The Honorary Consul

by Graham Greene

  They went together to the manager's office which was empty and Doctor Plarr wrote out the cables. When he turned he saw the eyes of Doctor Saavedra red with unshed tears. Saavedra said, "Montez was like a son to me. I admired his books. They were so different from my own, and they had quality—I could see they had quality. Yet all the time he must have been despising me. I am an old man, Doctor Plarr, so death is not very far off from me in any case. That story I was describing to the hotel manager—the story of the intruder—I was going to call the novel 'The Intruder'—it would probably never have been finished. Even while I was planning it I knew it belonged to his region of literature and not to mine. I used to give him advice and see me now—planning to imitate him. It is the privilege of the young to imitate. I would prefer to die in a way that even Montez would have to respect."

  "He will say that you were killed too in the end by 'Martin Fierro'."

  "In Argentina we are most of us killed by 'Martin Fierro'. But a man has the right to choose the moment of death."

  "Charley Fortnum has not been allowed to choose."

  "Señor Fortnum is caught up in a contingency. I agree that is not a dignified way to die. It is like a street accident or a case of 'gripe'."

  ***

  Doctor Plarr offered to drive Saavedra home. He had never yet been invited to visit the novelist and he had imagined him in occupation of some old colonial house with barred windows looking out on a shady street, with a few orange trees and 'lapachos' in the garden, a house as dignified and out of fashion as his clothes. Perhaps there would be portraits on the wall of the great-grandfather who had been Governor of the province and of the grandfather who had been killed by the gaucho.

  "It is not far. I can easily walk," Saavedra said.

  "I think we ought to talk a little more about your offer and how it can be carried through."

  "All that is out of my hands now."

  "Not entirely."

  As he drove Doctor Plarr pointed out to the novelist that from the moment his offer was published in 'El Litoral' he would be watched by the police. "The kidnappers will have to communicate with you and suggest some way of making the exchange. It would be easier if you left the town tonight before the police know. You could stay out of sight with some friend in the country."

  "How would the kidnappers find me?"

  "Perhaps through me. They probably know I am a friend of Señor Fortnum."

  "I cannot run away and hide like a criminal."

  "Then it will be difficult for them to take your offer up."

  "Besides," Doctor Saavedra said, "there is my work."

  "Surely you can take it with you."

  "That is easy for you to say. You can go and attend a patient anywhere, you carry your experience with you. But my work is tied to the room where I work. When I came here from Buenos Aires it was nearly a year before I could put a pen to paper. My room was like a hotel room. To write one must have a home."

  A home: Doctor Plarr was surprised to find the novelist lived in a block even more modern and shabby than his own in a quarter close by the prison wall. The gray apartment houses stood in squares as though they formed an extension of the prison. One expected them to be lettered A, B and C and to be reserved for different categories of criminal. Doctor Saavedra's apartment was on the third floor and there was no hit. Children played a kind of bowls with tin cans in front of the entrance, and the smell of cooking pursued them up the stairs. Perhaps Doctor Saavedra felt that an explanation was required. He spoke a little breathlessly after his climb as he paused on the second floor. "You know a novelist does not pay visits like a doctor. He has to live with his subject. I could not live comfortably in a bourgeois setting because I write about the people. The good woman who cleans for me here is the wife of a warder at the prison. I feel myself in the right milieu. I put her in my last book. Do you remember? She was called Caterina and was the widow of a sergeant. I think I caught her way of thinking." He opened his door and said with a note of defiance, "Here you are at the heart of what my critics call the world of Saavedra."

  It was indeed a very small world. Doctor Plarr had an impression that the long pursuit of literature had brought the novelist little material reward beyond his tidy suit and his polished shoes and the respect of the hotel manager. The living room was narrow and long like a railway compartment. One shelf of books (most of them were Saavedra's own), a folding table which would have almost spanned the room if it had been opened, a nineteenth-century painting of a gaucho on a horse, one easy chair and two upright chairs—that was all the furnishing there was, apart from a huge antique mahogany cupboard which must have once belonged in more spacious quarters, for the baroque curlicues above the pediment had been cut to fit under the ceiling. Two open doors, which Doctor Saavedra quickly shut, gave Plarr glimpses of a monastic bedstead and the chipped enamel of a cooking stove. Through the window, which was veined by a rusty mesh against mosquitoes, came the clatter of tins from the children playing below.

  "May I give you a whisky?"

  "A small one, please."

  Doctor Saavedra opened the cupboard; it was like an enormous chest in which the possessions of a lifetime had been packed for an impending departure. Two suits hung there. Shirts and underwear and books had been stacked indiscriminately on the shelves: an umbrella leaned among obscure shapes at the back: four ties dangled from a rod: a little pile of photographs in old-fashioned frames shared the floor with two pairs of shoes and some books for which there had been no room elsewhere. On a ledge over the suits stood a whisky bottle, a half-finished bottle of wine and a few glasses—one of them chipped—a pile of cutlery and a bowl of bread. Doctor Saavedra said defiantly, "I am a little cramped for room, but I want the smallest possible space around me when I write. Space distracts." He looked anxiously at Doctor Plarr and attempted a smile. "This is the womb of my characters, doctor, and there is room for little else. You must forgive me if I cannot offer you any ice, but this morning my refrigerator failed and the electrician has not yet come."

  "I prefer my whisky neat after dinner," Doctor Plarr said.

  He had to stand on the points of his small gleaming shoes to reach the top of the wardrobe. A cheap plastic shade painted with pink flowers, which were beginning to brown from the heat, hardly dimmed the harshness of the central light. Watching Doctor Saavedra reach for the glass with his white hair, in his pearl-gray suit and his brightly polished shoes, Doctor Plarr felt much the same astonishment that he had felt in the 'barrio' of the poor when he saw a young girl emerge in an immaculate white dress from a waterless hovel of mud and tin. He felt a new respect for Doctor Saavedra. His obsession with literature was not absurd whatever the quality of his books. He was willing to suffer poverty for its sake, and a disguised poverty was far worse to endure than an open one. The effort needed to polish his shoes, to press the suit... He couldn't, like the young, let things go. Even his hair must be cut regularly. A missing button would reveal too much. Perhaps he would be remembered in the history of Argentine literature only in a footnote, but he would have deserved his footnote. The bareness of the room could be compared to the inextinguishable hunger of his literary obsession.

  Doctor Saavedra tripped toward him holding two glasses. He asked, "How long do you think we shall have to wait for a response?"

  "It may never come."

  "Your father's name, I believe, is on the list of those they want released?"

  "Yes."

  "It would be strange for you, I imagine, to see your father again after all this time. How happy your mother will be if..."

  "I think she would prefer him dead. He wouldn't fit in with her life now."

  "And perhaps if Señor Fortnum returned he would not be welcomed by his wife either?"

  "How can I tell?"

  "Oh come, Doctor Plarr, I have friends at the house of Señora Sanchez."

  "So she has been back there?" Doctor Plarr asked.

  "I was there early this evening and so was she
. They were making a great fuss of her—even Señora Sanchez. Perhaps she hopes to have her back. When Doctor Benevento came to see the other girls I took her to the Consulate."

  "She told you about me?"

  He was a little irritated by her indiscretion, but nonetheless he felt a sense of relief. He was escaping from secrecy. There had not been one soul in the city to whom he could talk of Clara, and what better confidant could he hope to have than his own patient? There were secrets which Doctor Saavedra too would not want known.

  "She told me how very kind you had been to her."

  "Is that all she said?"

  "It was all that was necessary between old friends."

  "Was she one of your girls?" Doctor Plarr asked.

  "I was with her only once, I think."

  Doctor Plarr felt no jealousy. To think of Clara waiting naked in her cell in the candlelight while Doctor Saavedra hung up his pearl-gray suit was like watching on the stage a scene, both sad and comic, from a remote seat at the back of the gallery. Distance removed the characters so far from him that he could be touched only by a formal compassion. He asked, "Didn't you like her enough to try again?"

  Doctor Saavedra said, "It was not a question of liking. She was a good young woman, I am sure, quite attractive too, but she had nothing special for my purpose. She never struck me as a character—a character—forgive me if I speak like the critics—in the world of Jorge Julio Saavedra. Montez claims that world has no real existence. What does he know in Buenos Aires? Doesn't Teresa exist—you remember the evening when you met her? Before we had been together five minutes Teresa was the girl from Salta. There was something she said—I can't even remember the words now. I went with her four times and then I had to drop her, because she was saying too many things which were unsuitable. They confused my idea."

  "Clara comes from Tucumán. You got nothing from her?"

  "Tucumán is not a suitable region for me. My region is the region of extremes. Montez does not understand that. Trelew... Salta. Tucuman is an elegant city, and it is surrounded by half a million hectares of sugar. What 'ennui'! Her father was a cane-cutter, wasn't he? And her brother disappeared."

  "I would have thought that might have made a good subject for you, Saavedra."

  "Not for me. She never came alive. It was all dull poverty with no 'machismo' in half a million hectares." He added bravely as though the night were not noisy with the tins rolling back and forth in the cement yard below, "You do not realize how quiet and dull bare poverty can be. Let me give you a little more whisky. It is a genuine Johnny Walker."

  "No, no, thank you. I must go home." All the same he lingered. Novelists were supposed to have acquired a certain wisdom... He asked, "What do you suppose will become of Clara if Fortnum dies?"

  "Perhaps you might marry her?"

  "How can I? I would have to go away from here."

  "You could easily find a better living somewhere else. Rosario?"

  Doctor Plarr said, "This is my home too—or the nearest I have ever come to a home since I left Paraguay."

  "And you feel your father not so far away?"

  "You 'are' a perceptive man, Saavedra. Yes, it may have been my father's nearness which brought me here. In the 'barrio' of the poor I am aware of doing something he would have liked to see me do, but when I am with my rich patients, I feel as though I had left his friends to help his enemies. I even sleep with them sometimes, and when I wake up I look at the face on the pillow through his eyes. I suppose that's one reason why my affairs never last long, and when I have tea with my mother in the Calle Florida among all the other ladies of B. A.... he sits there too and criticizes me with his blue English eyes. I think my father might have cared for Clara. She is one of his poor."

  "Do you love the girl?"

  "Love, love, I wish I knew what you and all the others mean by the word. I want her, yes. From time to time. Sexual desire has its rhythms as you well know." He added, "She has lasted longer than I thought possible. Teresa was your one-legged girl from Salta. Perhaps Clara is—my poor. But I never want her to be my victim. Was that what Charley Fortnum felt when he married her?"

  Doctor Saavedra said, "I may not see you again. I have come to you for pills against melancholy, but at least I have my work. I wonder whether you do not need those pills more than I do."

  Doctor Plarr looked at him without understanding. His thoughts were elsewhere.

  ***

  When he got into the lift to his flat Doctor Plarr remembered the excitement with which Clara had made her first ascent in it. Perhaps, he thought, I will telephone to the Consulate and tell her to join me. The bed at the Consulate was too narrow for both of them, and, if he joined her there, he would be forced to leave before the hawklike woman came in the morning.

  He let himself in and went first to his consulting room to see whether his secretary Ana had left a note on his desk, but there was nothing there. He drew the curtains and looked down on the port: three policemen were standing by the Coca-Cola stall, perhaps because the weekly boat to Asunción lay at the jetty. It was like the scene of his boyhood, but he looked at it in reverse from his fourth-floor window above the river.

  He said, "God help you, father, wherever you are," speaking aloud. It was easier to believe in a god with a human sense of hearing than in some omniscient force which could read his unuttered thoughts. Strangely the face he conjured up when he spoke was not his father's but Charley Fortnum's. The Honorary Consul lay stretched out on the coffin and whispered, "Ted." Doctor Plarr's father had called him Eduardo as though in compliment to his wife. When he tried to substitute Henry Plarr's face for Charley Fortnum's he found his father's features had been almost eliminated by the years. As with an ancient coin that has been buried a long time in the ground he could only distinguish a fault unevenness of surface which might once have been the outline of a cheek or a lip. It was Charley Fortnum's voice which appealed to him again, "Ted."

  He turned away—hadn't he done all in his power to help?—and opened the bedroom door. He saw by the light from the study the body of Fortnum's wife outlined under the sheets. "Clara!" he said. She woke immediately and sat up. He noticed her clothes had been folded carefully on a chair, for she possessed the neatness of her former profession. For a woman who has to take off her clothes many times in a night it is essential to arrange them carefully or a dress would be hopelessly crumpled after two or three clients. She had told him once that Señora Sanchez insisted on each girl paving for her own laundry—it made for tidyness.

  "How did you get in?"

  "I asked the porter."

  "He opened the door for you?"

  "He knows me."

  "He has seen you here?"

  "Yes. And there too."

  So I have shared her with the porter as well, he thought. How many more of the unknown warriors of her battlefield would take form sooner or later? Nothing was more alien to the life of the Calle Florida and the tinkle of teacups and the cakes of 'dulce de leche', white as snow. He had shared Margarita for a while with Señor Vallejo—most affairs overlap at the beginning or the end—and he preferred the porter to Señor Vallejo, the smell of whose shaving lotion during those last dilatory months he had sometimes detected on Margarita's skin.

  "I told him you would give him money. You will?"

  "Of course. How much? Five hundred pesos?"

  "A thousand would be better."

  He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the sheet back. He was not yet tired of her thin body and the small breasts which barely yet, any more than her belly, indicated pregnancy. He said, "I am very glad you are here. I was going to call you up, though it wouldn't have been very wise. The police think I had something to do with the kidnapping. They suspect my motive may be jealousy," he added, smiling at the idea of it.

  "They would not dare do anything to you. You look after the finance secretary's wife."

  "They might start watching me all the same."

  "What would that ma
tter? They watch me."

  "Did they follow you here?"

  "Oh, I know how to deal with men like that. It is not the police I worry about, but that swine of a journalist. He was back at the camp just after it got dark. He offered me money."

  "What for? A story?"

  "He wanted to sleep with me."

  "What did you say?"

  "I told him I did not need his money any more, and then he got angry. He really believed I liked him for himself when I was with Señora Sanchez. He thought he was a great lover. Oh, how I hurt his pride," she went on with pleasure, "when I told him that Charley was twice the man he was."

  "How did you get rid of him?"

  "I called the policeman (they have left one at the camp—they say he is there to protect me, but he watches me all the time), and while the two of them were arguing I drove away."

  "But you don't know how to drive, Clara."

  "I watched Charley often enough. It is not so difficult. I knew the things to push and the things to pull. I got them mixed up at first, but all was right in the end. It went in jerks as far as the road, and then I found how to do things properly and I drove faster than Charley."

  "Poor Fortnum's Pride," Plarr said.

  "I think I drove a little too fast because I did not see the 'camión' coming."

  "What happened?"

  "There was an accident."

  "Were you hurt?"

  "The jeep was hurt but not me."

  Her eyes gleamed up at him from the pillows; they were bright with the excitement of strange events. Never before had he known her to talk so much. She had for him still the attraction of a stranger—like some unknown girl at a cocktail party. He said, "I like you," lightly, without thought, as he might have said it over the cocktails, neither of them believing the words meant any more than "Come and sleep with me."

  "The driver gave me a lift," she said. "Of course he wanted to make love, and I said I would when we got to the town at a house he goes to in San Jose, but I got out at the first traffic lights, before he could stop me, and I went to Señora Sanchez. Oh, she was glad to see me I can tell you, really glad, not angry with me at all, and she put on a bandage herself."