There were only two other Englishmen, so far as he was aware, in the city, an old English teacher who had adopted the title of doctor without ever having seen the inside of a university, and Charley Fortnum, the Honorary Consul. Since the morning months ago when he had begun sleeping with Charley Fortnum’s wife, Doctor Plarr found he was ill at ease in the Consul’s company; perhaps he was plagued by primitive sensations of guilt; perhaps he was irritated by the complacency of Charley Fortnum who appeared so modestly confident of his wife’s fidelity. He talked with pride rather than anxiety of his wife’s troubles in her early pregnancy as though they were a kind of compliment to his prowess until Doctor Plarr was almost ready to exclaim, “But who do you suppose is the father?”
There remained Doctor Humphries… though it was still too early to go and find the old man where he lived at the Hotel Bolivar.
Doctor Plarr found a seat under one of the white globes which lit the river front and took a book out of his pocket. From where he sat he could keep his eye on his car parked by the Coca-Cola stall. The book Doctor Plarr carried with him was a novel written by one of his patients, Jorge Julio Saavedra. Saavedra, too, bore the title of doctor, but it was an authentic title, for twenty years ago he had been awarded an honorary degree in the capital. The novel, which had been Doctor Saavedra’s first and most successful, was called The Taciturn Heart, and it was written in a heavily loaded melancholy style, full of the spirit of machismo.
Doctor Plarr found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time. These noble and uncommunicative characters in Latin-American literature seemed to him too simple and too heroic ever to have had living models. Rousseau and Chateaubriand were a greater influence in South America than Freud-there was even a city in Brazil named after Benjamin Constant. He read: “Julio Moreno would sit for hours in silence, on those days when the wind blew continuously from the sea and salted their few hectares of dry earth, shrivelling the rare plants which had survived the last wind, his chin in his hands, his eyes closed as though he wished to live only in some hidden corridor of his nature from which his wife was excluded. He never complained. She would stand beside him for long minutes, holding the mate gourd in her left hand, and when he opened his eyes Julio Moreno would take it from her without a word spoken. Only a relaxation of the muscles around the stern and unbeaten mouth appeared to her like an expression of thanks.”
Doctor Plarr, who had been brought up by his father on the works of Dickens and Conan Doyle, found the novels of Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra hard to read, but he regarded the effort as part of his medical duties. In a few days he would have to take one of his regular dinners with Doctor Saavedra at the Hotel Nacional and he must be ready to make some comment on the book which Doctor Saavedra had so warmly inscribed “To my friend and counsellor Doctor Eduardo Plarr, this my first book to show him I have not always been a political novelist and to disclose, as I can only do to a close friend, the first fruit of my inspiration.” Doctor Saavedra was in fact far from taciturn, but Doctor Plarr suspected he regarded himself as a Moreno manqué. Perhaps it was significant that he had given Moreno one of his own Christian names…
Doctor Plarr had never caught anyone else reading in the whole city. When he dined out he saw only books imprisoned behind glass to guard them from humidity. He never met anyone unawares reading by the river or even in one of the city squares-except occasionally El Litoral, the local paper. There were sometimes lovers on the benches or tired women with shopping baskets, or tramps, but never readers. A tramp would proudly occupy a whole bench. No one cared to share the bench with a tramp, so unlike the rest of the world he could stretch at full length.
Perhaps reading in the open air was a habit he had acquired from his father who always took a book with him when he went farming, and in the orange-scented air of his abandoned country Doctor Plarr had got through all the works of Dickens except Christmas Tales. People when they first saw him sitting on a bench with an open book had looked at him with keen curiosity. Perhaps they thought it was a custom peculiar to foreign doctors. It was not exactly unmanly, but it was certainly foreign. The men here preferred to stand at street corners and talk, or sit drinking cups of coffee and talk, or lean out of a window and talk. And all the time, while they talked, they touched each other to emphasize a point or just from friendship. In public Doctor Plarr touched nobody, only his book. It was a sign, like his English passport, that he would always remain a stranger: he would never be properly assimilated.
He began to read again. “She herself worked in an unbroken silence, accepting the hard toil, like the bad seasons, as a law of nature.”
Doctor Saavedra had enjoyed a period of critical and popular success in the capital. When he began to feel himself neglected by the reviewers-and still worse by the hostesses and the newspaper reporters-he had come to the north where his great-grandfather had been governor and where he was shown the proper respect due to a famous novelist from the capital, even though there were probably few people who actually read his books. Strangely enough the mental geography of his novels remained unaltered. Wherever he might choose to live now, he had found his mythical region once and forever as a young man, the result of a holiday which he had taken in a small town by the sea, in the far south near Trelew. He had never encountered a Moreno, but he had imagined him very clearly one evening in the bar of a small hotel, where a man sat in melancholy silence over a drink.
Doctor Plarr had learned all this in the capital from an old friend and jealous enemy of the novelist, and he found the knowledge of Saavedra’s background of some value when he came to treat his patient who suffered from bouts of voluble manic-depression. The same character appeared again and again in all his books, his history changed a little, but never his strong sad silence. The friend and enemy, who had accompanied the young Saavedra on that voyage of discovery, had exclaimed scornfully, “And do you know who the man was? He was a Welshman, a Welshman. Who has ever heard of a Welshman with machismo? There are a lot of Welshmen in those parts. He was drunk, that was all. His weekly drunk when he came in from the country.” A ferry left for the invisible shore of scrub and swamp, and later the same ferry returned. Doctor Plarr found it difficult to concentrate on the taciturnity of Julio Moreno’s heart. Moreno’s wife left him at last with a casual labourer on his land who had youth and good looks and some facility in talking, but she was unhappy in the city by the sea where her lover remained unemployed. He soon became habitually drunk in bars and garrulous in bed, and she felt a nostalgia for the long silences and the dry salt ruined earth. So back she came to Moreno, who made room for her without a word at the table where he had prepared a meagre dinner, and afterward he sat mutely in his customary chair with his chin in his hands while she stood beside him holding his mate gourd. There were still another hundred pages to come, though the story, it seemed to Doctor Plarr, might well have ended there. However Julio Moreno’s machismo had not yet found full expression, and when he indicated to his wife, in the fewest possible words, his decision to visit the city of Trelew, Doctor Plarr felt quite certain of what would happen there. Julio Moreno would encounter the labourer in a bar of the city and then there would be a fight with knives, won of course by the younger man. Hadn’t his wife, when he left, seen in Moreno’s eyes “the expression of an exhausted swimmer who surrenders to the dark tide of his ineluctable destiny”?
It could not be said that Doctor Saavedra wrote badly. There was a heavy music in his style, the drumbeats of destiny were never very far away, but Doctor Plarr sometimes had a longing to exclaim to his melancholy patient, “Life isn’t like that. Life isn’t noble or dignified. Even Latin-American life. Nothing is ineluctable. Life has surprises. Life is absurd. Because it’s absurd there is always hope. Why, one day we may even discover a cure for cancer and the common cold.” He turned to the last page. Sure enough Julio Moreno’s life blood was draining away between the broken tiles on the floor of the Trelew bar and his wife (how had she got there so quickly?) stood by his side, though for once she was not holding a maté gourd. “A relaxation of the muscles around the hard unbeaten mouth told her, before the eyes closed on the immense weariness of existence, that he found her presence welcome.”