The Honorary Consul

PART FOUR

1

The day began badly for Sir Henry Belfrage at breakfast. For the third time running the cook had fried his egg on both sides. He said, “Did you forget to tell Pedro, dear?”

“No,” Lady Belfrage said, “I swear I didn’t. I remember distinctly…”

“He must have picked the habit up from the Yankees. It’s a Yankee custom. Don’t you remember the trouble we had once at the Plaza in New York? They’ve got a name for ‘fried on one side.’ Can you remember it? Pedro might understand.”

“No, dear… I don’t think I ever heard it.”

“Sometimes I sympathize with those chaps who write about Yankee imperialism. Why should we have to eat our fried eggs like this? Soon he’ll be giving us maple syrup with our sausages. That was a terrible wine we had last night at the American Embassy, darling. Californian, I suppose.”

“No, dear. It was Argentine.”

“Ah, he was trying to curry favor with the Minister of the Interior. But the Minister would have preferred a good French table wine like we serve here.”

“Not a very good wine all the same.”

“The best we can afford with our miserable expense allowance. Did you notice that he served Argentine Scotch?”

“The trouble is, dear, he doesn’t drink anything himself. Do you know he was quite shocked because Mr…. poor Mr. C… you know our Consul, Mason isn’t it?”

“No, no, the other chap. Fortnum.”

“Well, poor Mr. Fortnum apparently brought two bottles of Scotch with him when they went to the ruins.”

“I don’t blame him for that. Do you know the Ambassador travels with an icebox full of Coca-Cola? I wouldn’t have drunk so much of that bloody wine if he hadn’t watched me with those New England eyes of his. I felt like that girl in the book who had a scarlet letter A on her dress. A for Alcoholism.”

“I think it was Adultery, dear.”

“I daresay. I only saw the film. Years ago. They didn’t make it clear.”

The day which had begun miserably enough with the badly fried eggs got steadily worse. Crichton, the Press Attache, came to see him to protest that he was being driven up the wall by telephone calls from the press. He complained to Sir Henry, “I keep telling them that Fortnum was only an Honorary Consul. The reporter on La Prensa can’t understand the difference between Honorary and Honourable. I wouldn’t be surprised if they make him the son of a peer.”

Sir Henry said soothingly, “I doubt if they know enough about our titles for that.”

“They seem to think the whole affair is so very important.”

“Only because it’s the silly season, Crichton. They have no Loch Ness monster here, and the flying saucers go on all through the year.”

“I wish we had some tranquillizing statement we could make, sir.”

“So do I, Crichton, so do I. Of course you can say I spent several hours last night with the American Ambassador-you needn’t say I have a damn bad head as a consequence.”

“The Nación has had another anonymous telephone call-from Cordoba this time. Only four days left.”

“Thank God it’s no longer,” the Ambassador said. “Next week it will all be over. He’ll be either dead or freed.”

“The police think that Cordoba is a blind and he may be in Rosario-or even here by this time.”

“We ought to have retired him six months ago and then none of this would have happened.”

“The police say the kidnapping was a mistake, sir. They wanted the American Ambassador. If that’s right surely the Americans ought to be grateful to us and do something.”

“Wilbur,” Sir Henry Belfrage said, “-the Ambassador insists that I call him Wilbur-refuses to admit he was the intended victim. He says the U. S. A. is very popular in Paraguay-Nelson Rockefeller’s tour proved that. No one threw stones in Paraguay or set fire to any offices. It was as quiet as it was in Haiti. He calls Rockefeller Nelson-it had me confused for a moment. Do you know I really thought for a moment he was going to invite me to call Rockefeller Nelson too?”

“I can’t help being sorry for the poor devil.”

“I don’t think Wilbur needs any of our sympathy, Crichton.”

“I didn’t mean him-I meant-“

“Oh, Mason? Damnation, my wife has started calling him Mason and now I’m doing the same. If Mason gets into an official telegram, God knows where it will end up in London. They’ll think it has something to do with the Mason-Dixon line. I shall have to say to myself Fortnum, Fortnum, Fortnum, like that raven which said Nevermore.”

“You don’t think they will really kill him, sir?”

“Of course I don’t, Crichton. They didn’t even kill that Paraguayan Consul they took a few years back. The General said he wasn’t interested, and they let the fellow go. This isn’t Uruguay or Colombia-or Brazil, for that matter. Or Bolivia. Or Venezuela. Or even Peru,” he added apprehensively as the field of hope narrowed.

“We are in South America, though, aren’t we?” Crichton said with incontestable logic.

A few tiresome telegrams came in during the morning. Somebody had started another Falkland Islands scare: the islands cropped up, like Gibraltar, whenever there was nothing else to worry about. The Foreign Secretary wanted to know as a consequence how Argentina was likely to vote in the latest African issue before the United Nations. The Chief Clerk had issued a new directive about entertainment expenses, and Sir Henry Belfrage could see the time rapidly approaching when he too might have to serve Argentinian wine. There was also a question about the British entry at the Mar del Plata film festival-a Conservative member of Parliament had described the British entry by some man called Russell as pornographic. There had been no directive at all about Fortnum since the previous day when Belfrage had been ordered to see the Foreign Minister and afterward to act in concert with the American Ambassador-the British Ambassador in Asunción had received the same instruction, and Sir Henry hoped he had an American to deal with who was a little more dynamic than Wilbur.

After lunch his secretary told him that a Doctor Plarr was asking to see him.

“Who’s Plarr?”

“He comes from the north. I think he wants to see you about the Fortnum case.”

“Oh bring him in, bring him in,” Sir Henry Belfrage said, “let them all come.” He was vexed at losing his siesta-it was the only time of day when he could feel a private person. There was a new Agatha Christie waiting by his bed, fresh from his bookshop in Curzon Street.

“We’ve met before somewhere,” he said to Doctor Plarr, and he looked at Plarr with suspicion-everyone in B. A. except the Army people seemed to have the title of Doctor. A thin lawyer’s face, he thought; he never felt at ease with lawyers; he found himself shocked by the heartlessness of legal jokes-a convicted murderer was no more to them than a patient with incurable cancer to a surgeon.

“Yes-here at the Embassy,” Doctor Plarr reminded him. “A cocktail party. I rescued your wife from a poet.”

“Of course, of course, I remember now, my dear chap. You live up there. We talked about Fortnum, didn’t we?”

“That’s right. I’m looking after his wife. She’s having a baby, you know.”

“Oh, you are that kind of doctor, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God! One never knows here, does one? And you really are British too. Not like the O’Briens and the Higginses. Well, well, it must be an awful anxiety for poor Mrs. Fortnum. You must tell her we are doing everything in our power…”

“Yes,” Doctor Plarr said, “of course, she realizes that, but I thought I’d like to know a little of how things are going. I flew down to B. A. this morning, because I felt I had to see you and learn a little, and I’m flying back tonight. If there were some definite news I could take back with me… to comfort Mrs. Fortnum…”

“It’s an awfully difficult situation, Plarr. You see, something which is everybody’s responsibility is always nobody’s responsibility. The General is down here in the south fishing and refuses to discuss the matter while he’s on holiday. The Foreign Minister says it’s a purely Paraguayan affair, and the President can’t be expected to bring pressure on the General, when he’s a guest of the nation. Of course the police are doing their best, but they’ve probably been told to act as discreetly as possible. For Fortnum’s own sake.”

“But the Americans… Surely they can bring pressure on the General. He wouldn’t exist twenty-four hours in Paraguay without their help.”

“I know all that, but it makes it the more awkward, Plarr. You see the Americans take the sensible view that these kidnappings have to be discouraged-even if it means, well, how shall I put it? a certain danger to life. Like that German Ambassador they killed-where was it? Guatemala? In this case, to be quite frank… well, an Honorary Consul is not an Ambassador. They feel it would be a bad principle if they interfered. The English are not very popular with the General. Of course if Fortnum were an American he would probably take a different view.”

“The kidnappers thought he was. So the police say. They think the kidnappers were looking for a diplomatic car in the dark and CC is awfully like CD.”

“Yes, how often we’ve told the damned fool not to fly a flag or show CC plates. An Honorary Consul hasn’t the right to use them.”

“Still a death sentence seems a bit severe.”

“What more can I do, Plarr? I’ve been twice to the Foreign Ministry. Last night I spoke unofficially to the Minister of the Interior. He was having dinner with Wilbur-I mean the American Ambassador. I can’t do a thing more without instructions from London, and London has a remarkable sense of-well-unurgency. By the way how is your mother? It all comes back to me now. You are that Plarr. Your mother often has tea with my wife. They both like sweet cakes and those things with dulce de leche.”

“Alfajores.”

“That’s the name. Can’t stand them myself.”

Doctor Plarr said, “I know what a nuisance I must seem to you, Sir Henry, but my father is in one of the General’s jails if he’s still alive. Perhaps this kidnapping is his last chance. That makes me suspect to the police, so I feel personally concerned. And besides there’s Fortnum. I can’t help feeling responsible a bit for him. He’s not a patient of mine, but Mrs. Fortnum is.”

“Wasn’t there something odd about that marriage? I got a letter from up there, from some old busybody called Jeffries.”

“Humphries.”

“Yes. That was the name. He wrote to me that Fortnum had married an ‘undesirable’ woman. Lucky man! I’ve reached the age when I never meet anyone of that sort.”

“It did occur to me,” Doctor Plarr said, “that I might be able to make contact with the kidnappers. They may telephone Mrs. Fortnum if they find they are getting nowhere with the authorities.”

“A bit improbable, my dear chap.”

“But not impossible, sir. If something like that did happen and I had some hope to offer them… Perhaps I could persuade them to extend their time limit-say for a week. In that case surely there might be a chance to negotiate?”

“If you want my honest opinion you would only be extending the agony-for Fortnum and Mrs. Fortnum. If I were Fortnum I’d prefer a quick death.”

“But surely something could be done?”

“I’m sure of this, Plarr, I’ve seen Wilbur twice and the Americans won’t budge. If they can discourage kidnapping by letting an Honorary British Consul, in an obscure province, take the rap, they’ll be very satisfied. Wilbur says Fortnum is an alcoholic-he brought two bottles of whisky to their picnic at the ruins and the Ambassador only drinks Coca-Cola. I looked up our file on him, but there wasn’t anything very definite about alcoholism, though one or two of his reports… well, they did sort of ramble. There was a letter too from that man-Humphries?—saying he had flown the Union Jack upside down. But you don’t need to be an alcoholic to do that.”

“All the same, Sir Henry, if the kidnappers could be persuaded to delay only a little…”

Sir Henry Belfrage knew the time for his siesta was irrevocably lost-the new Agatha Christie would have to wait. He was a kind man and a conscientious one, and he was modest into the bargain. He told himself that in Doctor Plarr’s situation he would have been unlikely to fly in the November heat to Buenos Aires to help the husband of a patient. He said, “There is something you might try to do. I very much doubt if you would be successful, but all the same…”

He hesitated. With a pen in his hand he was a master of compression: his reports were admirably short and lucid, and a telegram never presented him with the least difficulty. He was at home in his Embassy as he had been at home in his nursery. The chandeliers glittered like the glass fruit on a Christmas tree. In the nursery he could remember building neatly and quickly with his coloured bricks. “Master Henry is a clever boy,” his nurse always said, but sometimes when he was let out on the vast green spaces of Kensington Gardens he strayed wildly. There were moments with strangers-just as there still were at his annual cocktail party-when he nearly panicked.

“Yes, Sir Henry?”

“I’m so sorry, my dear chap. My mind was wandering. I’ve got a terrible head this morning. That wine from Mendoza… Cooperatives! What can a Cooperative know about wine?”

“You were saying…”

“Yes, yes.” He put his hand into his breast pocket and touched his ballpoint pen. It was like a talisman. He said, “A delay would be only useful if we could get people sufficiently interested… I’ve been doing all I can, but nobody at home knows Fortnum. Nobody cares about an Honorary Consul. He doesn’t belong to the Service. And to tell you the truth I advised getting rid of him six months ago. That letter will certainly be on the files. So everyone at home will be relieved when the dateline is passed and there are no more minutes to write-and he’s released as I believe.”

“And if he’s killed?”

“I’m afraid the P. O. will take the credit for that too. It will be a sign of firmness; it will show they won’t treat with blackmailers. You know the kind of words they’ll use in the Commons. Law and order. No Danegeld. They’ll quote Kipling. Even the Opposition will applaud.”

“It’s not only Charles Fortnum. There’s his wife… she’s having a baby. Suppose the press took it up…”

“Yes. I see what you mean. The woman who waits, etcetera. But from what that man Humphries wrote I don’t think the kind of wife Fortnum has married will arouse the right sort of sentiment in the English press. Not family reading. The Sun might use the real story of course or the News of the World, but it would hardly have the effect we want.”

“What do you suggest, Sir Henry?”

“You must never, never quote me on this, Plarr. The F. O. would put me out to grass if they knew I had suggested anything of the kind. And I don’t suppose for a moment my idea would do any good. Mason is not the right material.”

“Mason?”

“I’m sorry. I meant Fortnum.”

“You haven’t suggested anything yet, Sir Henry.”

“Well, what I was getting at… There’s nothing a civil servant hates more than a yelp in respectable papers. Sometimes the only way to get action is the right publicity. If you could organize some reaction in your city… Even a telegraphed appeal from the English Club to The Times. Tribute to his…” He touched his pen again as though he might draw from it the correct official jargon. “…. his untiring pursuit of British interests.”

“But there is no English Club, sir. I don’t think there are any other English in the city except Humphries and me.”

Sir Henry Belfrage took a quick look at his fingernails (he had mislaid his nail brush). He said something so rapidly that Doctor Plarr couldn’t catch a word.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear…”

“My dear chap, I don’t have to spell it out to you. Form an English Club immediately and telegraph your tribute to The Times and Telegraph.”

“Do you think it would do any good?”

“No, I don’t, but there’s no harm in trying. There’s always some Opposition M. P. who will take it up whatever his leaders say. At least it might give the Parliamentary Secretary un mauvais quart d’heure. And then there are the American papers. It’s just possible they might copy. The New York Times can be quite virulent. ‘Fighting Latin-American independence to the last Englishman.’ You know the kind of line the antiwar chaps might take. It’s rather a forlorn hope, of course. If he’d been a business tycoon everybody would be a great deal more interested. The trouble is, Plarr, Fortnum is such pitiably small beer.”

There was no plane by which he could return north before the evening, and Doctor Plarr could think of no excuse with which to ease his conscience if he failed to meet his mother. He knew very well what would please her most, and he made a rendezvous by telephone for tea at the Richmond in the Calle Florida-she had no liking for inescapable family conversations in her apartment which she kept almost as airless as the dome over the wax flowers she had bought at an antique shop near Harrods. He always had the impression in her flat that there were secrets from him lying about everywhere, on shelves and on tables, even pushed away under the sofa, secrets she didn’t want him to see-perhaps only tiny extravagances on which she had spent the money he sent her. Cream cakes were food, but a china parrot was an extravagance.

He had to move at a snail’s pace through the crowd that filled the narrow calle every afternoon when it was closed to traffic. He was not displeased, for every minute he lost before meeting his mother was pure gain.

He saw her at the far end of the crowded tea room, sitting in unrelieved black before a plate of sweet cakes. She said, “You are ten minutes late, Eduardo.” From his early childhood they had always spoken Spanish together. Only with his father had he spoken English, and his father was a man of few words.

“I am sorry, mother. You should have begun.” When he bent to kiss her cheek he could smell the hot chocolate in her cup like a sweet breath from a tomb.

“Call the waiter, dear, if there is not a cake here that pleases you.”

“I don’t really want to eat anything, mother. I’ll just have a cup of coffee.”

She had heavy pouches below her eyes, but they were not, Doctor Plarr knew, the pouches of grief, but of constipation. He had an impression that if they were squeezed they would squirt cream like an éclair. It is terrible what time can do to a beautiful woman. A man’s looks often improve with age, seldom a woman’s. He thought: a man should never love a woman less than twenty years younger than himself. In that way he can die before the vision fades. Had Fortnum insured himself against disillusion when he married Clara, who was more than forty years younger than himself? Doctor Plarr thought, I’m not so wise, I shall outlive her attraction by many years.

“Why the mourning, mother?” he asked. “I have never seen you in black before.”

“I am mourning for your father,” Seńora Plarr said and wiped the chocolate off her fingers with a paper napkin.

“Have you had news then?”

“No, but Father Galvăo has been speaking to me very seriously. He says that for the sake of my health I must give up vain hopes. Do you know what day it is, Eduardo?”

He searched his mind without success-he was even uncertain of the day of the month. “The fourteenth?” he asked.

“It is the day we said goodbye to your father in the port of Asunción.”

He wondered whether his father, if he were to walk into the tea room now, could possibly recognize the stout and pouchy woman who had a smear of cream at the corner of the mouth. In our memories people we no longer see age gracefully. Seńora Plarr said, “Father Galvăo held a Mass this morning for the repose of his soul.” She scrutinized the plate of cakes and picked a particular éclair, not noticeably different from the others. Yet when he searched his memory he could still just remember a lovely woman who lay and wept in her cabin. Tears at the age she had been then enhanced the brilliance of her eyes. There were no pouches to mar them.

He said, “I still have hope, mother. You know the kidnappers have named him on the list of prisoners they want released?”

“What kidnappers?” He had forgotten she never read the papers.

“Oh well,” he said, “it’s too long a story to tell you now.” He added politely, “What a very nice black dress.”

“I am glad you like it. I had it made specially for the Mass this morning. The material was quite inexpensive, and I had it run up by a little woman… You must not think I am extravagant.”

“No, of course not, mother.”

“If only your father had been less obstinate… What was the use of staying on the estancia to be murdered? He could have sold it for a good price, and we could have been happy here together.”

“He was an idealist,” Doctor Plarr said.

“Ideals are all very well, but it was very wrong of him and very selfish of him not to put his family first.”

He wondered what kind of bitter and reproachful prayers she had muttered that morning at Father Galvăo’s Mass. Father Galvăo was a Portuguese Jesuit who for some reason had been transferred from Rio de Janeiro. He was very popular with women-perhaps they were more ready to confide in him because he had come from a long way off.

All around him in the Richmond he heard the chatter of women’s voices. He could hardly distinguish a single phrase. He might have been in an aviary, listening to a babel of birds from many different regions. There were those who twittered in English, others in German, he even heard a French phrase which his mother would appreciate, “George est trčs coupable.” He looked at her as she tipped her mouth toward the chocolate. Had she ever felt any love for his father or himself, or had she just played the comedy of love like Clara? He had grown up, during the years he spent alone with his mother in Buenos Aires, to despise comedy. There were no sentimental relics in his apartment-not even a photograph. It was as bare and truthful-almost-as a police station cell. Even during his affairs with women he had always tried to avoid that phrase of the theatre, “I love you.” He had been accused often enough of cruelty, though he preferred to think of himself as a painstaking and accurate diagnostician. If for once he had been aware of a sickness he could describe in no other terms, he would have unhesitatingly used the phrase “I love,” but he had always been able to attribute the emotion he felt to a quite different malady-to loneliness, pride, physical desire, or even a simple sense of curiosity.

Seńora Plarr said, “He never loved either of us. He was a man who never knew what love meant.”

He wanted to ask her seriously, “Do we?” but he knew she would take it as a reproach, and he had no desire to reproach her. With more justice he could reproach himself for equal ignorance. Perhaps, he thought, she is in the right and I resemble my father. He said, “I do not remember him at all clearly, except that, when he said goodbye, I noticed how grey his hair had become. I remember too how he would go round locking all the doors at night. The noise always woke me up. I do not even know how old he would be if he were alive now.”

“He would have been seventy-one today.”

“Today? Then was it on his birthday…?”

“He told me the best present he could receive from me was to watch the two of us go off down the river. It was very cruel of him to say that.”

“But, mother, I don’t think he could have meant it cruelly.”

“He had not even told me beforehand. I had no time to pack properly. I forgot some of my jewels. There was a little watch with diamonds which I used to wear with a black dress. You remember the black dress? But of course you would not remember. You were always such an unobservant boy. He said he was afraid I would tell my friends and they would gossip and the police would stop us. I had prepared a very nice birthday dinner for him, with a cheese savoury-he always liked savouries better than a dessert. That is what it is like to marry a foreigner. Our tastes were never the same. This morning I prayed very hard he might not be suffering too much.”

“I thought you believed he was dead.”

“Suffering in purgatory of course I mean. Father Galvăo says that the worst pain in purgatory is when people see the consequence of their actions and the suffering they have caused to those they love.” She picked out another éclair.

“But you said he loved neither of us.”

“Oh, I suppose he did feel a certain affection. And duty. He was very English. He preferred the company of other men. I have no doubt he went to the Club after the boat left.”

“What club?” For years they had not spoken so much of his father.

“It was not a safe club for him to belong to. It was called the Constitutional, but the police closed it. Afterward the members met in secret-once even at our estancia. He would not listen to me when I protested. I said, ‘You have a wife and child.’ He said, ‘Every member of the club has a wife and child.’ I said, ‘In that case they should have more important things to talk about than politics.’ Oh well,” she added with a little sigh, “those are old quarrels. Of course I have forgiven him. Tell me a little about yourself, dear,” and her eyes glazed over with lack of interest.

“Oh,” he said, “there is nothing really to tell.”

The evening plane to the north represented a hazard for a man like Doctor Plarr who liked to remain alone. Few strangers or tourists travelled by it. Among the passengers were usually local politicians returning from a visit to the capital, or expensive wives whom he had sometimes examined (they would have gone to Buenos Aires for a shopping expedition or a party, even for a hairdo because they didn’t trust their local hairdresser). They would form a noisy group of familiars in the small two-engined plane.

There was only the smallest chance of an undisturbed flight, and his spirits sank when, from just across the gangway, Seńora Escobar greeted him, before he even saw her, with a parrot cry of pleasure. “Eduardo!”

“Margarita!”

He began resignedly to unbuckle his safety belt, so as to take the empty seat beside her.

“No,” she told him in a quick whisper, “Gustavo is with me. He is at the back talking to Colonel Perez.”

“Colonel Perez is here too?”

“They are talking about the kidnapping. Do you know what I believe?”

“No?”

“I think the man Fortnum has run away from his wife.”

“Why would he do that?”

“You must know the story, Eduardo. She is a putain. She comes from that horrible house in Calle… but you are a man. You know very well the one I mean.”

He remembered that Margarita had always, when she wished to be a little coarse, employed a French term. He could hear her crying, in the carefully measured shadows of her room, made by the persianas two thirds closed, “Baise-moi, baise-moi!” Never would she have allowed herself to use the equivalent Spanish phrase. She said, “I have not seen you for such a long time, Eduardo,” with a sigh as carefully adjusted for the occasion as the shutters of her bedroom. He wondered what had happened to her new lover-Caspar Vallejo of the financial department. He hoped that there had been no quarrel.

The roar of the engines saved him from the need to reply, and by the time the overhead warnings had been switched off and they were high above the khaki-coloured Plata, which turned black as the evening darkened, he had a vague phrase ready on the tongue. “You know what it is like to be a doctor, Margarita.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know-who better? Do you still see Seńora Vega?”

“No. I think she must have changed her doctor.”

“I would never do that, Eduardo-there are not so many good doctors as that. If I have not asked you to come to see me it is only that I have been disgustingly well. Why, here is my husband at last. Look whom we have here, Gustavo! Do not pretend you have forgotten Doctor Plarr.”

“How could I forget him? Where have you been all this long time, Eduardo?” Gustavo Escobar laid his hand heavily on Doctor Plarr’s shoulder and kneaded it gently-he had the Latin-American desire to touch any man to whom he spoke. Even the knife-thrust in one of Jorge Julio Saavedra’s stories could be interpreted as a way of touching. “We have missed you,” he went on in the loud voice of a deaf man. “How often my wife has said ‘I wonder why Eduardo never calls on us now?’ “

Gustavo Escobar had a large black moustache and abundant sideburns: his face, brick-red as laterite, resembled a clearing which has been hacked out of the bush, and his nose reared like the horse of a conquistador. Escobar said, “I have missed you as much as my wife has. All those friendly little dinners we used to have…”

Doctor Plarr, during the whole time that he had been Margarita’s lover, had never been able to distinguish with certainty between his rough playfulness and his irony. Margarita had always assured him that her husband was a man of the most passionate jealousy-it would have hurt her pride to feel he did not really care. Perhaps indeed he did care, for she was at least one of his women, even though he had a great many. Doctor Plarr on one occasion had encountered him at Mother Sanchez’ house where he was entertaining four girls at once. The girls, against all the rules of the house, were drinking champagne, good French champagne which he must have brought with him. No rules of the house were likely to be enforced against Gustavo Escobar. Doctor Plarr sometimes wondered whether he had ever been a client of Clara’s. What sort of comedy would she have played for him? Perhaps abasement?

“What have you been up to, my dear Eduardo, in Buenos Aires?”

“I have been to the Embassy,” Doctor Plarr shouted back at him, “and I have seen my mother. And you?”

“My wife has been shopping. As for myself I had lunch at the Hurlingham.” He continued to finger Doctor Plarr’s shoulder almost as though he were considering whether to buy him for breeding purposes (he had a big estancia on the Chaco side of the Paraná).

“Gustavo is deserting me again for a whole week,” Margarita said. “He always allows me to go shopping just before he deserts me.”

Doctor Plarr would have liked to turn the conversation to his successor, Caspar Vallejo, to whom the information she had given him ought more properly to have been addressed. It would have been reassuring to know that Vallejo was still a friend of the family.

“What about joining me on the estancia, Eduardo? I can give you some good shooting.”

“A doctor is tied to his patients,” Doctor Plarr said.

The plane dipped in an air pocket and Escobar had to grasp the back of Plarr’s seat.

“Be careful, caro. You will hurt your precious self. Better sit down.”

Perhaps it was the mechanical expression of his wife’s solicitude which irritated Escobar. Or perhaps he took the warning as a reflection on his machismo. He said with quite unmistakable irony, “You are tied to a very favourite patient at the moment, I believe, Eduardo?”

“All my patients are favourite ones.”

“Seńora Fortnum is having a baby, I believe?”

“Yes. And so, I expect you know, is Seńora Vega, but she doesn’t trust me with a childbirth. She goes to Doctor Benevento now.”

“A discreet man Eduardo,” Escobar said. He fumbled past his wife to the seat by the window and sat down. Almost as soon as he closed his eyes he appeared to be asleep, sitting bolt upright. He looked as one of his ancestors might have looked, asleep on the saddle, crossing the Andes; he rocked gently with the stride of the plane across the snowy summits of the clouds.

“What did he mean, Eduardo?” his wife asked in a whisper.

“How do I know?”

He remembered that Escobar had always been a very heavy sleeper. Once, very early in their relationship, Margarita had told him, “Nothing ever wakes him except a sudden silence. Just go on talking.”

“What about?” he had asked.

“Anything. Why not tell me how much you love me?” They had been sitting together on a sofa and her husband was sleeping in an armchair at the opposite end of the room, the back of the chair turned to them. Doctor Plarr couldn’t even tell whether his eyes were closed. He said cautiously, “I want you.”

“Yes?”

“I want you.”

“Don’t sound so staccato,” she said as she touched him. “He needs to hear the steady murmur of conversation.”

It is difficult to keep a monologue going while a woman makes love to you. In desperation Doctor Plarr had begun to recount the story of the Three Bears, beginning it in the middle, while all the time he watched with anxiety the powerful statuesque head above the chair back.

“And then the third bear said in his gruff voice, ‘Who has been eating up my porridge?’ “

Seńora Escobar sat astride him as though she were a child playing ponies. “And so all three bears went upstairs and the little bear said, ‘Who has been sleeping in my bed?’ ” He clutched Seńora Escobar’s shoulders, and lost the thread of the story, so that he had to continue with the first phrase which came into his head, “This is the way the post boy rides. Gallopy, gallopy, gallopy.” When they were relaxed again on the sofa side by side, Seńora Escobar-he had not been given enough time to think of her yet as Margarita-said, “You were speaking in English. What were you saying?”

“I was telling you how much I wanted you,” Doctor Plarr said warily. The post boy had been a game he had played with his father: his mother had no repertoire. Perhaps Spanish children had no games-or no childish ones.

“What did Gustavo mean about Seńora Fortnum?” Margarita asked again, bringing him back to the present and the plane which lurched in the wind currents above the Paraná.

“I have no idea.”

“You would disappoint me terribly, Eduardo, if you really had anything to do with that little putain. I am still very fond of you.”

“Excuse me, Margarita,” he said. “I want to have a word with Colonel Perez.” The lights of La Paz blinked below them-there was a white ruled line of lamps along the river with complete darkness on the other side, as though the lamps marked the edge of a flat world. Perez was sitting at the far end of the plane near the lavatory and the seat beside him was empty.

“Any news, Colonel?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“News of what?”

“Of Fortnum.”

“No. Why? Were you expecting any?”

“I thought perhaps the police might have some… Didn’t the radio say you were looking for him in Rosario?”

“If he had been really in Rosario they could easily have brought him into Buenos Aires by this tune.”

“And what about the call from Cordoba?”

“That was probably a stupid attempt to confuse us. Cordoba is out of the question. I doubt if they could have even reached Rosario by the time of the call. It would have taken fifteen hours in the fastest car.”

“Then where do you suppose he is?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“He is probably dead in the river or else he is hidden nearer home. What were you doing in Buenos Aires?” It was a polite question, not a police question. He was no more interested than Escobar.

“I wanted to see the Ambassador about Fortnum.”

“Yes. What did he have to say?”

“I interrupted his siesta, poor man. He said the trouble is that no one’s really interested.”

Colonel Perez said, “I assure you I am. Yesterday I wanted to organize a thorough search of the barrio popular, but the Governor thought it too dangerous. He does not want shooting if possible. Ours has been a very quiet province up till now except for a little trouble from those third world priests. He sent me off to Buenos Aires today to talk to the Minister of the Interior. I think the Governor hopes to delay matters. If he can postpone action long enough and we are lucky Fortnum’s body may be found outside the province. No one can complain then that we acted imprudently. The blackmail will have failed. Everyone will be happy. Except myself. Even your government will be happy. I hope they will pay a pension to the widow?”

“I doubt it. He was only an Honorary Consul. What did the Minister say?”

“He is not afraid of shooting, that man. We could do with more like him. He advises the Governor to go ahead whatever happens and to use troops if necessary. The President wants everything settled before the General finishes his fishing. What else did your Ambassador say?”

“He said if the papers made enough fuss…”

“Why should they? Have you heard the afternoon radio? A BOAC plane has crashed. A hijacker let off his grenade this time. There are a hundred and sixty-seven death’s-a hundred and sixty-seven Fortnums, and one of them a film star. No, Doctor Plarr, we have to admit that ours is a very small affair.”

“Do you want to give up then?”

“Oh no-I have dealt all my life in small affairs, and I have always preferred to see them settled. Unfinished dossiers take up a lot of room. A smuggler was shot yesterday on the river, so we have been able to close his file. Somebody has stolen a hundred thousand pesos from a bedroom in the Naciónal-but we have our eyes on the man. And early this morning there was a small bomb found in the church of La Cruz. A very small bomb-for we are a very quiet province-and it was set to go off at midnight when the church was empty. If it had exploded, though, it might have destroyed the miraculous cross-and that would have been real news in El Litoral, even if not in the Nación. Perhaps it may become news in any case. There are rumours already that Our Lady herself got down off her altar and defused the bomb with her own hands and the Archbishop has visited the scene. You know the cross was first saved-years before Buenos Aires even existed-when lightning killed the Indians who were going to burn it.” The door of the lavatory opened. “You know my colleague Captain Velardo, doctor? I was telling the doctor about our new miracle, Ruben.”

“You may laugh, colonel, but the bomb did not go off.”

“You see, doctor, Ruben half believes.”

“I keep an open mind. Like the Archbishop. The Archbishop is an educated man.”

“I think the fuse was badly set.”

“And why was the fuse badly set? One has to go back to the source, colonel. A miracle is very much like a crime. You say the fuse was badly set, but how can we be sure that it was not Our Lady who guided the hand which set the fuse?”

“All the same I prefer to believe we are kept in the air now by the engines-even though they are not Rolls Royce-rather than by divine intervention.”

The plane dropped again in a pocket of air and the warning lights went on, telling them to fasten seatbelts. Doctor Plarr thought that Colonel Perez looked a little uneasy. He went back to his seat.

2

Having sent out invitations by telephone from the airport Doctor Plarr waited for his two guests on the terrace of the Nacional. On a sheet of hotel notepaper he drafted a careful letter which he believed the Ambassador would have found sober and convincing. The city was beginning to wake up for the evening hours after the long siesta of the afternoon. A chain of cars drove by along the riverside. The white naked statue in the belvedere shone under the lamplight, and the Coca-Cola sign glowed in scarlet letters like the shrine of a saint. Through the darkness the ferry boat was screaming a warning from the Chaco shore. It was a few minutes past nine-far too early for most people to dine-and Doctor Plarr was alone on the terrace except for Doctor Benevento and his wife. Doctor Benevento sat taking little sips at an aperitif, as though he were suspiciously testing the tonic of a rival, while his wife, a severe and middle-aged woman who wore a large gold cross like some order of distinction, ostentatiously took nothing and watched the disappearance of her husband’s aperitif with a false air of patience. It was a Thursday, Doctor Plarr remembered, and perhaps Doctor Benevento had come straight to the hotel from his weekly inspection of Mother Sanchez’ girls. The two doctors ignored each other: after all the years which had passed since he arrived from Buenos Aires Doctor Plarr was still in the eyes of Doctor Benevento a foreign interloper.

Humphries was the first of his guests to arrive. He was tightly buttoned in a dark suit and his forehead was wet in the humid night. His temper was not improved when a bold mosquito, immediately he sat down, attacked his ankle through a thick grey woollen sock. The professor of English struck angrily out and complained, “I was just leaving for the Italian Club when I got your message,” as if he resented being deprived of his usual goulash. He looked at the third place at table and asked, “Who’s coming?”

“Doctor Saavedra.”

“In God’s name why? I can’t understand what you see in that fellow. A pompous ass.”

“I thought his advice might be useful. I want to draft a letter to the papers from the Anglo-Argentinian Club on behalf of Fortnum.”

“You are fooling me. What club? It doesn’t exist.”

“You and I are going to found the club tonight. Saavedra, I hope, will be the president, I will be the chairman. I thought you wouldn’t mind taking on the job of honorary secretary. There won’t be very much to do.”

“This is sheer madness,” Humphries said. “As far as I know there’s only one other Englishman in the city. Or there was. I’m convinced Fortnum’s absconded. That woman of his must have been costing him a great deal of money. Sooner or later we shall hear that the accounts at the Consulate are in the red. Or more likely we shall hear nothing at all. Those Embassy fellows in B. A. are sure to hush things up. For the honour of their so-called service. One never gets at the truth of anything.” It was his perpetual and quite genuine complaint. Truth was like a difficult sentence which his pupils never succeeded in getting grammatically right. Doctor Plarr said, “At least there’s no doubt about the kidnapping. That’s true enough. I’ve talked to Perez.”

“Do you trust what a policeman says?”

“This policeman, yes. Look, Humphries, be reasonable. We have to do something for Fortnum. Even if he did fly the Union Jack upside down. The poor devil has only three days left to live. The Ambassador today-he doesn’t want it known-suggested we ought to write some sort of tribute to the papers. Anything to stir up a little interest. From the English Club here. Oh, yes, yes, you’ve already said it. Of course there’s no such club. Coming back on the plane I thought it would be better to call the club the Anglo-Argentinian. In that way we can use Saavedra’s name and we have more chance of making the B. A. papers. We can talk about the good influence Fortnum has always had on our relations with Argentina. We can speak of his cultural activities.”

“Cultural activities! His father was a notorious drunkard and so is Charley Fortnum. Don’t you remember the night we had to haul him back to the Bolívar? He couldn’t even stand up. All he has done for our relations with Argentina is to marry a local whore.”

“All the same we can’t just let him die.”

“I wouldn’t raise my little finger,” Humphries said, “for that man.”

Something was going on inside the Nacional. The maître d’hôtel, who had come out on the terrace to breathe the air before the night’s activities began, was hurrying back to the dining room. A waiter, who was halfway to Doctor Benevento’s table, turned tail in response to a signal. Through the French window of the restaurant Doctor Plarr saw the pearl-gray gleam of Jorge Julio Saavedra’s suit as the author paused to exchange a few words with the staff. A woman from the cloakroom took his hat, the waiter took his cane, the manager came hurrying from his office to join the maître d’hôtel. Doctor Saavedra was explaining something, pointing here and there; when he came out on the terrace, they escorted him in a phalanx toward Doctor Plarr’s table. Even Doctor Benevento rose a few inches in his seat, as Doctor Saavedra pigeon-toed by in his gleaming pointed shoes.

“Here comes the great novelist,”. Humphries sneered. “I bet none of them has read a word he ever wrote.”

“You are probably right, but his great-grandfather was Governor here,” Doctor Plarr said. “In Argentina they have a strong sense of history.”

The manager wanted to know whether the table was placed in a position satisfactory to Doctor Saavedra; the maître d’hôtel whispered in Doctor Plarr’s ear news of a special dish which was not marked on the menu-some salmon had arrived that day fresh from Iguazu; there was also a dorado if Doctor Plarr’s guests would prefer that.

When the staff had departed one by one, Doctor Saavedra said, “They make a ridiculous fuss of me. I was only telling them I was going to set a scene in my new novel in the restaurant of the Nacional. I wanted to explain where I wanted my character to be seated. I had to see exactly what would lie in his view at the moment when Fuerabbia, his assailant, enters armed from the terrace.”

“Is it a detective story?” Humphries asked with malice. “I like a good detective story.”

“I trust I shall never write a detective story, Doctor Humphries, if by a detective story you mean one of those absurd puzzles, which are the literary equivalent of a jigsaw. In my new book I am concerned with the psychology of violence.”

“Gauchos again?”

“No, not gauchos. This is a contemporary novel-my second venture into politics. It is set in the time of the dictator Rosas.” “I thought you said it was contemporary.”

“The ideas are contemporary. If you were a writer, Doctor Humphries, instead of a teacher of literature, you would know a novelist has to stand at a distance from his subject. Nothing dates more quickly than the immediately contemporary. You might as well expect me to write a story about the kidnapping of Seńor Fortnum.” He turned to Doctor Plarr. “I had some difficulty in getting away tonight, something unpleasant happened, but when my doctor calls I have to obey. What is it all about?”

“Doctor Humphries and I have decided to found an Anglo-Argentina Club.”

“An excellent idea. What activities…?”

“Cultural of course. Literary, archaeological. We want you to be president.”

“I am honoured,” Doctor Saavedra said.

“One of the first things I would like the club to do is to make an appeal to the press on the subject of Fortnum’s kidnapping. If he had been here he would certainly have been a member.”

“How can I help you?” Doctor Saavedra asked. “I have hardly spoken to Seńor Fortnum. Just once at Seńora Sanchez’…”

“I have brought a rough draft-a very rough draft. I am no writer-except of prescriptions.”

Humphries said, “The man has absconded. That is all there is to it. He probably arranged the whole affair himself. Personally I refuse to sign.”

“Then we shall have to do without you, Humphries. Only your friends-if you have any-may wonder, when the letter’s published, why you are not a member of the Anglo-Argentinian Club. They may even think you were blackballed.”

“You know there’s no such club.”

“Oh yes, there is, and Doctor Saavedra has agreed to be our president. This is the first club dinner. And we have a very good salmon from Iguazu. If you don’t wish to be a member, go away and have some goulash at your Italian joint.”

“Are you trying to blackmail me?”

“In a good cause.”

“Morally you are no better than the kidnappers.”

“No better-all the same I would rather they didn’t kill Charley Fortnum.”

“Charley Fortnum’s a disgrace to his country.”

“No signature. No salmon.”

“You give me no alternative,” Doctor Humphries said, undoing his napkin.

Doctor Saavedra read the letter with care. He laid it down beside his plate. “If I might take this home and work on it,” he said. “It lacks-you must not mind my criticism, it comes from a professional conscience-it lacks the sense of urgency. It reads as coldly as a company report. If you would leave the letter in my hands I will write you something with color and dramatic effect. Something the press would have to print on its own merits.”

“I want to cable it tonight to The Times in London and get it into tomorrow’s papers in Buenos Aires.”

“A letter like this cannot be hurried, Doctor Plarr, and I am a slow writer. Give me till tomorrow and I promise you the result will be worth waiting for.”

“The poor devil may have only about three days to live. I’d rather cable my rough draft tonight than wait till tomorrow. Over in England it’s already tomorrow.”

“Then you will have to do without my signature. I’m sorry, doctor, it would be wrong for me to put my name to the letter as it stands now. No one in Buenos Aires would believe I had a hand in it. It contains-forgive me-some terrible clichés. Just listen to this…”

“That is why I wanted you to rewrite the letter.

Surely you can do it now. At the table.”

“Do you believe writing is as easy as that? Would you do a delicate operation, on the spur of the moment, on this table? I will sit up all night if necessary. The quality of the letter I write you will more than make up for the delay, even in translation. By the way who is going to translate it-you or Doctor Humphries? I would like to check the translation before you send it abroad. I trust your accuracy, of course, but it is a question of style. In a letter like this we have to move the reader, to bring home to him the character of this poor man…”

“The less you bring home his character the better,” Humphries said.

“As I see it, Seńor Fortnum is a simple man-not very wise or intelligent-and suddenly he finds himself close to violent death. Perhaps he has never even thought of death before. It is a situation in which such a man either succumbs to fear or he grows in stature. Consider the case of Seńor Fortnum. He is married to a young wife, a child is on the way…”

“We have no time to write a novel on the subject,” Doctor Plarr said.

“When I met him, he had drunk a little too much. I found his company embarrassing until I saw, behind the superficial gaiety, a profound melancholy.”

“You are not far wrong there,” Doctor Plarr said with surprise.

“He was drinking, I think, for the same reason that I write-to escape the darkness of his own spirit. He confided to me that he was in love.”

“In love at sixty!” Humphries exclaimed. “He ought to have got beyond all that nonsense.”

“I have not got beyond it,” Doctor Saavedra said. “If I were beyond it, I would no longer be able to write. The sexual instinct and the creative instinct live and die together. Youth, Doctor Humphries, lasts longer in some men than you, from your personal experience, may suppose.”

“He just wanted to keep a whore handy. Do you call that love?”

“If we could get back to the letter…” Doctor Plarr said.

“And what do you call love, Doctor Humphries? An arranged marriage in the Spanish tradition? A large family of children? Let me tell you I have loved a whore myself. A whore can have more generosity of spirit than you will find in the bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires. As a poet I have been helped better by a whore than by any critic-or professor of literature.”

“I thought you were a novelist, not a poet.”

“In Spanish we do not confine the term poet to those who write metrically.”

“The letter,” Doctor Plarr interrupted. “Let us try to finish the letter before we finish the salmon.”

“You must let me think quietly-the opening sentence is the key to the rest. One has to strike the right tone, even the right rhythm. The right rhythm in prose is every bit as important as the right meter in a poem. This is a very good salmon. May I have another glass of wine?”

“You can drink the whole bottle if you will write the letter.”

“What a fuss to make about Charley Fortnum,” Doctor Humphries said. He had finished his salmon, he had drained his glass, he had nothing to fear. “You know there’s another possible motive for his disappearance-he doesn’t want to stand father to another man’s child.”

“I want to begin the letter with a character study of the victim,” Doctor Saavedra said, ballpoint in hand, a little salmon shaking on his upper lip, “but somehow Seńor Fortnum refuses to come alive. I have had to cross out almost every other word. In a novel I could have created him in a few sentences. It is his reality which defeats me. I am hamstrung by his reality. When I write down a phrase it is as though Fortnum himself put a hand on my wrist and said, ‘But this is not how I am at all.’”

“Let me pour you another glass.”

“There is another thing he says to me which makes me hesitate. ‘Why are you trying to send me back to the kind of life I used to lead, a Life sad and without honour?’”

“Charley Fortnum never worried much about honour,” Doctor Humphries said, “so long as there was enough whisky around.”

“If you could look deep enough into anyone’s character, even perhaps your own, you would find the sense of machismo.”

It was past ten o’clock and guests were beginning to drift across the terrace for dinner. They moved along separate routes, passing on either side of Doctor Plarr’s table, like migrating tribes passing a rock in the desert, and they carried their children with them. A baby, which might have been an idol of wax, sat upright in a pram: a pale-faced child of three staggered from fatigue across the marble desert dressed in a blue party dress, her little ears pierced for gold rings; a boy of six drummed his way, yawning at every step, along the terrace wall. One had the impression that they had crossed a whole continent to arrive here. No doubt at dawn, the grazing exhausted, they would pack up and move to another camping ground. Doctor Plarr said impatiently, “Give me back my letter. I want to send it as it is.”

“In that case I cannot put my name to it.”

“And you, Humphries?”

“I won’t sign. You can’t threaten me now. I’ve finished my salmon.”

Doctor Plarr took the letter and tore it in two. He put some money on the table and rose.

“Doctor Plarr, I am sorry to anger you. Your style is not bad, it is workmanlike, but nobody would believe that I had written the letter.”

Doctor Plarr went to the lavatory. As he washed his hands he thought: I am like Pilate, a cliché of which Doctor Saavedra would not approve. He washed his hands scrupulously as though he were about to examine a patient. Raising them from the water he looked into the glass and threw a question at the worried image there-if they kill Fortnum will I marry Clara? It would not be a necessary consequence; she would never expect him to marry her. If she inherited the camp she could sell it and move elsewhere-home to Tucumán? Or perhaps she would take a flat in B. A. and eat sweet cakes like his mother? It would be more satisfactory for all of them if Fortnum lived. Fortnum would make a better father for the child than he would-a child needed love.

As he dried his hands he heard the voice of Doctor Saavedra behind him. “You think I have failed you, doctor, but you are not aware of all the circumstances.”

The novelist was urinating. He had turned up the right sleeve of his pearl-gray jacket; he was a fastidious man.

Doctor Plarr said, “I thought it was not too much to ask you to sign a letter, however badly written, and perhaps save a man’s life.”

“I think I had better tell you the real reason. I need more than one of your pills tonight Doctor, I have been deeply wounded.” Doctor Saavedra buttoned up his trousers and turned. “I have spoken to you already about Montez?”

“Montez? No, I can’t remember the name.”

“He is a young novelist in Buenos Aires-not so young now, I suppose, older than you, the years pass quickly. I helped him to get his first novel published. A very strange novel. Surrealist but excellently written. Emece turned it down, Sur would not accept it, and I only persuaded my own publisher to take it by promising that I would write a favourable criticism. In those days I was writing a weekly column in the Nation which had a lot of influence. I was fond of Montez. I felt myself to be a sort of father to him. Even though, during my last years in Buenos Aires, I saw very little of him. He had made his own friends after his success. All the same I never failed to praise his work when I had the chance. Now see what he has written about me.” He took from his pocket a folded page of print. It was a long and well-written article. The subject was the bad effect of the epic poem, Martin Fierro, on the Argentine novel. Borges the author excepted from his criticism. He had a few words of praise for Mallea and Sabato, but he made cruel fun of Jorge Julio Saavedra’s novels. The word mediocre appeared frequently, the word machismo rang mockingly out from nearly every paragraph. Was he revenging the patronage which Saavedra had once shown him, all the boring counsel to which he had probably been forced to listen? Doctor Plarr said, “Yes, it is a betrayal, Saavedra.”

“Not only of myself. Of his country. Martin Fierro is Argentina. Why, my own grandfather died in a duel. He fought with bare hands against a drunken gaucho who insulted him. Where would we be now”-his hands waved from basin to urinoir-“if our fathers had not reverenced machismo? You see what he writes about the girl from Salta. He has not even understood the symbolism of her one leg. If I had signed your letter imagine how he would have sneered at the style. ‘Poor Jorge Julio-that is what happens to a writer who runs away from his peers and hides in the provinces. He writes like a clerk of the intendente.’ I wish Montez were here now so that I could teach him the meaning of machismo. Here on these tiles.”

“Have you a knife handy?” Doctor Plarr asked, hoping in vain to raise a smile.

“I would fight him as my grandfather did with my bare hands.”

Doctor Plarr said, “Your grandfather was killed.”

“I am not afraid of death,” Doctor Saavedra said. “Charley Fortnum is. It’s a very small thing to do-to sign a letter.”

“A small thing? To sign a piece of prose like that? It would be much easier to give my life. Oh, I know it’s impossible for someone who is not a writer to understand.”

“I am trying to,” Doctor Plarr said. “Your purpose is to draw attention to Seńor Fortnum’s case? Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Then this is what I suggest. Inform the newspapers and your government that I have offered myself as a hostage in his place.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am quite serious.”

It might work, Doctor Plarr thought, there is just a faint possibility that in this crazy country it might work. He was moved to say, “It’s brave of you, Saavedra.”

“At least I will show young Montez that machismo is not an invention of the author of Martin Fierro.”

“You realize,” Doctor Plarr said, “they might accept your offer? And then there would be no more novels by Jorge Julio Saavedra-unless perhaps the General reads you and you have a big public in Paraguay.”

“You will cable Buenos Aires and The Times of London too? You will not forget The Times? Two of my novels were published in England. And El Litoral. You must telephone them. The kidnappers are sure to read El Litoral.”

They went together to the manager’s office which was empty and Doctor Plarr wrote out the cables. When he turned he saw the eyes of Doctor Saavedra red with unshed tears. Saavedra said, “Montez was like a son to me. I admired his books. They were so different from my own, and they had quality-I could see they had quality. Yet all the time he must have been despising me. I am an old man, Doctor Plarr, so death is not very far off from me in any case. That story I was describing to the hotel manager-the story of the intruder-I was going to call the novel The Intruder-it would probably never have been finished. Even while I was planning it I knew it belonged to his region of literature and not to mine. I used to give him advice and see me now-planning to imitate him. It is the privilege of the young to imitate. I would prefer to die in a way that even Montez would have to respect.”

“He will say that you were killed too in the end by Martin Fierro.”

“In Argentina we are most of us killed by Martin Fierro. But a man has the right to choose the moment of death.”

“Charley Fortnum has not been allowed to choose.”

“Seńor Fortnum is caught up in a contingency. I agree that is not a dignified way to die. It is like a street accident or a case of gripe.”

Doctor Plarr offered to drive Saavedra home. He had never yet been invited to visit the novelist and he had imagined him in occupation of some old colonial house with barred windows looking out on a shady street, with a few orange trees and lapachos in the garden, a house as dignified and out of fashion as his clothes. Perhaps there would be portraits on the wall of the great-grandfather who had been Governor of the province and of the grandfather who had been killed by the gaucho.

“It is not far. I can easily walk,” Saavedra said.

“I think we ought to talk a little more about your offer and how it can be carried through.”

“All that is out of my hands now.”

“Not entirely.”

As he drove Doctor Plarr pointed out to the novelist that from the moment his offer was published in El Litoral he would be watched by the police. “The kidnappers will have to communicate with you and suggest some way of making the exchange. It would be easier if you left the town tonight before the police know. You could stay out of sight with some friend in the country.”

“How would the kidnappers find me?”

“Perhaps through me. They probably know I am a friend of Seńor Fortnum.”

“I cannot run away and hide like a criminal.”

“Then it will be difficult for them to take your offer up.”

“Besides,” Doctor Saavedra said, “there is my work.”

“Surely you can take it with you.”

“That is easy for you to say. You can go and attend a patient anywhere, you carry your experience with you. But my work is tied to the room where I work. When I came here from Buenos Aires it was nearly a year before I could put a pen to paper. My room was like a hotel room. To write one must have a home.”

A home: Doctor Plarr was surprised to find the novelist lived in a block even more modern and shabby than his own in a quarter close by the prison wall. The grey apartment houses stood in squares as though they formed an extension of the prison. One expected them to be lettered A, B and C and to be reserved for different categories of criminal. Doctor Saavedra’s apartment was on the third floor and there was no hit. Children played a kind of bowls with tin cans in front of the entrance, and the smell of cooking pursued them up the stairs. Perhaps Doctor Saavedra felt that an explanation was required. He spoke a little breathlessly after his climb as he paused on the second floor. “You know a novelist does not pay visits like a doctor. He has to live with his subject. I could not live comfortably in a bourgeois setting because I write about the people. The good woman who cleans for me here is the wife of a warder at the prison. I feel myself in the right milieu. I put her in my last book. Do you remember? She was called Caterina and was the widow of a sergeant. I think I caught her way of thinking.” He opened his door and said with a note of defiance, “Here you are at the heart of what my critics call the world of Saavedra.”

It was indeed a very small world. Doctor Plarr had an impression that the long pursuit of literature had brought the novelist little material reward beyond his tidy suit and his polished shoes and the respect of the hotel manager. The living room was narrow and long like a railway compartment. One shelf of books (most of them were Saavedra’s own), a folding table which would have almost spanned the room if it had been opened, a nineteenth-century painting of a gaucho on a horse, one easy chair and two upright chairs-that was all the furnishing there was, apart from a huge antique mahogany cupboard which must have once belonged in more spacious quarters, for the baroque curlicues above the pediment had been cut to fit under the ceiling. Two open doors, which Doctor Saavedra quickly shut, gave Plarr glimpses of a monastic bedstead and the chipped enamel of a cooking stove. Through the window, which was veined by a rusty mesh against mosquitoes, came the clatter of tins from the children playing below.

“May I give you a whisky?”

“A small one, please.”

Doctor Saavedra opened the cupboard; it was like an enormous chest in which the possessions of a lifetime had been packed for an impending departure. Two suits hung there. Shirts and underwear and books had been stacked indiscriminately on the shelves: an umbrella leaned among obscure shapes at the back: four ties dangled from a rod: a little pile of photographs in old-fashioned frames shared the floor with two pairs of shoes and some books for which there had been no room elsewhere. On a ledge over the suits stood a whisky bottle, a half-finished bottle of wine and a few glasses-one of them chipped-a pile of cutlery and a bowl of bread. Doctor Saavedra said defiantly, “I am a little cramped for room, but I want the smallest possible space around me when I write. Space distracts.” He looked anxiously at Doctor Plarr and attempted a smile. “This is the womb of my characters, doctor, and there is room for little else. You must forgive me if I cannot offer you any ice, but this morning my refrigerator failed and the electrician has not yet come.”

“I prefer my whisky neat after dinner,” Doctor Plarr said.

He had to stand on the points of his small gleaming shoes to reach the top of the wardrobe. A cheap plastic shade painted with pink flowers, which were beginning to brown from the heat, hardly dimmed the harshness of the central light. Watching Doctor Saavedra reach for the glass with his white hair, in his pearl-gray suit and his brightly polished shoes, Doctor Plarr felt much the same astonishment that he had felt in the barrio of the poor when he saw a young girl emerge in an immaculate white dress from a waterless hovel of mud and tin. He felt a new respect for Doctor Saavedra. His obsession with literature was not absurd whatever the quality of his books. He was willing to suffer poverty for its sake, and a disguised poverty was far worse to endure than an open one. The effort needed to polish his shoes, to press the suit… He couldn’t, like the young, let things go. Even his hair must be cut regularly. A missing button would reveal too much. Perhaps he would be remembered in the history of Argentine literature only in a footnote, but he would have deserved his footnote. The bareness of the room could be compared to the inextinguishable hunger of his literary obsession.

Doctor Saavedra tripped toward him holding two glasses. He asked, “How long do you think we shall have to wait for a response?”

“It may never come.”

“Your father’s name, I believe, is on the list of those they want released?”

“Yes.”

“It would be strange for you, I imagine, to see your father again after all this time. How happy your mother will be if…”

“I think she would prefer him dead. He wouldn’t fit in with her life now.”

“And perhaps if Seńor Fortnum returned he would not be welcomed by his wife either?”

“How can I tell?”

“Oh come, Doctor Plarr, I have friends at the house of Seńora Sanchez.”

“So she has been back there?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“I was there early this evening and so was she. They were making a great fuss of her-even Seńora Sanchez. Perhaps she hopes to have her back. When Doctor Benevento came to see the other girls I took her to the Consulate.”

“She told you about me?”

He was a little irritated by her indiscretion, but nonetheless he felt a sense of relief. He was escaping from secrecy. There had not been one soul in the city to whom he could talk of Clara, and what better confidant could he hope to have than his own patient? There were secrets which Doctor Saavedra too would not want known.

“She told me how very kind you had been to her.”

“Is that all she said?”

“It was all that was necessary between old friends.”

“Was she one of your girls?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“I was with her only once, I think.”

Doctor Plarr felt no jealousy. To think of Clara waiting naked in her cell in the candlelight while Doctor Saavedra hung up his pearl-gray suit was like watching on the stage a scene, both sad and comic, from a remote seat at the back of the gallery. Distance removed the characters so far from him that he could be touched only by a formal compassion. He asked, “Didn’t you like her enough to try again?”

Doctor Saavedra said, “It was not a question of liking. She was a good young woman, I am sure, quite attractive too, but she had nothing special for my purpose. She never struck me as a character-a character-forgive me if I speak like the critics-in the world of Jorge Julio Saavedra. Montez claims that world has no real existence. What does he know in Buenos Aires? Doesn’t Teresa exist-you remember the evening when you met her? Before we had been together five minutes Teresa was the girl from Salta. There was something she said-I can’t even remember the words now. I went with her four times and then I had to drop her, because she was saying too many things which were unsuitable. They confused my idea.”

“Clara comes from Tucumán. You got nothing from her?”

“Tucumán is not a suitable region for me. My region is the region of extremes. Montez does not understand that. Trelew… Salta. Tucuman is an elegant city, and it is surrounded by half a million hectares of sugar. What ennui! Her father was a cane-cutter, wasn’t he? And her brother disappeared.”

“I would have thought that might have made a good subject for you, Saavedra.”

“Not for me. She never came alive. It was all dull poverty with no machismo in half a million hectares.” He added bravely as though the night were not noisy with the tins rolling back and forth in the cement yard below, “You do not realize how quiet and dull bare poverty can be. Let me give you a little more whisky. It is a genuine Johnny Walker.”

“No, no, thank you. I must go home.” All the same he lingered. Novelists were supposed to have acquired a certain wisdom… He asked, “What do you suppose will become of Clara if Fortnum dies?”

“Perhaps you might marry her?”

“How can I? I would have to go away from here.”

“You could easily find a better living somewhere else. Rosario?”

Doctor Plarr said, “This is my home too-or the nearest I have ever come to a home since I left Paraguay.”

“And you feel your father not so far away?”

“You are a perceptive man, Saavedra. Yes, it may have been my father’s nearness which brought me here. In the barrio of the poor I am aware of doing something he would have liked to see me do, but when I am with my rich patients, I feel as though I had left his friends to help his enemies. I even sleep with them sometimes, and when I wake up I look at the face on the pillow through his eyes. I suppose that’s one reason why my affairs never last long, and when I have tea with my mother in the Calle Florida among all the other ladies of B. A…. he sits there too and criticizes me with his blue English eyes. I think my father might have cared for Clara. She is one of his poor.”

“Do you love the girl?”

“Love, love, I wish I knew what you and all the others mean by the word. I want her, yes. From time to time. Sexual desire has its rhythms as you well know.” He added, “She has lasted longer than I thought possible. Teresa was your one-legged girl from Salta. Perhaps Clara is-my poor. But I never want her to be my victim. Was that what Charley Fortnum felt when he married her?”

Doctor Saavedra said, “I may not see you again. I have come to you for pills against melancholy, but at least I have my work. I wonder whether you do not need those pills more than I do.”

Doctor Plarr looked at him without understanding. His thoughts were elsewhere.

When he got into the lift to his flat Doctor Plarr remembered the excitement with which Clara had made her first ascent in it. Perhaps, he thought, I will telephone to the Consulate and tell her to join me. The bed at the Consulate was too narrow for both of them, and, if he joined her there, he would be forced to leave before the hawk like woman came in the morning.

He let himself in and went first to his consulting room to see whether his secretary Ana had left a note on his desk, but there was nothing there. He drew the curtains and looked down on the port: three policemen were standing by the Coca-Cola stall, perhaps because the weekly boat to Asunción lay at the jetty. It was like the scene of his boyhood, but he looked at it in reverse from his fourth-floor window above the river.

He said, “God help you, father, wherever you are,” speaking aloud. It was easier to believe in a god with a human sense of hearing than in some omniscient force which could read his unuttered thoughts. Strangely the face he conjured up when he spoke was not his father’s but Charley Fortnum’s. The Honorary Consul lay stretched out on the coffin and whispered, “Ted.” Doctor Plarr’s father had called him Eduardo as though in compliment to his wife. When he tried to substitute Henry Plarr’s face for Charley Fortnum’s he found his father’s features had been almost eliminated by the years. As with an ancient coin that has been buried a long time in the ground he could only distinguish a fault unevenness of surface which might once have been the outline of a cheek or a lip. It was Charley Fortnum’s voice which appealed to him again, “Ted.”

He turned away-hadn’t he done all in his power to help?—and opened the bedroom door. He saw by the light from the study the body of Fortnum’s wife outlined under the sheets. “Clara!” he said. She woke immediately and sat up. He noticed her clothes had been folded carefully on a chair, for she possessed the neatness of her former profession. For a woman who has to take off her clothes many times in a night it is essential to arrange them carefully or a dress would be hopelessly crumpled after two or three clients. She had told him once that Seńora Sanchez insisted on each girl paving for her own laundry-it made for tidiness.

“How did you get in?”

“I asked the porter.”

“He opened the door for you?”

“He knows me.”

“He has seen you here?”

“Yes. And there too.”

So I have shared her with the porter as well, he thought. How many more of the unknown warriors of her battlefield would take form sooner or later? Nothing was more alien to the life of the Calle Florida and the tinkle of teacups and the cakes of dulce de leche, white as snow. He had shared Margarita for a while with Seńor Vallejo-most affairs overlap at the beginning or the end-and he preferred the porter to Seńor Vallejo, the smell of whose shaving lotion during those last dilatory months he had sometimes detected on Margarita’s skin.

“I told him you would give him money. You will?”

“Of course. How much? Five hundred pesos?”

“A thousand would be better.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the sheet back. He was not yet tired of her thin body and the small breasts which barely yet, any more than her belly, indicated pregnancy. He said, “I am very glad you are here. I was going to call you up, though it wouldn’t have been very wise. The police think I had something to do with the kidnapping. They suspect my motive may be jealousy,” he added, smiling at the idea of it.

“They would not dare do anything to you. You look after the finance secretary’s wife.”

“They might start watching me all the same.”

“What would that matter? They watch me.”

“Did they follow you here?”

“Oh, I know how to deal with men like that. It is not the police I worry about, but that swine of a journalist. He was back at the camp just after it got dark. He offered me money.”

“What for? A story?”

“He wanted to sleep with me.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I did not need his money any more, and then he got angry. He really believed I liked him for himself when I was with Seńora Sanchez. He thought he was a great lover. Oh, how I hurt his pride,” she went on with pleasure, “when I told him that Charley was twice the man he was.”

“How did you get rid of him?”

“I called the policeman (they have left one at the camp-they say he is there to protect me, but he watches me all the time), and while the two of them were arguing I drove away.”

“But you don’t know how to drive, Clara.”

“I watched Charley often enough. It is not so difficult. I knew the things to push and the things to pull. I got them mixed up at first, but all was right in the end. It went in jerks as far as the road, and then I found how to do things properly and I drove faster than Charley.”

“Poor Fortnum’s Pride,” Plarr said.

“I think I drove a little too fast because I did not see the camion coming.”

“What happened?”

“There was an accident.”

“Were you hurt?”

“The jeep was hurt but not me.”

Her eyes gleamed up at him from the pillows; they were bright with the excitement of strange events. Never before had he known her to talk so much. She had for him still the attraction of a stranger-like some unknown girl at a cocktail party. He said, “I like you,” lightly, without thought, as he might have said it over the cocktails, neither of them believing the words meant any more than “Come and sleep with me.”

“The driver gave me a lift,” she said. “Of course he wanted to make love, and I said I would when we got to the town at a house he goes to in San Jose, but I got out at the first traffic lights, before he could stop me, and I went to Seńora Sanchez. Oh, she was glad to see me I can tell you, really glad, not angry with me at all, and she put on a bandage herself.”

“Then you were hurt?”

“I told her I knew a good doctor,” she said and smiled and pulled the sheet off to show the bandage round her left knee.

“Clara, I must take it off and see…”

“Oh, it can wait,” she said. “You love me a little?” She corrected herself quickly, “Do you want to make love to me?”

“Plenty of time for that. Lie still and let me take the bandage off.”

He tried to be as gentle as possible, but he knew he must be hurting her. She lay quiet without complaint, and he thought of some of his bourgeois patients who would have persuaded themselves that the pain was unbearable; they might even have faulted from fear or to win his attention. “Good peasant stock,” he said with admiration.

“What do you mean?”

“You are a brave girl.”

“But that cut is nothing. You should see what men do to themselves in the fields when they cut cane. I have seen a boy with half his foot cut off.” She asked casually, as though she were making polite conversation about a relative whom they had in common, “Is there any news yet of Charley?”

“No.”

“Do you still think he may be alive?”

“I am pretty sure of it,” he said.

“Then you have had news?”

“I have talked to Colonel Perez again. And I have been to Buenos Aires today to see the Ambassador.”

“But what shall we do if he comes back?”

“Do? I suppose what we are doing now. What else?” He finished retying the bandage. “We shall go on just as we always did. I shall come to see you at the camp, and Charley will go farming.” It was as though he were describing some life which had been pleasant enough once, but in which he no longer quite believed.

“It was good seeing the girls again at Seńora Sanchez’. I told them I had a lover. Of course I did not tell them who.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t know. Everybody in this town seems to know except poor Charley.”

“Why do you call him poor Charley? He was happy. I always did what he wanted me to do.”

“What did he want?”

“Not very much. Not very often. It was boring, Eduardo. I have not the words to tell you how boring it was. He was kind and careful of me. He never hurt me like you hurt me. Sometimes I say thank you to Our Lord and Our Blessed Lady that it is your child which is stuck in me here, not his. What sort of child would have come out if it had belonged to Charley? The child of an old man. I would have wanted to strangle it at birth.”

“Charley would make a better father than I could ever be.”

“He cannot do one thing better than you can.”

Oh yes, he can, Doctor Plarr thought, he can die better, and that is quite something.

She put out a hand and touched him on the cheek-he could feel the nerves through her fingertips. She had never caressed him like that before. A face was part of the forbidden territory of tenderness, and the purity of the gesture shocked him as much as though a young girl had touched his sex. He withdrew quickly. She said, “Do you remember that time at the camp when I told you I was pretending? But, caro, I was not pretending. Now when you make love to me I pretend. I pretend I feel nothing. I bite my lip so as to pretend. Is it because I love you, Eduardo? Do you think I love you?” She added with a humility which put him on his guard as much as a demand, “I am sorry. I did not really mean that… It makes no difference, does it?”

No difference? How could he begin to explain to her the vast extent of the difference? “Love” was a claim which he wouldn’t meet, a responsibility he would refuse to accept, a demand… So many times his mother had used the word when he was a child; it was like the threat of an armed robber, “Put up your hands or else…” Something was always asked in return: obedience, an apology, a kiss which one had no desire to give. Perhaps he had loved his father all the more because he had never used the word or asked for anything. He could remember only a single kiss on the quay at Asunción and that was the kind of kiss one man can give to another. It was like the formal kiss he had seen French generals give in photographs after they have presented a decoration. It claimed nothing. His father would sometimes pull at his hair or tap him on his cheek. The English phrase “Old fellow” was the nearest that he ever came to an endearment. He remembered his mother, as she wept in the cabin while the ship pulled into the current, telling him, “I have only you to love me now”; she had reached at him from her bunk, repeating “Darling, my darling boy,” as Margarita had reached at him years later from her bed, before Seńor Vallejo had come to take his place, and he remembered how Margarita had called him “the love of my life” as his mother had sometimes called him “My only boy.” He felt no belief at all in sexual love, but lying awake in the overcrowded flat in Buenos Aires he had sometimes recalled, as his mother’s footsteps creaked toward the privy, the illicit nocturnal sounds which he had heard on the estancia in Paraguay-the tiny reverberations of a muffled knock, strange tiptoes on the floor below, whispers from the cellar, a gunshot which rang out an urgent warning from far away across the fields-those had been the signals of a genuine tenderness, a compassion deep enough for his father to be prepared to die for it. Was that love? Did Leon feel love? Even Aquino?

“Eduardo,” he came back from far away to hear her imploring him, “I will say anything you want. I did not mean to make you angry. What do you want, Eduardo? Tell me. Please. What do you want? I want to know what you want, but how can I know if I do not understand?”

“Charley is simpler, isn’t he?”

“Eduardo, will you always be angry if I love you? I swear it won’t make any difference. I will stay with Charley. I will come only when you want me just like at the house.”

He was startled by the doorbell which rang and stopped and rang again. He hesitated to go. Why hesitate? Hardly a week passed without a telephone call or a ring at the door during the night. “Lie quiet,” he said, “it is only a patient.” He went into the hall and looked through the spy hole in the door, but no one was visible in the darkness of the stair head. He felt he was back in the Paraguay of his childhood. How often his father must have called out before a bolted door as he called now, “Who is it?” trying to make the intonation sound firm.

“The police.”

He unlocked the door and found himself face to face with Colonel Perez. “May I come in?”

“When you say ‘Police’ how can I refuse?” Doctor Plarr asked. “If you had said ‘Perez’ I might have told you, since you are a friend, to call tomorrow morning, at a better time.”

“It was because we are good friends that I said ‘Police’ to warn you this is an official call.”

“Too official for a drink?”

“No, it has not reached that point yet.”

Doctor Plarr led Colonel Perez to his consulting room and brought out two whiskies of the Argentinian mark. He said, “I keep the little genuine Scotch I have for social visits.”

“Yes, I understand. And your meeting with Doctor Saavedra tonight, that I suppose was purely social?”

“Are you having me watched?”

“Not until now. Perhaps I ought to have done so earlier. Someone on El Litoral told me of your telephone call tonight, and of course the cables you left at the hotel interested me when they showed them to me. There is no such thing in this city as an Anglo-Argentinian Club, is there?”

“No. Did the cables go off?”

“Why not? There was no harm in them. But then there was the lie you told me yesterday… You seem to be very mixed up in this affair, doctor.”

“You are right of course, if you mean I’m doing my best to have Fortnum released, but surely both of us are working for that.”

“There is quite a difference, doctor. I am not really interested in Fortnum, only in his kidnappers. I would prefer the blackmail to be unsuccessful, because it would discourage others. You on the other hand want the blackmail to succeed. Of course-it is only natural-I would like to win the game both ways, to save Seńor Fortnum. Are you alone here?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I was looking out of the window and I thought I saw a light go off in the next room.”

“It was a car passing by the river road.”

“Yes. Perhaps.” He drank his whisky slowly. Doctor Plarr had an odd impression that he was at a loss for words. “Do you really believe, doctor, these men can get your father released?”

“Well, prisoners have been released by the same method.”

“Not in return for a mere Honorary Consul.”

“Even an Honorary Consul is human-he has the right to live. The British Government would not want him murdered.”

“It does not depend on the British Government, it depends on the General, and I doubt if the General worries much about any human life. Except his own, of course.”

“He depends on American aid. If they insist…”

“Yes, but he already gives the Yankees something in return which they value a great deal more than an English Honorary Consul. The General has one great quality, like Papa Doc used to have in Haiti. He is anti-communist. Are you quite sure you are alone, doctor?”

“Of course.”

“It was only… I thought I heard… well, never mind. Are you a communist, doctor?”

“No. I have always found Marx unreadable. Like most economics. But you really believe these kidnappers are communist? It is not only communists who are against tyranny and torture.”

“Some of the men they want released are communist-or so the General claims.”

“My father is not.”

“Then you do really believe he is still alive?”

The telephone rang out at Doctor Plarr’s elbow. He lifted the receiver unwillingly. A voice which he recognized as Leon’s said, “Something has happened. We need you urgently. We have been trying all day…”

“It is so very urgent? I have a friend drinking with me.”

“Are you under arrest?” the voice whispered up the line.

“Not for the moment.”

Colonel Perez leaned forward, watching him, trying to hear.

“It is too late to telephone me. Yes, yes, I know. A little fear is quite natural under the circumstances, but the temperature of a child always runs high. Give her two more aspirin.”

“I will call you again in fifteen minutes.”

“I hope you will not find it necessary. Ring me up tomorrow morning but not too early. I have had a long day, I have been to Buenos Aires.” He added with his eye on Colonel Perez, “I want to get to bed.”

“In fifteen minutes,” the voice of Leon repeated. Doctor Plarr put down the receiver.

“Who was that?” Perez asked. “Oh, forgive me, I get into the habit of asking questions. It is a police vice.”

“Only a worried parent,” Doctor Plarr said.

“I thought I heard a man’s voice.”

“Yes. The father. Men are always much more worried about their children than women. The mother is in Buenos Aires shopping. What were we talking about, colonel?”

“Your father. It is strange that these men included his name in their list. There are so many others who would be much more useful to them. Younger men. Your father must be quite an old man now. It almost looks as though they were paying for some help you could give them…” He finished his sentence with a vague gesture.

“What could I do for them?”

“All the publicity you are trying to arrange-it’s useful to them. It is something they cannot do for themselves. They do not want to kill the man. His death would be a sort of defeat. And then-it occurred to me only today, I am a slow thinker-they knew what the papers never printed-the real program the Governor had made for the Ambassador’s visit. It is funny how something so obvious escaped me for so long. They must have received information, confidential information.”

“Perhaps. But not from me. I am not in the Governor’s confidence.”

“No, but Seńor Fortnum knew and he might have told you. Or Seńora Fortnum. It is not an unusual thing for a woman to mention to her lover when her husband is going to be away.”

“You make me out a Don Juan with my patients, colonel. I might be afraid of a husband in England, but here the General Medical Council does not operate. I hope you have not been bothering Seńora Fortnum?”

“I wanted to have a word with her, but she was not at the camp. This evening she visited the Sanchez house. Then she went to the Consulate, but she is not there now. I was a little anxious at first because Seńor Fortnum’s Land Rover was found by the road damaged-poor man, he has had two cars smashed in two days. I was glad to hear she had been with Seńora Sanchez and that her injuries were only small ones. You have been attending a patient, doctor, I think? Your right sleeve is turned up.”

Doctor Plarr pushed the telephone away from him. He was afraid it might speak to him again too soon. He said, “How observant you are, colonel. I did not trust Seńora Sanchez as a doctor. Clara is with me here.”

“And I was right too about your lies yesterday.”

“An affair always involves a few lies.”

“I am sorry to have interrupted you, doctor, but it was the lies which bothered me. After all we are old friends. We have even shared a few adventures in our time. Seńora Escobar, for example.”

“Yes, I remember. I told you I was leaving her and the coast was-nearly-clear. I never understood why in the end she preferred Vallejo to you.”

“She did not trust my motives. The common fate of a policeman. You see Seńor Escobar has a landing strip on his estancia in the Chaco. Probably whisky and cigarettes come out of Paraguay by that route.”

“A public benefactor.”

“Yes, of course I would never have interfered with him. I hope those aspirins work. You will not want to be interrupted again.” Colonel Perez drained his whisky and stood up. “You have relieved my mind a great deal. Of course I understand now why you would want Seńor Fortnum released. A husband is of great importance in a love affair. He is a way of escape when an affair begins to get boring. No one would wish to leave a woman quite alone. Well, we shall have to try and save Seńor Fortnum for you-and capture his kidnappers too. They will know what to do with them on the other side of the river.”

Doctor Plarr went with him to the door. “I am glad you are feeling happier about me.”

“Secrets always smell bad to a policeman, even innocent secrets. We are trained, like a dog with cannabis, to scent them out. Take my advice, doctor, you have really done enough now, so please do not interfere any more. We have always been friendly, but if you meddle in this affair, you must look out for yourself. I will shoot first and send a wreath later.”

“You sound a bit like Al Capone.”

“Yes. Capone too supported order in his own way.” He opened the door and hesitated for a moment on the dark landing, as though something important had slipped his memory. “There is one more thing I ought perhaps to have told you earlier. I do have news of your father. From the Chief of Police in Asunción. Naturally we checked with him all the names that the kidnappers put on their list. Your father was killed more than a year ago. He tried to escape with another man-a man called Aquino Ribera-but he was too old and too slow. He could not make it and he was abandoned. You see-it is no good thinking there is anything you can do to help him now. Goodnight, doctor. I am sorry to bring you bad news, but at any rate I leave you with a woman. A woman is the best comforter a man can have.”

The telephone began to sound again, almost as soon as the door closed.

Doctor Plarr thought: Leon cheated me. He has been lying to me all along in order to get my help. I won’t answer the telephone. Let them get out of their own mess in their own way. Not for a moment did it occur to him that it might be Colonel Perez who had lied. The police were strong enough to speak the truth.

The bell rang and rang as he stood stubbornly in the hall, and then whoever was calling him gave it up. For all he knew this time it might have been one of his patients, and in the accusing silence he began to feel guilt for his egoism: it was like the silence after a suicide’s cry for help. There was silence in the bedroom too. From Clara a little while ago had come an appeal. He had walked away from that too.

The small patch of marble floor on which he stood seemed like the edge of an abyss; he could not move one step in either direction without falling deeper into the darkness of involvement or guilt. He stood and listened to the silence-in the flat where Clara lay, in the midnight street outside where a police car would now be moving home, in the barrio popular where something must have happened among the huts of mud and tin. Silence, like a thin rain, blew across the great river into the world-abandoned republic where his father was lying dead in the deepest silence of all-“He was too old and slow. He couldn’t make it and they abandoned him.” He felt giddy on his ledge of marble parquet. He couldn’t stand motionless for ever. Again the telephone rang and he moved back into his office.

Leon’s voice spoke. “What has happened?”

“I had a visitor.”

“The police?”

“Yes.”

“You are alone now?”

“Yes. Alone.”

“Where have you been all day?”

“In Buenos Aires.”

“But we tried to get you last night.”

“I was called out.”

“And this morning at six.”

“I couldn’t sleep. I took a walk by the river. You said you wouldn’t need me any more.”

“Your patient needs you now. Go down to the river and stand near the Coca-Cola stall. We can see if anyone is watching. If the road is clear we will pick you up.”

“I have just had news of my father. From Colonel Perez. Is it true?”

“What news?”

“That he made a break, but he was too slow, and you abandoned him.”

He thought: if I detect one lie over the telephone-even a hesitation-I will put the receiver down, and I will never answer again.

Leon said, “Yes. I am sorry. It is true. I could not tell you before. We needed your help.”

“And my father is dead?”

“Yes. They shot him at once. As he lay on the ground.”

“You could have told me.”

“Perhaps, but we could not take the risk.”

Leon’s voice reached him as though across an immeasurable distance, “Will you come?”

“Oh yes,” Doctor Plarr said, “111 come.” He put down the receiver and went into the bedroom. He turned on the light and saw Clara, her eyes wide open, watching him.

“Who was it came?”

“Colonel Perez.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“Not from him.”

“And the telephone?”

“A patient. I have to go out for a while, Clara.”

He remembered there was some question which had been left hanging unanswered between them, but he couldn’t remember now what it was. He said, “My father is dead.”

“Oh, Eduardo. I am sorry. Did you love him?” She couldn’t take love for granted any more than he could, even between a father and son.

“Perhaps I did.”

He had once known a man in Buenos Aires who was illegitimate. The man’s mother died without telling him the name of his father. He searched through his mother’s letters, he asked questions of her friends. He even examined bank records-his mother had an income which must have come from somewhere. He was not angry, nor shocked, but the desire to know who his father was vexed him like an itch. He explained to Doctor Plarr, “It is like one of those little picture puzzles with quicksilver. I cannot get the eyes in the right place, and yet I cannot put the puzzle down.” Then one day he learned his father’s name: that of an international banker who had been dead a long time. He said to Plarr, “You cannot imagine how empty I feel now. What is there left to interest me?” It is that kind of emptiness, Doctor Plarr thought, which I am experiencing now.

“Come and lie down, Eduardo.”

“No. I must go out.”

“Where?”

“I am not sure. It is something to do with Charley.

“Have they found his body?” she asked.

“No, no, nothing like that.” She had half thrown the sheet off and he tucked it around her. He said, “You will catch cold from the air-conditioner.”

“I will go back to the Consulate.”

“No, stay here. I shall not be very long.” In solitude, one welcomes any living thing-a mouse, a bird on the sill, Robert Brace’s spider. In complete loneliness even a certain tenderness can be born. He said, “I am sorry, Clara. When I come back-” but he could not think of anything which was really worthwhile to promise her. He put his hand over her stomach and said, “Look after it. Sleep well.” He turned the light out so that he could no longer see her eyes watching him-puzzled, as though his actions were too complicated for any girl from the establishment of Seńora Sanchez to understand. On the stairs (the lift might have been heard by his neighbours) he tried to remember what that question of hers had been which he had never answered. It could not have been very important. The only questions of importance were those which a man asked himself.