“Do you love the girl?”
“Love, love, I wish I knew what you and all the others mean by the word. I want her, yes. From time to time. Sexual desire has its rhythms as you well know.” He added, “She has lasted longer than I thought possible. Teresa was your one-legged girl from Salta. Perhaps Clara is-my poor. But I never want her to be my victim. Was that what Charley Fortnum felt when he married her?”
Doctor Saavedra said, “I may not see you again. I have come to you for pills against melancholy, but at least I have my work. I wonder whether you do not need those pills more than I do.”
Doctor Plarr looked at him without understanding. His thoughts were elsewhere.
When he got into the lift to his flat Doctor Plarr remembered the excitement with which Clara had made her first ascent in it. Perhaps, he thought, I will telephone to the Consulate and tell her to join me. The bed at the Consulate was too narrow for both of them, and, if he joined her there, he would be forced to leave before the hawk like woman came in the morning.
He let himself in and went first to his consulting room to see whether his secretary Ana had left a note on his desk, but there was nothing there. He drew the curtains and looked down on the port: three policemen were standing by the Coca-Cola stall, perhaps because the weekly boat to Asunción lay at the jetty. It was like the scene of his boyhood, but he looked at it in reverse from his fourth-floor window above the river.
He said, “God help you, father, wherever you are,” speaking aloud. It was easier to believe in a god with a human sense of hearing than in some omniscient force which could read his unuttered thoughts. Strangely the face he conjured up when he spoke was not his father’s but Charley Fortnum’s. The Honorary Consul lay stretched out on the coffin and whispered, “Ted.” Doctor Plarr’s father had called him Eduardo as though in compliment to his wife. When he tried to substitute Henry Plarr’s face for Charley Fortnum’s he found his father’s features had been almost eliminated by the years. As with an ancient coin that has been buried a long time in the ground he could only distinguish a fault unevenness of surface which might once have been the outline of a cheek or a lip. It was Charley Fortnum’s voice which appealed to him again, “Ted.”
He turned away-hadn’t he done all in his power to help?—and opened the bedroom door. He saw by the light from the study the body of Fortnum’s wife outlined under the sheets. “Clara!” he said. She woke immediately and sat up. He noticed her clothes had been folded carefully on a chair, for she possessed the neatness of her former profession. For a woman who has to take off her clothes many times in a night it is essential to arrange them carefully or a dress would be hopelessly crumpled after two or three clients. She had told him once that Seńora Sanchez insisted on each girl paving for her own laundry-it made for tidiness.
“How did you get in?”
“I asked the porter.”
“He opened the door for you?”
“He knows me.”
“He has seen you here?”
“Yes. And there too.”
So I have shared her with the porter as well, he thought. How many more of the unknown warriors of her battlefield would take form sooner or later? Nothing was more alien to the life of the Calle Florida and the tinkle of teacups and the cakes of dulce de leche, white as snow. He had shared Margarita for a while with Seńor Vallejo-most affairs overlap at the beginning or the end-and he preferred the porter to Seńor Vallejo, the smell of whose shaving lotion during those last dilatory months he had sometimes detected on Margarita’s skin.
“I told him you would give him money. You will?”
“Of course. How much? Five hundred pesos?”
“A thousand would be better.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the sheet back. He was not yet tired of her thin body and the small breasts which barely yet, any more than her belly, indicated pregnancy. He said, “I am very glad you are here. I was going to call you up, though it wouldn’t have been very wise. The police think I had something to do with the kidnapping. They suspect my motive may be jealousy,” he added, smiling at the idea of it.
“They would not dare do anything to you. You look after the finance secretary’s wife.”
“They might start watching me all the same.”
“What would that matter? They watch me.”
“Did they follow you here?”
“Oh, I know how to deal with men like that. It is not the police I worry about, but that swine of a journalist. He was back at the camp just after it got dark. He offered me money.”
“What for? A story?”
“He wanted to sleep with me.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him I did not need his money any more, and then he got angry. He really believed I liked him for himself when I was with Seńora Sanchez. He thought he was a great lover. Oh, how I hurt his pride,” she went on with pleasure, “when I told him that Charley was twice the man he was.”
“How did you get rid of him?”
“I called the policeman (they have left one at the camp-they say he is there to protect me, but he watches me all the time), and while the two of them were arguing I drove away.”
“But you don’t know how to drive, Clara.”
“I watched Charley often enough. It is not so difficult. I knew the things to push and the things to pull. I got them mixed up at first, but all was right in the end. It went in jerks as far as the road, and then I found how to do things properly and I drove faster than Charley.”
“Poor Fortnum’s Pride,” Plarr said.
“I think I drove a little too fast because I did not see the camion coming.”
“What happened?”
“There was an accident.”
“Were you hurt?”
“The jeep was hurt but not me.”
Her eyes gleamed up at him from the pillows; they were bright with the excitement of strange events. Never before had he known her to talk so much. She had for him still the attraction of a stranger-like some unknown girl at a cocktail party. He said, “I like you,” lightly, without thought, as he might have said it over the cocktails, neither of them believing the words meant any more than “Come and sleep with me.”
“The driver gave me a lift,” she said. “Of course he wanted to make love, and I said I would when we got to the town at a house he goes to in San Jose, but I got out at the first traffic lights, before he could stop me, and I went to Seńora Sanchez. Oh, she was glad to see me I can tell you, really glad, not angry with me at all, and she put on a bandage herself.”
“Then you were hurt?”
“I told her I knew a good doctor,” she said and smiled and pulled the sheet off to show the bandage round her left knee.
“Clara, I must take it off and see…”
“Oh, it can wait,” she said. “You love me a little?” She corrected herself quickly, “Do you want to make love to me?”
“Plenty of time for that. Lie still and let me take the bandage off.”
He tried to be as gentle as possible, but he knew he must be hurting her. She lay quiet without complaint, and he thought of some of his bourgeois patients who would have persuaded themselves that the pain was unbearable; they might even have faulted from fear or to win his attention. “Good peasant stock,” he said with admiration.
“What do you mean?”
“You are a brave girl.”
“But that cut is nothing. You should see what men do to themselves in the fields when they cut cane. I have seen a boy with half his foot cut off.” She asked casually, as though she were making polite conversation about a relative whom they had in common, “Is there any news yet of Charley?”