The Honorary Consul (2 page)

       Perhaps reading in the open air was a habit he had acquired from his father who always took a book with him when he went farming, and in the orange-scented air of his abandoned country Doctor Plarr had got through all the works of Dickens except 'Christmas Tales'. People when they first saw him sitting on a bench with an open book had looked at him with keen curiosity. Perhaps they thought it was a custom peculiar to foreign doctors. It was not exactly unmanly, but it was certainly foreign. The men here preferred to stand at street corners and talk, or sit drinking cups of coffee and talk, or lean out of a window and talk. And all the time, while they talked, they touched each other to emphasize a point or just from friendship. In public Doctor Plarr touched nobody, only his book. It was a sign, like his English passport, that he would always remain a stranger: he would never be properly assimilated.

       He began to read again. "She herself worked in an unbroken silence, accepting the hard toil, like the bad seasons, as a law of nature."

       Doctor Saavedra had enjoyed a period of critical and popular success in the capital. When he began to feel himself neglected by the reviewers—and still worse by the hostesses and the newspaper reporters—he had come to the north where his great-grandfather had been governor and where he was shown the proper respect due to a famous novelist from the capital, even though there were probably few people who actually read his books. Strangely enough the mental geography of his novels remained unaltered. Wherever he might choose to live now, he had found his mythical region once and forever as a young man, the result of a holiday which he had taken in a small town by the sea, in the far south near Trelew. He had never encountered a Moreno, but he had imagined him very clearly one evening in the bar of a small hotel, where a man sat in melancholy silence over a drink.

       Doctor Plarr had learned all this in the capital from an old friend and jealous enemy of the novelist, and he found the knowledge of Saavedra's background of some value when he came to treat his patient who suffered from bouts of voluble manic-depression. The same character appeared again and again in all his books, his history changed a little, but never his strong sad silence. The friend and enemy, who had accompanied the young Saavedra on that voyage of discovery, had exclaimed scornfully, "And do you know who the man was? He was a Welshman, a Welshman. Who has ever heard of a Welshman with 'machismo'? There are a lot of Welshmen in those parts. He was drunk, that was all. His weekly drunk when he came in from the country." A ferry left for the invisible shore of scrub and swamp, and later the same ferry returned. Doctor Plarr found it difficult to concentrate on the taciturnity of Julio Moreno's heart. Moreno's wife left him at last with a casual laborer on his land who had youth and good looks and some facility in talking, but she was unhappy in the city by the sea where her lover remained unemployed. He soon became habitually drunk in bars and garrulous in bed, and she felt a nostalgia for the long silences and the dry salt ruined earth. So back she came to Moreno, who made room for her without a word at the table where he had prepared a meager dinner, and afterward he sat mutely in his customary chair with his chin in his hands while she stood beside him holding his mate gourd. There were still another hundred pages to come, though the story, it seemed to Doctor Plarr, might well have ended there. However Julio Moreno's 'machismo' had not yet found full expression, and when he indicated to his wife, in the fewest possible words, his decision to visit the city of Trelew, Doctor Plarr felt quite certain of what would happen there. Julio Moreno would encounter the laborer in a bar of the city and then there would be a fight with knives, won of course by the younger man. Hadn't his wife, when he left, seen in Moreno's eyes "the expression of an exhausted swimmer who surrenders to the dark tide of his ineluctable destiny"?

       It could not be said that Doctor Saavedra wrote badly. There was a heavy music in his style, the drumbeats of destiny were never very far away, but Doctor Plarr sometimes had a longing to exclaim to his melancholy patient, "Life isn't like that. Life isn't noble or dignified. Even Latin-American life. Nothing is ineluctable. Life has surprises. Life is absurd. Because it's absurd there is always hope. Why, one day we may even discover a cure for cancer and the common cold." He turned to the last page. Sure enough Julio Moreno's life blood was draining away between the broken tiles on the floor of the Trelew bar and his wife (how had she got there so quickly?) stood by his side, though for once she was not holding a maté gourd. "A relaxation of the muscles around the hard unbeaten mouth told her, before the eyes closed on the immense weariness of existence, that he found her presence welcome."

       Doctor Plarr closed the book with a bang of irritation. The Southern Cross lay on its crosspiece in a night which was full of stars. No towns or television masts or lighted windows broke the flat horizon. If he went home might there still be the danger of a telephone call? When the time had come to leave his last patient, the finance secretary's wife who was suffering from a touch of fever, he was determined not to go home before the early morning. He wanted to keep away from the telephone until it was too late for any unprofessional call. There was one particular possibility, at this hour on this day, of being troubled. Charley Fortnum, he knew, was dining with the Governor who needed an interpreter for his guest of honor, the American Ambassador. Clara, now she had overcome her fear of using the telephone, might easily call him and demand his company, with her husband out of the way, and he had no wish to see her on this Tuesday night of all nights. His sexual feeling was anesthetized by anxiety. He knew how likely it was that Charley would return unexpectedly early; for the dinner would certainly, sooner or later, be canceled for a reason he had no right to know in advance.

       Doctor Plarr decided that it was better to keep out of the way until midnight. The Governor's party would have surely dispersed by that time, and Charley Fortnum would be well on his way home. I am not a man with 'machismo', Doctor Plarr reflected ruefully, though he could hardly imagine Charley Fortnum coming at him with a knife. He got up from the bench. The hour was late enough for the professor of English.

       He did not find Doctor Humphries, as he expected, at the Hotel Bolivar. Doctor Humphries had a small room with a shower on the ground floor with a window opening on the patio which contained one dusty palm and a dead fountain. He had left his door unlocked and this perhaps showed his confidence in stability. Doctor Plarr remembered how at night his father in Paraguay would lock even the internal doors of his house, the bedrooms, the lavatories, the unused guest rooms, not against robbers but against the police, the military and the official assassins, though they would certainly not have been deterred long by locked doors.

       In Doctor Humphries' room there was hardly space for a bed, a dressing table, two chairs, a basin and the shower. You had to fight your way through them as though they were passengers in a crowded subway. Doctor Plarr saw that Doctor Humphries had pasted a new picture on the wall, from the Spanish edition of 'Life', showing the Queen perched on a horse at Trooping the Color. The choice was not necessarily a mark of patriotism or nostalgia: patches of damp were continually appearing on the plaster of the room and Doctor Humphries covered them with the nearest picture which came to hand. Perhaps however his choice did show a certain preference for wakening with the Queen's face rather than Mr. Nixon's on the wall. (Mr. Nixon's face would surely have appeared somewhere in the same number of 'Life'.) Inside the small room it was cool, but even the coolness was humid. The shower behind the plastic curtain had a faulty washer and dripped upon the tiles. The narrow bed was pulled together rather than made—the bumpy sheet might have been hastily drawn over a corpse, and a mosquito net hung bundled above it like a gray cloud threatening rain. Doctor Plarr was sorry for the self-styled doctor of letters: it was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will—if such a man existed—would have chosen to await death. My father, he thought with disquiet, must be about the same age as Humphries now, and perhaps he survives in even worse surroundings.

       A scrap of paper was inserted in the frame of Humphries' looking glass—"Gone to the Italian Club." Perhaps he had been expecting a pupil and that was the reason why he had left his door unlocked. The Italian Club was in a once-impressive colonial building across the road. There was a bust of somebody, perhaps of Cavour or Mazzini, but the stone was pockmarked and the inscription no longer readable; it stood between the house, which had a stone garland of flowers over every tall window, and the street. Once there had been a great number of Italians living in the city, but now all that was left of the club was the name, the bust, the imposing facade which bore a nineteenth-century date in Roman numerals. There were a few tables where you could eat cheaply without paying a subscription, and only one Italian was left, the solitary waiter who had been born in Naples. The cook was of Hungarian origin and served little else but goulash, a dish in which he could easily disguise the quality of the ingredients, a wise thing to do since the best beef went down the river to the capital, more than eight hundred kilometers away.

       Doctor Humphries was seated at a table close to an open window with a napkin tucked into his frayed collar. However hot the day he was always dressed in a suit with a tie and a waistcoat like a Victorian man of letters living in Florence. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles; probably the prescription had not been revised for years, for he bent very low over the goulash to see what he was eating. His white hair was streaked the color of youth by nicotine, and there were smears of nearly the same color on his napkin from the goulash. Doctor Plarr said, "Good evening, Doctor Humphries."

       "Ah, you found my note?"

       "I'd have looked in here anyway. How did you know I was coming to your room?"

       "I didn't, Doctor Plarr. But I thought somebody might look in, somebody..."

       "I had been going to suggest we have dinner at the National," Doctor Plarr explained. He looked around the restaurant for the waiter without any anticipation of pleasure. They were the only clients.

       "Very kind of you," Doctor Humphries said. "Another day, if you'll let me have what I believe the Yankees call a raincheck. The goulash here is not so bad, one grows a little tired of it, but at least it's filling." He was a very thin old man. He gave the impression of someone who had worked a long while at eating in the hopeless hope of filling an inexhaustible cavity.

       For want of anything better Doctor Plarr, too, ordered goulash. Doctor Humphries said, "I am surprised to see you. I would have thought the Governor might have invited you... he must need someone who speaks English for his dinner tonight."

       Doctor Plarr realized why the message had been stuck into the looking glass. There could have been a last-minute slip in the Governor's arrangements. It had happened once, and Doctor Humphries had been summoned... After all there were only three Englishmen who were available. He said, "He has invited Charley Fortnum."

       "Oh yes, of course," Doctor Humphries said, "our Honorary Consul." He underlined the adjective in a tone of embittered denigration. "This is a diplomatic dinner. I suppose the Honorary Consul's wife could not appear for reasons of health?"

       "The American Ambassador is unmarried, Doctor Humphries. It's informal—a stag party."

       "A very suitable occasion one might have thought for inviting Mrs. Fortnum to entertain the guests. She must be accustomed to stag parties. But why does the Governor not invite you or me?"

       "Be fair, doctor. You and I have no official position here."

       "But we know a lot more about the Jesuit ruins than Charley Fortnum does. According to 'El Litoral' the Ambassador has come here to see the rums, not the tea or the maté crop, though that hardly seems likely. American ambassadors are usually men of business."

       "The new Ambassador wants to create a good impression," Doctor Plarr said. "Art and history. He can't be suspected of a take-over bid there. He wants to show a scholarly interest in our province, not a commercial one. The secretary of finance has not been invited, even though he speaks a little English. Otherwise a loan might have been suspected."

       "And the Ambassador—doesn't he speak enough Spanish for a polite toast and a few platitudes?"

       "They say he is making rapid progress."

       "What a lot you always seem to know about everything, Plarr. I only know what we read in 'El Litoral'. He's off to the ruins tomorrow, isn't he?"

       "No, he went there today. Tonight he returns to B. A. by air."

       "The paper's wrong then?"

       "The official program was a little inaccurate. I suppose the Governor didn't want any incidents."

       "Incidents here? What an idea! I haven't seen an incident in this province in twenty years. Incidents only happen in Córdoba. The goulash isn't so very bad, is it?" he asked hopefully.

       "I've eaten worse," Doctor Plarr said without trying to remember on what occasion.

       "I see you've been reading one of Saavedra's books. What do you think of it?"

       "Very talented," Doctor Plarr said. Like the Governor he didn't want any incidents, and he recognized the malice which remained alive and kicking in the old man long after discretion had died from a lifetime's neglect.

       "You can really read that stuff? You believe in all that 'machismo'?"

       "While I read it," Doctor Plarr said with care, "I can suspend my disbelief."

       "These Argentinians—they all believe their grandfathers rode with the gauchos. Saavedra has about as much 'machismo' as Charley Fortnum. Is it true Charley's having a baby?"

       "Yes."

       "Who's the lucky father?"