The Honorary Consul (10 page)

       "I paid."

       "And she was happy to leave?"

       "She was a bit bewildered at first and frightened too. Señora Sanchez was angry. She didn't like losing her. She told her she wouldn't have her back when I got tired of her. As if that would ever happen."

       "Life's a long time."

       "Mine isn't. Be frank, Ted, you wouldn't give me ten more years would you? Even though I've knocked down a bit on the drink since I knew Clara."

       "What will happen to her afterward?"

       "This isn't a bad little property. She could sell it and go to Buenos Aires. You can get fifteen percent interest now without risk. Even eighteen if you take a chance. And you know I can import a car every two years... Perhaps five more cars to sell before I kick the bucket. I calculate that would mean another five hundred pounds a year."

       "She could eat sweet cakes with my mother at the Richmond."

       "No joking, would your mother consent to meet Clara one day?"

       "Why not?"

       "You don't know what a difference Clara's made to me."

       "You must have made quite a difference to her too," Doctor Plarr said.

       "When you get to my age you accumulate a lot of regrets. It's not a bad thing to feel you've made at least one person a little happier."

       It was the kind of simple, sentimental and self-confident statement which Doctor Plarr found embarrassing. No reply was possible. It was a statement which it would be rude to question and impossible to confirm. He made his excuses and drove Home.

       All down the dark country road he thought of the young woman in the great Victorian bed which had belonged, with the sporting prints, to the Honorary Consul's father. She was like a bird which had been bought in the market in a makeshift cage and transferred to one at home more roomy and luxurious, equipped with perches and feeding bowls and a swing to play on.

       He was surprised by the amount of thought he was giving the girl, who was only a young prostitute he had noticed once in the establishment of Señora Sanchez because of her odd birthmark. Had Charley really married her? Perhaps Doctor Humphries had misled the Ambassador when he spoke of a marriage. Probably Charley Fortnum had taken a new housekeeper—that was all. If that were the case he would be able to reassure the Ambassador. A wife provided worse material for a scandal than a mistress.

       But his thoughts were like the deliberately banal words of a clandestine letter in which the important phrases have been added between the lines in secret ink to be developed in privacy. Those hidden phrases described a girl in a cell leaning down to make her bed, a girl who returned to her table and picked up her glass of orange juice, as though she had been momentarily interrupted by a tradesman at the door, a thin body stretched out on Charley Fortnum's double bed, with immature breasts which had never suckled a child. All three of Doctor Plarr's mistresses had been married women, mature women proud of their lush figures which smelt of expensive bath oils. She must have been a good whore, he thought, to have been taken out by two men in succession with a figure like hers, but that was no reason why he should think of her all the way home. He tried to change the direction of his thoughts. There were two hopeless cases of malnutrition in the 'barrio' of the poor, there was a police officer he was attending who would soon be dead of throat cancer, there was Saavedra's melancholy and Doctor Humphries' dripping shower, and yet try as he would his mind returned continually to that small hill of Venus—mount was a misnomer.

       He wondered how many men she had known. Doctor Plarr's last mistress, who was married to a banker called Lopez, had told him with some pride of his four predecessors—perhaps she was trying to arouse a sense of competition. (One of her lovers, he knew from another source, had been her chauffeur.) The fragile body on Charley Fortnum's bed must have known hundreds. Her stomach was like the site of an old country battlefield where pale grass grew which had abolished the scars of war, and a small stream flowed peacefully between the willows: he was back in the passage, outside the bedroom, staring at the sporting prints and resisting the desire to return.

       He braked sharply as he approached the road which led to Bergman's orange-canning factory, and for a moment he contemplated reversing the car and driving back to the camp. Instead he lit a cigarette. I will not be the victim of an obsession, he thought. The attraction of a whorehouse is the attraction I sometimes find in trivial shopping—I may see a tie which momentarily attracts me, I wear it once or twice, then I leave it in the drawer and it becomes overlaid with newer ties. Why didn't I try her out when I had the chance? If I had bought her that night at Señora Sanchez' she would be lying safely forgotten at the bottom of the drawer. Is it possible, he wondered, if a man is too rational to fall in love, that he may be reserved for a worse fate, to fall into an obsession? He drove angrily in the direction of the city where the reflection of the light lay flat along the horizon and the Three Marys hung on their broken chain in the sky overhead.

       ***

       Some weeks later Doctor Plarr woke early. It was a Saturday and he had a few hours free. He decided to spend them in the open air with a book while the morning was still fresh; he preferred somewhere out of sight of his secretary who read only what she called serious books—those of Doctor Saavedra among them.

       He chose a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges shared the tastes he had himself inherited from his father—Conan Doyle, Stevenson, Chesterton. 'Ficciones' would prove a welcome change from Doctor Saavedra's last novel which he had not been able to finish. He was tired of South American heroics. Now Doctor Plarr, sitting under the statue of an heroic sergeant—'machismo' again—who had saved the life of San Martin—was it a hundred and fifty years ago?—read with a sense of immense relaxation of the Countess de Bagno Regio, of Pittsburgh and Monaco. After a time he grew thirsty. To appreciate Borges properly he had to be taken, like a cheese biscuit, with an aperitif, but in this heat Doctor Plarr wanted a longer drink. He decided to call on his friend Gruber and demand a German beer.

       Gruber was one of Doctor Plarr's earliest friends in the city. As a boy he had escaped from Germany in 1936 when the persecution of the Jews was intensified. He was an only child, but his parents had insisted that he escape abroad, if only to save the name of Gruber from becoming extinct, and his mother baked a special cake for his journey in which to hide the few small valuables they were able to send with him—his mother's engagement ring set with inconsiderable diamonds and his father's gold wedding ring. They told him they were too old to make a new life in a strange continent and they pretended to believe that they were too old to be regarded as a danger by the Nazi state. Of course he never heard from them again: they had made their withered little plus two sign to that mathematical formula—the Final Solution. So Gruber like Doctor Plarr was a man without a father. He didn't even possess a family grave. Now he kept a photographic store in the main shopping street of the city, which, with its overlapping signs and slogans stuck out over the sidewalks, had a Chinese look. He was an optician as well. "Germans," he once said to Doctor Plarr, "always inspire confidence as chemists, opticians and photographic specialists. More people have heard of Zeiss and Bayer than of Goebbels and Goering, and even more people here have heard of Gruber."

       Gruber left his customer installed in the private section of his shop, where he worked on his lenses. There the doctor could see all that went on without being noticed himself, for Gruber (he had a passion for gadgets) had fitted a small internal television screen on which he was able to watch in miniature, as in a candid camera program, the customers outside in the shop. For some reason, which Gruber had never been able to explain, his shop attracted the prettiest girls in the city (no 'boutique' could compete with Gruber), as though pulchritude and the practice of photography were linked. They came in flocks to receive their color prints and they examined them with cries of excitement, chattering like birds Doctor Plarr watched them while he drank his beer and listened to Gruber's gossip of the province.

       "Have you met Charley Fortnum's woman?" Doctor Plarr asked.

       "You mean his wife?"

       "She can't be his wife, surely? Charley Fortnum's a divorced man. And there's no remarriage here—it's convenient for single men like me."

       "Didn't you hear that his wife died?"

       "No. I've been away. And when I saw him the other day he didn't mention it."

       "He went off with this new girl to Rosario and got married there. So people say. Nobody really knows, of course."

       "That was an odd thing for him to do. It couldn't have been necessary. You know where he found her?"

       "Yes, but she's a very pretty girl," Gruber said.

       "Oh yes, one of the best of Mother Sanchez' lot. But one doesn't necessarily have to marry a pretty girl."

       "Girls of that kind often make good wives, especially for old men."

       "Why old men?"

       "Old men are not very demanding and girls like that are glad of a rest."

       The phrase "like that" irritated Doctor Plarr. After seven days he was still obsessed by the unremarkable body which Gruber had classified so easily. Now on the television screen he saw a girl who leaned across the counter to buy a roll of Kodachrome in the same way Clara had leaned across her bed at Señora Sanchez'. She was more beautiful than Charley Fortnum's wife, and he felt no desire for her at all.

       "Girls like that are very content to be left alone," Gruber repeated. "You know they count it good luck when they find a caller who is impotent or too drunk to perform. They have a native word for it here—I have forgotten the Spanish, but it means a Lenten visitor."

       "Have you been often to the Sanchez place?"

       "Why should I? Look at the temptations I have to resist nearer home with all these charming customers of mine. Some of the films they bring me to develop are quite intimate, and when I hand the packet back to one, I can see the amusement in her eyes. He has observed that moment when the bikini slipped, she is thinking—and so I have. By the way, there were two men in here the other day who asked about you. They wanted to know if you could possibly be the Eduardo Plarr they knew years ago in Asunci6n. They saw your name on those films I sent round to you on Thursday. Of course I said I had no idea."

       "Were they police agents?"

       "They didn't look like police agents, but of course it doesn't do to take chances. I heard one of them call the other father. He didn't look old enough to be his father and he wasn't dressed like a priest, and that made me suspicious."

       "I'm on good terms with the Chief of Police here. Sometimes he calls me in when Doctor Benevento's on holidav Do you think those men came from across the border? The General's agents perhaps? But why should he be interested in me? I was only a boy when I left..."

       "Talk of the devil," Gruber said.

       Doctor Plarr looked quickly at the television screen expecting to see two strangers reflected there, but all he saw was a thin girl in sunglasses of an exaggerated size—they might have been made for a skin diver. "She buys sunglasses," Gruber said, "as other women buy costume jewelry. I've sold her at least four pairs."

       "Who is she?"

       "You ought to know. You were talking about her just now. Charley Fortnum's wife. Or girl if you prefer it."

       Doctor Plarr put down his beer and went into the shop. The girl was examining a pair of sunglasses and she was too absorbed to notice him. The lenses were colored bright mauve, the rims were of incandescent yellow and the sidepieces were encrusted with chips of what looked like amethyst. She took her own glasses off and tried the new ones on, and immediately added ten years to her age. Her eyes were quite invisible: all he could see was his own mauve face mirrored back at him.

       The assistant said. "We have only just received these from Mar del Plata. They are all the fashion there."

       Doctor Plarr knew that Gruber was probably watching him on the television screen, but why should he care? He asked. "Do you like them, Señora Fortnum?"

       She said, "Who...? Oh, it is you, Doctor, Doctor...?"

       "Plarr. They make you look a lot older, but of course you can afford to add a few years."

       "They cost too much. I was only trying them on for fun."

       "Wrap them up," he told the assistant. "And a case..."

       "They have their own case, doctor," she said, beginning to polish the glasses.

       "No," Clara said, "I cannot..."

       "You can with me. I am your husband's friend."

       "That makes it all right?"

       "Yes."

       She gave a jump which he was to learn later was her expression of joy at any present, even a sweet cake. He had never known a woman accept a present so frankly, with less fuss. She said to the assistant, "Please, I will wear them. Put the old ones in the case." In these glasses, he thought, as they left Gruber's shop together, she looks more like my mistress and less like my younger sister.

       "It is very kind of you," she said, speaking like a well-brought up schoolgirl.

       "Come and sit by the river where we can talk." When she hesitated he added, "Nobody can recognize you in those glasses. Not even your husband."

       "You do not like them?"

       "No. I don't like them at all."

       "I thought they looked very rich and very smart," she said with disappointment.

       "They are a good disguise. That was why I wanted you to have them. No one would recognize the young Señora Fortnum with me now."

       She said, "Who would recognize me? I know no one and Charley is at home. He sent me with the foreman. I said I wanted to buy something."