The Honorary Consul (23 page)

       "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 hawklike 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 Señora Sanchez insisted on each girl paving for her own laundry—it made for tidyness.

       "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 Señor Vallejo—most affairs overlap at the beginning or the end—and he preferred the porter to Señor 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 Señora 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 'camión' 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 Señora 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 Señora 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 Señor 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 Léon feel love? Even Aquino?