“These contraptions never tell the worst-or the best. All the same your pressure’s a bit high. I’ll give you some tablets, but couldn’t you cut down the drink a little?”
“That’s what the doctors were always saying to my father. He told me once he might have been paying a lot of parrots for squawking the same thing. I suppose I must take after the old bastard-except for the horses. They scare me stiff. He used to be angry about that. He said, ‘You’ve got to conquer fear, Charley, or it will conquer you.’ What’s your other name, Plarr?”
“Eduardo.”
“I’m Charley to my friends. Mind if I call you Ted?”
“If you must.”
Charley Fortnum sober had arrived at the same stage of intimacy which he had reached on the last occasion, though by a longer route. Doctor Plarr wondered how often, if their acquaintance continued, they would have to tread the same path before they arrived on the last lap at Charley and Ted.
“You know there’s only one other Englishman in this city. A fellow called Humphries, an English teacher. Met him?”
“We were all together one night. Don’t you remember? I saw you home.”
The Honorary Consul looked at him with an expression of near fear. “No, I don’t. Not a thing. Is that a bad sign?”
“Oh, it happens to all of us sometimes if we are drunk enough.”
“When I saw you outside the door, I did think for a moment I remembered your face. That’s why I asked your name. I thought I might have bought something from you and forgotten to pay. I’ll have to go a bit steadier, won’t I? For a while, I mean.”
“It wouldn’t do you any harm.”
“I remember some things very well, but I’m like the old man-he used to forget a lot too. Do you know once-I’d fallen off my horse, it got up suddenly on its hind legs-just to test me, the beast I mean. I was only six, it knew I was only a kid, it was right by the house, and my father was sitting there on the verandah. I was scared in case he might be angry, but what scared me worse was I could see when he looked down at me, where I lay on the ground, that he didn’t even remember who I was. He wasn’t angry at all, he was puzzled and worried, and he went back to his chair and took up his glass again. So I went round the back to the kitchen (the cook was always a good friend of mine), and I left the bloody horse. Of course I understand now. We had that much in common. He forgot things when he was drunk. Are you married, Ted?”
“No.”
“I was once.”
“Yes, so you told me.”
“I was glad when we split up, but all the same I wish we’d had a child first. When there’s no child it’s generally the man’s fault, isn’t?”
“No. I think the chances are about even.”
“I’d be sterile anyway, wouldn’t I, by now?”
“Of course not. Age doesn’t make you sterile.”
“If I had a child I wouldn’t try to make him conquer fear like my father did. It’s part of human nature, isn’t it, fear? If you conquer fear, you conquer your human nature, too. It’s a bit like the balance of nature. I read in a book once that, if we killed all the spiders in the world, we would all of us be suffocated under the weight of flies. Have you got a child, Ted?”
The name Ted had an irritating effect on Doctor Eduardo Plarr. He said, “No. If you want to call me by a Christian name I wish you’d call me Eduardo.”
“But you are as English as I am.”
“I’m only half English and that half is in prison or dead.”
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s living in B. A.”
“You’re lucky. You have somebody to save for. My mother died when I was born.”
“It’s not a good reason to kill yourself with drink.”
“That’s not the reason, Ted. I only mentioned my mother in passing, that’s all. What’s the good of a friend if one can’t talk to him?”
“A friend doesn’t make a good psychiatrist.”
“You sound a hard man, Ted. Haven’t you ever loved anyone?”
“That depends on what you call love.”
“You analyse too much,” Charley Fortnum said. “It’s a young man’s fault. Don’t turn up too many stones is what I always say. You never know what you’ll find underneath.”
Doctor Plarr said, “My job is to turn up stones. Guesswork is not much good when you make a diagnosis.”
“And what’s your diagnosis?”
“I’m going to give you a prescription, but it won’t do you any good unless you cut down on your drinking.”
He went back into the Consul’s office. He was irritated by the sense of time wasted. He could have seen three or four patients in the poor quarter of the city during the time he had spent listening to the self-pity of the Honorary Consul. He walked out of the bedroom and sat down at the desk and wrote his prescription. He felt the same sense of wasted time as when he visited his mother and she complained of headaches and loneliness while she sat before a plate heaped up with éclairs in the best tea shop of Buenos Aires. She always implied that she had been deserted by her husband-because a husband’s first duty was to his wife and child and he should have fled with them.
Charley Fortnum put on his jacket in the next room. “You aren’t going, are you?” he called.
“Yes. I’ve left the prescription on the desk.”
“What’s the hurry? Stay and have a drink.”
“I have patients to see.”
“Well, I’m your patient too, aren’t I?”
“You are not the most important of them,” Doctor Plarr said. “The prescription isn’t renewable. You’ll have enough tablets for a month, and then we’ll see.”
Doctor Plarr closed the door of the Consulate with a sense of relief, the relief he always felt when he finally left his mother’s apartment after a visit to the capital. He hadn’t enough time available to waste any of it on the incurable.
2
Nearly two years passed before Doctor Plarr visited for the first time the establishment which was so ably run by Seńora Sanchez, and then it was not in the company of the Honorary Consul. He went there with his friend and patient, the novelist, Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra. Saavedra, as he himself explained over a plate of tough beef at the Nacional, was a man who believed in following a very strict discipline. An observer might have guessed so much from his appearance, which was neat, of a uniform grey, grey hair, grey suit, grey tie. Even in the northern heat he wore the same well-cut double-breasted waistcoat that he used to wear in the coffee houses of the capital. His tailor there, he told Doctor Plarr, was English. “You wouldn’t believe it, but I haven’t had to buy a new suit in ten years.” As for the discipline of work, “I write five hundred words a day after my breakfast. No more no less,” he said, not for the first time.
Doctor Plarr was a good listener. He had been trained to listen. Most of his middle-class patients were accustomed to spend at least ten minutes explaining a simple attack of flu. It was only in the barrio of the poor that he ever encountered suffering in silence, suffering which had no vocabulary to explain a degree of pain, its position or its nature. In those huts of mud or tin where the patient often lay without covering on the dirt floor he had to make his own interpretation from a shiver of the skin or a nervous shift of the eyes.
“Discipline,” Jorge Julio Saavedra was repeating, “is more necessary to me than to other more facile writers. You see I have a demon where others have a talent. Mind you I envy them their talent. A talent is friendly. A demon is destructive. You cannot conceive how much I suffer when I write. I have to force myself day after day to sit down pen in hand and I struggle for expression… You will remember in my last book, that character, Castillo, the fisherman, who wages an endless war with the sea for such a small reward. In a way you might say that Castillo is a portrait of the artist. Such daily agony and the result-five hundred words. A very small catch.”