The Honorary Consul

PART THREE

1

Doctor Plarr did not arrive home from the hut until nearly three in the morning. Because of police patrols Diego took a circuitous route and dropped him near the house of Seńora Sanchez, thus giving him an excuse, if one were needed, for being out on foot in the early morning. There was one awkward moment when he climbed the stairs and a door on the floor below him opened and a voice demanded, “Who is that?” He called down, “Doctor Plarr. Why are children born at unconscionable hours?”

Although he lay down on his bed he hardly slept at all. Nevertheless he got through his morning’s work with more than usual expedition and drove out to Charley Fortnum’s camp. He had no idea of the kind of situation with which he might have to cope, and he was in a tired, nervous and angry mood, expecting to find a hysterical woman awaiting him. While he lay sleepless in bed he had considered the possibility of disclosing all to the police, but that would be to condemn Léon and Aquino to almost certain death, probably Fortnum as well.

It was a heavy sun-drenched midday when he arrived at the camp and a police jeep stood beside Fortnum’s Pride in the shade of the avocados. He walked into the house without ringing, and in the living room he found the Chief of Police talking to Clara. She was not the hysterical woman he had anticipated but a young girl sitting stiffly on the sofa as though she were receiving orders from a superior. “… all we can,” Colonel Perez was saying.

“What are you doing here?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“I have come to see Seńora Fortnum, doctor, and you?”

“I have come to see the Consul on business.”

“The Consul is not here,” Colonel Perez said.

Clara gave him no greeting. She seemed to be waiting without a will of her own, as she had often waited in the patio of the establishment, for one of many men to lead her away-hustling being forbidden by Mother Sanchez.

“He is not in town,” Doctor Plarr said.

“You have been to his office?”

“No. I telephoned.”

He regretted immediately what he had said, for Colonel Perez was no fool. One ought never to volunteer information to a policeman. Doctor Plarr had watched more than once the cool and efficient way Perez went to work. On one occasion a man had been found stabbed on a raft of logs which had been floated down the Paraná from two thousand kilometres away. In Doctor Benevento’s absence Doctor Plarr was summoned to a bend of the river near the airport where the logs were waiting for transhipment. At the bottom of a little slippery country path, where snakes rustled in the undergrowth, he reached a small wooden jetty-the so-called port for timber.

A family had been living on the raft for a month. Doctor Plarr, stumbling across the logs behind Perez, admired the easy way in which the police officer balanced-he felt himself in constant danger of slipping when the logs sank underfoot and leaped up again. It must, he thought, be a little like standing on a horse as it cantered round a circus ring.

“You spoke to his housekeeper?” Colonel Perez asked.

Doctor Plarr was again annoyed at himself for his rash lies. He was Clara’s doctor. Why had he not simply said that this was a routine medical visit to a pregnant wife? One He in the presence of a policeman seemed to multiply like bacilli. He said, “No. There was no answer.”

Colonel Perez considered his reply through a long silence.

He remembered how rapidly and easily Perez had walked over the heaving trunks as though he were treading a firm city pavement. The logs covered half the width of the river. A group of people, diminished by distance, stood in the very centre of the wide horizontal forest. Perez and he had to jump from one raft to another to reach them, and every time he jumped the doctor feared he would fall into the gap between the rafts, though the gap was usually less than a meter. His shoes became waterlogged as the trunks sank beneath his weight and rose again. “I warn you,” Perez said, “it’s not going to be very pretty. The family have been travelling on the raft for weeks with the body. It would have been much better if they had just pushed it into the water. We would never have known.”

“Why didn’t they?” Doctor Plarr asked, with his arms stretched out as though he were walking a tightrope.

“The murderer,” Perez said, “wanted him to have a Christian burial.”

“He has admitted killing him then?” the doctor asked.

“Oh, he admitted it to me,” Perez replied. “You see-these are all my own people.”

When they reached the group-two men, a woman and a child with two officers-Doctor Plarr noticed that the police had not even bothered to take away the assassin’s knife. He sat cross-legged beside the disagreeable corpse as though it were his job to guard it. He had an expression of sadness more than of guilt.

Colonel Perez said, “I came to tell the Seńora that her husband’s car has been found in the Paraná not far from Posadas. There is no sign of a body, so we hope he may have escaped.”

“An accident? Of course you know-the Seńora won’t mind my saying it-Fortnum is rather a heavy drinker.”

“Yes. But there are other possibilities,” Colonel Perez said.

The doctor would have found it easier to play his part to the police officer or to Clara if he had been alone with either of them. He was afraid when he spoke that one or the other would detect something false in his tone. He asked, “What do you think may have happened?”

“Any incident which occurs so close to the border may be political. We always have to remember that. You remember the doctor who was kidnapped in Posadas?”

“Of course. But why on earth Fortnum? There’s nothing political about him.”

“He is a Consul.”

“Only an Honorary Consul.” Even the Chief of Police seemed unable to understand that distinction.

Colonel Perez spoke to Clara, “We shall let you know, Seńora, as soon as there is any news.” He put his hand on the doctor’s elbow. “There is something I would like to ask you, doctor.” The colonel led Doctor Plarr across the verandah, where the dumbwaiter with its Long John glasses seemed to emphasize the remarkable absence of Charley Fortnum (he would certainly have invited them to take “a spot” before they left), and on into the deep shade of the avocado trees. He picked up one of the fallen fruit, examined it for ripeness with an expert’s eye and put it in the back of the police car, laying it down carefully where the sun wouldn’t strike. “A beauty,” he said. “I like to eat them mashed in a little whisky.”

“What is it you want?” the doctor asked.

“There is one thing which worries me a little.”

“You don’t really believe that Fortnum has been kidnapped?”

“It is one of the possibilities. It has even occurred to me that he might have been the victim of a silly mistake. He was with the American Ambassador, you see, in the ruins. The Ambassador obviously would be a more likely target. If that is the case the men must be strangers-perhaps from Paraguay. You and I would never make a mistake like that, doctor. I only say ‘you’ because you are nearly one of us. Of course there is always the possibility you might be indirectly concerned.”

“I’m not quite the kidnapping type, colonel.”

“I was thinking about your father across the border. You told me once that he was either dead or in prison. You might have a motive. Forgive the way I think aloud, doctor, but I always feel a little at sea when it comes to political crime. In politics crime is often the occupation of a caballero. I am more used to crimes which are committed by criminals-or at least by violent or poor men. For money or lust.”

“Or machismo,” the doctor said, venturing to tease him.

“Oh, everything here is machismo,” Perez said, and he smiled at the doctor’s remark in so friendly a way that Plarr felt a little reassured. “Here machismo is only another word for living. A word for the air we breathe. When there is no machismo a man is dead. Are you coming back to the city, doctor?”

“No. Now that I am here I may as well take a look at Seńora Fortnum. She is expecting a baby.”

“Yes. She told me that.” The Chief of Police had his hand on the door of the car, but at the last moment he turned and said in a low voice as though they were sharing a friendly confidence, “Doctor, why did you tell me you rang up the Consul’s office and that there was no reply? I have had a man stationed there all the morning in case a call came.”

“You know what the telephone service is like in this city.”

“When a telephone is out of order one usually hears an engaged tone, not a ringing tone.”

“Not always, colonel. Anyway it may have been the ringing tone. I did not listen very carefully.”

“And yet you came all the way out to the camp?”

“It was about time anyway that I visited Seńora Fortnum. Why should I lie to you?”

“I have to think of all the possibilities, doctor. Even a crime of passion is possible.”

“Passion?” the doctor smiled. “I am an Englishman.”

“Yes, it is unlikely-I know that. And in the case of Seńora Fortnum… one would not suppose a man like you with all your chances would find it necessary… yet I have known crimes of passion even in a brothel.”

“Charley Fortnum is a friend of mine.”

“Oh, a friend… It is usually a friend one betrays, isn’t it, in these cases?” Colonel Perez put a hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “You must forgive me. I know you well enough, doctor, to allow myself a little speculation when I feel myself at a loss. As I do now. I have heard it said your relations with Seńora Fortnum have been very close. All the same-I agree-I would not have thought they would require the elimination of her husband. And yet I still keep wondering why you lied to me.”

He climbed into the car. His revolver holster creaked as he eased-himself down in his seat. He leaned back to make sure that the avocado was not in a position where it would bounce and bruise.

Doctor Plarr said, “I was not thinking, colonel, when I spoke, that was all. Lying to the police is almost an automatic reflex. And I was unaware you knew so much about me.”

“This is a small city,” Colonel Perez said. “It is always safer to assume common knowledge when you sleep with a married woman.”

Doctor Plarr watched the police car out of sight and then went reluctantly back into the house. Secrecy, he thought, is part of the attraction in a sexual affair. An open affair has always a touch of absurdity.

Clara sat exactly where he had left her. He thought: this is the first time we have been together with no sense of hurry, no rendezvous for her to keep at the Consulate, no fear that Charley will return accidentally from farming. She asked, “Do you think he is dead?”

“No.”

“Perhaps it would be good for everybody if he were.”

“Not for Charley.”

“Yes. Even for Charley. He is so afraid,” she said, “of getting old.”

“All the same I don’t suppose he wants to die just yet.”

“The baby was kicking hard this morning.”

“Yes?”

“Do you want to go to the bedroom?”

“Of course.” He waited for her to get up and lead the way.

They never kissed on the mouth (that was part of the brothel training), and he followed her with a slow renewal of excitement. In a real love affair, he thought, you are interested in a woman because she is someone distinct from yourself; then bit by bit she adapts herself to you, she picks up your habits, your ideas, even your turns of phrase, she becomes part of you, and then what interest remains? One cannot love oneself, one cannot live for long close to oneself-everyone has need of a stranger in the bed, and a whore remains a stranger. Her body has been scrawled over by so many men you can never decipher your own signature there.

When they were quiet and her head was lying against his shoulder in the same attitude taken by a peaceful lover, she began a sentence which he mistook for one he had too often heard, “Eduardo, is it true? Do you really…?”

“No,” he said firmly.

He thought she was demanding the same answer to a banal question that his mother had constantly forced out of him after they left his father, the answer which each of his mistresses sooner or later had always Insisted on-“Do you really love me, Eduardo?” One merit of a brothel is that the word love is seldom if ever employed. He repeated, “No.”

“How can you be sure?” she asked. “Just now you sounded so certain he was alive, but even that policeman thinks he is dead.”

Doctor Plarr realized he had been mistaken and in his relief he kissed her close to the mouth.

The news came over the radio from the local station while they were at lunch. It was the first meal they had ever taken together, and they were both of them ill at ease. Eating food side by side seemed more intimate to Doctor Plarr than the sexual act: The maid served them and disappeared between each course into the vast untidy regions of the ramshackle house, regions which he had never penetrated. First she served them an omelette, then an excellent steak which was far better than the goulash at the Italian Club or the tough beef at the Nacional. There was a bottle of Charley’s Chilean wine which had more body than the cooperative wine from Mendoza. It was odd eating so formally and so well with one of Seńora Sanchez’ girls. It opened an unexpected vista into quite another sort of life, a domestic life equally strange to both of them. It was as though he had taken a boat down one of the small tributaries of the Paraná and suddenly found himself in some great delta like that of the Amazon, where all sense of direction can be lost. He felt an unaccustomed tenderness toward Clara who had made this strange voyage possible. They picked their words carefully, it was the first time there were words to pick; they had a subject of conversation-Charley Fortnum’s disappearance.

Doctor Plarr began to speak of him as though he were, after all, certainly dead-it seemed to him safer that way, for otherwise she might begin to wonder what was the source of his hope. Only when Clara spoke of the future did he change his tack in order to evade a dubious topic. Charley, he assured her, might yet prove to be alive. To navigate in this new Amazonian waste of deeps and shoals proved difficult-it made for a confusion of tenses. “It’s quite possible he escaped from the car, and then if he was exhausted he might have been carried a long way by the current… He may have landed far from any village…”

“But why was his car in the river there?” She added with regret, “It was the new Cadillac. He was going to sell it next week in Buenos Aires.”

“Perhaps he had some errand in Posadas. He was a man who might well…”

“Oh no, I know he was not going to Posadas. He was coming to see me. He did not want to go to those ruins. He did not even want to go to the Governor’s dinner. He was anxious about me and the baby.”

“Why? He had no reason. You are a strong girl, Clara.”

“I pretended sometimes to be sick so he would ask you to come and see me. It was easier for you that way.”

“What a little bitch you are,” he exclaimed with pleasure.

“And he took my best sunglasses, the ones you gave me. I shall never see them again now. They were my favourite sunglasses. They were so smart. And they came from Mar del Plata.”

“I will go to Gruber’s tomorrow,” he said, “and get you another pair.”

“It was the only one they had.”

“They can order another pair.”

“He borrowed them once before and nearly broke them.”

“He must have looked a bit odd in them,” Doctor Plarr said.

“He never cares what he looks like. And he saw very badly when he had been drinking.” The tenses, present and past, swung to and fro like the arrow of a barometer moving irregularly between settled and unsettled weather.

“Did he love you, Clara?” It was not a question which had ever troubled him. Charley Fortnum, as Clara’s husband, had never meant more to him than a slight inconvenience when he felt the need to have her quickly, but Charley Fortnum, lying drugged on a box in a dirty back room, took on the appearance of a serious rival.

“He was always kind to me.”

After the avocado ice had been served he felt desire for her beginning to return. He had no patients to see before the evening; he could take a siesta at the camp without keeping his ear pricked for the rumbling approach of Fortnum’s Pride. After the morning climax he would be able to prolong his pleasure through the whole afternoon. She had never, since that first occasion in his flat, attempted to play the comedy of passion, and her indifference had begun to represent a challenge. Sometimes when he was alone he dreamed of surprising her into a genuine cry of excitement.

“Did Charley ever say why he married you?” he asked.

“I told you. It was a question of money when he died. And now he’s dead.”

“Perhaps.”

“Would you like to have more ice? I can call María. There is a bell, but Charley always rings it.”

“Why?”

“I am not used to bells. All these electric things-they frighten me.”

It amused him to watch her sitting upright at the end of the table like a hostess. He thought of his mother in the old days on the estancia when he had been brought in by his nurse for the dessert-she too had often served an avocado ice. She had been far more beautiful than Clara-they were not to be compared-but he remembered all the aids which she had bought for beauty in those days; they stood two deep on the long dressing table that stretched from wall to wall. He wondered sometimes whether even in those days his father had not taken second place to Guerlain or Elizabeth Arden.

“What was Charley like as a lover?”

Clara did not bother to answer. She said, “The radio… we ought to listen. There may be news.”

“News?”

“News of Charley, of course. What are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking of the long afternoon we can spend together.”

“He might turn up.”

Taken off his guard he said, “He won’t turn up.”

“Why are you so sure that he is dead?”

“I’m not sure, but if he is alive he will go to a telephone before he does anything else. He will not want to surprise you-and the baby.”

“We ought to listen all the same.”

After getting Asunción first he found a local station. There was no news. Only a sad Guaraní song came over the air and the music of a harp. She said, “Do you like champagne?”

“Yes.”

“Charley has some champagne. He was given it once in exchange for Long John Whisky-real French champagne, he said.”

The music stopped. A voice announced the station and the news bulletin, and news of Charley Fortnum took first place. A British Consul-the speaker left out the qualifying and diminishing adjective-had been kidnapped. There was no mention of the American Ambassador. Somehow Léon must have communicated with his contacts. The omission lent Charley a certain importance. It made him sound worth kidnapping. The authorities, so the speaker said, believed the kidnappers were Paraguayan. It was thought that the Consul might have been taken across the river and the kidnappers were making their demands through the Argentine government in order to confuse the trail. Apparently they had demanded the release of ten political prisoners who were held in Paraguay. Any police action in Paraguay or Argentina would endanger the life of the Consul. A plane to Havana or Mexico City must be arranged for the prisoners… There were the usual detailed conditions. The announcement had been made only an hour ago by a telephone call from Rosario to the Nación in Buenos Aires. The announcer said there was no possibility that the Consul was held in the capital, for his car had been found near Posadas more than a thousand kilometres away.

“I do not understand,” Clara said.

“Keep quiet and listen.” The announcer went on to explain that the kidnappers had chosen their time with some skill, for General Stroessner at the moment was on an unofficial holiday in the south of Argentina. He had been informed of the kidnapping and he was reported to have said, “That is no concern of mine. I am here for fishing.” The kidnappers had given the Paraguayan government until Sunday midnight to agree to their terms by an announcement on the radio. When that time expired they would be forced to execute their prisoner.

“But why Charley?”

“It must have been a mistake. There’s no other explanation. You mustn’t worry. He will be back home In a few days. Tell your maid you wish to see no one-I expect there will be journalists coming out here.”

“You will stay?”

“I’ll stay for a while.”

“I do not think I want to make love.”

“No. Of course. I understand.” They moved together down the long passage hung with sporting prints, and Doctor Plarr paused to look again at the narrow stream shaded by willows situated in that small northern island where his father had been born. No general went fishing with his colonels in streams like those. He carried the thought of his father’s abandoned home into the bedroom. He asked, “Do you ever want to go back to Tucumán?”

“No,” she said, “of course not. Why do you ask me that?”

She lay on the bed without taking off her clothes. It was cool as a sea cave in the shuttered air-conditioned room.

“What does your father do?”

“He cuts cane,” she said, “in the season, but he is getting old.”

“And out of season?”

“They live on the money I send them. They would starve if I died. I will not die, will I? with the baby?”

“No, of course not. Have you no brother or sister?”

“I had a brother, but he went away-no one knows where.” He sat on the edge of the bed and her hand touched his for a moment and withdrew. Perhaps she was afraid he would take her gesture for a comedy of tenderness and resent it. “He went away,” she said, “to cut cane one morning at four o’clock and then he never came back. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he just went away.”

He was reminded of his father’s disappearance. Here they lived on a continent, not on an island. What a vast area of land, with ill-defined frontiers of mountain, river, jungle and swamp, there was to lose oneself in-all the way from Panama to Tierra del Fuego. “Your brother never wrote?”

“How could he? He did not know how to read or write.”

“But you can.”

“A little. Seńora Sanchez taught me. She liked her girls to be educated. And Charley has helped me too.”

“You had no sister?” he asked.

“Yes. She had a baby in the fields and strangled it and then she died.”

He had never asked about her family before. He could think of no reason for questioning her now, unless perhaps he was seeking to discover what lay behind his obsession. Was there some characteristic in which she differed from the other girls he had seen at Seńora Sanchez’ house? Perhaps if he discovered the nature of the difference, the obsession would be killed like a trauma at the end of analysis. He would have strangled the obsession as her sister had strangled her child. He said, “I am tired. Let me lie down beside you for a bit. I need to sleep. I was up until three this morning.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was seeing a patient,” he said. “Will you wake me when it begins to get dark?”

The air conditioner humming by the window sounded like a natural summer sound, and once through his sleep he seemed to hear a bell ringing-the big ship’s bell which hung on a rope from the eaves of the verandah. He was half aware that she had got up and left him. He heard distant voices, the sound of a car starting, and then she was back, lying beside him, and he slept again. He dreamt, as he hadn’t dreamt for some years, of the estancia in Paraguay. He was lying in his child’s bunk at the top of a ladder, he listened to the noise of keys which were turned and bolts which were pushed to-his father was making the house secure, but he was afraid all the same. Perhaps someone had been locked in who should have been locked out.

Doctor Plarr opened his eyes. The raised edge of the bunk became Clara’s body set against his own. It was dark. He could see nothing. He put his hand out and touched her and he felt the baby move. He put his fingers up to her face. Her eyes were open. He said, “Are you awake?” but she didn’t answer. He asked, “Is something wrong?”

She said, “I do not want Charley back, but I do not want him to die either.”

He was astonished by this expression of emotion. She had shown none at all, as she sat and listened to Colonel Perez, and, when she had spoken to him after Perez left, it was of the Cadillac and of the lost sunglasses from Gruber’s.

She said, “He was good to me. He is a kind man. I do not want him to be hurt. I only want him not to be here.”

He began to comfort her with his hand as he would have comforted a frightened dog, and gently, without intention, they came together. He felt no lust, and when she moaned and tightened, he felt no sense of triumph.

He wondered with sadness, why did I ever want this to happen? Why did I think it would be a victory? There seemed to be no point in playing the game since now he knew what moves he had to make to win. The moves were sympathy, tenderness, quiet, the counterfeiting of love. He had been drawn to her by her indifference, even her enmity. She said, “Stay with me tonight.”

“How can I? Your maid would know. You can’t trust her not to tell Charley.”

“I could leave Charley.”

“It’s too soon to think of that. First we have to save bun-somehow.”

“Yes, of course, but afterward…”

“You were anxious about him just now.”

“Not about him,” she said. “About me. When he is here I can talk about nothing-only the baby. He wants to forget that Seńora Sanchez ever existed, so I can never see my friends because they all work there. What good am I to him? He does not want to make love to me any more because he is afraid it will do something to the baby. Do what? Sometimes I long to tell him-it is not yours anyway, so why do you bother about it?”

“Are you sure it isn’t his?”

“Yes. I am sure. Perhaps if he knew about you he would let me go.”

“Who were those people who came to the house just now?”

“Two journalists.”

“Did you speak to them?”

“They wanted me to make an appeal to the kidnappers-for Charley. I did not know what to say. I knew one of them-he used to have me sometimes when I was with Seńora Sanchez. I think he was angry about the baby. Colonel Perez must have told him about the baby. He said the baby was news. He always thought I liked him more than the other men. So I think his machismo was hurt. These men always believe you when you pretend. It suits their pride. He wanted to show his friend, the photographer, that there was something special between us, but there was nothing. Nothing. I was angry and I began to cry, and they took a picture. He said ‘Fine. O. K. Fine. That’s what we want. The sorrowing wife and mother-to-be,’ he said, and they drove away.”

It was not easy to interpret her tears correctly. Were they tears for Charley, tears of anger, tears for herself?

“What a funny beast you are, Clara,” he said.

“Is something wrong?”

“You were acting again just now, weren’t you?”

“What do you mean? Acting?”

“When we made love.”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course I was acting. I always try to do what you like. I always try to say what you like. Yes. Just like at Seńora Sanchez. Why not? You have your machismo too.”

He half believed her. He wanted to believe her. If she were speaking the truth there might be something still to discover, the game was not over yet.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I have been wasting a lot of time here, Clara. There must be something I can do to help Charley.”

“And me? What about me?”

“You had better take a bath,” he said, “or your maid might smell the sex.”

2

Doctor Plarr drove back to the city. He told himself it was necessary to do something about Charley Fortnum immediately, but he had no idea what. Perhaps if he stayed quiet everything might be put in order in the accustomed way-the British and American Ambassadors would bring the right diplomatic pressure to bear, Charley Fortnum would be found deposited some early morning in a church and go home-home?—and ten prisoners in Paraguay would be given their liberty-it was even possible his father might be among them. What else could he do but leave things to sort themselves out? He had already lied to Colonel Perez, he was implicated.

Of course, to salve his conscience, he might make an emotional appeal to Léon Rivas to let Charley Fortnum go-“in the name of our old friendship.” But Léon was a man under orders and in any case Doctor Plarr had no clear idea of where to find him. In the barrio of the poor all the marshy tracks resembled one another, there were the same avocado trees everywhere, the same huts of mud or tin, and the same potbellied children carrying petrol tins of water. They would look at him with their blank eyes which were already infected by trachoma and reply nothing to any question. It might take him hours, even days, to find the hut where Charley Fortnum was hidden, and what good would his appeal do in any case? He tried unsuccessfully to reassure himself that Léon was not a man to commit murder, nor was Aquino, but they were only instruments-there remained El Tigre, whoever he might be.

He had heard of El Tigre for the first time one evening when he had passed Léon and Aquino sitting side by side in his waiting room. They were just two strangers among the other patients and he hadn’t given them a second look. All who waited there were the responsibility of his secretary.

His secretary was a pretty young woman called Ana. She was dauntingly efficient and the daughter of an influential official in the public health department. Doctor Plarr sometimes wondered why he had never been tempted to make love to her. Perhaps he hesitated because of the white starched uniform which she had adopted of her own wish-it would creak or crackle if one touched her: she might have been connected to a burglar alarm. Or perhaps it was the importance of her father, or her piety, real or apparent, which deterred him. She always wore a small gold cross round her neck, and once, when he had been driving through the square by the cathedral, he had seen her emerge with her family from Sunday Mass carrying a missal bound in white vellum-it might have been a first Communion present, for it closely resembled the sugar almonds which are distributed on such occasions.

The evening when Léon and Aquino came to see him, he had dealt with all the other patients before it became the turn of the two strangers. He had not remembered them because there were always new faces waiting his attention. Patience and patients were words closely allied. His secretary came with a crackle to his side and put a slip of paper on the desk. “They want to see you together,” she said. He put back on the shelf a medical book he had been consulting in front of a patient-for some reason patients gained confidence if they could see a coloured picture, an aspect of human psychology which American publishers knew well. When he looked back the two men were standing side by side in front of his desk. The smaller, who had protruding ears, said, “It is Eduardo surely?”

“Léon,” Plarr exclaimed, “it is Léon, Léon Rivas?” They embraced with a certain shyness. Plarr asked, “How many years…? I haven’t heard from you since you sent me that Ordination card. I was sorry I could not come to the ceremony-it would have been unsafe for me.”

“That is all over anyway.”

“Why? Have they thrown you out?”

“I am married for one thing. The Archbishop did not like that.”

Doctor Plarr hesitated.

Léon Rivas said, “I am very lucky. She is a fine woman.”

“Congratulations. Who in all Paraguay did you find willing to celebrate the marriage?”

“We made our vows to each other. You know a priest at a marriage is never more than a witness. In an emergency… this was an emergency.”

“I had forgotten things were so easy.”

“Oh, I can assure you not so easy. It needs a lot of thought. That sort of marriage is more irrevocable than in a church. Don’t you recognize my friend?”

“No… I don’t think so… no…” Doctor Plarr tried to strip away the thin beard and identify some schoolboy face which he might have known years ago in Asunción.

“Aquino.”

“Aquino? Why of course it’s Aquino.” Another embrace: it was like a military ceremony, a kiss on the cheek and a decoration awarded for a dead past in a devastated land. He asked, “What are you doing now? You were going to be a writer, weren’t you? Are you a writer?”

“There are no writers left in Paraguay.”

“We saw your name on a parcel in Gruber’s shop,” Léon said.

“So he told me, but I thought you were police agents from over there.”

“Why? Are you watched?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We have come from over there.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“Aquino has been in prison,” Léon said.

“They let you out?”

“The authorities did not exactly invite me to go,” Aquino said.

“We were lucky,” León explained. “They were transferring him from one police station to another, there was a little shooting, but the only man who was killed was the policeman we were going to pay. He was shot by his own side, by accident. We had given him only half the money in advance, so we got Aquino cheap.”

“Are you going to settle here?”

“Not settle,” Léon said. “We are here to do a job. Afterward we shall go back.”

“You are not patients then?”

“No, we are not patients.”

Doctor Plarr appreciated the dangers of a frontier. He got up and opened the door. His secretary was standing beside the filing cabinet in the outer office. She inserted a card here, a card there. Her cross swung to and fro as she moved, like a priest’s censer. He closed the door. He said, “You know, Léon, I’m not interested in politics. Only medicine. I am not like my father.”

“Why are you here and not in Buenos Aires?”

“I was not doing very well in Buenos Aires.”

“We thought you might want to know what had happened to your father.”

“Do you know?”

“I think we may soon be in a position to find out.”

Doctor Plarr said, “I had better make notes about your condition. I’ll put down low blood pressure for you, Léon, a suspicion of anaemia… Aquino-perhaps your gall bladder… I will put you down for x-rays. You understand my secretary will expect to see what diagnosis I make.”

“We believe your father may be alive still,” Léon said. “So naturally we thought of you…”

There was a knock on the door and the secretary came in. She said, “I have finished all the cards. If you would let me go now…”

“A lover waiting?”

She said, “Today is Saturday,” as though that ought to explain everything.

“I know that.”

“I want to go to Confession.”

“Oh,” Doctor Plarr said, “of course, I am sorry, Ana. I forgot. Of course you must go.” His lack of desire for her irritated him, so he deliberately found an occasion to vex her. “Pray for me,” he said.

She ignored his flippancy. “If you will leave those two cards on my desk when you have finished…” Her dress crepitated, as she went out, like a nocturnal insect.

Doctor Plarr said, “I doubt if her Confession will take very long.”

“Those who have nothing to confess always take the longest,” León Rivas said. “They want to please the priest and give him something to do. A murderer has only one thing on his mind, so he forgets all the rest-perhaps worse things. One can deal with him very quickly.”

“You still talk like a priest, Léon. What made you marry?”

“I married when I lost faith. A man must have something to guard.”

“I can’t imagine you without your faith.”

“I only mean my faith in the Church. Or in what they have made of it. Of course I know one day things may be better. But I was ordained when John was Pope. I am not patient enough to wait for another John.”

“You were going to be an abogado before you became a priest. What are you now?”

“A criminal,” Léon said.

“You are joking.”

“No. That is why I have come to you. We need your help.”

“To rob a bank?” Doctor Plarr asked. He couldn’t take Léon seriously, when he looked at those familiar protruding ears and remembered so much…

“To rob an Embassy-you might call it that.”

“But I’m no criminal, Léon.” He added deliberately, “Except for an abortion or two,” to see if the priestly eyes would flinch a little, but they stared back at him with indifference.

“In a wrong society,” Léon Rivas said, “the criminals are the honest men.” The phrase came a bit too glibly. It was probably a well-known quotation. Doctor Plarr remembered how first there had been the law books Léon studied-he had once explained to him the meaning of tort. Then there had been ail the works of theology-Léon was able to make even the Trinity seem plausible by a sort of higher mathematics. He supposed there must be other primers to read in the new life. Perhaps he was quoting Marx.

“The new American Ambassador,” Léon said, “is planning to visit the north in November. You have contacts here, Eduardo. All we need are the exact details of his program.”

“I’m not going to be an accomplice in murder, Léon.”

“There will be no murder. A murder would be of very little use to us. Aquino, tell him about the treatment they gave you.”

“It was simple,” Aquino said. “Not at all up-to-date. Nothing electric. Like the conquistadors they managed with a knife…”

Doctor Plarr listened with nausea. He had been present at many unpleasant deaths which had affected him less. In those cases there had been something to do, some means of helping in however small a degree. He felt sickness at this narrative in the past tense, just as years ago, when he was a young student, he had been upset by the dissection of a cadaver for educational purposes. When it came to a living body there was always curiosity and hope. He asked, “And you didn’t talk?”

“Of course I talked,” Aquino said “They have it all in the files now. The counterinsurgency section of the CIA was pleased with me. Two of their agents were there, and they gave me three packets of Lucky Strike. A packet for each man I had betrayed.”

“Show him your hand, Aquino,” Léon said.

Aquino laid his right hand on the desk like a patient seeking advice. Three fingers were missing: the hand without them looked like something drawn up in a fish net from the river where eels were active. Aquino said, “That was why I began to write poetry. Verse was less tiring than prose with only a left hand. I could learn it by heart. I was allowed a visitor every three months (that was another reward they gave me) and I would recite her the verses I had made.”

“They were good verses,” Léon said, “for a beginner. A kind of Purgatorio in villancico.”

“How many of you are there?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“A dozen of us crossed the border, not counting El Tigre. He was already in Argentina.”

“Who is El Tigre?”

“The one who gives the orders. We call him that, but it is a term of affection. He likes to wear striped shirts.”

“The scheme sounds mad, León.”

“It has been done before.”

“Why kidnap the American Ambassador here instead of the one you have in Asuncion?”

“That was our first plan. But the General takes great precautions. Here, you must know it yourself, they have much less fear of guerrillas since the failure in Salta.”

“All the same you are in a foreign country.”

“South America is our country, Eduardo. Not Paraguay. Not Argentina. You know what Che said, ‘The whole continent is my country.’ What are you? English or South American?”

Doctor Plarr remembered the question, but he still could not answer it as he drove into the city past the white Gothic prison which always reminded him of a sugar decoration for a wedding cake. He told himself that Léon Rivas was a priest, and not a murderer. And Aquino? Aquino was a poet. It would have been easier to discount the danger to Charley Fortnum if he had never seen him lying unconscious on a box, a box so oddly shaped that it might have been a coffin.

3

Charley Fortnum woke with the worst head he could ever remember having. His eyes were aching and his vision was blurred. He whispered, “Clara,” putting out his hand to touch her side, but all he touched was a mud wall. Then an image came to his mind of Doctor Plarr standing over him during the night with an electric torch. The doctor had told him some implausible story of an accident.

It was daylight now. The sunlight seeped across the floor under the door of the next room, and he could tell, even through his bruised eyes, that this was no hospital. Nor was the hard box on which he lay a hospital bed. He swung his legs over the side and tried to stand up. He was giddy and nearly fell. Clutching the side of the box, he saw that he had been lying all night upon a coffin. It gave him, as he would have put it, a nasty turn.

“Ted?” he called. He didn’t associate Doctor Plarr with practical jokes, but there had to be some sort of explanation, and he was anxious to be back with Clara. Clara would be frightened, Clara wouldn’t know what to do. Why, she was afraid even to use the telephone. “Ted?” he called again in a dry croak. Whisky had never treated him like this before, not even the local brand. Whom the bloody hell had he been drinking with and where? Mason, he told himself, you’ve got to pull yourself together. It was always to Mason he attributed his worst errors and his worst failings. In his boyhood when he still practiced confession it was always Mason who knelt in the box and muttered abstract phrases concerning sins against purity, though it was Charley Fortnum who would leave the box, his face ashine with beneficence after Mason’s absolution. “Mason, Mason,” he whispered now, “you snotty little beast, Mason, what were you up to last night?” He knew that when he exceeded the proper measure he was apt to forget things, but never before had he forgotten to quite this extent… He took a stumbling step toward the door and for the third time called out to Doctor Plarr.

The door was pushed open and a stranger stood there waving a submachine gun at him. He had the narrow eyes and jet black hair of an Indian and he shouted at Fortnum in Guaraní. Fortnum, in spite of his father’s angry insistence, had never learned more than a few words of Guaraní, but it was clear enough that the man was telling him to get back onto the so-called bed. “All right, all right,” Fortnum said, speaking English so that the man would no more understand him than he understood Guaraní. “Keep your shirt on, old man.” He sat down on the coffin and said, “Piss off,” with a sense of relief.

Another stranger in blue jeans, naked to the waist, came in and ordered the Indian away. He carried a cup of coffee. The coffee smelled like home, and Charley Fortnum was a little comforted. The man had protruding ears and for a moment Charley was reminded of a boy at school whom Mason had unmercifully teased, though Fortnum repented afterward and shared a bar of chocolate with the victim. This memory gave him-a sense of reassurance. He asked, “Where am I?”

“You do not need to worry,” the man replied. He held out the coffee.

“I have to go home. My wife will be anxious.”

“Tomorrow. I hope you will be able to go tomorrow.”

“Who was that man with a gun?”

“Miguel. A good man. Drink your coffee, please. You will feel much better then.”

“What’s your name?” Charley Fortnum asked.

“Léon,” the man said.

“I mean your family name?”

“None of us here have families,” the man said, “so we are nameless.”

Charley Fortnum turned this statement over in his mind like a difficult phrase in a book; it made no more sense to him at the second reading.

“Doctor Plarr was here last night,” he said.

“Plarr? Plarr? I do not think I know anyone called Plarr.”

“He told me I had been in an accident.”

“It was I who told you that,” the man said.

“It was not you. I saw him. He carried an electric torch.”

“You dreamt him. You have had a shock… Your car was badly damaged. Please drink your coffee. You will remember things better perhaps afterward.”

Charley Fortnum obeyed. It was very strong coffee, and it was true that his head began to clear. He asked, “Where is the Ambassador?”

“I do not know of any Ambassador.”

“I left him in the ruins. I wanted to see my wife before dinner. I wanted to see that she was all right. I don’t like leaving her for long. She is expecting a baby.”

“Yes? That must make you very happy. It is a fine thing to be the father of a child.”

“I remember now. There was a car across the road. I had to stop. There was no accident. I’m quite sure there was no accident. And why the gun?” His hand shook a little as he drank his coffee. He said, “I want to go home now.”

“It is much too far to walk from here,” the man said. “You are not fit yet. And the way-you do not know the way.”

“I will find a road. I can stop a car.”

“Better to rest today. After the shock. Tomorrow perhaps we can find you some transport. Today it is not possible.”

Fortnum threw what was left of his coffee in the man’s face and charged into the other room. Then he stopped. The Indian stood twelve feet away in front of the outer door, pointing his gun at Charley Fortnum’s stomach. His dark eyes shone with pleasure, as he moved the gun a little this way, a little that, as though he were deciding his target, between the navel and the appendix. He said something which amused him in Guaraní.

The man called Léon came from the inner room. He said, “You see. I told you. You cannot go today.” One cheek was flushed red from the hot coffee, but he spoke gently, without anger. He had the patience of someone who was more used to enduring pain than inflicting it. He said, “You must be hungry, Seńor Fortnum. If you would like some eggs…”.

“You know who I am?”

“Yes, yes, of course. You are the British Consul.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“You will have to stay with us for a little -while. Believe me, we are not your enemies, Seńor Fortnum. You will be helping us to save innocent men from imprisonment and torture. By this time our man in Rosario will have telephoned to the Nación to tell them you are in our care.”

Charley Fortnum began to understand. “You got the wrong man, is that it? You were after the American Ambassador?”

“Yes, it was an unfortunate mistake.”

“A very bad mistake. No one is going to bother about Charley Fortnum. What will you do then?”

The man said, “I am sure you are wrong. You will see. Everything will be arranged. The British Ambassador will talk to the President. The President will speak to the General. He is here in Argentina on a holiday. The American Ambassador will intervene too. We are only asking the General to release a few men. Everything would have been quite easy if one of our men had not made a mistake.”

“You were not very well-informed, were you? The Ambassador had two police officers with him. And his secretary. That was why there was no room for me in his car.”

“We could have dealt with them.”

“All right. Give me your eggs,” Charley Fortnum said, “but tell that man Miguel to put away his gun. It spoils my appetite.”

The man called Léon knelt before a small spirit stove on the earth floor and busied himself with matches, a frying pan, a bit of lard.

“I could do with some whisky if you have it.”

“I am sorry. We have no spirits.”

The lard began to bubble in the pan.

“Your name is Léon, eh?”

“Yes.” The man broke two eggs one after the other on the edge of the pan. As he held two half shells over the pan there was something in the position of the fingers which reminded Fortnum of that moment at the altar when a priest breaks the Host over the chalice.

“What will you do if they refuse?”

“I pray they will accept,” the kneeling man said, “I am sure they will accept.”

“Then I hope to God God hears you,” Charley Fortnum said. “Don’t fry the eggs too hard.”

It was not until the afternoon that Charley Fortnum heard the official news about himself. The man Léon turned on a pocket radio at noon, but the battery failed in the middle of some Guaraní music and he had no spares. The young man with a beard whom Léon called Aquino went into town to buy more batteries. He was a long time gone. A woman came in from the market with food and cooked their lunch, a vegetable soup with a few scraps of meat. She made a great show too of cleaning the hut, raising the dust in one part so that it settled in another. She had a lot of untidy black hair and a wart on her face and she treated Léon with a mixture of possessiveness and servility. He called her Marta.

Once Charley Fortnum, with embarrassment because of the woman’s presence, said he wanted to use a lavatory. Léon gave an order to the Indian who led him to a cabin in the yard at the back of the hut. The door had lost one of its hinges and wouldn’t close, and inside there was only a deep hole dug in the earth with a couple of boards across it. When he came out the Guaraní was sitting a few feet away playing with his gun, sighting it on a tree, a bird flying past, at a stray mongrel dog. Through the trees Charley Fortnum could see another hut, even poorer than the one to which he was returning. He thought of running to it for help, but he felt sure the Indian would welcome the chance to try his gun. When he got back he said to Léon, “If you can get a couple of bottles of whisky I’ll pay you for them.” No one had stolen his wallet, he had noticed that, and he took out the necessary notes.

Léon gave the money to Marta. He said, “You will have to be patient, Seńor Fortnum. Aquino is not back. No one can go till he returns. And it is a long walk into the town.”

“I will pay for a taxi.”

“I am afraid that is not possible. There are no taxis here.”

The Indian squatted down again by the door. Charley Fortnum said, “I’m going off to sleep a bit. That drug you gave me was pretty strong.” He went back into the inner room and stretched out on the coffin. He tried to sleep, but he was kept awake by his thoughts. He wondered how Clara was managing in his absence. He had never left her alone for a whole night before. He knew nothing about childbirth, but he had an idea that shock or anxiety could affect the unborn child. He had even tried to cut down his drinking after he married Clara-except for that first married night of whisky and champagne when for the first time they made love properly, without impediment, in the Hotel Italia in Rosario-an old-fashioned hotel which smelled agreeably of undisturbed dust like an ancient library.

They had gone there because he thought she would be a little scared of the Riviera Hotel which was new, expensive, and air conditioned. There were papers he had to collect at the Consulate at Santa Fe 939 (he remembered the number because it represented the month and year of his first marriage), the papers which if inquiries were made would show that there was no impediment to his second marriage-it had taken weeks to get a copy of Evelyn’s death certificate from a small town in Idaho. He was able at the same time to leave his will in a sealed envelope in the Consulate safe. The Consul was a pleasant middle-aged man. He and Charley Fortnum had hit it off right away when for some reason the subject of horses came up. He invited them back after the civil and religious ceremonies and opened a bottle of genuine French champagne. That little drinking ceremony among the file boxes compared very favourably with the reception in Idaho after his first marriage. He remembered with horror the white cake and the relations-in-law who wore dark suits and even hard collars, although it was a civil marriage which was not acceptable in Argentina. They had been prudent and not spoken of it when they returned. His wife had refused a Catholic marriage-it was against her conscience as she had become a Christian Scientist. Of course the civil marriage made her inheritance unsafe-which was also an indignity. He wanted very much to arrange things more safely for Clara; to ensure there were no cracks in the walls of this second marriage. He intended to leave her, when he came to die, in a security which was impregnable.

After a while he slid into a deep dreamless sleep; he was only awakened when the radio in the next room began to repeat his own name-Seńor Carlos Fortnum. The police-the announcer said-believed he might have been brought to Rosario because the telephone call to the Nación had been traced to that city. A city of more than half a million inhabitants couldn’t be searched very thoroughly, and the authorities had been given only four days in which to agree to the kidnappers’ terms. One of these four days had already passed. Charley Fortnum thought: Clara will be listening to the broadcast, and he thanked God Ted would be around to reassure her. Ted would know what had happened. Ted would go to see her. Ted would do something to keep her calm. Ted would tell her that, even if they killed him, she would be all right. She had so much fear of the past-he could tell that from the way she never spoke of it. It was one of his reasons for marrying her, to prove she would never under any circumstances have to return to Mother Sanchez. He took exaggerated care of her happiness like a clumsy man entrusted with something of great fragility which didn’t belong to him. He was always afraid of dropping her happiness. Someone was talking now about the Argentine football team which was touring Europe. He called, “Léon!”

The small head with the bat ears and the attentive eyes of a good servant peered round the door. Léon said, “You have slept a long time, Seńor Fortnum. That is good.”

“I heard the radio, Léon.”

“Ah, yes.” Léon was carrying a glass in one hand and a bottle of whisky was tucked under each arm. He said, “My wife has brought two bottles from the town.” He showed the whisky proudly (it was an Argentine brand) and counted out the change with care. “You must not worry. Everything will be over in a few days.”

“Everything will be over with me, you mean? Give me that whisky.” He poured out a third of a glass and drank it down.

“I am sure tonight we shall hear them announce that they have accepted our terms. And then by tomorrow evening you can go home.”

Charley Fortnum poured out another dose.

“You are drinking too much,” the man called Léon said with friendly anxiety.

“No, no. I know the right measure. And it’s the measure that counts. What’s your other name, Léon?”

“I told you I have no other name.”

“But you have a title, haven’t you? Tell me what you are doing in this setup, Father Léon.”

He could almost believe the ears twitched, like a dog’s, at a familiar intonation-“Father” taking the place of “walk” or perhaps “cat.”

“You are mistaken. You saw my wife just now. Marta. She brought you the whisky.”

“But once a priest always a priest, Father. I spotted you when you broke those eggs over the dish. I could see you at the altar, Father.”

“You are imagining things, Seńor Fortnum.”

“And what are you imagining? You might have made a good bargain for the Ambassador, but you can’t get anything in return for me. I’m not worth a peso to a human soul-except my wife. It seems an odd thing for a priest to become a murderer, but I suppose you’ll get someone else to do the thing.”

“No,” the other said with great seriousness, “if it should ever come to that, which God forbid, I will be the one. I do not want to shift the guilt.”

“Then I’d better leave you some of this whisky. You’ll need a swig of it-in how many days did they say-three was it?”

The other man’s eyes shifted. He had a frightened air. He shuffled two steps toward the door as though he were leaving the altar and was afraid of treading on the skirt of a soutane which was too long for him.

“You might stay and talk a bit,” Charley Fortnum said. “I feel more scared when I’m alone. I don’t mind telling you that. If one can’t talk to a priest who can one talk to? That Indian now… he sits there and stares at me and smiles. He wants to kill.”

“You are wrong, Seńor Fortnum. Miguel is a good man. He has no Spanish, that is all, and so he smiles just to show he is a friend. Try to sleep again.”

“I’ve had enough sleep. I want to talk to you.” The man made a gesture with his hands, and Charley Fortnum could imagine him in church, making his formal passes. “I have so many things to do.”

“I can always keep you here if I try.”

“No, no. I must go.”

“I can keep you here easily. I know the way.”

“I will come back presently, I promise.”

“All I have to say to keep you is-Father, please hear my confession.”

The man stayed stuck in the doorway with his back turned. His protruding ears stood out like little hands raised over an offering.

“Since my last confession, Father…” The man swung around and said angrily, “You must not joke about things like that. I will not listen to you if you joke…”

“But that’s no joke, Father. I’m not in a position to joke about anything at all. Surely every man has a lot to confess when it comes to dying.”

“My faculties have been taken away,” the other said in a stubborn voice. “You must know what that means if you are really a Catholic.”

“I seem to know the rules better than you, Father. You do not need faculties, not in an emergency-if there is no other priest available… there isn’t, is there? Your men would never let you bring one here…”

“There is no emergency-not yet.”

“All the same time is short… if I ask…”

The man reminded him again of a dog, a dog who has been reproved for a fault which he does not clearly understand. He began to plead, “Seńor Fortnum, I assure you there never will be an emergency… it will never be necessary…”

” ‘I am sorry and beg pardon’-that’s how I begin, isn’t it? It’s been the hell of a long time… I’ve been once to church in the last forty years… a while ago when I got married. I was damned if I’d go to confession though. It would have taken too long and I couldn’t keep the lady waiting.”

“Please, Seńor Fortnum, do not mock me.”

“I’m not mocking you, Father. Perhaps I’m mocking myself a bit. I can do that as long as the whisky lasts.” He added, “It really is a funny thing when you come to think of it. ‘I ask forgiveness of God through you, Father.’ That is the formula, isn’t it-and all the time you’ll have the gun ready. Don’t you think we ought to begin now? Before the gun is loaded. There are plenty of things I have on my mind.”

“I will not listen to you.” He made the gesture of putting his hands against the protruding ears. They flattened and sprang back.

Charley Fortnum said, “Oh, don’t worry, forget it. I was only half serious. What difference does it make anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t believe a thing, Father. I would never have bothered to marry in a church if the law hadn’t forced me to. There was the question of money. For my wife, I mean. What was your intention, Father, when you married?” He added quickly, “Forgive me. I had no business to ask that.”

But the little man, it seemed, was not angry. The question even appeared to have an attraction for him. He came slowly across the floor with his mouth ajar, as though he were a starving man drawn irresistibly by the offer of bread. A little saliva hung at the corner of his mouth. He came and crouched down on the floor beside the coffin. He said in a low voice (he might have been kneeling in the confessional box himself), “I think it was anger and loneliness, Seńor Fortnum. I never meant any harm to her, poor woman.”

“I can understand the loneliness,” Charley Fortnum said, “I’ve suffered from that too. But why the anger? Who were you angry with?”

“The Church,” the man said and added with irony, “my Mother the Church.”

“I used to be angry with my father. He didn’t understand me, I thought, or care a nickel about me. I hated him. All the same I was bloody lonely when he died. And now”-he lifted his glass-“I even imitate him. Though he drank more than I do. All the same a father’s a father-I don’t see how you can be angry with Mother Church. I could never get angry with a fucking institution.”

“She is a sort of person too,” the man said, “they claim she is Christ on earth-I still half believe it even now. Someone like you-un Ingles-you are not able to understand how ashamed I felt of the things they made me read to people. I was a priest in the poor part of Asunción near the river. Have you noticed how the poor always cling close to the river? They do it here too, as though they plan one day to swim away, but they have no idea how to swim and there is nowhere to swim to for any of them. On Sunday I had to read to them out of the Gospels.”

Charley Fortnum listened with a little sympathy and a good deal of cunning. His life depended on this man, and it was vitally important for him to know what moved him. There might be some chord he could touch of fellow feeling. The man was speaking immoderately as a thirsty man drinks. Perhaps he had been unable to speak freely for a long time: perhaps this was the only way he could unburden himself to a man who was safely dying and would remember no more what he said than a priest in the confessional. Charley Fortnum asked, “What’s wrong with the Gospels, Father?”

“They make no sense,” the ex-priest said, “anyway not in Paraguay. ‘Sell all and give to the poor’-I had to read that out to them while the old Archbishop we had in those days was eating a fine fish from Iguazu and drinking a French wine with the General. Of course the people were not actually starving-you can keep them from starving on mandioca, and malnutrition is much safer for the rich than starvation. Starvation makes a man desperate. Malnutrition makes him too tired to raise a fist. The Americans understand that well-the aid they give us makes just that amount of difference. Our people do not starve-they wilt. The words used to stick on my lips-‘Suffer little children,’ and there the children sat in the front rows with their pot bellies and their navels sticking out like doorknobs. ‘It were better that a millstone were hung around his neck,’

‘He who gives to one of the least of these.’ Gives what? gives mandioca? and then I distributed the Host-it’s not so nourishing as a good chipá-and then I drank the wine. Wine! Which of these poor souls had ever tasted wine? Why could we not use water in the sacrament? He used it at Cana. Wasn’t there a beaker of water at the Last Supper He could have used instead?” To Charley Fortnum’s astonishment the doglike eyes were swollen with unshed tears.

The man said, “Oh, you must not think we are all of us bad Christians as I am. The Jesuits do what they can. But they are watched by the police. Their telephones are tapped. If anyone seems dangerous he is quickly pushed across the river. They do not kill him. The Yankees would not like a priest to be killed, and anyway we are not dangerous enough. I spoke in a sermon once about Father Torres who was shot with the guerrillas in Colombia. I only said that unlike Sodom the Church did sometimes produce one just man, so perhaps she would not be destroyed like Sodom. The police reported me to the Archbishop and the Archbishop forbade me to preach any more. Oh well, poor man, he was very old and the General liked him, and he “thought he was doing right, rendering to Caesar…”

“These things are a bit above my head, Father,” Charley Fortnum said, lying propped on his elbow on the coffin and looking down at the dark head which still showed the faint trace of a tonsure through the hair, like a prehistoric camp in a field seen from a plane. He interjected “Father” as often as he could: it was somehow reassuring. A father didn’t usually kill his son, although of course it had been a near miss in the case of Abraham. “I am not to blame, Father.”

“I am not blaming you, Seńor Fortnum, God forbid.”

“I can see how the American Ambassador from your point of view-well, he was a legitimate objective. But me-I’m not even a proper Consul and the English are not in this fight, Father.”

The priest muttered a cliché absentmindedly, “They say one man has to die for the people.”

“But that was what the crucifiers said, not the Christians.”

The priest looked up. “Yes, you are right,” he said, “I was not thinking when I spoke. You know your Testament.”

“I have not read it since I was a boy. But that’s the kind of scene which sticks in the mind. Like Struwelpeter.”

“Struwelpeter?”

“He had his thumbs cut off.”

“I never heard of him. Is he one of your martyrs?”

“No, no, it’s a nursery story, Father.”

“Have you children?” the priest asked sharply.

“No, but I told you. In a few months there should be one around. He kicks hard already.”

“Yes, I remember now.” He added, “Don’t worry, you will be home soon.” It was as though the sentence were framed in question marks and he wanted the prisoner to reassure him -by agreeing, “Yes, of course. It goes without saying,” but Charley Fortnum refused to play that game.

“Why this coffin, Father? It seems a bit morbid to me.”

“The earth is too damp for sleeping on, even with a cloth under you. We did not want you to catch rheumatism.”

“Well, that was a kindly thought, Father.”

“We are not barbarians. There is a man near here in the barrio who makes coffins. We bought one from him. It was much safer than buying a bed… There is a greater demand in the barrio for coffins than beds. Nobody asks questions about a coffin.”

“And I suppose you thought it might be handy later on for stowing away a body.”

“That was not in our minds, I swear. To ask for a bed would have been dangerous.”

“Oh well, I think I will have another whisky, Father. Have one with me.”

“No, You see-I am on duty. I have to guard you.” He gave a timid smile.

“You would not be difficult to overpower, would you? Even for an old man like me.”

“There are always two of us on duty,” the priest said. “Miguel is out there now with his gun. Those are El Tigre’s orders. There is another reason for that too. One man might be talked around. Or even bribed. We are all of us human beings. This is not the sort of life any of us would have chosen.”

“The Indian does not speak Spanish?”

“Yes, that too is a good thing.”

“Do you mind if I stretch my legs a little?”

“Of course you may.”

Charley Fortnum went to the doorway and checked the truth of what the priest had said. The Indian was squatting by the door with the gun on his lap. He smiled at Fortnum confidentially, as though they shared a secret joke. Almost imperceptibly he moved the position of his gun.

“You speak Guaraní, Father?”

“Yes. I used to preach in Guaraní once.”

A few minutes ago there had been a moment of closeness, of sympathy, even of friendship between them, but that moment had passed. When a Confession is finished, the priest and the penitent are each alone. They pretend not to recognize each other if they pass in the church. It was as though it were the penitent who stood now by the coffin looking at his watch. Charley Fortnum thought: he is checking to see how many hours are left.

“Change your mind and have a whisky with me, Father.”

“No. No, thank you. One day perhaps when all this is over.” He added, “He is late. I should have been gone long before now.”

“Who is late?” The priest answered angrily, “I have told you before that people like us have no names.”

The darkness was falling and in the shuttered outer room one of them had lit a candle. They had left his door open and he could see the Indian sitting close beside the door nursing his gun. Charley Fortnum wondered when his turn would come to sleep. The man called Léon had been gone a long while. There was a Negro he had not noticed before… If I had a knife, he wondered, could I make a hole to escape by?

The man called Aquino brought in a candle, carrying it in his left hand. Charley Fortnum noticed that he kept his right hand always concealed in his jeans. Perhaps it held a gun-or a knife-and his thoughts went back to the rather hopeless idea of cutting a hole through the dried mud of the wall. In an impossible situation one had to try the impossible. He asked, “Where is the Father?”

“He has things to do in the town, Seńor Fortnum.”

They always treated him with great courtesy, he noticed, as though they were trying to reassure him, “There is nothing personal in this affair. Once it is over we can meet as friends.” Or was it perhaps the habitual courtesy which a prison warder is said to show even the most brutal murderer before his execution? People have the same awed respect for death as they have for a distinguished stranger, however unwelcome he may be, who visits their town.

He said, “I’m hungry. I could eat an ox.” It wasn’t true, but perhaps they would be foolish enough to let him have a knife with his food. He had an impression he was in the hands of amateurs, not professionals.

“Soon,” Aquino said, “be a little patient, Seńor Fortnum. We are waiting for Marta. She has promised to make us a stew. She is not a very good cook, but if you had been in prison like me…”

He thought: stew. That means I’ll be given only a spoon again. “There is still some whisky left,” he said. “Will you have a drink with me?”

Aquino said, “We are none of us supposed to drink.”

“A small one-to keep me company.”

“A very small one then. I will eat one of the onions Marta has brought for the stew. It will take away the smell. I do not want to disappoint Léon. For him it comes naturally to be strict, but we are not all priests, thank God. That is a very large whisky,” he protested.

“Large? Why, it is only half as big as mine. Salud.”

“Salud.”

He noticed Aquino still kept his right hand in his pocket.

“What are you, Aquino?”

“What do you mean, what am I?”

“Are you a worker?”

“I am a criminal,” Aquino said with pride. “We are all criminals.”

“Is that a full-time occupation?” Fortnum raised his glass and Aquino followed suit. “You must have begun somewhere.”

“Oh, I went to school like all the world. It was run by priests. They were good men, and it was a good school. Léon was there too-he wanted to be an abogado. As for me, I wanted to be a writer, but even a writer has to live, so I went into the tobacco business. I made money selling American cigarettes in the street. Smuggled cigarettes from Panama. Good money too… I mean I was able to share a room with three others and we had enough to buy chipás. You get quite fat on chipás. They are better than mandioca.”

“I have a camp outside the city,” Charley Fortnum said, “I could do with a new capataz. You are an educated man. You could easily learn the job.”

“Oh, I have another job now,” Aquino said with pride. “I told you-I am a criminal. I am also a poet.”

“A poet?”

“At school Léon helped me to write. He said I had talent, but once I sent an article to the paper in Asunción criticizing the Yankees. In our country it is forbidden by the General to publish anything against the Yankees, and afterward they would not even read any of the articles I sent in. They thought I was writing something between the lines which would get them into trouble. They thought I was a político, and so naturally-what else could I do? I became a político. So then they sent me to prison. It happens always that way, if you are a político and you are not a Colorado, one of the General’s party.”

“Was it bad in prison?”

“Pretty bad,” Aquino said. He pulled out his right hand and showed it to Charley Fortnum. “That is when I started to make poetry. It takes a long time to learn to write anything with the left hand, and it is very slow work. I hate things which are slow. I would rather be a mouse than a tortoise, even though the tortoise lives a longer time.” He had become voluble after his second gulp of whisky. “I admire the eagle which drops on its victim like a rock out of the sky, but not the vulture which flaps slowly down, looking as it goes to see if the carrion moves. That is why I took to poetry. Prose moves too slowly, poetry drops like an eagle and stabs before you know. Of course in prison they would not give me paper or a pen, but I did not have to write the poetry. I could learn it by heart.”

“Was it good poetry?” Charley Fortnum asked. “Not that I’d know the difference.”

Aquino said, “I think some of it was good.” He finished his whisky. “Léon said some of it was good. He told me it was like a man called Villon. He was a criminal like me.”

“Never heard of him,” Charley Fortnum said.

“The first poem I wrote in prison,” Aquino said, “was about the first prison of all-the one we all of us know. Do you know what Trotsky said when they showed him his new home in Mexico? They had made it secure from assassins, or so they thought. He said, “This reminds me of my first prison. The doors make the same sound.’ My poem had a refrain, ‘I see my father only through the bars.’ I was thinking, you see, of the pens in which they put children in bourgeois houses. In my poem the father went on following the child all through his life-he was the schoolmaster, and then he was the priest, the police officer, the prison warder, and last he was General Stroessner himself. I saw the General once when he was touring the countryside. He came to the police station I was in and I saw him through the bars.”

“I have a child on the way,” Charley Fortnum said. “I would like to see the little bastard, if only for a short time. But not through bars, you know. I would like to live long enough to know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“When will it be born?”

“In five months I think or thereabouts. I’m not quite sure. I’m a bit hazy about all that sort of thing.”

“Don’t worry. You will be home, Seńor, long before then.”

“Not if you kill me,” Charley Fortnum replied, hoping against hope to receive the usual reassuring response, however false it might sound. He was not surprised when none was forthcoming. He was beginning to live in the region of truth.

“I have written a good many poems about death,” Aquino said cheerfully, with satisfaction, as he held the last drop of his whisky up to catch the light of the candle. “The one I like best has the refrain, ‘Death is a common weed: requires no rain.’ Léon disagrees with me-he says I am writing there like a farmer-I wanted to be a farmer once. He likes better the one that goes, ‘Whatever the crime, the same meal’s served to all.’ And there is another I am pleased with, though I do not really know what exactly I mean by it, but it sounds fine, when you recite it properly, ‘When death is on the tongue, the live man speaks.’ “

“You seem to have written the hell of a lot about death.”

“Yes. I think about half my poems are about death,” Aquino said. “It is one of the two proper subjects for a man-love and death.”

“I don’t want to die before my child is born.”

“I wish you all the luck in the world, Seńor Fortnum. But none of us has a choice. Perhaps tomorrow I will be killed by a car or a fever. And a bullet is one of the quickest and most honourable of deaths.”

“I suppose that’s the way you are going to kill me.”

“Naturally… What other way is there? We are not cruel men, Seńor Fortnum. We shall not cut off your fingers.”

“And yet one can go on living without a few fingers. You haven’t found them so important, have you?”

“Oh, I understand your fear of pain-I know what pain can do to a man-what it did to me-but I cannot understand why you are so afraid of death. Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterward if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.”

“Did you believe in that ‘afterward’ when they tortured you?”

“No,” Aquino admitted. “But I did not think of death either. There was only the pain.”

“We have an expression in English-a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I don’t know anything about that ‘afterward.’ I only know I would like to live another ten years, at my camp, watching the little bastard grow.”

“But, Seńor Fortnum, think what might happen in those ten years. Your child might die, children die so easily here, your wife might betray you, you might be tortured by a long cancer. A bullet is simple and quick.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Perhaps a little more whisky would do me no harm,” Aquino said.

“I’m thirsty myself. You know the old saying-An Englishman is always two whiskies below par.”

He poured it out very carefully: there was hardly more than a quarter of a bottle left, and he thought with sadness of his camp, of the dumbwaiter on the verandah and the fresh bottle which had always stood ready at hand. He asked, “Are you married?”

“Not exactly,” Aquino replied.

“I have been married twice. The first time it didn’t take. The second time-I don’t know why-I felt different. Would you like to see a photograph?”

He found one in his pocketbook-a square Kodachrome print. Clara was sitting at the wheel of Fortnum’s Pride, staring sideways at the camera with an expression of fear as though it might go off like a revolver.

“A pretty girl,” Aquino commented politely.

“Of course you know she can’t really drive,” Fortnum said, “and there’s a lot too much blue in the print. You can see that from the color of the avocados. It wasn’t one of Gruber’s best efforts.” He looked at the photograph with an expression of regret. “It’s a bit out of focus too,” he said, “it doesn’t do her proper justice, but I had taken one over the measure and I suppose my hand must have shaken a bit.” He looked anxiously at what remained in the bottle.

“As a rule,” he said, “there is nothing better to steady the hand. What about finishing the bottle?”

“A very little for me,” Aquino said.

“Every man has his own proper measure. I’d never criticize anyone for not sharing mine. A measure’s sort of built into a man’s system, like a lift in a block of flats.” He was watching Aquino carefully. He had judged correctly that their measures were very different. He said, “I liked that poem of yours about death.”

“Which one?”

“I have such a shocking memory. What will you do with the body?”

“Body?”

“My body.”

“Seńor Fortnum, why talk about disagreeable subjects? I write about death, yes, but only death the great abstraction. I do not write about the death of friends.”

“Those people, you know, in London-they’ve never even heard of me. What do they care? I don’t belong to the right club.”

” ‘Death is a common weed: requires no rain.’ Was that the poem you meant?”

“Yes, of course, that was the one. I remember now. All the same, Aquino, even if it’s as common as all that, one ought to die with a bit of dignity. You will agree to that? Salud.”

“Salud, Seńor Fortnum.”

“Call me Charley, Aquino.”

“Salud, Charley.”

“I wouldn’t like people to find me like this-dirty, unshaven…”

“You can have a bowl of water If you like, Charley.”

“And a razor?”

“No.”

“Only a Gillette. I can’t do much harm with a Gillette.”

It was the measure which counted all right. Everything seemed possible to him now. For instance, even with a pair of scissors-he could moisten the baked earth of the wall first.

“A pair of scissors then just for a trim?”

“I would have to ask Léon first, Charley.” A pointed stick?—he searched for a suitable euphemism. He felt sure, now he had drunk the right measure and he had his wits about him, that it was possible to escape. He said, “I want to write to Clara-she’s my wife. The girl in the photo. You can keep the letter until it’s all over and you are safe. I just want her to know that I thought of her at the end. A pencil-a sharp pencil,” he added incautiously, taking a look at the wall and wondering whether after all he was a bit overoptimistic. There was one point where the wall had crumbled a little: he could see wisps of straw which had been mixed with the mud.

“I have a ballpoint,” Aquino said, “but I had better ask Léon, Charley.” He took it out of his pocket and looked at it carefully.

“What harm can there be, Aquino? I would ask your friend myself, but you know how it is, I never feel at ease with priests.”

Aquino said, “You must give us anything you write. And we shall have to read it.”

“Of course. Shall we open the other bottle?”

“You are not trying to make me drunk? I can drink any man under the table.”

“No, no. It’s only I haven’t had the proper measure myself yet. It’s one over the half that counts with me, and you’ve drunk half my measure yourself.”

“It may be a long time before we can buy you more.”

“Let tomorrow look after tomorrow. That sounds like something from the Bible. I’m getting the literary touch too. The whisky helps. You see I’m not much used to letter-writing. This is the first time I’ve been separated from Clara-since we were really together.”

“You will need some paper, Charley.”

“Yes, I’d forgotten that.”

Aquino brought him five sheets of paper pulled off a pad. “I have counted them,” he said. “You must return all the sheets to me, used or not.”

“And some water to wash in. I don’t want to leave dirty marks all over my letter.”

Aquino obeyed, but he grumbled a little this time. “This is not a hotel, Charley,” he said, planking the basin down and splashing the water on the earth floor.

“If it was, I would be able to hang a notice ‘Not to be disturbed’ on the door. Take a little more whisky with you, Aquino.”

“No. I have drunk enough.”

“Be a friend and shut the door. I can’t bear that Indian staring at me.”

When he was alone Charley Fortnum chose the worn spot on the wall, rubbed water in and attacked it with the ballpoint. After a quarter of an hour there was a little worm cast of dirt on the floor, and a tiny indentation in the wall. If it had not been for the whisky he would have despaired. He propped himself on the floor to hide the mark, washed the ballpoint, and began a letter. He had to justify the time he had spent. “My dear little Clara,” he began and hesitated a long while. For his official reports he used a typewriter which always seemed to find the right bureaucratic phrase, “In reply to your letter of August 10,”

“I have received yours of December 22.”

“How I miss you,” he wrote now. It was the only important thing he had to write; anything he added would be only a repetition or a paraphrase of that. “It seems years since I drove away from the camp. You had a headache that morning. Is it better now? Please do not take too many aspirins. They are bad for the stomach and they must be bad for the baby too. You will see, won’t you, that a tarpaulin is kept over Fortnum’s Pride in case the rains come.”

The letter, he thought, would not be delivered until he was home again or until he was dead, and the sense of an immense distance grew up between the mud hut and the camp, between the coffin and the jeep waiting under the avocados, Clara lying late in the double bed, the dumbwaiter standing idle on the verandah. Tears pricked at his eyes, and he remembered how his father would rebuke him: “Be a man, Charley, not a coward. You cry too easily. I can’t bear self-pity. You should be ashamed. Ashamed. Ashamed.” The word rang like the knell for all hope. Sometimes, but not often, he would defend himself. “But I’m not crying for me. I squashed a lizard this morning in the shutters. I didn’t mean to. I was trying to let it out. I’m crying for the lizard, not for me.” He was not crying now for himself. The tears were for Clara and a few of them for Fortnum’s Pride, both left alone and defenceless. All he was suffering was a little fear and a little discomfort. Loneliness, as he knew from experience, was a worse thing to suffer.

He abandoned the letter, took another swallow of whisky, and started to dig again with the ballpoint pen. The wall absorbed the water and was soon as dry again as a bone. After hah5 an hour he gave up. He had made a hole as large as a mouse-hole, but not an inch deep. He took up his letter again and wrote defiantly, “I can tell you Charley Fortnum’s on his mettle. I’m not the poor chap they think I am. I’m your husband, and I love you far too much to let any bastards like these stand between you and me. I’m going to think up something and I’m going to put this letter in your hands myself, and we’ll laugh at it together and we’ll drink some of that good French champagne I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Champagne never did a baby any harm, or so I’m told.” He stopped writing and laid the letter aside because an idea was really beginning to form in however hazy a way. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and for a moment he had the impression that he was wiping away the whisky too, leaving his mind clear.

“Aquino,” he called, “Aquino.” Aquino came reluctantly and suspiciously in. “No more whisky,” he said.

“I want to use the lavatory, Aquino.”

“I will tell Miguel to go with you.”

“No, please, Aquino… I’ll never get a proper shit with that Indian sitting outside waving his gun at me. He’s longing to use it, Aquino.”

“Miguel means no harm. He is interested in the gun-that’s all. He has never had one before.”

“He frightens me just the same. Why not take the gun yourself and guard me, Aquino? I know you wouldn’t shoot unless you had to.”

“He would not like anyone else to hold his gun.”

“Then I’ll damn well shit in here.”

“I will speak to him,” Aquino said. It’s difficult for most men to shoot a friendly man in cold blood-Charley Fortnum’s plan was as simple as that.

When Aquino returned he was holding the submachine gun. “All right,” he said, “go ahead. I know I have only my left hand, but remember no one needs to be a marksman with one of these. One bullet will always go home.”

“Even a poet’s bullet,” Charley Fortnum said, raking up a smile. “I wish you would give me a copy of that poem. I’d like to keep it as a souvenir.”

“Which poem?”

“You know the one I mean. The one about death.”

He walked through the outer room. The Indian did not look at him. He was watching the gun with anxiety as though something very dear had been put in untrustworthy hands.

Charley Fortnum talked all the way to the shed among the avocados. His watch had stopped during his coma and he had no idea of the time, but he could see how long the shadows were. Under the trees heavy with dark-brown fruit it was already night. He said, “I’ve nearly finished that letter. It’s a damned difficult one to write.” When he got to the door of the shed he turned and tried a smile out on Aquino. If Aquino smiled back it would be a good sign, but Aquino didn’t smile. Perhaps he was only preoccupied. Perhaps he had drunk the wrong measure.

Charley Fortnum waited in the hut for a reasonable time, screwing his courage up. Then he came quickly out and turned sharp right to put the hut between them. It was only a matter of yards and under the trees the darkness waited. He heard a short burst of fire, a shout, an answering shout, he felt nothing. He cried out, “Don’t shoot, Aquino.” At the second burst he fell on the very edge of the dark.