Pablo said, “Diego asked me once why there were only Paraguayans on your list of prisoners to be released. I told him-these are the most urgent cases. Men who have been in prison more than ten years. The next time we strike together perhaps it will be for our own people, like the time in Salta. There were Paraguayans who helped us then. I do not believe he will go to the police, Father.”
“Nor do I, Pablo.”
“We have only a little time to wait,” Aquino said. “They must surrender-or we leave a dead Consul in the river.”
“How long before the news?”
“Ten minutes,” Doctor Plarr said.
Father Rivas picked up his detective story, but to Doctor Plarr, watching him closely, he seemed to be reading with unnatural slowness. He had fastened his eyes on one passage and he kept them there a long time before he turned the leaf. His lips moved a little. He might have been praying-in secrecy perhaps, because prayers by a priest at a deathbed are the last resort and the patient must not be allowed to hear them. All of us are his patients, Doctor Plarr thought, we are all about to die.
The doctor had no belief that things would turn out well. From a false equation you get only a chain of errors. His own death might be one of the errors, for afterward people would say he had followed in his father’s steps, but they would be wrong-that had not been his intention.
He wondered with an unpleasant itch of anxiety and curiosity about his child. The child too was the result of an error, a carelessness on his part, but he had never before felt any responsibility. He had considered the child to be a useless part of Clara like her appendix, perhaps a diseased appendix which ought to be removed. He had suggested an abortion, but the idea had frightened her-perhaps there had been too many unprofessional abortions in the house of Mother Sanchez. Now, waiting for the news bulletin on the radio, he said to himself: the poor little bastard, if only I could have made some sort of arrangement for it. What sort of a mother was Clara likely to prove? Would she go back to Mother Sanchez and have the child brought up as the spoiled brat of a brothel? That would probably be better than life with his mother in B. A. stuffed with dulce de leche in the Calle Florida among the international voices of the well-to-do. He thought of the tangle of its ancestry, and for the first time in the complexity of that tangle the child became real to him-it was no longer just one more wet piece of flesh like any other torn out of the body with a cord which had to be cut. This cord could never be cut. It joined the child to two very different grandfathers-a cane-cutter in Tucuman and an old English liberal who had been shot dead in the yard of a police station in Paraguay. The cord joined it to a father who was a provincial doctor, to a mother from a brothel, to an uncle who had walked away one day from the cane fields to disappear into the waste of a continent, to two grandmothers… There was no end to the tangle which must constrict the tiny form like the swaddling bandages with which in old days they used to bind the limbs of a newborn child. A cold fish, Charley Fortnum had called him. What effect did it have on a child to have a cold fish for a father? It might have been better if they could have exchanged fathers. A cold fish would have been his own proper parentage rather than a father who had cared enough to die. He would have liked the little bastard to believe in something, but he was not the kind of father who could transmit belief in a good or a cause. He called across the dirt floor, “Do you really believe in God the Father Almighty, Leon?”
“What? I am sorry. I did not hear. This detective is a very cunning man, so there must be a good reason why the train from Edinburgh is half an hour late.”
“I asked if you believed sometimes in God the Father?”
“You have asked me that before. You do not really want to know. You are only mocking me, Eduardo. All the same I will give you my answer when there is no more hope. You will not be ready to laugh then. Excuse me a moment-the story has become more interesting-the Edinburgh express is steaming into a station called King’s Cross. King’s Cross. Would that be symbolic?”
“No. Just the name of a station in London.”
“Be quiet, both of you.” Aquino turned the radio up and they listened to the international news which was beamed at that hour from Buenos Aires. The announcer described the visit by the Secretary General of the United Nations to West Africa; fifty hippies had been expelled with violence from Majorca; there was yet another rise in taxes on cars imported to Argentina; a retired general had died in Cordoba at the age of eighty; a few bombs had exploded in Bogota, and of course the Argentine football team was continuing its violent progress through Europe.
“They have forgotten us,” Aquino said.
“If only we could believe that,” Father Rivas said. “To stay here… forgotten… forever. It would not be so bad a fate, would it?”
3
On Saturday at midday the news came for which they had been waiting so long, but they had to listen patiently until the end of the bulletin. It was the policy of all the governments concerned to play down the importance of the Fortnum affair. Buenos Aires quoted moderate expressions of British opinion. The Times of London, for instance, had stated that an Argentinian novelist (whose name was not given) had offered himself in exchange for the Consul, and a BBC broadcast put the affair, as the Argentinian commentator remarked, in proper perspective. A Junior Minister had referred to the matter briefly when questioned in a television discussion on political violence occasioned by the tragic death of more than a hundred and sixty BOAC passengers. “I know no more about this affair in Argentina than any of our listeners. I do not have time to read many novels, but before I came out this evening I did ask my wife’s bookseller about Mr. Savindra, and I’m afraid he was no better informed than me.” The Minister added, “Much as I sympathize with Mr. Fortnum, I want to emphasize that we cannot treat a kidnapping like this as an attack on the British diplomatic service with all that would imply. Mr. Fortnum has never at any time been a member of the diplomatic service. He was born in Argentina, and so far as I know he has not even visited this country. When the unfortunate affair occurred we were about to terminate his engagement as Honorary Consul since he had passed the normal age for retirement and there was really no occasion to replace him as the number of British residents in that particular province has been very much reduced in the last ten years. I am sure you are aware that this Government is making every effort to economize in the Foreign Service.”
Asked whether the Government’s attitude would have been the same if the victim had been a member of the diplomatic service the Minister said, “Certainly it would have been the same. We don’t intend to give in to this kind of blackmail anywhere, under any circumstances. In this particular case we have every confidence that Mr. Fortnum will be released when these desperate men realize the complete futility of their action. It is for the President of Argentina in that case to decide whether he will treat these criminals with clemency. Now, if the chairman will allow me, I would like to return to the real subject of tonight’s broadcast. I can assure you that there were no security men on the plane and so no question of an armed struggle…” Pablo turned off the radio. “What did all that mean?” Father Rivas asked. Doctor Plarr said, “They have left Fortnum’s case in your hands.”
“If they have rejected the ultimatum,” Aquino said, “the sooner we kill him the better.”
“Our ultimatum was not made to the British Government,” Father Rivas said.