The novelist was urinating. He had turned up the right sleeve of his pearl-gray jacket; he was a fastidious man.
Doctor Plarr said, “I thought it was not too much to ask you to sign a letter, however badly written, and perhaps save a man’s life.”
“I think I had better tell you the real reason. I need more than one of your pills tonight Doctor, I have been deeply wounded.” Doctor Saavedra buttoned up his trousers and turned. “I have spoken to you already about Montez?”
“Montez? No, I can’t remember the name.”
“He is a young novelist in Buenos Aires-not so young now, I suppose, older than you, the years pass quickly. I helped him to get his first novel published. A very strange novel. Surrealist but excellently written. Emece turned it down, Sur would not accept it, and I only persuaded my own publisher to take it by promising that I would write a favourable criticism. In those days I was writing a weekly column in the Nation which had a lot of influence. I was fond of Montez. I felt myself to be a sort of father to him. Even though, during my last years in Buenos Aires, I saw very little of him. He had made his own friends after his success. All the same I never failed to praise his work when I had the chance. Now see what he has written about me.” He took from his pocket a folded page of print. It was a long and well-written article. The subject was the bad effect of the epic poem, Martin Fierro, on the Argentine novel. Borges the author excepted from his criticism. He had a few words of praise for Mallea and Sabato, but he made cruel fun of Jorge Julio Saavedra’s novels. The word mediocre appeared frequently, the word machismo rang mockingly out from nearly every paragraph. Was he revenging the patronage which Saavedra had once shown him, all the boring counsel to which he had probably been forced to listen? Doctor Plarr said, “Yes, it is a betrayal, Saavedra.”
“Not only of myself. Of his country. Martin Fierro is Argentina. Why, my own grandfather died in a duel. He fought with bare hands against a drunken gaucho who insulted him. Where would we be now”-his hands waved from basin to urinoir-“if our fathers had not reverenced machismo? You see what he writes about the girl from Salta. He has not even understood the symbolism of her one leg. If I had signed your letter imagine how he would have sneered at the style. ‘Poor Jorge Julio-that is what happens to a writer who runs away from his peers and hides in the provinces. He writes like a clerk of the intendente.’ I wish Montez were here now so that I could teach him the meaning of machismo. Here on these tiles.”
“Have you a knife handy?” Doctor Plarr asked, hoping in vain to raise a smile.
“I would fight him as my grandfather did with my bare hands.”
Doctor Plarr said, “Your grandfather was killed.”
“I am not afraid of death,” Doctor Saavedra said. “Charley Fortnum is. It’s a very small thing to do-to sign a letter.”
“A small thing? To sign a piece of prose like that? It would be much easier to give my life. Oh, I know it’s impossible for someone who is not a writer to understand.”
“I am trying to,” Doctor Plarr said. “Your purpose is to draw attention to Seńor Fortnum’s case? Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Then this is what I suggest. Inform the newspapers and your government that I have offered myself as a hostage in his place.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am quite serious.”
It might work, Doctor Plarr thought, there is just a faint possibility that in this crazy country it might work. He was moved to say, “It’s brave of you, Saavedra.”
“At least I will show young Montez that machismo is not an invention of the author of Martin Fierro.”
“You realize,” Doctor Plarr said, “they might accept your offer? And then there would be no more novels by Jorge Julio Saavedra-unless perhaps the General reads you and you have a big public in Paraguay.”
“You will cable Buenos Aires and The Times of London too? You will not forget The Times? Two of my novels were published in England. And El Litoral. You must telephone them. The kidnappers are sure to read El Litoral.”
They went together to the manager’s office which was empty and Doctor Plarr wrote out the cables. When he turned he saw the eyes of Doctor Saavedra red with unshed tears. Saavedra said, “Montez was like a son to me. I admired his books. They were so different from my own, and they had quality-I could see they had quality. Yet all the time he must have been despising me. I am an old man, Doctor Plarr, so death is not very far off from me in any case. That story I was describing to the hotel manager-the story of the intruder-I was going to call the novel The Intruder-it would probably never have been finished. Even while I was planning it I knew it belonged to his region of literature and not to mine. I used to give him advice and see me now-planning to imitate him. It is the privilege of the young to imitate. I would prefer to die in a way that even Montez would have to respect.”
“He will say that you were killed too in the end by Martin Fierro.”
“In Argentina we are most of us killed by Martin Fierro. But a man has the right to choose the moment of death.”
“Charley Fortnum has not been allowed to choose.”
“Seńor Fortnum is caught up in a contingency. I agree that is not a dignified way to die. It is like a street accident or a case of gripe.”
Doctor Plarr offered to drive Saavedra home. He had never yet been invited to visit the novelist and he had imagined him in occupation of some old colonial house with barred windows looking out on a shady street, with a few orange trees and lapachos in the garden, a house as dignified and out of fashion as his clothes. Perhaps there would be portraits on the wall of the great-grandfather who had been Governor of the province and of the grandfather who had been killed by the gaucho.
“It is not far. I can easily walk,” Saavedra said.
“I think we ought to talk a little more about your offer and how it can be carried through.”
“All that is out of my hands now.”
“Not entirely.”
As he drove Doctor Plarr pointed out to the novelist that from the moment his offer was published in El Litoral he would be watched by the police. “The kidnappers will have to communicate with you and suggest some way of making the exchange. It would be easier if you left the town tonight before the police know. You could stay out of sight with some friend in the country.”
“How would the kidnappers find me?”
“Perhaps through me. They probably know I am a friend of Seńor Fortnum.”
“I cannot run away and hide like a criminal.”
“Then it will be difficult for them to take your offer up.”
“Besides,” Doctor Saavedra said, “there is my work.”
“Surely you can take it with you.”
“That is easy for you to say. You can go and attend a patient anywhere, you carry your experience with you. But my work is tied to the room where I work. When I came here from Buenos Aires it was nearly a year before I could put a pen to paper. My room was like a hotel room. To write one must have a home.”
A home: Doctor Plarr was surprised to find the novelist lived in a block even more modern and shabby than his own in a quarter close by the prison wall. The grey apartment houses stood in squares as though they formed an extension of the prison. One expected them to be lettered A, B and C and to be reserved for different categories of criminal. Doctor Saavedra’s apartment was on the third floor and there was no hit. Children played a kind of bowls with tin cans in front of the entrance, and the smell of cooking pursued them up the stairs. Perhaps Doctor Saavedra felt that an explanation was required. He spoke a little breathlessly after his climb as he paused on the second floor. “You know a novelist does not pay visits like a doctor. He has to live with his subject. I could not live comfortably in a bourgeois setting because I write about the people. The good woman who cleans for me here is the wife of a warder at the prison. I feel myself in the right milieu. I put her in my last book. Do you remember? She was called Caterina and was the widow of a sergeant. I think I caught her way of thinking.” He opened his door and said with a note of defiance, “Here you are at the heart of what my critics call the world of Saavedra.”