Henry Diamond

Henry Diamond is an Anglo-Argentine rancher whose life at Los Alamos Estate becomes inseparable from Rosa Diamond’s memories of love, violence, and departure. He brings Rosa to Argentina as his bride, but the story she later tells Gibreel Farishta gives the marriage a setting and scale beyond the domestic: the immense pampas, the fortunes of the estancia, and Henry’s decision to shield Martin de la Cruz after a killing. In that remembered history, Henry’s code of honour has lasting consequences for both his estate and his marriage.

Identity and Marriage

Henry is introduced through Rosa’s recollection as the fair-haired, soft-bodied, wide-eyed, ponderous Anglo-Argentine who takes her to Los Alamos Estate. In 1935, she sails to Argentina as his bride. On the voyage, he points out the ocean and compares it to the pampas: its vastness, he explains, cannot be understood just by looking; it has to be travelled through. He describes powerful but silent winds and warns her that the leaves of the ombú are poisonous. Rosa responds with delight at the strange, almost fairy-tale quality of this new world, while Henry objects that it is not as bad as she makes it sound.

That exchange establishes a difference in outlook without making Henry a simple foil to his wife. He presents the landscape as something to be understood through its conditions and distances; Rosa hears it as a challenge to discover what she might become in such open space. She has accepted his proposal as the answer available to a forty-year-old spinster, but Argentina prompts her to ask what she can do there and whether she has the courage to become new. Henry brings her into the vastness that gives those questions their force, even though the memories she later cherishes belong more to her than to him.

Los Alamos and the Decision to Protect Martin

Henry’s standing at Los Alamos rests partly on his authority over the estate and the people in his charge. After Martin de la Cruz kills Juan Julia, Henry refuses to involve the authorities. He tells Rosa that the people there are his responsibility and presents his choice as a matter of honour. Instead of distancing himself from Martin, Henry demonstrates that his trust continues: he makes him captain of the estancia polo team.

The choice has a cost. Henry is described as never really the same after Martin has killed the man referred to as the Vulture. He becomes more readily exhausted and increasingly listless, losing interest even in birds. The account does not reduce the estate’s decline to a single cause, but places Henry’s change within a broader unravelling at Los Alamos. The men in white suits return and are no longer driven away; when Rosa contracts typhus, people at the estancia read her illness as an allegory of the old estate’s decline. Henry’s decision to shelter Martin thus stands amid consequences that are personal, institutional, and difficult to separate.

Conscience, Responsibility, and Decline

The conflict between Henry’s defence of Martin and the consequences of that defence becomes explicit in a later exchange with Dr. Jorge Babington. Babington reveals that Henry had asked him to falsify Juan Julia’s death certificate, a favour Babington granted out of their old friendship but later judged wrong. He connects Henry’s decision to shelter a killer with the possibility that conscience is consuming him, and urges him to return home with Rosa before something worse happens.

Henry rejects the idea that Argentina is simply a place from which he should go home: he insists that he is already home, and objects to Babington’s reference to his wife. The reply makes his attachment to Argentina clear, while Babington’s parting remark sets that attachment against the persistence of English identity abroad. In this recollected scene, Henry’s sense of home does not resolve the moral problem. He has claimed responsibility for the people of the estancia, yet Babington’s accusation makes that claim inseparable from his complicity in concealing a death.

Departure and Narrative Role

The end of Rosa’s story brings Henry and Rosa back to England. After Martin’s funeral, Aurora del Sol spits in Rosa’s face. The account then describes an arrangement under which nobody is charged for the murder, on condition that Henry takes Rosa back to England promptly. At the Los Alamos station, the men in white suits watch to ensure that the couple really leave. Once the train is moving, Rosa opens a holdall and reveals the silver-hafted knife as a souvenir she has brought with her. Henry dies during their first winter back in England; Rosa remembers that afterward came the war and then its end.

Henry’s past reaches the reader through Rosa’s late-life narration rather than through a continuous account of his own. In the drawing room, she tells Gibreel fragments of the Argentina years as the clock strikes six and sherry is poured; the memory is, for her, the bright part of a diminished present. Her story also overtakes Gibreel’s dreamlike experience: he finds himself in Henry’s place, addressing him in words he does not know but can understand, and answering Henry’s request to accompany Rosa on a convalescent journey. Henry therefore appears both as a person in Rosa’s recollection and as a role temporarily inhabited by Gibreel. His insistence that Argentina is home, followed by the forced departure from Los Alamos, gives Rosa’s remembered world its central tension between attachment and loss.