“But, mother, I don’t think he could have meant it cruelly.”
“He had not even told me beforehand. I had no time to pack properly. I forgot some of my jewels. There was a little watch with diamonds which I used to wear with a black dress. You remember the black dress? But of course you would not remember. You were always such an unobservant boy. He said he was afraid I would tell my friends and they would gossip and the police would stop us. I had prepared a very nice birthday dinner for him, with a cheese savoury-he always liked savouries better than a dessert. That is what it is like to marry a foreigner. Our tastes were never the same. This morning I prayed very hard he might not be suffering too much.”
“I thought you believed he was dead.”
“Suffering in purgatory of course I mean. Father Galvăo says that the worst pain in purgatory is when people see the consequence of their actions and the suffering they have caused to those they love.” She picked out another éclair.
“But you said he loved neither of us.”
“Oh, I suppose he did feel a certain affection. And duty. He was very English. He preferred the company of other men. I have no doubt he went to the Club after the boat left.”
“What club?” For years they had not spoken so much of his father.
“It was not a safe club for him to belong to. It was called the Constitutional, but the police closed it. Afterward the members met in secret-once even at our estancia. He would not listen to me when I protested. I said, ‘You have a wife and child.’ He said, ‘Every member of the club has a wife and child.’ I said, ‘In that case they should have more important things to talk about than politics.’ Oh well,” she added with a little sigh, “those are old quarrels. Of course I have forgiven him. Tell me a little about yourself, dear,” and her eyes glazed over with lack of interest.
“Oh,” he said, “there is nothing really to tell.”
The evening plane to the north represented a hazard for a man like Doctor Plarr who liked to remain alone. Few strangers or tourists travelled by it. Among the passengers were usually local politicians returning from a visit to the capital, or expensive wives whom he had sometimes examined (they would have gone to Buenos Aires for a shopping expedition or a party, even for a hairdo because they didn’t trust their local hairdresser). They would form a noisy group of familiars in the small two-engined plane.
There was only the smallest chance of an undisturbed flight, and his spirits sank when, from just across the gangway, Seńora Escobar greeted him, before he even saw her, with a parrot cry of pleasure. “Eduardo!”
“Margarita!”
He began resignedly to unbuckle his safety belt, so as to take the empty seat beside her.
“No,” she told him in a quick whisper, “Gustavo is with me. He is at the back talking to Colonel Perez.”
“Colonel Perez is here too?”
“They are talking about the kidnapping. Do you know what I believe?”
“No?”
“I think the man Fortnum has run away from his wife.”
“Why would he do that?”
“You must know the story, Eduardo. She is a putain. She comes from that horrible house in Calle… but you are a man. You know very well the one I mean.”
He remembered that Margarita had always, when she wished to be a little coarse, employed a French term. He could hear her crying, in the carefully measured shadows of her room, made by the persianas two thirds closed, “Baise-moi, baise-moi!” Never would she have allowed herself to use the equivalent Spanish phrase. She said, “I have not seen you for such a long time, Eduardo,” with a sigh as carefully adjusted for the occasion as the shutters of her bedroom. He wondered what had happened to her new lover-Caspar Vallejo of the financial department. He hoped that there had been no quarrel.
The roar of the engines saved him from the need to reply, and by the time the overhead warnings had been switched off and they were high above the khaki-coloured Plata, which turned black as the evening darkened, he had a vague phrase ready on the tongue. “You know what it is like to be a doctor, Margarita.”
“Yes,” she said, “I know-who better? Do you still see Seńora Vega?”
“No. I think she must have changed her doctor.”
“I would never do that, Eduardo-there are not so many good doctors as that. If I have not asked you to come to see me it is only that I have been disgustingly well. Why, here is my husband at last. Look whom we have here, Gustavo! Do not pretend you have forgotten Doctor Plarr.”
“How could I forget him? Where have you been all this long time, Eduardo?” Gustavo Escobar laid his hand heavily on Doctor Plarr’s shoulder and kneaded it gently-he had the Latin-American desire to touch any man to whom he spoke. Even the knife-thrust in one of Jorge Julio Saavedra’s stories could be interpreted as a way of touching. “We have missed you,” he went on in the loud voice of a deaf man. “How often my wife has said ‘I wonder why Eduardo never calls on us now?’ “
Gustavo Escobar had a large black moustache and abundant sideburns: his face, brick-red as laterite, resembled a clearing which has been hacked out of the bush, and his nose reared like the horse of a conquistador. Escobar said, “I have missed you as much as my wife has. All those friendly little dinners we used to have…”
Doctor Plarr, during the whole time that he had been Margarita’s lover, had never been able to distinguish with certainty between his rough playfulness and his irony. Margarita had always assured him that her husband was a man of the most passionate jealousy-it would have hurt her pride to feel he did not really care. Perhaps indeed he did care, for she was at least one of his women, even though he had a great many. Doctor Plarr on one occasion had encountered him at Mother Sanchez’ house where he was entertaining four girls at once. The girls, against all the rules of the house, were drinking champagne, good French champagne which he must have brought with him. No rules of the house were likely to be enforced against Gustavo Escobar. Doctor Plarr sometimes wondered whether he had ever been a client of Clara’s. What sort of comedy would she have played for him? Perhaps abasement?
“What have you been up to, my dear Eduardo, in Buenos Aires?”
“I have been to the Embassy,” Doctor Plarr shouted back at him, “and I have seen my mother. And you?”
“My wife has been shopping. As for myself I had lunch at the Hurlingham.” He continued to finger Doctor Plarr’s shoulder almost as though he were considering whether to buy him for breeding purposes (he had a big estancia on the Chaco side of the Paraná).
“Gustavo is deserting me again for a whole week,” Margarita said. “He always allows me to go shopping just before he deserts me.”
Doctor Plarr would have liked to turn the conversation to his successor, Caspar Vallejo, to whom the information she had given him ought more properly to have been addressed. It would have been reassuring to know that Vallejo was still a friend of the family.
“What about joining me on the estancia, Eduardo? I can give you some good shooting.”
“A doctor is tied to his patients,” Doctor Plarr said.
The plane dipped in an air pocket and Escobar had to grasp the back of Plarr’s seat.
“Be careful, caro. You will hurt your precious self. Better sit down.”
Perhaps it was the mechanical expression of his wife’s solicitude which irritated Escobar. Or perhaps he took the warning as a reflection on his machismo. He said with quite unmistakable irony, “You are tied to a very favourite patient at the moment, I believe, Eduardo?”
“All my patients are favourite ones.”
“Seńora Fortnum is having a baby, I believe?”
“Yes. And so, I expect you know, is Seńora Vega, but she doesn’t trust me with a childbirth. She goes to Doctor Benevento now.”