The Honorary Consul Read Free Page A

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 gray 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 kilometers 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 raincheck. 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