Free The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene Page B

talked about Salta.
     
     
     
     
     
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    Doctor Plarr's practice prospered. He never regretted leaving the harsh competition of the capital, where there were too many doctors with German, French and English degrees, and he had grown fond of the small city by the great Paraná River. There was a local legend that those who once visited the city always returned, and it had certainly proved true in his case. One glimpse of the little port with its background of colonial houses, seen for an hour one dark night, had drawn him back. Even the climate did not displease him—the heat was less humid than he remembered it in the land of his childhood, and when the summer broke up at last with an enormous eruption of thunder, he liked watching from the window of his apartment the forked flashes dig into the Chaco shore. Nearly every month he gave a dinner to Doctor Humphries, and sometimes now he would take a meal with Charley Fortnum who was always either sober, laconic, and melancholy, or drunk, talkative, and what he liked to term "elevated." Once he went out to Charley Fortnum's camp, but he was no judge of a mate" crop and he found the heaving motion of Fortnum's Pride as he was driven around hectare by hectare—Charley called it "farming"—so disagreeable that he refused the next invitation. He preferred a night at the Nacional when Charley would talk unconvincingly of a girl he had found.
           Every three months Doctor Plarr flew down to Buenos Aires and spent a weekend with his mother who was growing more and more stout on her daily diet of cream cakes and 'alfajores' stuffed with 'dulce de leche'. He could not remember the features of the beautiful woman in her early thirties who had said goodbye to his father on the river front and who wept continuously for lost love throughout the three days' voyage to the capital. Since he had no old photograph of her to remind him of the past, he always pictured her as the woman she had become with three chins and heavy dewlaps and a stomach which, outlined in black silk, imitated pregnancy. On the shelves of his apartment the works of Doctor Jorge Julio Saavedra annually increased by one volume, and of all his books Doctor Plarr thought he preferred the story of the one-legged girl of Salta. After the first visit, he had lain with Teresa several tunes at the Sanchez house and he was amused to observe how far fiction deviated from reality. It was almost a lesson in the higher criticism. He possessed no close friends, though he remained on good terms with two former mistresses whom he had first met as patients; he was also on friendly terms with the latest Governor, and enjoyed his visits to the Governor's big mate plantation in the east, flying there in the Governor's private plane and descending on the lawn between two flower beds in time for an excellent lunch. At Bergman's orange-canning factory closer to the city he was an occasional guest, and sometimes he went fishing in a tributary of the Paraná with the director of the airport.
           Twice there were attempted revolutions in the capital which made big headlines in 'El Litoral', but on both occasions when he telephoned to his mother he found she knew nothing of the disturbances; she read no newspaper and never listened to the radio, and Harrods and her favorite teashop remained open through all the troubles. She told him once that she had been satiated forever with politics during their life in Paraguay. "Your father could talk of nothing else. Such undesirable people used to come to the house, sometimes in the middle of the night, dressed in any old clothes. And you know what became of your father." The last was an odd turn of phrase since neither of them knew anything at all—whether he had been killed in the civil war or died of disease or become a political prisoner under the dictatorship of the General. His body was never identified among the corpses which were sometimes washed up on the Argentine