The Honorary Consul (17 page)

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

       "Oh, I have another job now," Aquino said with pride. "I told you—I am a criminal. I am also a poet."

       "A poet?"

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

       "Was it bad in prison?"

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

       "Was it good poetry?" Charley Fortnum asked. "Not that I'd know the difference."

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

       "Never heard of him," Charley Fortnum said.

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

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

       "When will it be born?"

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

       "Don't worry. You will be home, Señor, long before then."

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

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

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

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

       "I don't want to die before my child is born."

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

       "I suppose that's the way you are going to kill me."

       "Naturally... What other way is there? We are not cruel men, Señor Fortnum. We shall not cut off your fingers."

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

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

       "Did you believe in that 'afterward' when they tortured you?"

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

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

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

       "Are you sure of that?"

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

       "I'm thirsty myself. You know the old saying—An Englishman is always two whiskies below par."

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

       "Not exactly," Aquino replied.

       "I have been married twice. The first time it didn't take. The second time—I don't know why—I felt different. Would you like to see a photograph?"

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

       "A pretty girl," Aquino commented politely.

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

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

       "A very little for me," Aquino said.

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

       "Which one?"

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

       "Body?"

       "My body."

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

       "Those people, you know, in London—they've never even heard of me. What do they care? I don't belong to the right club."

       " 'Death is a common weed: requires no rain.' Was that the poem you meant?"

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

       "'Salud', Señor Fortnum."

       "Call me Charley, Aquino."

       "'Salud', Charley."

       "I wouldn't like people to find me like this—dirty, unshaven..."

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

       "And a razor?"

       "No."

       "Only a Gillette. I can't do much harm with a Gillette."

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

       "A pair of scissors then just for a trim?"

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

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

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

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

       "Of course. Shall we open the other bottle?"

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

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

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

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

       "You will need some paper, Charley."

       "Yes, I'd forgotten that."

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

       "And some water to wash in. I don't want to leave dirty marks all over my letter."

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

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

       "No. I have drunk enough."

       "Be a friend and shut the door. I can't bear that Indian staring at me."

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

       "I have received yours of December 22."

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

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

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