A Flag for Sunrise (40 page)

“What about the
foco
here?” Justin asked. “Is it going to happen?”

“Absolutely it will happen. When the signal is given. Arms are on the way. And it will be soon. Absolutely.”

“And how will I know what to do?”

“You’ll be directed by people who know you. You must prepare.”

“We might have done things here as they did in the mountains,” Justin said sadly. “We might have organized collectives on the land.”

“The situation is different here. Here the foreign companies have what they want and the structure is not so visible. Also one is cut off on this coast. It can be liberated only together with the rest of the country.”

“I thought the nursing was enough,” Justin said, bowing her head. “I wasn’t looking around me. I wasn’t seeing. In all this time …” She could hear Godoy tapping his fingertips on the pew bench, impatiently.

“Don’t reproach yourself. You have your job and I have mine.”

After a moment she said: “I’m sorry you’re leaving.”

Godoy himself was silent for a while. She waited in the darkness for his answer.

“Interrupted friendships are disappointing” was what he said.

“Yes,” Justin said calmly, “but I suppose they’re very much part of the work.”

“Sadly so.”

Sadly so. He had done her the courtesy of informing her personally of his leaving and he wanted her to be off.

“How much notice do you think I’ll have,” she asked him, “before the dispensary is needed?”

“You were told to be ready at the shortest possible notice. At most you will have only a day or so. It depends on circumstances.”

“O.K.,” Justin said.

“I must go very soon. I have many things to do before I leave for the mountains.”

“Yes,” Justin said. “I have to go myself.” In fact she had nowhere to go. Nothing of any value to attend to except the nursing of a dying drunk.

They sat beside each other, neither moving.

Will you just touch me, Justin thought, will you do only that much? I will do whatever you ask, I will face the Guardia, I will die, I will try to kill for you, will you just touch me? Will you do something for me, to me? Will you give me your hand? Will you give me anything?

Godoy stood up and waited in the aisle for her to do the same. She rose and walked the length of the aisle with him. A key was in his hand.

“Father Godoy,” she said to him. He had not looked at her, had marched her straight back to the door which he was now unlocking. “Father Godoy!” She nearly shouted it at him. “What I care about … maybe all I care about … is me! Not about this country. Only about the way I myself feel.”

He looked at her in silence for a moment and then he smiled. He had a sad smile for all the wind and weather, she thought.

“I think we are all that way deep inside. But there can be a coincidence of interest, can there not? Between justice and one’s feelings.”

In despair, she played the schoolgirl and then the penitent.

“Of course. But before I go there is something I want to say. I want to say it because we may never meet again. My feeling for you is particular. I have come to feel about you in a particular way.”

Godoy had opened the door a crack. She stepped back from the light so that he might not see the shame in her face. It would have been so easy not to say anything. And then to say it in the absurd language of the cloister. Now it was too late.

In time suspended, she watched him search for an answer, saw his brows knit, his eyes shift. Then, without looking at her, he said: “I feel the same about you.” Immediately she knew that he was lying. Whatever his feelings might be, his declaration to her was a simple lie, a pacifier.

She watched the Adam’s apple bob in his white throat above the top button of his cassock and the thought came to her that he must be quite good at lying. But for her he was not trying very hard.

“There you see the extent of my selfishness,” she said. Driven by the lie, she could not stop. “And my smallness and foolishness.”

Godoy was genuinely embarrassed and perhaps concerned for his
foco.

“Please,” he said. He opened the door and they were standing together in the white hot light. “I am your friend, you can believe that. I need you to help me. These poor also need you.”

“There was never any question of that,” she said. “I’ll be there when you need me.”

Another melancholy smile. “Until later then, dear friend.”

“Yes, until later,” Justin said, and went down the three whitewashed steps. The two men in print shirts were on the corner and she needed all her strength to walk past them, calm and heedless with a friendly, superior nod.

On the drive back she let herself cry. She cried from shame and from revulsion at his deceit and unctuousness. But he was right, she thought. Her feelings were a child’s feelings, and they were a matter of no importance. It was she, by all the rules of all the games, who was wrong.

By the time she was most of the way along the beach road, the sun was out of sight behind the mountains. Justin parked her jeep beside the ocean, climbed out and walked to the water’s edge. For a
long time she looked out over the ocean before her, still in sunlight and deep blue.

In all the working systems, she thought, the weakness was always yourself—that spot of gristle in the gears. It applied on every level—even the act of getting through a day could be performed with gusto and dispatch if you kept out of your own way. Justin believed that she knew as much as anyone about self-struggle. But if I win, if I crush myself, she wondered, what will be left of me? She was not so much afraid as curious. Would what was left be useful? And if so, in what way? Would what was left be happy? And there I am again, she thought. Me.

The self was only a girl, a young thing, brought in arsy-varsy. A One True Church was a One True Church, a scientific system was a scientific system, a Revolution, no less, was a Revolution, but a broad was only a broad. It was all so obvious.

I am unworthy, she thought. You are. We are. They are. We are all fucked flat unworthy, unworthy beyond belief, unworthy as a pile of shit. Help us there, you—help us crush ourselves out of recognition, help us to be without eyes without pudenda without any of those things. Most of all make us without childish feelings. Because it’s that kid inside that makes us so damnably unworthy. We’ll scourge ourselves, we’ll walk in the fiery furnace, we’ll turn ourselves around.

To do penance and to amend my life, amen. To struggle unceasingly in the name of history. Gimme a flag, gimme a drum roll, I’m gonna be there on that morning, yes I am. And it won’t be the me you think you see. It’ll be the worthy revolutionary twice-born me. The objective historical unceasingly struggling me. The good me.

And if I’m not there on that morning, she thought, I won’t be anywhere at all.

She walked a few steps into the mild surf, wetting her chino trousers to the knee, and cupped two handfuls of salt water to pour over her face. When she started back to her jeep it was a few minutes before twilight and the hillside across the road had started to settle into evening. The first howler monkeys were awake and signaling their alarms, the diurnal birds settling down to cover among the thickest boughs, trilling the last calls of the day.

Something was in the road ahead; Justin stopped in her tracks. It was an animal running along the inshore shoulder, but it did not run
so much as prance. And it was not an animal, it was a kind of man. The light was still strong enough for her to make out some of its colors—a topping of flaxen hair, white garments that were stained.

Back behind the wheel, she could not be certain that the stains were red. They were bright, of that she was sure. No fruit she knew would stain that brightly. She could not make the stains be anything but blood.

And she understood then that the creature she had seen was the young Mennonite who had passed the mission weeks before. The hillside now was darkening and apparently deserted, the road empty of traffic. Justin shivered, turned her headlights on and started the jeep for home.

Holliwell hobbled along a rutted pathway lined with frangipani toward the dining hall. The stars were out, the wind easy.

The half dozen working tables in the Paradise’s utilitarian refectory were lined up along the seaward edge of the hall. Japanese lanterns hung from the rafters above them and from wire stays in the palm grove between the tables and the beach. On the other side of the huge floor space, some officers of the Guardia were lined up at the bar, drinking rum and listening to old Lucho Gatica records on the jukebox. Looking over the line of tables, Holliwell saw Mr. Heath sitting by himself over a gin and a dish of peanuts. Heath looked up and called him over.

“Hurt your foot, did you?” he asked. His face was florid in the lantern light, his nose and the skin under his eyes marked with swollen veins.

“I kneeled on a sea urchin over by the Catholic mission. There was a nun standing by to pull the spines out for me.”

“Good luck. Was that sister Justin?”

“I never asked her name. I think she’s the only one there.”

“Yes,” Heath said. “What brought you over that way?”

Holliwell shrugged. “Nothing special.”

“What do you make of them over there?”

“I don’t know what to make of them,” Holliwell said. “What do you make of them?”

“They’re quite pleasant, didn’t you think?”

“Yes,” Holliwell said. “Yes, they are.”

Heath and Holliwell dined on fresh dorado. As they took dinner Mr. Heath said that he had been offered a position in the fruit company’s new resort enterprise.

“Old hands like me are redundant since the blight,” he told Holliwell. “The profits are in tourism. So it’s take that up or retire.”

“And which will you do?”

Heath smiled vaguely. At that moment, Holliwell realized how drunk the man was.

“When I first came out here,” Mr. Heath said, “ten bandits and myself were the only force of law in two hundred miles of mountains. Great days they were.”

Holliwell nodded.

“We could put a company blanket on a tree stump—leave it for weeks and no one would dare touch it. We were respected. We respected ourselves as well. Every morning I could get up and say—
Yo sé quien soy.
Understand?”

“Sure,” Holliwell said.

“My men were able to say that because I made them able. And I didn’t do it by avoiding their eyes and tipping them ten shillings for smiling at me. D’ye see?” He did not wait to be encouraged. “It reflected my training.”

Holliwell was about to ask him where his training had been acquired.

“Nineteen years of age I was in the legion—the Légion Etrangère. Sidi Barras. Christ, great days!”

“And you came here after that?”

For his question, Holliwell received a momentary glance of dark and profound suspicion. It was a look to stay the timid and was obviously meant to be.

“After that I was in the Ceylon police. Had a bit of trouble there … a damn religious procession in Kandi. I was shown the instruments, you might say. Drove off in superintendent’s car after a party and that was that. Then I came out here.”

“Do you ever go back to England?”

“Can’t,” Heath said. “She’s not there, bless her. Not my England. Of course, I was home for the war. I was with the Second Army.”

“Montgomery … wasn’t it?”

Heath laughed. “Yes. Monty. Teetotaler.”

When the server took their plates, he called for more gin. Holliwell, who was fighting a wave of fatigue, would try to counter it with another small rum.

“We’re going to have tourists coming down here at the rate of a few thousand a month. We’re going to have me spying through keyholes so the hotel staff doesn’t pinch their Minoxes. We’re going to teach the people to steal and we’re going to teach them contempt for us.”

Holliwell began to say something about jobs for the populace. About giving them a share.

“These people don’t like being poor, Holliwell. No one does. We’re going to teach them to be ashamed of being poor and that’s something new, you see.”

“That’s the American way,” Holliwell said.

Heath sniffed. “Don’t like to see a man run his country down. Not abroad.”

“I’m not doing that. I think what’s best about my country is not exportable.”

Mr. Heath did not hear him. “We’re all wringing our bloody hands, that’s it. We’ve been doing it since the war. Apologizing and giving in and giving over and not one black, brown or yellow life have we saved doing it. We want to be destroyed, you see. So we will be.”

At the bar, the celebrating Guardia officers had grown progressively more hilarious. But a few of them, drunker than the others, were subsiding into a sinister quietude. They were not coastal people but Indians and mestizos from over the mountains and their style of being drunk was different. They leaned on the bar as though holding themselves up, communicating to each other in single shouted words, in whistles, sudden gestures, bursts of unpleasant laughter. Some telepathy of alcohol.

The Miami dentist came in, accompanied by a tall youthful man in an elegant
guayabera.
Behind them came Mrs. Paz and her sons, all combed and scented. Their entrance was cordially saluted by everyone present, not least by the officers at the bar. Holliwell gave them good evening and Heath, who apparently knew the tall man, did the same. The tall man, Holliwell assumed, was Mrs. Paz’s brother.

When the Cuban party were seated and served, an American
couple came in from the darkness outside, and seated themselves at a table behind Holliwell’s chair. Holliwell had time to observe them as they passed.

The woman was of a certain age—perhaps in her forties, though she might also have been sixty or even older. She wore a muumuu with a coral necklace at her fleshy throat, and her hair, dyed deep black, was pasted against her temples like Pola Negri’s. The man was lean, pale and thick-lipped. He had very close-shaven hair and small dark eyes; his face preserved a kind of desiccated youthfulness. He was in white, even to his loafers.

The couple’s entrance induced an attitude of watchful menace in the drunken Guardia officers at the bar. But it appeared that no one knew them.