Free The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

doing nothing."
           "Let him stare, he does no harm, poor man. And he has no money."
           "I was telling you about my political novel," Doctor Saavedra spoke with irritation. He removed his hand from Teresa's grasp.
           "But I don't understand the point of one leg."
           "A symbol," Doctor Saavedra said, "of this poor crippled country, where we still hope..."
           "Will your readers understand? I would have thought something more direct. Those students last year in Rosario..."
           "If one is to write a political novel of lasting value it must be free from all the petty details that date it. Assassinations, kidnapping, the torture of prisoners—these things belong to our decade. But I do not want to write merely for the seventies."
           "The Spaniards tortured their prisoners three hundred years ago," Doctor Plarr murmured, and he looked again for some reason toward the girl at the communal table.
           "Are you not coming with me tonight?" Teresa asked Doctor Saavedra.
           "Yes, yes, all in good time. I am talking to my friend here on a subject of great importance."
           Doctor Plarr noticed on the other girl's forehead, a little below the hairline, a small gray birthmark, in the spot where a Hindu girl wears the scarlet sign of her caste.
           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."
           Docor 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