Free The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene Page A

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 theater—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 Córdoba."
           "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 Señora 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.
           Señora Sanchez was still plying her needles. A friend had joined her. She sat and knitted in a second deck chair. "You found a girl?" Señora 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, Señora 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