“Was it bad in prison?”
“Pretty bad,” Aquino said. He pulled out his right hand and showed it to Charley Fortnum. “That is when I started to make poetry. It takes a long time to learn to write anything with the left hand, and it is very slow work. I hate things which are slow. I would rather be a mouse than a tortoise, even though the tortoise lives a longer time.” He had become voluble after his second gulp of whisky. “I admire the eagle which drops on its victim like a rock out of the sky, but not the vulture which flaps slowly down, looking as it goes to see if the carrion moves. That is why I took to poetry. Prose moves too slowly, poetry drops like an eagle and stabs before you know. Of course in prison they would not give me paper or a pen, but I did not have to write the poetry. I could learn it by heart.”
“Was it good poetry?” Charley Fortnum asked. “Not that I’d know the difference.”
Aquino said, “I think some of it was good.” He finished his whisky. “Léon said some of it was good. He told me it was like a man called Villon. He was a criminal like me.”
“Never heard of him,” Charley Fortnum said.
“The first poem I wrote in prison,” Aquino said, “was about the first prison of all-the one we all of us know. Do you know what Trotsky said when they showed him his new home in Mexico? They had made it secure from assassins, or so they thought. He said, “This reminds me of my first prison. The doors make the same sound.’ My poem had a refrain, ‘I see my father only through the bars.’ I was thinking, you see, of the pens in which they put children in bourgeois houses. In my poem the father went on following the child all through his life-he was the schoolmaster, and then he was the priest, the police officer, the prison warder, and last he was General Stroessner himself. I saw the General once when he was touring the countryside. He came to the police station I was in and I saw him through the bars.”
“I have a child on the way,” Charley Fortnum said. “I would like to see the little bastard, if only for a short time. But not through bars, you know. I would like to live long enough to know if it’s a boy or a girl.”
“When will it be born?”
“In five months I think or thereabouts. I’m not quite sure. I’m a bit hazy about all that sort of thing.”
“Don’t worry. You will be home, Seńor, long before then.”
“Not if you kill me,” Charley Fortnum replied, hoping against hope to receive the usual reassuring response, however false it might sound. He was not surprised when none was forthcoming. He was beginning to live in the region of truth.
“I have written a good many poems about death,” Aquino said cheerfully, with satisfaction, as he held the last drop of his whisky up to catch the light of the candle. “The one I like best has the refrain, ‘Death is a common weed: requires no rain.’ Léon disagrees with me-he says I am writing there like a farmer-I wanted to be a farmer once. He likes better the one that goes, ‘Whatever the crime, the same meal’s served to all.’ And there is another I am pleased with, though I do not really know what exactly I mean by it, but it sounds fine, when you recite it properly, ‘When death is on the tongue, the live man speaks.’ “
“You seem to have written the hell of a lot about death.”
“Yes. I think about half my poems are about death,” Aquino said. “It is one of the two proper subjects for a man-love and death.”
“I don’t want to die before my child is born.”
“I wish you all the luck in the world, Seńor Fortnum. But none of us has a choice. Perhaps tomorrow I will be killed by a car or a fever. And a bullet is one of the quickest and most honourable of deaths.”
“I suppose that’s the way you are going to kill me.”
“Naturally… What other way is there? We are not cruel men, Seńor Fortnum. We shall not cut off your fingers.”
“And yet one can go on living without a few fingers. You haven’t found them so important, have you?”
“Oh, I understand your fear of pain-I know what pain can do to a man-what it did to me-but I cannot understand why you are so afraid of death. Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterward if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.”
“Did you believe in that ‘afterward’ when they tortured you?”
“No,” Aquino admitted. “But I did not think of death either. There was only the pain.”
“We have an expression in English-a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I don’t know anything about that ‘afterward.’ I only know I would like to live another ten years, at my camp, watching the little bastard grow.”
“But, Seńor Fortnum, think what might happen in those ten years. Your child might die, children die so easily here, your wife might betray you, you might be tortured by a long cancer. A bullet is simple and quick.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Perhaps a little more whisky would do me no harm,” Aquino said.
“I’m thirsty myself. You know the old saying-An Englishman is always two whiskies below par.”
He poured it out very carefully: there was hardly more than a quarter of a bottle left, and he thought with sadness of his camp, of the dumbwaiter on the verandah and the fresh bottle which had always stood ready at hand. He asked, “Are you married?”
“Not exactly,” Aquino replied.
“I have been married twice. The first time it didn’t take. The second time-I don’t know why-I felt different. Would you like to see a photograph?”
He found one in his pocketbook-a square Kodachrome print. Clara was sitting at the wheel of Fortnum’s Pride, staring sideways at the camera with an expression of fear as though it might go off like a revolver.
“A pretty girl,” Aquino commented politely.
“Of course you know she can’t really drive,” Fortnum said, “and there’s a lot too much blue in the print. You can see that from the color of the avocados. It wasn’t one of Gruber’s best efforts.” He looked at the photograph with an expression of regret. “It’s a bit out of focus too,” he said, “it doesn’t do her proper justice, but I had taken one over the measure and I suppose my hand must have shaken a bit.” He looked anxiously at what remained in the bottle.
“As a rule,” he said, “there is nothing better to steady the hand. What about finishing the bottle?”
“A very little for me,” Aquino said.
“Every man has his own proper measure. I’d never criticize anyone for not sharing mine. A measure’s sort of built into a man’s system, like a lift in a block of flats.” He was watching Aquino carefully. He had judged correctly that their measures were very different. He said, “I liked that poem of yours about death.”
“Which one?”
“I have such a shocking memory. What will you do with the body?”
“Body?”
“My body.”
“Seńor Fortnum, why talk about disagreeable subjects? I write about death, yes, but only death the great abstraction. I do not write about the death of friends.”
“Those people, you know, in London-they’ve never even heard of me. What do they care? I don’t belong to the right club.”
” ‘Death is a common weed: requires no rain.’ Was that the poem you meant?”
“Yes, of course, that was the one. I remember now. All the same, Aquino, even if it’s as common as all that, one ought to die with a bit of dignity. You will agree to that? Salud.”
“Salud, Seńor Fortnum.”
“Call me Charley, Aquino.”
“Salud, Charley.”
“I wouldn’t like people to find me like this-dirty, unshaven…”
“You can have a bowl of water If you like, Charley.”