"How does your ankle feel?"
"It's all right."
"I will bring a light and change the bandages."
"No."
Doctor Plarr said, "The soldiers have us surrounded.
You mustn't give up hope."
"Hope of what?"
"There's only one man who really wants your death."
"Yes?" the indifferent voice replied. "Aquino."
"And you," Charley Fortnum said, "you! You want it."
"Why should I?"
"You talk too loud, Plarr. I don't suppose you ever talked so loud at the camp, even when I was out farming a mile away. You were always so damned discreet, weren't you, in case the servants heard. But the time always comes when even a husband has his ears open." There was a sound of scrabbling in the darkness as though he were trying to pull himself upright. "I always thought" there was some code of honor for doctors, Plarr, but of course that's an English notion, and you're only half English, and as for the other half..."
"I don't know what you heard," Doctor Plarr said. "You must have dreamt it or misunderstood."
"I suppose you thought to yourself what the hell does it matter, she's only a little tart from Mother Sanchez' house. How much did she cost you? What did you offer her, Plarr?"
"If you want to know," Doctor Plarr said in a spurt of rage, "I gave her a pair of sunglasses from Gruber's."
"Those glasses? She was fond of those glasses. She thought they were smart, and now they've been smashed to bits by your friends. What a swine you are, Plarr. It was like raping a child."
"It came more easily."
Doctor Plarr had not realized how close he was to the coffin bed. A fist struck at him through the dark. It caught him on the neck and made him choke. He stepped back and heard the coffin creak.
"Oh God," Charley Fortnum said, "I've knocked the bottle over." He added, "There was still a measure left. I'd kept it for..." A hand groped across the floor, touched Doctor Plarr's shoes and recoiled.
"I'll bring a light."
"Oh no, you won't. I don't want to see your fucking face ever again, Plarr."
"You are taking it too hard. These things happen, Fortnum."
"You don't even pretend to love her, do you?"
"No."
"I suppose you'd had her at the brothel, and so you thought..."
"I've told you before—I saw her there, but I never had her."
"I'd saved her from that place and you've begun to push her back."
"I never intended this, Fortnum."
"You never intended to be found out. It was cheaper for you, wasn't it, not having to pay for your fucks."
"What good do scenes like this do? I thought it would be all over quickly and you'd never know. It's not as if she or I really cared for each other. Caring is the only dangerous thing, Fortnum."
"I cared."
"You'd have had her back. You would never have known."
"When did it begin, Plarr?"
"The second time I saw her. At Gruber's. When I gave her the sunglasses."
"Where did you take her? Back to Mother Sanchez?" The persistent questions reminded Doctor Plarr of fingers pressing the pus out of a boil.
"I took her to my flat. I asked her in to have coffee, but she knew very well what I meant by coffee, Fortnum. If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else sooner or later. She even knew the porter at my flat."
"Thank God," Fortnum said. "What do you mean?"
"I've found the bottle. It's not spilt." He could hear the sound of Fortnum drinking. He said, "You'd better save a little for later in case..."' "I know you think I'm a coward, Plarr, but I'm not much afraid of dying now. It's a lot easier than going back and waiting at the camp for a child to be born with your face, Plarr."
"It's not how I intended things," Doctor Plarr repeated. He had no anger left with which to defend himself. "Nothing is ever what we intend. They didn't mean to kidnap you. I didn't mean to start the child. You would almost think there was a great joker somewhere who likes to give a twist to things. Perhaps the dark side of God has a sense of humor."
"What dark side?"
"Some crazy notion of Léon's. You should have heard that—not the things you did hear."
"I wasn't trying to hear—I was trying to get off this damn box and join you. I was lonely, and your drugs don't work any more. I'd nearly got to the door when I heard the priest say you were jealous. Jealous, I thought, jealous of what? And then I heard and I got back on to the box."
In a distant village Doctor Plarr had once been forced to perform an emergency operation for which he was not qualified. He had the choice of risking the operation or letting the woman die. Afterward he felt the same fatigue as he felt now, and the woman had died just the same. He had sat down on the floor in his exhaustion. He thought: I've said all I can. What more can I say? The woman was a long time dying or it seemed so to him then.
Fortnum said, "To think I wrote to Clara telling her you would look after her and the baby."
"I know."
"How the hell do you know?"
"You aren't the only one who overhears things. The joker again. I overheard you dictating to Léon. It made me angry."
"You angry? Why?"
"I suppose Léon was right—I am jealous."
"Jealous of what?"
"That would be another comic twist, wouldn't it?"
He could hear the sound of Charley Fortnum drinking again. Doctor Plarr said, "Even one of your measures won't last forever."
"I haven't got forever. Why can't I hate you, Plarr? Is it the whisky? I'm not drunk yet."
"Perhaps you are. A little."
"It's an awful thing, Plarr, but there's no one else I can leave them with. I can't trust Humphries..."
"I'll give you a jab of morphine if you want to sleep."
"I'd rather stay awake. I've the hell of a lot of things to think about and not much time. I want to be left alone, Plarr. Alone. I have to get used to that, haven't I?"
4
It seemed to Doctor Plarr that they had all been left completely alone. Their enemies had abandoned them: the loudspeaker had fallen silent, the rain had stopped, and in spite of his thoughts Doctor Plarr slept, though fitfully. The first time he opened his eyes it was the voice of Father Rivas that woke him. The priest was kneeling by the door with his lips pressed to a crack in the wood. He seemed to be speaking to the dead or dying man outside. Words of comfort, a prayer, the formula of conditional absolution? Doctor Plarr turned on his other side and slept again. When he woke a second time, Charley Fortnum was snoring in the other room—a dry-throated grating whisky snore. Perhaps he was dreaming of security in the big bed at home after he had finished the bottle on the dumbwaiter. Was Clara patient with him when he snored like that? When she was forced to lie awake beside him what had her thoughts been? Had she regretted her cell at Mother Sanchez'? There, with the dawn, she could sleep peacefully alone. Did she regret the simplicity of her life there? He had no idea. He could no more imagine her thoughts than he could imagine the thoughts of a strange animal.
The light from the projectors shining under the door lost brilliance. The last day had begun. He remembered an occasion years ago when he sat with his mother at a 'son-et-lumière' performance outside Buenos Aires. The searchlights came and went like a professor's white chalk, picking out a tree, under which someone—San Martin was it?—had sat—an old stable where another figure of history had tethered his horse, the windows of a room where a treaty or a constitution—he couldn't remember what—had been signed. A voice explained the story in a prose touched with the dignity of the un-recallable past. He was tired from his medical studies and he fell asleep. When he woke for the third time it was to see Marta busy at the table laying a cloth, while daylight seeped through the interstices of window and door. There were two unlit candles on the table stuck in saucers. "They are all we have left, Father," Marta said.
Father Rivas was still asleep, curled up like an embryo.
One by one, as she spoke, the others began to wake to the new day, Léon, Pablo, Aquino.
"What time is it?"
"What?"
"What did you say?"
"There are not enough candles, Father."
"The candles do not matter, Marta. You fuss too much."
"Your shirt is still wet. You will catch your death from cold."
"I doubt that," Father Rivas said.
She grumbled her disappointments as she laid out on the table in turn a medicine bottle full of wine, a mate gourd which had to serve as a chalice, a torn dishcloth for a napkin. "It is not how I wanted it to be," she complained. "It is not how I dreamed of it." She put a pocket missal which had lost half its binding open on the table. "What Sunday is it, Father?" she asked, as she fumbled with the leaves. "Is it the twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost or the twenty-sixth? Or can it be Advent, Father?"
"I have no idea," Father Rivas said.
"Then how can I find you the right Gospel and the right Epistle?"
"I will take what comes. Pot luck," he said.
Pablo said, "It would be a good thing to release Fortnum now. It must be nearly six, and in two hours..."
"No," Aquino said, "we have voted to wait."
"He hasn't voted," Pablo said, indicating Doctor Plarr.
"He has no vote. He is not one of us."
"He will die with us."
Father Rivas took his wet shirt from Marta. He said, "We have no time to argue now. I am going to say Mass. Help Señor Fortnum in if he wants to hear it. I shall be saying Mass for Diego, for Miguel, for all of us who may be going to die today."
"Not for me," Aquino said.
"You cannot dictate to me whom I pray for. I know well enough you believe in nothing. All right. Believe in nothing. Stay In the corner there and believe in nothing. Who cares whether you believe or not? Even Marx cannot guarantee what is true or false any more than I can."
"I hate to see time wasted. We have not so much of it left."
"What would you prefer to do with your time?"
Aquino laughed. "Oh, of course, I would waste it like you. 'When death is on the tongue, the live man speaks.' If I still had a wish to write I would make that verse a little clearer—I almost begin to understand it myself."
"Will you hear my confession, Father?" the Negro asked.
"Of course. In a moment. If you come into the yard. And you, Marta?"
"How can I confess, Father?"
"Why not? You are near enough to death to promise anything. Even to leave me."
"I will never..."
"The parachutists will see to that."
"But you, Father?"
"Oh, I will have to take my chance. There are not many people lucky enough to die with a priest handy. I am glad to be one of the majority. I have been one of the privileged too long."
Doctor Plarr left them and went in to the inner room. He said, "Léon's going to say Mass. Do you want to be there?"
"What time is it?"
"I don't know. Some time after six, I think. The sun has risen."
"What will they do now?"
"Perez has given them till eight to release you."
"They are not going to?"
"I don't think so."
"Then they'll kill me and Perez will kill them. You've got the best chance, haven't you?"
"Perhaps. It's not a big chance."
"My letter to Clara... you'd better keep it for me all the same."
"If you want me to."
Charley Fortnum took a wad of papers from his pocket. "Most of these are bills. Unpaid. The tradesmen all cheat except Gruber. Where in hell did I put it?" At last he found the letter in another pocket. "No," he said, "there's not much point in sending it to her now. Why should she care to hear a lot of loving words from me if she has you?" He tore the letter into small pieces. "Anyway I wouldn't want the police to read it. There's a photo too," he said, searching in his wallet. "The only one I've got of Fortnum's Pride, but she's in it as well." He took a quick look and then he tore it also into minute pieces.
"Promise you won't tell her that I knew about you. I wouldn't want her to feel any guilt. If she's capable of it."
"I promise," Doctor Plarr said.
"These bills—you'd better look after them," Charley Fortnum said. He handed them to Doctor Plarr. "There may be enough in my current account to meet them. If not—the buggers have swindled me enough. I'm clearing the decks," he added, "but I don't want the crew to suffer."
"Father Rivas will be starting Mass by now. If you want to hear it, I'll give you an arm in there."
"No, I've never been what you'd call a religious man. I think I'll stay out here with the whisky." He carefully measured what was left in the bottle. "Perhaps one small one now—that leaves a real measure at the last. Bigger than a shipmaster's."
A low voice was speaking in the other room. Charley Fortnum said, "I know people are supposed to get a bit of comfort at the end—by believing in all that. Do you believe in anything at all?"
"No."
Now that the personal truth was out between them Doctor Plarr felt a curious need to speak with complete accuracy. He added, "I don't think so."
"Nor do I—except... It's a damn silly thing to feel, but when I'm with that fellow out there, I mean the priest... the one who's going to murder me... I feel... Do you know there was even a moment when I thought he was going to confess to me. To me, Charley Fortnum? Can you beat that? And by God I'd have given him absolution. When are they going to kill me, Plarr?"
"I don't know what the time is. I have no watch. Some time around eight I suppose. Perez will send in the paras then. What happens afterward, God knows."
"God again! You can't get away from the bloody word, can you? Perhaps I'll go and listen awhile after all. It won't do any harm. It'll please him. I mean the priest. And there's nothing else to do. If you'll help me."
He put his arm around Doctor Plarr's shoulder. He weighed surprisingly light for his bulk—like a body filled only with air. He's an old man, Doctor Plarr thought, he wouldn't have had long to live anyway, and he remembered the night he had met him first, when he and Humphries lugged him protesting across the road to the Bolivar. He had weighed a lot heavier then. They made only two steps toward the door and then Charley Fortnum stopped dead in his tracks. "I can't make it," he said. "Why should I anyway? I wouldn't want to curry favor at the last moment. Take me back to the whisky. That's my sacrament."
***
Doctor Plarr returned to the other room. He took up his stand near Aquino who sat on the ground, watching the motions of the priest with a look of suspicion. It was as though he feared that Father Rivas was laying some trap, planning a betrayal, as he moved to and fro by the table and made the secret signals with his hands. All Aquino's poems were of death, Doctor Plarr remembered. He wasn't going to be robbed of it now.
Father Rivas was reading the Gospel. He read it in Latin not in Spanish, and Doctor Plarr had long forgotten the little Latin he had once known. He kept his eye on Aquino while the voice ran rapidly on in the dead tongue. Perhaps they thought he was praying with his eyes lowered and a kind of prayer did enter his mind—or at least a wish, heavy with self-distrust, that if the moment came he would have the skill and determination to act quickly. If I had been with them over the border, he wondered, what would I have done when my father called for help in the police-station yard? Would I have gone back to him or escaped as they did?
Father Rivas reached the Canon of the Mass and the consecration of the bread. Marta was watching her man with an expression of pride. The priest lifted up the mate gourd and spoke the only phrases of the Mass which Doctor Plarr had for some reason never forgotten. "As often as you do these things you shall do them in memory of Me." How many acts in a lifetime had he done in memory of something forgotten or almost forgotten?
The priest lowered the gourd. He knelt and rose quickly. He seemed to be whi
pping the Mass to its conclusion with impatience. He was like a herdsman driving his cattle toward the byre before a storm burst, but he had started home too late. The loudspeaker blared its message in the voice of Colonel Perez. "You have exactly one hour left to send the Consul out to us and save your lives." Doctor Plarr saw Aquino's left hand tighten on his gun. The voice went on, "I repeat you have one hour left. Send the Consul out and save your lives."
"... who takes away the sins of the world, grant them eternal rest."
Father Rivas began "Domine, non sum dignus." Marta's was the only voice which joined his. Doctor Plarr looked around seeking Pablo. The Negro knelt with bowed head by the back wall. Would it be possible, he wondered, before the Mass ended, while they were distracted by the ceremony, to seize Aquino's gun and hold them up for long enough to enable Charley Fortnum to escape? I'd be saving all their lives, he thought, not only Charley's. He looked back toward Aquino, and as though Aquino knew what was in his mind he shook his head.
Father Rivas took the kitchen cloth and began to clean the gourd, as punctiliously as though he were back in the parish church at Asunción.
"'Ite missa est.'"
The voice on the loudspeaker answered like a liturgical response, "You have fifty minutes left."
"Father," Pablo said. "The Mass is over. Better surrender now. Or let us vote again."
"My vote is the same," Aquino said.
"You are a priest, Father, you cannot kill," Marta said.
Father Rivas held out the dishcloth. "Go into the yard and burn this. It will not be needed again."
"It would be a mortal sin for you to kill him now, Father. After the Mass."
"It is a mortal sin for anyone at any time. The best I can do is to ask for God's mercy like anyone else."
"Was that what you were doing up at the altar?" Doctor Plarr asked. He felt wearied out by all the arguments, by the slowness with which the short time left them dragged by.
"I was praying I would not have to kill him."
"Posting a letter," Doctor Plarr said. "I thought you didn't believe in any reply to letters like that."
"Perhaps I was hoping for a coincidence."
The loudspeaker announced: "You have forty-five minutes left."
The Honorary Consul Page 25
