“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 Seńora 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 Seńora Escobar or Seńora 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 Seńora 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 Seńora 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.
Seńora 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,” Seńora 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 Seńora 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 Seńora Sanchez was strict about that; here a man might take his time. One man sat alone over a glass, and another, dressed like a peon, 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 giving 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 peon 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 grey birthmark, in the spot where a Hindu girl wears the scarlet sign of her caste.