wanted you to have them. No one would recognize the young Seńora Fortnum with me now.”

She said, “Who would recognize me? I know no one and Charley is at home. He sent me with the foreman. I said I wanted to buy something.”

“What?”

“Oh, just something. I did not know what.”

She walked contentedly beside him, following whatever direction he chose to take. He felt disturbed by the easy way that things were happening. He remembered the stupid conflict in his mind when he wanted to turn his car back toward the camp, and the number of occasions, during the last week, when he had lain awake, wondering what was the right move to make in order to see her again. He ought to have known it would be no more difficult than leading her to her cell at Seńora Sanchez’ house.

She said, “I am not frightened of you today.”

“Perhaps because I have given you a present.”

She said, “Yes, it could be that. A man would never bother to give a present to someone he did not like, would he? And the other day I thought you did not like me. I thought you were my enemy.”

They came to the bank of the Paraná. A small bastion jutted into the river, fringed with white pillars, making a tiny temple for a naked statue of classical innocence which faced the water. The ugly yellow block of flats where he lived was hidden by the trees. The leaves were like the lightest of feathers; they gave an illusion of coolness because they seemed to be always in motiona breath of air undetectable on the skin was enough to set them waving. A heavy barge moved past them up the river, coughing against the current, and the usual black plume of smoke lay across the Chaco.

She sat and stared at the Paraná when he looked at her all he could see was his own face reflected in the mirror-glass. He said, “For God’s sake take off those spectacles. I don’t want to shave.”

“Shave?”

“I look at myself like that twice a day-that’s quite enough.”

She took them off obediently and he saw her eyes, which were brown and expressionless and indistinguishable from all the Spanish women’s eyes he had ever known. She said, “I do not understand.”

“Oh, forget what I said. Is it true that you are married?”

“Yes.”

“What does it feel like?”

“I think it’s like wearing another girl’s dress,” she said, “which doesn’t fit.”

“Why did you do it?”

“He wanted to marry. Something to do with his money when he dies. And if there’s a child…”

“Have you started one?”

“No.”

“Well, it must be better than life at Mother Sanchez’.”

“It is different,” she said. “I miss the girls.”

“And the men?”

“Oh, I am not bothered about them.”

They were alone on the long parade beside the Paraná: for men it was the hour of work, for women of shopping. Everything here had its proper hour-the hour for the Paraná was evening, and then it was the time for young true lovers, who held hands and didn’t speak. He said, “When do you have to be home?”

“The capataz is picking me up at Charley’s office at eleven.”

“It is nine o’clock now. How will you fill in the time?”

“I will look at the shops and then I will have a coffee.”

“Do you never see any of your old friends?”

“The girls are all asleep now.”

“You see those flats there beyond the trees?” Doctor Plarr asked. “I live there.”

“Yes?”

“If you want coffee I can give you coffee.”

“Yes?”

“Or orange juice,” he said.

“Oh, I do not really like orange juice. Seńora Sanchez said we must keep sober, that was all.”

He asked, “Will you come with me?”

“It would not be right, would it?” she asked, as though she were seeking information from someone whom she knew and trusted.

“It was right at Mother Sanchez’…”

“But I had my living to earn there. I sent money home to Tucumán.”

“What happens now?”

“Oh, I send money to Tucumán just the same. Charley gives it to me.”

He stood up and put out his hand. “Come along.” He was prepared to be angry if she hesitated, but she took his hand with the same shallow obedience and followed him across the road, as though the distance were no greater than across the little patio at Mother Sanchez’. The lift, however, made her hesitate. She told him she had never been in a lift before-there were few houses in the city which stood more than two stories high. She tightened her hand in excitement or fear, and when they reached the top floor she asked, “Can we do that again, please?”

“When you go.”

He led her straight to his bedroom and began to undress her. A catch of her dress stuck, and she took the work out of his hands. All she said, while she lay naked on the bed waiting for him to join her, was, “Those sunglasses cost you much more than a visit to Seńora Sanchez,” and he wondered whether she thought of them as a payment in advance. He remembered how Teresa would count the peso notes and afterward lay them on a ledge below her saint’s statue as though they were the result of a collection in church. They would be divided later in the correct proportion with Seńora Sanchez: the personal gift always came later.

As he joined her he thought with relief: this is the end of my obsession, and when she cried out, he thought: I’m a free man again, I can say goodnight to Seńora Sanchez as she knits in her deck chair and I can walk back along the river with a sense of lightness which wasn’t mine when I left home. The last number of the British Medical Journal lay on his desk-it had remained a whole week in its wrapping, and he was in the mood for reading something in a style even more precise than a story by Borges, and of greater practical value than a novel by Jorge Julio Saavedra. He began to read an article of startling originality-or so it seemed to him-on the treatment of calcium deficiency by a doctor called Caesar Borgia.

“Are you asleep?” the girl asked.

“No,” but all the same he was surprised when he opened his eyes and saw the sunlight between the slats of the blind. He had thought it was night and that he was alone.

The girl caressed the inside of his thigh and ran lips down his body. He felt no more than a mild interest, a curiosity to see if she were capable of arousing him a second time. Perhaps that was the secret of her success at Mother Sanchez’-she gave a man double his money’s worth. She climbed on to his body and cried out an obscenity, taking his ear between her teeth, but the obsession had died with his desire, and he felt depressed at the void it left behind. For a week he had lived with one idea and now he missed the idea as a mother might miss the crying of an unwanted child. I never really desired her, he thought, I only desired my idea of her. He would have liked to get up and go, leaving her alone to make the bed and afterward find another customer.

“Where is the bathroom?” she asked. There was nothing to distinguish her from the others he had known except that she played her comedy with more spirit and invention.

He had dressed when she returned, and he watched impatiently while she put on her clothes. He was afraid she would ask him for the coffee he had promised and linger a long time over it. It was his hour for visiting the barrio popular. The women by now would have finished their first chores and the children would have returned from carrying water. He asked, “Do you want me to drop you at the Consulate?”

“No,” she said. “I had better walk. The capataz may be there waiting.”

“You have not done much shopping.”

“I will show Charley the sunglasses. He will never know how much they cost.”

He took a ten-thousand-peso note from his pocket and held it out to her. She turned it over as if to make sure of the amount. She said, “Nobody ever gave me more than five thousand afterward. Generally it was two. Mother Sanchez did not like us taking more. She was afraid it meant we had been hustling. She was wrong. Men are odd that way. If they can do nothing they always give you more.”

“As if any of you cared,” he said.

“As if we cared.”

“A Lenten visitor.”

The girl laughed. She said, “It is good to be able to talk free again. I cannot talk free to Charley. I think he wants to forget all about Seńora Sanchez.” She handed him back the note. “It would not be right,” she said, “now I am married. And I do not need it. Charley is generous. And the sunglasses cost a lot.” She put them on, so that again he saw his own face staring back at him, in miniature, as though he were a doll looking out of a doll’s house window. She asked, “Shall I see you again?”

He wanted to say, “No. It’s all finished now,” but common politeness-and the relief he felt because she had forgotten the coffee-made him reply formally, like a host to a guest whom he doesn’t really want to encourage to call again. “Of course. One day when you come into town… I’ll give you my telephone number.”

“You need not give me a present every time,” she assured him.

“And you needn’t play a comedy,” he said.

“Comedy?”

He said, “I know there are always men who want to believe you are finding the same pleasure that they do. Naturally at Mother Sanchez’ you had to play a part to earn your present, but here you see-you need not act any longer. Perhaps you have to act with Charley, but not with me. You don’t have to pretend anything at all with me.”

“I am sorry,” she said. “I did something wrong?”

“It always used to annoy me,” Doctor Plarr went on, “in that house of yours. A man is not nearly so stupid as he seems to you. He knows he has come to get a pleasure and not to give it.”

She said. “All the same I think I pretended very well because I got bigger presents than the other girls.” She wasn’t annoyed. He could tell that she was accustomed to this sadness after coition. He didn’t differ, even in that, from the other men she had known. And this void, he thought-is she right? is it no more than the temporary tristitia most men feel when they leave a brothel behind?

“How long were you there?”

“Two years. I was nearly sixteen,” she said, “when I arrived. The girls gave me a cake with candles on my birthday. I had never seen one before. It was very pretty.”

“Does Charley Fortnum like you to pretend like that?”

“He likes me to be very quiet,” she said, “and very tender. Is that what you would have liked too? I am sorry… I thought… You are so much younger than Charley, so I thought…”

“I would like you to be yourself,” he said. “Be as indifferent as you like. How many men have you known?”

“How could I remember that?”

He showed her the way to work the lift, and she asked him to come down with her-she was still a little afraid of it, even though it excited her. When she pressed the button and it began to descend she gave the same jump she had given in Gruber’s shop. At the door she admitted to him that she was afraid of the telephone too. “And your name-I have forgotten your name.”

“Plarr. Eduardo Plarr.” He tried her name for the first time aloud. “You are Clara, aren’t you?” He added, “If you are afraid to use the telephone, I shall have to telephone to you. But perhaps Charley will answer.”

“He usually drives around the camp before nine. And Wednesdays he is nearly always in town-though he likes me to come with him.”

“Oh well,” Doctor Plarr said, “we shall find a way.” He didn’t bother to see her into the street or watch her go. He was a free man.

And yet, inexplicably, the same night, while he was trying to sleep, he thought with regret that he had a clearer memory of her stretched out in Charley Fortnum’s bed than he had of her in his own. An obsession may sleep awhile, but it doesn’t necessarily die, and in less than a week he wanted to see her again. He would have liked to hear her voice, however indifferent it might sound on the telephone, but the telephone never rang with any message of importance.