The Honorary Consul (22 page)

       "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 favorable 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 Señor 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."

       "Señor 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 Señor 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 gray 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 Señor 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 Señora 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 Señora 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.