Jorge Julio Saavedra said, “A poet-the true novelist must always be in his way a poet-a poet deals in absolutes Shakespeare avoided the politics of his time, the minutiae of politics. He wasn’t concerned with Philip of Spain, with pirates like Drake. He used the history of the past to express what I call the abstraction of politics. A novelist today who wants to represent tyranny should not describe the activities of General Stroessner in Paraguay-that is journalism not literature. Tiberius is a better example for a poet.”
Doctor Plarr thought how agreeable it would be to take the girl to her room. He had not slept with a woman for more than a month, and how easily sexual attention can be caught by something superficial, like a birthmark in an unusual position.
“Surely you understand what I mean?” the novelist asked him severely. “Yes, Yes. Of course.”
Doctor Plarr was prevented by a certain fastidiousness from treading quickly in another man’s tracks. What interval, he wondered, would he be prepared to accept? Half an hour, an hour-or merely the physical absence of his predecessor, who had already ordered himself another drink?
“I can see the subject has no interest at all for you,” Doctor Saavedra said with disappointment.
“The subject… forgive me… I’ve drunk rather heavily tonight.”
“I was talking of politics.”
“But of course politics interest me. I’m a kind of politica1 refugee myself. And my father… I don’t even know whether my father is alive. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he was murdered. Perhaps he is shut up in a police station somewhere across the border. The General doesn’t believe in prisons for political offenders-he leaves them to rot alone in police stations all over the country.”
“That is exactly my point, doctor. Of course I sympathize with you, but how can I make art out of a man shut up in a police station?”
“Why not?”
“Because it is a special case. It is a situation which belongs to the nineteen seventies. I hope my books will be read, if only by discriminating readers, in the twenty-first century. My fisherman Castillo I have tried to make timeless.”
Doctor Plarr remembered how seldom he had thought of his father, and perhaps it was a sense of guilt because of his own safety and comfort which made him a little angry now. He said, “Your fisherman is timeless because he never existed.” He regretted his words immediately. “I am sorry,” he said. “Don’t you think we ought to have another drink? And your charming companion-we are neglecting her.”
“There are more important subjects than Teresa,” Saavedra said, but he surrendered his hand again into her keeping. “Isn’t there a girl here who pleases you?”
“Yes, there is one, but she has found another customer.”
The girl with the birthmark had joined the solitary drinker and they were proceeding together to her cell. She passed her former companion without a glance and he hadn’t enough curiosity to look at his successor. There was something clinical in a brothel which appealed to Doctor Plarr. It was as though he were watching a surgeon accompanying a new patient to the operating theatre-the previous operation had been successful and was already out of mind. Only in television dramas did emotions of love, anxiety or fear infiltrate into the wards. His first years in Buenos Aires, while his mother complained, dramatized and wept over his missing father’s fate, and the later years when she became volubly content with sweet cakes and chocolate ices had given Doctor Plarr a suspicion of any emotion which was curable by means as simple as an orgasm or an éclair. The memory of a conversation-if you could call it that-with Charley Fortnum came back to him. He asked Teresa, “Do you know a girl here called María?”
“There are several Marías,” Teresa said.
“She comes from Cordoba.”
“Oh, that one. She died a year ago. She was really bad, that one. Somebody killed her with a knife. He went to prison, poor man.”
“I suppose I had better go with the girl,” Saavedra said. “I am sorry. It is not often I have an opportunity to discuss problems of literature with a cultivated man. In a way I would really much prefer to have another drink and continue our talk.” He looked at his captive hand as though it belonged to someone else and he hadn’t the right to pick it up.
“There will be other opportunities,” Doctor Plan-encouraged him, and the novelist surrendered. “Come, chica,” he said and rose. “You will wait for me, Doctor? I shall not be long tonight.”
“Perhaps you will learn a lot about Salta.”
“Yes, but there is always a moment when a writer has to say ‘Enough.’ One mustn’t know too much.” Doctor Plarr had the impression that Jorge Julio Saavedra under the influence of drink was beginning to repeat a lecture he had once delivered to some woman’s club in the capital.
Teresa pulled him by the hand. He rose reluctantly and followed her to where the candle burned below her statue of the Avila saint. The door closed on them. A novelist’s work, he had once said sadly to Doctor Plarr, is never finished.
It was a quiet evening at the establishment of Seńora Sanchez. All the doors were open except the two which hid Teresa and the girl with the birthmark. Doctor Plarr finished his drink and left the patio. He was sure the novelist, in spite of his promise, would take his time. After all he had a decision to make-whether the girl should lose her leg at the femur or the knee.
Seńora Sanchez was still plying her needles. A friend had joined her. She sat and knitted in a second deck chair. “You found a girl?” Seńora Sanchez asked.
“My friend did.”
“There was no one who pleased you?”
“Oh, it wasn’t that, but I drank too much at dinner.”
“You can ask your colleague Doctor Benevento about my girls. They are very clean.”
“I am sure they are. I shall certainly return, Seńora Sanchez.”
But in fact more than a year passed before he did come back. He looked in vain then for the girl with the birthmark on her forehead. He was neither surprised nor disappointed. Perhaps it was the time of her period, but in any case girls in such establishments change frequently. Teresa was the only one he recognized. He stayed with her for an hour, and they talked about Salta.
3
Doctor Plarr’s practice prospered. He never regretted leaving the harsh competition of the capital, where there were too many doctors with German, French and English degrees, and he had grown fond of the small city by the great Paraná River. There was a local legend that those who once visited the city always returned, and it had certainly proved true in his case. One glimpse of the little port with its background of colonial houses, seen for an hour one dark night, had drawn him back. Even the climate did not displease him-the heat was less humid than he remembered it in the land of his childhood, and when the summer broke up at last with an enormous eruption of thunder, he liked watching from the window of his apartment the forked flashes dig into the Chaco shore. Nearly every month he gave a dinner to Doctor Humphries, and sometimes now he would take a meal with Charley Fortnum who was always either sober, laconic, and melancholy, or drunk, talkative, and what he liked to term “elevated.” Once he went out to Charley Fortnum’s camp, but he was no judge of a mate” crop and he found the heaving motion of Fortnum’s Pride as he was driven around hectare by hectare-Charley called it “farming”-so disagreeable that he refused the next invitation. He preferred a night at the Nacional when Charley would talk unconvincingly of a girl he had found.
Every three months Doctor Plarr flew down to Buenos Aires and spent a weekend with his mother who was growing more and more stout on her daily diet of cream cakes and alfajores stuffed with dulce de leche. He could not remember the features of the beautiful woman in her early thirties who had said goodbye to his father on the river front and who wept continuously for lost love throughout the three days’ voyage to the capital. Since he had no old photograph of her to remind him of the past, he always pictured her as the woman she had become with three chins and heavy dewlaps and a stomach which, outlined in black silk, imitated pregnancy. On the shelves of his apartment the works of Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra annually increased by one volume, and of all his books Doctor Plarr thought he preferred the story of the one-legged girl of Salta. After the first visit, he had lain with Teresa several tunes at the Sanchez house and he was amused to observe how far fiction deviated from reality. It was almost a lesson in the higher criticism. He possessed no close friends, though he remained on good terms with two former mistresses whom he had first met as patients; he was also on friendly terms with the latest Governor, and enjoyed his visits to the Governor’s big mate plantation in the east, flying there in the Governor’s private plane and descending on the lawn between two flower beds in time for an excellent lunch. At Bergman’s orange-canning factory closer to the city he was an occasional guest, and sometimes he went fishing in a tributary of the Paraná with the director of the airport.