Doctor Plarr closed the book with a bang of irritation. The Southern Cross lay on its crosspiece in a night which was full of stars. No towns or television masts or lighted windows broke the flat horizon. If he went home might there still be the danger of a telephone call? When the time had come to leave his last patient, the finance secretary’s wife who was suffering from a touch of fever, he was determined not to go home before the early morning. He wanted to keep away from the telephone until it was too late for any unprofessional call. There was one particular possibility, at this hour on this day, of being troubled. Charley Fortnum, he knew, was dining with the Governor who needed an interpreter for his guest of honour, the American Ambassador. Clara, now she had overcome her fear of using the telephone, might easily call him and demand his company, with her husband out of the way, and he had no wish to see her on this Tuesday night of all nights. His sexual feeling was anaesthetized by anxiety. He knew how likely it was that Charley would return unexpectedly early; for the dinner would certainly, sooner or later, be cancelled for a reason he had no right to know in advance.
Doctor Plarr decided that it was better to keep out of the way until midnight. The Governor’s party would have surely dispersed by that time, and Charley Fortnum would be well on his way home. I am not a man with machismo, Doctor Plarr reflected ruefully, though he could hardly imagine Charley Fortnum coming at him with a knife. He got up from the bench. The hour was late enough for the professor of English.
He did not find Doctor Humphries, as he expected, at the Hotel Bolivar. Doctor Humphries had a small room with a shower on the ground floor with a window opening on the patio which contained one dusty palm and a dead fountain. He had left his door unlocked and this perhaps showed his confidence in stability. Doctor Plarr remembered how at night his father in Paraguay would lock even the internal doors of his house, the bedrooms, the lavatories, the unused guest rooms, not against robbers but against the police, the military and the official assassins, though they would certainly not have been deterred long by locked doors.
In Doctor Humphries’ room there was hardly space for a bed, a dressing table, two chairs, a basin and the shower. You had to fight your way through them as though they were passengers in a crowded subway. Doctor Plarr saw that Doctor Humphries had pasted a new picture on the wall, from the Spanish edition of Life, showing the Queen perched on a horse at Trooping the Color. The choice was not necessarily a mark of patriotism or nostalgia: patches of damp were continually appearing on the plaster of the room and Doctor Humphries covered them with the nearest picture which came to hand. Perhaps however his choice did show a certain preference for wakening with the Queen’s face rather than Mr. Nixon’s on the wall. (Mr. Nixon’s face would surely have appeared somewhere in the same number of Life.) Inside the small room it was cool, but even the coolness was humid. The shower behind the plastic curtain had a faulty washer and dripped upon the tiles. The narrow bed was pulled together rather than made-the bumpy sheet might have been hastily drawn over a corpse, and a mosquito net hung bundled above it like a grey cloud threatening rain. Doctor Plarr was sorry for the self-styled doctor of letters: it was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will-if such a man existed-would have chosen to await death. My father, he thought with disquiet, must be about the same age as Humphries now, and perhaps he survives in even worse surroundings.
A scrap of paper was inserted in the frame of Humphries’ looking glass-“Gone to the Italian Club.” Perhaps he had been expecting a pupil and that was the reason why he had left his door unlocked. The Italian Club was in a once-impressive colonial building across the road. There was a bust of somebody, perhaps of Cavour or Mazzini, but the stone was pockmarked and the inscription no longer readable; it stood between the house, which had a stone garland of flowers over every tall window, and the street. Once there had been a great number of Italians living in the city, but now all that was left of the club was the name, the bust, the imposing facade which bore a nineteenth-century date in Roman numerals. There were a few tables where you could eat cheaply without paying a subscription, and only one Italian was left, the solitary waiter who had been born in Naples. The cook was of Hungarian origin and served little else but goulash, a dish in which he could easily disguise the quality of the ingredients, a wise thing to do since the best beef went down the river to the capital, more than eight hundred kilometres away.
Doctor Humphries was seated at a table close to an open window with a napkin tucked into his frayed collar. However hot the day he was always dressed in a suit with a tie and a waistcoat like a Victorian man of letters living in Florence. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles; probably the prescription had not been revised for years, for he bent very low over the goulash to see what he was eating. His white hair was streaked the color of youth by nicotine, and there were smears of nearly the same color on his napkin from the goulash. Doctor Plarr said, “Good evening, Doctor Humphries.”
“Ah, you found my note?”
“I’d have looked in here anyway. How did you know I was coming to your room?”
“I didn’t, Doctor Plarr. But I thought somebody might look in, somebody…”
“I had been going to suggest we have dinner at the National,” Doctor Plarr explained. He looked around the restaurant for the waiter without any anticipation of pleasure. They were the only clients.
“Very kind of you,” Doctor Humphries said. “Another day, if you’ll let me have what I believe the Yankees call a rain check. The goulash here is not so bad, one grows a little tired of it, but at least it’s filling.” He was a very thin old man. He gave the impression of someone who had worked a long while at eating in the hopeless hope of filling an inexhaustible cavity.
For want of anything better Doctor Plarr, too, ordered goulash. Doctor Humphries said, “I am surprised to see you. I would have thought the Governor might have invited you… he must need someone who speaks English for his dinner tonight.”
Doctor Plarr realized why the message had been stuck into the looking glass. There could have been a last-minute slip in the Governor’s arrangements. It had happened once, and Doctor Humphries had been summoned… After all there were only three Englishmen who were available. He said, “He has invited Charley Fortnum.”
“Oh yes, of course,” Doctor Humphries said, “our Honorary Consul.” He underlined the adjective in a tone of embittered denigration. “This is a diplomatic dinner. I suppose the Honorary Consul’s wife could not appear for reasons of health?”
“The American Ambassador is unmarried, Doctor Humphries. It’s informal-a stag party.”
“A very suitable occasion one might have thought for inviting Mrs. Fortnum to entertain the guests. She must be accustomed to stag parties. But why does the Governor not invite you or me?”
“Be fair, doctor. You and I have no official position here.”
“But we know a lot more about the Jesuit ruins than Charley Fortnum does. According to El Litoral the Ambassador has come here to see the rums, not the tea or the maté crop, though that hardly seems likely. American ambassadors are usually men of business.”