The Honorary Consul

  "You play too well for me," Aquino said.

  "What are you reading, Léon?" Doctor Plarr asked. "Do you still read your breviary?"

  "I gave that up years ago."

  "What have you got there?"

  "Only a detective story. An English detective story."

  "A good one?"

  "I am no judge of that. The translation is not very good, and with this sort of book I can always guess the end."

  "Then where is the interest?"

  "Oh, there is a sort of comfort in reading a story where one knows what the end will be. The story of a dream world where justice is always done. There were no detective stories in the age of faith—an interesting point when you think of it. God used to be the only detective when people believed in Him. He was law. He was order. He was good. Like your Sherlock Holmes. It was He who pursued the wicked man for punishment and discovered all. But now people like the General make law and order. Electric shocks on the genitals. Aquino's fingers. Keep the poor ill-fed, and they do not have the energy to revolt. I prefer the detective. I prefer God."

  "Do you still believe in Him?"

  "In a way. Sometimes. It is not so easy as all that to answer yes or no. Certainly he is not the same God as the one they taught us at school or in the seminary."

  "Your personal God," Doctor Plarr said, teasing again. "I thought that was a Protestant heresy."

  "Why not? Is it any worse for that? Is it any less likely to be true? We no longer kill heretics—only political prisoners."

  "Charley Fortnum is your political prisoner."

  "Yes."

  "So you are a bit like the General yourself, Léon."

  "I do not torture him."

  "Are you sure of that?"

  ***

  Marta returned from the town alone. She asked, "Is Diego here?"

  "No," Father Rivas said, "surely he went with you—or did you take Pablo?"

  "He stayed behind in the town. He said he would catch me up. He had to collect petrol. The car is nearly dry, he said, and there is no reserve."

  Aquino said, "That is not true."

  Marta said, "He was very frightened by the helicopter. By the old man too."

  "Do you think he has gone to the police?" Doctor Plarr asked.

  "No," Father Rivas said, "I will never believe that."

  "Then where is he?" Aquino demanded.

  "He may have been arrested on suspicion. He may have gone with a woman. Who knows? Anyway there is nothing for us to do. We can only wait. How long now before the news comes on?"

  "Twenty-two minutes," Aquino said.

  "Tell Pablo to come in. If they have spotted us, there is no point in leaving him outside to be picked off alone. Better to keep together at the end."

  Father Rivas took up his detective story again. He said, "The only thing we can do is hope." He added, "What a wonderful peaceful world this one is. Everything is so well ordered. There are no problems. There is an answer to every question."

  "What are you talking about?" Doctor Plarr asked.

  "The world in this detective story. Can you tell me what Bradshaw means?"

  "Bradshaw?"

  It seemed to Doctor Plarr that this was the first time he had seen Léon so relaxed since the long arguments they used to have when they were schoolboys together. Had he, as the situation grew darker, lost the sense of responsibility, like a roulette player who abandons his chart and no longer bothers even to watch the ball? He should never have tried to be a man of action: as a priest at a bedside he would have been most at his ease waiting passively for the end. "It's an English family name," Doctor Plarr said. "My father had a friend Bradshaw who used to write to him from a town called Chester."

  "This one seems to be a man who knows all the trams in England by heart. The trains never take more than a few hours to go anywhere. And they always arrive on time. The detective only has to consult Bradshaw to know exactly when... What a strange world your father came from. Here we are little more than eight hundred kilometers from Buenos Aires and the train is supposed to take a day and a half to make the journey, but it is often two or three days late. This English detective is a very impatient man. He is pacing the platform of the station in London, waiting for the train from Edinburgh—that is nearly as far as Buenos Aires surely?—and the train is half an hour late, according to this man Bradshaw, and yet the detective thinks something must be wrong. Half an hour late!" Father Rivas exclaimed. "It is like when I was a child and I would be late in coming home from school and my mother would worry and my father used to say, 'But what could happen to the child between here and the school house?'"

  Aquino said with impatience, "And Diego? Diego is late too, and I tell you I worry."

  Pablo came into the hut. Aquino told him at once, "Diego has gone."

  "Where to?"

  "To the police perhaps."

  Marta said, "All the way into town he talked about the helicopter. And when we came to the river—oh, he did not say anything, but it was the way he looked. At the ferry landing he said to me. That is strange. There are no police controlling the passengers.' I said to him, 'And the other side—can you see all the way across there? And can you tell a policeman when he is out of uniform?'"

  Pablo said, "What do you think, Father? I introduced him to you. I feel ashamed. I told you he was a good man to drive the car. And a brave man."

  Father Rivas said, "There is no reason to start worrying yet."

  "I have to worry. He was my countryman. All you others come from across the border. You can trust each other. I feel as though I were Diego's brother and my brother had betrayed you. You should not have come to me for help."

  "What could we have done without you, Pablo? There is nowhere in Paraguay where we could have hidden the Ambassador. Even taking him across the river would have been too dangerous. Perhaps it was a mistake to include any of your countrymen in our group, but El Tigre never thought of us as foreigners here in Argentina. He does not think in terms of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians, Argentinians. I think he would like to call us all Americans, if it were not for that place up there in the north."

  Pablo said, "Diego asked me once why there were only Paraguayans on your list of prisoners to be released. I told him—these are the most urgent cases. Men who have been in prison more than ten years. The next time we strike together perhaps it will be for our own people, like the time in Salta. There were Paraguayans who helped us then. I do not believe he will go to the police, Father."

  "Nor do I, Pablo."

  "We have only a little time to wait," Aquino said. "They must surrender—or we leave a dead Consul in the river."

  "How long before the news?"

  "Ten minutes," Doctor Plarr said.

  Father Rivas picked up his detective story, but to Doctor Plarr, watching him closely, he seemed to be reading with unnatural slowness. He had fastened his eyes on one passage and he kept them there a long time before he turned the leaf. His lips moved a little. He might have been praying—in secrecy perhaps, because prayers by a priest at a deathbed are the last resort and the patient must not be allowed to hear them. All of us are his patients, Doctor Plarr thought, we are all about to die.

  The doctor had no belief that things would turn out well. From a false equation you get only a chain of errors. His own death might be one of the errors, for afterward people would say he had followed in his father's steps, but they would be wrong—that had not been his intention.

  He wondered with an unpleasant itch of anxiety and curiosity about his child. The child too was the result of an error, a carelessness on his part, but he had never before felt any responsibility. He had considered the child to be a useless part of Clara like her appendix, perhaps a diseased appendix which ought to be removed. He had suggested an abortion, but the idea had frightened her—perhaps there had been too many unprofessional abortions in the house of Mother Sanchez. Now, waiting for the news bulletin on the radio, he said to himself: the poor little ba
stard, if only I could have made some sort of arrangement for it. What sort of a mother was Clara likely to prove? Would she go back to Mother Sanchez and have the child brought up as the spoiled brat of a brothel? That would probably be better than life with his mother in B. A. stuffed with 'dulce de leche' in the Calle Florida among the international voices of the well-to-do. He thought of the tangle of its ancestry, and for the first time in the complexity of that tangle the child became real to him—it was no longer just one more wet piece of flesh like any other torn out of the body with a cord which had to be cut. This cord could never be cut. It joined the child to two very different grandfathers—a cane-cutter in Tucumán and an old English liberal who had been shot dead in the yard of a police station in Paraguay. The cord joined it to a father who was a provincial doctor, to a mother from a brothel, to an uncle who had walked away one day from the cane fields to disappear into the waste of a continent, to two grandmothers... There was no end to the tangle which must constrict the tiny form like the swaddling bandages with which in old days they used to bind the limbs of a newborn child. A cold fish, Charley Fortnum had called him. What effect did it have on a child to have a cold fish for a father? It might have been better if they could have exchanged fathers. A cold fish would have been his own proper parentage rather than a father who had cared enough to die. He would have liked the little bastard to believe in something, but he was not the kind of father who could transmit belief in a good or a cause. He called across the dirt floor, "Do you really believe in God the Father Almighty, Léon?"

  "What? I am sorry. I did not hear. This detective is a very cunning man, so there must be a good reason why the train from Edinburgh is half an hour late."

  "I asked if you believed sometimes in God the Father?"

  "You have asked me that before. You do not really want to know. You are only mocking me, Eduardo. All the same I will give you my answer when there is no more hope. You will not be ready to laugh then. Excuse me a moment—the story has become more interesting—the Edinburgh express is steaming into a station called King's Cross. King's Cross. Would that be symbolic?"

  "No. Just the name of a station in London."

  "Be quiet, both of you." Aquino turned the radio up and they listened to the international news which was beamed at that hour from Buenos Aires. The announcer described the visit by the Secretary General of the United Nations to West Africa; fifty hippies had been expelled with violence from Majorca; there was yet another rise in taxes on cars imported to Argentina; a retired general had died in C6rdoba at the age of eighty; a few bombs had exploded in Bogota, and of course the Argentine football team was continuing its violent progress through Europe.

  "They have forgotten us," Aquino said.

  "If only we could believe that," Father Rivas said. "To stay here... forgotten... forever. It would not be so bad a fate, would it?"

  3

  On Saturday at midday the news came for which they had been waiting so long, but they had to listen patiently until the end of the bulletin. It was the policy of all the governments concerned to play down the importance of the Fortnum affair. Buenos Aires quoted moderate expressions of British opinion. The Times of London, for instance, had stated that an Argentinian novelist (whose name was not given) had offered himself in exchange for the Consul, and a BBC broadcast put the affair, as the Argentinian commentator remarked, in proper perspective. A Junior Minister had referred to the matter briefly when questioned in a television discussion on political violence occasioned by the tragic death of more than a hundred and sixty BOAC passengers. "I know no more about this affair in Argentina than any of our listeners. I do not have time to read many novels, but before I came out this evening I did ask my wife's bookseller about Mr. Savindra, and I'm afraid he was no better informed than me." The Minister added, "Much as I sympathize with Mr. Fortnum, I want to emphasize that we cannot treat a kidnapping like this as an attack on the British diplomatic service with all that would imply. Mr. Fortnum has never at any time been a member of the diplomatic service. He was born in Argentina, and so far as I know he has not even visited this country. When the unfortunate affair occurred we were about to terminate his engagement as Honorary Consul since he had passed the normal age for retirement and there was really no occasion to replace him as the number of British residents in that particular province has been very much reduced in the last ten years. I am sure you are aware that this Government is making every effort to economize in the Foreign Service."

  Asked whether the Government's attitude would have been the same if the victim had been a member of the diplomatic service the Minister said, "Certainly it would have been the same. We don't intend to give in to this kind of blackmail anywhere, under any circumstances. In this particular case we have every confidence that Mr. Fortnum will be released when these desperate men realize the complete futility of their action. It is for the President of Argentina in that case to decide whether he will treat these criminals with clemency. Now, if the chairman will allow me, I would like to return to the real subject of tonight's broadcast. I can assure you that there were no security men on the plane and so no question of an armed struggle..." Pablo turned off the radio. "What did all that mean?" Father Rivas asked. Doctor Plarr said, "They have left Fortnum's case in your hands."

  "If they have rejected the ultimatum," Aquino said, "the sooner we kill him the better."

  "Our ultimatum was not made to the British Government," Father Rivas said.

  "Of course," Doctor Plarr hastily corrected himself, "they have to say all that in public. We can't tell what pressures they may be exerting in Buenos Aires and Asunción privately." Even to himself his words lacked confidence.

  ***

  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."