Good heavens, I said.
I can prove it, Henry. Look here. He opened his notebook and showed me a page. His writing went something like this:
1
Forgot to time (разг.) Забыл отметить время
He said, Youve only got to multiply by seven. That makes half an hour a week. Twenty-six hours a year. Of course shipboard life isnt quite average. Theres more drinking between meals. And beer keeps on repeating. Look at this time here one minute, fifty-five seconds. Thats more than the average, but then Ive noted down two gins. Theres a lot of variations too I havent accounted for[247], and from now on Im going to make a note of the temperature too. Heres July twenty-fifth six minutes, nine seconds n.c. that stands for not complete. I went out to dinner in BA and left my notebook at home. And heres July twenty-seventh only three minutes twelve seconds in all, but, if you remember, there was a very cold north wind on July twenty-fifth and I went out to dinner without an overcoat.
Are you drawing any conclusions? I asked.
Thats not my job, he said. Im no expert. I just report the facts and any data like the gins and the weather that seem to have a bearing[248]. Its for others to draw the conclusions.
Who are the others?
Well, I thought when I had completed six months research Id get in touch with a urinary specialist. You dont know what he mightnt be able to read into these figures. Those guys deal all the time with the sick. Its important to them to know what happens in the case of an average fellow.
And you are the average fellow?
Yes. Im a hundred per cent healthy, Henry. I have to be in my job. They give me the works every so often.
The CIA? I asked.
Youre kidding, Henry. You cant believe that crazy girl.
He fell into a sad silence as he thought of her, leaning forward with his chin in his hand. An island with the appearance of a gigantic alligator floated downstream with its snout extending along the water. Pale green fishing boats drifted downstream faster than our engines could drive us against the current they passed rapidly like little racing cars. Each fisherman was surrounded by floating blocks of wood to which his lines were attached. Rivers branched off into the grey misty interior, wider than the Thames at Westminster but going nowhere at all.
He asked, And she really called herself Tooley?
Yes, Tooley.
I guess she must think of me sometimes? he said with a sort of questioning hope.
Chapter 3
It was two days later that we came to Formosa, on a day which was as humid as all the others had been. The heat broke on the cheek like little bubbles of water. We had turned off the great Parana river the night before near Corrientes, and now we were on the Paraguay. Fifty yards across the water from the Argentinian Formosa the other country lay, sodden and empty. The import-export man went ashore in his dark city suit carrying a new suitcase. He went with rapid steps, looking at his watch like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. It certainly seemed an ideal town for smugglers, with only a river to cross. In Paraguay I could see only a crumbling hut, a pig and a small girl.
I was tired of walking the deck, so I went ashore too. It was a Sunday and quite a crowd had collected to see the boat come in. There was a pervading smell of orange petals, but it was the only sweet thing about Formosa. One long avenue was lined with oranges and trees bearing rose-coloured flowers, which I learnt later to be lapachos. The side streets petered out a few yards away into a niggardly wild nature of mud and scrub. Everything to do with government, business, justice or amusement lay in the one avenue: a tourist hotel of grey cement on the waters edge had been half-built, for what tourists? little shops selling Coca-Cola; a cinema which advertised an Italian Western; two hairdressers; a garage with one wrecked car; a cantina. The only house of more than one story was the hotel, and the only old and beautiful building in the long avenue proved, as I came closer to it, to be the prison. There were fountains all down the avenue but they didnt play.
The avenue must lead me somewhere, I thought, but I was wrong. I passed the bust of a bearded man called Urquiza, who, judging from the carved inscription, must have had something to do with liberation from what? and ahead of me I saw rise up above the orange trees and the lapachos a marble man upon, a marble horse who was certainly General San Martín Buenos Aires had made me familiar with his features and I had seen him upon the seafront at Boulogne too. The statue closed the avenue as the Arc de Triomphe closes the Champs-Elysées; I expected some further avenue beyond, but when I reached the statue I found the hero sat on his horse in a waste of mud at the farthest limit of the town. No strollers came so far, and the road went no farther. Only a starving dog, like a skeleton from the Natural History Museum[249], picked his way timorously across the dirt and the rain pools towards me and San Martín. I began to walk back.