The Honorary Consul (7 page)

       "No."

       "I was once."

       "Yes, so you told me."

       "I was glad when we split up, but all the same I wish we'd had a child first. When there's no child it's generally the man's fault, isn't?"

       "No. I think the chances are about even."

       "I'd be sterile anyway, wouldn't I, by now?"

       "Of course not. Age doesn't make you sterile."

       "If I had a child I wouldn't try to make him conquer fear like my father did. It's part of human nature, isn't it, fear? If you conquer fear, you conquer your human nature, too. It's a bit like the balance of nature. I read in a book once that, if we killed all the spiders in the world, we would all of us be suffocated under the weight of flies. Have you got a child, Ted?"

       The name Ted had an irritating effect on Doctor Eduardo Plarr. He said, "No. If you want to call me by a Christian name I wish you'd call me Eduardo."

       "But you are as English as I am."

       "I'm only half English and that half is in prison or dead."

       "Your father?"

       "Yes."

       "And your mother?"

       "She's living in B. A."

       "You're lucky. You have somebody to save for. My mother died when I was born."

       "It's not a good reason to kill yourself with drink."

       "That's not the reason, Ted. I only mentioned my mother in passing, that's all. What's the good of a friend if one can't talk to him?"

       "A friend doesn't make a good psychiatrist."

       "You sound a hard man, Ted. Haven't you ever loved anyone?"

       "That depends on what you call love."

       "You analyze too much," Charley Fortnum said. "It's a young man's fault. Don't turn up too many stones is what I always say. You never know what you'll find underneath."

       Doctor Plarr said, "My job is to turn up stones. Guesswork is not much good when you make a diagnosis."

       "And what's your diagnosis?"

       "I'm going to give you a prescription, but it won't do you any good unless you cut down on your drinking."

       He went back into the Consul's office. He was irritated by the sense of time wasted. He could have seen three or four patients in the poor quarter of the city during the time he had spent listening to the self-pity of the Honorary Consul. He walked out of the bedroom and sat down at the desk and wrote his prescription. He felt the same sense of wasted time as when he visited his mother and she complained of headaches and loneliness while she sat before a plate heaped up with éclairs in the best tea shop of Buenos Aires. She always implied that she had been deserted by her husband—because a husband's first duty was to his wife and child and he should have fled with them.

       Charley Fortnum put on his jacket in the next room. "You aren't going, are you?" he called.

       "Yes. I've left the prescription on the desk."

       "What's the hurry? Stay and have a drink."

       "I have patients to see."

       "Well, I'm your patient too, aren't I?"

       "You are not the most important of them," Doctor Plarr said. "The prescription isn't renewable. You'll have enough tablets for a month, and then we'll see."

       Doctor Plarr closed the door of the Consulate with a sense of relief, the relief he always felt when he finally left his mother's apartment after a visit to the capital. He hadn't enough time available to waste any of it on the incurable.

2

Nearly two years passed before Doctor Plarr visited for the first time the establishment which was so ably run by Señora Sanchez, and then it was not in the company of the Honorary Consul. He went there with his friend and patient, the novelist, Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra. Saavedra, as he himself explained over a plate of tough beef at the Nacional, was a man who believed in following a very strict discipline. An observer might have guessed so much from his appearance, which was neat, of a uniform gray, gray hair, gray suit, gray tie. Even in the northern heat he wore the same well-cut double-breasted waistcoat that he used to wear in the coffee houses of the capital. His tailor there, he told Doctor Plarr, was English. "You wouldn't believe it, but I haven't had to buy a new suit in ten years." As for the discipline of work, "I write five hundred words a day after my breakfast. No more no less," he said, not for the first time.

       Doctor Plarr was a good listener. He had been trained to listen. Most of his middle-class patients were accustomed to spend at least ten minutes explaining a simple attack of flu. It was only in the 'barrio' of the poor that he ever encountered suffering in silence, suffering which had no vocabulary to explain a degree of pain, its position or its nature. In those huts of mud or tin where the patient often lay without covering on the dirt floor he had to make his own interpretation from a shiver of the skin or a nervous shift of the eyes.

       "Discipline," Jorge Julio Saavedra was repeating, "is more necessary to me than to other more facile writers. You see I have a demon where others have a talent. Mind you I envy them their talent. A talent is friendly. A demon is destructive. You cannot conceive how much I suffer when I write. I have to force myself day after day to sit down pen in hand and I struggle for expression... You will remember in my last book, that character, Castillo, the fisherman, who wages an endless war with the sea for such a small reward. In a way you might say that Castillo is a portrait of the artist. Such daily agony and the result—five hundred words. A very small catch."

       "I seem to remember Castillo died from a revolver shot in a bar defending his one-eyed daughter from rape."        "Ah yes, I am glad you noticed the Cyclops symbol," Doctor Saavedra said. "A symbol of the novelist's art. A one-eyed art because one eye concentrates the vision. The diffuse writer is always two-eyed. He includes too much—like a cinema screen. And the violator? Perhaps he represents this melancholy of mine which descends for weeks at a time, when I struggle for hours to do my daily stint."

       "I hope you find my tablets give you some help."

       "Yes, yes, they help a little, of course, but sometimes I think it is only the daily discipline which saves me from suicide." Doctor Saavedra, with his fork suspended on the way to the mouth, repeated, "Suicide."

       "Oh come, surely your faith won't allow you...?"

       "In those black moments, doctor, I have no faith, no faith at all. 'En una noche oscura'. Shall we open another bottle? This wine from Mendoza is not wholly bad."

       After the second bottle the novelist revealed another rule of his self-imposed discipline, his weekly visit to the house of Señora Sanchez. He explained that it was not merely a question of keeping his body calm so as to prevent important desires coming between him and his work: from his weekly visit he learned a great deal about human nature. In the social life of the city there was no contact between the classes. How could dinner with Señora Escobar or Señora Vallejo provide him with any insight into the life of the poor? The character of Carlota the daughter of Castillo, the heroic fisherman, was based on a girl he had met in the establishment of Señora Sanchez. Of course she had two eyes. She was indeed remarkably pretty, but when he came to write his novel he found her beauty gave her story a false and banal turn: it fitted ill with the bleak severity of the fisherman's life. Even the violator became a conventional character. Pretty girls were being violated all the time everywhere, especially in the books of his contemporaries, those facile writers of undoubted talent.

       At the end of dinner Doctor Plarr was easily persuaded to accompany the novelist on his disciplinary visit, though he was tempted more by curiosity than sexual desire. They left their table at midnight and set out on foot. Though Señora Sanchez was protected by the authorities it was better not to leave a car outside in case an inquisitive policeman noted the number. Such an addition to one's police file might one day prove undesirable Doctor Saavedra wore pointed highly polished shoes and gave the impression of hopping when he walked because he was a little pigeon-toed. One half expected to see bird marks left behind on the dusty pavement.

       Señora Sanchez sat in a deck chair outside her house knitting. She was a very stout lady with a dimpled face and a welcoming smile from which kindliness was oddly lacking, as though it had been mislaid accidentally a moment before like a pair of spectacles. The novelist introduced Doctor Plarr.

       "I am always glad to welcome a medical gentleman," Señora Sanchez said. "You will appreciate how well my girls are looked after. I employ your colleague Doctor Benevento, a most sympathetic man."

       "So I have heard. I have not met him," Doctor Plarr said.

       "He comes here on Thursday afternoons and all my girls are very fond of him."

       They passed through the narrow lighted doorway. Except for Señora Sanchez in her deck chair there were no exterior signs to differentiate her establishment from the other houses in the respectable street. A good wine, Doctor Plarr thought, needs no bush.

       It was a house very different in character from the clandestine brothels he had occasionally visited in the capital where small rooms were darkened by closed shutters and crammed with bourgeois furniture. There was a pleasant country air about this house. An airy patio about the size of a tennis court was surrounded by small cells. Two open doors faced him when he had taken a seat, and he thought the cells looked gayer, cleaner, and in better taste than Doctor Humphries' bedroom at the Hotel Bolivar. Each possessed a little shrine with a lighted candle which gave the tidy interiors the atmosphere of a home rather than of a place of business. A group of girls sat at a table apart, while two talked with young men, leaning against the pillars of the verandah which surrounded the patio. There was no sign of hustling—it was obvious Señora Sanchez was strict about that; here a man might take his time. One man sat alone over a glass, and another, dressed like a 'peón', stood by a pillar, watching the girls with an unhappy, envious expression (perhaps he hadn't the means to buy even a drink).

       A girl called Teresa came immediately to take the novelist's order ("Whisky," he advised, "the brandy is not to be trusted"), and afterward sat down with them unasked "Teresa comes from Salta," Doctor Saavedra explained leaving his hand in her care like a glove in a cloakroom She turned it this way and that and examined the fingers as though she were looking for holes. "I am thinking of setting my next novel in Salta."

       Doctor Plarr said, "I hope your demon won't insist on grvinp her one eye."

       "You laugh at me," the novelist said, "because you have so little idea of how a writer's imagination works. He has to transform reality. Look at her—those big brown eyes those plump little breasts, she's pretty isn't she"—the girl gave a gratified smile and scratched his palm with her nail—"but what does she represent? I am not planning a love story for a woman's magazine. My characters must symbolize more than themselves. Now it 'has' occurred to me that with perhaps one leg..."

       "A girl with one leg could be more easily violated."

       "There is no violation in my story. But a beauty with one leg—don't you see the significance of that? Think of her halting walk, her moments of despair, the lovers who feel they do her a favor if they stay with her one night Her stubborn faith in a future which somehow will be better than today's. For the first time," Doctor Saavedra said, "I am proposing to write a political novel."

       "Political?" Doctor Plarr asked with some surprise.

       A cell door opened and a man came out. He lit a cigarette, went to a table and drank from an unfinished glass. In the glow of light, below the saint's shrine, Doctor Plarr could see a thin girl who was straightening the bed. She arranged the coverlet with care before she came out and joined her companions at their communal table. An unfinished glass of orange juice awaited her. The 'peón' by the pillar watched her with his hungry envy.

       "Don't you resent that man?" Doctor Plarr asked Teresa.

       "What man?"

       "The one over there who stands staring, doing nothing."

       "Let him stare, he does no harm, poor man. And he has no money."

       "I was telling you about my political novel," Doctor Saavedra spoke with irritation. He removed his hand from Teresa's grasp.

       "But I don't understand the point of one leg."

       "A symbol," Doctor Saavedra said, "of this poor crippled country, where we still hope..."

       "Will your readers understand? I would have thought something more direct. Those students last year in Rosario..."

       "If one is to write a political novel of lasting value it must be free from all the petty details that date it. Assassinations, kidnapping, the torture of prisoners—these things belong to our decade. But I do not want to write merely for the seventies."

       "The Spaniards tortured their prisoners three hundred years ago," Doctor Plarr murmured, and he looked again for some reason toward the girl at the communal table.

       "Are you not coming with me tonight?" Teresa asked Doctor Saavedra.

       "Yes, yes, all in good time. I am talking to my friend here on a subject of great importance."

       Doctor Plarr noticed on the other girl's forehead, a little below the hairline, a small gray birthmark, in the spot where a Hindu girl wears the scarlet sign of her caste.

       Jorge Julio Saavedra said, "A poet—the true novelist must always be in his way a poet—a poet deals in absolutes Shakespeare avoided the politics of his time, the minutiae of politics. He wasn't concerned with Philip of Spain, with pirates like Drake. He used the history of the past to express what I call the abstraction of politics. A novelist today who wants to represent tyranny should not describe the activities of General Stroessner in Paraguay—that is journalism not literature. Tiberius is a better example for a poet."