The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

Cadillac arrived safely last week, and today he's found a purchaser."
           "You've been eating here?"
           "He wanted to take me to the Nacional, but he's much too drunk for the Nacional—or even my hotel. Now we've got to get him home somehow, but he insists on going to see Señora Sanchez."
           "A friend of his?"
           "Of half the men in this town. She runs the only good brothel here—or so they say. I'm not a good judge of that kind of thing myself."
           "Surely they are illegal," said Doctor Plarr.
           "Not in this city. We are a military headquarters—don't forget that. The military don't allow anyone in B. A. to dictate to them here."
           "Why not let him go?"
           "You can see why—he can't stand up."
           "Surely the point of a brothel is that one can lie down?"
           "Something has to stand up," Doctor Humphries said with unexpected coarseness and an expression of distaste.
           In the end they lugged Charley Fortnum between them across the street to the little room which Doctor Humphries occupied in the Hotel Bolívar. There were fewer pictures on the walls in those days because there were fewer damp stains, and the shower had not yet begun to drip.
           Inanimate objects change at a faster rate than human beings. Doctor Humphries and Charley Fortnum were not noticeably different men that night than they were now; a crack in the plaster of a neglected house grows more quickly than a line on a human face, paint changes color more rapidly than hair, and a room's decay is continuous: it never comes to a temporary halt on that high plateau of old age where a man may live a long time without apparent change. Doctor Humphries had been established on the plateau for many years, and Charley Fortnum, though he was still on one of the lower slopes, had found a reliable weapon in the fight against senility—he had pickled in alcohol some of the high spirits and the naiveté of earlier days. As the years passed, Doctor Plan: could discern little alteration in either of his early acquaintances—perhaps Humphries moved more slowly between the Bolivar and the Italian Club, and sometimes he believed he could detect in Charley Fortnum increasing spots of melancholy, like mold, in his well-bottled bonhomie.
           Doctor Plarr left Fortnum with Humphries at the Hotel Bolivar and went to fetch his car. He was living in the same flat in the same block that he inhabited now. Lights were still burning in the port, where laborers worked through the whole night. On a flat barge in the Paraná they had mounted a metal tower from which an iron rod pounded the bottom of the river. Thud, thud, thud, the noise reverberated like tribal drums. From a second barge lengths of pipe were extended, attached to some underwater engine which sucked the gravel out of the riverbed and sent it scuttling and rattling down the waterfront to an inlet half a mile away. The Governor, who had been appointed by the newest President after that year's 'coup d'etat', was planning to deepen the port so that it might take ferries of greater draught from the Chaco shore and receive larger passenger boats from the capital. When, after a second military coup, this time in Córdoba, he was dismissed from office, the idea was abandoned, to the benefit of Doctor Plarr's sleep. The Governor of the Chaco, it was said, had not been prepared to spend the necessary money to deepen his side of the river, and the passenger boats from the capital were already too large in the dry season to mount beyond the city where passengers had to be transferred anyway to smaller boats for the voyage to the Paraguayan republic in the north. It was difficult to judge who had made the initial mistake, if it was a mistake. The question 'Cui bono?' pointed at no individual, since all the contractors had benefited and all undoubtedly had shared their benefits with others. The