The Honorary Consul (30 page)

       ***

       They all, taking turns with those on guard, spent the afternoon drinking mate, with the exception of Doctor Plarr who had inherited from his father a taste for tea. He played another game with Aquino and, by pretending a slip which lost him his queen, he allowed Aquino a victory, but there was a sullen lack of belief in the way Aquino pronounced "Checkmate."

       Doctor Plarr visited his patient twice and found him sleeping on both occasions. He regarded with resentment the peaceful expression on the condemned man's face. He was even smiling a little—perhaps he was dreaming of Clara or the child, or perhaps only of the "proper measure." Doctor Plarr wondered what the years ahead might be like—in the unlikely event of there being any years ahead. He was not worried about Clara: that affair—if you could call it an affair—would have been finished soon in any case. It was the child's unage, as he grew up under Charley Fortnum's care, which worried him. For no rational reason he pictured the child as a boy, a boy who resembled two early photographs of himself, one taken at four years and one at eight. His mother preserved them still in the overcrowded apartment, the silver frames tarnished from lack of care, among the china cockatoos and the junk of antique shops.

       Charley, he was certain, would have the child brought up as a Catholic—he would be all the more strict about that because he had once broken the laws of the Church himself—and he could imagine Charley listening with sentimental pleasure beside the boy's bunk while the child stumbled through an Our Father. Afterward he would join Clara beside the dumbwaiter on the verandah. Charley would be a very kind father. He would never make his son ride a horse. It was even possible that he would give up drink or at least severely reduce the proper measure. Charley would call the boy "old fellow" and pat his cheek and turn over the pages of 'London Panorama' before tucking him up firmly in bed. Doctor Plarr suddenly saw the boy sitting up in his bunk, as he had done, listening to the distant locking of doors, to the low voices downstairs, the stealthy footsteps. There was one night he remembered when he had crept for reassurance to his father's room, and he was looking down now at the bearded face of his father stretched on the coffin—four days' stubble had begun to resemble a beard.

       Doctor Plarr returned abruptly to the company of Charley Fortnum's future murderers.

       Guard duty had been resumed. Aquino was outside, while Pablo took the place of the Indian at the door. The Guaraní slept quietly on the floor, and Marta was clattering dishes noisily in the yard behind. Father Rivas sat with his back to the wall. He played with some dried beans which he tossed from hand to hand, like the beads of a broken rosary.

       "Did you finish your book?" Doctor Plarr asked.

       "Oh yes," Father Rivas said. "The end was exactly what I thought. You can always tell. The murderer went and committed suicide on the Edinburgh express. That was why it was half an hour late and why the man Bradshaw was wrong. How is the consul?"

       "Sleeping."

       "And his wound?"

       "Doing all right. But will he live long enough to see it heal?"

       "I thought you believed in those secret pressures?"

       "I thought you believed in something too, Léon. Things like mercy and charity. Once a priest always a priest—that's the theory, isn't it? Don't start telling me about Father Torres or the bishops who went to war in the Middle Ages. This isn't the Middle Ages and this isn't war. This is the murder of a man who has done you no harm at all—a man old enough to be my father—or yours. Where is your father, Léon?"

       "Under a marble monument in Asunción almost as big as this hut."

       "We all of us seem to live with dead fathers, don't we? Fortnum hated his. I think I may have loved mine. Perhaps. How can I possibly tell? That word love has such a slick sound. We take credit for loving as though we had passed an examination with more than the average marks. What was your father like? I can't remember even seeing him."

       "He was what you would expect, one of the richest of the bourgeoisie in Paraguay. You must remember our house in Asunción with the great portico and the white columns and the marble bathrooms and all the orange and lemon trees in the garden? And the lapachos covering the paths with their rose petals. Probably you never saw inside the house, but I am sure you came once to a birthday party in the garden. Friends of mine were never allowed inside the house—there were so many things they might break or soil. We had six servants. I liked them much better than my parents. And there was a gardener called Pedro—he was always busy sweeping up the petals—they were so untidy my mother said. I was very fond of Pedro, but my father threw him out because he stole a few pesos which had been left on a garden seat. My father paid a lot of money every year to the Colorado Party, so there was no trouble for him when the General came to power after the civil war. He was a good 'abogado', but he never worked for a poor client. He served the rich faithfully until he died, and everyone said he was a good father because he left plenty of cash behind him. Oh well, I suppose he was, in that way. It is one of the duties of a father to provide."

       "And God the Father, Léon? He doesn't seem to provide much. I asked last night if you still believed in Hun. To me He has always seemed a bit of a swine. I would rather believe in Apollo. At least he was beautiful."

       "The trouble is we have lost the power to believe in Apollo," Father Rivas said. "We have Jehovah in our blood. We can't help it. After all these centuries Jehovah lives in our darkness like a worm in the intestines."

       "You should never have been a priest, Léon."

       "Perhaps you are right, but it's too late to change now. What time is it? How tired to death I am of this radio, but we have to listen to the news—it is still possible they may give in."

       "My watch has stopped. I forgot to wind it."

       "Then we had better keep the radio on, however dangerous, as long as there is a chance..." He turned the sound as low as he could, but all the same they ceased to be alone. Someone was playing a harp almost inaudibly, someone sang in a whisper. They might have been sitting in a vast hall where they couldn't even see or hear the performers.

       There was nothing to do but talk, talk about anything under the sun except about Sunday midnight.

       "I've often noticed," Doctor Plarr said, "when a man leaves a woman he begins to hate her. Or is it that he hates his own failure? Perhaps we want to destroy the only witness who knows exactly what we are like when we drop the comedy. I suppose I shall hate Clara when I leave her."

       "Clara?"

       "Fortnum's wife."

       "It 'is' true what they say?"

       "There's not much point in lying about anything, Léon, in the position we are in now. Dying is a wonderfully effective truth drug, better than pentothal. You priests have always known that. When the priest arrives I always leave a dying man so that he's free to talk. They most of them want to talk, if they have the strength."

       "Are you planning to desert this woman?"

       "I'm planning nothing. But it will happen. If I live. I am certain of that. Nothing is for keeps in this world, Léon. When you entered the Church, weren't you sure in your heart that one day even your priesthood would come to an end?"

       "No. I never believed that. Not for a moment. I thought the Church and I wanted the same thing. You see I had been very happy in my seminary. You might say that was the period of my honeymoon. Only there were occasions... I suppose it happens the same way in all honeymoons... there was a hint that something might be wrong... I remember one old priest... he was the professor in the moral theology course. I've never known a man so cut and dried and sure of the truth. Of course moral theology is the bugbear in every seminary. You learn the rules and find they don't apply to any human case... Oh well, I used to think, a little difference of opinion, what does it matter? In the end a man and wife grow together. The Church will grow nearer to me as I grow nearer to her."

       "But when you left the Church you began to hate it, didn't you?"

       "I have told you—I never left the Church. Mine is only a separation, Eduardo, a separation by mutual consent, not a divorce. I shall never belong wholly to anyone else. Not even to Marta."

       "Even a separation brings hate often enough," Doctor Plarr said. "I have seen it happen many times among my patients in this damned country where no one is allowed a divorce."

       "It will never happen in my case. Even if I cannot love, I see no reason to hate. I can never forget that long honeymoon in the seminary when I was so happy. Now, if I feel any emotion for the Church, it is regret, not hate. I think she could have used me easily for a good purpose if she had understood a little better. I mean about the world as it is."

       The radio murmured on, and they listened with ears alert for the time signal. In the room of mud, which might well have been some primitive aboveground tomb prepared for a whole family, Doctor Plarr no longer felt the least desire to torment Léon Rivas. If there was anyone he wanted to torment, it was himself. He thought: whatever we may pretend to each other, we have both given up hope. That is why we can talk like the friends we used to be. I have reached a premature old age when I can no longer mock a man for his beliefs, however absurd. I can only envy them.

       Curiosity after a while drove him to speak. He remembered how at his first Communion in Asunción, dressed like a diminutive monk with a rope round his waist, he had believed—something, though now he could not remember what.

       "It's a long time," he told Léon, "since I listened to a priest. I thought you taught that the Church was infallible like Christ."

       "Christ was a man," Father Rivas said, "even if some of us believe that he was God as well. It was not the God the Romans killed, but a man. A carpenter from Nazareth. Some of the rules He laid down were only the rules of a good man. A man who lived in his own province, in his own particular day. He had no idea of the kind of world we would be living in now. Render unto Caesar, but when 'our' Caesar uses napalm and fragmentation bombs... The Church lives in time too. Only sometimes, for a short while, for some people—I am not one of them—I am not a man of vision—I think perhaps—but how can I explain to you when I believe so little myself?—I think sometimes the memory of that man, that carpenter, can lift a few people out of the temporary Church of these terrible years, when the Archbishop sits down to dinner with the General, into the great Church beyond our time and place, and then... those lucky ones... they have no words to describe the beauty of that Church."

       "I don't understand a word you say, Léon. You used to explain things more clearly. Even the Trinity."

       "Forgive me. It is such a very long time since I read the right sort of books."

       "You haven't the right audience either. I feel no more interested in the Church now than I feel in Marxism. The Bible is as unreadable to me as Das Kapital. Only sometimes, like a bad habit, I find myself using that crude word God. Last night..."

       "Any word one uses from habit means nothing at all."

       "All the same, when you shoot Fortnum in the back of the head, are you sure you won't have a moment's fear of old Jehovah and His anger? 'Thou shalt not commit murder.' "

       "If I kill him it will be God's fault as much as mine."

       "God's fault?"

       "He made me what I am now. He will have loaded the gun and steadied my hand."

       "I thought the Church teaches that He's love?"

       "Was it love which sent six million Jews to the gas ovens? You are a doctor, you must often have seen intolerable pain—a child dying of meningitis. Is that love? It was not love which cut off Aquino's fingers. The police stations where such things happen... He created them."

       "I have never heard a priest blame God for things like that before."

       "I don't blame Him. I pity Him," Father Rivas said, and the time signal struck faintly in the dark.

       "Pity God?"

       The priest put his fingers on the dial. For a moment he hesitated to turn it. Yes, Doctor Plarr thought, there is always something to be said for remaining ignorant of the worst. I have never told a cancer patient yet that' there is no hope any longer.

       A voice said as indifferently as if it were reading out a list of prices on the stock exchange, "The following communique has been issued from police headquarters. 'At seventeen hours yesterday a man who refused to give his name was arrested while attempting to board the ferry to the Chaco shore. He attempted to escape by plunging into the river, but he was shot by police officers. His body was recovered. It proved to be that of a lorry driver employed at the Bergman orange-canning factory. He had been absent from work since last Monday, the day before the kidnapping of the British Consul. His name was Diego Corredo and his age was thirty-five. Unmarried. His identification is believed to be an important step toward tracing the other members of the gang. It is thought that the kidnappers have not left the province, and an intensive search is now in progress. The commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade has put a parachute company at the disposal of the police.'"

       Doctor Plarr said, "Lucky for you he was not interrogated. I doubt if Perez would have many scruples at this stage."

       It was Pablo who answered. "They will discover soon enough who his friends were. I was employed at the same factory until a year ago. Everyone knew we were good friends." The man on the radio was talking again about the Argentinian football team. There had been a riot with twenty injured when they played in Barcelona.

       ***

       Father Rivas woke Miguel and sent him out to relieve Aquino, and when Aquino returned, the old arguments, broke out anew. Marta had cooked the anonymous stew which she had served for two days now. Doctor Plarr wondered whether Father Rivas had endured the same meal every day of his married life, but probably it was no worse than he had been accustomed to eat in the poor 'barrio' of Asunción.