He wondered how many men she had known. Doctor Plarr’s last mistress, who was married to a banker called Lopez, had told him with some pride of his four predecessors-perhaps she was trying to arouse a sense of competition. (One of her lovers, he knew from another source, had been her chauffeur.) The fragile body on Charley Fortnum’s bed must have known hundreds. Her stomach was like the site of an old country battlefield where pale grass grew which had abolished the scars of war, and a small stream flowed peacefully between the willows: he was back in the passage, outside the bedroom, staring at the sporting prints and resisting the desire to return.
He braked sharply as he approached the road which led to Bergman’s orange-canning factory, and for a moment he contemplated reversing the car and driving back to the camp. Instead he lit a cigarette. I will not be the victim of an obsession, he thought. The attraction of a whorehouse is the attraction I sometimes find in trivial shopping-I may see a tie which momentarily attracts me, I wear it once or twice, then I leave it in the drawer and it becomes overlaid with newer ties. Why didn’t I try her out when I had the chance? If I had bought her that night at Seńora Sanchez’ she would be lying safely forgotten at the bottom of the drawer. Is it possible, he wondered, if a man is too rational to fall in love, that he may be reserved for a worse fate, to fall into an obsession? He drove angrily in the direction of the city where the reflection of the light lay flat along the horizon and the Three Marys hung on their broken chain in the sky overhead.
Some weeks later Doctor Plarr woke early. It was a Saturday and he had a few hours free. He decided to spend them in the open air with a book while the morning was still fresh; he preferred somewhere out of sight of his secretary who read only what she called serious books-those of Doctor Saavedra among them.
He chose a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges shared the tastes he had himself inherited from his father-Conan Doyle, Stevenson, Chesterton. Ficciones would prove a welcome change from Doctor Saavedra’s last novel which he had not been able to finish. He was tired of South American heroics. Now Doctor Plarr, sitting under the statue of an heroic sergeant-machismo again-who had saved the life of San Martin-was it a hundred and fifty years ago?—read with a sense of immense relaxation of the Countess de Bagno Regio, of Pittsburgh and Monaco. After a time he grew thirsty. To appreciate Borges properly he had to be taken, like a cheese biscuit, with an aperitif, but in this heat Doctor Plarr wanted a longer drink. He decided to call on his friend Gruber and demand a German beer.
Gruber was one of Doctor Plarr’s earliest friends in the city. As a boy he had escaped from Germany in 1936 when the persecution of the Jews was intensified. He was an only child, but his parents had insisted that he escape abroad, if only to save the name of Gruber from becoming extinct, and his mother baked a special cake for his journey in which to hide the few small valuables they were able to send with him-his mother’s engagement ring set with inconsiderable diamonds and his father’s gold wedding ring. They told him they were too old to make a new life in a strange continent and they pretended to believe that they were too old to be regarded as a danger by the Nazi state. Of course he never heard from them again: they had made their withered little plus two sign to that mathematical formula-the Final Solution. So Gruber like Doctor Plarr was a man without a father. He didn’t even possess a family grave. Now he kept a photographic store in the main shopping street of the city, which, with its overlapping signs and slogans stuck out over the sidewalks, had a Chinese look. He was an optician as well. “Germans,” he once said to Doctor Plarr, “always inspire confidence as chemists, opticians and photographic specialists. More people have heard of Zeiss and Bayer than of Goebbels and Goering, and even more people here have heard of Gruber.”
Gruber left his customer installed in the private section of his shop, where he worked on his lenses. There the doctor could see all that went on without being noticed himself, for Gruber (he had a passion for gadgets) had fitted a small internal television screen on which he was able to watch in miniature, as in a candid camera program, the customers outside in the shop. For some reason, which Gruber had never been able to explain, his shop attracted the prettiest girls in the city (no boutique could compete with Gruber), as though pulchritude and the practice of photography were linked. They came in flocks to receive their color prints and they examined them with cries of excitement, chattering like birds Doctor Plarr watched them while he drank his beer and listened to Gruber’s gossip of the province.
“Have you met Charley Fortnum’s woman?” Doctor Plarr asked.
“You mean his wife?”
“She can’t be his wife, surely? Charley Fortnum’s a divorced man. And there’s no remarriage here-it’s convenient for single men like me.”
“Didn’t you hear that his wife died?”
“No. I’ve been away. And when I saw him the other day he didn’t mention it.”
“He went off with this new girl to Rosario and got married there. So people say. Nobody really knows, of course.”
“That was an odd thing for him to do. It couldn’t have been necessary. You know where he found her?”
“Yes, but she’s a very pretty girl,” Gruber said.
“Oh yes, one of the best of Mother Sanchez’ lot. But one doesn’t necessarily have to marry a pretty girl.”
“Girls of that kind often make good wives, especially for old men.”
“Why old men?”
“Old men are not very demanding and girls like that are glad of a rest.”
The phrase “like that” irritated Doctor Plarr. After seven days he was still obsessed by the unremarkable body which Gruber had classified so easily. Now on the television screen he saw a girl who leaned across the counter to buy a roll of Kodachrome in the same way Clara had leaned across her bed at Seńora Sanchez’. She was more beautiful than Charley Fortnum’s wife, and he felt no desire for her at all.
“Girls like that are very content to be left alone,” Gruber repeated. “You know they count it good luck when they find a caller who is impotent or too drunk to perform. They have a native word for it here-I have forgotten the Spanish, but it means a Lenten visitor.”
“Have you been often to the Sanchez place?”
“Why should I? Look at the temptations I have to resist nearer home with all these charming customers of mine. Some of the films they bring me to develop are quite intimate, and when I hand the packet back to one, I can see the amusement in her eyes. He has observed that moment when the bikini slipped, she is thinking-and so I have. By the way, there were two men in here the other day who asked about you. They wanted to know if you could possibly be the Eduardo Plarr they knew years ago in Asuncion. They saw your name on those films I sent round to you on Thursday. Of course I said I had no idea.”