The Honorary Consul (5 page)

       "An Honorary Consul," Doctor Plarr corrected.

       "It will be a warning to people who are more important. Perhaps they will take our next threat seriously. That is a small tactical point gamed in a long war."

       Doctor Plarr said, "So I suppose you'll be prepared to hear the stranger's confession and give him absolution before you kill him? Charley Fortnum's a Catholic, you know. He'll appreciate having a priest at his deathbed."

       Father Rivas said to the Negro, "Give me a cigarette, Pablo."

       "He will be even glad of a married priest like you, Léon," Doctor Plarr said.

       "You were willing enough to help us, Eduardo."

       "In the case of the Ambassador, yes. His life wouldn't have been in any danger. They would have given way. In any case an American... he's a combatant. The Americans have killed plenty of men in South America."

       "Your father is among those we are trying to help—if he is still alive."

       "I don't know whether he would have liked your method."

       "We have not chosen our method. 'They' have reduced us to this."

       "What on earth can you ask in return for Charley Fortnum? Perhaps a case of real Scotch?"

       "For the American Ambassador we would have demanded the release of twenty prisoners. For a British Consul I think we shall have to halve the bill. That is up to El Tigre."

       "Where the hell is your El Tigre?"

       "Only those in Rosario are in touch with him until the operation is finished."

       "I suppose his schedule did not allow for mistakes. Or for human nature. The General can kill the men you name and say they died years ago."

       "We have been through that argument many times. If they kill them our demands will be greater next time."

       "Léon, listen to me. If you can be sure that Charley Fortnum will remember nothing, surely...?"

       "How could we ever be certain? You have no drugs to wipe out memory. Does he mean so much to you, Eduardo?"

       "He's a voice in the confessional box which I have recognized."

       "Ted," a familiar voice called to bun from the inner room. "Ted."

       "You see," Father Rivas said, "he knows you."

       Doctor Plarr turned his back on the tribunal and went through the doorway. "Yes, Charley," he said, "here I am. How do you feel?"

       "God awful, Ted. What happened? Where am I?"

       "You had an accident with your car. Nothing serious."

       "Are you going to take me home?"

       "Not yet. You must lie quiet for a while. In the dark. You've got a bit of concussion."

       "Clara's going to be anxious."

       "Don't worry. I'll deal with Clara."

       "You mustn't upset her, Ted. The child..."

       "I am her doctor, Charley."

       "Of course, old man, I'm a bloody fool. Will she be able to see me?"

       "In a few days you'll be going home."

       "A few days! Have you a drink with you, Ted?"

       "No. I'm going to give you something better—to make you sleep."

       "You are a good friend, Ted. Who are those men out there? Why do you have to use a torch?"

       "There's a power cut. When you wake up it will be daylight."

       "You'll look in and see me?"

       "Of course."

       Charley Fortnum lay still for a moment and then asked in a voice which must have carried clearly into the other room, "It wasn't really an accident, Ted, was it?"

       "Of course it was an accident."

       "The sunglasses... what happened to the sunglasses?"

       "What sunglasses?"

       "They were Clara's," Charley Fortnum said. "She liked those sunglasses. I shouldn't have borrowed them. Couldn't find my own." He raised his knees toward his chest and settled on his side with a long sigh. "It's the measure that counts," he said and lay still like an aged embryo which had failed to get born.

       In the other room Father Rivas sat with his chin on his crossed fingers and his eyes closed. He might be praying, Doctor Plarr thought as he came back into the room, or perhaps he was only listening carefully to the words of Charley Fortnum as he once used to listen in the confessional to the voice of a stranger in order to decide what penance...

       "What blunderers you are," Doctor Plarr accused him. "What amateurs!"

       "On our side we are all amateurs. The police and the soldiers are the professionals."

       "An Honorary Consul, alcoholic at that, in place of an Ambassador."

       "Yes. And Che took photographs like a tourist and left them around. At least no one here has a camera. Or keeps a journal. We learn from our mistakes."

       "Your driver will have to take me home," Doctor Plarr said.

       "Yes."

       "I will come back tomorrow..."

       "You will not be needed any more, Eduardo."

       "Perhaps not by you, but..."

       "It is better if he does not see you again before we decide..."

       "Léon," Doctor Plarr said, "you can't be serious about this. Old Charley Fortnum..."

       Father Rivas said, "He is not in our hands, Eduardo. He is in the hands of the governments. In the hands of God too, of course. I do not forget my old claptrap, you notice, but I have never yet seen any sign that He interferes in our wars or our politics."

PART TWO

1

It was easy for Doctor Plarr to remember the first time he met Charley Fortnum. The meeting occurred a few weeks after he had arrived in the city from Buenos Aires. The Honorary Consul was exceedingly drunk, and he had lost the use of both legs. Doctor Plarr was making his way up Bolivar when an elderly gentleman leaned from the window of the Italian Club and called to him for help. "The bloody waiter's gone home," he explained, speaking in English.

       When Doctor Plarr entered the club he found a drunk man who seemed perfectly content—the only trouble was he couldn't stand up, but this didn't worry him at all. He said he was quite comfortable on the floor. "I've sat on worse things," he said, "including horses."

       "If you'll take one arm," the old man said, "I'll take the other."

       "Who is he?"

       "The gentleman you see sitting here on the floor and refusing to get up is Mr. Charles Fortnum, our Honorary Consul. You are Doctor Plarr, aren't you? Glad to meet you. I'm Doctor Humphries. Doctor of Letters, not medicine. We three, you may say, are the pillars of the English colony, but one pillar has fallen."

       Fortnum said, "The measure was wrong." He added something about the wrong kind of glass. "You have to have the right sort of glass or you get confused."

       "Is he celebrating something?" Doctor Plarr asked. "His new Cadillac arrived safely last week, and today he's found a purchaser."

       "You've been eating here?"

       "He wanted to take me to the Nacional, but he's much too drunk for the Nacional—or even my hotel. Now we've got to get him home somehow, but he insists on going to see Señora Sanchez."

       "A friend of his?"

       "Of half the men in this town. She runs the only good brothel here—or so they say. I'm not a good judge of that kind of thing myself."

       "Surely they are illegal," said Doctor Plarr.

       "Not in this city. We are a military headquarters—don't forget that. The military don't allow anyone in B. A. to dictate to them here."

       "Why not let him go?"

       "You can see why—he can't stand up."

       "Surely the point of a brothel is that one can lie down?"

       "Something has to stand up," Doctor Humphries said with unexpected coarseness and an expression of distaste.

       In the end they lugged Charley Fortnum between them across the street to the little room which Doctor Humphries occupied in the Hotel Bolívar. There were fewer pictures on the walls in those days because there were fewer damp stains, and the shower had not yet begun to drip.

       Inanimate objects change at a faster rate than human beings. Doctor Humphries and Charley Fortnum were not noticeably different men that night than they were now; a crack in the plaster of a neglected house grows more quickly than a line on a human face, paint changes color more rapidly than hair, and a room's decay is continuous: it never comes to a temporary halt on that high plateau of old age where a man may live a long time without apparent change. Doctor Humphries had been established on the plateau for many years, and Charley Fortnum, though he was still on one of the lower slopes, had found a reliable weapon in the fight against senility—he had pickled in alcohol some of the high spirits and the naiveté of earlier days. As the years passed, Doctor Plan: could discern little alteration in either of his early acquaintances—perhaps Humphries moved more slowly between the Bolivar and the Italian Club, and sometimes he believed he could detect in Charley Fortnum increasing spots of melancholy, like mold, in his well-bottled bonhomie.

       Doctor Plarr left Fortnum with Humphries at the Hotel Bolivar and went to fetch his car. He was living in the same flat in the same block that he inhabited now. Lights were still burning in the port, where laborers worked through the whole night. On a flat barge in the Paraná they had mounted a metal tower from which an iron rod pounded the bottom of the river. Thud, thud, thud, the noise reverberated like tribal drums. From a second barge lengths of pipe were extended, attached to some underwater engine which sucked the gravel out of the riverbed and sent it scuttling and rattling down the waterfront to an inlet half a mile away. The Governor, who had been appointed by the newest President after that year's 'coup d'etat', was planning to deepen the port so that it might take ferries of greater draught from the Chaco shore and receive larger passenger boats from the capital. When, after a second military coup, this time in Córdoba, he was dismissed from office, the idea was abandoned, to the benefit of Doctor Plarr's sleep. The Governor of the Chaco, it was said, had not been prepared to spend the necessary money to deepen his side of the river, and the passenger boats from the capital were already too large in the dry season to mount beyond the city where passengers had to be transferred anyway to smaller boats for the voyage to the Paraguayan republic in the north. It was difficult to judge who had made the initial mistake, if it was a mistake. The question 'Cui bono?' pointed at no individual, since all the contractors had benefited and all undoubtedly had shared their benefits with others. The harbor works before they were abandoned had done a lot of good; they were responsible for a grand piano in one house, a new refrigerator in somebody's kitchen, and perhaps in some small unimportant subcontractor's cellar, where spirits had hitherto been little known, lay a dozen or two cases of the national Scotch. When Doctor Plarr returned to the Hotel Bolivar he found Charley Fortnum drinking strong black coffee made on a spirit ring which was installed on a marble-topped washstand, beside the soap dish and Doctor Humphries' tooth glass. He had become a good deal more coherent, and it was all the more difficult to dissuade him from visiting Señora Sanchez. "There's a girl there," he said. "A real girl. Not what you think at all. I've got to see her again. Last time I wasn't in a fit condition..."

       "You aren't in a fit condition now," Humphries said.

       "You don't understand me at all, do you? I only want to talk to her. We aren't all bloody lechers, Humphries. There's a quality about María. She doesn't belong..."

       "She's a whore like all the rest, I suppose," Doctor Humphries said, clearing his throat. Doctor Plarr was soon to learn that, whenever Humphries disapproved of a subject, his throat clogged with phlegm.

       "And that's where you're both of you so bloody wrong," Charley Fortnum said, although Doctor Plarr had not expressed an opinion. "She is different from all the others. She's got a sort of refinement. Her family comes from Córdoba. There's good blood in her or else I'm not Charley Fortnum. I know you think I'm a fool, but there's something well... almost virginal about that girl."

       "And you're the Consul here, honorary or not. You've no business to be seen in a low dive like that."

       "I respect the girl," Charley Fortnum said, "I respect her even when I sleep with her."

       "It's all you are capable of doing tonight."

       After a little more harsh persuasion, Fortnum allowed himself to be assisted to-Doctor Plarr's car.

       There he brooded in silence for a time, while his chin shook to the movement of the engine. "One grows old I suppose," he said suddenly. "You are young. You don't suffer from memories, regrets... Are you married?" he asked abruptly as they drove up San Martin.

       "No."

       "I was married once," Fortnum said, "twenty-five years ago—it seems a century now. It didn't work out. She was an intellectual if you understand what I mean. She didn't understand human nature." He switched—by an association of ideas Doctor Plarr found it impossible, to follow—to his present condition. "I always feel a great deal more human," he said, "when I've drunk just over half a bottle. A little less than half—that's no use at all, but a little more... Of course the effect doesn't last, but half an hour of feeling really good is worth some sadness afterward."

       "Are you talking of wine?" Doctor Plarr asked with incredulity. He couldn't believe that Fortnum had been so moderate.

       "Wine, whisky, gin, it's all the same. It's the measure that counts. There's something psychological in the measure. Less than half a bottle and Charley Fortnum's a poor lonely bastard with only Fortnum's Pride for company."

       "Fortnum's Pride?"

       "My proud and well-groomed steed. But one glass over the half-bottle—any glass, even a liqueur glass, it's just the measure that counts and Charley Fortnum's quite himself again. Fit for royalty. You know I went on a picnic with some royals once among the rums. We had two bottles among the three of us, and it was quite a day, I can tell you, but that's another story. Like Captain Izquierdo. Remind me to tell you one day about Captain Izquierdo." It was very hard for a stranger to follow Charley Fortnum's associations.