It was indeed a very small world. Doctor Plarr had an impression that the long pursuit of literature had brought the novelist little material reward beyond his tidy suit and his polished shoes and the respect of the hotel manager. The living room was narrow and long like a railway compartment. One shelf of books (most of them were Saavedra’s own), a folding table which would have almost spanned the room if it had been opened, a nineteenth-century painting of a gaucho on a horse, one easy chair and two upright chairs-that was all the furnishing there was, apart from a huge antique mahogany cupboard which must have once belonged in more spacious quarters, for the baroque curlicues above the pediment had been cut to fit under the ceiling. Two open doors, which Doctor Saavedra quickly shut, gave Plarr glimpses of a monastic bedstead and the chipped enamel of a cooking stove. Through the window, which was veined by a rusty mesh against mosquitoes, came the clatter of tins from the children playing below.
“May I give you a whisky?”
“A small one, please.”
Doctor Saavedra opened the cupboard; it was like an enormous chest in which the possessions of a lifetime had been packed for an impending departure. Two suits hung there. Shirts and underwear and books had been stacked indiscriminately on the shelves: an umbrella leaned among obscure shapes at the back: four ties dangled from a rod: a little pile of photographs in old-fashioned frames shared the floor with two pairs of shoes and some books for which there had been no room elsewhere. On a ledge over the suits stood a whisky bottle, a half-finished bottle of wine and a few glasses-one of them chipped-a pile of cutlery and a bowl of bread. Doctor Saavedra said defiantly, “I am a little cramped for room, but I want the smallest possible space around me when I write. Space distracts.” He looked anxiously at Doctor Plarr and attempted a smile. “This is the womb of my characters, doctor, and there is room for little else. You must forgive me if I cannot offer you any ice, but this morning my refrigerator failed and the electrician has not yet come.”
“I prefer my whisky neat after dinner,” Doctor Plarr said.
He had to stand on the points of his small gleaming shoes to reach the top of the wardrobe. A cheap plastic shade painted with pink flowers, which were beginning to brown from the heat, hardly dimmed the harshness of the central light. Watching Doctor Saavedra reach for the glass with his white hair, in his pearl-gray suit and his brightly polished shoes, Doctor Plarr felt much the same astonishment that he had felt in the barrio of the poor when he saw a young girl emerge in an immaculate white dress from a waterless hovel of mud and tin. He felt a new respect for Doctor Saavedra. His obsession with literature was not absurd whatever the quality of his books. He was willing to suffer poverty for its sake, and a disguised poverty was far worse to endure than an open one. The effort needed to polish his shoes, to press the suit… He couldn’t, like the young, let things go. Even his hair must be cut regularly. A missing button would reveal too much. Perhaps he would be remembered in the history of Argentine literature only in a footnote, but he would have deserved his footnote. The bareness of the room could be compared to the inextinguishable hunger of his literary obsession.
Doctor Saavedra tripped toward him holding two glasses. He asked, “How long do you think we shall have to wait for a response?”
“It may never come.”
“Your father’s name, I believe, is on the list of those they want released?”
“Yes.”
“It would be strange for you, I imagine, to see your father again after all this time. How happy your mother will be if…”
“I think she would prefer him dead. He wouldn’t fit in with her life now.”
“And perhaps if Seńor Fortnum returned he would not be welcomed by his wife either?”
“How can I tell?”
“Oh come, Doctor Plarr, I have friends at the house of Seńora Sanchez.”
“So she has been back there?” Doctor Plarr asked.
“I was there early this evening and so was she. They were making a great fuss of her-even Seńora Sanchez. Perhaps she hopes to have her back. When Doctor Benevento came to see the other girls I took her to the Consulate.”
“She told you about me?”
He was a little irritated by her indiscretion, but nonetheless he felt a sense of relief. He was escaping from secrecy. There had not been one soul in the city to whom he could talk of Clara, and what better confidant could he hope to have than his own patient? There were secrets which Doctor Saavedra too would not want known.
“She told me how very kind you had been to her.”
“Is that all she said?”
“It was all that was necessary between old friends.”
“Was she one of your girls?” Doctor Plarr asked.
“I was with her only once, I think.”
Doctor Plarr felt no jealousy. To think of Clara waiting naked in her cell in the candlelight while Doctor Saavedra hung up his pearl-gray suit was like watching on the stage a scene, both sad and comic, from a remote seat at the back of the gallery. Distance removed the characters so far from him that he could be touched only by a formal compassion. He asked, “Didn’t you like her enough to try again?”
Doctor Saavedra said, “It was not a question of liking. She was a good young woman, I am sure, quite attractive too, but she had nothing special for my purpose. She never struck me as a character-a character-forgive me if I speak like the critics-in the world of Jorge Julio Saavedra. Montez claims that world has no real existence. What does he know in Buenos Aires? Doesn’t Teresa exist-you remember the evening when you met her? Before we had been together five minutes Teresa was the girl from Salta. There was something she said-I can’t even remember the words now. I went with her four times and then I had to drop her, because she was saying too many things which were unsuitable. They confused my idea.”
“Clara comes from Tucumán. You got nothing from her?”
“Tucumán is not a suitable region for me. My region is the region of extremes. Montez does not understand that. Trelew… Salta. Tucuman is an elegant city, and it is surrounded by half a million hectares of sugar. What ennui! Her father was a cane-cutter, wasn’t he? And her brother disappeared.”
“I would have thought that might have made a good subject for you, Saavedra.”
“Not for me. She never came alive. It was all dull poverty with no machismo in half a million hectares.” He added bravely as though the night were not noisy with the tins rolling back and forth in the cement yard below, “You do not realize how quiet and dull bare poverty can be. Let me give you a little more whisky. It is a genuine Johnny Walker.”
“No, no, thank you. I must go home.” All the same he lingered. Novelists were supposed to have acquired a certain wisdom… He asked, “What do you suppose will become of Clara if Fortnum dies?”
“Perhaps you might marry her?”
“How can I? I would have to go away from here.”
“You could easily find a better living somewhere else. Rosario?”
Doctor Plarr said, “This is my home too-or the nearest I have ever come to a home since I left Paraguay.”
“And you feel your father not so far away?”
“You are a perceptive man, Saavedra. Yes, it may have been my father’s nearness which brought me here. In the barrio of the poor I am aware of doing something he would have liked to see me do, but when I am with my rich patients, I feel as though I had left his friends to help his enemies. I even sleep with them sometimes, and when I wake up I look at the face on the pillow through his eyes. I suppose that’s one reason why my affairs never last long, and when I have tea with my mother in the Calle Florida among all the other ladies of B. A…. he sits there too and criticizes me with his blue English eyes. I think my father might have cared for Clara. She is one of his poor.”