“When you go.”
He led her straight to his bedroom and began to undress her. A catch of her dress stuck, and she took the work out of his hands. All she said, while she lay naked on the bed waiting for him to join her, was, “Those sunglasses cost you much more than a visit to Seńora Sanchez,” and he wondered whether she thought of them as a payment in advance. He remembered how Teresa would count the peso notes and afterward lay them on a ledge below her saint’s statue as though they were the result of a collection in church. They would be divided later in the correct proportion with Seńora Sanchez: the personal gift always came later.
As he joined her he thought with relief: this is the end of my obsession, and when she cried out, he thought: I’m a free man again, I can say goodnight to Seńora Sanchez as she knits in her deck chair and I can walk back along the river with a sense of lightness which wasn’t mine when I left home. The last number of the British Medical Journal lay on his desk-it had remained a whole week in its wrapping, and he was in the mood for reading something in a style even more precise than a story by Borges, and of greater practical value than a novel by Jorge Julio Saavedra. He began to read an article of startling originality-or so it seemed to him-on the treatment of calcium deficiency by a doctor called Caesar Borgia.
“Are you asleep?” the girl asked.
“No,” but all the same he was surprised when he opened his eyes and saw the sunlight between the slats of the blind. He had thought it was night and that he was alone.
The girl caressed the inside of his thigh and ran lips down his body. He felt no more than a mild interest, a curiosity to see if she were capable of arousing him a second time. Perhaps that was the secret of her success at Mother Sanchez’-she gave a man double his money’s worth. She climbed on to his body and cried out an obscenity, taking his ear between her teeth, but the obsession had died with his desire, and he felt depressed at the void it left behind. For a week he had lived with one idea and now he missed the idea as a mother might miss the crying of an unwanted child. I never really desired her, he thought, I only desired my idea of her. He would have liked to get up and go, leaving her alone to make the bed and afterward find another customer.
“Where is the bathroom?” she asked. There was nothing to distinguish her from the others he had known except that she played her comedy with more spirit and invention.
He had dressed when she returned, and he watched impatiently while she put on her clothes. He was afraid she would ask him for the coffee he had promised and linger a long time over it. It was his hour for visiting the barrio popular. The women by now would have finished their first chores and the children would have returned from carrying water. He asked, “Do you want me to drop you at the Consulate?”
“No,” she said. “I had better walk. The capataz may be there waiting.”
“You have not done much shopping.”
“I will show Charley the sunglasses. He will never know how much they cost.”
He took a ten-thousand-peso note from his pocket and held it out to her. She turned it over as if to make sure of the amount. She said, “Nobody ever gave me more than five thousand afterward. Generally it was two. Mother Sanchez did not like us taking more. She was afraid it meant we had been hustling. She was wrong. Men are odd that way. If they can do nothing they always give you more.”
“As if any of you cared,” he said.
“As if we cared.”
“A Lenten visitor.”
The girl laughed. She said, “It is good to be able to talk free again. I cannot talk free to Charley. I think he wants to forget all about Seńora Sanchez.” She handed him back the note. “It would not be right,” she said, “now I am married. And I do not need it. Charley is generous. And the sunglasses cost a lot.” She put them on, so that again he saw his own face staring back at him, in miniature, as though he were a doll looking out of a doll’s house window. She asked, “Shall I see you again?”
He wanted to say, “No. It’s all finished now,” but common politeness-and the relief he felt because she had forgotten the coffee-made him reply formally, like a host to a guest whom he doesn’t really want to encourage to call again. “Of course. One day when you come into town… I’ll give you my telephone number.”
“You need not give me a present every time,” she assured him.
“And you needn’t play a comedy,” he said.
“Comedy?”
He said, “I know there are always men who want to believe you are finding the same pleasure that they do. Naturally at Mother Sanchez’ you had to play a part to earn your present, but here you see-you need not act any longer. Perhaps you have to act with Charley, but not with me. You don’t have to pretend anything at all with me.”
“I am sorry,” she said. “I did something wrong?”
“It always used to annoy me,” Doctor Plarr went on, “in that house of yours. A man is not nearly so stupid as he seems to you. He knows he has come to get a pleasure and not to give it.”
She said. “All the same I think I pretended very well because I got bigger presents than the other girls.” She wasn’t annoyed. He could tell that she was accustomed to this sadness after coition. He didn’t differ, even in that, from the other men she had known. And this void, he thought-is she right? is it no more than the temporary tristitia most men feel when they leave a brothel behind?
“How long were you there?”
“Two years. I was nearly sixteen,” she said, “when I arrived. The girls gave me a cake with candles on my birthday. I had never seen one before. It was very pretty.”
“Does Charley Fortnum like you to pretend like that?”
“He likes me to be very quiet,” she said, “and very tender. Is that what you would have liked too? I am sorry… I thought… You are so much younger than Charley, so I thought…”
“I would like you to be yourself,” he said. “Be as indifferent as you like. How many men have you known?”
“How could I remember that?”
He showed her the way to work the lift, and she asked him to come down with her-she was still a little afraid of it, even though it excited her. When she pressed the button and it began to descend she gave the same jump she had given in Gruber’s shop. At the door she admitted to him that she was afraid of the telephone too. “And your name-I have forgotten your name.”
“Plarr. Eduardo Plarr.” He tried her name for the first time aloud. “You are Clara, aren’t you?” He added, “If you are afraid to use the telephone, I shall have to telephone to you. But perhaps Charley will answer.”
“He usually drives around the camp before nine. And Wednesdays he is nearly always in town-though he likes me to come with him.”
“Oh well,” Doctor Plarr said, “we shall find a way.” He didn’t bother to see her into the street or watch her go. He was a free man.
And yet, inexplicably, the same night, while he was trying to sleep, he thought with regret that he had a clearer memory of her stretched out in Charley Fortnum’s bed than he had of her in his own. An obsession may sleep awhile, but it doesn’t necessarily die, and in less than a week he wanted to see her again. He would have liked to hear her voice, however indifferent it might sound on the telephone, but the telephone never rang with any message of importance.
PART THREE
1
Doctor Plarr did not arrive home from the hut until nearly three in the morning. Because of police patrols Diego took a circuitous route and dropped him near the house of Seńora Sanchez, thus giving him an excuse, if one were needed, for being out on foot in the early morning. There was one awkward moment when he climbed the stairs and a door on the floor below him opened and a voice demanded, “Who is that?” He called down, “Doctor Plarr. Why are children born at unconscionable hours?”