“Are you trying to blackmail me?”
“In a good cause.”
“Morally you are no better than the kidnappers.”
“No better-all the same I would rather they didn’t kill Charley Fortnum.”
“Charley Fortnum’s a disgrace to his country.”
“No signature. No salmon.”
“You give me no alternative,” Doctor Humphries said, undoing his napkin.
Doctor Saavedra read the letter with care. He laid it down beside his plate. “If I might take this home and work on it,” he said. “It lacks-you must not mind my criticism, it comes from a professional conscience-it lacks the sense of urgency. It reads as coldly as a company report. If you would leave the letter in my hands I will write you something with color and dramatic effect. Something the press would have to print on its own merits.”
“I want to cable it tonight to The Times in London and get it into tomorrow’s papers in Buenos Aires.”
“A letter like this cannot be hurried, Doctor Plarr, and I am a slow writer. Give me till tomorrow and I promise you the result will be worth waiting for.”
“The poor devil may have only about three days to live. I’d rather cable my rough draft tonight than wait till tomorrow. Over in England it’s already tomorrow.”
“Then you will have to do without my signature. I’m sorry, doctor, it would be wrong for me to put my name to the letter as it stands now. No one in Buenos Aires would believe I had a hand in it. It contains-forgive me-some terrible clichés. Just listen to this…”
“That is why I wanted you to rewrite the letter.
Surely you can do it now. At the table.”
“Do you believe writing is as easy as that? Would you do a delicate operation, on the spur of the moment, on this table? I will sit up all night if necessary. The quality of the letter I write you will more than make up for the delay, even in translation. By the way who is going to translate it-you or Doctor Humphries? I would like to check the translation before you send it abroad. I trust your accuracy, of course, but it is a question of style. In a letter like this we have to move the reader, to bring home to him the character of this poor man…”
“The less you bring home his character the better,” Humphries said.
“As I see it, Seńor Fortnum is a simple man-not very wise or intelligent-and suddenly he finds himself close to violent death. Perhaps he has never even thought of death before. It is a situation in which such a man either succumbs to fear or he grows in stature. Consider the case of Seńor Fortnum. He is married to a young wife, a child is on the way…”
“We have no time to write a novel on the subject,” Doctor Plarr said.
“When I met him, he had drunk a little too much. I found his company embarrassing until I saw, behind the superficial gaiety, a profound melancholy.”
“You are not far wrong there,” Doctor Plarr said with surprise.
“He was drinking, I think, for the same reason that I write-to escape the darkness of his own spirit. He confided to me that he was in love.”
“In love at sixty!” Humphries exclaimed. “He ought to have got beyond all that nonsense.”
“I have not got beyond it,” Doctor Saavedra said. “If I were beyond it, I would no longer be able to write. The sexual instinct and the creative instinct live and die together. Youth, Doctor Humphries, lasts longer in some men than you, from your personal experience, may suppose.”
“He just wanted to keep a whore handy. Do you call that love?”
“If we could get back to the letter…” Doctor Plarr said.
“And what do you call love, Doctor Humphries? An arranged marriage in the Spanish tradition? A large family of children? Let me tell you I have loved a whore myself. A whore can have more generosity of spirit than you will find in the bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires. As a poet I have been helped better by a whore than by any critic-or professor of literature.”
“I thought you were a novelist, not a poet.”
“In Spanish we do not confine the term poet to those who write metrically.”
“The letter,” Doctor Plarr interrupted. “Let us try to finish the letter before we finish the salmon.”
“You must let me think quietly-the opening sentence is the key to the rest. One has to strike the right tone, even the right rhythm. The right rhythm in prose is every bit as important as the right meter in a poem. This is a very good salmon. May I have another glass of wine?”
“You can drink the whole bottle if you will write the letter.”
“What a fuss to make about Charley Fortnum,” Doctor Humphries said. He had finished his salmon, he had drained his glass, he had nothing to fear. “You know there’s another possible motive for his disappearance-he doesn’t want to stand father to another man’s child.”
“I want to begin the letter with a character study of the victim,” Doctor Saavedra said, ballpoint in hand, a little salmon shaking on his upper lip, “but somehow Seńor Fortnum refuses to come alive. I have had to cross out almost every other word. In a novel I could have created him in a few sentences. It is his reality which defeats me. I am hamstrung by his reality. When I write down a phrase it is as though Fortnum himself put a hand on my wrist and said, ‘But this is not how I am at all.’”
“Let me pour you another glass.”
“There is another thing he says to me which makes me hesitate. ‘Why are you trying to send me back to the kind of life I used to lead, a Life sad and without honour?’”
“Charley Fortnum never worried much about honour,” Doctor Humphries said, “so long as there was enough whisky around.”
“If you could look deep enough into anyone’s character, even perhaps your own, you would find the sense of machismo.”
It was past ten o’clock and guests were beginning to drift across the terrace for dinner. They moved along separate routes, passing on either side of Doctor Plarr’s table, like migrating tribes passing a rock in the desert, and they carried their children with them. A baby, which might have been an idol of wax, sat upright in a pram: a pale-faced child of three staggered from fatigue across the marble desert dressed in a blue party dress, her little ears pierced for gold rings; a boy of six drummed his way, yawning at every step, along the terrace wall. One had the impression that they had crossed a whole continent to arrive here. No doubt at dawn, the grazing exhausted, they would pack up and move to another camping ground. Doctor Plarr said impatiently, “Give me back my letter. I want to send it as it is.”
“In that case I cannot put my name to it.”
“And you, Humphries?”
“I won’t sign. You can’t threaten me now. I’ve finished my salmon.”
Doctor Plarr took the letter and tore it in two. He put some money on the table and rose.
“Doctor Plarr, I am sorry to anger you. Your style is not bad, it is workmanlike, but nobody would believe that I had written the letter.”
Doctor Plarr went to the lavatory. As he washed his hands he thought: I am like Pilate, a cliché of which Doctor Saavedra would not approve. He washed his hands scrupulously as though he were about to examine a patient. Raising them from the water he looked into the glass and threw a question at the worried image there-if they kill Fortnum will I marry Clara? It would not be a necessary consequence; she would never expect him to marry her. If she inherited the camp she could sell it and move elsewhere-home to Tucumán? Or perhaps she would take a flat in B. A. and eat sweet cakes like his mother? It would be more satisfactory for all of them if Fortnum lived. Fortnum would make a better father for the child than he would-a child needed love.
As he dried his hands he heard the voice of Doctor Saavedra behind him. “You think I have failed you, doctor, but you are not aware of all the circumstances.”