“No.”
“Do you still think he may be alive?”
“I am pretty sure of it,” he said.
“Then you have had news?”
“I have talked to Colonel Perez again. And I have been to Buenos Aires today to see the Ambassador.”
“But what shall we do if he comes back?”
“Do? I suppose what we are doing now. What else?” He finished retying the bandage. “We shall go on just as we always did. I shall come to see you at the camp, and Charley will go farming.” It was as though he were describing some life which had been pleasant enough once, but in which he no longer quite believed.
“It was good seeing the girls again at Seńora Sanchez’. I told them I had a lover. Of course I did not tell them who.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t know. Everybody in this town seems to know except poor Charley.”
“Why do you call him poor Charley? He was happy. I always did what he wanted me to do.”
“What did he want?”
“Not very much. Not very often. It was boring, Eduardo. I have not the words to tell you how boring it was. He was kind and careful of me. He never hurt me like you hurt me. Sometimes I say thank you to Our Lord and Our Blessed Lady that it is your child which is stuck in me here, not his. What sort of child would have come out if it had belonged to Charley? The child of an old man. I would have wanted to strangle it at birth.”
“Charley would make a better father than I could ever be.”
“He cannot do one thing better than you can.”
Oh yes, he can, Doctor Plarr thought, he can die better, and that is quite something.
She put out a hand and touched him on the cheek-he could feel the nerves through her fingertips. She had never caressed him like that before. A face was part of the forbidden territory of tenderness, and the purity of the gesture shocked him as much as though a young girl had touched his sex. He withdrew quickly. She said, “Do you remember that time at the camp when I told you I was pretending? But, caro, I was not pretending. Now when you make love to me I pretend. I pretend I feel nothing. I bite my lip so as to pretend. Is it because I love you, Eduardo? Do you think I love you?” She added with a humility which put him on his guard as much as a demand, “I am sorry. I did not really mean that… It makes no difference, does it?”
No difference? How could he begin to explain to her the vast extent of the difference? “Love” was a claim which he wouldn’t meet, a responsibility he would refuse to accept, a demand… So many times his mother had used the word when he was a child; it was like the threat of an armed robber, “Put up your hands or else…” Something was always asked in return: obedience, an apology, a kiss which one had no desire to give. Perhaps he had loved his father all the more because he had never used the word or asked for anything. He could remember only a single kiss on the quay at Asunción and that was the kind of kiss one man can give to another. It was like the formal kiss he had seen French generals give in photographs after they have presented a decoration. It claimed nothing. His father would sometimes pull at his hair or tap him on his cheek. The English phrase “Old fellow” was the nearest that he ever came to an endearment. He remembered his mother, as she wept in the cabin while the ship pulled into the current, telling him, “I have only you to love me now”; she had reached at him from her bunk, repeating “Darling, my darling boy,” as Margarita had reached at him years later from her bed, before Seńor Vallejo had come to take his place, and he remembered how Margarita had called him “the love of my life” as his mother had sometimes called him “My only boy.” He felt no belief at all in sexual love, but lying awake in the overcrowded flat in Buenos Aires he had sometimes recalled, as his mother’s footsteps creaked toward the privy, the illicit nocturnal sounds which he had heard on the estancia in Paraguay-the tiny reverberations of a muffled knock, strange tiptoes on the floor below, whispers from the cellar, a gunshot which rang out an urgent warning from far away across the fields-those had been the signals of a genuine tenderness, a compassion deep enough for his father to be prepared to die for it. Was that love? Did Leon feel love? Even Aquino?
“Eduardo,” he came back from far away to hear her imploring him, “I will say anything you want. I did not mean to make you angry. What do you want, Eduardo? Tell me. Please. What do you want? I want to know what you want, but how can I know if I do not understand?”
“Charley is simpler, isn’t he?”
“Eduardo, will you always be angry if I love you? I swear it won’t make any difference. I will stay with Charley. I will come only when you want me just like at the house.”
He was startled by the doorbell which rang and stopped and rang again. He hesitated to go. Why hesitate? Hardly a week passed without a telephone call or a ring at the door during the night. “Lie quiet,” he said, “it is only a patient.” He went into the hall and looked through the spy hole in the door, but no one was visible in the darkness of the stair head. He felt he was back in the Paraguay of his childhood. How often his father must have called out before a bolted door as he called now, “Who is it?” trying to make the intonation sound firm.
“The police.”
He unlocked the door and found himself face to face with Colonel Perez. “May I come in?”
“When you say ‘Police’ how can I refuse?” Doctor Plarr asked. “If you had said ‘Perez’ I might have told you, since you are a friend, to call tomorrow morning, at a better time.”
“It was because we are good friends that I said ‘Police’ to warn you this is an official call.”
“Too official for a drink?”
“No, it has not reached that point yet.”
Doctor Plarr led Colonel Perez to his consulting room and brought out two whiskies of the Argentinian mark. He said, “I keep the little genuine Scotch I have for social visits.”
“Yes, I understand. And your meeting with Doctor Saavedra tonight, that I suppose was purely social?”
“Are you having me watched?”
“Not until now. Perhaps I ought to have done so earlier. Someone on El Litoral told me of your telephone call tonight, and of course the cables you left at the hotel interested me when they showed them to me. There is no such thing in this city as an Anglo-Argentinian Club, is there?”
“No. Did the cables go off?”
“Why not? There was no harm in them. But then there was the lie you told me yesterday… You seem to be very mixed up in this affair, doctor.”
“You are right of course, if you mean I’m doing my best to have Fortnum released, but surely both of us are working for that.”
“There is quite a difference, doctor. I am not really interested in Fortnum, only in his kidnappers. I would prefer the blackmail to be unsuccessful, because it would discourage others. You on the other hand want the blackmail to succeed. Of course-it is only natural-I would like to win the game both ways, to save Seńor Fortnum. Are you alone here?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I was looking out of the window and I thought I saw a light go off in the next room.”
“It was a car passing by the river road.”
“Yes. Perhaps.” He drank his whisky slowly. Doctor Plarr had an odd impression that he was at a loss for words. “Do you really believe, doctor, these men can get your father released?”
“Well, prisoners have been released by the same method.”
“Not in return for a mere Honorary Consul.”
“Even an Honorary Consul is human-he has the right to live. The British Government would not want him murdered.”
“It does not depend on the British Government, it depends on the General, and I doubt if the General worries much about any human life. Except his own, of course.”
“He depends on American aid. If they insist…”