The Honorary Consul (34 page)

       "I don't know what the time is. I have no watch. Some time around eight I suppose. Perez will send in the paras then. What happens afterward, God knows."

       "God again! You can't get away from the bloody word, can you? Perhaps I'll go and listen awhile after all. It won't do any harm. It'll please him. I mean the priest. And there's nothing else to do. If you'll help me."

       He put his arm around Doctor Plarr's shoulder. He weighed surprisingly light for his bulk—like a body filled only with air. He's an old man, Doctor Plarr thought, he wouldn't have had long to live anyway, and he remembered the night he had met him first, when he and Humphries lugged him protesting across the road to the Bolivar. He had weighed a lot heavier then. They made only two steps toward the door and then Charley Fortnum stopped dead in his tracks. "I can't make it," he said. "Why should I anyway? I wouldn't want to curry favor at the last moment. Take me back to the whisky. That's my sacrament."

       ***

       Doctor Plarr returned to the other room. He took up his stand near Aquino who sat on the ground, watching the motions of the priest with a look of suspicion. It was as though he feared that Father Rivas was laying some trap, planning a betrayal, as he moved to and fro by the table and made the secret signals with his hands. All Aquino's poems were of death, Doctor Plarr remembered. He wasn't going to be robbed of it now.

       Father Rivas was reading the Gospel. He read it in Latin not in Spanish, and Doctor Plarr had long forgotten the little Latin he had once known. He kept his eye on Aquino while the voice ran rapidly on in the dead tongue. Perhaps they thought he was praying with his eyes lowered and a kind of prayer did enter his mind—or at least a wish, heavy with self-distrust, that if the moment came he would have the skill and determination to act quickly. If I had been with them over the border, he wondered, what would I have done when my father called for help in the police-station yard? Would I have gone back to him or escaped as they did?

       Father Rivas reached the Canon of the Mass and the consecration of the bread. Marta was watching her man with an expression of pride. The priest lifted up the mate gourd and spoke the only phrases of the Mass which Doctor Plarr had for some reason never forgotten. "As often as you do these things you shall do them in memory of Me." How many acts in a lifetime had he done in memory of something forgotten or almost forgotten?

       The priest lowered the gourd. He knelt and rose quickly. He seemed to be whipping the Mass to its conclusion with impatience. He was like a herdsman driving his cattle toward the byre before a storm burst, but he had started home too late. The loudspeaker blared its message in the voice of Colonel Perez. "You have exactly one hour left to send the Consul out to us and save your lives." Doctor Plarr saw Aquino's left hand tighten on his gun. The voice went on, "I repeat you have one hour left. Send the Consul out and save your lives."

       "... who takes away the sins of the world, grant them eternal rest."

       Father Rivas began "Domine, non sum dignus." Marta's was the only voice which joined his. Doctor Plarr looked around seeking Pablo. The Negro knelt with bowed head by the back wall. Would it be possible, he wondered, before the Mass ended, while they were distracted by the ceremony, to seize Aquino's gun and hold them up for long enough to enable Charley Fortnum to escape? I'd be saving all their lives, he thought, not only Charley's. He looked back toward Aquino, and as though Aquino knew what was in his mind he shook his head.

       Father Rivas took the kitchen cloth and began to clean the gourd, as punctiliously as though he were back in the parish church at Asunción.

       "'Ite missa est.'"

       The voice on the loudspeaker answered like a liturgical response, "You have fifty minutes left."

       "Father," Pablo said. "The Mass is over. Better surrender now. Or let us vote again."

       "My vote is the same," Aquino said.

       "You are a priest, Father, you cannot kill," Marta said.

       Father Rivas held out the dishcloth. "Go into the yard and burn this. It will not be needed again."

       "It would be a mortal sin for you to kill him now, Father. After the Mass."

       "It is a mortal sin for anyone at any time. The best I can do is to ask for God's mercy like anyone else."

       "Was that what you were doing up at the altar?" Doctor Plarr asked. He felt wearied out by all the arguments, by the slowness with which the short time left them dragged by.

       "I was praying I would not have to kill him."

       "Posting a letter," Doctor Plarr said. "I thought you didn't believe in any reply to letters like that."

       "Perhaps I was hoping for a coincidence."

       The loudspeaker announced: "You have forty-five minutes left."

       "If they would leave us alone..." Pablo complained.

       "They want to break our nerve," Aquino said.

       Father Rivas left them abruptly. He carried his revolver with him.

       ***

       Charley Fortnum lay on the coffin. His eyes were open and he stared up at the mud roof. "Have you come to liquidate me, Father?" he asked.

       Father Rivas had a look of shyness or perhaps shame. He moved a few steps into the room. He said, "No. No. Not that. Not yet. I thought there might be something you needed."

       "I still have some whisky left."

       "You heard their loudspeaker. They will be coming for you soon."

       "And then you will kill me?"

       "Those are my orders, Señor Fortnum."

       "I thought a priest took his orders from the Church, Father. Oh, I forgot. You don't belong any more, do you? All the same you were saying a Mass. I'm not much of a Catholic, but I didn't feel inclined to attend it. It's not exactly a holiday of obligation. Not for me."

       "I remembered you at the altar, Señor Fortnum," Father Rivas said with awkward formality, as though he were addressing a bourgeois parishioner. The phrase came from a language which had grown rusty during the last years.

       "I'd rather you forgot me, Father."

       "I shall never be allowed to do that," Father Rivas said.

       Charley Fortnum noticed with surprise that the man was close to tears. He said, "What's the matter, Father?"

       "I never believed it would come to this. You see—if it had been the American Ambassador—they would have given way. And I would have saved ten men's lives. I never believed I would have to take a life."

       "Why did they ever choose you as a leader?"

       "El Tigre thought he could trust me."

       "Well, he can, can't he?"

       "I don't know now. I don't know."

       Does a condemned man always have to comfort his executioner? Charley Fortnum wondered. He said, "Is there anything I can do for you, Father?"

       The man looked at him with an expression of hope, like a dog who thinks he has heard the word "walk." He shuffled a step nearer. Charley Fortnum remembered the boy at school with protuberant ears whom Mason used to bully. He said, "I am sorry..." Sorry for what? For failing to be the American Ambassador?

       The man said, "I know how hard it must be for you. Lying there. Waiting. Perhaps if you could prepare yourself a little... that might take your mind off..."

       "You mean confess?"

       "Yes." He explained, "In an emergency... even I..."

       "But I'm no good as a penitent, Father. I haven't confessed in thirty years. Not since my first marriage anyway—which wasn't a marriage. You'd better look to the others."

       "I have done all I can for them."

       "After such a long time... it's impossible... I haven't enough belief. I would be ashamed to speak all those pious words, Father, even if I remembered them."

       "You would feel no shame now if you had no belief. And you need not say them to me aloud, Señor Fortnum. Only make an act of contrition. In silence. To yourself. That is enough. We have so little time. Just an act of contrition," he pleaded as though he were asking for the price of a meal.

       "But I've told you, I've forgotten the words."

       The man came two steps nearer, as if he were gathering a bit of courage or hope. Perhaps he hoped to be offered enough cash for a piece of bread.

       "Just say you are sorry and try to mean it."

       "Oh, I'm sorry for a lot of things, Father. Not the whisky though." He picked the bottle up, scrutinized what was left and put it down again. "It's a difficult life. A man has to have one sort of drug or another."

       "Forget the whisky. There must be other things. I only ask you to say—I am sorry for breaking a rule."

       "I don't even remember what rules I've broken. There are so many damned rules."

       "I have broken the rules too, Señor Fortnum. But I am not sorry I took Marta. I am not sorry I am here with these men. This revolver—one cannot always swing a censer up and down or sprinkle holy water. But if there was another priest here I would say to hurt, yes I am sorry. I am sorry I did not live in an age when the rules of the Church seemed more easy to keep—or in some future when perhaps they will be changed or not seem so hard. There is one thing I can easily say. Perhaps you could say it too. I am sorry not to have had more patience. Failures like ours are often just failures of hope. Please—cannot you say you are sorry you did not have more hope?"

       The man obviously needed comfort and Charley Fortnum gave him all he could. "Yes, I suppose I could go about as far as that, Father."

       Father, Father, Father. The word repeated itself in his mind. He had a vision of his father sitting bewildered, not understanding, not recognizing him, by the dumbwaiter, while he lay on the ground and the horse stood over him. Poor bugger, he thought.

       Father Rivas finished the words of absolution. He said, "Perhaps I will have a drink with you now—a small one."

       "Thank you, Father," Charley Fortnum said. "I'm a lot luckier than you are. There's no one to give you absolution."

       ***

       "I only saw your father for a few minutes once a day," Aquino said, "when we walked around the yard. Sometimes..." He broke off to listen to the loudspeaker from the trees outside. The voice said, "You have only fifteen minutes left."

       "The last quarter of an hour has gone a bit too quickly for my taste," Doctor Plarr commented.

       "Will they begin to count out the minutes now? I wish they would let us die quietly."

       "Tell me a little more about my father."

       "He was a fine old man."

       "During the few minutes you had with him," Doctor Plarr asked, "what did you talk about?"

       "We never had time to talk of anything much. A guard was always there. He walked beside us. He would greet me—very formally and affectionately like a father greeting his son—and I—well, I had a great respect for him, you understand. There would always be a spell of silence—you know how it is with a caballero like that. I would wait for him to speak first. Then the guard would shout at us and push us apart."

       "Did they torture him?"

       "No. Not in the way they did to me. The CIA men would not have approved. He was an Anglo-Saxon. All the same fifteen years in a police station is a long torture. It is easier to lose a few fingers."

       "What did he look like?"

       "An old man. What else can I say? You must know what he looked like better than I do."

       "He wasn't an old man the last time I saw him. I wish I had even a police snap of him lying dead. You know the kind of thing they take for the records."

       "It would not be a pleasant sight."

       "It would fill a gap. Perhaps we wouldn't have recognized each other if he had escaped. If he had been here with you now."

       "He had very white hair."

       "Not when I knew him."

       "And he stooped badly. He suffered very much from rheumatism in his right leg. You might say it was the rheumatism which killed him."

       "I remember someone quite different. Someone tall and thin and straight. Walking fast away from the quay at Asunción. Turning once to wave."

       "Strange. To me he seemed a small fat man who limped."

       "I'm glad they didn't torture him—in your way."

       "With the guards always around I never had a proper chance to warn him about our plan. When the moment came—he did not even know the guard had been bribed—I shouted to him 'Run' and he looked bewildered. He hesitated. That hesitation and the rheumatism..."

       "You did your best, Aquino. It was no one's fault." Aquino said, "Once I recited a poem to him, but I do not think he cared much for poetry. It was a good poem all the same. About death of course. It began, 'Death has the taste of salt.' Do you know what he said to me once? It was as if he were angry—I do not know who with—he said, 'I am not unhappy here, I am bored. Bored. If God would only give me a little pain.' It was an odd thing to say."

       "I think I understand," Doctor Plarr said. "In the end, he must have got his pain."

       "Yes. He was lucky at the end."

       "As for me I have never known boredom," Aquino said. "Pain yes. Fear. I am frightened now. But not boredom."

       Doctor Plarr said, "Perhaps you have not come to the end of yourself. It's a good thing when that happens only when you are old, like my father was." He thought of his mother among the porcelain parrots in Buenos Aires or eating éclairs in the Calle Florida, of Margarita fallen asleep in the carefully shaded room while he lay wide awake watching her unloved face, of Clara, and the child, and the long impossible future beside the Paraná. It seemed to him he was already his father's age, that he had spent as long in prison as his father had, and that it was his father who had escaped.

       "You have ten minutes left," the loudspeaker said. "Send the Consul out immediately and afterward one at a time with your hands raised..."